“about facebook”
the other day a friend of mine sent out an email to a grouplist giving everyone the link to deleting their friendster profile because it’s “useless”. i wondered why no one was sending out a link to their facebook profile because it’s “orwellian”:
When one of America’s largest electronic surveillance systems was launched in Palo Alto a year ago, it sparked an immediate national uproar. The new system tracked roughly 9 million Americans, broadcasting their photographs and personal information on the Internet; 700,000 web-savvy young people organized online protests in just days. Time declared it “Gen Y’s first official revolution,” while a Nation blogger lauded students for taking privacy activism to “a mass scale.” Yet today, the activism has waned, and the surveillance continues largely unabated.
Generation Y’s “revolution” failed partly because young people were getting what they signed up for. All the protesters were members of Facebook, a popular social networking site, which had designed a sweeping “news feed” program to disseminate personal information that users post on their web profiles. Suddenly everything people posted, from photos to their relationship status, was sent to hundreds of other users in a feed of time-stamped updates. People complained that the new system violated their privacy. Facebook argued that it was merely distributing information users had already revealed. The battle–and Facebook’s growing market dominance in the past year–show how social networking sites are rupturing the traditional conception of privacy and priming a new generation for complacency in a surveillance society. Users can complain, but the information keeps flowing.
Facebook users did not recognize how vulnerable their information was within the site’s architecture. The initial protests drew an impressive 8 percent of users, but they quickly subsided after Facebook provided more privacy options. Today the feed is the site’s nerve center. Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said that when he speaks on campuses these days, students approach him to say that while they initially “hated” the feed, now they “can’t live without it.”
i’m always on the edge of deleting my facebook profile because a) their widgets drive INSANE and b) their privacy TOU is horrible, except almost every other day someone from my past emerges and connects with me via the network. damn facebook’s functionality!!
Filed in blogging | Tagged with facebook, orwell | Comment (0)facebook ageism
i got into a weird personal discussion over IM in which a long distance friend of mine stated that he thought it was disrespectful for me to have “it’s complicated” as my relationship status (because – hey – it is complicated) on Facebook instead of the generic “in a relationship”. under “what are you looking for?”, i had also checked “whatever i can get” (instead of “friends” or “networking”), because i thought it was funnier than the other responses. the result of the combination of these two, he said, was that i was “denying my relationship” online and leaving myself open to or even inviting romantic advances on Facebook and trying to hide my LTR.
i found his arguments traditional and inside the box, and he wouldn’t take any of my web 2.0 counter-arguments seriously. first, i don’t agree with him in interpreting the “what are you looking for ” question and “whatever i can get” response sexually, and secondly, i don’t agree that if you put something other than “in a relationship” you’re courting advances (unless you put you’re single when you’re not, then maybe you are). nevermind that fact that i don’t hook up with people i meet online, nor do i ever have any interest in ever doing so. or, that almost everyone in the world who knows me well enough to be my friend on facebook knows that i’ve been in an LTR for almost 10 years. besides, i said, jay’s facebook profile says he’s looking for “random play”. so WTF? why am i the lecherous whore?
eventually i got him to shut up about it, especially when i added “with jay” (with link to jay’s facebook profile) to the “it’s complicated status”, and jay’s now shows he’s in a complicated relationship with me. our respective answers for what we’re looking for remain the same.
anyway, then my friend started poking around his own profile, and wanted to know why he didn’t have those options – “random play” and “whatever i can get” – under “what are you looking for?” it turns out that facebook decided to get rid of those options for people over 30, as some straight hetero types found it offensive.
i know a lot of people on facebook who are in the market for “random play” over the age of 30. assuming that anyone over 30 is somehow either going to be offended by that or “not that type” or already too settled down for such a thing is just …. ageist. and lame.
Filed in blogging | Tagged with facebook | Comments (10)is the web economy about to burst again?
However, over the last year my thinking has evolved dramatically. I have become less interested in every new shiny object and more engrossed in the social changes it, slowly, effects…
…The bubble really began in earnest on October 9, 2006 when Google bought YouTube. That’s when every person with an entrepreneurial itch woke up and smelled the hype and money. Prior to then, startups were more focused on the entrance, not the exit. But the Google YouTube deal and many others that followed (including big time investments) really opened up the floodgates to money and it changed the attitude of the web.
– osbervations on the soc.net and user-generated-content site phenomenon from The Web 2.0 World is Skunk Drunk on Its Own Kool-Aid
i feel pretty much the same way. advertising has spread across the internet like some kind of fungus, and just like commercials on television make my skin crawl, ads (especially video ads but even google text ads) on websites make me annoyed and less likely to regularly visit. more and more the new web 2.0 sites like Facebook just seem like huge marketing campaigns – even if the revenue generating activity is cleverly disguised, the marketing scheme is thinly veiled – with one goal: get users who will click on ads so that the ads create revenue. that’s it. everything is revenue generating; everything is commercial, and it’s sort of making me ill. it’s also not economically sustainable should the market take a downward turn (which is coming soon, they say – this summer’s housing market crash being the first major indicator…), historically evidenced by the dot com bubble bust a few years ago.
on the other hand, i greatly enjoying watching the ship go down and analyzing all the reasons and noting the societal causes/effects, so i guess i’ll just enjoy it while it lasts.
