Facebook is ridiculous

I was well into my old age (like, 21?) when Facebook appeared, so I never created a Facebook account until earlier this year. I was lured in by the walled garden effect; the Franklin Humanities Institute would post event details on Facebook, and you could only see them if you had an account, so I created one. Then my adorable young cousin friended me and I was sunk, i.e. Facebookified. (I still love you, FHI. You too, Brookie!)

While I've come to be a big fan of Twitter and, of course, blogs, I've never found a reason to relinquish my suspicion of Facebook. Even before the privacy controversies, it always seemed to me that Facebook only gave the illusion of privacy, leaving you with limited control of your identity and none of the advantages of total openness that you get with blogs and Twitter (which is of course simply microblogging).

I also find the "friend" relation on Facebook, frankly, creepy. Facebook requires that this relation be symmetrical; it actively tries to dissolve the distinctions between acquaintances, colleagues, family, and friends. This contrasts with Twitter and RSS feeds (and Zotero), in which you control whom you follow but not who follows you.

Asymmetrical relationships encourage professional connections; I follow my friends and they often follow me back, but I also follow some scholars who have no idea who I am (and that's fine). Some people follow me and I have no idea who they are; that's fine too, because we're not "friends." Twitter is largely for sharing links, so people who subscribe to my Twitter feed generally do so because they want the kinds of things I find interesting to come across their radar. It is, in other words, an intellectual relation. A Twitter connection is primarily formal, not emotional, and that's a good thing.

What a difference between Twitter's asymmetrical "following" and the ways Facebook tries to guilt you into being "friends" with everybody you've ever known or could plausibly know. The classic example is being Facebook "friends" with your parents--always an awkward thing, even if you get along well with your parents, because after all, a parent is something other than and beyond a friend. A whole bunch of French Canadian Cécires, charming people but of no known relation to me, have tried to friend me on Facebook. Of course! That's how Facebook works; that's how "friending" works. Nobody would ever follow my Twitter feed on the basis of a surname. On the basis of tweet contents (limerick, a mention of Marianne Moore, the use of a conference hashtag), yes. A possible genealogical connection, no.

I never posted much of anything on Facebook (I think I made two status updates: one to post a CFP and one to say that I was deactivating my account). I deactivated my account a few weeks ago, which isn't the same as deleting the account. I think my short and apathetic tenure on Facebook has me fairly safe, although of course I could be kidding myself (Byzantine instructions for actually deleting an account are linked below).

Typical of its penchant for confusing the personal with business, Facebook attempts some pretty funny emotional manipulation when you deactivate an account. Below, I'm told that a friend from college; my best friend from second grade, now an actor in L.A.; a good local friend; my sister-in-law; and my youngest brother are going to miss me. They won't be able to keep in touch with me.



It could be just me, but it strikes me that if the only thing keeping me in touch with someone is Facebook, then that person is not going to miss me, and I'm not going to miss them either. I think my friends and family and I are going to manage.

Some recent Facebook-related links:

• Ryan Singel at wired.com: "Facebook's Gone Rogue" (via Julia)


• The always insightful danah boyd: "Facebook and Radical Transparency," and her follow-up "Facebook is a utility; utilities get regulated"


• Aaron's smart post on the privilege of demanding that others be unveiled: "The Soul of Mark Zuckerberg"


• Melissa at Geek Feminism Blog: "Facebook is a Feminist Issue"


• Tracy Clark-Flory: "Facebook predicts your relationship is over" (not informative so much as hilarious)


• How to permanently delete your Facebook account

Another one for the "my alma mater sometimes embarrasses me" files: Twitterature.

Admittedly, I am primarily interested in Twitter because of its potential pedagogical applications.

Update: The Chronicle has more.

(Via HUP. Yes, Twitter.)

Statistical Panic

Kathleen Woodward, Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009.

Statistical Panic challenges the idea that the category of the emotions is altogether psychological, and therefore a refuge from the political. By constellating a variety of texts -- literary, critical, social -- Woodward interrogates the emotions as sites of political thought and political action. The emotions have, she argues, a "cognitive edge." I find this formulation less illuminating than an example she returns to over and over, the moment in A Room of One's Own (one of my favorites) in which the narrator, sitting in the British Library, finds herself doodling a caricature of a professor, realizes that she is angry, and then realizes that her anger is a defense against the professor's anger. Anger is, for the narrator, a diagnostic and then analytical tool. Woolf's narrator offers a model for Woodward's meditative readings of the emotions.

