Intersubjectivity and Facebook

Hmm...just went on Facebook and saw that one of my friends has friended their...mum. Ooh, how interesting. Got me thinking. These social network sites define a new cartography in human relations and they can't be ignored.

They are eminently in the LL category of AQAL. How they play a role in intersubjectivity is interesting. On the one hand, they allow you to get in contact with friends of yore, catch up with them, groove, as it were. On the other, the exchanges that mostly take place on them could be described as, well, nugatory (especially between established friends who seem to regard it as an excuse to bastardise the language and, for the first time in history, provide fodder to the puritans who say the language is generally on the decline).

So there is an interesting dialectic going on. A few steps forward, some back - how many forward and how many back, I don't know. In any case, it got me thinking. Increasingly, public organisations make use of social network sites to purvey their goods and services. On the other hand, Facebook and others play to the more primitive instincts of the young, exploiting them, getting them to type their e-mail passwords ingenuously, and uploading all kinds of rubbish.

Facebook, and others, are artefacts (under Ken Wilber’s definition, et al). That's what they are and meant to be. That means that anyone, on whatever level of consciousness they're at, can use them. Even Eckhart Tolle's got a profile. Makes you wonder; they say they've transcended desire and then there's this little remnant of a...

Is it creative evolution? Is it Spirit's desire to express itself through Form? As Ken Wilber says, even in Big Mind, there is an impulse in there 'not to stay alone'. With Genpo Roshi's triangles, we can see with great clarity how this works. i.e. you neither repress the one who wants to make contact nor the one who's Absolutely Perfect. Interesting.

So is this the dance of form? In one way, yes. In other ways, like with other things, it is the dialectic of progress and it behoves us to remember this.
As regards the language, well – I said that for the first time in history linguistic puritans may actually have a point when they say the language is on the decline. What do I mean by that? Well, that up until now, language evolution truly has been telic. Take Jean Aitcheson’s ‘Language Change: Progress and Decay’ and this really crystallises the point. It’s a wonderful book. Made me really aware of how language change really is a process of change in one segment of language and then making up for it in other. Now, it seems, since the advent of television and, more worryingly, chat rooms and text messaging, youngsters seem given to routinely abusing the language, as if it were primitive means of communication designed for little more than communication between a sailor and the native, as would have been the case in the development of pidgins, because that’s what pidgins are for.

So what impact is technology having on communication, language and relationships? Well, I’ve already touched upon some of the points. Bringing people together, if superficially. Defining new methods of social organisation and indeed means of social discourse.

Technology is an artefact, whether we like it or not. Anyone can use it, for good or bad. It seems it's here to stay for a while, so let's see how this kosmic groove develops in the ever unfolding waves intersubjectivity...

Any comments welcome.