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    Facebook and Philosophy: What's on Your Mind?
    Facebook and Philosophy: What's on Your Mind?
    Facebook and Philosophy: What's on Your Mind?
    Ebook537 pages5 hours

    Facebook and Philosophy: What's on Your Mind?

    By Open Court

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Facebook and Philosophy is an entertaining, multi-faceted exploration of what Facebook means for us and for our relationships. With discussions ranging from the nature of friendship and its relationship to "friending," to the (debatable) efficacy of "online activism," this book is the most extensive and systematic attempt to understand Facebook yet. And with plenty of new perspectives on Twitter and Web 2.0 along the way, this fun, thought-provoking book is a serious and significant contribution for anyone working with social media, whether in academia, journalism, public relations, activism, or business. Exploring far-reaching questions Can our interactions on Facebook help us care about each other more? Does Facebook signal the death of privacy, or (perhaps worse yet) the death of our desire for privacy? Facebook and Philosophy is vital reading for anyone involved in social networks today.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Court
    Release dateSep 15, 2010
    ISBN9780812697209
    Facebook and Philosophy: What's on Your Mind?

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    Reviews for Facebook and Philosophy

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      This is an anthology of essays about facebook utilizing a variety of philosophical perspectives. I have a passing familiarity with most of the philosophers the writers refer to, but I don't consider myself an expert. I found the essays mainly readable and interesting.
    • 4/5
      A growing trend in social communication is the use of Social Networking sites. This transcends the day to day personal interaction with a more accessible and faster communication. The sphere of the virtual world has caught reality into a next level. Facebook and Philosophy is a compilation of essay/analysis on Facebook not only as a virtual fanaticism but as a social medium. It is seen through a philosophical perspective of both ancient (Aristotelian, Platonic, Socratic) and Modern/Contemporary thinking. It gives a guide on how and why people use such a social networking like Facebook, link it with ordinary interactions as friendship, consumerism, security, relationships and psychology.Facebook and Philosophy by D.E.Wittkower is a handy material for scholarly reference. Though Facebook in general updates easily, brings more features and enhances its processes, this book is still a good one and not outdated. Though there might be citations on features no longer in use, these are negligible and can still be used for learning.
    • 3/5
      I've decided I'm just not the right audience for this pop culture and philosophy series. Though I enjoyed some of the Facebook-related essays -- the more specific the scope, the better -- there was just too much repetition/overlap for my tastes. (I probably should've realized that since the focus was Facebook, which with all its bells and whistles is just a website instead of a book or movie series, many of the pieces would discuss the News Feed, friending, and similar functions over and over.) I'm also not fond of ivory-tower arguments that have more to do with the writer's own opinions and biases than any sort of concrete considerations (such as what actual Facebook users say). When it comes down to it, any social media, or technology for that matter, is a tool whose uses are partly determined by its designers and partly by its users. But I guess that would've been too short for a book!

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    Facebook and Philosophy - Open Court

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    1

    The Privacy Virus

    JAMES GRIMMELMANN

    039

    How many times have you heard someone (probably someone over forty) say, Kids these days don’t care about privacy? Facebook is their Exhibit A: over four hundred million users and growing, telling the world all sorts of scandalously personal details. And it’s not just keg stands, either. There are things federal law considers so private it’s illegal to ask you about them in a job interview. Age. Sex. Birthplace. Religion. They’re all questions on the first page of the Facebook profile form. Yea, verily, privacy is dead and the kids these days killed it.

    It’s a neat theory, except for one inconvenient detail: the actual behavior of Facebook users. If privacy is on the list of words nobody uses any more, Facebook users didn’t get the memo. College students spend the wee hours of weekend nights untagging photos of themselves on Facebook, removing the evidence of their drunken revels earlier in the evening. A Facebook stalker is a creep, not a contradiction in terms.

    In fact, as you look closer and closer, the idea that Facebook is privacy’s tombstone becomes stranger and stranger. If over four hundred million users don’t care about privacy, why are they using a site that allows them to reject friend requests? If they wanted to broadcast every last detail about their lives to everyone everywhere, why don’t you ever see credit card numbers on Facebook profiles? And why did hundreds of thousands of users sign petitions protesting Facebook’s decision to introduce real-time news feeds? For people who allegedly don’t care about privacy, Facebook users sure spend a lot of time worrying about it.

    Challenge a Facebook skeptic on the lack of evidence for her claim and she’ll usually retreat to one of a few related backups:

    1. Actions speak louder than words. Anyone can say they care about privacy, but when it comes time to actually doing something about it, there they are on Facebook, posting incriminating photos and salacious stories.

    2. Actions have consequences. Wanting privacy on Facebook is like training for a marathon by drinking gasoline; you’d only try it if you hadn’t thought things through.

    3. Youthful indiscretions. Facebook users care about privacy only after they’ve learned their lesson the hard way.

    These replies may sound more plausible, but they all have something in common: contempt for Facebook users. If you say you care about privacy but don’t, then you’re a hypocrite. If you don’t reconcile your desire for privacy with the facts of Facebook, then you’re stupid. If you haven’t yet had a bad experience on Facebook, then you’re young, lucky, and foolish. These attitudes—which, to be fair, are rarely stated so baldly and insultingly—all presume that Facebook users simply haven’t seen the truth about privacy that the dismissive skeptic has. She’s right, you’re wrong, end of story.

    Actually, it’s the skeptic who has things wrong about privacy on Facebook. Facebook users do care about privacy, and they do try to protect it on Facebook. The skeptic goes wrong when she assumes that privacy can only mean something like keeping things secret. It doesn’t—privacy is much richer and subtler than that. Privacy is a key component of being free to be yourself, building healthy relationships, and fitting into a community that values you. Facebook users care about contextual privacy:¹¹ they want others to respect the rules of the social settings they participate in.

    Private and Public

    Let’s start by asking what the skeptic is thinking of when she talks about privacy. If we pressed her for an explanation, she might say something like the right to be let alone, or I don’t want my personal life on Entertainment Tonight, or you can’t come in without a search warrant. These ideas all depend on an implicit theory of what privacy is: private is the opposite of public.

    The underlying idea is that the world can be divided into two spheres: one that’s out in the open and shared with others, and one that’s behind closed doors and shared with almost no one. The daytime world is the public sphere. That’s where politics, news, work, and the mass media are. The nighttime world is the private sphere. That’s where home, family, and friends are. The public is extroverted and loud; the private is introverted and quiet. Public is visible; private is hidden. Everything is one or the other.

    As a theory, it has a natural logic to it. Things you do in public—that is, in public places or where all sorts of strangers can see you—are fair game for anyone. Things you do in private—that is, in your home where no one can see—are off limits. When a celebrity pleads with the paparazzi to stop following her, she’s typically upset that her private time with friends and family is being turned into public news and entertainment. The police can trail you freely when you’re out walking in public, but they need a search warrant to enter the private space of your home.

    Drawing this bright line between private and public means that privacy is a close relative of secrecy. Private information is secret information: just you and a few close friends and family. If someone tries to make it public without your consent—the paparazzi, a blackmailer, a creepy neighbor who steals your diaries—the legal system will step in and protect your desire for privacy. But once you voluntarily choose to give up secrecy, by going out in public or publishing your writings, the cat is out of the bag and the legal system won’t help you put it back in. The choice is yours: you can keep your secrecy or give it up. But you have to choose one or the other, no

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