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FACEBOOK and GOOGLE:

Tools to Help People Harness Their Collective Wisdom and Power,

or

Distractions for the 99%?

By stealing Paul Adams from Google, Facebook not only got one of Silicon Valley’s most revered techies, it also got a “techie” with a social science bent. This should serve the company well if it moves from a technology devoted to instant gratification to one that serves building of relationships devoted to long-term goals. But will in fact the move be made?

A major issue that arises in any evaluation of Facebook for short- or long-term purposes is “Facebook vs. Face-to-Face.”¹ This alternative is fundamental not only to the question of how we deal with loneliness in our personal lives but also to what forms of political involvement might be most effective or meaningful. The common measure for both personal and public lives is distance. We seek both closeness and meaning in relationships. In other words, we strive to seek something purposeful or someone meaningful to connect with. Yet research shows that “the average person on Facebook wants 302 friends.” How is this meaningful unless you are a glad-handing politician looking for votes? Now, by getting onto Facebook, “we can be alone, face a computer and believe we are part of a social network…Or (achieve) a false sense of community…”²

There’s a nice congruence here again between the personal and the political. The advice that follows from it is simple: Turn off the TV, shut down the computer, shut off the cell phone and make the effort to fully communicate, share and engage with one another, person-to-person, face-to-face.³

This, however, does not seem to be the advice of my favorite cartoon character, Dilbert (a.k.a. Scott Adams). He says:

“Imagine being able to go to one website to see the best arguments for and against every issue, with links to support or refute every factual claim…Citizens need that sort of help because we‘re not good at sorting the good arguments from the bad.”⁴

So, Dilbert would make much heavier use of IT/SM than most of us have been doing. But would Facebook be the tool of choice? Maybe; may be not. Up through 2011, Facebook had been more rapidly adapting to and exploiting Web 2.0 than other vendors, but Google was running fast to catch up with Facebook in the “social domain” of Internet technology (IT). Facebook was racing to catch up with Google in their Internet advertising contest. With over 800 million users (and rising), Facebook certainly has the potential to set a standard for enabling social (collective) intelligence as well as individual relationship choices.

Will Facebook’s new model “F8” win out in the IT social media (SM) war? FORTUNE magazine reported that “the boldest move at F8 was not Zuckerberg’s flashy redesign but rather deeper social integration with other services like Netflix and Spotify.” In addition, at the company’s September, 2011, developers event, Face book announced a raft of new features emerging from F8 “that alter the current service radically…The upside is that you can find and listen to your friends‘ play lists on Spotify or on Facebook directly.”⁵

The question that we need to ask here is: What does “radically” mean? Is Facebook’s rollout any more than a competitive reaction to Google’s introduction of “Google +” which, in turn, was a reaction to Facebook’s increasing domination of the social IT space? One cannot answer this question without answering first defining the terms in which it was put. What is “social”? What is the nature of the competitive “space”?

Google + has been built around the definition of “circles” -- “an intuitive way to put people in buckets.” At the same time, Google, by copping technical entrepreneur Andy Rubin and his Android enterprise, has been able to command up to 65% of the mobile phone market and introduce dozens of new applications (“ap’s”) to smartphone users. Thus, even though Facebook dominates the desktop, laptop and notebook portion of the IT/SM market, Google stands to dominate the much faster growing mobile part of it. “Google may…find ways to build many Google + features right into Android phones and tablets…”⁶

Another major part of Google’s growth owes to its acquisition and revamp of YouTube. This has demonstrated two important features of the new IT/SM: (1) the latter’s gaining market share of ad industry revenues while, (2) showing how IT can compete with TV. YouTube has continued to advance greatly on both fronts since it was bought by Google in October, 2006. As for (2):

“Today, it has 800 million unique users a month, and generates more than 3 billion views a day. 48 hours of new video are uploaded to the site every minute….It is the first truly global media platform on earth…But there is one category in which YouTube has made little progress. The average ‘Tuber spends only 15 minutes a day on the site – a paltry showing…compared with the 4 or 5 hours the average American spends in front of the TV each day…If YouTube could get people to stay on the site longer, it could sell more advertising.”⁷

And so back to (1) – the battle to gain market share of advertising revenues – YouTube proceeded to develop YouTV. At first, it bought rights to movies from producers. Then, it started to produce its own. And then it proceeded to create (“commission”) a multitude of new TV channels. In so doing, it joined and amplified a trend already initiated by the ad industry, aided and abetted by IT/SM – increasing fragmentation of the TV viewing and advertising markets. YouTube “received more than a thousand proposals for new…channels.” There’s to be a Sundance channel, a “Life and Times” channel, an urban channel for Latin American young adults (“123 UnoDosTres”), a dance channel, a skateboard channel, comedy channels and up to 94 more.

