Scattered Work

Facebook: The Suburbs of the Internet

After about nine or ten months on Facebook, I’ve become truly disenchanted with the service. Perhaps it’s my own fault for accepting too many friend requests; requests from people I know only vaguely or not at all in fleshspace. It comes down to a problem of over-sharing. These 400+ people are spewing their random thoughts and intimate details, and these trivia are presented by Facebook as “News.” That probably sounds curmudgeonly, but I’m not alone. As Jane Jacobs wrote in her classic “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,”

“Togetherness” is a fittingly nauseating name for an old ideal in planning theory. This ideal is that if anything is shared among people, much should be shared. “Togetherness,” apparently a spiritual resource of the new suburbs, works destructively in cities. The requirement that much shall be shared drives city people apart.

This deluge of minutia is what is driving me away from the social space of Facebook. To the site’s credit, there are lots of ways to share selectively with different groups, and to hide people from your news feed. But the overwhelming tendency is towards the kind of sharing that would be delightful in an intimate, organic gathering of friends and acquaintances, only there are hundreds of people chattering this way at once. It’s an unworkable system, at least to my sensibilities.

In this light, it’s worth considering whether the social networking project has been too idealistic, too much in the heritage of the social planners Jacobs railed against, the planners whose greatest legacy is suburban sprawl. Facebook’s fine-grained settings do nothing to mask the fact that it is essentially an experiment in large-scale, top-down social planning (or more cynically, social engineering). Like the Garden City Movement, the Social Networking Movement lays out strict aesthetics, and shapes social interaction with complex, pre-conceived pathways for interaction. The network does not adapt to the needs or behaviors of its inhabitants, the way urban environments do, and the way that the internet as a whole does.

Luckily, it’s much easier to stop visiting a website than it is to uproot yourself from the suburbs. Just ask MySpace.

Tags: Facebook, Garden City Movement, Jane Jacobs, social networks, social planning

Lucky Jim, Mayfair Squatter

As I read an article about London’s Mayfair squatters, I came across a reference to a blogger among the group who calls himself “luckyjim.” Out of curiosity, I looked up his blog and started reading. To my surprise, I found that he’s a better writer than all the journalists covering his plight (myself included), and in a certain sense seems to have more integrity. As he inhabits abandoned, multi-million dollar homes in an upper class London neighborhood, he documents the class struggles and social codes among these temporarily high-profile vagrants. The internal struggles over who can truly claim “outsider” status (”he admitted he worked for a brand consultancy and had a mortgage, which he defended as ‘more anarchic than renting’”) are juxtaposed with moments of genuine compassion and humiliation. It’s a mesmerizing window into the world of a highly literate, self-aware squatter.

Tags: blogs, London, Mayfair, squatters

Although it is life, not art

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.

— Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Tags: dance, Jane Jacobs, sidewalks, urban life