I’ve resisted a long time, but at Jeremy’s insistence I am now a member of Facebook, and what a strange kind of a system it is. I don’t think that even John Reid could have managed to muster up a better means of social surveillance than that system – quite remarkable. The moment you change anything, click anything, everyone knows… But you can trace some interesting things too. Freaky.
Yes, I will be interested to see how it works too. Facebook opened it up from just college students to anyone sometime in the autumn, I think. It still bears very much the marks of having started life on campus, but the people involved do seem to be changing (or maybe it’s just that my own friends have joined up).
What I imagine it is good for is keeping people in touch – and that’s something I imagine much more of interest to people in organisations like JEF where they are very scattered, or say alumni groupings, than it is for students who live next door to each other anyway.
I wonder what uses there are for it… There are more than 400 Labour Party members on Facebook apparently. I’ll stick to blogging more than Facebook though!
Perhaps my ignorance of Facebook is a sure sign of getting old, though on the other hand nobody’s really given me a good reason to try it out.