 |
| “One of us, one of us, one of us . . .” |
Looking at the numbers, it would seem that FB has definitely peaked: On July 22 of 2010, it got its 500 millionth user—but now three months later, it’s at 543 million.
The inference is easy to make: From the halcyon days of consistently charting 25 million new users per month, Facebook is now going up by about 14 million new users per month.
Still: 14 million users a month? The implications are staggering.
FB doesn’t release numbers of users who’ve quit—rather cagily, they say that, on any given day, half of all users log on to Facebook.
But none of that really matters: Who has registered, and now is inactive, who registered and is on every day, who registered and is sporadic, who registered and now wants their Facebook account shut down and disappeared—all of that is trivial and unimportant, compared to the central and obvious fact that they all registered on Facebook.
This means? It means that one corporation has managed to get the basic personal information of roughly ten percent of the world.
That’s epochal. No wonder the fuckers in Hollywood made a movie about the people behind the Facebook program. So let’s not get too cavalier and condescending, when discussing this remarkable achievement. Regardless of what happens, unless a meteor comes out of the sky and blows away the computer servers holding all that information, the implications of the Facebook program are going to be with us for decades to come. Yes, decades.
Facebook is a big deal.
Now, there are myriad issues regarding the Facebook program—my concerns are two-fold: The marketing possibilities, and the corporatist issues. Both concerns sort of meld into one another in my head, so I won’t try making a hard-and-fast distinction between the two as I write.
Facebook is a marketer’s wet dream: It is the largest market survey ever carried out—and the beauty of it is, the Facebook program quantifies all the market preferences of its users, making them easy targets for market campaigns.
A lot of people are concerned about privacy rights, vis-à-vis the Facebook program—they should be, but the battle is lost: Facebook users are the traitors in this war. They themselves signed away their privacy, when they gave out their information to Facebook.
What, the Facebook corporation isn’t going to make use of all this data it’s collected? Dream on, fool—and if you’re still dreamin’, then I got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell ya.
Of course the Facebook corporation is going to use all the data it’s collected: There is really no other use for all this data. The Facebook program is the world’s largest personal database. The world’s largest corporate database. The Facebook corporation will sell this data to other corporations—I’m frankly assuming it already is doing so.
Therefore, as the Facebook corporation interacts more and more with other corporations looking for the sweet data the Facebook program has collected, the Facebook corporation could easily become the lynchpin of most marketing campaigns. It would eclipse Google, because although Google is everywhere, it doesn’t have the targeted data that the Facebook program has collected.
In other words, Google is the weapons system—but Facebook is the guidance system. The target is the same—the consumer. But only one of the two components is invaluable. The other is simply brute force.
This guidance that Facebook can provide because of all the data it has accumulated will put it in the position to dictate to its corporate customers how it will share that data. The Facebook corporation would be wise to never share the data—rather, it should import the corporate client’s business plan, and run it out of the Facebook corporation’s offices.
If the data Facebook has accumulated goes out the door, then it’s lost—so Facebook can’t do that: Facebook itself will guard the privacy of its users—but it will sell that data very dearly to it corporate customers, who will have to play ball with the Facebook corporation.
So long as Facebook never allows its data out the door, it’s in the driver’s seat.
Do I want Facebook to succeed? No. Am I a fan? Not at all.
My own experience with Facebook has not been particularly pleasant. It hasn’t been un-pleasant: It’s been . . . creepy.
I only started three months ago, as a support for my blog.
Unlike the best tech—Apple, Twitter, Blogger, Google—I found Facebook surprisingly convoluted and complicated to use: Apart from its soothing blue-on-white color scheme, aesthetically it’s a mess.
But that’s not what made it creepy: For me, the initial entry was creepy.
When it asked me for my likes and dislikes in different forms of entertainment—books, music, movies, and so on—the program quickly tried to offer me convenient shortcuts. I began to type my favorite kind of music—“Cl—”—and before I had input the vowel, Facebook was suggesting “Classical”, “Club music”.
The program was like a sieve, quickly trying to sort me into a kind. Whether I liked classical music or club music really wasn’t the issue—the issue was pinning me down as to one or the other. It could have been both—the program didn’t care: It just wanted me to pick. To choose. To define my taste.
