Confusionism

Why a facebook users union?

“Guys i agree with the idea here but doesnt it feel like “i watch tv and the tv channel makes money over me coz i watch the ads” so it should pay me too?, is it just the user generated content?”

Well, In this instance the television program is you. You are the product and the service. You and your life have been turned into  the equivalent of a television show,  a show that is watched by your friends. Facebook has commercialized your social relationships for the benefit of advertising. 

Developments with the Union

I spoke yesterday with the Guardians tech podcast about the facebook users union. I think I got the majority of the points across. I guess they are

1. Fair distribution of profits

2. Releasing our data from a digital prison

3. Encouraging someone to set up a benevolent social network

Have a listen here and let me know what you think. 

The facebook users union

So a month ago I set up the facebook users union and thanks to Jemima Kiss it I managed to get it into the Guardian website.

A while back, on my birthday before last I took a stand and commited facebook suicide. I managed to last for almost a year. Why did I sign up again? We’ll I went to India for a 2 month trip and thought it would be a good way to keep in contact with my friends and family. I have always had a tenuous relationship relationship with social networks, being a natural rebel. I hate the idea of participating in something so mass. 

I tried to leave and I failed. I have quite good will power. I think the overall effect of this process, leaving and returning has led me to the acceptance that the world has fundamentally changed forever. For everyone ever.

The things we do now could determine the future for everyone else? I know it sounds like a grand statement. Jared Laneir is quite adamant that we need to protect against lock in? What is the lock in here? What things have been built into facebook already? Could these become given shorthand? Maybe the business model behind it should be evolved. Maybe this is the platform for a new kind of business.

So, The facebook users union is a simple concept. Each user on a social network is in fact a worker. You are creating value. It may not seem like work too you. You ask, how can updating your status, posting links, hosting pictures and all the other things we do be work. It’s fun.

I guess it helps to understand the reason facebook is so valuable. Facebook facilitates social connection between people. Which is great. It also creates a graph of the individual and the way the individual fits into the society and the social network. Every action within the network is collected, stored and tracked. Existence within facebook creates a model of desire, like and dislikes. It is this model of desire, these traces you leave in the system that create the value. The value is realised in the way it enables brands to understand you and sell stuff to you. It’s is basically a giant marketing engine.

You are building a digital city for digital masters. So you must now ask yourself how much you think you are worth to facebook? Maybe not so much today, tomorrow, what about 10 years? I personally can’t envisae a world without social networks. I can imagine a world without facebook though.

Say you are worth hypothetically 3 dollars every year to facebook. It’s not very much money you might think. What I am suggesting is to take 10% of that money, that yearly value and ask facebook to donate collect it together and donate it to a good cause of our choice. A benevolent profit sharing. Social networks act like co-operatives to get people to participate and then remove the value like normal businesses. Don’t get digitally sharecropped. 

Could this ever happen? Well maybe not with facebook, however it gives future social networks a point of differentiation. A competitive advantage. Someone who is still in school right now. The diaspora guy’s might look at this as a way to ensure that they are doing something great. Fingers crossed.

Facebook users union

We now have our own social network so please feel free to sign up and invoice facebook.

www.facebookusersunion.ning.com

automated culture!

Stephen Bailey also raises the point that identity is inextricably linked to memory and that,

“When you de-skill someone, you alter not only his culture, but his personality”

So not only are we altering culture through automating the tools with which culture is created. We are also creating a connected society in which identity is being created, determined and stored online. Is the automation of craft resulting in the demolition of culture to mediocre pre-sets? I find these questions to be quite interesting and far from being the luddite reactionist. I feel that culture will change as a result of moving from a telegenetic to a cybergenetic information culture, a bit to atom, a mental to physical. We should try to remember what culture was lost!

Context free information in real time = Unthink!

Alot of the thinking in this post is drawn from Neil Postmans book “Amusing ourselves to death”. I recommend reading it as it is a fantastic look at a world in media transition.

Is context free information creating a world  of “strangers and pointless quantity; a world of fragments and discontinuities, a world of dignified irrelevance and incoherent discourse?

Ask yourself the question how often does any of the information you receive influence your daily business? The truth is very rarely, if ever.

This question raised by Neil Postman in his book “amusing ourselves to death” written in the mid 80’s and has become ever more prophetic ever since. It provides a brilliant assessment of the social impact of the telegraph (and television) and context free information upon society.

Twitter, a real time information delivery system is mirroring and building upon the foundation laid by the antiquated system of the telegraph. Samuel Finlay Breese Morse’s invention the telegraph promised to create “one neighborhood of the whole county”. It annihilated space and time by linking places that had no need or reason to be connected, were connected. It also created a new paradigm for information and the sharing of information.

The telegraph was the first context free information environment, (essentially, the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in a social and political decision making) and as a result realigned the information action/ratio to one more abstract and remote. We began using less and less of the information received in our daily lives.

The telegraph made the “irrelevant, relevant”, and created value for information based on its “novelty, interest and curiosity factor” not it’s practical application in the real world . Echoing Coleridge’s poem, ’ Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink” this new connected paradigm delivered information that had very little, if anything to do with the person it was addressed. The telegraph became service that sent information that answered no question asked and offered no reason to reply. Postman suggests

” The Telegraph may have made the world into “one neighborhood”, but it was a peculiar one populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other”

Sound familiar? Postman also argues that the legacy of the telegram was to establish:

- dignified irrelevance and amplified impotence

- created incoherent discourse through broken time and broken attention

In parallel the principal strength of the telegraph, as with twitter is to move mass amounts of information very quickly, it is not to collect it, explain it, or analyze it. Both Twitter and the telegraph lack permanence, continuity and coherence. The telegraph according to Postman is best suited to :

- “Flashing messages, each to be replaced by a more up to date one”

- “Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither

permit or require evaluation”

What are the ramifications of context free, real time information? Read the below paragraph from the book distilling the characteristics of the telegraph.