Facebook and Julie Dash
Facebook is surprising. I need Facebook because too many important people will not communicate without a “friendly” and visual application like Facebook. Specifically, I am certain that Julie Dash, the first Black woman to release a feature-length film in the United States, would never have written to me without the help of Facebook.
People who read this Blog regularly may have felt suspicious that my writing drops a name or two just to “show off”—well, this time I am flagrantly and proudly name-dropping: Julie Dash! Julie Dash! Since I was very much honored to interview designer and filmmaker Floyd Webb back in 2000—and again in 2004, I had some strange assumption that I would get in contact Julie Dash. This has not been the case. Floyd Webb worked with Julie Dash on the landmark film Daughters of the Dust. It has been eight years since the kintespace.com interviews. Enter Facebook. Julie Dash! Julie Dash!
What Facebook does for busy, visual people (like Julie Dash) is allow them to ‘see’ who the hell is trying to contact them. I seriously can’t remember but suppose that Julie Dash got an email from some person named Bryan Wilhite years ago. Ms. Dash has to visualize who this Bryan Wilhite is… “Do I know this guy?” Facebook helps by allowing Ms. Dash to view my Facebook friends—some of these friends might be her friends. Facebook also let’s me show my, well, face—Ms. Dash can look at my photograph and perhaps find it strange that guy that looks like me has a name like mine.
Through Facebook, the context-appropriate opportunity came for me show Ms. Dash my writing about film. She wrote me back telling me that she liked what she read (“rasx() Screenshots: Shots out at Sci-Fi Slavery”). This single event is my “reward” for developing kintespace.com. I am serious about this. I don’t care that it took eight years for this moment to happen. I can only hope that Julie Dash has some idea of the depth of gratitude I have for experiencing this single event.
So let’s recap: I have spent ten years on the web for Julie Dash to recognize my existence and be pleased by it for just a few minutes. Yes. It was worth it. No lying. No jokes. No sarcasm. Mission accomplished. Everything else will be gravy.
Now I have already critiqued Facebook by citing “Tom Hodgkinson on the politics of the people behind Facebook” in “2008’s Ten Worst Places to Be Black and Other Media Links.” Now that I have actually used Facebook here are a few more whiny complaints:
- I still cannot figure out how to list in summary all of the “Become a Fan” choices I have made. It seems that this information would enhance my Profile.
- Facebook seems to send Inbox compositions to one or more recipients synchronously. Because of this, I notice that these send operations fail—or, worse, they succeed without notifying the user (me). Often the notification is a useless error message that I should not even see. I sent a message three times because of these errors only to find three copies of the same message sent to multiple people. This mistake can be dangerous because it can look like spamming to code monkeys.
- Facebook is generally slow. This is just unacceptable to a development team that is supposed to be world class. There should be more asynchronous operations—more AJAX—and more “smart” caching of data. I have yet to listen to a podcast explaining why such a white-supreme operation as Facebook still sports these Web 1.0 problems. Yes, we all can’t have trillions of servers like Google or even Yahoo! but, when you front like you super-bad, it is best to be super-bad.