I saw The Social Network, a movie about the founding of Facebook. Though halfway through I had to slip out into the lobby to check my ticket, making sure I didn’t wander into a screening of Douchebag by mistake (and the Oscar goes to…).
The "polite" ad for The Social Network film. (image source: comingsoon.net)
FINDING FACEBOOK
I joined Facebook in 2007, which means I was among the first 50 million users. A friend of mine who is a Web producer suggested I check it out after I was complaining about the spammification of MySpace. Even though I didn’t know anyone who was on it, besides her, I signed up and created a profile. Not a lot of action at first.
Now there are more than 500 million Facebook users around the world. That’s more than one out of every 14 people on the planet. It is, as the Internetters like to say, the next big thing. Yet, unlike other next big things - such as MySpace, Friendster, RealAudio, Netscape, AltaVista, Excite, and Lycos, for example – those in the know say that this is the real deal (which, of course, is what they say about every next big thing that comes along).
Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy Facebook – to an extent. But clearly not as much as many of my friends. They love to post pictures of their kids or pets. Or videos of someone else’s kids or pets doing something cute or stupid.
I understand that sort of Facebooking. People want to share the things they like. But what I can’t understand is the people who play games on Facebook, like FarmVille or FronteirVille. That and those stupid surveys that seemed to be all the rage not long ago – how well do you know so-and-so and shit like that.
It’s one thing to share trivial facts about your life with everyone. But these people don’t even have enough trivial facts in their life to share, so they must seek applications and other gimmicks to manufacture them. That’s really sad. It’s one thing not to have a life, a zero life value, but those people have ventured into the realm of negative life values.
Personally, I have 142 friends on Facebook. That’s a very tight network compared to a lot of people. Still, I only really communicate (as in occasionally speak to, in real life) with a handful of them. There are five people on this list I honestly don’t even know. When they requested my friendship, I figured they must know me, even though I couldn’t remember them. And despite their postings, I still haven’t a clue.
But the sad truth is that I hide 46 of these “friends” – a good third of them. Why? Because they play shit like FarmVille, Mafia Wars, FronteirVille, Bejeweled Blitz, or any of that useless crap. Or they do stuff like How Well Do You Know so-and-so or I Just Answered A Question About so-and-so. Hey, if you are going to say something, then say something – don’t post some Hallmark bullshit!
Which President Are You? Which Celebrity Are You? Who cares! I’d rather know what you think. Tell me something original. If you can’t do that, then share something that will either get me to think, or make me laugh. That is, after all, what I use Facebook for – to inspire and amuse others.
Or so I think. I’m sure that there are plenty of people who hide my ass on Facebook. I’m a different offender altogether. I’m the guy who shamelessly promotes his blogs. And since few of my friends share my passion for soccer, the constant posts about soccer and Total Footblog must get very annoying for them. That and my rabid political rants.
Perhaps the most annoying Facebookers of all are the location posters. These are the people who post that they are in an airport or at a restaurant. Why do people do that? Are they simply bragging that they are travelling, or dining out? I’m having dinner at Quaker State & Lube in Cleveland Hopkins International…and you’re not!
Or is it in case I need to locate them - immediately – as in I wouldn’t have time to give them a call or shoot them a text? Perhaps I’m going to get a call from the President some day, insisting that I tell them the location of a Facebook friend because aliens have landed and said they’d only deal directly with my friend…or they’ll destroy the planet in 40 seconds. Yes, that’s probably why people feel compelled to let everyone know exactly where they are at any given moment in their day.
People do the same sort of thing on sites like FourSquare and Twitter. Ya know, if you like a place that much, why not write a post that explains why it’s so good, rather than just say you are there. Information without context or reason is just noise.
But Twitter has to be the most useless and annoying of all the social networking sites. Once the media darling, you don’t see a lot written about Twitter anymore. It was hyped as the next big thing, but not so much these days.
