facebook: disorienting

I’ve heard grumbles from many friends about facebook.  Indeed, there’s something amiss about this megalithic inbox replacement social utility that I have had difficulty diagnosing until recently.  I’ve found a few articles on the interwebs that I take to be clues.

First, Dunbar’s Number is a network theorem that states that individuals can sustain meaningful relationships with 148 people.  Beyond that point, network salience becomes much too difficult to sustain strong ties among nodes in the network.  Some neurologists and primatologists postulate that our threshold for juggling social connections is directly related to the size of our neocortex – which is bigger in women. I digress.

The other clue is my continued rumination about Yrji Engeström’s great post from back in the day about object centered sociality, and the subsequent research I did about the Scandinavian Activity Theory as it relates to the sociology of information systems.

People don’t just connect to each other, they connect through a shared object that resonates with them both.  Shared objects are the reason why people affiliate with specific others and not just anyone.

The way those new ideas gelled with my undergrad studies of Communities of Practice in educational psychology class really are what led to my contributions in the formulation of itsasickness: the obsession network.

Whatever the case, beyond this Dunbar’s Number threshold, people become disoriented in conversation – they literally can no longer relate to the object that brought about the conversation in the first place.  The very exchanges of conversation, the “likes”, the LOLs, the emoticons, only serve to further distance us from the object because more and more participants in the ‘conversation’ are from outside of the user’s immediate circle of friends.

Quite often, I have a hard time accepting that strangers whose senses of humor I don’t know could possibly be talking about the same thing in the same way in which i’m talking to my friends.  Homophily gives us tunnel vision sometimes.

Another clue:
 How many people an individual communicates with probably exists somewhere between their total network size and their support network. Some research by Gueorgi Kossinets and Duncan Watts observing all email communication at a university shows that the number of ongoing contacts hovers somewhere between 10 and 20 over a 30 day period.

Another clue:
 The average facebook user has 130 friends which is too close to Dunbar for comfort.  This helps explains why facebook is pushing Pages so hard. The other reason is money. FB Pages can be sponsored.

So, it makes sense that I’m disoriented by the size of our networks on facebook. The feeling that I increasingly can’t relate to what’s happening around me is akin to boredom.

If objects are what we talk about with people, then is the number of objects we can simultaneously socialize around also 148?  I would hypothesize: probably. Actor Network Theory talks about the the interoperability of objects and people in complex networks, and in my experience, this is true.  This is why memes like David After Dentist are so resonant in our internet culture: they provide the long strands that connect geographically disparate and socially removed circles of friends.  These joke memes garner tens of millions of views (DAD has 62,436,953).  Who watches the video? Probably half a million circles of friends.

If half a million people, reaching out to their immediate friends will result in 20% of the country getting touched, then facebook may be the most effective free delivery system ever.

But what can be delivered effectively online? Things like “David After Dentist,” I assume – specifically, portable and permalinked objects that have a temperament which is immediately understood: “this is funny”, “this is gross” , “this is beautiful.”

This also makes sense when looking at the array of successful “defined-temperament” community websites; sites like Wonkette.com or TMZ.com or CollegeHumor.com. These can maintain conversation threads of thousands because the temperament is constant: it’s always a story of “conservatives are nuts” or “celebrities are nuts” or “laugh at this guy getting kicked in the nuts.”

Objects can connect more people than people can.

Itsasickness keeps users oriented toward the objects of obsession.  The objects themselves exist in a worldview temperament that is constantly reiterated all over the site.  Once again, for good measure: “This is sick” = your sickness makes you extraordinary.

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Fred Gooltz, July 1st 2010 | Posted in technology

Abe Lincoln’s Folly

This is adult literacy, the bottom 13 states. The states with the lowest levels of adult literacy are Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina and Arkansas
the bottom 13 states.

Should have let them go.

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Fred Gooltz, June 16th 2010 | Posted in politics

Abe Lincoln’s Folly

Shoulda let them go.

This guy rails against modernity itself. And lies.

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Fred Gooltz, June 14th 2010 | Posted in politics

Abe Lincoln’s Folly

Shoulda let them go.

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Fred Gooltz, May 18th 2010 | Posted in politics

Previous Change Agents From Fake History

“So enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did the Slave Trade’s wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for Abolition. Let the consequences be what they would, I from this time determined that I would never rest until I had effected its abolition. Until, as they would, my opposition in Parliament called me a cruel monicker in the news-broadsheet, whereupon I immediately backed-off so as to not ‘overreach’ or seem radical.”

- William Wilberforce

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Fred Gooltz, May 13th 2010 | Tags:
Posted in politics

Abe Lincoln’s Folly

Shoulda let them go.

