Copyright © 2013 by Peter Olsthoorn, The Netherlands. All rights reserved. For information: www.thepoweroffacebook.com or peter@olsthoorn.nl

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author.

Publishing partner: Ehio Media, Amsterdam
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ISBN : 978 90 8954 513 8

Quotes from this book

“You love Facebook for exactly the reasons you pretend to hate it … it’s the Big Thing”
(Raina Kelley, chapter 9)

“The question is whether Facebook can become truly social.”
(Chapter 18)

“Whoever tends towards misanthropy must, once landed on Facebook, revise his view of his fellow man very thoroughly.”
(Joost Zwagerman, chapter 14)

“In 10 years from now, people will be sharing about 1,000 times as many things as they do today.”
(Mark Zuckerberg, chapter 17)

“Facebook may become a giant experiment in personal disclosure.”
(David Kirkpatrick, chapter 3)

“If posting on Facebook is as enjoyable as sex, you’re not doing one of them right.”
(Chapter 9)

Facebook appeals to our better self
(Joost Zwagerman, chapter 14)

“Maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous.”
(Zadie Smith, Chapter 15)

“The reward given by a person’s brain when a Facebook posting of theirs is liked and commented on is comparable in pleasure to the response from food and sex.”
(Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell, chapter 11)

“It is truly a dream come true for the CIA.”
(The Onion, chapter 11

“Facebook is the most appealing spying machine ever invented for use by the U.S. secret services.”
(Julian Assange, chapter 11)

“What people sometimes misinterpret is that it is not an upfront gatekeeper approach. It’s a risk-based approach.”
(Facebook’s security chief Joe Sullivan, chapter 11)

“Facebook isn’t addictive—your desire to know what other people are up to is addictive.”
(Raina Kelley, chapter 9)

What’s the greatest database of Jews on the planet? Facebook. What will happen when you want the biggest database of leftists on the planet? Or right wing people?
(Jacob Appelbaum, chapter 13)

“Facebook characterized terrorist Anders Breivik as a do-gooder”
(chapter 12)

“Women are much better Facebook stalkers than men.”
(Woman student, Chapter 11

“Emotional sex is a friendship that escalates into something that feels the same as romantic love.”
(therapist Sheri Meyers, chapter 9)

“I accidentally posted a video of my husband and I having sex.”
(chapter 11)

“The Facebook birthday greeting has become a symbol of all that is irritating about the social network.”
(David Plotz, chapter 11)

“We are not a user, we are used.”
(Douglas Rushkoff, chapter 13)

“I am surprised by the objection that Facebook is careless in the way it deals with privacy. The whole medium is pre-eminently used to blur the boundary between private and public …”
(Richard Sennett, chapter 14)

“Searching for exes on Facebook does not support my rosy colored view of romantic pasts. Pictures on Facebook rather clashed with my sweet memories.”
(chapter 11)

In the beginning we knew nothing about anything. We made tons of mistakes … You don’t get judged by your mistakes, but by what you did right.
(Mark Zuckerberg, chapter 17)

“KLM started an experiment with contact between passengers via Facebook on flights. Fortunately, it works on a voluntary base.”
(chapter 7)

“Everyone throws their whole life into it, with billions of photos, preferences and opinions. I find that extremely dubious, dangerous, dark.”
(Rop Gonggrijp, chapter 17)

“I am the follower who is mad about outpourings and loves voyeurism.”
(Stine Jensen, chapter 16)

“Amongst users of social media, there is instead the tendency to hawk the intimate, to deploy it as capital in the hope of acquiring power and prestige.”
(Hans Schnitzler, chapter 16)

“Social media increases our security, and the vitality of our democracy.”
(Yme Bosma, chapter 16)

“We will share our bodies with doctors and our cars with garages via Facebook
(chapter 19)

“Just 10 percent rated the general population as having excellent manners using mobile internet. Amazingly, 50 percent said that their own etiquette was excellent.”
(Chapter 9)

“Paedophilia, necrophilia, beheadings, suicides … I left because I value my mental sanity.”
(Facebook moderator, chapter 1)

“Pictures of drug use are not permitted. Marijuana is an exception … Animal abuse can also be published, as long as it is intended as an illustration to demonstrate one’s aversion.”
(Chapter 1)

Introduction

The reigning champion of the internet

A thousand youngsters in Silicon Valley are enthusiastically tapping software code while all over the world, almost a billion people are radically adapting their social behavior. Amazement at this is the theme of this book. The fundamental journalistic question is: what’s going on here, how, and why?

