Someone with whom I was participating in a discussion on Israel asked me to not post replies on his or her wall, notwithstanding that in the same post she attacks me. Are Facebook discussion threads the property of the person who initiates them, because they appear on his or her wall? This wall consists of or can be defined as the collection of posts that he or she has initiated and the conversations following upon them. The idea is that the discussion is the property of the person who posted the original picture or paragraph. Why should that be? Why should we assume that it is the case? As a writer, I believe I have the intellectual property right to be acknowledge as the author of whatever I wrote. (To me intellectual property is a right to recognition, more than proceeds; I also believe I have the right to publish something anonymously or pseudonymously; being recognizable as author is only a right not and not a duty). But if I post something I have written or quoted on Facebook, it is as absurd to object when someone says something I have not approved of as it is to object when there is any reply at all (my posts are most often not replied to do but only liked by one or two people, presumably read by a few others). I will grant that in a blog there is an editorial privilege to select which replies to ones posts he or she will publish. I am not convinced that a Facebook wall is individual property in that sense. For one thing, one of the peculiarities of Facebook that differentiates it from a blog is that most of the time we are in not my wall or someone elses but our own news feed, which consists of posts that also appear on and might be thought to originate in the walls of those posting them, though in fact when I post something it appears simultaneously on my wall, in my news feed, and in the news feeds of all my friends. So where does it originate? Cyberspace has a tendency to change the relevant ideas we have of locations as well as identities, particular with regard to questions of origin. Of course, the idea of origin is related to that of propriety and thus property (and normality, which is conformist because it ties ought to is). This is one way a blog differs from a Facebook wall: my blog posts are not simultaneously posts in a shared space, albeit a community limited to those individuals with whom a mutual agreement was established to admit each other to our online networks.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 20:44:52 +0000
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