The Era of Facebook Is an Anomaly 260
An anonymous reader writes "Speaking to The Verge, author and Microsoft Researcher Danah Boyd put words to a feeling I've had about Facebook and other social networking sites for a while, now: 'The era of Facebook is an anomaly.' She continues, 'The idea of everybody going to one site is just weird. Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space. Fragmentation is a more natural state of being. Is your social dynamic interest-driven or is it friendship-driven? Are you going there because there's this place where other folks are really into anime, or is this the place you're going because it's where your pals from school are hanging out? That first [question] is a driving function.' Personally, I hope this idea continues to propagate — it's always seemed odd that our social network identities are locked into certain websites. Imagine being a Comcast customer and being unable to email somebody using Time Warner, or a T-Mobile subscriber who can't call somebody who's on Verizon. Why do we allow this with our social networks?"
Talking outta ass (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Laughable (Score:4, Funny)
The basic premise, that it is an anomaly for us to come together into a common social space, is so ridiculous
Is Facebook a "single space? I thought it had groups.
Facebook is just a medium of communication - like talking using a mouth. Everybody used mouths before and nobody thought it was weird.
I have to wonder what her agenda is for making such a blatantly false claim.
She's just having a massive cognitive failure because nobody's using a Microsoft space and her job is to justify that.
It's a bit like Zune: It was a perfectly good piece of hardware so why did nobody want it? Why did they think Steve Ballmer "squirting" his Zune at people was wrong? It sounded like fun to her...
Does not compute.