Culture Briefings
Cultural megalomania
Facebook has become a hot topic of discussion and scholarly study. Since facebook applications platform opened up, there are about 5000+ applications only with no real monetization channels. I have expressed my views before about the facebook applications — but there’s an interesting social awareness that is surfacing in this sphere: almost a sort of cultural megalomania.
People are taking pride in sharing their ‘bookshevles," movie interests, virtual gifts, traveled cities and causes. Essentially, all applications that allow them to display their ‘cultural worth’ or ‘cultural currency." I have been guilty of this as well — having toyed around with each of these applications and then removed them because I got lazy of updating my ‘cultural hall of fame’ or simply realized that others had more fuller maps and more gifts and more drinks from their friends and that I would just look lame with such a meagre supply of all of the above. It’s interesting to me that there is a visual metaphor on facebook for all kinds of cultural behavior people engage in — and that people are taking pride in & engaging in that sort of cultural bragging where they think of those graphics as trophies and reflections of who they are and what their online worth is.
It is also, a very strong tool for people to control and sometimes manipulate exactly what their online identity will be. I am hard-pressed to say this is new to facebook. It probably started when we first spent hours trying to pick the right email handle, the right icq name, the right AIM name, the right msn name….The handle reflects our personality and it a strong representation of our physical self into a virtual world. Online diaries, livejournals and blogs allowed to portray our virtual handle in the real world — and supplement it with constant data and feed to promote it, build it further and even, live up to it.
Facebook applications and facebook itself — by allowing visual and graphical representations of more than one aspect of our intelligent/ the culturally assimilated self, as taken this cultural megalomania to a whole new level.
And that’s the extend of thought I’ve given this right now —
what about you?
Discussion
5 comments for “Cultural megalomania”
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Hah, yes…! I’m ‘guilty’ of doing all of the above with my FB apps…I’ve found I self-edit when adding (or not adding) certain books, music, etc. I recently deleted the textual likes/interests (books, movies, etc) and replaced these with as you said, visual representations with various apps. And why did I do this? Partially probably out of boredom, but also because I felt it would represent my interest/me in a louder, more obvious way.
Courtney - hi! it’s interesting, isnt it? I do want to give it more thought but I need to find more time to be able to do that. sigh..
No doubt time is not much of a luxury for you at the moment, what with the new job. Hope that’s going well!
Hi Jinal- great post! I find this to be so true- the societal changes are reflected in our use of technology, especially sites like Facebook. The ever-present trend of “celebritizing” ordinary people and opening up to an unknown audience is all too familiar for us with our “reality” shows and Second Life. Our narcissistic society has reared it’s ugly head…
Hi Jinal- great post! I find this to be so true- the societal changes are reflected in our use of technology, especially sites like Facebook. The ever-present trend of “celebritizing” ordinary people and opening up to an unknown audience is all too familiar for us with our “reality” shows and Second Life. Our narcissistic society has reared it’s ugly head…