This of course points to one of the key shortcomings of the very concept of online existence: A human being’s experience is not a collection of likes and dislikes—rather, it’s the journey whereby you come to realize your likes and dislikes.
Facebook doesn’t understand that. It’s an inherently conservative program; it is not a program that is temperamentally suited for ambiguity, or even has much room for ambiguity. It wants you to choose from within a limited scope of possibilities—a very wide scope of possibilities, perhaps, but a limited and defined scope.
So there’s not much room for explorations, in Facebook: Just more of the same.
The other thing I found creepy about the program was its thirst to gain access to every little scrap of quantifiable information about me.
After a couple of weeks of using the program, all of a sudden, I was denied access to my user account, until I provided the program my cell phone number. I deliberately have an anonymous, pre-paid cell phone—there’s no registry anywhere that my particular number is attached to me. I like it fine that way.
But the Facebook program was saying that it needed my cell phone number, so that it could send me a confirmation code, to verify that I was indeed a human being, and not a machine with a Facebook account.
Now of course, every time you send a message via Facebook to one of the other users, you have a cofirmation code: So as to ascertain that you are carbon-based as opposed to silicone-based. I had filled out those confirmation codes all the time, every time I sent a message. I had proven I was human.
So why was the Facebook program all of a sudden demanding my cell phone number, in order to access my account? Could it be that it had realized that I had not input my number in the space provided for my cell phone number? As a collectioner, could Facebook be a completist?
Absolutely—and a bully about it, too. Because—like a bully—it refused access to my user account, which I had been checking a couple of times a day. I would regain access only on surrendering my cell phone number—no other way.
But I refused—so I skipped Facebook and refused to go back and use it.
So then—just like a bully who’s faced with someone who won’t back down—the program contacted me, via e-mail: It asked me to return. When I tried to log on, presto: No more requests for my cell phone number. No more strong arm tactics—I’m guessing until, of course, I’m fully hooked into the Facebook experience. Then it’ll probably ask me for my cell phone number again.
The experience of using the Facebook program is eerie.
See, when you interact with another human being in person, all sorts of tells clue in the person you’re speaking to: They can tell your confidence, your social position, your brain-pan power, your social ability—everything. There is a reason people still prefer face-to-face business meetings, rather than closing deals over the phone or via e-mail: You can sense so much about a person, by the trivial act of talking to them unmediated.
Facebook, of course, doesn’t have that. People have critiqued the program for providing superficial connections with “friends” who don’t really rise to the level of acquaintance. My own thinking dismisses the superficiality, and goes towards the niggardlyness of the Facebook social experience.
Since it deprives interlocutors with all the unspoken but necessary cues that people share with one another, Facebook makes social interactions not merely superficial, but precarious. Very limited information is passed between two people via the Facebook program.
The addictiveness that many Facebook users have spoken of is really highlighting the lack of social feedback inherent in the Facebook program. The lack of social reassurance—an automatic part of real-world social interaction—makes users of the Facebook program highly reactionary: They are literally standing by, to find out the reaction a particular action of theirs has elicited, and which will therefore elicit a reaction from them in return.
Thus communication is not a series of infinitesimal incremental back-and-forth feedbacks—as one would experience in an ordinary, real-world conversation—but rather a slow, over-dramatic series of interactions via the clumsy method of “messaging” and “poking” and other such Facebook program devices.
All of these communications devices that the Facebook program offers its users simultaneously limit the amount of humain interaction that can be exchanged, and heighten the drama, because of the inherent slowness of the interaction.
Compare a Facebook interaction with a regular real-world interaction: In the real-world, two people joke, touch each other, smile, scowl, and exchange a myriad different feedbacks, the actions-reactions infinitesimal, yet crucial for a smooth, undramatic interaction. Something as trivial as a couple asking one another “What’s for dinner?” contains endless layers of interaction, all happening at lightning speed, often multiple exchanges on different layers of meaning occurring simultaneously—and unspoken.
