Facebook's TOS and YOU.
I'm pretty intrigued by facebook's tweaks to their terms of service agreement and this write-up on it: http://mashable.com/2009/02/16/facebook-tos-privacy/
I've been pretty fascinated lately by how different media affect people, with one author in particular, Marshall Mcluhan, taking center stage there. He writes that all media is an extension of ourselves in some way or other: television is an extension of our imaginations, a photograph is an extension of our eye, the massive amount of online information and how we search for it is an extension of our minds. One of his major ideas is that all media have certain advantages and qualities, but when taken to an extreme will reverse on themselves, shattering what they originally increased (his point being: be open, but be cautious, in how far you take a media). Too much tv will actually kill off your ability to think creatively, someone or something that is over-publicized will begin to loose their identity, networks with such an overwhelming amount of information can paralyze someone's ability to make a decision.
This man who died in the early 80s predicted that the final frontier, that of extending our consciousness, wasn't far away. I'm no expert on his thought, but social networking websites seem to eerily fulfill this prophecy. Your likes, dislikes, thoughts, relationships, conversations - all get expressed online in a handily searchable and watchable format. Good stuff, but it doesn't take much to see we've long since gone overboard with this idea. Relationships were the first to reverse (just how much does "friends" mean anymore?), now our personal information and conversations are no longer ours to show/remove as we please. I don't really blame FB, it's costly to build systems to properly cull out old information and put security in place to enforce it's protection. When you have millions of users that don't (and won't) pay you a red cent, can you be surprised that a service would begin to do this? What I find interesting though is we have lost all control over our own information, which happens to be our own selves. Something about you gets posted on facebook or youtube and, accurate or not, done by you or not - it doesn't matter. That information can't be taken back and now begins to define YOU, rather than you defining it. Your reputation is now being dictated by what someone finds attached to your name on flickr or myspace.
Caffeine induced rambling? Possible. Likely. It sounds gloomy reading back through it. :) I'm really not in the camp of someone who hates social networking websites or the idea of letting your possessions express some part of your personality, but just as we had an industrial age and an information age, these are the days of self-expression. Yea, people have always found ways to try and express themselves through something they have or do, but I think an argument can be made that this natural impulse is on hyperdrive right now. The marketing machinery certainly isn't overlooking the opportunity to play on this craze (thereby driving it further, imho). On my profile, in my food choices, my blog, the books I read, the phone I use, the brand of purse I carry - it's all about how that thing succeeds or fails at communicating some part of who I am (or who I want people to see). We've seen so many great things come from this emphasis on the personal, but hopefully we can also acknowledge the dark side of our fixation on this topic as well. The exhaustion of the industrial age may be little compared to the loss of identity of the personalization age.
I've been pretty fascinated lately by how different media affect people, with one author in particular, Marshall Mcluhan, taking center stage there. He writes that all media is an extension of ourselves in some way or other: television is an extension of our imaginations, a photograph is an extension of our eye, the massive amount of online information and how we search for it is an extension of our minds. One of his major ideas is that all media have certain advantages and qualities, but when taken to an extreme will reverse on themselves, shattering what they originally increased (his point being: be open, but be cautious, in how far you take a media). Too much tv will actually kill off your ability to think creatively, someone or something that is over-publicized will begin to loose their identity, networks with such an overwhelming amount of information can paralyze someone's ability to make a decision.
This man who died in the early 80s predicted that the final frontier, that of extending our consciousness, wasn't far away. I'm no expert on his thought, but social networking websites seem to eerily fulfill this prophecy. Your likes, dislikes, thoughts, relationships, conversations - all get expressed online in a handily searchable and watchable format. Good stuff, but it doesn't take much to see we've long since gone overboard with this idea. Relationships were the first to reverse (just how much does "friends" mean anymore?), now our personal information and conversations are no longer ours to show/remove as we please. I don't really blame FB, it's costly to build systems to properly cull out old information and put security in place to enforce it's protection. When you have millions of users that don't (and won't) pay you a red cent, can you be surprised that a service would begin to do this? What I find interesting though is we have lost all control over our own information, which happens to be our own selves. Something about you gets posted on facebook or youtube and, accurate or not, done by you or not - it doesn't matter. That information can't be taken back and now begins to define YOU, rather than you defining it. Your reputation is now being dictated by what someone finds attached to your name on flickr or myspace.
Caffeine induced rambling? Possible. Likely. It sounds gloomy reading back through it. :) I'm really not in the camp of someone who hates social networking websites or the idea of letting your possessions express some part of your personality, but just as we had an industrial age and an information age, these are the days of self-expression. Yea, people have always found ways to try and express themselves through something they have or do, but I think an argument can be made that this natural impulse is on hyperdrive right now. The marketing machinery certainly isn't overlooking the opportunity to play on this craze (thereby driving it further, imho). On my profile, in my food choices, my blog, the books I read, the phone I use, the brand of purse I carry - it's all about how that thing succeeds or fails at communicating some part of who I am (or who I want people to see). We've seen so many great things come from this emphasis on the personal, but hopefully we can also acknowledge the dark side of our fixation on this topic as well. The exhaustion of the industrial age may be little compared to the loss of identity of the personalization age.
posted by Kim at 9:33 PM
1 Comments:
This idea in relation to media - that anything taken to an extreme wraps back upon itself - is a specific case of a Taoist philosophy.
If you look at the Taiji symbol (often called the yin-yang symbol) you see that yin eventually becomes yang and yang becomes yin.
There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit.
“Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically.
“We’ll see,” the farmer replied.
The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses.
“How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed.
“We’ll see,” replied the old man.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune.
“We’ll see,” answered the farmer.
The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.
“We’ll see” said the farmer.
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