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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)
Facebook and ‘frictionless sharing’
Facebook and ‘frictionless sharing’
Facebook and ‘frictionless sharing’
Facebook and ‘frictionless sharing’
• 2010 - 2012: Facebook launches ‘Open Graph’, making users’ information available to
app developers. Facebook becomes a platform for frictionless sharing.
Facebook and ‘frictionless sharing’
Facebook and ‘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
How does Facebook make money?
‘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)
How does Facebook make money?
• The Matrix (1999)
How does Facebook make money?
• The Matrix (1999)
Neo discovers that we are plugged into the matrix, feeding the machines!
How does Facebook make money?
‘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
How does Facebook make money?
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’.
PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL MEDIA
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’
How does Facebook make money?
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
The gift shift: prosumers rising
The gift shift: prosumers rising
The gift shift: prosumers rising
PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL MEDIA
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