Facebook is fabulous! Together with Google Search it’s the most powerful application that has ever been built for an internet web browser. Yet the day after tomorrow, Facebook might prove to be a total disaster. Or the first, virtual, global power. Right now, everything hangs in the balance.

Facebook is assuming many of the tasks that, until recently, we used to perform on the open internet. These include almost all new and old forms of communication, such as public statements and comments, e-mail, chat, and groups, complemented by numerous useful apps and games. By creating a media platform now suited to television broadcasts, video, radio, magazine and newspapers, Facebook has launched an attack on the existing media and telecommunication corporations, although the effects of this have not yet been absorbed. Increasingly too, we find ourselves playing in the Facebook enclosure rather than in the streets or in the park.

Google, Apple, and Amazon have been relegated to battling for second place, whilst Microsoft is doing its very best to team up with Facebook, after first having partnered with Nokia, and its attempt to outrun yet another predicted decline. This means that the gold medal has been awarded to Facebook. It scores with its main core, a social network that connects people and because of that, it is able to integrate all of the aforementioned technical features.

For me, Facebook also denotes a break in the recent history of the commercial use of the internet, which I have followed as a journalist since 1995. Most forms of innovation were initiated by technology. Facebook too, can pride itself on its technological superiority, yet it has paid more attention to the personal needs of the public.

Our craving for attention, affection, curiosity and the prospect of sex has been fulfilled and programmed by Facebook in a phenomenal way. Facebook knows more about our desires and urges than any other medium on the planet.

Provided he can hang on a little longer, Zuckerberg will become the Bill Gates of the first half of the 21st century. Bill Gates was a somewhat appealing character and came across in a sympathetic way when I first met him almost twenty years ago at a breakfast press session. He charmed with his nervousness and even then was unsuccessful in getting his hair into decent shape.

Zuckerberg is just as cunning as Gates in his command of software as a means of conquering the world. Is he any more or less awkward, pig-headed or realistic than the young Bill? I can follow, understand and appreciate Zuck too, which means I can also criticize him. How did Mark feel when he tapped the code for Facebook in that famous summer of 2004, when he dared to take the defining step from the sheltered environment of Harvard to Silicon Valley? He was as hard as nails on himself, relentless and focused, using the keyboard as a machine gun. But did he finally build a genuine ‘social’ medium? I don’t think so. Facebook could still become a marvelous social network.

During the research of this book, I was enthralled by Facebook for more than a two years, instead of the three months I had originally planned. Although the Facebook set-up is far more consistent than that of Google, I found that it was much harder to fathom than my previous case study. Also, I had followed Google right from the very beginning, whereas Facebook had preoccupied me far less.

Despite all of my attention, coaxing and generosity, the Facebook company point-blank refused to speak to me whilst I was writing this book. As much as Mark Zuckerberg pretends to be transparent, the truth is that he has rigged an entire network around him, which has the intention of disguising Facebook’s true nature.

There are two important American books written about Facebook so far. One offers a clear, positive and the other a negative take on the activities and successes of Zuckerberg and his company. Ben Mezrich wrote a fascinating narrative The Accidental Billionaires. Although the scope was limited, this book provided the perfect screenplay for the great movie The Social Network. With The Facebook Effect, David Kirkpatrick wrote a magnificent inside story documenting the rise of Facebook, managing even to get Facebook to cooperate, which Mezrich had no such luck in doing. Negativity surrounded Mezrich’s engagement, whereas Kirkpatrick’s attitude was mostly positive in surveying the zeitgeist. In my own work here, the fact that Facebook refuses to talk to me is not any reason to denounce the company, but nor can it be a hindrance to doing so; arguably it enables me to deal with complex positive and negative aspects of the phenomenon quite freely.

