A couple of signposts from the strange new world we live in, both from New York magazine. Vanessa Grigoriadis offers one of the most insightful analysis pieces I’ve seen on Facebook, asking Do You Own Facebook? Or Does It Own You? Chronicling the backlash over Facebook’s Terms of Service and its new look, she also travels to Palo Alto to meet Facebook executives. The trip to Facebook HQ reveals some priceless nuggets about the young people creating this fascinating social experiment.
I took a trip to visit Facebook because I was interested in the way it is remaking social groups of old friends, so I mostly wanted to talk about that, but all these executives wanted to talk about was sharing. And privacy. And control. (Although I did learn the biggest user complaint on the site: the inability to remove unflattering photos of themselves posted by friends.)
They said this kind of stuff: “People have been traditionally too scared to share on the web,” that from another executive, Chris Kelly, the company’s chief privacy officer at the moment, though he is widely rumored to be leaving soon to run for attorney general of California. “They lost all control because they were too open with sharing information,” he continued. “We give them back that control, so they will share again, and we think people will soon be much more comfortable about sharing more with more people.” He cleared his throat. “Ultimately, human beings are very social,” said Kelly. “They want to share. They just want to share with people that they know and trust.”
For all the talk of sharing, it was a slightly tense environment, a little like being in a capsule, hurtling into the great unknown, which is the future of the web. It was all a little vertiginous. In our conversation, we marveled at Facebook’s runaway growth of about a million new members a day, which Kelly called an “explosion.” It’s an astonishing number, but things are moving and changing incredibly fast on the web right now. They know that Facebook’s massive cultural footprint could be washed away tomorrow by forces not yet understood, not least by the micro-choices and preconscious perceptions of its users.
Grigoriadis’ graceful prose is effortlessly, enviably stylish:
If there were one word to describe what Facebook has added to my life, I would use it. It’s a multidimensional pleasure: It’s given me a tool for exceptionally mindless, voyeuristic, puerile procrastination; crowd-sourced pesky problems like finding a new accountant; stoked my narcissism; warmed my heart with nostalgia; and created a euphoric, irrational, irresistible belief in the good in men’s hearts among the most skeptical people I know—people who should know better. As the dominant social network on the web (the Internet began, essentially, as a social network, with Usenet in the late seventies) Facebook has created a space similar to a college quad, where members can check each other out, talk about culture, gossip, and pass mash notes. Users really like Facebook; they believe in it so strongly that they want to protect it from itself. That much is clear from the anger over the redesign …
Also at New York and also on faces, Jonathan Van Meter delivers an in-depth examination of changing notions of beauty, and their visible impacts on the faces of celebrities. Van Meter’s piece is first and foremost a fascinating investigation of contemporary cosmetic surgery, whose frontiers are advancing as rapidly as certain actors’ lips. But it is also a kind of mirror image of Grigoriadis’ piece, probing not the changing social expression of friendship but something we could think of as its flip-side: the changing tastes of mass-media constructs of facial beauty.
… the Mount Rushmore cheekbones, the angular jawline, the smoothed forehead, the plumped skin, the heartlike shape of the face. Their faces didn’t seem pulled tight in that typical face-lift way; they seemed pushedout. Looking at Madonna, I kept thinking of the British expression for reconditioning a saddle: having it “restuffed.” Perhaps that’s where she got the idea to have some work done. After the hunt, Madge dismounted her trusty steed and thought, My saddle needs restuffing. And, by George, so does my face!
Van Meter uncovers all sorts of fascinating and illuminating factoids: the celebrity obsession with youth is relatively recent, the Jolie-inspired lip craze is nearly over, and the newest “injectables” are not Botox but based on hyaluronic acid. It’s also, in a relentlessly depressing way, a story about the eclipse of a certain utopia which dared to dream that humans (both women and men) would one day emancipate themselves from the judgmental gaze.