Evgeny Morozov wrote on a topic close to my heart, cyberflânerie, last week in the NYT:

As the popular technology blogger Robert Scoble explained in a recent post defending frictionless sharing, “The new world is you just open up Facebook and everything you care about will be streaming down the screen.”

This is the very stance that is killing cyberflânerie: the whole point of the flâneur’s wanderings is that he does not know what he cares about. As the German writer Franz Hessel, an occasional collaborator with Walter Benjamin, put it, “in order to engage in flânerie, one must not have anything too definite in mind.” Compared with Facebook’s highly deterministic universe, even Microsoft’s unimaginative slogan from the 1990s — “Where do you want to go today?” — sounds excitingly subversive. Who asks that silly question in the age of Facebook?

One of the things that crossed my mind while reading this article was whether pornography is social nowadays. If not, will it be in the future? Why not? But first what exactly does social porn entail? Is it broadcasting to persons known and unknown the tidbit “K has seen/liked this video”? If so, I don’t think this will happen. The artifice of a uniform personal identity (brand) we’re encouraged to build online has to play by society’s rules. No breaking of taboos here. 

But what’s more insidious, and Morozov nails this point, is that even the “subversive” stuff we encounter online has already been vouched for socially - maybe not by your immediate friends but certainly by aggregate votes, ratings, views, etc. That’s not to say one doesn’t encounter stuff that’s unexpected or serendipitous.  I come across stuff like this all the time - from various Internet curators, social news sites, social networks, etc. But as Morozov suggests most of these links are useful (utility maximization/information diet) in some way. So when Mozorov says that “hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore” he means that surfing has become passive (feeds) than remaining active. And even when it’s an active seeking out, there’s always the vast history of browser cookies, trackers etc. that first point you to “personalized results.”