In the first section of the book, Woodward explores the ways that feelings like anger, shame, and compassion have been theorized to different ends, and what different narratives about the emotions mean politically. These are suggestive and politically aware chapters that particularly point up the emotions surrounding identity politics: "feminist anger," the anger of the aging, racial shame, and politicized compassion. These chapters do important work to set up how Woodward thinks about (and with) emotions, but the real heart of the book, I think, is the second half on "new feelings," and particularly the final essay, titled, like the book itself, "Statistical Panic."* In these chapters, Woodward offers rubrics for thinking about the emotions occasioned by postmodern life, such as "sympathy for nonhuman cyborgs" and "bureaucratic rage," emotions that are often "impersonal" (you aren't really angry at the particular unhelpful bureaucrat on the other end of the line, for example, but rather at the bureaucracy itself). "Statistical Panic," I find, very powerfully names a "structure of feeling" embedded in what Ulrich Beck calls the "risk society." "Our bodies," Woodward points out, "are figured as being in a perpetual state of risk. The statistics profiling the body are for the most part melancholy and grim .... fatally we feel that a certain statistic, which is in fact based on an aggregate and is only a measure of probability, represents our very future" (196). Since the very nature of the statistic is to belong not to individuals but to groups, the emotions that statistics occasion oscillate between panic and boredom, postmodern analogues, Woodward suggests, to the modern dyad of shock/ennui.

Statistical Panic does not operate by argument but rather by constellation, juxtaposition, and suggestion. Woodward's language is most frequently a language of presentation: I refer to... I turn to... I take up ... Benjamin offers... X represents [emotion] in this way, while Y represents it in this other way. The book is therefore frustrating precisely when it is the most successful; at its most suggestive moments, I found myself wishing that Woodward would take an idea or a reading further, only to have her move on to some other, equally provocative text.

I particularly wished for greater pressure on the literary elements in this book; Woodward's eclecticism is clearly intentional, yet I frequently found myself wishing for a more explicit articulation of what role genre was playing in this map of the emotions. While Woodward often discusses popular culture in the familiar condemnatory terms ("postmodern televisual culture" and its tabloid obsessions, for instance, or the too-pat representation of statistics in the television drama Chicago Hope), any theory of the relationship between genre and feeling is at best only hinted at. Although in the introduction she suggests that "countering a fragment, or providing nuanced context for an information-story, is a more ample narrative -- a story," I wished for more on just what a "story" was, in contradistinction to the "information-story." These terms immediately conjured up for me Walter Benjamin's distinction between the "story" and "information" in his essay "The Storyteller," an essay that Woodward explicitly alludes to in her chapter on "Bureaucratic Rage" (172). But while Benjamin's terms are useful for Woodward, she ultimately and perhaps misleadingly uses them in quite a different way. The "story" that she privileges is above all the memoir, which she describes as "a medium promising (although not always delivering) intimate voices that allow us entrance into [the authors'] lives" (191). I cannot help thinking that this is more or less the opposite of what Benjamin means by "story," as I remember the moment in "The Storyteller" when Benjamin writes that

With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent — not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth.

It seems to me that the memoirs of "the tiny, fragile human body" that Woodward examines work much differently than the Benjaminian "story," and yet they do something for Woodward's account of postmodern feelings that is worth theorizing in greater depth. Precisely because, as Woodward so lucidly observes, statistics seem to encapsulate stories about our futures, a theory of how stories work in the age of statistical panic -- sometimes called the "information age" -- seems warranted.

Yet my desire to see such a theory articulated is, I recognize, a measure of the success with which Statistical Panic maps out an emotional terrain and places crucial issues in conversation. One cannot fairly complain that a book is not three chapters longer than it is, and I come away from reading this book with a raft of notes and references, especially on the studies of aging, illness, and disability, areas that have tended to be insufficiently attended to in theories of postmodernity.


*An earlier version of "Statistical Panic" appears in differences 11.2 (1999): 177-203, Duke Journals Online, PDF.

Deep thought of the day: Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno is the original lolcat.

Slavoj Žižek says this is required reading for college students.

I am starting to worry that I will have to sign up for Twitter one day. I actually have three relatives on it, it turns out. And, you know, Žižek. (Or is that "Žižek"?)

I'm reading Kathleen Woodward's Statistical Panic right now. It's fascinating.

I have recently learned that some of my own blood kin are on Twitter. Disturbing. Why can't they stick to something nice and old-fashioned, like a blog?

The sands of Google

Also found in my Google search of the other day, and just now investigated:

I once wrote a blog post including the words "World of Warcraft," so this blog is hilariously associated with this computer game in the inscrutable mind of Google, via something pertaining to the game called a "quest" (evidently a mini-narrative within the game), which contains my first name.

I could mention that the original post was in reference to the "x of y" construction of metaphor (e.g. "the sands of time," "the ghosts of memory"). I'm still hoping my friend Karen, a linguist, will one day give me the definitive analysis of this construction, but I tend to associate it with inappropriate metaphors and bad undergraduate writing (good undergraduate writing avoids irresponsible metaphors!). A famous South Park episode lampoons the way that gamers (allegedly) think of the world of Warcraft (a game) as being as important as the actual world.

In any case, according to Google, the game World of Warcraft has a quest called "Dearest Natalia":

My dear Natalia has gone missing.

Truth be told, she had been acting strangely for weeks leading up to her disappearance. I had caught her talking to herself when no one was around on more than one occasion. She was adamant that everything was ok and that she must be allowed to continue her research.

