I’ve been reading a lot of good writing about Facebook, lately. Critics are fair and give us a lot to think about our relationship with the always on social network and the idea of “Building a global community”. As always, even before the Internet, it’s not enough we repeat “technology is neutral”. It is neutral, but we must commit so we get more good than bad, as Kevin Kelly said 7 years ago. But how can you work with something you do not own or comprehend? Because Facebook, as Max Read puts it in the first article you’ll read here, is «like a four-dimensional object: we catch slices of it when it passes through the three-dimensional world we recognize». So we need a four-dimensional approach, and a lot of patience.
- Does Even Mark Zuckerberg Know What Facebook Is? by Max Read.
Facebook’s actual value system seems less positive than recursive. Facebook is good because it creates community; community is good because it enables Facebook. The values of Facebook are Facebook.
The truth is that while many reporters knew some things that were going on on Facebook, no one knew everything what was going on on Facebook, not even Facebook.
Their amount of concentrated authority resembles the divine right of kings, and is sparking a backlash that is still gathering force.
We need to break up these online monopolies because if a few people make the decisions about how we communicate, shop, learn the news, again, do we control our own society?