I guess people don’t really care what you ate for breakfast. It’s one thing to be able to share your thoughts, ideas, and experiences with others via platforms like Facebook, but Twitter lends itself more to the mundane – the minute-by-minute brief clips of one’s daily activities. And, despite the popularity of reality TV, that’s just not that interesting. You can tell me something in 140 characters, but rarely can you tell me enough to make it meaningful. If anything, following a friend on Twitter – someone who tweets regularly – will likely make you want to stop being their friend.
I admit that I’ve seen some celebrities, journalists, and even a few companies put Twitter to good use. But I think a lot of regular folk have realized that Twitter is an exotic French term for talking when no one is listening. And lest you think I’m being harsh, compare the number of Tweeters who have more followers than followings to those who are following more than they are followed. It’s a great divide.
But what separates Facebook from Twitter and all the other social networking sites is not just the fact that more than one in 14 people on the planet use it. No, the real sign of preeminence is the fact that they have made a movie about it. You haven’t really arrived in American culture until Hollywood takes note.
The "less polite" ad for The Social Network film. (image source: sixthseal.com)
THE MOVIE
The movie, entitled The Social Network, is about the founding of Facebook, and supposedly follows the exploits of Facebook founder and furher, Mark Zuckerberg, from his freshman year of college to the founding of the company and ensuing litigation. Now keep in mind that this isn’t exactly an accurate portrayal. The writers never spoke with Zuckerberg, and they have a reputation for combining characters and events in an effort to create drama. As is often the case with social networking, drama and sensationalism often trump the truth.
For example, the film ignores Zuckerberg’s child prodigy status in the tech world prior to his arrival at Harvard. And then it fixates on a manufactured desire to join elite clubs at the university, as if they needed to pin some sort of motive on Zuckerberg’s actions. But, as is the case with Facebook, when something is shared with that many people, it becomes the truth – regardless of its accuracy. And, in a nutshell, that is the problem I have with Facebook, Zuckerberg, and The Social Network.
Zuckerberg was a gifted child who grew up in a very comfortable environment. His father is a dentist and his mother was a psychiatrist. He attended an elite boarding school before going to Harvard. He was receiving big offers from AOL and Microsoft before he took his first college class. And over the past eight years, his life as gotten even rosier. Despite some litigation along the way, it’s been nothing but a charmed existence for the 26 year-old, who has become the world’s youngest billionaire – and then some.
So what’s the problem? Zuckerberg is indeed very smart. But book-smart. His life experience has been very limited, and very skewed. In a word, the guy is naive. And the good thing about The Social Network is that it will hopefully open his eyes a little.
Zuckerberg claims that he’s “trying to make the world a more open place.” And that’s a noble goal, as you might expect from a 26 year-old billionaire. But by “more open” he means less private. In fact, Facebook’s entire business model depends upon people sharing information about themselves. The more personal data that people reveal, the more money Zuckerberg can make from his advertisers. So the real question is, for whom is he trying to make the world a more open place?
Until The Social Network appeared on the horizon, Zuckerberg was a very private person. A strange choice for someone who makes their money by getting other people to be less private. Forced to face Hollywood’s version of the story he refused to ever discuss, Zuckerberg is now starting to do more interviews. What he’s finding, though, is that – as he says about his business – execution is everything. A big-budget Hollywood film will trump magazine articles every time. And, as is the case with sharing information online, once it is out there, it’s a lot harder to change…even if it’s not true.
Unlike his portrayal in the film, Zuckerberg wasn’t necessarily a social misfit who had trouble with the ladies. Sure, it might have been a tough freshman year for the kid, as it is for most, but by the time he was a sophomore he had a steady girlfriend (who he is still with today) and joined a fraternity.
However, the one thing that seems to be true from The Social Network is that Zuckerberg was a bit of an arrogant asshole. As part of the litigation over the origins of Facebook, which also received what appears to be a fairly accurate depiction in the film, some of Zuckerberg’s emails from his Harvard days were made public (you know…to make the world a more open place). And these emails paint a pretty scary picture for anyone naive enough to think that Zuckerberg and Facebook can be trusted with their information, or that they have their best interests in mind.
