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?

Notes on the semantics of the internet

Mark Zuckerberg wants you to share. He doesn’t much care if you want to share. Sharing, in Zuckerberg’s view, has morphed from an affirmative act—that video was hilarious, I think I’ll Like it!—to something more like an unconscious state of being. I watched that video, and therefore it will be shared.[…]

Zuckerberg calls this “frictionless” sharing. What he means is that I don’t have to bother with the “friction” of choosing to tell you that I like something. On Facebook, now, merely experiencing something is enough to trigger sharing. Once I sign up for Spotify’s Facebook app, my consent is assumed: When I listen, I share. The same goes for the many other apps that Facebook’s partners are launching. [….]

This is a nightmare, but not for the reasons you might suspect. I don’t hate this new model because of its lack of “privacy,” or due to Facebook’s clear financial interest in collecting my personal information. […] My problem with “frictionless sharing” is much more basic: Facebook is killing taste […]

For as much as he’s invested in sharing, though, Zuckerberg seems clueless about the motivation behind the act. Why do you share a story, video, or photo? Because you want your friends to see it. And why do you want your friends to see it? Because you think they’ll get a kick out of it. I know this sounds obvious, but it’s somehow eluded Zuckerberg that sharing is fundamentally about choosing. You experience a huge number of things every day, but you choose to tell your friends about only a fraction of them, because most of what you do isn’t worth mentioning.

Now Zuckerberg wants to lower the bar. “One thing that we’ve heard over and over again is that people have things that they want to share, but they don’t want to annoy their friends by putting boring stuff in their news feeds,” he said during his keynote. To me, this doesn’t sound like a problem that needs solving. If Facebook users aren’t sharing stuff because they worry it will bore their friends, good! Thank you, people of Facebook, for your restraint in choosing not to bore me.

But Zuckerberg couldn’t let this undersharing stand. “Our solution was to create a new place that’s lighter-weight where you can see lighter-weight stuff—that’s how we came up with Ticker.” If you translate “lighter-weight” to boring, you’ll understand what Zuckerberg is saying: Facebook now has a place on its site reserved especially for boring updates

I think Manjoo - but potentially also Zuckerberg - has misunderstood something about sharing all this information. It’s not for your friends to read. If it’s useful, it’ll work in subtle and largely invisible ways - simply shaping the selection of music you get on Spotify so it’s stuff you’re more likely to like, or helping you be directed to the news stories you really want to read.

If the Facebook interface has got it wrong, however, it will indeed be bombarding users with the little stuff. Already the top right Latest Activity box is entirely useless - I don’t care whether a ‘friend’ I hardly know has Liked a stranger’s status update; “Like” means so little.

This bodes badly for the usability of the new Facebook design.

However what I also wanted to highlight was Manjoo’s other point about all this sharing producing “another bit of noise in their already noisy world”. It’s made me think about what I retweet and some of the things I post to Tumblr. Another quote? Another article? I only share things I think are good, but I’ll share “good” and not just “great” or “life-changing”. And I wonder whether this essentially amounts to clutter.

Already I spend too much time reading things on the internet, and not as much as I should thinking and writing. I don’t read anything that’s not interesting and engaging - I will close a boring or irrelevant article after the first couple of paragraphs - but nonetheless I would like to refine this further; to read only five mind-bending ideas a day, not fifty “that’s nice”.

All this content sharing and recommendation is information that could be used to help direct me to those five articles. (I use TweetedTimes.com already, and very relevant it is.) But still the volume’s just a bit too close to ‘flood’.