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Fred Gooltz, April 29th 2010 | Tags:
Posted in politics

Tim Sheridan is obsessed with Doctor Who

I used to watch this show on PBS with my big brother in the early 80s.

Tim Sheridan is obsessed with Doctor Who on itsasickness.com.

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Fred Gooltz, April 15th 2010 | Posted in art

The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats

Here is my comment on the 2010 midterms:

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

- William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

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Fred Gooltz, January 20th 2010 | Posted in art, politics

Now It’s 1978

The Senate seat occupied by the Democratic Kennedy brothers since 1952 has fallen to the Republican Party.

When you accept that 2009 was a wormhole of 1977, it all makes sense. Rahm Emanuel is Hamilton Jordon and Barack Obama is Jimmy Carter.

This is Barack Obama’s greatest failure. So far.

Massachusetts voters have given up on President Obama as an agent for anything but the status quo, and this is most evident in his willingness to dole out trillions of dollars in direct and indirect support to the banks. The Massachusetts polls show this issue to be foremost on the minds of the voters.

If 2009 was 1977, and Avatar is the new Star Wars, and Obama is the new Carter, so now that it’s 2010 and we’re in bizarro 1978, what else should we expect from this year?

Based on 1978’s returns, I’ve a hunch Dems will lose three Senate seats.

Based on 1978’s Bakke case, SCOTUS will strike down Campaign Finance with similarly twisted logic: because free and fair elections should be allowed to get purchased fairly with the free spending of corporate dollars.

I have a hunch that based on California’s Prop 13, that the Golden State will do another incredibly stupid thing. A cop-out? Yeah, but seriously, with a Austrian action hero for a Governor and a completely failed constitution, picking what idiotic thing they’ll do next is nearly impossible.

Harvey Milk was assassinated in 1978 – gulp. Conservatives still like to kill liberals.

Also, for good measure, Pope Ratzinger’s name is on the list.

Buckle up. It gets worse.

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Fred Gooltz, January 20th 2010 | Posted in politics

It’s 1977 And I Quit Politics

The Year Is 1977. Politically. And because it’s 1977 again, I have to quit.

Now, as it was in ‘77, punching hippies is just about the only thing the GOP does well. It’s actually the one thing that unites both political parties.

‘Punching hippies’ is a technical term used to describe various instances in modern realpolitik. Applications range from when moderate Democrats throw liberals under the bus procedurally, to when party leadership elbows us out of power via triangulation, to when conservatives literally kill us with bullets, to when media calls us Marxist-Socialist Nazi Communist Fascists and suggest we should be hung for treason, or shot with aforementioned bullets.

All of those things can be described as ‘punching hippies.’

How is it 1977? I talked to a veteran politico friend about her career in politics. She got sucked into party and campaign politics because of Bobby Kennedy, but after the country went off the rails in ‘68, she stayed in politics – - transitioning into what i’ll describe generally as anti-Nixon extra-party structures – - mostly out of pure loathing for Nixon. She recently told me that right now feels exactly like how she remembers 1977.

After Carter pardoned draft dodgers, which she celebrated, she said that the rest of that whole year felt like one losing battle after another. Social justice liberals lost the fight against the Death Penalty. Liberals lost several battles against gay-bashing Anita Bryant, the Supreme Court started chipping away at Roe v. Wade on the Medicare Amendment, environmentalists lost the battle of the Alaska Pipeline. Even the violent crimes which conservatives sensationalized were blamed on liberalism’s effect on our culture. Reagan started running hard against Carter not long thereafter.

That is her recollection of 1977.

Very similar to her story, I got sucked into politics by Howard Dean – who also sought to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic party – and then I was kept in politics by rage at the atrocities of Bush-Cheney.

But here’s the thing, Bush-Cheney, and the GOP in general, have never stopped fighting 1968’s culture war. Democrats seem to think that they won the war with the unforced error of Watergate. They could not be more wrong.

Conservatives and Nixon believed in Norman Rockwell’s make-believe America. Nixon believed that he was the last line of defense to preserve the precious painting. Thus Nixon justified his illegal acts as necessary, akin to how total warfare perpetrated by victors are later forgiven… by themselves. Firebombing Dresden, Sherman’s March, tapping the DNC’s phones, turning USAGs into an arm of the RNC, etc.

Nixon was waging a full on war from the White House against Americans: young people, poor people, and minorities – the enemy was the DFH (dirty fucking hippie). It wasn’t just rhetoric, this conflict was occasionally militarized – especially in cities and on campuses. Debased by Nixon, liberals were arrested, beaten and otherwise flogged relentlessly by conventional wisdom zombies in the press. This is where our modern understanding of ‘punching hippies’ comes from – schmucks like David Broder.