In one email exchange, a friend asks him how he’s going to deal with Divya Narenda and the Winklevoss twins, who had hired him to help build Harvard Connection, the site they claim he stole to create Facebook. Zuckerberg replied “I’m going to fuck them.”
And once he had launched Facebook, Zuckerberg bragged to a friend via email that “if you ever need info about anyone at harvard, just ask; I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns.” When his friend asked him how he amassed that information, Zuckerberg replied “people just submitted it; I don’t know why; they ‘trust me;’ dumb fucks.”
Zuckerberg has said that he regrets what he said in those email exchanges. And that he is worried that the public exposure of such information – along with his depiction in the film – will tarnish his image. Ah, the irony.
Zuckerberg's mission sounds noble but his practices are often less than noble. (image source: time.com)
THE FUCKERBERG EFFECT
Two element’s of Zuckerberg’s vision for the future of the Internet trouble me. First is his premise that what people really want to know is what’s going on with the people in your life. No, that’s what life is for. Life experiences. Real world social interactions tell me what’s going on with the people in my life. And if I cannot take the time to actively engage the people in my life, then clearly what’s happening in their lives is not that important to me.
The other flawed notion is that the Internet needs a new approach to information. Zuckerberg believes that, while Google indexes information available on the Web, his goal is to create a way of indexing what’s in people’s heads. Do you want everything in your head indexed and searchable for the world to see?
Clearly Zuckerberg doesn’t. But he’s made billions of dollars trying to do that to you. Famous for the confusing complexity of its privacy policies, Facebook changes them frequently, and the default always ensure maximum exposure of your information. Unless you are vigilant, that means information such as your name, gender, list of friends, and your photographs are all available to the public. Why? Because advertisers will pay for that information – enough to make Zuckerberg the youngest billionaire in the world.
If you look at the various products that Zuckerberg created in his relatively brief career, they all have one thing in common: eliminating people’s choices. For some reason, he thinks that people do not want to seek out their own information. And by narrowing and channeling the information you receive, he hopes to make some of those choices for you.
It began with Synapse, a program he created that tracked the music you liked to listen to, theoretically to help you find other artists you might like. But had it become commercial, like Pandora, that tracking information would have been sold to advertisers, and finding music that didn’t fit into the most profitable demographics would have been even harder to find than it is today.
Facebook’s latest addition, Open Graph, is designed to track what information you read. Again, like everything else on Facebook, Zuckerberg will sell his knowledge of your reading habits to advertisers. But the worst part of it is that – in his vision – people will start to read articles, watch movies, and shop for things based on what their friends read, watch, and buy. Instead of making the world a more open place, Zuckerberg’s vision will likely make it a more partisan place.
While Google seeks to gather and index a broad spectrum of information, Zuckerberg seeks to limit what’s available to those things which others we know have available. In his world, if no one I know listens to Goldfish or reads Fareed Zakaria, than there’s no need for me to even know about them.
Limiting our options is one thing, but the whole privacy issue is equally disturbing. Why should you be worried about what information Facebook shares with advertisers and other companies? If you have nothing to hide, then you should have nothing to fear, right? Well, even a billionaire who has led a charmed and relatively sheltered life is starting to realize that, with a feature film and emails from his youth surfacing to paint a rather unflattering picture of the man, not all information needs to be shared.
Since I’m relatively cautious with Facebook, let me give you an example of how another Web site, Amazon.com, uses information about its customers. My 16 year-old nephew was offered an HPV vaccine at his school. He didn’t want to take it. As a joke, I thought about giving him a book about STDs for Christmas. After I searched for such a book on Amazon.com, now I receive suggestions to purchase a myriad of STD-related items when I visit that online retailer. I have also received some rather questionable email offers to my email account that I use to shop at that retailer. Which is all just an embarrassing inconvenience, unless I happened to be searching for a new health insurance provider.