So, advertisers: Start your engines! Prepare ads finely targeted down to precise “demographics,” personal tastes, past buying behaviors and a host of other characteristics revealed by the terabytes of data collected on individuals via every click on IT/SM sites. On YouTube:

“the niches will get nichier, and the audiences smaller still. But those audiences will be even more engaged, and much more quantifiable…Audience buying is kind of creepy, privacy-wise, and it has alarming demographics-as-class implications. Would the one-percent watch Mercedes ads during the Super Bowl, while the rest of us watched ads from Walmart?”⁸

The implications for YouTube may be positive overall but not unalloyed even for them. As TIME magazine observed: “The danger for YouTube is that by trying to beat TV, it will become TV, and in so doing it will lose its weird, fluky, anarchic (and one might add, in the spirit of Tahir Square, revolutionary) heart.”⁹ The danger is not limited to YouTube. It pertains to the Internet and IT/SM overall. By taking over and growing YouTube so that it becomes more like TV, Google is not competing with Facebook to become the greatest provider of social media; it is competing to see who gets the lion’s share of advertising revenues. Thus, the truly revolutionary potential of “social” in SM is likely to be lost – the potential to enable us to realize and exploit our “collective intelligence” for the benefit of ourselves and our republic.

The most alarming specific implications are twofold: (1) people watching more TV, not less, and thereby becoming less engaged in public life; and (2) people tending to watch different things rather than same or similar things as in the old days of TV broadcasting. The latter means that there’s ever less of shared media experience(s) – less to bind us together as a people or as a community of souls.

Again, the source of these influences is what the two Internet giants are fighting over -- who’s going to win more ad revenues. Advertising dominates the competitive space race on IT/SM as on conventional TV. This fact also limits what’s meant by “social.” For the ad game now centers on how best to achieve micro-marketing -- ads targeted directly to individuals in light of their characteristics and buying habits. The game is the same as on TV; all that’s different is a targeting much finer than broadcast advertising could ever achieve.

Facebook and Google are competing to dominate a “new” IT/SM advertising market based on the reams of data they collect from those who use their services. This is only a “social” market, however, only with respect to imitation, or “keeping up with the Joneses”, aspect of consumer buying behavior -- not with respect to the long-term, social and community relationship building that a process of real political change requires. Individuals are viewed as consumers seeking to maximize their own satisfaction, not as civic-minded citizens or public-spirited souls seeking what is best for a community larger than themselves. From the latter standpoint, the more hopeful social media are blogs and wikis.

Is the critique offered thusfar unfair to Facebook (FB) and others making hay (and billionaires) out of social media? Let’s hope so, but consider the possibility that the viewpoint could become an indictment or a glass ceiling sort of limit to FB’s explosive growth. TIME’s “2010 Man of the Year,” FB’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a guru of “the human psyche.” FB’s 2011 approach is dominant because it “makes cyberspace more like the real world: dull and civilized” -- Definitely not anonymous; however; rather the opposite by way of invasions of privacy.

“Facebook…was recently called out by the Electronic Frontier Foundation…for being the only major Web company absent from discussions about universal “Do Not Track,” a button to allow consumers to opt-out of targeted Web advertising.”¹⁰

Thus, FB is determined to continue to turn individuals’ private information into corporate profit.

But have the newly rich IT/SM corporate moguls and promoters forgotten the tried and true economic “law of diminishing returns”? Perhaps, as long as they are fixated on: (1) the advertising industry, and (2) politics as big money business as usual. As for (1), most of us already sense, even if uneasily and subconsciously, that the viral spread of the ‘Net and ‘Web have led to overloads of information and profusion of choices. The Internet appears to have reached its apogee, offering “the world’s information and entertainment instantly accessible, and we at our screens, poised, enthralled and weightless.” Rob Goodman sees FB, Google and other as Internet “arbiters of taste…the ones who ensure that the Internet can give us something new and enjoyable and forgettable every day…”¹¹ How does this evolving scenario differ from the world of conventional TV, multiplied by cable to 500 channels, now amplified further by ‘Net TV streaming via the ‘Web? Hardly. The gluttony of media consumer choice has gone viral!