Tragically, liberal candidates and liberal political heroes were murdered in 1968 by conservatives and Nixon won the election. Nevertheless, a surprising majority continued to fight Nixon, often forming extra-party political structures like issue advocacy organizations. My friend I mentioned above was one of those people.

Next to the victory of impeaching Nixon, putting a Democrat into the White House after those eight long painful years was well-earned schadenfreude. This is how I felt when we beat McCain and got Obama in.

Had I been a professional political operative 1976, I don’t think I would have been able to stomach the constant belittling and undercutting attack campaign that the conservative movement waged against President Carter. To be honest, I would have probably joined Ted Kennedy’s campaign to primary Carter.

Conservatives attacked Carter relentlessly and called him hapless and timid. He reacted as they anticipated: poorly and timidly. Famous actor scumbag Ronald Reagan attacked Carter for the entirety of Carter’s pitiful term. It did not abate: after a few years, Reagan simply shifted his all-purpose bad guy from Carter into Mondale.

The gutter-style politics which Nixon resorted to, was perfected and elevated to an art by Reagan’s people. American politics in the 80s was a shitshow of epic proportions. Impeachable offenses, policy failures… horrible stuff – punctuated always with Atwater’s flawless character assassinations spun through perfect media control and heavily reinforced scapegoating.

Which now brings us to 1992.

A sanity recap: this cycle beginning in ’68 marks how for the next 24 years, most of the American political spectrum found common cause in the joyful practice of punching hippies. For 20 of the 24 years it was done directly from the White House! As a liberal American, it doesn’t feel good to have your country so rejoice in beating the shit out of you.

Enter Clinton. The GOP calls him a hippie and punches him, and what does he do? A brilliant maneuver – unless you’re a hippie – he too punches hippies. It works for two terms, he’s able to diffuse most attacks by joining with the attack slightly pushing focus onto a strawman… or some unfortunate actual living hippie. That brings us to 2000.

This was when America went completely insane for 8 years. The result of thirty-two years of violent anti-liberal attack propaganda; hate speech equating liberals & Democrats to murderers, rapists, terrorists, pedophiles, abortionists, communists, and of course dirty fucking hippies.

The result was that the very vocal minority who voted for George W. Bush cheered whenever he got his way over objections of the loathed Democrats. If “his way” was an illegal war, or torture, or financial ruin, impeachable offenses, often literally criminal acts, no matter – they cheered. The jumbotron told them to.

Today, the year may as well be 1977. Obama is so much like Carter it’s frightening. If he doubles down on Afghanistan without passing a healthcare plan with a public option he may end up more like LBJ without the Great Society legislation. Both analogies are pain.

Think of the losses Carter’s liberals soldiered through in 1977: the Death Penalty, gay-bashing Anita Bryant, the Hyde Amendment, the Alaska Pipeline!

Four years of losses like that, plus the all out attacks from professional dickhead Reagan and his conservative movement goons, and it all added up to a really depressed party base. Just as dispirited as we are today.

Based on my experience these past years, to be a professional liberal in American politics is to know mostly pain, loss, and sadness. I love my wife too much to share that kind of life with her. It is a life away from your family, underpaid; it is to be attacked by your enemies, and then betrayed by the “friends” who you put into power. It is to be attacked by your own party, even: Rahm, Obama, and Reid really do not like us. It’s an infuriating life.

However, there will be no Ted Kennedy-esque primary campaign against Obama. The identity politics would tear the party apart. (To be honest, odds are even that Obama may be able to win reelection without any accomplishments because he has such a nice smile.)

Things go in cycles, like circles around – then down – a drain. I think that where we are right now with our hapless, timid Obama is at the same point in the cycle that I described for Carter’s liberals, just 32 years later – and deeper down the drain.

Had I been born in the same year as Bill Clinton, I probably would have gone clean for Gene, switched to Bobby, and then spent the next 8 years of Nixon fighting the evil bastard tooth and nail. And then I would have walked away from the madness.

I’d rather not be like Carter’s liberals. I’m a Howard Dean guy. Thanks to him I fought Bush to his demise and then I helped elect a Democratic President. It’s not my problem that the man is Carter-redux and the cycle is beginning again. Instead, it’s everybody’s problem that we’re not allowed to have liberal leaders in this country.

The good news is that because it’s 1977 we’re only a few months away from some sort of analogue to the day when The Talking Heads began their collaboration with Brian Eno. That plus the recording of Led Zeppelin’s final studio album helped kill off disco for good.

I’m looking forward to the updated version of that – we’ll know it when we see it. Because it’ll be awesome. Already, people are making Avatar is the new Star Wars analogies. Star Wars, you remember, came out in 1977. Next year, I will be born.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

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Fred Gooltz, December 23rd 2009 | Posted in politics
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