Re: <nettime> Has Facebook superseded Nettime?

[Sean Smith <sean.smith@rogers.com>]

Not to suggest that everything should be done on Facebook, or any
other service/community for that matter, but isn't part of responsible
activism to engage this space and find how it works, what is possible
there, which barriers are firm and which are smooth, if so many
millions of people are using it?

For example, if in Facebook I write a Note, I am able to tag up to
30 people from my Friend list to let them know the content of the
note is about them (the official use). But perhaps I want to share a
piece of information with them, or let them know that their ideas were
responsible for the ideas in my note, and so my tagging takes on a
different semantic meaning.

What if we substituted Speech and Public Square for Note
and Friend List? The 30-tag limit all of a sudden becomes a
technical/corporate-legislated barrier to public assembly. A solution
might be to post the note a second time and tag 30 more people, but
then the ensuing dialogue would be fragmented across the two threads.

Perhaps this is a trivial example. But the "what is possible" of
Nettime is a relatively known quantity with a fairly select audience.
Facebook, on the other hand, has a general audience of millions,
and its "what is possible" is still relatively unknown, I would
argue. Maybe it's not so much that Facebook is "friendlier" for media
artistic, activist and scholarly communities, but rather that its
quasi-public space is where work needs to be done?

Sean

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