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Posts tagged ‘social media’

Mar 1

6 Behaviors to Avoid On Facebook

I heard someone say when I was in Italy awhile back that there are rules to driving in Rome, it’s just that those rules aren’t the published ones.  You have to be there for awhile to get a feel for the real rules.

Social media is kind of like that.  There aren’t really published rules.  Or if they are, they are the terms of use and not really the rules of how to engage well.  But there are rules for how to engage in social media, unwritten rules that ought to govern our conduct to make social media work.  In my experience, social media reflects real life but it multiplies exponentially the sense in which some people feel like the whole world is theirs to take up space in and to explain to others, while working to limit the degree to which other people can feel like that.  Social media then becomes a mechanism by which what Robin James has called multiracial white supremacist patriarchy (MrWaSP) perpetuates itself.  That’s not going to stop unless we actively resist it.

I think there are people out there who troll by virtue of their character.  But other people just seem oblivious.  This post is for those people.  I like the idea that we should think about people’s Facebook walls as their virtual home (ok, I say social media, but chiefly I mean Facebook – I spend time on Twitter, but I’m much less active there).  You are a guest, you should act like a guest.  If you don’t know someone IRL, you should be more reserved and not assume you are welcome until further encouraged.  But this rule, like the others, should be contextualized–some people will always be made to feel less welcome and you should think about that as you moderate your own wall.  Also, the host-guest metaphor might be insufficient because I think some people who behave poorly on Facebook would treat me like this in my house, too.  In any case… Read more

Oct 31

#SPEP14

Last weekend, the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, the umbrella organization for continental philosophy in North America was held in New Orleans.  New Orleans is a fantastic city.  I had never visited before, so I had an impression that was kitschy.  But I left thinking it was beautiful.  I stayed in the Garden District.  My first morning there I took the streetcar to the conference hotel and the driver of the streetcar got out of the streetcar and went into a hotel and was gone for five minutes.  As a friend said, “Union break, don’t h8.”  The city was loud and colorful and much better than anything I had ever learned from The Pelican Brief about what the city would be like.

SPEP was all a-Twitter® and I storify it here.  In this post, I want to give a more sustained consideration to two panels I attended, two papers in particular: Sara Brill’s “Beyond Zôê and Bios: On the Concept of Shared Life in Aristotle’s Ethics” and Robin James’ remarks at the Advocacy Committee’s New Media, Social Networks and Philosophy panel.* Read more