And if I were looking for a new health insurance provider, they would surely do some research about me. Clearly my information has been placed in some STD-friendly database, so they might suspect that I had an STD or engage in unsafe sexual practices. Suddenly it’s not so harmless, is it?
Think about that for a moment. I have never had an STD and I don’t engage in risky sexual practices (unless, of course, the harness breaks). So I have nothing to hide, right? So I should have nothing to fear?
Yet, like Zuckerberg’s Harvard emails or his depiction in the film, once information – true or false – is out there on the Internet, it’s forever in your virtual “public record.”
Facebook aggressively collects and sells your data. Everything that you like, every place that you visit. And if you happen to list Capt. Morgan and 15 other liquor brands among your likes, along with three photo albums and a few videos that show you in regular states of maniacal inebriation, you might find it harder to get affordable health insurance than someone who searched for an STD book as a gag gift.
In an effort that seems designed more to sell magazines than accurately document our time, Time Magazine selected Zuckerberg as its 2010 Person of the Year. (image source: time.com)
Just among my friends on Facebook, which are an admittedly dicey bunch, I’ve seen photos of several colleagues smoking from a hookah. I’ve witnessed numerous posts in which people have told their company/management to suck it, fuck off, etc. And certainly I’ve shared some twisted and shocking things, thinking it worth the risks given the reward of amusing my friends.
Of course I have set my privacy settings to the strictest Facebook offers. And I have done so repeatedly because Facebook continually changes its privacy policies, automatically resetting them to zero protection, so I must be vigilant. Clearly Facebook does this so that it can profit from selling our information – name, contact info, and interests – to data mining companies. Which is exactly what they do. And if they were otherwise concerned about your privacy, they would simply make the default settings for privacy the strictest, instead of the laxest.
But the trouble doesn’t stop there. Even if I set my privacy to the strictest settings and my friends do not, I may still be exposed to this data mining practice. For example, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that Facebook’s partners, those companies that create third-party applications for Facebook (like FarmVille and FronteirVille), have been selling user information as well as the information of those users’ friends “to dozens of advertising and internet tracking companies.” In fact, the report found that, of the 10 most popular Facebook applications, all of them were sharing information about users - and their friends – with other companies.
One of the key bits of information that these companies are sharing is your Facebook user ID. And with that piece of data, anyone with access to the Internet can easily find your name and, depending on your privacy settings, information such as your age, residence, occupation, interests, photos, and contact info.
But what’s the big deal? A friend of mine recently posted on Facebook about a company that offers access – searchable by name, email, or phone number – to sensitive data like income history and mortgage information. And there are plenty of companies that catalog this, offering it to anyone willing to pay the price. But, as often the case with the Internet, this information may not necessarily be accurate.
Data mining is not a union gig. It’s done by computer, with little if any human fact-checking. So, whether you are applying for a loan or insurance, information provided by these data miners may very well play an important role in the process – for better or worse. If one of these companies picks up something negative about you – true or not – it will spread like wildfire to all of the others.
Think I’m exaggerating? Those of you who have lost a family member know I’m not. Information never goes away. Nothing is ever erased. And even when you tell someone that the person they are calling about is deceased, they will apologize and promise to correct their records. But you can be certain that you’ll get another call from that organization somewhere down the road.
As a movie, The Social Network (aka Revenge of the Nerds V: All About the Money, Honey) was entertaining. Like Oliver Stone’s JFK, it’s wise to know the facts before you watch it. As for Facebook itself, I am going to continue to use it, but with even greater caution.
As a marketing communications professional (stand back, he’s a marketing communications professional!), I need to know how to utilize sites like Facebook and Twitter for my clients. And using them to promote my blogs is a perfect exercise.
So forgive me if you don’t see that much data about me personally. I will try to be a better friend in real life, as opposed to the “speak but selectively listen” world of social networking. And forgive the constant crap I post promoting my blogs. I’m just developing my digital marketing proficiency. Besides, what do you care? The only people regularly reading my posts are the data miners!