Facebook is just as fascinating and fantastic as it is dubious and focused on exploitation. It is a key force of the internet, both literally and figuratively speaking. Facebook is a combination of powerful ideas, designed and programmed in a great way. It is perfect for connecting the staggering number of one billion people with each other.

Understanding the new standard

“It’s complicated.” I consider this to be the funniest profile setting Mark Zuckerberg ever invented for the one billion inhabitants of his empire. This is one of the options you can choose from to represent your relationship status to other users. But it is not only our relationships; our lives as a whole are becoming rather more complicated.

The internet has made many operations in our lives easier, but not our lives as a whole. Facebook is taking over the internet by bringing many online functions formerly operative on the open web inside of its own borders. This makes things easier, but you’re only allowed to enter using the passport Facebook essentially issue you.

This is why Facebook is so attractive: the internet, and especially Facebook, is lowering thresholds for our actions, reactions and interactions.

Of course, the internet has always been a social network, and it is arguable that our lives were already intensely ‘social’ last century, when there was no Facebook nor any other so-called ‘social media’. What we are seeing now is just a social technology and culture of a different kind.

We pretend to understand what’s happening. But do we? I want to suggest that maybe we do not fully realize the full extent of what is happening here, even those of us publishing dozens of status updates a day and fully integrating Facebook with our lives.

My starting point for this book is the simple journalistic question: What is happening? The answer is … it’s complicated. You may choose what to believe what you like from the incredible selection of facts and quotes I have gathered here, and construct your own picture. I will also give my own commentary along the way.

Each Facebook experience opens up from your News Feed, which is a selection of your Friends’ postings, your subscriptions to company web pages, and your groups. This is increasingly how we experience the news in the year 2013, since roughly a billion people lapping the day’s data up in this way.

Should we take this change for granted? If it were down to you, would you want to know what all your friends and acquaintances were doing and thinking? And then view this all at once, in one, big overview? How was it in the past? Why do we choose this new way of communicating? Why does it give us so much pleasure?

Another way of asking this question is to ponder: Why is Facebook so exceptionally good at satisfying the needs we never had, that is, until a few years ago? The first time I tried to answer this question was with a 140-character tweet reply. Subsequently, I tried to write a Facebook status update. When this didn’t work, I thought possibly it needed a book on the topic, and that would be enough - a Facebook book without the distracting pictures and cat pictures asking for your surrender.

In great numbers, we surrender ourselves to IT and to Mark Zuckerberg’s brilliant vision of modern communication. His genius program is our daily vision. But is Mark Facebook? No, you are Facebook. You read it, look at it, fill it, dream of it, long for it, and pay for it.

The turnover Facebook currently achieves as a result of your activity is about $5 a year, but you were worth more than twenty times as much on the stock market. You aren’t just a participant; no, you are also the actual product. You, and your friendships, went public for about $115 each (106 billion dollar, 900 million participants). That’s what you were worth to the new shareholders; those are the profits that they have projected.

Did you buy shares yourself? If you did, you essentially (re)purchased your own value. First, you poured out your soul and happiness to Facebook, which contributes to the company’s advertising profits. Then you were offered the chance to pay for this yourself, and potentially cash in on others’ increasing personal investments in and uptake of the platform. Would those 115 dollars have been better spent on a dinner with your best Facebook friend? Yes, because at least for now, the dinner is really on you.

Knowing me, knowing you

If at 8:30am you come across your friend Jenny in your News Feed, will you have more of an appetite for Kellogg’s? At 10 o’clock you think about drinking a Nescafe Instant Espresso from home when a picture of your most handsome friend Jim shows up in your News Feed, but if Robert demands your attention, you might meet him where he has registered his location, and look for a Starbucks to have a coffee. If at half past five Carol appears at the top of your feed, you might go out to buy Dove cream, but Tim in your News Feed reminds you to check if Durex are still in stock.

