Comments on: One book, another book

By: duus

duus — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 17:50:21 +0000

i just joined the group.

What is the best practice with respect to looking at students’ profiles? Accepting invitations to be friends with them? etc?

haven’t looked at students’ profiles. have decided to accept invites from grad students, but not undergrads. I feel like that’s a good rule.

By: Katherine

Katherine — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 09:51:33 +0000

Joel, I did as you suggested some time ago – and because I had made my Facebook profile extremely private there was naff all about me on Rapleaf bar my email address. So I registered on Rapleaf and made that incredibly private too.

The outfall is though that I am now getting a lot more spam email of the “enlarge your penis” variety, which goes straight into my spam folder anyway, so ho hum. Clearly these spammers have no filter on the gender of the names they are spamming too though.

By: Bill Gardner

Bill Gardner — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 12:38:18 +0000

when I decided that I wanted to marry one or both of the younger Prinsesses von Thurn und Taxis it occurred to me to ennoble myself a little, so I upgraded to “von Bladet”.

I get it. You are a Pynchon character.

By: des von bladet

des von bladet — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 10:19:24 +0000

The von Bladet story: not long after I started blogging, I started to concentrate on prinsess stories drawn from Zweden’s mighty Aftonbladet – unquestionably the world’s finest newspaper, since it is both the best-selling paper in Zweden and firmly social-democratic in political orientation. (It remains to this day the only mass-circulation tabloid that I have seen publish an article on queer theory with references to Judith Butler, among others.)

In tribute, I appropriated the common Scandiwegian newspaper suffix -bladet (meaning literally “the sheet”) for my own blog.

Some time later, when I decided that I wanted to marry one or both of the younger Prinsesses von Thurn und Taxis it occurred to me to ennoble myself a little, so I upgraded to “von Bladet”.

Now, of course, I am happily married (one year yesterday!) and resident in the Disunited Lowlands of Benelux, but the name persists, and I mostly persist in believing (despite considerable empirical data to the contrary) that the etymology is basically pretty transparent.

By: joel hanes

joel hanes — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 07:57:24 +0000

Google “rapleaf”.
Then disable your Facebook account.

By: Dennis

Dennis — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 01:11:28 +0000

What a beautiful book: deep, clear, full of insights, widely relevant, as rigorous as can be. Formal philosophy at its best. And facebook is pretty fun too!

By: Bill Gardner

Bill Gardner — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 00:31:31 +0000

Cool. So is there a story about what ‘Des von Bladet’ means?

By: Jacob Christensen

Jacob Christensen — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 22:57:37 +0000

Well, so be it. There are four of you btw.

By: Brad DeLong

Brad DeLong — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 21:52:18 +0000

Not at all…

Brad

By: Jacob Christensen

Jacob Christensen — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 16:54:11 +0000

I accidentally added one of my (former) students as a friend. It’s a bit strange to get updated about his whereabouts. Otherwise it turned out that most of the present and former Ph.D.-students at my (still-)department are on FB, but so far I’m the only senior member of the faculty. I blame Chris Bertram for this.

I’m still wondering if it would be invasive to add Brad deLong as a virtual friend.

By: des von bladet

des von bladet — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 15:33:13 +0000

Matt: I’ll always be DvB to me, too, but not to my mother or the passport inspection officers of any actually existing state.

And I forgot to mention that I am actually a Facebook Friend of my University itself (I get to call it “Open”), which is certainly better than being friends with any of its mere flunkies.

By: Jared

Jared — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 14:07:55 +0000

Did Facebook just hit the tipping point in Europe? I got back in touch with a bunch of European friends this week.

FWIW, my personal policy is to accept friend requests only from former students, not current.

By: acb

acb — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 14:06:32 +0000

also, the thing that worries me about facebook is that even if the company itself is no more malevolent than it need be, it is providing a wonderful hunting grounds for malevolence of a particularly worrying kind.

If I write an app which will appeal to everyone who—shall we say—hates repression in Burma, and release it on Facebook, it will, as it spreads across the system, tell me not only who uses it, but who their friends are, and how the social networks run among that friend group; this is information hard to get in any other way if my employers should be interested in such questions.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 14:04:29 +0000

Yeah, after the initial flurry of activity (as you construct your network), you get into this phase where nothing is happening. That’s where they try to convince you do do all kinds of pretty dumb stuff (superpoke! zombie wars! stupid “gifts” that cost real money!) to keep using it. I’m unconvinced. The main advantage is that, unlike the wider web, they have a complete picture of the network.

By: Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Patrick Nielsen Hayden — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 13:52:14 +0000

I’m beginning to think that Facebook is optimized to look like a tempting time sink, while actually providing almost nothing of value not always available in more useful form on the wider net.