a facial apparatus

Holding out: a way out of facebook?

The words below are clips from a longer article that attempts to analyze online social/antisocial networks like facebook and myspace in the context of cultural capital.

I for one, have held out of facebook, but feel the increasing pressure to join...
I found this article while skulking around like a gangly gollum looking for a way out,
is there a productive way to be engage whilst disengaging/ holding out/ not participating in the unpaid work being done by 'users'?

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_12/bigge/index.html

From: The Cost of (anti-)social networks; Identity, agency and neo-luddites.
Author: Ryan Bigge.


"Related to front-end formatting decisions, Galloway describes how intelligent networks “produce an apparatus to hide the apparatus.” [8]

Is Theodora Stites’s information calisthenics work or play? Andrejevic (2004), concludes that:

“Instead of promoting power sharing, the contemporary deployment of interactivity exploits participation as a form of labor. Consumers generate marketable commodities by submitting to comprehensive monitoring. They are not so much participating, in the progressive sense of collective self-determination, as they are working by submitting to interactive monitoring.”

Hughes describes a false choice, a sociotechnical scenario devoid of agency. In his article, Cassidy (2006) underscores this narrative of inevitability: “‘It was viewed as an addictive guilty pleasure — lots of students using language like ‘resisting’ and ‘holding out’ when describing their hesitation to join,’ recalled a Harvard graduate who joined Facebook as a senior, in February, 2004.”

Is there any difference between those excluded from creating a robust social network and those who chose not to participate? How would a neo-Luddite (that is, a conscientious MySpace objector) differ from someone with social network failure? Or, to put it another way, is it possible to communicate intent through a lack of participation?"