Looking Out To Sea

Two stories popped up on my radar at about the same time, both about Facebook and social software. The first, by Clay Shirky, is a transcription of an excellent talk about group dynamics on- and off-line, and why communities need to be protected from themselves. There’s a lot in there that seemed familiar and self-evident, but at the same time I had never thought about. That was also one of his points — that we have probably all seen communities die in the same ways over and over again, but no-one is learning from this.

The other story is — to put it politely — a slightly unhinged rant in The Guardian about the dangers of Facebook and its ‘terrifying’ controllers. It’s not often you find yourself in the company of a bona fide conspiracy theorist, and it’s difficult to know where to look. Reading Tom Hodgkinson’s article is a bit like that. You know if you looked him straight in the eye you’d probably just burst out laughing.

For instance, he says this of one the board members at Facebook:

So by his own admission, Thiel is trying to destroy the real world, which he also calls “nature”, and install a virtual world in its place, and it is in this context that we must view the rise of Facebook.

What about 9/11? Was that an inside job? What about the Illuminati? Do they have a Facebook group and — if so — can one be a member of both their group and the Elders of Zion?

So, besides the idea that Facebook is an attempt to “destroy the real world” (hint: it’s a website, you plonker), does he say anything else? Anything coherent?

Facebook pretends to be about freedom, but isn’t it really more like an ideologically motivated virtual totalitarian regime with a population that will very soon exceed the UK’s?

No mate, it’s not: it’s a website. It doesn’t pretend to be about freedom, it’s about social interaction. The word free appears nowhere on any of their blurb. The Free Software Foundation is about freedom. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is about freedom. Amnesty International’s about freedom. Facebook’s about chatting to people. It seems a bit of stretch to call something which has no minimum investment other than a working email address a “totalitarian regime”. You can leave just by no longer taking part. It’s as much of a Big Brother environment as being a stamp collector is, and easier to quit.

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The strangest part was this bit though. Everything else was conspiratorial nonsense, but this was just plain weird:

Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.

Yes, that is exactly the point! It’s like the telephone! Or email! Or shouting across the room! It’s like instant messenger or IRC or blogs or… well, any other technology that people use to communicate. Calling these inventions “profoundly uncreative” or (as he hints here) parasitic is absurd. I can only infer that the newspaper he writes for is as “profoundly uncreative” as Facebook, since it was merely mediating his ill-conceived message from his brain to mine.

It seems Tom Hodgkinson hasn’t noticed that human communication is one of those things that it’s almost impossible to stop happening, and to try is probably a bad thing too. New, more effective methods of communication are never just mediators. Remember up top, I mentioned two articles? The other one had a much better opinion of group communication software and group communication in general. I urge you to read it.

The companies that own these sites understand very little about what they are doing — they wouldn’t make so many laughable mistakes, otherwise. But the ones who understand even less are the hangers-on. The companies who think you’ll tell your friends about their soft drink because you like it. It’s like they have completely abdicated common sense when you say the word “online”. But this is as it always was.

Hodgkinson believes the hype used by Facebook to sell advertising to corporations who trying desperately to be hip. We know they’re failing because they come out with nonsense like this:

“This is beyond creating advertising impressions. This is about Blockbuster participating in the community of the consumer so that, in return, consumers feel motivated to share the benefits of our brand with their friends.”

Aye, sure it is mate. Why just the other day my friends were telling me — on Facebook, in fact — just how excited they were about some washing powder/soft drink/video rental service… er, no. Or as Clay Shirky puts it:

The users are there for one another. They may be there on hardware and software paid for by you, but the users are there for one another.

And that’s it, really. No groups without members, no members without groups. People couldn’t give a flying toss how you think they’ll “share your brand with their friends” or some nonsense. If your product was any good, they might mention it to their friends. And if they think it stinks, boy will you know about it. But most sensible people will talk about their relationships, because that’s what people do.

All things come to an end — except hype

Right now Facebook is in the ascendant, but this is not permanent. The only thing that’s going to kill Facebook is the users. Sooner or later there will be a new Facebook and people will flock to that because it affords better communication and better interaction than the current one. Or more likely, because the people who are there first know what it’s about and don’t abuse the system:

…one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was a high school. And who, in 1978, was hanging out in the room with the computer and the modems in it, but the boys of that high school. And the boys weren’t terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in salacious talk. They were interested in running amok and posting four-letter words and nyah-nyah-nyah, all over the bulletin board.

Then it’ll get popular and the people who liked it when it was small will move away. You see this a bit now, in Facebook. It’s the endless barrage of (Fun|Super|Graffiti)Walls and attacks by simulated denizens of the undead. And so Facebook turns into MySpace, the modern GeoCities. You saw it when the owners of Digg censored several articles on the front page, and there was a mass exodus of readers to Reddit. And now the old guard from the latter complain how it’s gone down hill since it got popular.

Facebook will decline. Until that happens, the whining of paranoid journalists won’t make any difference. Just think of all those millions of people who don’t use Google any more because of privacy concerns… yeah, those millions.

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