Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Zadie Smith Takes On Facebook

While you're waiting for Zadie Smith to come out with her next novel, you could do worse than reading her  New York Review of Books essay on Facebook, the life and the movie. Take a look at it here.

A couple of points that particularly intrigued me. First, the idea that programming happens haphazardly, but is easy to get locked in, because, though mediocre, it becomes too big, or in this case, too interfaced, to fail. I buy this. I work in a store where we are still working with IBID, a DOS-based program. Believe me when I tell you that we are not the only bookstore operating back in the dark ages. It is stable, but ridiculous. In the case of Facebook, Smith urges us to keep in mind that this program was created by and retains the traces of the desires of a college sophomore.

The second point I'll just quote:

To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook—if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large—this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.

So check it out. Although I wasn't that crazy about her third novel, On Beauty, she is one of those writers I will always read.




18 comments:

  1. I haven't read Zadie Smith, I'm not on Facebook, and I find nothing exceptionable in the excerpt you quote. But I find nothing exceptional either. What she says seems obvious.

    Why would anyone not believe that "To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos."?
    ======================
    Detectives Beyond Borders
    "Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
    http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/

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  2. Of course you are right, Peter, but for me the salient point was the solipsism with which we enter the social networking world, thinking that the whole game is actually about us.

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  4. I suppose if she includes tattooed, artsy kids who think they're rebellious when they're really tied into the whims of corporations far more than their parents and grandparents were, she's right.

    Of course, the (formerly) mainstream media, desperate to jump on any trend, will not have noticed this, so there's room for statements like Zadie Smith's.

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  5. I don't think it's just kids. Most people I know think of Facebook as a benign or at least neutral thing, probably a little like how I mislead myself into believing Google, aka, "We're Not Evil!" is.

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  6. Facebook ... Amazon ... Apple ... Microsoft. It's all bad!

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  7. You're right but you better not say it so loud, or they'll shut us down.

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  8. There are enough Kool-Aid drinkers out there watching out for technological and consumer-electronic heresies. The companies don't have to do their own watching.

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  9. It's probably just as well I never particularly liked Kool-Aid, then.

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  10. Yeah, my trouble is that I take words seriously, so when Steve Jobs says he has changed the world, I presume he intends people to believe him. And I never fail to be shocked that people appear to do so.

    I may have said this before that one decided result of the proliferation of cell phones is that it gives bores one more subject to talk about. I actually did hear a man bragging to his friend on a street corner that "mine is smaller than yours."

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  11. He has changed the world. Just not necessarily for the better.

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  12. I didn't say rocked your world. I think he's changed all our worlds, though I don't mean to imply that he did it alone. I just mean that the social context in which we live is different because of these guys.

    I tend to notice the more annoying ones...

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  13. I think I'm the world champion at noticing annoying things.

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  14. No--only of noticing the things that annoy you.

    You might be a connoisseur, though.

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  15. An experienced finder of annoying things, yes, particularly this week. I was thinking of making a post about some of them.

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  16. Do. Annoyances are amusing if you're not the person involved.

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  17. I don't know-- If it doesn't annoy me, it's not annoying. I'm sure that's annoyingly self-centered.

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