A Lightspeed Review on Facebook in Fiction and Speculation

Image via CrunchBase

Not too long ago, I decided to make the financial leap of purchasing my first magazine through Amazon.com. Well, I suppose that honour has gone to Lightspeed Magazine. I'm not sure if it was out of gratitude to Amazon for selling me an instrument which would make the great library available on Gutenberg.org pleasantly accessible or if I was genuinely interested in modern science fiction. But, whatever it was that motivated me, I ended up coughing up the $2.99 for the magazine at Amazon.com. You can find the same magazine through either the link to Amazon or the ad I embedded to the right. 



Postings From an Amorous Tomorrow -- Corey Mariani

The first story is "Postings from an Amorous Tomorrow" by Corey Mariani. It is the first published fiction by the author.

It somehow combines an angst against the social juggernaut, FaceBook, with an angst against a relatively pacifist culture. The average person has millions of friends. Those who do not have at least a certain number of friends are considered to be dangerous.

This is because of a single incident involving a person who had had no friends that went on a murdering rampage. The adults were unable to do anything about the problem because they had long been programmed against violent tendencies. There are no more wars. No one gets into fights. Everyone knows and likes each other, and therefore, there's no reason to fight. However, in the mean time, they have lost the ability to deal with violence when it does come. The solution, they found, to the terrorist, was to breed certain young children to attack and kill the provocateur.

To overcome the ingrained pacifism which the young protagonist had already been programmed for, he is exposed to violent images. In the end, he and others who are trained with him are armed with lighters. Those lighters are used to cause a fire at the home of their target, Nick. However, a consequence of doing this meant that the people who were trained to do the killing became anti-social. Thus, in the end, it is inferred that it is merely a matter of time before he loses his last thread to the rest of humanity, and therefore becomes a target of the next band of youths, trained to take preemptive measures against an antisocial.

Well, there is something to the story. In some ways, I could say that it's not unlike how old men often send young men to wars to fight. Youths are always sacrificed for the wants of the elderly. Sometimes it's a matter of defence, and sometimes it's a matter of getting a bit of property away from the control of another. In which case, it will become an endless cycle of youth-killing-youth. For, as each group of youths are programmed to kill, they lose their love for humanity, and thus become the target of the next group programmed to kill.

One might also say that there is a glimmer of Orwellian implication in this story. One might wonder if the narrator is really an insane terrorist or really just one cog working on a wheel.

In any case, this ought to be just the first of several reviews as I read the fiction in this magazine.

There is also a short interview with the author about the piece.

The Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades: Guessing the Aesthetics of Tomorrow's Social Media -- Genevieve Valentine

This is an article that follows the interview. It also concerns Facebook. Therefore, I decided to include it with my review of the short story.

This article appears in the January 2011 edition of Lightspeed Magazine. Genevieve clocked the total headcount at 500 million users. Today, I took a look at how many figure in Facebook's tally (today being July 29, 2011), and they claim 750 million users. However, I would suggest that many people have more than one account. I can think of several people who have more than one account. My reason for having more than one is because I want to interact with my students, or at least have that possibility, while not exposing them to some of the adult interests I have.

Image by Bill McIntyre via FlickrZamyatin might have said that today we live in digital glass houses. Genevieve uses the word iGlass to depict the glass house theory. That is to say, people advertise to their customers through Facebook have a wealth of information on hand to help the advertiser target individuals who might very well be interested in the products that they are selling. Personally, I cannot find any objection to that. Having ads that are interesting to me is not a negative. That's a positive.

Genevieve sort of meanders around a few speculative ideas about the invasion of privacy. However, this very aspect is what is so attractive. That is to say, it has made finding long lost friends and family easier. I don't seem to communicate with them much more than I did in the past, but the potential is there. From time-to-time, I do see a tidbit of their lives on it. That's better than nothing, which is what I might have in Korea in the absence of Facebook.

Thus far, I do not regret my investment of $2.99 for this entertainment. Perhaps I will invest in another purchase from the makers of Lightspeed Magazine.