The Wisdom of Crowds
Article published: Saturday, January 19th 2008
Controversy recently struck Facebook, the “social networking site†that serves as the front organisation for a global collective consciousness, albeit one with diminutive intelligence. Apparently, the leadership – personified in the form of Billionaire primary node, Mark Zuckerberg, who may or may not exist in human form – had crept Grinch like into the lives’ of Facebook’s many members and stolen Christmas.
To achieve this fiendish plot, the good people at Facebook had installed Beacon, a feature that tracks members’ movements elsewhere on the internet. This feature then broadcast what those members had recently purchased, thus ruining the surprise of numerous Christmas presents. Whether Facebook was intentionally trying to sabotage Christmas, the centrepiece of another notable cult, is perhaps less important than the blatant trespass upon people’s rights.
Of course, one of the consequences of joining a hive mind is that you have no rights, which is why those of us who somehow struggle through our lives relying upon eye to eye human contact and such Victorian throwbacks as emails and mobile phones should feel no sympathy for the whining cretins who feel the need to publish every banal moment of their permanent adolescences online. Those whining cretins, in the last, futile reminiscence of their previous autonomous selves protested the infringement of their rights in, naturally enough, a Facebook group. With 69,000 members revolting, Primary Consciousness Zuckerberg apologised.
The total hold of Facebook is obvious to anyone who has waited in line at a public library computer cluster, or sat in a bus, where conversations seemingly can’t be held without Facebook as a contextual touchstone. When groups such as No2ID organise groups on the site, it can only be assumed that the mental putrefaction consequent of online social networking has set in and that they no longer appreciate irony. Notably, employers now check Facebook when vetting applicants for jobs to see aspects of their personal lives that, naturally, they do not want their bosses to know. That such a totalising network of people’s every detail and movement is available online is terrifying, given Facebook’s evident ability to exploit that fact to make money. Of course, they may have withdrawn Beacon and apologised, but that is beside the point.
Facebook’s crucial element of collective stupidity is not so much this level of blatant disregard for the trust of its members, as important as it is, but rather that its primary benefit – a free and easy way of keeping in touch with large numbers of friends – has added a new dimension to socialising that in fact undermines its supposed reason to be. Facilitating social networks is no longer (if it ever genuinely was) what Facebook is about: instead, it is about bringing those social networks within a new network – the network of Facebook itself. Social events become endlessly photographed and written about on people’s individual profiles, in effect subsuming the original social life into a narrative parody of the original, documented in images and analysed in commentary. Every event becomes not a case of going out but rather a case of providing raw materials for the Facebook life, in effect producing not a social event but a spectacle to be presented in an album of photographs with its own pithy title. Each night is a comedy, a tragedy, a drama, every following day consisting of a string of posts laughing, commiserating, discussing the night beforehand’s events.
With Microsoft buying a £7.3 billion minority stake in Facebook, and Zuckerberg gaining $3 billion from it, it is perhaps worth remembering on whose terms these lives are being presented. The night out, as spectacle presented to an audience, is framed by adverts. That this net is to where many people – and the UK is the European leader and second only in the world to Canada in the amount of time it spends on such sites – upload most of their details is perhaps not too terrifying, considering that the CIA is probably not concerned with the latest house party (although it may explain the police’s regular involvement) or what a photo of you drunkenly pouting in one of the poorly lit, lap-sweat and stale beer reeking crypts that pass for clubs looks like. What is important, however, is how ‘social networking sites’ are undermining actual socialising. They are taking it from a way of enjoying company with friends, and turning it into a way of presenting your life as an endless story, rather than actually living it. And this is the real danger: if we upload our very friendships into internet spectacles that are used to sell shit to our friends, then Facebook have stolen more than Christmas. They’ll have taken any organic spirit of fun that we have left. What’s worse, we’ll have willingly given it to them.
N.B. Since writing, an article in the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook) appeared which was not only better, but does suggest a commercial link between Facebook and the CIA, who clearly know how to appeal to an addictive personality (cocaine, anyone?)
That’s if you can trust the Guardian of course. Our current poll seems to suggest that you can, so visit it quick.
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