It’s hard to assume of course, but the daily marketing possibilities of Facebook, based on complex algorithms, are endless. Your communication with Friends provides a steady stream of information for the marketing identity machine Facebook.

This machine behind the screen constantly evaluates your expressions and behavior en masse using numerous psychological, sociological, anthropological, and who knows what other variables from different sciences.

There is only one company that owns all this information about your preferences in relation to your friends combined with your real names and pictures; furthermore, this information is held alongside the equivalent information and preferences of another billion people. Just think, one billion people with a Facebook passport. Only China and India have more identities registered in one governed space.

Here arises the first virtual empire, unless Facebook keeps on making costly mistakes. An example of such a mistake was the IPO. Greed is not social. On February 1, 2012, Facebook announced its IPO filing for 5 billion dollars.

But on May 16, 2012, an incredible 16 billion dollars worth of Facebook shares were announced to the public; the company kept 7 billion for itself and 9 billion for investors. A 2 billion dollar over-allotment was not even exercised. The threefold amount was simply the result of greed, as was the share price: 38 dollars on May 16, dropping down to low of $17.55 in September, 2012.

Suddenly, Facebook’s ‘social’ reach was all about money for the lawyers and bankers, taking the board into a deadlock on behalf of profit-hungry investors. Some think we should be glad that Facebook seems to be fostering its own potential collapse by entering into this spiral of satisfying greedy shareholders, by satisfying dedicated marketers, exploiting users.

Virtues or sins?

Let’s consider the notion of virtues with regard to Facebook, particularly those seven from the Christian religion: faith, hope, love, prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.

All sorts of faith can be found in abundance on Facebook. You can convert to goodness-knows-what, but that’s not what I mean. Is ‘faith’ a true virtue on Facebook? In other words, do all opinions and messages stem from a true belief? It is impossible to persist with claims that this is the case.

As for temperance, this virtue is not even on the radar. Very few people manage to hold back with Facebook. The desire for more (of everything) goes on and on.

On the other hand, prudence is present. Although people don’t pay much thought to restricting themselves in their comments, they are very conscious of the influence their updates can have on the outside world. “What will they think of this?” is a thought that constantly enters our minds. Our reputations are what Facebook has been established for.

All the time we use it, we keep hoping that our lives will become better because of our constant Facebooking. If you don’t agree with me on this, why would you partake in it otherwise?

We find justice sometimes in the bartering experience. You like my picture; I like yours. Of course, we all engage in this exchange of good feeling, but it is also taking place in an implicit hierarchy; Facebook’s hierarchy amounts from the fact that it is impossible to distribute the love equally between 230 Facebook friends.

‘Fortitude’ comes last of all. Where can this virtue be found? Do you take courage from Facebook? Or is it all just a load of feeble rubbish? Does cowardice reign? Facebookers are safely, snugly hidden behind their computers; or they wield a phone or tablet computer while sharing their lives. Courage stops at the keyboard. On the other hand, Facebook has liberated us from the anonymous comments and the cowardly behavior that had become a virtual law of its own in this world.

What about the sins: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust. It may prove just as fascinating to measure Facebook by these negative standards.

From the seven (deadly) sins, vanity (or pride) is the most forceful motive on Facebook. In answer to the question of “Why, for heaven’s sake?” do people use Facebook, pride scores the most points. My goodness, what an astonishing amount of energy can be generated by mere pride. Billions of messages, each and every day, from nearly 1 billion participants.

And what about the other six sins? Don’t they also bother us in our desire for Facebook? Well, of course they do, but it makes a difference whether you are a 15-year old boy or girl, a 32-year old woman, or a grandfather of 68.

On average, the atmosphere on Facebook is friendly. How else could it be, with so many Friends meeting each other? You can appreciate something (Like), but you won’t find a ‘Dislike’ button. Time and again, the outside world will introduce this kind of button, but Facebook still manages to prevent widespread use of it. Last year the Dislike button proved to be a virus in disguise. That served you negative thinkers right for clicking on it, didn’t it?

