Bill, I get your point about the inexperience of some of these developers and designers, but then again if people stopped to think about what they were doing we probably wouldn’t have Linux or the internet. I think to have the vision of wanting something FB to exist means you are aloowed a few mistakes. I do think that they need to think more about their social repsonsibiity as opposed to what works on a technical level. I don’t actually think that life experience has much to do with it. I have always found those with a long experience in business and development to generally have the most contstrained thinking patterns and problem solving methods and the newbies to be unfettered by bad thinking. It leads to mistakes, but also to innovation. (Sorry to use somethign so crass as a military history example but take Napoleon as a good example, who wiped the floor with the Austrian armies in the campaigns of 1796/97 at age of 26, without ever previously having been involved in a field battle, let alone been a general at one).

You say yu are not holding your breath but there is every reason to think that solutions do come quickly. Look at wikipeadia and its growth. The problem is not the inexperience of developers - Linux is a good example of what inexperienced people can achieve - but the injection of revenue streams and polictical agendas. FB wants to appeal to mass N. American markets so it has a political agenda of tight controls, a religious bias and crappy revenue midelling. If it loosens these up (or better still someone begins an open source FB idea which does not rely on advertising) then it will become a much better paradigm. Impossible? Wikipaedia has only 5 full time staff, but its technical solution and intelligence model work very successfully.

And on the humorous side, the subtitle of this post could be “It all depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”

-Bill A

This is then a perfect reflection of western “democratic” societies: like Facebook, democracies like the US, Britain, Canada give a highly superficial democratic feeling but really are societies with “purposefully limited fields”: Canada has never elected a female prime minister or (like Britain) its head of state or upper house, America will never elect a poor president, Britain has a parliament that represents white male lawyers (and their business paymasters) and no one else. All the fields in our so called democracies are limited.

Similarly, these fields shift. Why allow religion to be an open field in Facebook and not politics? Why are some people exempt from the law and societal obligations (eg, the Kelwona Accord, the invasion of Iraq, any number of a hundred illegal acts the British government undertakes every day) and some of us are not exempt? The questions are related because these decisions seem arbitrary, but of course are made for a reason and not by us, whether it is the nefarious inclusion of your religion on Facebook (why not favourite color instead?) or the decision of a government to treat someone of a different skin color illegally. So you’re right: Facebook is a place where medium meets message - it is a social network like the wider world and works on the same principles.

Thank you very much for the comment (and so nice to see you around again!). I really appreciate what you’re saying here:

“Anyway, what I find most sinister about the lack of control viz a viz predefined political settings is that FB places no such restriction on the religious description.”

This is it precisely - this proves that there’s absolutely zero technological reason for the dropdown. And yes, I would agree that the word is sinister if they’re limiting user’s free expression of ideological identity. That should be deeply concerning to any thinking person.

One truly best practice for any forum that says it’s democratic and open is to - at the very least - permit differences of belief and creed. That’s part of our human rights code here in Canada. The use of the dropdown, with its highly questionable choices and purposefully limited fields, is discouraging of democratic expression. This is why so many of my non Facebook using friends refuse to create an account.

Some people I know have used the religion field to write their political view by adding a colon and then the religion. Another user used the field to write: Do not message me through facebook. And there’s another issue - the facebook inbox is not a genuine email. And does not have the kinds of controls you should have with an email program. It also requires to you stay logged in to Facebook if you wish to check messages from within the system - otherwise you have to aggregate your Facebook into your email, which is like opening up a door to all the Facebook developers.