Thursday, May 15, 2008

Overanalysis

I was perusing Facebook instead of studying, and I came across this guy's comment:

Groups: The Paradox of Belonging
by Patrick Shearing at 11:36pm on May 8th, 2008

"Throughout our Facebook lives, we wander aimlessly through a mass web of irrelevant data and commercialized logic. Nonetheless, we also have the responsibilities which resound with importance such as our Inbox, Wall and the more recent addition of Chat. These serve as our only means of communication with our peers as we meander through the infinite streams of Application requests, Pokes, You Might Know This Person lists and nefarious Super Pokes. Groups tend to be a median between the monotony of obligations and the desultory nature of freedom. Nothing needs to be done as far as groups are concerned, they are simply worn as badges on a profile. In our contemporary culture, creating Facebook groups is the social equivalent of establishing a catchphrase. The title of a Group should either be regarded as a statement expressing information about the author (in an indirect manner) or as deeply symbolic. The influential scientist and theorist Niels Bohr once exclaimed 'Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.' This is an apt description of the ritualized phenomenon of group appellation. The process of creating and joining these groups is intrinsic to this diverse subculture. The correlation between Bohr's theory of Complementarity and Facebook groups can be summed up as follows: physical reality is determined and defined by manifestations of properties, in the virtual world these manifestations are called applications. This explains how a Facebook group can be meaningless and symbolic at the same time, that is the paradoxical nature of this application."

On the one hand, wow. Heck yes. On the other hand, dude... a little bit of overthinking, are we? He even goes so far as to use a Niels Bohr quote. A freaking Bohr quote, and it's a blurb about Facebook's GROUPS.

Jeez. I don't know whether to shake my head and walk away or to add this guy to my friends list. O_o

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