On Facebook

How difficult it is, really, to say anything truly original about Facebook. No one really expected it to take over our internet lives the way it has; no one really understand why, out of all the social networking sites, it emerged as dominant; no one can really predict what is going to become of it, whether it will die by the wayside like so many other internet phenomena, or whether it will become an internet-within-the-internet: a safe sandbox in the wild wild west of all the rest of the internet, with its fictitious personae, its masquerading identities, its child molesters, its identity thieves, its hackers with malicious code ready to jump into your computer and turn your life upside down. And, as icing on the cake, it has Scrabulous.

What makes Facebook different is that people are, generally, who they say they are. It's easy to spot a charlatan because he or she will be lacking in friends who vouch for this person's identity; even a group who conspire to create a fictitious persona will eventually run out of numbers. And if the conspiracy grows too large; then, well, it isn't much of a conspiracy, is it? Identity on Facebook has one foot planted in 'real', i.e., non-online life; you meet someone, and then keep in touch via Facebook; you find an old classmate, and then meet up in person. Anthropologists and historians from the future who are researching the current period in wester civilisation will suffer not from paucity, but from plethora, of information. All of everyday life is archived on public and private servers, somewhere, from personal websites to darker side of humanity, in chatrooms where individuals with names such as alz36697_tg trade pictures of children or information on which public urinals are the sites of anonymous sexual activity. Facebook is, literally, the face of the internet, as opposed to its groin. It's a happy, shiny, beaming face, where all acquaintances are friends, messages are polite, and everyone gives cutesy virtual gifts and plays little games and quizzes.

It's also wonderful for studying the dynamics of social networks, as a social networking site is likely to be. Like Google's ranking system, the processing of finding and making friends operates on the basis of eigenvector centrality. It isn't so much how many friends you have, but how important your friends are. So you can be very outgoing, but your five hundred friends who have less than a hundred friends will not matter as much as the few dozen friends you have who are immensely popular. Inbound popularity (people like you and want to be friends with you) counts differently than outbound gregariousness (wanting to be friends with everyone). These people are like the Van der Luydens in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, whose scarcity makes them sought after, and whose friendship becomes a societal badge of approval. Not, of course, that I'm doing anything like counting the number of friends that I have.

The feature that I love most about Facebook is the newsfeed. For someone who has moved around a lot and left groups of friends in various cities, some as near as Oxford, some on the other side of the world, receiving a terse report that so-and-so is getting married, has broken up, has just had sex (isn't that what 'has changed from "single" to "it's complicated"' means?), etc., makes me feel connected and still part of their lives; even as, at the same time, it can drive home the reality that one is very far away.

Chasing Times

Summer is upon us without it having passed through spring; and though May is only halfway done I'll dare to throw a clout, as well as a jugful of cold water over myself to ease the heat. The foreign students have arrived in London; you can hear the nasal accents of the Americans from the other end of the tube carriage. It is blindingly, stiflingly, insufferably hot. I perched myself above the frozen food section in the supermarket and rolled myself over the open top of the deep freeze as though I were on a spit. But everyone looks good in the afternoon light as they soak in the sun at the outdoor tables of the pubs, the city is bathed in a wonderful glow with dark blacks in the shadows and subtle gradients running up the domes and rooftops, and music is in the air. I suddenly remembered Snow Patrol's hit, 'Chasing Cars', from two summers ago. Record companies who are pushing a song by having it played on the radio incessantly want this sort of association; because the song is everywhere, you don't associate it with a place, but with a time: what you were doing in your life, whom you were dating, how you were feeling. I'm currently listening to A Fine Frenzy on my player, but I opened the window and let Snow Patrol blare out into the street as I was preparing dinner, for old time's sake.

When everything is glowing in the late afternoon light I mourn the passing of Kodachrome, of Technical Pan, and of Polaroid, all of which I would have turned to on a day like this. I miss my home darkroom, also known as the kitchen, where I would have chemicals and developing trays beside the chopping boards and food. It had the advantage of being my own place, where I knew the equipment by heart, and things would be where I left them; but frankly, I'm surprised I'm alive. I'm surprised the dog survived, even after lapping at a dish filled with selenium toner. I've found darkroom space in London, albeit at the other end of the city, and for the first time I have a properly-ventilated space with automatic multigrade heads which switch contrast at the press of a switch, huge developing trays with chemicals mixed and ready for you, and several archival print washers. The main drawback is that now I don't have an excuse for my crappy prints, which look especially bad when I'm working beside professional printers, creating gloriously perfect images with efficiency and precision. I was testing out the darkroom space in the ambition of going on to do some alternative process work, so I wanted to get my head back in the game by making a few prints just to see if I still could; apparently, I can't. So I'll be roaming the city with ordinary HP5+, because that's what I know best, and doing standard 8x10's until I'm up to making interpositives for contact negatives.

As I thumbed through my archive of negatives to try my hand at the enlarger again, I realized that they were arranged more or less chronologically from the time I bought my Leica and started taking photographs, through some of the best and worst years of my life. They weren't many years; they just felt that way. I stopped long before I came to England. The summer of 2006 was a decisive one for me; it was when I started being happy again. I stopped experimenting with exotic emulsions; I ditched the heavy 75mm and learned to shoot wide, and have stayed with the 35/2.0 since then. I shot two rolls in 2006 and then went trigger happy in 2007. This summer, maybe I'll actually make a few images worth keeping.