In Mark Zuckerberg's keynote address at the recent f8 conference there was a lot of talk about open community and open lives. When you gloss over the social networking aspect that Facebook touts as priority you cannot help but admire their ability to dredge up through willing participants, more personal information than a police warrant could wrest from most thinking, breathing life forms.
They are doing the impossible, getting us to give our privacy away (usually with full story and pictures) and accessing what marketers have been unable to corner since the web began dominating our way of life. They can answer the age old questions, what do I want, what is important to me and most importantly, when do I want it?
And as annoying as it is, the constant tweaking and new app blow-outs that mess with our unconscious socializing online are a brilliant and necessary way to keep any evolving competition at bay and learn how humans react to technological poking and prodding. It's got to be some the most astounding human experimentation ever conducted.
While taking my first IT class I was amazed to learn how freely our information flows online and that the majority of people outside of CS are ignorant of the fact that a URL is indeed an actual physical address, that cell phones position you globally every moment of our lives. So, personal security is a valid concern, and when Youtube threatens to block my account without a phone number, it starts getting personal.
"Authentic identification" as reiterated as a constant theme at f8 may be the only thing standing between Facebook and the holy grail of advertisers hungry for some idea how to regain market share with an audience that is not longer "captive" in any way shape or form. How many free online accounts do we all have with ficticious ids? And now Google owns them all and they know who you really are, they know what you're doing and when. They know what you're buying, saying even thinking. They know where you bank and what you spend. There is no longer any safety in being an avatar or anonymous entity, you are not "incogneto" you are a pattern!
Some days I buy into the soft sell vision of Facebook's networking and openness and it leaves me with a warm fuzzy feeling all over. Other days I consider basic human behavior and the motivation seems nothing less than global assimilation, taking over the world. Poit!
No comments:
Post a Comment