Facebook-- A Transformative Space?

Sorry that I’m ignoring Lev Manovich (again) in my response this week. The Language of New Media is winding down to an interesting conclusion, which I look forward to. Manovich is tying loose strings together. But before I entirely understand where he is going, I don’t want to write about him.

This week, I was extremely interested in Gina Maranto and Matt Barton’s “Paradox and Promise: Myspace, Facebook, and the Sociopolitics of Social Networking in the Writing Classroom.” I’m feeling rather friendly, at the moment, toward the idea of using digital forms and social media in the composition classroom. At the same time, I question the basis for some of Maranto and Barton’s more idealistic claims. In this response, I’ll first discuss some of the good points Maranto and Barton raise; I’ll then work with some of the ideas I find problematic.

First, I agree with Maranto and Barton’s subtext that Facebook and Myspace, when used within the academy, can have a seemingly positive disruptive affect on questions of power and hierarchy. Perhaps a consideration for the differences between Blackboard and Facebook will illustrate what I mean. If you turn to Blackboard, it’s apparent that this website was developed with a traditional idea of education in mind. Though discussions boards offer some opportunity for student collaboration, more emphasis is placed on the ideas—on the writing— within this space than on facilitating community. Though students can respond to one another (usually with some sort of explicit instruction), they can’t post profiles or upload pictures; their performance of identity on Blackboard is mono-dimensional and often teacher-controlled. At the same time, the structure of the website is deeply hierarchical. The majority of the content can be manipulated or sanctioned only by the instructor. The design of Blackboard reinforces a traditional “banking-concept” model of the classroom while inhibiting—though not entirely precluding—a dialogic model. I’ve never used Blackboard because I find it distasteful.

In contrast to Blackboard, Facebook seems to facilitate a multi-dimensional performance of student-identity at the same time that it deemphasizes some of the traditional hierarchal structures of the academy. Were I to create an English 101 Facebook page I would have control over some of the profile information, but any of my students could post to my wall (I’d probably ask them to create Facebook profiles specifically for English 101. I don’t want to see pictures of students doing bong hits or whatever, though on a personal level I do think there’s academic value in this activity). Students would be able to upload photos and would have control over other parts of their performative identity; they would be able to explore and experiment with not only the logos, but also the ethos and the pathos of the academy. At the same time, the word-limits and social norms of Facebook could facilitate an emphasis on certain aspects of rhetoric—ethos, kairos, wit, etc—at the potential expense of logos. I’d take Victor Vallenueva’s view that, in balance, this may not be an entirely bad thing.

But despite the potential of Facebook, I nonetheless question some of the values that it embodies. I’m a bit of a curmudgeon. I’m one of the people that Maranto and Barton seem to dismiss. When it comes to Facebook, I find its’ “ineluctable emphasis on personal identity” and its’ “disregard [for] traditional cultural boundaries between private and public” wildly problematic. At the end of the day, this is because I feel that “discourse based on the construction and representation of personal and shared identities” drifts toward solipsism and an emphasis on image over substance. Though I hate to make wild claims, I do feel that Western society radically emphasizes the “I” at the expense of a communal sense of shared responsibility and community. This problematic emphasis on the individual has transferred in to digital forms:

(Twitter in Real-Life. Unfortunately, embedding is disabled. But it really speaks toward my argument.)

The emphasis on superficial connections and individual expression that these videos speak toward has severely precluded the democratic potential of new media. In “Small Change,” a recent article in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell develops this argument that new media has come to favor “weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger.” He contextualizes this discussion by contrasting the “twitter revolution” in Iran (which um… wasn’t all that successful) with counter sit-ins during the civil rights era in the US. Despite the strong potential of new media, there’s no inherent link between students (or ourselves) posting status updates or tweets and the cultivation of actual (and potentially transformative) community.

This ties in with the question that I’m really asking: does Facebook’s (and our culture’s) emphasis on self-expression and weak-tie collaboration dramatically inhibit a real and substantive commitment to living along with and in concert with others? And if it does, how can we disrupt predominant discourses that favor the individual while also using new media forms that reflect these discourses?

I don’t think it would be wise to immediately turn away from using Facebook in the classroom. But I think Marato and Barton’s happy emphasis on perfomative identity needs to be challenged in order to prepare the grounds for these authors other aim, which seems to be actual collaboration.