Confusing a public with the public
Confusing a public with the public
The admirable Diaspora Project is trying to build an open and distributed version of Facebook to let us publish, aggregate, and control our own stuff to make up our own identities. That’s great, but I think that, too, conflates the ideas of a public and the public; it does what Zuckerberg is doing by having us publish everything to all, except it gives us ownership of that. I’m not criticizing the effort at all; I think it’s great. I’m just saying that this isn’t a substitute for Facebook; it’s something different, something more public.
For anyone thinking about leaving Facebook it is worth considering the alternatives. Social networking raises many concerns and challenges for people, and even more vexing ones for (aspiring) political theorists (like myself).