As for (2), FB is also determined to play the money-as-power/power-as-money Washington game in full force. On March 20, 2012, the company announced it had hired Greg Maurer, a former aide to House Speaker John Boehner, to join its D.C. office, and Susan Gonzales, a Vice Chairperson of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, to “serve as liason to key members of Congress.”¹² FB also announced that it was adding a set of the nation’s biggest banks to “help underwrite its public offering…and cover a tax bill related to employee stock awards…” The list included Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase – all implicated in the “crony capitalism” of the big banks’ bailout.¹³

Which brings up one of the facts of life: Too much of any good thing can turn bad. What are the returns on information overload and multiplicities of choices if key elements of the information-for-decision-making that we most need are lacking – information to enable us to (1) define and face major problems, and (2) define and make big choices as to how they might be solved? At best, they are diminishing. The “glass ceiling” is in sight for those with eyes to see. The vision of even those in high positions reputed to be visionary, however, may be limited by the “bounded rationality” of their success.¹⁴ Even on a clear day, none of us can see forever if our vision is clouded, especially if we are unable to see who we are relative to the context of our times and its (our) historical moment. Can Mark Zuckerberg and his peers?

Look at Facebook’s IPO prospectus for clues. It’s a fine marketing piece, showing off both stunning figures and great intentions. No one expects an IPO filing to take a moral stand, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg reveals himself to be:

“an idealist of the first order…(for) the singular pursuit of profit is not what’s driving him. “We don’t build services to make money…we make money to build services.”¹⁵

Mr. Zuckerberg’s IPO filing also states that:

“things should be social by design…anyone investing in the company’s stock would be buying into a firm that would sometimes put its long-term mission…ahead of short-term financial considerations.”¹⁶

Yet, good intentions are no substitute for hard thinking in the real social arena – a wicked mix of politics and economics. Will FB investors ask hard questions? What about FB’s over-dependence on advertising, from which it derives 85% of its revenues? What are the implications of the facts that Zuckerberg will retain more than half of the stock ownership and that there will be no independent Board of Directors? What about the “glass ceiling”, the deeper meanings of “social” and the need to move IT/SM to another level?

Even FORTUNE magazine sees a mix of “hypocrisy” and “arrogance” in the IPO –

“HYPOCRISY: A selling point of social media is that it’s a democratizing force…But Facebook’s stock structure, like Google’s, is far from democratic. There’s one class of voting stock for the public peasants, and a higher voting class that ensures control for the elite insiders.”

“ARROGANCE: Zuckerberg’s (founder’s letter) is a classic…I’m in this to make the world “friendlier,” not to make money. Yeah, right…Wall Street exists to help small…investors. And the check is in the mail.”¹⁷

The quandary that Facebook and other “social” IT services vendors face was highlighted earlier by Zuckerberg himself. During an interview, he stated:

“The best way for Facebook to work is to do what people want…building things that have lasting value for people…really emphasizing what people do. This is about making sharing natural, easy and a part of people’s lives.”¹⁸

Trouble is, FB’s CEO begs the key questions, such as: What DO people (really) want? Does what FB offer in the way of “social” sharing help people build anything of “lasting value” other than extensions to their personal profiles or family histories? Or facilitate social learning, or collective intelligence? What other kinds of social sharing would do so? Isn’t there a built-in conflict between building on what people do NOW and what they could or should be doing to build “things that have lasting value” for the lives of their kids and grandkids?

We’ve already had reason to ask: What does “social” mean? If we reflect on the limitations of our FB experiences, then we can begin to answer the question. The experience is scarcely different from that we find featured in TV advertising, YouTube, and celebrity shows. How does the typical user make use of FB -- by exchanging brief vignettes about personal experiences, sharing personal photos or videos, and now, via FB’s “Timeline”, by graduating from personal “Profile” to personal history? This largely reflects the kind of social behavior conventionally promoted by consumer advertising. Can we not come to see ourselves as making a social/ political history of larger scope, as did some of the Tunisian and Egyptian protesters and American occupiers?

As the ongoing, now four year old economic crisis reveals, “social behavior conventionally promoted” makes FB part of the problem. FB’s CEO understands “social” only as IT/SM connectivity that yields data of value to advertisers. Unless FB users are enabled to truly “graduate” to a truly social (political, economic) perspective on their personal Timeline during the (political, economic) crisis that has adversely affected so many, FB is implicated as part the “problem” brought to our attention by OWS.

