Nobody gets out of Facebook alive

January 25, 2008 in life, technology by Paul Currion | 8 comments

I recently disengaged from Facebook. It was fun for about two months, but then the endless round of trivial “applications” became oppressive and the irritating whimsy of the interface made me uneasy. Facebook didn’t represent my life in any way - it didn’t even represent my online life in any way. While I’ve kept my account, I no longer respond to invitations to “Become a Vampire” or “SuperPoke” anybody - and if you try to get me to play Scrabulous, I will fight you (offer extends to real life only).

Facebook claims to be “a social utility that connects you with the people around you”, but it doesn’t feel much like that to me, and Tom Hodgkinson smacked that claim down in his Guardian comment last week, With Friends Like These. Hodgkinson is a grumpy bastard Luddite - the column starts with the words “I despise Facebook” and gets more vitriolic from there - but he nails some of the deep and unpleasant realities behind Facebook’s founders and language:

Facebook is a well-funded project, and the people behind the funding, a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearly thought out ideology that they are hoping to spread around the world. Facebook is one manifestation of this ideology. Like PayPal before it, it is a social experiment, an expression of a particular kind of neoconservative libertarianism. On Facebook, you can be free to be who you want to be, as long as you don’t mind being bombarded by adverts for the world’s biggest brands.

Nobody has enunciated my concerns as well as Giant Robot, a Finnish electro group (and awesome Finnish group, by the way), in their track “Public=Shopping”. Now this track is about the commodification of urban life, but it resonates quite heavily with Facebook:

YouTube Preview Image

Public = Shopping
(Internet to make you shop)

Office = Desktop
(Internet to make you work)

Home = Bed and TV
(Internet to make you sleep)

Encourage to consume
Encourage to produce

We know what Facebook is (social utility, blah blah blah), but what is Facebook about? The simple truth is this: Facebook is about other people making money from your friendships. That’s not something I want - how about you?

  1. JMK’s avatar

    JMK on January 30, 2008 at 9:05 am

    I hear you. I joined a few months ago but just don’t see what all the fuss is about. The irony seems to be that while facebook is probably most useful to people in our business, who move around a lot and so can’t always stay in direct contact with their friends - the site actually seems to be used primarily by people who could quite easily ring up (or in the case of college kids…walk down the dormitory hall and visit) most of the people on their “friends” list. So what’s the value added of the site? Apart from turning people into vampires, of course.

    Have to say, though - I do love scrabulous. Wanna play? ;-)

  2. Jelena’s avatar

    Jelena on February 5, 2008 at 2:10 pm

    I always wondered how come you have almost 300 friends?

  3. Paul Currion’s avatar

    Paul Currion on February 5, 2008 at 2:59 pm

    About 280 of them think that I’m somebody else…

  4. Jelena’s avatar

    Jelena on February 6, 2008 at 3:36 am

    LOL… well…well…I hope I am among those 20 special creatures who actually met you.

  5. J A Ginsburg’s avatar

    J A Ginsburg on February 8, 2008 at 4:53 pm

    Hello Paul,

    My name is Janet Ginsburg. I first heard about you though Nancy White and later Nigel Snoad, and I’ve thought for some time our paths ought to cross. Reading your Facebook diatribe made me howl so much, I thought, “Well, now, there’s a kindred spirit!”

    The News Feed feature may have a sort of weird poetry to it, but I now know all kinds of banal details about people that I so wish I didn’t. Thoreau wrote about lives lived in “quiet desperation” and I find I’m kind of missing the quiet…

    I am also a little nervous about all those nifty parlor-game apps requiring that you give permission to anonymous app-producers to mine your data.

    Beyond these personal qualms, there is something disturbingly off about how different types of content are equalized. Not all social interactions are of identical significance or enduring value. And yet even the most trivial social interaction on Facebook can become a headline on a newsfeed and achieve cyber-immortality (fossilization?) in an archive. Likewise, I also find it disconcerting to see “friends” piled together, past, present, important, fleeting and the occasional “how did *he* get on my list?”

    Although I still have a “just above flat-lining” presence on Facebook because I am curious to see whether it ever does turn into anything of real interest and value, I warn all would-be “friends” that I’m a bad Facebooker, and if they want to email me, to please do it directly….

    Anyway, thanks for making my day.

    cheers,

    Janet

    The problem isn’t the idea of web-based social networking but the fact that, at least as defined by Facebook, it doesn’t always match real life social networking.

  7. Jelena’s avatar

    Jelena on February 23, 2008 at 7:26 pm

    Well done Paul. Decline is there….

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7257073.stm