Photo: nolifebeforecoffee, of Banksy, on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
Tom Hodgkinson's piece on Facebook in today's Guardian raises some fascinating questions about the "commodification of human relationships" and whether we should let a "bunch of supergeeks in California" mediate our social lives. He also explores, in very unsympathetic terms, the background of investor Peter Thiel.
He says Thiel's mentor is Stanford University professor René Girard, who expounds the theory of 'mimetic desire' - that humans will mostly follow each other like sheep and without reflection; on top of that, Thiel also funds an artificial intelligence firm.
Hodgkinson also traces the oft-recited links between Facebook and the US government, altogether painting a picture of a malevolent, Big Brother-organised repository of much of our personal lives. When identity cards prompted so much outrage among privacy campaigners in the UK, it seems ironic that so many of us voluntarily submit acres of information to social networking sites.
"It's true that Facebook recently got into hot water with its Beacon advertising programme. Users were notified that one of their friends had made a purchase at certain online shops; 46,000 users felt that this level of advertising was intrusive, and signed a petition called "Facebook! Stop invading my privacy!" to say so. Zuckerberg apologised on his company blog. He has written that they have now changed the system from "opt-out" to "opt-in". But I suspect that this little rebellion about being so ruthlessly commodified will soon be forgotten: after all, there was a national outcry by the civil liberties movement when the idea of a police force was mooted in the UK in the mid 19th century."
His case is very compelling and it's a healthy remedy to Facebook fever, although I'd have to take issue with some of Hodgkinson's initial observations about how Facebook is used.
• "Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends?"
No. It's an enabling tool. I don't know anyone who has turned down an invitation to the pub to stay in and play with Facebook - those of us that spend much of our time online are more likely to be invited out or contacted precisely because we're on Facebook, Twitter et al. Those networks often facilitate conversations that wouldn't happen otherwise. It's a means to an end, and perhaps there are more 'ends' because of it.
• "If I put up a flattering picture of myself with a list of my favourite things, I can construct an artificial representation of who I am in order to get sex or approval."
Don't people see through that pretty quickly? And anyway, most people you connect with on social networks, at least on Facebook where users go by their real names, tend to be people you know already.
• "The more friends you have, the better you are."
Users are becoming far more sophisticated in their use of social networking sites; plenty of users feel the value is in the quality, rather than quantity, of friends. The Future Laboratories research conducted recently proved this among bands like Party Shank and video producers H&H; the former edits friend requests to pick out only people they know, have been in contact with or have checked out, while H&H only accepts people they have worked with.
I hope that's evidence of social networkers evolving a little, but they are still so much in their infancy that it is extremely hard to work out quite where they are heading or what their lasting legacy will be. It might be that in ten years' time, we use them as a customised phone book, shopping tool and media platform that makes it much easier to find targeted goods and services. And we might wonder what all the fuss was about back in 2008.
Source: Guardian
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