A quick note inspired by today's Metaviews Teleseminar on the Internet as Application. There was a brief discussion about the relative stickiness of Facebook in spite of its failure to consistently offer trustworthy custodianship: why people leave, why they come back, why they stay, and, above all, how for some people it represents a really special different way of interacting with others. On social networking sites people can find voices more powerful than they might have offline.

When I think about the idea of being famous to your friends or of having a 'successful' Facebook identity, I think about Sheila Heti, whose book, How Should a Person Be?, is (amongst other things) an exploration of how we conceive of our own identities.

From the excerpt on her site:

"I can tell that a lot of young people today are interested in being famous. I’ve often heard that while young people used to want to be doctors and ballerinas and firemen, now they want to win a singing competition. I do too.

"How should a person be? I sometimes wonder about it, and I can’t help answering like this: a celebrity. But for all that I love celebrities, I would never move somewhere that celebrities actually exist. My hope is to live a simple life, in a simple place, where there’s only one example of everything.

"By a simple life, I mean a life of undying fame that I don’t have to participate in. I don’t want anything to change, except to be as famous as one can be, but without that changing anything. Everyone would know in their hearts that I am the most famous person alive — but not talk about it too much. ... It is the quality of fame one is after here, without any of its qualities."

People have described this book as a Reality TV novel - and I think Sheila does a good job of writing the link between the sort of fame we seek on reality shows and on Facebook. As author Lee Henderson puts it in an interview with Sheila, "Perhaps this decade was the first in which becoming celebrity outweighed our culture’s fascination with celebrities. Has celebrity been democratized?"