i started collecting new and exciting chocolate bars (especially kit kats, they seem to be doing the most experimentation in flavours) when fono was in nigeria and had no chocolate. i'd go on hunts at pacific mall to find him something he hadn't tried, so that he'd get an extra special surprise in his care package. it didn't help that alex and helen brought me all sorts of new flavours of kitkats too (green tea, lemon cheesecake). as you can see, it's become a bit of a habit now. fono now has quite a collection waiting for him when he gets here in a few weeks.

if anyone wants to try some of these (i recommend the cookie dough and honeycomb), let me know and i'll bring you some back in december!

[click image for full descriptions, and more exciting chocolate bars]

plazes: yet another way for self-surveillance mechanism that also incorporates the every addictive element of collection that turns games like world of warcraft into crack.

basically, you collect internet access points, and it plots it on a map and you can show your friends and have it automatically update to your msn or skype name. part of the fun is getting ones that no one else has yet. i wish i had this when i was traveling (esp in nigeria). i wouldve levelled up for sure.

i talked to greg early this morning about jack layton being on facebook. he told me kinda fearfully (or maybe its just me projecting) that he thinks facebook could get so big it just never goes away. like email or msn messenger. he pointed that facebook is moving upwards, age wise, which is usually an indication of the ubiquity and maturity of a technology. everyone i know knows of someone's parent joining, and a lot of older people i wouldn't expect to join now have facebooks. and then there's all the canadian politicians. its always the kids who are early adopters, but once your grandma is on it, its totally part of the everyday.

once facebook reaches a critical mass and has so many people, says greg, why would anyone switch? it would be nearly impossible to compete with facebook once everyone is on it, since any SNS's value is mostly derived from the size and activity level of its user base. besides, why would you give up your 7000 wall messages and 500 meticulously tagged photos that your friends tagged of you. it's not like switching from msn to yahoo messenger, cuz you have digital artifacts and relationships that aren't really portable. sure you can import your photos to something else, but you can't reproduce the social capital created by having your friends tag you in photos and then being able to show off on your profile, the fact that you not only have friends who you do cool things with, but lots of friends who take the time to tag you in a photo.

on the other hand, toronto has the biggest facebook network in the world, so greg's experience could either be the leading edge, or an exaggeration of the rest of the world's use. they don't use facebook here in perth like they do in toronto, where they are absolutely nuts for it. you meet someone once and they add you. you went to school with someone when you were 2 and you havent seen them in 20 years and the add you. people who wouldn't even talk to you at the mall add you (this has happened to me). here in perth, on the other hand, no one really cares. even at uni.

the red bull looks like apple juice, or pee, rather radioactive yellow like the stuff in canada.

i found an amazing article today on the political economy of facebook, myspace and the other usual suspects written by ryan bigge (former adbusters staffer before kalle lasn went apeshit).

basically, bigge argues that use of social networking sites can actually be seen as unpaid work. in using such facebook et al, we're essentially producing a stream of self-surveillance that can be monitored, repackaged and sold. for example, taken collectively, we're voluntarily producing huge databases of our preferences that are a marketers dream (think recommendations on amazon.com - customers who bought this also liked...) its the darker side of web 2.0's utopian wisdom of crowds that created wikipedia. but also more broadly, the entire value of facebook is entirely in its users and the networks they've created, without any financial compensation. writing in the same vein as bigge, Fred Scharmen notes that even on flickr, the users are creating all the content that drives visits to the site, which in turn provides the eyeballs that can be sold to advertisers. did you know myspace also claims ownership of its user's profiles? so even your online identity is commodifiable content.

the big takeaway for me though was the realization that this could be why we all resent facebook, but still use it. we're aware on some level that something isn't right, that we're giving away something we shouldn't be. but if we opt out and refuse to use facebook, we're essentially a nobody. as bigge puts it: "In this environment [Facebook et al.], the digital enclosure generates increasingly polarized options: either the constant, self-generated surveillance of the type described by Stites or the self-negation (“You don’t exist”) that social network avoidance entails."

bigge also points out the gaming-elements in social networks that make them similar to WoW which i mentioned earlier, and brings this into his analysis of the political economy of social networking:

But digital gardening, like its soil-based equivalent, requires commitment and effort. The
question becomes: are MySpace users at all aware of the political economy of the space in
which they operate? As Kline, et al. (2003) demonstrate, the line between work and play in
the video game arena grows increasingly fuzzy. Wittel (2001), meanwhile, argues that “The
assimilation of work and play corresponds with the blurring of boundaries between work
and private life, between colleagues and friends.”

One can draw parallels between the effort required to invite friends into your MySpace
network and the repetitive work involved in collecting gold in online gaming environments
like EverQuest or World of Warcraft. Cassidy (2006) quotes different Facebook users:
“I remember people competing to see how many ‘friends’ they could
accumulate and how quickly, and tracking how many ‘friends’ they shared in
common with other ‘friends’,” [Olivia Ma] said.

Hilary Thorndike, a schoolteacher who graduated from Harvard in 2005 and
still uses Facebook, has more than eight hundred friends on the site. “I always
find the competitive spirit in me wanting to up the number,” she wrote in an
e-mail.

Williams (2005) underscores this narrative of accumulation:

Seabron Ward, 19, a student at the University of Colorado at Denver, said that many students consider it a status symbol to build a big friend list. ‘This one guy on my list has a thousand,’ she said, a bit enviously. ‘I only have 79.’

so while the gaming element explains why we're all addicted, the problematic political economy of facebook is what makes us hate it.