In response to the rather petulant “I’m taking my ball and going home” hubbub caused by Jason Calcanis, Om Malik has put up a post suggesting ways to avoid ‘Facebook Fatigue’ where he advises that one think of Facebook friends as simply an extension of your real life friends (which sounds eerily familiar to all those email etiquette articles in the mainstream press a few years back). And while I agree with Malik’s suggestion that people must, among other things, simply learn to say no, the entire question of Facebook fatigue seems peculiarly unique to people like Calcanis, Scoble, Veronica Belmont or Malik himself. As a few people in the comments of Malik’s post point out, it is only those who are both in the public sphere and technologically literate – i.e. the technorati – who are inundated with so many Facebook friend requests that it becomes a serious problem. Additionally, while treating Facebook friends as real life ones sounds like a smart plan, it seems to deny the power of Facebook as a place for casual acquaintances to get together and get to know each other. For the time being, this seems like a discussion this lot should have on IM and let the rest of us continue enjoying Facebook.
In an interesting parallel discussion, Mathew Ingram takes Calcanis to task for his technoratic elitism by arguing that comments and audience interaction is central to the very concept of blogging. Calcanis responds in that classically libertarian way by suggesting that freedom is something that is to be taken, not given. But as I pointed on the comments, Calcanis’ claims of meritocracy seem to miss that the meritocratic is always subtly elitist, as it always attempts to erase the hierarchies of power that underpin who rises to the top and how.
The trouble with that idea, however, is that it’s becoming increasingly clear that being a leftist blogger in the uber-capitalist world of Web 2.0 is fast becoming a losing battle.
