I was taking online classes in technical writing at the Utah
State University at about the same time I signed up for Facebook.
Occasionally as I peruse my Facebook memories – thoughtfully
tossed up by the social network itself – I see one of those early posts where,
like so many others, I engaged in the hokey syntax of assuming my name was part
of the post: “Brian John Davidson is sick of eating green bananas,” or some
other such nonsense.
At the same time, David Hailey, one of my USU professors,
was asking us a poser.
He’d have us visit a website and report back on what we
thought was wrong with it. Of course he was fishing for a pet answer – but a
pet answer that, once we figured it out – made a lot of sense, though it took
us a while to figure it out. Most of what we were seeing wasn’t written or
conceived for the Web – it was being shoehorned into service and being used by
people who wouldn’t use it in the sense intended. People don’t come into the
Internet, or our material on the Internet, through the front door. They come in
via search algorithms, and zero in on the stuff they need. If it’s there,
they’ll linger. If it’s not they depart as quickly as they came.
I still see vestiges of this. For example, a few weeks ago I
was furiously scrubbing the Internet, trying to find addresses where I needed
to have universities where our oldest son has dual enrollment credit send his
transcripts. Universities were enthusiastically telling me how to order
transcripts from them, but it took a lot more poking through their websites to
find addresses to send transcripts to (nevermind the backwards approach of
having to physically mail the transcripts; only one of the schools my son had
credit at would offer an electronic option).
So that lesson Prof. Hailey was trying to teach us way back
in 2009 is still a struggle to learn today, and for people who supposedly have
much more internet savvy than I.
Enter Facebook.
In an excellent article at Wired, Nicholas Thompson and Fred
Vogelstein outline how Facebook has grappled – and continues to grapple – with
how its users use Facebook. Facebook’s founders envisioned the social network
as a place for friends to get together. Recent events have shown the platform
is being used for political and social manipulation, some of it on the part of
Facebook.
A few illustrating quotes:
“And I’m sitting there going, ‘Guys, seriously, I don’t
think that’s how it works,’” [Roger] McNamee [an early Facebook investor] says.
“You can assert till you’re blue in the face that you’re a platform, but if
your users take a different point of view, it doesn’t matter what you assert.”
To McNamee, the way the Russians used the platform was
neither a surprise nor an anomaly. “They find 100 or 1,000 people who are angry
and afraid and then use Facebook’s tools to advertise to get people into
groups,” he says. “That’s exactly how Facebook was designed to be used.”
The article is definitely worth reading.
And it all goes back to Professor Hailey. We can put
whatever we want on the Internet – but we can’t make our users use it in the
way we intended. It’s just like Homer Simpson finding Henry Kissinger’s glasses
in the toilet.*
*I’ll leave it in a sidebar conversation for those who want
to decide if it was Kissinger or Simpson who used the toilet glasses for evil.
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