My social media sabbatical has ended, and with it comes the challenge of reintegrating the various services back into my life, without letting them overwhelm me. i can see this being an ongoing process of deciding what I use, when, and where, and setting limits. However, I know one service is going to get the most of my effort in determining its role in my life—Facebook. I tried giving up Facebook once before only to end up sucked back in. Why? It’s simple: Facebook is where all my friends are. If I want to keep in touch with them, in any way, I’ll have to be on Facebook.
I just don’t have to do it on Facebook’s terms.
It’s something I’d been thinking about over the past few weeks. I started by installing the DoNotTrackMe extension for Safari. This way, I don’t have to worry about Facebook building a shadow profile on me. After reactivating my account, I started removing identifying personal information. I plan to strip it down to just my name, and my relationship. They don’t need to know anything else. I don’t know how effective it will be, but I hope that by explicitly removing information from my profile, it’s less information Facebook will have to track me. I’m also using AdBlock to hide what whatever advertising Facebook would show me anyway. [1] A friend suggested I go all out with a pseudonym as well, but that won’t stop the beast from tracking me.
Then, as I prepared to return to the Facebook world, in whatever form, I listened to Episode #2 of Analog(ue) on Relay.fm. In it, Myke Hurley described how he used Facebook: for Messenger, and Events… and not much else. He does not feed the beast. Myke’s Facebook strategy went well with Elan Morgan’s piece about giving up the “Like.” Facebook’s algorithm feeds on the data we give it, from status updates, to comments, to—yes—likes. I may comment to let my friends know I exist, but posting is verboten, let alone hitting the “Like” button.
Not hitting “Like” should help reduce the amount of nonsense in my stream, meaning I should get more relevant information from and about the people I care about, and not just clickbait. Combine that with Social Fixer to hide the excess Facebook chaff, and clear my news feed of all the stuff I’ve read (or just don’t care about), I’m able to have a much more relaxed experience. And, of course, I’m not using it at all on my phone. I don’t need the distraction while I’m out. Except for Messenger—i’m one of the rare people for whom decoupling the Messenger app makes life better. It keeps me away from the uncontrolled stream of nonsense.
I’m sure Facebook is getting enough data on me, even with the limitations I’ve imposed. Not to mention the years of data I’ve given it that it will not give up easily. But, if I can be in control, even just a little bit, of how much Facebook infiltrates my online life, it’ll make me feel better about it. Recognizing that Facebook is a communication tool, and not a way of life, goes a long way to gaining control. I plan to use it only as such from here on out. If I do not feed the beast, it loses strength.
I am going to whitelist the decent ads like Fusion and The Deck, though. What I don’t want is targeted, spy based ads. ↩
Over at Wired, Kevin Kelly is suggesting that we deal with surveillance, public and private alike, by giving in. And by spying back.
[O]ur central choice now is whether this surveillance is a secret, one-way panopticon — or a mutual, transparent kind of “coveillance†that involves watching the watchers. The first option is hell, the second redeemable.
Oh, if it were only that easy. And even if it was, it still wouldn't be worth doing.
It's not that easy because there's an imbalance of power between the spies, be they Facebook or the NSA, and us, the normal users. It's to the benefit of the spies that we not see the secret sauce that powers what they do. It's why social media companies bury the lead on what they do with and to our data in pages upon pages of legalese, designed to obfuscate their intentions. When was the last time you read Facebook's Terms of Service Agreement? With the NSA, you have the additional problem of trust. Namely, the government will trust them, before it trusts you. The NSA would happily operate in secret, transparency being a threat to national security.
Further complicating the mess is that the tools of surveillance are owned by the companies (and governments) that make it their business to spy on us. They won't open those tools up without a fight, unless you're an advertiser with a lot of money to spend. If there's one thing Facebook, Google, and the NSA have in common, it's not just that they want us to keep our mitts out of the gear they use to spy on us, but they have the same reason for doing so: to prevent competition.
When your doctor says “take off your clothes,” it makes no sense for you to say, “You first, doc.” The two of you are not engaging in an interaction of equals.
It's perhaps true that, should we be able to overcome the Himalayan institutional obstacles preventing “coveillence” we would be a society of equals. That still doesn't mean it's a society we would want to live in. A good parallel is the Cold War, and the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction from matched stockpiles of nuclear missiles. Neither side dared make the first move, knowing that retaliation would be swift and deadly.
