It has been nearly two weeks since my last entry and longer since my last entry that was more than a link-post. I've been off covering a music festival, traveling a bit, and following sports. But my time for excuses are over. Apologies to the few of you who may have come to expect an entry every Tuesday.

The most recent issue of The Economist had a piece about how two of Facebook's innovations have made it the new talk-of-the-town among Silicon Valley types. One of these features is their Facebook Platform, which allows third party developers to create applications for Facebook users, and the second is Facebook's news feed and mini-feed, which aggregate recently updated data from an individual user's friends. When this second feature was first released, there was a lot of skepticism and downright anger (on Facebook especially) about the news feed's intrusion into a user's privacy. You'll have to excuse a quick "I told you so" on my part, because it seems that my analysis that this feature merely enhanced the central purpose of online social networking sites has been proven correct over time.

How could it fail after all? Participation in social networking sites is more of an act of exhibitionism and of positioning oneself as an object for other's gaze than most want to admit. Just as much as users use these services to browse other people's information, they use them to express their own in intricate and deliberate ways. These are spaces where subjectivity and identity become fluid in both the presentation of data and the ways through which it is consumed. The news feed merely brings this point to the surface - it tells the user that s/he is there to find out information about his or her friends and to let them in on updates as well.

A friend of mine used this network of spectacle to amusing use as an April Fool's Day prank this year. He and his long-time girlfriend "broke up" on Facebook by removing their "in a relationship with..." status from their profiles. This went out to their friends via the news feed, and what followed was a stream of shock and sympathy that culminated in their mothers calling them in distress.

What this anecdote shows is that the streams of data that we use to construct and position an online subjectivity (to the extent that we have control over it) are viewed far more seriously than the informal nature of the medium might imply. There is an immediate translation between our networked selves and our offline selves that is often more direct than indirect.

Facebook was on to something when they introduced the news feed. In doing so they identified one of the central purposes for online social networks: subjective production and projection.