Facebook’s Name Game

Facebook has  launched its customizable URL feature, joining the ranks of MySpace in giving you a “real” URL that people can navigate to, outside of the Facebook log-in procedure. An unnamed friend of mine shot me an email about how exciting this whole thing was. At a gut level, I was less than enthused about it. (Ask him.) What was the purpose? Isn’t it easy enough to simply type someone’s name in the search box when you are logged in Facebook?

But today Douglas Rushkoff of the Daily Beast and New School has articulated quite well why I was kind of not feeling the whole move. First of all, the hype is overblown since people are going to get stuck with crazy URLs. I tried to get /SamHan but obviously by 2AM when I got home from seeing “The Hangover” with the GF, someone had already taken it. So, what do I have now?–/samhan.samhan. Ha!

So besides the problem of creating user names in general, what other problems do I have with this move? Here’s Rushkoff:

Facebook must be hoping the name change will not only make the site more user friendly, but also get people to start thinking of their Facebook pages as their public faces for both personal and business activities: true home pages.

That’s a problem. Facebook’s relative detachment from the Internet is not a bug, but a feature. Its only competitive advantage in the Internet space—its only reason for being—was that it was more personal, more closed off, and arguably more private than the Internet itself. Even then, the biggest problem has never been how to get people to find you, but how to not friend many of those who do. Now that we’ll be quickly findable via Google, what’s left to distinguish this social-networking site from the social network that is… the Internet?

Rushkoff has it right. This is Facebook’s attempt to make Facebook much(more officially at least) people’s public pages. Google has also been a part of this trend with their new “Google Profile” feature. (Yes, I hate Google but I got one too. Kill me.)

I’ve got a problems with this theoretically. I think the attempt to create a “real” home page on the Web is quite silly and nostalgic. Web users, casual ones and addicts such as myself, do not have a single home in utilizing the Web. They are everywhere almost simultaneously. We, as Web users, can never be there, there. Media theorists have been calling this “distributed cognition,” and I called this the “lurking-effect.” I tend to side with Gloria Anzaldua, who gave us the important notion of “borderlands” and also “home-ophobia,” forcing us to reconsider the home-centrism of much of American culture. Whenever we meet people, we ask or are asked “Where are you from?” as if anyone of us are from a single place. Most people in the world are forced to migrate, whether it is from the depths of poverty to the First World or from the desolate factory towns into major metropoles. The 20th century has seen the greatest level in human history, just taking place in China’s massive “deruralfication.” Hence, to assume that individuals have a singular home where his/her “heart” is, is to articulate a spatial metaphysics that runs parallel to the metaphysics of “the soul” of Aristotle and of course Descartes, which assumes that individuals contain an essential “being” inside of them, making them who they are. Facebook and others attempting to lay claim to users’ “true” home on the Web are unable to see the very social effect that they have had. Plus, Cartesian metaphysics are sooooo last century.

Thus, I’m in agreement with Rushkoff when he says:

That shift, I believe, portends the beginning of the end for this social network. That may sound preposterous, but the short history of the Internet is littered with quickly fallen giants. They all appear to be permanent features of the digital landscape—Friendster, MySpace, Orkut, Napster, CompuServe—until they’re not. A minute after midnight on Saturday may just be the moment 200 million more people find themselves thrown firmly onto the Internet, and in the process make Mark Zuckerberg’s digital wading pool obsolete.