one of the first things i saw at Twitter on Sunday morning was a link to Zadie Smith's brilliant essay, "Generation Why?" in The New York Review of Books. in it, she reviews both the film, The Social Network, and a book by internet visionary Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. [note: if you haven't seen the film, you may want to skip to the latter part of the essay...though i haven't seen it yet and reading her review certainly didn't spoil it for me.]
Smith was at Harvard in 2003 when the first version of Facebook broke and she says she remembers the fuss that it caused. she reminds us that this is a program that was created by a college sophomore...
...with a Harvard sophomore’s preoccupations. What is your relationship status? (Choose one. There can be only one answer. People need to know.) Do you have a “life”? (Prove it. Post pictures.) Do you like the right sort of things? (Make a list. Things to like will include: movies, music, books and television, but not architecture, ideas, or plants.)
Zuckerberg created it quickly (in three weeks, she writes) but didn't seem to give much thought about the implications of it until much later.
Connection is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the information that passes through it, the quality of the relationship that connection permits—none of this is important.
we can be various versions of ourselves with different groups of people, yet Facebook seems not to care about that as evidenced by their cavalier resetting of privacy settings awhile back.
On this occasion, the world protested, loudly, and so Facebook has responded with “Groups,” a site revamp that will allow people to divide their friends into “cliques,” some who see more of our profile and some who see less.
yet how does Groups work with FacebookConnect?
In this new, open Internet, we will take our real identities with us as we travel through the Internet...you’ll also take your likes and dislikes with you, your tastes, your preferences, all connected to your name, through which people will try to sell you things.
this leads her to Lanier's book, which she calls "frightening" and says it "chimes with my own discomfort."
Lanier is interested in the ways in which people “reduce themselves” in order to make a computer’s description of them appear more accurate...We know that we are using the software to behave in a certain, superficial way toward others. We know what we are doing “in” the software. But do we know, are we alert to, what the software is doing to us? Is it possible that what is communicated between people online “eventually becomes their truth”?
the bottom line, in my opinion:
“You have to be somebody,” Lanier writes, “before you can share yourself.” But to Zuckerberg sharing your choices with everybody (and doing what they do) is being somebody.
Smith posits that the real reason behind Facebook is simply to be liked.
If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us...To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.
it's a brilliant essay and i encourage you to read it.
some corners of the blogosphere are all abuzz over Facebook possibly unveiling an email program today. as we turn more and more (and more) of our online intereactions over to Facebook (well, i don't, but many do), i just thought it might be good to remind ourselves that the bottom line is Facebook's bottom line.
Recent Comments