By K. A. Laity
It's the end of the world as we know it! Where's Buffy?! She's averted several apocalypses (apocalypseé? apocalypso?) already. Cameron's behind this somehow, or Goldman-Sachs, I bet. Oh, wait—it's only Zuckerberg?
For a minute there, I was worried.
Yes, as the guys at Wired have warned us, Facebook has you in its sights on the path toward world domination:
"Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed."
Yes, it's true: the forced public option is a bit of a bastard. Settle down, tea-baggers, we're not talking about that public option. But to hear some tech folk talk about it, you'd think we were. And yes, something "open and distributed" would be wonderful. Hop right on that, will you? On your own time, with your own funds and support, too, okay? Because I'm not paying for it. There's the rub, as someone once said. And until we do actually get some socialists in charge, we're stuck with the evils of capitalism.
Facebook is not a civil right you have been guaranteed. It's a big ol' bundle of programs that you signed up for. Yeah, I know you were pressured by friends/family/colleagues/fellow Masons. You still had to choose to be a part of it. If you don't like the way it works, walk away. It can be done. Look at MySpace. No, over there—it's the ghostly figure gibbering next to the Pet Rock.
No one held a gun to your head and demanded you join Facebook (okay, if they did, I apologize but you have bigger problems than whether your friends know that you really do like Justin Bieber, so quit reading now and call the police!). By all means, complain to the FTC. Do make your displeasure known to Zuckerberg. Or—here's a novel idea—quit Facebook. And for Pete's sake, stop whining about it with that sense of entitlement in your voice.
The bottom line is if a thing is useful, people will use it. If it isn't people abandon it like last year's "new black" and never look back (sorry, MySpace). The people who spent all their effort building it, investing their time and money, are going to try to find ways to get something back for all that (me, too: the web does not, on the whole, pay). They will balance that zeal for payoff against the possibility of killing the golden goose they've built by pulling too hard on the eggs as they come out [I'm going to drop that metaphor now—eww].
Hey, Ning—how's that going for you?
Having been declared "evil" by the Bishop of Albany, just because I'm a blogger (apparently we're ALL part of the discourse of incivility that inflames the fires of hate what with our grand generalizations and so on), I know that a big part of the anxiety around so much of social media is fear about this widespread and uncontrollable power in the hands of—gasp!—anyone. When governments crack down, people tweet it in the streets; when the traditional sources of power misunderstand social media, folks use it to mobilize opposition and support. The web can be a powerful force for undermining traditional power structures.
But the truth is most people just want to share laughs and pictures and what they thought about [fill in popular television show name] last night. It makes me think of Peter Cook's genius creation, EL Wisty, and his World Domination League who declared in 1964 their number one goal was "Total domination of the world by 1958." Their method?
"We shall move about in people's rooms and say, 'Excuse me, we are the World Domination League. May we dominate you?' Then, if they say 'Get out,' of course we give up."
So, don't worry too much about the massive power of Facebook; we're a fickle bunch of mammals and we'll drop Zuckerberg's network in a heartbeat if they ask too much. We're not the helpless victims some hand-wringers want to imagine. But if you can get a half-dozen of your pals together, I think we can take over MySpace.
Image via Oversocialized's Flickr