I find it amusing that in the last three years, Facebook has convinced people to divulge every piece of personal information – details like birthdays, spouse names and birth places, thing that we’re told not to share – in hopes of engaging in some fabulous social experiment with our high school friends. A few years into this great social experiment, and it’s finally got people concerned this faceless, multi-billion dollar corporation might be using their innocently volunteered blood types, child photos and family records for advertising purposes.
“When I listed my favorite Acapello groups, sports teams, bank routing and account numbers, the names of all my family members and how to build a dirty bomb from a home pregnancy test, I never though any of it would be used to target me with advertising! How sick!”
So Facebook now has to pump the breaks. Their head guy Mark Zuckerberg does a mea culpa and says they’ll make it easier to share less. But then, he expresses the Facebook anthem once again, that the core of this social media movement is people’s urge to share more info with the world, and that this core drive is what makes social media work, not secrecy.
This is quaint. I’m sure there’s a segment of the internet, fearless next-gener’s that don’t mind telling all their deepest to Google, Twitter and the wayback machine, but let’s be honest about what really makes Facebook work.
Social Media is just another soapbox.
Anyone that’s spent enough time on Facebook – and you can record it in minutes – knows you’re either enamored with the though of telling the world about your overly detailed and commonplace life, or quickly annoyed by the sea of folks who are. Just like blogging (speak of the devil), it’s an instant forum to speak at the world. What’s so great about Social Media is with ubiquitous Wifi, broadband and mobile connections, it’s incredibly easy to use these forums.
No doubt, there’s a momentary charm of telling old college friends your married or showing them pictures of your children, but the notion that this represents some greater public urge to break the walls of privacy and tell everyone everything is self-serving hubris. Facebook doesn’t change human nature, though it does sometimes reveals aspects of it you wish you didn’t have witness.
I’m not saying there’s no place for Facebook. I have an account, and I like how it connects me with old friends across the world, but it’s not a great leap forward in my mind. This was the appeal of writing letters – they’re short, sweet, and skip out on the things you don’t need, like knowing what I had for breakfast or how much the guy in front of me at Arby’s looks like Jim Belushi.
Social Media is cheap
I won’t rag on using the Internet as a soapbox either, especially via my own Internet soapbox. I will say is that Social Media soapboxes are cheap. I’m no novelist (as much as I love the thought), but with 140 characters being the standard of most “bursts”, it invites some of the most meaningless, half-baked, esoteric partial-thoughts to be shared with all.
Think about Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon. Now imagine he had mobile service and an iPhone handy (fantasy, I know – AT&T hardly reaches major metropolitan areas, but stay with me). You think he would have tweeted something like “wow – just stepped on da moon. crazy day – check out my pics http://bit.ly/bDlUlY“? How about if the Continental Congress messaged the Declaration of Independence to King George via Facebook? Kinda cheapens the moment, even robs it all of respect, doesn’t it?
Of course, this cheapness may have it’s place. Would have been nice to see a Tweet from Paul Revere rather than requiring a 40 mile horse ride at 2 in the morning. Even better, to be able to see the building pattern of tweets coming out of Concord about “red coats”. And outside of my twisted sense of “what-if” history and butchered grade school history knowledge, the intelligent mining of large social media data blobs can lead to some more meaningful trending. Of course, it’s typically done on more meaningful participants, like traders, executives and dealers on Wall Street, or the members of the `86 Mets team. Gary Carter, you are my rock.
In short, I think Social Media is really the immediate, tip of the tongue, hastily blurted monologues of the world. You won’t see borders broken or revolutions started by tweets. But you can piece together the unfiltered mind of the Internet from a mainline connection to a world of texting addicts. Half of them have atrocious grammar and written skills, but like it or not, people have lots to say. All. The. Time.
No, it doesn’t mean we want passports to a utopia where privacy is outmoded (Mark). We just like saying stuff. Some of us say more than others. Perhaps I’ve said too much.
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