I had no idea World of Warcraft was about grad students.

I imagine the object of the quest is to get Natalia a fellowship so she can continue her research. I could really get behind that idea, actually.

Some notes on recently read children's books

1. Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Sherwood Ring

I read Pope's The Perilous Gard when I was a child. It was a Newbery Honor book, and I liked it a lot, although I don't know how it would hold up to adult re-reading. The Sherwood Ring is entertaining, but not as good, and most of the time Peggy's actions are just an excuse for ghosts to narrate more of their own stories. The sexism in the novel is... very 1958. Appallingly so. At least Pope got the humanities scholar=poverty thing right. She was a humanities scholar herself, and probably knew from experience.

2. Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom series

I've read two of the books in this series, and right away I was annoyed by the days-of-the-week conceit. Okay, seven days of the week, seven wacky adventures. This is, of course, no worse than the Harry Potter seven years in school, seven wacky adventures. Still. Seven keys to the kingdom is like six Signs of the Light, and like Will in The Dark Is Rising, Arthur keeps being directed by magic beyond his understanding, which, I am sorry, is irritating.

Nix's cosmology is interesting, filled with pastiche but in a self-aware way. Grim Tuesday reflects slightly (not deeply) on the meaning of pastiche and originality in art. The cosmic and the comic intertwine playfully in this series, which is much different from Sabriel's high seriousness.

Sabriel seemed to be Nix's Oxford School shout-out, deeply tied to land, kingdom, lineage, and law. The Keys to the Kingdom is also in love with the law, but the rightful heir is (thankfully) no longer part of a particular blood line. Arthur is chosen as the rightful heir nearly randomly: asthmatic, he is chosen because he is on the point of dying (or so the chooser thinks). Unlike Sabriel, whose Ancelstierre is clearly a fantastic England, Arthur apparently lives in Australia, slightly in the future (Monday features email; Tuesday has "luminescent e-paper").

I'm always fascinated by Nix's representations of text. In Sabriel, text is lex, an emanation of both reality and law (the two are nearly interchangeable in that series). In The Keys to the Kingdom on the other hand, text is either completely banal, i.e. telegrams, receipts, memoranda, and endless records which are filed and can never be found, or the embodiment of will. Which is to say, there is a legal will, which is a volition in and of itself, and is moreover an actual character in the series.

It's hard to tell the two kinds of text apart; there's a critical moment in Monday in which Arthur and Suzy have to work alone, because a pit of "bibliophages," adders that will annihilate any text-bearing thing, separates him, the Will, and Suzy from Mister Monday's lair. The Will cannot cross because it is, ultimately, just text, "entirely composed of type" (interestingly enough), and in that sense indistinguishable from the label in Arthur's shorts. It also has no real medium and no materiality; in Monday it inhabits the body of a frog, and in Tuesday it takes the form of a woman and a bear. These media are incidental to the actual Will, which can flit about as disembodied type if necessary.

There is, of course, a unique codex, the Compleat Atlas of the House and its Immediate Environs, but in spite of its foreign, hand-written text it resembles nothing so much as Wikipedia, for Arthur always opens it seeking specific answers, and gets them (although, as with Wikipedia, some entries are more helpful than others). The textual world of The Keys to the Kindgom is that of the information age, ephemeral, abundant, both banal and all-controlling.

I need to think more about this approach to text in comparison to that of the Sabriel trilogy.

The child as ideal automaton

Apparently I can only post about children's lit lately, but I swear this comes from a non-children's lit source.

I attended Scott Bukatman's keynote address at the ParaSite New Media Symposium today. The talk, titled "Disobedient Machines: Autonomy and Animation," discussed the tradition of created beings (e.g. the Pygmalion myth). Bukatman, reading Disney’s Pinocchio, noted that interesting automata in film —- the good kind, the kind that really come alive —- always rebel. Their disobedience is a sign of their autonomy, a sign that creation was successful (insert long passage from Paradise Lost here).

Bukatman discussed this in terms of cinema’s creations, specifically the uncanny (but cute) disobedient creatures of animation (which are subsequently schooled, like Pinocchio or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice) and the sublime disobedient creations of live-action film.

But what struck me was his revelation that many of the 18th century automata (the clockwork mechanical bodies some folks were apparently fond of constructing) were automated children. Bukatman’s talk raised the idea of the child as a kind of disobedient (and therefore successful) creation. As Anne Scott MacLeod and Myra Jehlen have observed, American childhood (boyhood, in their formulations) is seen as constitutively disobedient, and this disobedience and unsophistication (construction as children’s literature) only makes it seem more quintessentially American (the American is the infantile, the unmediated), such that Huckleberry Finn can be pronounced the American novel. The resemblance between Twain’s project of vernacular realism and Disney’s project of simulated photography in films like Pinocchio -— both projects that seek to render the created boy “real” -— is striking, especially given how that realism is figured as specifically American (at least for Twain; I don’t know that much about Disney). I’ll have to think more about this.