Facing the Future

We now have a Facebook group for Cosmic Variance! But let me work up to it.

I had heard about Facebook many times, but had effortlessly resisted the temptation to learn anything about it or get involved in any way. It’s a social-networking site, allowing people to keep each other up to date with stuff they are doing. A pastime in which I pretty much have no interest, despite what one might gather from the fact that I have a blog and all that. While I’ll tell stories about travel or amusing anecdotes for purposes of local color, and mention the occasional big event, for the most part I prefer to use the blog to talk about ideas and keep the fascinating details of my everyday life a tightly-shrouded mystery.

But at some point, the “everyone is doing it, how hard can it be, and maybe it could even be fun” argument kicks in, and in a moment of weakness you sign up. I blame Carl Zimmer, who just joined himself, with the usual disclaimers. It’s free, and easy as pie — you sign up, post a photo if you like, and that’s it.

The basic point of Facebook, according to my limited understanding, is to have “Friends.” That is, a set of other Facebookers with whom you have (mutually) agreed to allow access to your profile and information. There is a quite brilliant application via which, if you choose to allow it, Facebook can zip through a conventional email program (Gmail, apple, etc) looking for email addresses of other people with Facebook accounts, and let you ask them to be friends. And then there are networks of common interest and all that stuff. The obvious use is that you can simply tell Facebook when you’ve decided to quit your job and hike across the Andes, rather than emailing all of your friends individually.

But there is a deep problem of postmodern community ethics here — who is a “Friend,” in the official Facebook sense? One group would be, you know, your actual friends. Another would be people with whom you have some less tangible, but nevertheless pretty mutual and well-defined, relationship — maybe you’ve exchanged emails, or comments on each others blogs. It’s all up to you where to draw the line.

But personally, I wouldn’t count someone as a “Friend” if I had simply read their book, or visited their blog, or listened to their radio show, without them knowing me at all. And vice-versa. I mean, I think — to be honest, I’m new at this, and have no idea what the standards are. It might be very natural, for example, for regular CV readers to want to be my friend, but I’m not really sure it fits my notion of what friendship is really all about.

Then I noticed that Crooked Timber has its own Facebook group. Which seemed, at first, like the dumbest thing in the world — why do you need some proprietary social network when you already have the damn blog?

Upon digging deeper, however, I realized it was actually the smartest thing in the world. (A very fine line.) With the Facebook group, people can come together and share pictures, or relevant stories or rants, without being “friends” and dealing with constant updates about what they all had for dinner last night. (Although advancing to friendship — or more! — is always possible.) And in fact there are lots of blogs that have their own Facebook group.

So, now, so do we. Go ahead and join up. Upload your photo (or not). Share videos and pictures from the regular “Fans of CV” get-togethers which I’m sure happen all the time. The Pharyngula group has over a hundred members — you don’t want to be shown up by a bunch of godless cephalophiles, do you?

But there’s no way I’m ever having a MySpace page.

Update: Seems to be working! Over a hundred members, and the irrepressible Mark Jackson has even started a conversation about physics-related movie titles.