What about sloth? Being active for around five hours a week can’t be called laziness. Could it be physical indolence or idleness? Meeting your friends online doesn’t entail the disadvantages of meeting them in person. Posting messages on Facebook distracts you from activities that require more effort, and perhaps also from more meaningful contact with friends, family, and acquaintances. Indolence, would this be the main issue?

But it might also be greed or avarice. Of course, using Facebook is completely free of charge. Further on in this book, you will read how you actually pay for Facebook, whilst discovering the way in which you add value to the future of the platform and contribute to the Facebook fortune by doing this. We think: hey, it’s free, let’s do it! Still today, much of the world assumes that all of the lovely Facebook features are presented to users absolutely free of charge.

Gluttony? There is no doubt that this sin plays a big role on Facebook. We can’t get enough of it. The hunger for knowledge is insatiable. Except, I truly wish it were knowledge. No, it is more a desire for trivialities, curiosity, the pleasure of being nosy. What is she doing now? What will she be doing? What does he look like? What’s going on in her head? Facebook is a kind of ‘All you can eat’ feast, though you will never be completely stuffed, nor have to fear obesity.

There is definitely envy, which leads to the most pointless waste of energy of all. Envy reigns supreme on Facebook. The medium is rumored to be ‘social’, but in fact, we are deeply annoyed at all these smart-asses, know-it-alls, eternally happy, astute and, most of all, beautiful Friends of ours. They are killing us. It’s potentially a kind of programmed-in inferiority complex, wouldn’t you say? If you didn’t already have one, Facebook will make sure you do.

And finally, lust, the sin against which all others pale on wonderful Facebook. What a gorgeous chick, what a cute guy, let me take another peek, just for a minute, please, just one last time. In the past, the computers in Zuckerberg’s bedroom and those of his friends revolved around girls. He invented a picture contest, a bit like Idols, to determine the fittest girl at Harvard University. This was rather too provocative, so he thought of a milder method, which was the Harvard College Yearbook.

The rest is history, but lust has gone on to become the driving force on Facebook. It is not always about lewdness. You will find your grandchildren there, and lots of other sources of inspiration that have nothing to do with sexual arousal, but that won’t liberate you from the platform’s carnal dealings. Partly the platform is very much about delayed sex, or more abstractly, desire.

Why you should read this book

With this book, I wanted to contribute a very practical and comprehensive take on the Facebook phenomenon. I am not an annoying inaccessible know-it-all with a PhD in programming or political theory. I’m also not dystopian or a fear monger.

I’m not going to tell you that Facebook is an inferior medium, a waste of time, a foolish addiction, and that you should stop using it and go and get lost again in books. At the other extreme, Facebook has often sparkled for many as a new utopia, a platform and medium that will help to overthrow regimes, allow economies to grow and propel culture upwards globally. I do not subscribe to that view either.

As early as 1994, I was working through and disputing the same kind of polarized hype and opinion about the internet in general. Having prior spent a decade covering changes to the regimes in Central Europe at first hand as a journalist, this no doubt helped me to hang on to a critical perspective about any technology or idea purported to be changing the world for the better.

I still believe the internet to be the most innovative and exciting medium that there is; its rich resources are especially great for this tech historian. But I don’t believe that we should be so totally invested in everything that might be, or even is, splendid about it. I write about technology and I often admire its inventors - nerds and hackers. They are met with misunderstanding because their personality and languages differ from ordinary socially compliant folk, a fact that I reflect on in this book too.

Technology is often a good, presenting new ways of living, but our usage of it leaves a lot to be desired. Pointing to criticism does not make you (or me) a neo-luddite. At the same time, I will show here that there are a great many reasons that ordinary people do and should have cause for excitement with Facebook’s digital innovation, and that such enthusiasm is not just the domain of uncritical or blind utopianists.

Journey of discovery through Facebookia

The aim of this book is to give a journalistic overview of Facebook that is as broad and detailed as possible, coming from the understanding that the social network is very much alive and well, has incredible influence upon our daily lives. I will often present my own opinions, but you might draw different conclusions and your own opinions will always holds the greater weight I hope.

