The Facebook Effect is the causatum of Zuckerberg's dream to turn our society into a more open, transparent world with the ultimate goal of uniting our fractured cultures via Facebook. Zuckerberg's logic is that people and governments in that kind of society will be more accounable for their actions in such an open and transparent world in which everyone is so forthcoming with their information about their likes and with what, how, and with whom they spend their time. The key to Zuckerberg's theory is the information that each individual volunteers to share with his/her network. The more people share, the more open each individual network becomes and the more transparent and accountable our society as a whole becomes. With some small privacy control exceptions, there is No Hiding on Facebook.
Google was created to index the world. To gather all the world's information in one place to be easily searched, accessed, and engaged. (That has been accomplished and now they are just starting to try to take over the world tech markets with their Android operating system.) Facebook was created to unite our own individual social network of friends and family to create a strong, open, and transparent world (network) in with which to live and share. Although you can Google and find a group, business or any individual's Facebook Profile you can't actually gain access to that information without that party's explicit consent. That is the real value in the business of Facebook; Their Ad Space. The very accurate personal data that is voluntarily entered into their system by people sharing information about themselves within their network has helped Zuckerberg create the first "Pin Point Marketing" System that he can sell to advertisers looking to get their brand or product in front of the most precise demographic as possible. The Google model of Cost-Per-Click (CPC) advertisements cannot compete. It is why Google has attempted to buy Facebook countless times and Zuckerberg hasn't broken yet. Google can't Google the information inside Facebook's servers. Facebook has basically created the very first world wide intranet.
And then in The Facebook Effect's Ripple, comes WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is an international non-profit media organization that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous sources and leaks. Its website, launched in 2006, is run by The Sunshine Press. Within a year of its launch, the site claimed a database that had grown to more than 1.2 million documents. The organization has described itself as having been founded by Chinese dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the U.S., Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. Newspaper articles and The New Yorker magazine (7 June 2010) describe Julian Assange, an Australian journalist and Internet activist, as its director.
WikiLeaks has made headlines recently by releasing hundreds of thousands of State Department documents with dangerous and unknown consequences to our national security. In this Age of Facebook, this is exactly the kind of transparency that, in theory, Facebook is trying to create. But with one major problem. The information was not voluntarily shared by The State Department. The information was stolen by an individual now being held in solitary confinement for months by the United States government. This article started out many weeks ago titled, "Will We Be Thankful for Facebook?" I wanted to get it out in time for Thanksgiving. But I was having trouble writing the article and tying all my thoughts together coherently. Thanksgiving came and went with me not having enough to publish the article. So I let it go. Almost deleted everything that I had staring frustrated at the screen very early Thursday morning.
After reading the papers today outlining exactly what was leaked, this article became much clearer but my main question was still unanswered. I don't know if I am "thankful" for Facebook. Yet. It is way too early to weigh all the positives and negatives to come up with a grand conclusion for its effect on our society. For as much good it has and will do for us, it has created a world of vultures who think that everything is a matter of public record. You did not have to read the paper today to know that not everything is for the public's consumption. The key to Facebook's society is the voluntary submission of information by persons directly involved with said information. There has to be a line, and not a fine one either. It has to be clear and concise. No Shades of Gray. This what not a bunch of papers leaked that showed how our government was mismanaging our tax dollars. There was no benefit to the world's peoples by leaking this information. Besides damaging American relations with foreign dignitaries, the only people benefiting from this information besides Wikileaks was our enemies. New York Representative Peter King is calling for the swift prosecution of the founder and persons directly involved at WikiLeaks. Which I believe to be totally justified. They put many American lives at risk for their own financial benefit. That to me is the true definition of terrorism. They should be arrested, tried, and hung from the top of The Empire State Building with all of world watching on YouTube. They should not be incarcerated and protected from a society that they have knowingly damaged.
The goal of an open and transparent society is a great one. And one I hope we get to. It can only benefit our society to hold individuals, corporations, and governments accountable for their actions. We are definitely not their yet, we still have major boundaries to define. But the information has to be shared voluntarily and cannot come at the expense of other individual lives and reputations.
WikiLeaks has shared their information, we know who they are and what they are about. Let's now hold them accountable for their actions.
Hopefully many years from now I will be able to write an article entitled, "Why We Are Thankful for Facebook."
