Readers will be familiar with the to and from among pundits about whether they should allow staff to use Facebook in work time or whether it should be banned.
Facebook is arguably the poster child for social media. 350 million (claimed) users love it. My wife is a Farmville addict. Many I know seem to love it. I think it's a mess and mostly keep out the way. As one of my colleagues recently said: 'Most of what you see on Facebook is rubbish but if only 5 or 10 million users are intelligent then that's a sizable market to which you can market.' But then recently Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO dropped a bomb, declaring that his company decides societal norms - one of which is that privacy is an outmoded concept.
Maybe to a 25 year old CEO who lives in the Silicon Valley bubble but not to almost anyone I know. My ZDNet colleague James Farrar who writes about sustainability said this:
...here I think Facebook is walking into the ethical trap of
determinism. Facebook judge we don’t value our privacy so they are
taking the safety guards away. Are we really lobotomized lemmings
without any regard for the value & dignity of our own privacy? Or
as Mike Arrington put it in his subtly titled post ‘Ok you Luddites, Time to Chill out on Facebook over Privacy’:
The point is, we don’t really care about privacy anymore. And Facebook is just giving us exactly what we want.
James is right to call attention to this and to the triumphalism of some in Silicon Valley. Danah Boyd, who works as a researcher at Microsoft added this:
No one makes money off of creating private communities in an era
of "free." It's in Facebook's economic interest to force people into
being public, even if a few people break up with Facebook in the
process. Of course, it's in Facebook's interest to maintain some
semblance of trust, some appearance of being a trustworthy enterprise.
It is coming to something when your and my trust are being sacrificed on the alter of economic interests. But then there is something more profound about the way Facebook has come to its astonishing conclusion.
Dana continues:
Public-ness has always been a privilege. For a long time, only a few
chosen few got to be public figures. Now we've changed the equation and
anyone can theoretically be public, can theoretically be seen by
millions. So it mustn't be a privilege anymore, eh? Not quite. There
are still huge social costs to being public, social costs that geeks in
Silicon Valley don't have to account for. Not everyone gets to show up
to work whenever they feel like it wearing whatever they'd like and
expect a phatty paycheck. Not everyone has the opportunity to be
whoever they want in public and demand that everyone else just cope. I
know there are lots of folks out there who think that we should force
everyone into the public so that we can create a culture where that IS
the norm. Not only do I think that this is unreasonable, but I don't
think that this is truly what we want. The same Silicon Valley tycoons
who want to push everyone into the public don't want their kids to know
that their teachers are sexual beings, even when their sexuality is as
vanilla as it gets. Should we even begin to talk about the marginalized
populations out there?
As professionals considering new technologies that can offer benefit but who still have to consider risk, I'm hoping that we see the kind of statements coming from Facebook for what they are. Thinly disguised and cynical attempts to get us to part with something that is of genuine value - our social capital - in exchange for a poorly defined return other than advertising spam.
It is that rather than the perceived waste of time that Facebook is thought to engender that represents the real risk to us both as individuals and collectively.