It started with a media report in France and in a few days the story had gone around the world. Our private Facebook messages from 2007 and 2008 were being made public on our walls. The story was picked up on U.S. blogs and was rapidly spread through Facebook status updates and on Twitter.
Facebook quickly issued a strong denial, tech journalists drilled deep, and the story was quickly debunked. Yet the message -- the cautionary status updates -- still spread, translated across Facebook's global communities. Even when faced with evidence to the contrary, people still insisted the story was true: They didn't care what Facebook said, they knew they didn't write that on their Wall, they never would have written that in public.
Our susceptibility to believe reports that Facebook is playing fast and loose with our data comes as no surprise. Facebook has let us down many times before, changing privacy settings without telling us and exposing our information. But in the social-media-powered hysteria, something else was on display. It was almost as if many of us wanted to believe it, as if we wanted to feel let down by Facebook. What the messaging saga showed us was the sheer depths of distrust and unease held by many of Facebook's heaviest users.
I confess: I love Facebook. It is my social network of choice. I am not a basement dweller, living my life online. I live a normal life with friends and family and Facebook is an enhancement of that. I use Twitter, but for journalism and networking rather than for communicating with friends. The Twitter me is the corporate me, truncated and reined in. On Facebook, I can be more myself. Over the years, Facebook has brought me closer with many people I am happy to be closer to. If I didn't use Facebook, I wouldn't have made those connections. The technology did that.
But sometimes, in praising Facebook, I feel like I am a rarity. Being too enthusiastic about Facebook is just not done in polite, techno-literate society. Among the general public, Facebook is the lowest-scoring "e-business company" on the American Customer Satisfaction Indexes with 61 on a 100-point scale. While Facebook has just reached a milestone of 1 billion users worldwide, there are some worrying signs for the company, for example the shrinking number of web-based users in the United States.
The sense of unease about Facebook appears in many different guises. There are those who criticize Facebook -- and social media in general -- for being inauthentic, superficial, and at odds with the "real world." There are those who take umbrage at Facebook's business model, its behavior as a virtual monopoly. There are those -- hipsters, fashionistas -- who wouldn't be seen dead anywhere other than Tumblr. There are those from the church of high-tech who ideologically oppose Facebook's closed platform, its capture of the open web, and long for a distributed open-source alternative. There are those who worry about what they see as Facebook's cavalier attitude to users' privacy, especially when those users are based in odious regimes. There are those who see Facebook as just the latest incarnation of mass consumer society, where our desires and behavior are being manipulated by The Man. And then there are those who just see Facebook, and social networking in general, as trivial and quit after getting too many Farmville requests.
While all of these viewpoints are very vocal, among the great mass of Facebook users they are likely edge cases, a long tail of elite unease. Right in the heart of Facebook's user base, though, the concern about the service is far more complex, revealing, and interesting. The low-level hum of discontent, revealed in the recent hysteria over messages is due to our evolving relationship with data. It is a relationship most of us don't really understand, but it gives us a general sense of foreboding.
by Luke Allnutt, Tangled Web | Read more:
