How Social is the World According to Facebook?
A recent opinion piece from The Guardian casts new light on Facebook, and more importantly, on the investors who have helped turn the dorm-room project into one of the fastest growing multi-national companies.
For the last eight months, Facebook has had a strangle hold on the imagination of the nonprofit tech community. Technology consultants and bloggers have written endlessly about strengthening the relationships between a nonprofit and its supporters through Facebook, including myself.
But to what end? If Facebook is designed primarily to centralize resources in the hands of the few and advertise brand names that have nothing todo with the nonprofits we support, then what good could a one-off Facebook group or fundraising application do for philanthropy and the change sector?
As Facebook continues to flex its corporate identity, nonprofits and the people who support them may start looking elsewhere for social action platforms designed for social change. Purpose-driven communities like Change.org, ZaZengo, GiveMeaning and Razoo may prove safer and more credible places for organizations and independent projects to harness the power of networked individuals.
Here are a few excerpts from Tom Hodgkinson's With Friends Like These:
I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as "a social utility that connects you with the people around you". But hang on. Why on God's earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?
And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.
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It seems, though, that I am very much alone in my hostility. At the time of writing Facebook claims 59 million active users, including 7 million in the UK, Facebook's third-biggest customer after the US and Canada. That's 59 million suckers, all of whom have volunteered their ID card information and consumer preferences to an American business they know nothing about. Right now, 2 million new people join each week. At the present rate of growth, Facebook will have more than 200 million active users by this time next year. And I would predict that, if anything, its rate of growth will accelerate over the coming months. As its spokesman Chris Hughes says: "It's embedded itself to an extent where it's hard to get rid of."
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Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.
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