Philosophy and Social Media 3: Technology in Question

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)

Facebook and ‘frictionless sharing’

"When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was 'why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?‘

"And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time”. (Zuckerberg 2010)


• 2010 - 2012: Facebook launches ‘Open Graph’, making users’ information available to

app developers. Facebook becomes a platform for frictionless sharing.


Why force ‘frictionless sharing’ on users?

How does Facebook make money?

• Targeted advertising: Facebook’s self-serve advertising platform

• Facebook targets advertisements to users by behaviour and interest

• Sharing adds data to your ‘social graph’ - this improves targeted advertising


‘Facebook’s profit model is built upon an ownership of its user’s labour,

specifically, the intimate detail of our lives and self-presentations. This is an

example a larger trend of “prosumption,” that is, the simultaneous role of being a

producer of what one consumes. … [P]rosumption … is the mechanism by which

we become unpaid workers, producing valuable information for the benefit of

businesses. This is the endlessly efficient business model of Web 2.0 capitalism’.

‘Prosumers of the world unite’ (see #philsocial for link)


• The Matrix (1999)


• The Matrix (1999)

Neo discovers that we are plugged into the matrix, feeding the machines!


‘What Facebook does is to enable the pooling of sharing and collaboration around

their platform - and by enabling, framing and "controlling" that activity, they create a

pool of attention. It is this pool of attention which is sold to advertisers, for

an estimated $3.2bn per year, which is barely $3.79 in ad revenue per user’.

-- Michel Bauwens

Social media: the business model

Businessinsider.com claims (02/12):

‘Pinterest doesn't have a business

plan at this point. The company

needs to first learn about its users,

what their interests are, what they

like to "pin," what sites they're

visiting, what they're uploading and

sharing. This is how the company

will eventually make money’.

Privacy and state surveillance

Heidegger: the age of enframing

• Planetary enframing: Heidegger’s vision of

technology at the end of history

• Technology is a ‘way of revealing’

• Everything is quantified, measured, plugged

into systems for calculable benefit

• Human beings as controllers: cease

questioning ‘being’ and focus on managing

the flow of resources through systems

• Human beings finally become resources

governed by systems

‘Where the danger is,

There lies the saving power also’

Prosumer culture

Prosumer culture: born in 60s communes, continued in hacker communities, driven

through Silicon Valley by the success of Facebook, Twitter, et al.

Social media creates prosumers – and fosters a culture of co-creation and sharing

Facebook as gift culture

“The thing that binds [gift cultures] together

and makes the potlatch work is the fact that

the community is small enough that people

can see each other’s contributions. But

once these societies get past a certain

point in size the system breaks down.”

Facebook as gift culture

“When there’s more openness, with

everyone being able to express their

opinion quickly, more of the economy starts

to operate like a gift economy. It puts the

onus on companies and organizations to

be more good, more trustworthy”.

The gift shift: prosumers rising

Philosophy and Social Media 3: Technology in Question

Education

Transcript of Philosophy and Social Media 3: Technology in Question