Week 10 Reflection

Hey everyone!


A lot like Marina, I found our last tutorial's conversations on online and resistance and culture jamming of interest, and I found an article on Reader Supported News, a website that believes that the reader is "best served by financial control of the news service they depend on".

The article, 'Facebook Censoring Online Activism? : Activists upset with Facebook' goes into depth at the recent (mid September) silencing of two large Facebook-user created pages in regards to Target's funding of anti-gay politics, and BP's gulf oil spill. Both pages were created to show awareness, and attempt to get large numbers of people to boycott the companies until they do something to clean up, literally and metaphorically, their acts.

"As the number of Facebook members signed up for the “Boycott Target Until They Cease Funding Anti-Gay Politics” page neared 78,000 in recent days, Facebook personnel locked down portions of the page — banning new discussion threads, preventing members from posting videos and standard Web links to other sites and barring the page’s administrator from sending updates to those who signed up for the boycott."

The locking of this did not go down well with the groups' creators, and, as the article goes on to explain, is because of fine print Facebook "clearly" explained in the past. Many readers of the article, and even in the article explain how Facebook uses their control when they please. '"It really does have a big effect when 10,000 people or 100,000 people join a group, and they change the rules midstream,” said Dorian Benkoil of New York-based Teeming Media. “Then, they try to thread the needle by saying you can still have a page, but we’re not going to let the admin post … They say it violates their rules. Then they say, we’ll go halfway.”'

This whole article just reminded me of living in such a controlled society. While we do not live in Facebook (obviously), people assume that because they have a profile there, it is theirs. Facebook is a private company, but people upload photos, phone numbers and address' without even thinking about it. A while ago, Facebook tried to change their privacy policy, saying any photo that had ever been uploaded to Facebook became their property, so any professional photographers who had uploaded photos no longer owned the rights to them. While this was rejected as ridiculous, and quickly removed, the thought still lingers. With people forgetting that all of their information lies within a private company, they don't know what is coming.

I have heard reports that Facebook recently changed its "Fan Pages", to an option that a user "likes", because they are hoping to be the new Google, a giant search operator, but personal. By using information that Facebook already has about each individual user- what you like and what you don't, Facebook knows what to tell advertisers about what would interest you, what you would most likely be looking for when browsing the internet and much more.

While convenient, this whole idea seems to be too much like The Truman Show for me.


While reading the article, I noticed the tab on the bottom of the page- 'Join us on Facebook'- had a bit of a laugh, why not join them and see if one day that search option suggests something like that!