~via
Filed in blogging | Tagged with facebook | Comment (0)social networking 101
seen at UC Berkeley this afternoon: “continuous city” felt like either a 45-minute facebook commercial, or a “social networking for freshman, 101″ orientation seminar geared toward UCB undergrads and their parents. it’s a good thing the whole thing was less than an hour long, because if i had to sit through one more “actor” showing us their favorite facebook functions, i was honestly thinking of leaving. given all the ways, reasons, and methods people use online interaction and how people evaluate one another, this play/presentation was completely flat and barely skimmed the surface of what i would say the real interesting meat of social networking phenomenon is. it was yawn-inducing and despite the long list of current sponsors rattled off at the beginning who are funding the project, it seemed incredibly dated – i mean, having people IM behind their boss’ back while he’s ranting on about some stupid marketing idea is not exactly cutting-edge. we were doing that at work back when the year date still started with 19–. and – they barely incorporated anything that online users might have submitted to the project – individual pieces were melded into an on-screen montage and were barely distinguishable.
i hate to think that what i saw presented there is honestly what people really think online communication boils down to. sure, i think the younger generation (the people who use facebook) probably has yet to figure out or think about all the nuances of what it means to live a lot of your life online, and how what you do online affects you IRL- particularly meeting new people online and then moving that into a face-to-face relationship – and so the characters themselves i could forgive for not really delving into the complexities, but i thought the idea of the performance was that with a sum of all these little user-contributed parts, it was supposed to delve into that FOR the audience – to examine all the channels and methods and nuances and complexities and present a more complicated picture that might give people pause to really consider what social networking is/means. instead, i was bored with people explaining what it means to “poke” someone on facebook or how to use social networking to stalk your ex or how online dating works (or doesn’t). the online dating parts were the only pieces that really seemed to dig deeper into the weirdness of translating human personality via the internet, but even that was sort of cliche and not really very compelling.
if the 45 minutes i saw had been Act I of a performance that then got into some of the more consequential aspects of opening yourself up online – positive and negative – i think it would have been acceptable as an introduction. but for what i saw to be the WHOLE performance? the level of complexity of the subject presented seemed really, well, undergraduate. i understand it’s a very difficult subject to pin down and things needed to be simplified in order to make them easier to present, and that a lot can be extrapolated from what was shown IF you are already really well-versed in online life; however, i thought the presentation was to be more of a researched teaching, and i don’t think a newly-networked audience member would learn much from watching this (other than more things to do on facebook), and for those like myself who are well versed on the subject it was just plain boring (to the point: the description of the project and its intention was relatively fascinating; the execution was not).
Filed in blogging | Tagged with facebook | Comment (1)TOU
i recently acquired a facebook profile, despite the should-be-heeded warnings such as this, because, well, you know…all the cool kids are doing it. i’m finding all the little widgets on facebook to be sort of creepy, like how you can see every single thing that everyone else has changed about their profile, or who they’ve just befriended, or what they’ve written on someone else’s “wall”. i know each user can change their settings which determine how much of your activity everyone else can see, but it still completely promotes some serious lurking.
i mentioned in the post about mydeathspace that it does sort of weird me out to think that some individual, group, company or org could take whatever i post there about myself and use it as content for something else. i have wondered now and then if some of the photos or content i’ve posted here or on my profiles have ended up in other places – copyscape.com keeps me aprised about content, more or less, but like ariel recently discovered – you never know where your old photos might end up. they might even end up in an ad for whatever site you posted it on.
the facebook terms of service state that they can use your content for promotional purposes anywhere, at any time, including translating your content and incorporating it into “other works”:
By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.
myspace and others have similar terms for using/reproducing your content, but facebook’s are far less limited. with tribe.net, for example, their terms state a limited license for reproduction for “mechanical” purposes only and specifically state that you are NOT granting license for any other use. they are, however, able to change these terms at any point in time. what this means is that i’m definitely going to go and delete blog posts i’ve reposted to sites like myspace, because i do NOT want my content translated/republished for any reason, especially not for some ad campaign. photos? whatever. content – no way.
tonight, i’m going to a focus group on social networking sites. i’m very interested to see how much the average web user knows about these things, and how they view their participation in them. i think most people don’t care/don’t think anything bad or weird will ever happen to them/their content, and that’s probably true. it just seems that more and more we’re all willing to sign away certain rights in exchange for services these days, and you wonder where it stops.
Filed in blogging | Tagged with facebook | Comment (1)
