The Power of Facebook

Take It or Leave It

Peter Olsthoorn

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
Design by Evelien Veenstra

ISBN : 978 90 8954 519 0

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? And the question for you: Facebook, now I know it better, take it or leave it

Facebook is fabulous! Together with Google Search it’s the most powerful application that has ever been built for an internet web browser. 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. 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, magazines 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.

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.

I can follow, understand and appreciate Mark Zuckerberg, which means I can also criticize him. But did he finally build a genuine ‘social’ medium? I don’t think so. Facebook could still become a marvelous social network.

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.

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.

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. That’s what you were worth to the new shareholders; those are the profits that they have projected.

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 flotation on the stock exchange (IPO). Greed is not social.

After the IPO, 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.

Why you should read this book

With this book, I wanted to contribute a very practical and comprehensive take on the Facebook phenomenon. The aim of this book is to give a journalistic overview, both to the confirmed fans and the biggest detractors of Facebook.

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 going to share its power with us.

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, Sophie Reece-Trapp and a top translator/editor with great final influence who preferred anonymity. Without them, this book would not have seen the light of day. Partners in marketing and publishing were Ehio Media and Achtung!, both located in Amsterdam