Networked Media // Week Seven Reading

Facebook, as we all know by now, is a place where individual people (500,00,00 to be approximate) go to tell/show their life story. This allowing for the supreme social media site to fall in the middle of this contemporary, online aesthetic spectrum, between narrative and flow. The structure of Facebook allows its users to post photos, statuses, show their likes and dislikes, etc, etc, to essentially perform a story of a version of themselves. This performance of identity on the social site ‘has no recognisable political or artistic significance’, but once again is rather just a ‘digitally mediated aesthetic experience’. Making Facebook an online form of storytelling. Its does, however encapsulate the popular aesthetic of flow – thus the whole Malcolm in The Middle situation.

Facebook is a flow-inducing website/app in that it doesn’t really seem to come to any particular end. It just keeps going and going, and users continue to go along with this never-ending flow as they monitor and respond to the posts of others, and keep posting themselves to never really reach any particular goal or ending. Further, this using of social media as an exertion of flow, is mostly apolitical. But it can become anti-political. See, using Facebook can be a combination of narrative and flow elements; this diversity meaning that it has somewhat reached an ability to perform social activity that doesn’t really align to any dominant form of narrative. That being, a start, middle and end.