[ICTs-and-Society] facebook and you

[Andrew Feenberg]

That is a wonderful cartoon but as you point out it is not necessarily the best analogy. How about this one? In Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan the immortal aliens traveling from one end of the universe to the other to deliver greetings to their distant counterparts get stuck in the solar system by a breakdown in one of their rockets. They are in no hurry (since they're immortal) and decide to set human history going on the off chance that one day humans will make an object that corresponds to the broken part. From their standpoint human history is mostly irrelevant. It only means a small metal object made by humans by accident to correspond with their needs. From the human standpoint of course human history has a lot of other complex meanings. Neither is "right," both are. This would be the relation between the data miners (aliens all) and the human users. 

Perhaps we should consider some other models of communication infrastructure as metaphors at least. For example, is the Internet a common carrier like the telephone in which a sharp separation between medium and message content is orchestrated by the technology? That would explain how it could be both experienced as a space of free communication by users and a money making proposition by owners of the infrastructure. Another model might be the sidewalk, a space where there is very little social control and no profitable enterprise, but which is essential to the profit making activities of businesses situated along it. 

I am not sure where this gets us but I feel that the ways in which money is made on the Internet today are quite strange by the standards of business history. This may be why it is hard to agree on a theory of the political economy of the Internet For a more commonplace model consider the French Minitel system which at its height connected 6 million terminals in homes throughout the country. The X.25 protocol was implemented so that every user's name was known, their time spent on each service was tracked, and they were charged by the minute on their phone bill with the revenue split between the phone company and the service provider. Now that's a business model! 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Sean Cubitt" <sean.cubitt at unimelb.edu.au> 
To: "Erik Jentges" <e.jentges at ipmz.uzh.ch>, discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net 
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 9:40:55 AM 
Subject: Re: [ICTs-and-Society] facebook and you 


It is real life that is the zoo – Facebook is the myth that makes us believe we are only zoo animals when we choose to be 




From: Erik Jentges < e.jentges at ipmz.uzh.ch > 
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2012 18:16:43 +0200 
To: < discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net > 
Subject: [ICTs-and-Society] facebook and you 






Thanks to all for the inspiring discussions. 
Sometimes a picture says more than a thousand words (some might know this): 

Pig 1 : Isn’t it great ? We have to pay nothing for the barn. 
Pig 2 : Yeah! and even the food is free. 

Facebook and You 
If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer. You’re the product being sold. 

Beschreibung: Facebook and You Pigs

After thinking a bit about this cartoon and the analogy drawn to facebook, some unexplainable sociological intuition rather gives me a hunch that users are not so much the product being sold (to whom?) but that facebook is some sort of a zoo, where all visitors are at the same time the animals on display. Those invited can create their own cages, curating and narrating their identities. This still leaves open who is the manager of the zoo (Zuckerberg and his corporation?) and if the zoo has a viable long term strategy. That remains to be seen. 

All the best at the conference, greetings, 
Erik 


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Dr. phil. Erik Jentges 
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Andrew Feenberg 
Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology 
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