‚In the World of Facebook‘ – NYRB book review

In der neuen Ausgabe des New York Review of Books, Volume 57, Number 3 · February 25, 2010, gibt es einen Artikel der sich mit zwei Bücher und einem Phänomen beschäftigt.

What is „social networking“? For all the vagueness of the term, which now seems to encompass everything we do with other people online, it is usually associated with three basic activities: the creation of a personal Web page, or „profile,“ that will serve as a surrogate home for the self; a trip to a kind of virtual agora, where, along with amusedly studying passersby, you can take a stroll through the ghost town of acquaintanceships past; and finally, a chance to remove the digital barrier and reveal yourself to the unsuspecting subjects of your gaze by, as we have learned to put it with the Internet’s peculiar eagerness for deforming our language, „friending“ them.