This level of sophistication is impossible to the Facebook program—so the lack of informational exchange creates uncertainty between the two people. The inability to touch one another to give reassurance, to smile instantly at a joke, to frown the second an uncool thing is said creates a dramatic tension in the Facebook user, which accounts for much of the addictiveness of the program—and the reason it is so popular.
The cost, of course, is peace of mind. And complexity.
The experience of using the Facebook program is eerie.
See, when you interact with another human being in person, all sorts of tells clue in the person you’re speaking to: They can tell your confidence, your social position, your brain-pan power, your social ability—everything. There is a reason people still prefer face-to-face business meetings, rather than closing deals over the phone or via e-mail: You can sense so much about a person, by the trivial act of talking to them unmediated.
Facebook, of course, doesn’t have that. People have critiqued the program for providing superficial connections with “friends” who don’t really rise to the level of acquaintance. My own thinking dismisses the superficiality, and goes towards the niggardlyness of the Facebook social experience.
Since it deprives interlocutors with all the unspoken but necessary cues that people share with one another, Facebook makes social interactions not merely superficial, but precarious. Very limited information is passed between two people via the Facebook program.
The addictiveness that many Facebook users have spoken of is really highlighting the lack of social feedback inherent in the Facebook program. The lack of social reassurance—an automatic part of real-world social interaction—makes users of the Facebook program highly reactionary: They are literally standing by, to find out the reaction a particular action of theirs has elicited, and which will therefore elicit a reaction from them in return.
Thus communication is not a series of infinitesimal incremental back-and-forth feedbacks—as one would experience in an ordinary, real-world conversation—but rather a slow, over-dramatic series of interactions via the clumsy method of “messaging” and “poking” and other such Facebook program devices.
All of these communications devices that the Facebook program offers its users simultaneously limit the amount of humain interaction that can be exchanged, and heighten the drama, because of the inherent slowness of the interaction.
Compare a Facebook interaction with a regular real-world interaction: In the real-world, two people joke, touch each other, smile, scowl, and exchange a myriad different feedbacks, the actions-reactions infinitesimal, yet crucial for a smooth, undramatic interaction. Something as trivial as a couple asking one another “What’s for dinner?” contains endless layers of interaction, all happening at lightning speed, often multiple exchanges on different layers of meaning occurring simultaneously—and unspoken.
This level of sophistication is impossible to the Facebook program—so the lack of informational exchange creates uncertainty between the two people. The inability to touch one another to give reassurance, to smile instantly at a joke, to frown the second an uncool thing is said creates a dramatic tension in the Facebook user, which accounts for much of the addictiveness of the program—and the reason it is so popular.
The cost, of course, is peace of mind. And complexity.
A friend of mine, Tarek, called Facebook “the Cartoon Network”, because it’s so flat: Everything is reducible to very two-dimensional items.
He’s right, of course: The Facebook program encourages people to define themselves by things, rather than by process. “What music do you like? Classical. What genre of books do you read? Literary”—but this call-and-respond dynamic doesn’t encompass the human experience of discovering what it is tha you like or dislike.
And that’s the essential component of friendship, the very raison d’être of Facebook—making friends.
Ther interaction with another human being that allows you to discover new things is interrupted by the Facebook program.
In junior high-school, it was a friend who turned me on to Rush. And then there was another friend who explained to us both how “2112” was structured like a symphoney, and how this led to listening to Tchaikovsky, and then getting into the Pathétique: Three junior high-school stoners, listening to Tchaikovsky on a record player in a suburban home—totally clean-and-sober—and being blown away by the shared experience.
This cannot happen on Facebook. The process of discovery is interrupted—short-circuited, rather—and the final result is arrived at quickly: The music you like, the book you like, the movie you like. But not the how you liked the thing that you like.
Human beings are not a conflation of likes and dislikes: They are the sum of the process of arriving at these discrete likes and dislikes. The likes and dislikes, in and of themselves, are unimportant. What matters is, how you got there.
Facebook has no algorithm for this central feature of the human experience. That’s why my guess is, Facebook will soon attract only the very young, the very foolish, and the very lonely. The rest will move on from this fad.
The corporations, however, will be using the information people so foolishly surrendered to the Facebook program for decades to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment