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People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives. By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date.
Rob Horning (Marginal Utility, Popmatters) notes that Zuckerberg “intends to rewire the way sociality works in the world” in his “grandiose” IPO letter quoted above.
Obviously Eli Pariser’s “filter bubble” takes on Z’s “diverse perspectives” argument and argues it’s not necessarily substantiated - friends & family are mostly people a lot like us, so the information we get from them is not going to be diverse, quite the opposite.
I’d also question how far Facebook is “helping people form connections”, and how much it’s just a marking - a fixing, arguably a reterritorialisation - of connections we make very largely face-to-face in person. I’ve made friends online - thanks, Twitter! - but haven’t met anyone new through Facebook - and I think that’s very typical.
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ETA: Interesting observation on this section in Tim Carmody’s annotated version of the IPO letter on WIRED:
“if there’s anything Zuck’s truly passionate about, it’s this: that there’s something broken about how we hide and mask ourselves with other people, and that our lives would be better if we were more open”
Gigaom’s Matthew Ingram notes:
“He doesn’t just want to enable these changes in society — on a fairly fundamental level, he wants to control them.”
And as Rob Horning (Marginal Utility, PopMatters) puts it:
“The message is: We will reprogram you to see privacy as some sort of despicable antisociality and corral you all into a kind of mandated intersbjectivity”
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But what does criticism of Zuckerberg’s hyperbole really mean when this IPO is going to make him so very, very rich?
Posted on February 5, 2012 with 3 notes ()
Source: popmatters.com
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