There are so many reasons to keep a secret. It's easy when you're a wealthy, white, heterosexual male to be willing to expose yourself. Not everyone has that luxury. I think back to Mike Monteiro's “How Designers Destroyed the World” talk, and the way Facebook's design exposed a woman's sexuality to her parents, destroying her relationship with them. It was a relationship predicated on hiding an aspect of her self that she knew her parents would react against. Maybe she planned to come out, in time, but it was not Facebook's job to reveal it for her before she was ready.
And we all have skeletons in our closets that we don't want to share. Because we don't know how people will react, and because we do. Part of where Kevin Kelly's argument falls apart—moreso—is when he tries to bring anthropology into it.
“For eons humans have lived in tribes and clans where every act was open and visible and there were no secrets. We evolved with constant co-monitoring. Contrary to our modern suspicions, there wouldn’t be a backlash against a circular world where we constantly spy on each other because we lived like this for a million years…”
I call bullshit.
And that call of bullshit is backed up by the narcissism of small differences. We see it everywhere, from the snark between Apple and Android fanboys, to the conflict in Ferguson, Missouri, to the Sunni/Shiite divide in Iraq. In small, tightly knit groups, deviance from the norm is a threat to group cohesion. In large groups, like cities, we get privacy, and the ability to fork new groups with our own norms and mores. The Internet is the biggest city, and every group on it behaves differently.
And those groups can be just as insular and unempathetic as the early tribes Kevin Kelly so romanticizes. When Kelly says “We’ve broadened our circle of empathy, from clan to race, race to species, and soon beyond that,” he's being naïve at best, disingenuous at worst. There's enough evidence to show that the Internet is making us less empathetic to people who aren't like us. At the very least, it's just given us new avenues to express that lack of empathy.
The imbalance of power that creates the surveillance state comes the dichotomy of the public and private self that is a defining characteristic of humanity. We are not open, or closed. There are a million subtle positions between sharing everything and sharing nothing. We share more of ourselves with our spouses than our friends, more with our friends than our co-workers, more with co-workers than our barista. Some things we keep to ourselves alone.
100% transparent or 100% opaque is a new development, a function pulled as much from the binary nature of computers as it does from technology teams who either don't care, or are paid not to care, about the degrees between those extremes. Instead of bending ourselves to the on or off, open or closed nature of our technology, we should bend the technology to be more like us.
There's an air of defeatism, too, in Kelly's argument. We are too far along, it says, on the road to the panopticon. Let's just go all the way, and make sure we have cameras to turn back on our observers. I reject the premise. None of this is written in stone. We made the technologies, we made the governments and corporations that spy on us. We can remake them as well. We are not, we are never, too late.
Though I've been away from social media, more or less, it's hard to stop thinking in a social sharing mindset. I still think in remarks of 140 characters or less. When I see something interesting, the thought is to snap a picture and post to Instagram. Instead, I snap a picture and add it to my journal in Day One at the end of the day. I can't be the only one.
There's enough worry about passive social media consumers, wallowing in what Michael Lopp described as “other people's moments.” He's not wrong, either. However, without people sharing their own moments, those passive consumers of moments would find something else. What is it that motivates us to share so many of our moments for strangers?
Part of it is our nature as social animals. That can't be denied. Something about access to an audience, however, makes so many of us willing to take photos of our dinners, take six second videos at concerts, or just post whatever comes to our mind at any moment. To quote my friend Jonathan Pfeffer, “The Internet is a void.” If so, something must fill it.
What does being always on for our audience, however large or small, do to us? How does it change our relationship to the world, and to each other? If all of our moments are grist for the mill of social media, if we live our lives constantly sharing our experiences—or at least the subset of those we think will be best received—it can distort the very idea of what our lives mean. There's no room for a rich, internal life in a world where even minor matters are shared.
That's not to say that the internal life is gone forever. We're all still adapting to the potential to be always on. The possibility exists that we will push back, as a culture, against the stress of being always on. We'll find the balance. However, it's to the benefit of Facebook, Twitter, et al, that we feed the beast with our thoughts, photos, and links. It's to their benefit that we Like, Favorite, Share, and Retweet, so they know more about us and what we like. They won't give up without a fight.