Both the confirmed fans and the biggest detractors of Facebook are exposed to many facts, arguments and analysis addressing the site. They often receive and share this information through Facebook itself, and stand their ground their through groups, campaigns and more.

You are not in for such an easy orientation of ‘for or against’ here. The mountain of facts inside this book gives it more the character of a living encyclopedia, but its division into small paragraphs and clear sections makes it simple to scan, skip over and through, whatever material is most relevant to you.

Presently as I write (summer 2012), Facebook is synonymous with an unsuccessful stock-market flotation. However, I will leave this disastrous surfeit of greed for the last section of the book. For the most part, I am principally interested in describing the essence of Facebook’s power. At its core, this power is captured in the online services behind the passport control, the tensions with privacy and then the marketers’ delight that was the result of these.

Following on from this, I will describe the social consequences in a broad spectrum, taking in to account the considerations of philosophers, writers and technical experts, so as to arrive via a section dedicated to economics, at the conclusion: how can Facebook truly, socially become ‘our friend’?

You might ask, “Why should I want to read all this stuff, such piles and piles of incompatible research and arguments?” This is a legitimate question, and I have hopefully a legitimate answer: I want to offer you food for thought, some anecdotes (humorous sometimes) and more options for developing your own perspective.

There’s an awful lot of misinformation growing in and around this platform’s struggle for your attention. While many successful American non-fiction books for the general reader give you a newly researched but single vision of what the world looks like, this book will not tell you once and for all what to think about Facebook - for example, whether it is completely flawed or totally OK to use.

I am not going to tell you that you should act in accordance with certain findings and advice so that you can contribute to change or become a more knowledgeable, happy, functional or successful person.

I am not interested in alluring you with the promise that you can possess the superior truth about Facebook by aligning yourself with my words (or deciding not to).

I have instead written the book to present information that feeds your own curiosity and nuanced judgment. Reality is complicated, and so is the virtual mirror of it in Facebook.

This is very much in spite of that fact that Facebook promises you ‘full control.’ Given that you won’t ever fully control your real life, you’ll never be the boss of your virtual life either. But you will no doubt become a little bit less naive using all those so-called free services after reading this stuff.

And, finally, Facebook don’t take the power over us, we freely build Facebook’s power. The question then is how to limit it, or rather, how Facebook is gonna share its power with us.

About language and causation

The age-old ‘correlation or causation’ question would in many cases here be left very much unanswered in this book. Life is far more complicated than a new online service changing the lives of a billion people in the same way and forever. Because I am interested in history I’m cautious to make an historical judgment about Facebook, although I consider the internet and it’s so-called “social” use as a remarkable change.

Even many facts involved are less secure than are being presented in the fast moving news mills of the internet. Even a simple fact like the amount of users Facebook has was hard to total and track consistently, and not only because it is changing so fast over the two years of writing. Facebook itself had difficulties with its many fake and double accounts, and in accounting for mobile use. Moreover, Facebook is counting daily use in minutes/hours that an account is open, while participants are not really active during that whole time.

Facebook has also changed our vocabulary, especially destabilizing use of the word and connotations of “friend.” This is a technical note that needs to be mentioned in the introduction, but of course it also has deeper meaning.

In this book, I’ve used the capitalized word Friend when it refers to an official coded Facebook relationship (of connected profiles), which we know can take place regardless of whether the relationships is genuine and happening also in real-life, or totally virtual and fantastical. This is the same for beFriend, Friending, etc.

Where I have written “Facebook friend” or “friend on Facebook” I decided to keep lower case. Friend is in lower case when the use of the word refers to “online friends” or friendships that involve platforms or sites other than Facebook and does not necessarily include the latter.

More predictably, the lower case “friend” is used to connote either real world or genuinely felt friendship, incorporating the more timeless idea/ls of the friendship relation.

