{"id":911,"date":"2007-10-06T09:56:17","date_gmt":"2007-10-06T15:56:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=911"},"modified":"2007-10-06T09:56:17","modified_gmt":"2007-10-06T15:56:17","slug":"facebook_and_th","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=911","title":{"rendered":"Facebook and the grownups"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Dwelling online,” writes Alice Mathias in a New York Times op-ed<\/a> about Facebook, “is a cowardly and utterly enjoyable alternative to real interaction.” Mathias, who graduated from Dartmouth earlier this year, punctures the hyper-serious hype that has engulfed Facebook since the social network let grownups in:<\/p>\n

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In no time at all, the Web site has convinced its rapidly assembling adult population that it is a forum for genuine personal and professional connections. Its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has even declared his quest to chart a \u201csocial graph\u201d of human relationships the way that cartographers once charted the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As usual, the adults are missing the point: “It\u2019s all comedy: making one another laugh matters more than providing useful updates about ourselves, which is why entirely phony profiles were all the rage before the grown-ups signed in. One friend announced her status as In a Relationship with Chinese Food, whose profile picture was a carry-out box and whose personal information personified the cuisine of China.” Now that Facebook is taking itself seriously, the site is being given a hasty intellectual makeover, retrofitted with a “social graph.” Like a college senior heading off to his first job interview, it’s being forced into an ill-fitting suit jacket:<\/p>\n

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Facebook administrators have since exiled at least the flagrantly fake profiles, the Greta Garbos and the I Can\u2019t Believe It\u2019s Not Butters, in an effort to have the site grow up from a farce into the serious social networking tool promised to its new adult users, who earnestly type in their actual personal information and precisely label everyone they know as former co-workers or current colleagues, family members or former lovers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s hard to apply a $10 billion valuation to, in Mathias’s words, “a circus ring.” So now Facebook is “a platform,” which certainly sounds important, not to mention boring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Dwelling online,” writes Alice Mathias in a New York Times op-ed about Facebook, “is a cowardly and utterly enjoyable alternative to real interaction.” Mathias, who graduated from Dartmouth earlier this year, punctures the hyper-serious hype that has engulfed Facebook since the social network let grownups in: In no time at all, the Web site has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}