“Home screens come in many flavors. We have semi-customizable experiences from cable TV providers, and the more modern over-the-top streaming content boxes like Roku. The problem with both is the focus on the “app†rather than on the content. When I land on my Apple TV home screen, it’s mostly a grid of apps — there are precious few clues as to what I should actually watch. The interface certainly lacks any notion of what I might want to consume based on previous patterns.”
The idea of a content focused home screen isn’t new with Joe. Amazon’s Kindle Fire devices provide a carousel of recent media and apps, though they don’t make suggestions as to what you might want to look at today. It’s an idea that makes sense on a dedicated content consumption device like a TV, or set-top box. Even on a more general device, be it smartphone, tablet, or computer, it should be easier than it is to view content somewhere else. “If I get a notification that a new piece of content is available and it happens to be a video, it should be easy to push that to my TV without launching the app and finding the funny-looking icon to cast it to my TV. If the TV is already on, shouldn’t it just show up as an option to watch?” I don’t own a TV, but it would be super useful to shoot a link from my iPhone or iPad to my MacBook, connected to a big display, if I want to watch some video content. Handoff in Yosemite and iOS 8 doesn’t do this, at least not yet.
Where it falls down is the idea that “[t]he home screen of the future needs to lead with content…” as a generalization. As I said earlier, this makes perfect sense for a content-consumption device. However, the idea of this kind of interface on a phone gives me the willies. I don’t need my phone buzzing me to check out this cool video a Twitter friend posted, or throwing suggestions out willy-nilly. Even on my iPad, I’d rather it give me the option to consume, or to create. The grid of icons with strange names does make it harder to find what we want or need, but it’s the best balance for devices that serve for consumption and creation tools. For now.
What would be more useful, on a smartphone in particular, is a home screen that adapts to a user based on context. If I’m at home, show me the apps and widgets that are about the things I do at home. For many people, that’s probably about media consumption, so that would be about stuff to control music, video, books, etc. Out and about, the home screen can focus on those apps and services we use while on the go: local search, transit directions, ways to keep in touch with friends. At the office, it’s all productivity and communication.
The technology is there to make a lot of this contextual stuff happen, and it’s less fuzzy than recommendation algorithms. Content consumption is a big part of what we use our gear for, but far from the only thing. Our most personal devices become far more useful, and far more personal, when they adapt to our needs and wants. Getting “relevant content” is nice. Doing relevant tasks, including consuming content, is better.
In The Circle, the titular company is huge on quantification. This is best illustrated by the project to count the grains of sand in the Sahara, simply because they can. Mae, the protagonist, is tracked relentlessly, her ranking in the company calculated by scores from customers, her activity on social media, the amount of product she moves on recommendation, and even how much she interacts with people on campus. Like the best dystopian science fiction, it’s not a huge leap to The Circle levels of quantification from what we have now. Our scores are self-reinforced for the most part: follower counts, retweets, favorites and likes—but also the numbers in our bank accounts and on our pay stubs. This goes way beyond just wearing a FitBit.
The risk we take when we try to keep score and compete on numbers with anything in our lives is losing perspective. It’s so easy to focus on relentless improvement and quantification in some area that something else falls by the wayside. If we’re focusing on improving our standing at work, it can be detrimental to our relationships at home or our physical fitness. If we focus too much on the surface indicators of physical health, it can be detrimental to our mental health. Concentrate on juicing our follower counts and Klout scores, and it can damage our work and personal lives, too. And to say nothing of the mental stress.
I’m guilty of this as much as anyone. A couple high-profile links to this site this month have spiked my stats to ridiculous levels that I’ve never seen in my entire history of blogging. I want to keep that up, and even in the back of my head, I know I can’t expect to have 1000 page views per day, every day, I look at the numbers, and see the drop off, and disappointment sets in. “I’m doing my best work, aren’t I? Where is the love, the social shares, the invitation to join The Deck or Fusion Ads?” But I’m the only one keeping score here. I have to recalibrate my expectations, and my determine that my worth isn’t based on any number of other people. Yes, it feels great when the numbers all match what I want to feel, but if they don’t, it doesn’t reflect badly on me.