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A Structural Demythologizing of Facebook

By Rosie Perera | October 9, 2009 at 9:05 pm

Sorina Higgins wrote a wonderful essay on Facebook for her literary theory class and posted it on her blog and (ironically) on Facebook. She writes about how Facebook has its own mythological language in which it perpetuates fictions, but some of its fictions spill over into the physical world and become reality. The article ends with this intriguingly provocative summary: “In essence, Facebook is a tool for suppressing revolution. It keeps the middle class from rising by convincing them that they are more important than they are. What feels like free speech and the freedom of assembly is actually a form of class repression: keeping us in our sphere by giving us a little room in which to shout and prance. We fancy we can make a difference. All we can really do is waste time.”

The full article can be found here.

While I agree with much of her analysis, I disagree when she says that we can’t make a difference on Facebook. Armchair activism is notoriously ineffective in the old technology of email chain letters and e-petitions. However because of the power of Facebook’s myth to spill over into reality, people really are donating real funds to real causes and volunteering their offline time for real social justice because of Facebook and Twitter. This article about the outpouring of love and tangible help in the wake of the recent Phillipine disaster, unexpected in a “culture of apathy,” corroborates this trend: Volunteerism in the age of Facebook, Twitter. Another success story is the microlending website Kiva, which I first found out about through social networking.

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