As novelist Ann Patchett remarked:

“Facebook tries to stand in place of the deeper connections that are essential for us to thrive, but it actually gets in the way of those connections, leaving people feeling all the more isolated.”¹⁹

Any personal/social/political transformation these days needs to enable people to confront and deal with the structural, regional, national, sexual, global and other problems that affect their everyday lives. Neither FB’s technology nor its CEO will inspire or induce FB users to graduate to the next level of “social” – that which would enable them to participate in a new American ®evolution. To focus our attention at this level, we’ll need to do it ourselves. And we can. Any technology is a tool. Much depends on how people use it. FB and other IT/SM technologies can help so long as we don’t let them distract us from whatever the “next level” may be for us. Achieving such focus will be a daily challenge, since “So much trivia whizzes by that it’s simultaneously distracting and tedious.”²⁰

Choices; schmoices. Increasing information overload and choices’ multiplication does little to help us broaden our selfhood beyond largely private circles and consumer levels of satisfaction. We are not enabled to work with others towards a “high energy democracy.” To serve the latter purpose, we’ll have to take matters in our own hands – pick the IT/SM technologies best for our “social”- collaborative projects, use them to define problems, arm ourselves with relevant information and make choices that spell better futures for generations. Fortunately, some protesters have begun to show the way in hundreds of American cities and many foreign countries.

To bring all this to a focus, consider the contrast between TIME’s 2010 “Man of the Year”, Mark Zuckerberg and the magazine’s choice for 2011: -- “The Protester’ -- a horse of a different color. Those who have been on streets and/or in the encampments of protest movements that have effected “regime change” worldwide have relied primarily on Twitter or Blackberry; secondarily on Facebook and YouTube. Why? -- Because of what “social” means in a chaotic era of change. There are needs at two levels:

1. Early stage: To mobilize people to get out en mass and be able to move about to stay ahead of authorities trying to head them off, round them up, arrest and detain them.

2. Later stages: To fully define problems, formulate agendas, strategies and plans, elect leadership, and prepare people to govern.

At both stages, speed is key. But the later stages have more information-rich requirements. The need of “homework” -- knowledge, education, training, etc. -- has been recognized, for example, within both the TP and OWS movements, especially by the latter in the aftermath of having their tent mini-communities destroyed. FB has not yet distinguished itself from other social media in either encouraging or enabling its users to share the more substantial social information that level 2 “protestors“ especially call for if they are aiming to make a real difference for their country over the long term. Will it succeed it doing so and thus breaking through the “glass ceiling” of social media? We’ll see. FB might if the “Zuck” can learn the lessons from Occupy Harvard that he never learned at the College itself. Then he, FB and even Harvard itself might “graduate.”²¹

Otherwise, we can see a future that doesn’t work for “We the People.” For it is already apparent that FB has built a “Data Base of Wealth and Power” that will enable the current generation of the best, brightest and wealthiest to maintain their power and influence at the top of American society. In a keynote speech at a users’ conference, Microstrategy CEO Michael Savior:

“spoke of social media exclusively in terms of Facebook…(saying) Facebook is..attracting all the most influential people…(iPad-toting Facebook users)…Anyone with wealth or power on earth is going to be sucked into the network…(because) wealth, power and money is concentrated in the hands of the first…people to buy these devices.”²²

We are witnessing an emergence of a new generation whose behavior hardly differs from that of the “robber barons” of an earlier era, however differently the hip, well educated newly rich of the IT/SM sector may see themselves. FB, Google, E-Bay and other huge IT/SM corporations have acted as self-interestedly as other businesses dominant in their sectors of industry.

The true power of IT/SM, however, has been demonstrated by people from all walks of life around the world who have used their cell phones to foment real, revolutionary change.²³ So, too, with Facebook, Google and other huge IT/SM vendors. We can use and adapt their offerings to suit our own purposes – those far more “social” because far more political and far more oriented to changes greater than switching the nameplates on White House and congressional seats.

PETER BEARSE, Ph.D., Author of A NEW AMERICAN REVOLUTION: How “We the People” can truly “take back” our government”-- a new e-book available through Amazon from which this article was excerpted on March 27, 2012. Feedback welcome via peterjamesbearse@Yahoo.com.