The Death of the Cyberflâneur

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Apollonius
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The Death of the Cyberflâneur

Post by Apollonius »

Death of the cyberflâneur – Evgeny Morozov, New York Times, 4 February 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opini ... aneur.html


... But if today’s Internet has a Baron Haussmann, it is Facebook. Everything that makes cyberflânerie possible — solitude and individuality, anonymity and opacity, mystery and ambivalence, curiosity and risk-taking — is under assault by that company. And it’s not just any company: with 845 million active users worldwide, where Facebook goes, arguably, so goes the Internet.

It’s easy to blame Facebook’s business model (e.g., the loss of online anonymity allows it to make more money from advertising), but the problem resides much deeper. Facebook seems to believe that the quirky ingredients that make flânerie possible need to go. “We want everything to be social,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said on “Charlie Rose” a few months ago.

What this means in practice was explained by her boss, Mark Zuckerberg, on that same show. “Do you want to go to the movies by yourself or do you want to go to the movies with your friends?” he asked, immediately answering his own question: “You want to go with your friends.”

The implications are clear: Facebook wants to build an Internet where watching films, listening to music, reading books and even browsing is done not just openly but socially and collaboratively. Through clever partnerships with companies like Spotify and Netflix, Facebook will create powerful (but latent) incentives that would make users eagerly embrace the tyranny of the “social,” to the point where pursuing any of those activities on their own would become impossible....



... As the popular technology blogger Robert Scoble explained in a recent post defending frictionless sharing, “The new world is you just open up Facebook and everything you care about will be streaming down the screen.”

This is the very stance that is killing cyberflânerie: the whole point of the flâneur’s wanderings is that he does not know what he cares about. As the German writer Franz Hessel, an occasional collaborator with Walter Benjamin, put it, “in order to engage in flânerie, one must not have anything too definite in mind.” Compared with Facebook’s highly deterministic universe, even Microsoft’s unimaginative slogan from the 1990s — “Where do you want to go today?” — sounds excitingly subversive. Who asks that silly question in the age of Facebook?

According to Benjamin, the sad figure of the sandwich board man was the last incarnation of the flâneur. In a way, we have all become such sandwich board men, walking the cyber-streets of Facebook with invisible advertisements hanging off our online selves. The only difference is that the digital nature of information has allowed us to merrily consume songs, films and books even as we advertise them, obliviously.
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Apollonius
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Re: The Death of the Cyberflâneur

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Facebook is using you - Lori Andrews, New York Times, 4 February 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opini ... g-you.html

... Ads that pop up on your screen might seem useful, or at worst, a nuisance. But they are much more than that. The bits and bytes about your life can easily be used against you. Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital doppelgänger — and you may never know why you’ve been turned down.

Material mined online has been used against people battling for child custody or defending themselves in criminal cases. LexisNexis has a product called Accurint for Law Enforcement, which gives government agents information about what people do on social networks. The Internal Revenue Service searches Facebook and MySpace for evidence of tax evaders’ income and whereabouts, and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services has been known to scrutinize photos and posts to confirm family relationships or weed out sham marriages. Employers sometimes decide whether to hire people based on their online profiles, with one study indicating that 70 percent of recruiters and human resource professionals in the United States have rejected candidates based on data found online. A company called Spokeo gathers online data for employers, the public and anyone else who wants it. The company even posts ads urging “HR Recruiters — Click Here Now!” and asking women to submit their boyfriends’ e-mail addresses for an analysis of their online photos and activities to learn “Is He Cheating on You?”

Stereotyping is alive and well in data aggregation. Your application for credit could be declined not on the basis of your own finances or credit history, but on the basis of aggregate data — what other people whose likes and dislikes are similar to yours have done. If guitar players or divorcing couples are more likely to renege on their credit-card bills, then the fact that you’ve looked at guitar ads or sent an e-mail to a divorce lawyer might cause a data aggregator to classify you as less credit-worthy. When an Atlanta man returned from his honeymoon, he found that his credit limit had been lowered to $3,800 from $10,800. The switch was not based on anything he had done but on aggregate data. A letter from the company told him, “Other customers who have used their card at establishments where you recently shopped have a poor repayment history with American Express.” ...
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YMix
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Re: The Death of the Cyberflâneur

Post by YMix »

Good thing I don't have a Facebook/Twitter/Google+ account.
“There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent? Take a look at what we’ve done, too.” - Donald J. Trump, President of the USA
The Kushner sh*t is greasy - Stevie B.
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Enki
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Re: The Death of the Cyberflâneur

Post by Enki »

Declinist nonsense.
Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.
-Alexander Hamilton
crashtech

Re: The Death of the Cyberflâneur

Post by crashtech »

... As the popular technology blogger Robert Scoble explained in a recent post defending frictionless sharing, “The new world is you just open up Facebook and everything you care about will be streaming down the screen.”

This is the very stance that is killing cyberflânerie: the whole point of the flâneur’s wanderings is that he does not know what he cares about. As the German writer Franz Hessel, an occasional collaborator with Walter Benjamin, put it, “in order to engage in flânerie, one must not have anything too definite in mind.” Compared with Facebook’s highly deterministic universe, even Microsoft’s unimaginative slogan from the 1990s — “Where do you want to go today?” — sounds excitingly subversive. Who asks that silly question in the age of Facebook?
I think there is a good point to be made here. StumbleUpon can help.
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Enki
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Re: The Death of the Cyberflâneur

Post by Enki »

It's also total nonsense. People are not ending up in these Facebook ghettos, it just isn't happening. By having access to the streams of a vast number of people you have a wide variety of paths to go down, and those paths open up other paths. It's no more restricting than a city street, in fact, it's less restricting.
Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.
-Alexander Hamilton
Ammianus
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Re: The Death of the Cyberflâneur

Post by Ammianus »

Enki wrote:It's also total nonsense. People are not ending up in these Facebook ghettos, it just isn't happening. By having access to the streams of a vast number of people you have a wide variety of paths to go down, and those paths open up other paths. It's no more restricting than a city street, in fact, it's less restricting.
Admittingly the start of the article did not reflect the actual concern of the author near the end. Nonetheless, his thrust still stands:

Is it such a good idea for the mass populace to entrust crucial details of their lives, no matter how small or large, to the ostensibly continued benevolence of those gentle giants such as Facebook and Google?
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Miss_Faucie_Fishtits
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Re: The Death of the Cyberflâneur

Post by Miss_Faucie_Fishtits »

Ammianus wrote:
Enki wrote:It's also total nonsense. People are not ending up in these Facebook ghettos, it just isn't happening. By having access to the streams of a vast number of people you have a wide variety of paths to go down, and those paths open up other paths. It's no more restricting than a city street, in fact, it's less restricting.
Admittingly the start of the article did not reflect the actual concern of the author near the end. Nonetheless, his thrust still stands:

Is it such a good idea for the mass populace to entrust crucial details of their lives, no matter how small or large, to the ostensibly continued benevolence of those gentle giants such as Facebook and Google?
......and Foursquare?
She irons her jeans, she's evil.........
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