So the f8 announcement whose pre-publicity I annotated is out. A sexy-but-scary timeline, lots more entertainment and sharing, more tendrils reaching out over the web.
I liked Adam Tinworth’s question about creepiness and death, and I’ve also got some sympathy with Slate’s ‘sharing everything = sharing nothing’ paradox, which suggests indiscriminate streams decontextualise our activity and deprivilege the decisions of our internal editors. They’re decisions which many, including me, would argue are pivotal to how we navigate the psychological terrain between inner and public self.
But my question’s about the reveal video itself, which, like the Google Chrome SBTV ad (slightly more palatable by virtue of laying claim to a mere career rather than an entire life) exhibits the belief that social media brands are the kind of brands people love, in the same way they love Apple or Nintendo.
For me, and for everyone I’ve ever met, the truth is they occupy a realm somewhere between infrastructure and celebrity magazines. They’re either getting stuff to you, like warehouses and railways, or delivering a voyeuristic pleasure hit you feel slightly grubby about, like the Daily Mail.
Here’s the thing: commercially, that’s not a bad thing. Infrastructure and guilty pleasures aren’t going anywhere – nobody’s getting rid of trains, and the Daily Mail website’s creaming it in off of celebrities and evanescent outrage, because it knows people want those things. They’ve got their users and customers in places where they either can’t or don’t think about it very much.
So I guess my question is why would Facebook suddenly leap onto stage and send a grand plan to hoover up every life stage, every trackable activity, zooming around the world? Why make people think about the implications of a contract that had been ticking away quietly in the background for years? And why, of all things, choose that same moment to try and look attractive?
I feel a bit like an awkward friend, possibly played by Jesse Eisenberg, just proposed to me. And I’m guessing that isn’t what Zuckerberg was going for at all.
It does seem odd, when surely Facebook are aware that the main concern people have with them is privacy-invasion, to introduce a format where suddenly you can see in great detail not just how your friends interact with you, but how they interact with third parties who are frequently strangers.
I think, however, that their reason for doing it is a very basic one: because the right-hand stream is constantly updating, it creates an impression of constant activity, even when that activity amounts to very little. Before, you might log on, look at the news feed, think “Not a lot going on here then”, and log straight off. Now there’s a superficial impression of buzz