I have, however, also decided to use the lower case when there could be a slippage in meaning between friend/Friend in quotes by experts, my own commentary, and especially in quotes from users. I have used the lower case also in cases where the idea of friendship, is also specifically being discussed with regard to Facebook itself.

You will see that I have chosen to leave most user anecdotes in lower case, because there is frequent, constant slippage between the idea and the coded reality in their speech. Some users notably draw on the concept of Friend and friend simultaneously.

Issues with differentiating between fan and Fan have been dealt with similarly. I have also capitalized News Feed, Pages and other terms that apply to specific, coded platform elements, popularized into daily use.

A much larger, albeit inevitable problem while writing this book, especially during the editing phase, was the problem of continuous ongoing changes to Facebook’s technology and policy updates – I gave myself the daily task of persisting with updating the book the whole time I was writing it.

But of course this is only possible up until a certain point. In some sections then, by the time you read this, what is documented might have become recent history already. This doesn’t have too much influence upon the larger contribution the book makes to public knowledge of Facebook’s operations, nor to the positions that I am taking on some of the key issues.

Chapter overview

This book is divided into clear sections, many of which will be immediately of interest, some of which you may be belatedly grateful to be aware of. It is designed so that you can easily skip chapters as sub-sections of chapters as you please. Just scan the headings to rush through the pages. The breakdown of the Sections is as follows:

I The Essential Pleasure and Power

The nature of the Facebook experience, its power and the strategy behind it are at the center of chapters 1, 2 and 3.

II The Battle for Privacy

All aspects of Facebook’s privacy and the battle over it fill the rather short chapters 4, 5 and 6.

III Marketing based on Facebook data

Chapters 7 and 8 analyze privacy and data collection before moving in to address the ‘social exploitation’ of users by companies thanks to Facebook.

IV Living with/in Facebook?

How Facebook influences our lives by re-coding death, programming for addiction, and interrupting traditional boundaries at work is the subject of chapters 9 to 12.

IV Facebook, Crime and Revolution

The links between Facebook and the surveillance society, crime (prevention) and terrorism, revolutions and election campaigns are subjects of the chapters 13, 14 and 15.

VI Survey of the Public Debates

The voices of philosophers, sociologists, and opinion leaders are introduced in chapter 15, but return more strongly in chapters 16 and 17. A dialogue is staged so that you can survey and agree or disagree with authors and technical experts, concerning the good and bad consequences of online social networks.

VII Social Greed and Facebook Economics

Chapters 18 and 19 finally attend to Facebook’s massively competitive industry position, and the economic aspects of Facebook. It includes analysis of the unsuccessful IPO flotation, and reflection on Mark Zuckerberg’s entrepreneurial motives and tendencies.

VIII Possible Futures

In the final chapter, consideration is given to the question of what Facebook might improve or change to become a social network in the true sense of the word.

Acknowledgments

This is the place to say thank you. I would like to thank the many editors and translators of the Dutch and English versions of this book, especially to Jeanine van Ooijen, who dealt with the first Dutch version of the text, and was as loving an editor as she was strict on vanities.

Thanks also to Sophie Reece-Trapp, the exceptionally disciplined and creative translator, and a top translator/editor with great final influence who preferred anonymity. Without them, this book would not have seen the light of day.

This book would also not have been possible without 5-year old Lauren, who illustrates on a daily basis that work is a matter of secondary importance. For many months she would rush to the printer at each print with the encouraging words: “A few more pages of your book are ready, Daddy, well done!”

Gerrit Komrij and Arjen van Veelen permitted the borrowing of many splendid observations about Facebook. Thanks also go to my friend René, a nerd who has been working on a competitor to Google for eight years – but never wants to be found on the internet himself – for his remark three years ago: “Facebook is busy taking over the internet.”

Karin Spaink, the most intelligent internet thinker that I know, and marketers Antoinette Hoes and Steven Jongeneel helped me put many aspects of this book into perspective.

Finally, I give my appreciation to true friends, for whom naming names would be haughty, and who helped me through the tough times of such an egocentric task of writing a book about Facebook. Thank you.