Design of Facebook Homogenizes Identity and Limits Personal Representation | Hacker News Reader

Design of Facebook Homogenizes Identity and Limits Personal Representation

hz-journal.org

43 pointsjkiuu26 comments

People are talking about visual customization, but the article is mostly talking about how Facebook forces you to conform to social definitions of yourself by giving you checkboxes for gender, language, forced spellings of particular concepts, etc.

Foucault talked about (I don't remember where) how technology isn't neutral, its expressive power is limited by the nature of systematization. and as technology takes more of a role in daily life, people are forced to conform to whatever limited system was thrown up that you have to interact with to get government services or buy groceries. Your life is complicated but the form gives you four options because a computer can't process your freeform answer. The article explores how Facebook does this, admits more or less to the technical and business reasons that underlie this, but then goes ahead and blames white males anyway. Three years later Facebook has far more options for languages and genders and naming, which is still limiting, but blows apart the hegemonic white cis male attitude argument and all you're left with is what Foucault observed. I don't think you can lump together technical reasons, business reasons and racial/gender hegemony reasons anyway, but these claims have currency with some people whether or not the argument for it is defensible.

Lacan argues that this perception, that there is an inexpressible, ineffable something which can't be captured by a limited conceptual system, is itself a product of that system. The male/female binary scheme produces the experience of being more than simply one or the other.

From this perspective, the best way to support a diversity of self-definitions is by providing fewer options, not more. Facebook only lets you make one kind of connection to other people, the "Friend". As a result, two people being Facebook Friends has many different possible interpretations. No one believes it means you are friends.

Didn't read the article, but that's one of the things I like about Facebook the most. The ability to customize your profile on MySpace is part of what killed it.

Oh, you already forgot about the flashing animated gifs and snowflakes falling while 3 different videos and/or songs played?

I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and I actually miss it. Yes, it was ugly, but it gave people agency. Facebook forces every single person to "look" more or less the same. I imagine there has to be at least one kid who got into CSS styling by trying to make their MySpace profile look cool, introducing them to web design...

Facebook's enforced "look" is sort of the equivalent of a school uniform, except for everyone, and it's stifling.

I prefer the enforced look of Facebook to the custom MySpace themes. That being said, MySpace is definitely the reason I first learned CSS and JavaScript. I might not have become a web developer without it!

Why not implement a "theme-less" viewing mode? If the surfer prefers to see everything looking the same, it's simple to offer such a mode.

Why do you prefer "the enforced look of Facebook"?

And yet Tumblr thrives on it, automatically playing music, custom cursors and all.

Tumblr continues to have a higher and higher percentage of unreadable "blogs" because of the increasing number of horribly looking themes being created. Just like MySpace, it will flame out and Facebook will out live it.

Personally, I don't enrage in any of that nonsense.

Tumblr content is read primarily from a tumblr account dashboard, which has a consistent look.

Source?

I guess I don't have a source for this and don't know that it's strictly true, but tumblr is certainly /designed/ with collated dashboard reading of content as its intended use case. The actual blogs at tumblr subdomains are incidental to how registered tumblr users use tumblr, and those are the people tumblr is focusing on. I think the only blogs whose content are primarily read at the blog level are those tumblr blogs that are actually some organization's website blog and which are consequently well-designed.

I had the exact same immediate reaction. Facebook was a smash hit in large part because of how restrictive and uniform it was. Could it not also be said that Twitter homogenizes communication and limits personal expression?

Twitter allows some degree of theming (color palette, banner, avatar), but I agree that these services definitely force you into a certain standard of representation or communication and it's probably helped them grow. There's something to be said of branding and "omakase".

You're right, everyone loves to wear exactly the same clothes in real life. It only makes sense that they'd want to wear the same "clothes" to express their online identity. It's obvious in retrospect. Silly MySpace!

oh people want to express themselves, but when it gets out of control, you get MySpace. It's not MySpace, it's the people.

I think Bebo found a nice middle ground. You could customise your profile with a 'theme'. These themes followed certain guidelines and the layout of elements on the page reminded the same. Of course there were bad themes that ruined readability of pages but nothing as horrible as MySpace. Personally Prefer the Facebook approach but I think there is a middle ground.

You should really read the article before you say anything about it.

There are definitely options between letting you hack falling snowflakes into your MySpace page and not letting you use any markup at all. A usability-oriented framework could exist which allows self-expression without all of the problems of Geocities, MySpace, and tumblr.

But this text isn't strictly about the fact that Facebook doesn't let you inline CSS and HTML and I think it presents some valid arguments about the social problems created by Facebook. People should actually read the article.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

It doesn't do any of those things. Behind the scenes facebook has an extremely rich representation of your identity. In fact it is so good that they could probably even predict your favorite color and make that the background of your profile. Would that kind of approach be considered not limiting one's identity and personal representation?

At the end of the day facebook wants to collect certain kinds of information to sell to advertisers and the site is set up to do just that. If for some reason advertisers wanted to know tomorrow if you also self-identify with two different genders then you'd be damn sure that tomorrow there would be two gender drop-down lists when you sign up. That is unless they couldn't predict it from the massive trove of data they already have. So really the argument in the article comes down to I don't like facebook's UI because it doesn't let me input the kind of information I want to input all the while forgetting who the real customer of that data is and that there is this thing called HTML/CSS/JavaScript that lets you express yourself as freely as you want for less than $5/month.

"Identity is theft of the self."

Of course it does and by doing so it allows users to focus on what really matter which is the content.

Could a more freely customized social network exist? Absolutely but it would still require some sort of ability to control the powers.

Aren't there now around 50 gender choices on Facebook?

jesus christ- how bout you dont tie up your identity in facebook to begin with

Mainstream academic fluff like this is what is truly homogenized. Academic articles are a marketplace like any other, and this market tends to promote in a vehement manner a rather limited worldview.

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