As Mike Isaac wrote in the Business page of the New
York Times today, Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Facebook will shift from a
public town hall to a platform that emphasizes group activities and relatively
closed circles of friends, rather like the email listservers and forums of the
Web 1.0 world, perhaps. The detailed story is here.
An immediate reaction of mine would be, Google+ tried
to sell even more concentricity than Facebook and it exists no longer for
individuals.
Facebook wants to encourage ephemeral posts, which
disappear in a day or two, like Snapchat.
It’s unclear if the “town hall” mode will continue
work for those who want to use it that way. It sounds sensible that the “pages”
might work that way still, even if the friending timelines don’t.
Right now, I’m able to purchase views of ads for my books
on my page and they are getting respectable traffic. But I cannot post
issue-oriented posts unless I have third party advertisers authenticate me.
Facebook has suggested allowing third party advertisers access to create
content and sell on my page. That is to say, for example, that the September
2018 post on power grid security should be selling Faraday cage bags, To me, that seems pushy and tacky.
But Facebook has a point. People should not resent being asked to
“sell” more aggressively or recruit others, despite the cultural resistance now
to spam and robocalls and political candidates knocking doors, because that is
the way they world needs to work, to have everybody play ball rather than watch
and comment from the distance on a one-way Town Square.
Facebook imagines that people who belong to “groups”
could raise money for causes and non-profits by virtue of their social sway
within the groups. I don’t like to do
things that way, in public. That
undermines the objectivity of speech and emphasizes social position in a group,
where others take gor granted they can count on you.
That’s how the Left wants everything to work –
everybody belongs to groups and faces their own potential vulnerability (or
privilege) from group prejudices and owns up to them, because that kind of
paradigm, however combative, tends to work out better for people in
marginalized groups. There may be some practical merit to this worldview.
My own intention is to join groups only related to
work I am doing on my own. Right now
these might include music composition and performance, finishing and publishing
a novel (finally) and networking on independent film because I do have a
screenplay (based on the three DADT books).
I do most of my giving privately through a process with a bank, I would not normally go along with the
“solidarity” of a group on a social media site and support all their causes
only because of an online social structure. Public giving would normally
require I already have a personal connection to the problem outside of social
media. Likewise, I would not join groups to raise money for political candidates, at least not now.
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