For better or worse, when you join facebook odds are you are going to show everyone who cares to look who you truly are. In the second part of The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick, David Kirkpatrick continues his history lesson about how Mark Zuckerberg’s creation became an actual business. The second part of this book starts with the acquisition of investments so that Zuckerberg could get some much needed money to buy more servers and keep facebook going. This money came from venture capitalists of which Zuckerberg was reluctant to deal with, but had to in order to get the money he needed. After that, David Kirkpatrick discusses when Sean Parker was pretty much forced to relinquish is role as president as a result of his erratic behavior. As a result of his ever growing success, facebook was sort of being forced into becoming a real professional business. Many new employees were hired to deal with coding and other parts of the company, Mark Zuckerberg decided to stop coding in order to focus on the direction of facebook, and although Zuckerberg hated putting ads on facebook, more ad deals were made. Also, more and more companies, such as Yahoo and MTV, kept approaching Zuckerberg with offers to buy facebook. Zuckerberg quickly refused the offers at first, but when Yahoo began making offers of one billion dollars, Zuckerberg had to take them seriously. After the success of facebooks news feed, although much protested at first, and the opening of facebook to everyone, Zuckerberg decided not to sell facebook. After this, David Kirkpatrick goes into what I feel is a much more interesting aspect of facebook, the issues dealing with privacy and a person’s self-image. In this discussion I feel David Kirkpatrick brings up the main argument of this section of the book. Although facebook allows users to increase privacy settings, for the most part people who have joined facebook have given up most of their privacy.
When a person joins facebook, contrary to what many might think, the privacy settings are initially set to allow pretty much everyone on facebook to view all of your information. Also, the privacy settings can be changed on facebook, but they have been made overly complicated and tend to make people not want to deal with them. I think the biggest argument in this section of the book is that the real goal of facebook is to completely abolish all forms of privacy. It’s what Mark Zuckerberg and his group at facebook call “radical transparency”. I find this ironic though, because although Mark Zuckerberg preaches about facebook making people deal with the consequences of their actions almost as if facebook is some kind of justice system, Mark Zuckerberg himself has no idea what it is like to suffer the repercussions of a bad facebook picture or wall post. Being the creater and CEO of facebook, Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t care if an embarrassing photograph or post appears on facebook. What does it matter to him, he is the CEO and creater of facebook, it’s not like he has a boss that will fire him or anything like that. He has majority control of facebook, so it doesn’t really matter what the board members think of him they can never force him out of the company. As long as the information posted on facebook does not give him any legal troubles than he pretty much never has to deal with the consequences of his actions. David Kirkpatrick gives plenty of examples of people who have had to deal with such consequences like the high school football team members who were suspended after the principal saw facebook pictures of them drinking alcohol (pg. 207) or Kimberly Swan, who was fired from her job after her boss saw a post on her facebook page that her job was boring (pg. 211). Neither of these incidences are really that bad. I am sure the principle knows that high school students go to parties and drink alcohol and the boss of Kimberly Swan’s job must know that parts of any job will be considered boring to anyone, but seeing the information in such a blatant form, especially when it comes to photographs, makes the incidences seem much more serious than they really are. Unless you’re a rich CEO who can pretty much do whatever you want, most people need a multi-faceted life in which certain people only see certain faces. Just because a person goes to a party now and then or maybe drinks more than they should on certain occasions doesn’t make them unreliable or deserving of being fired from their job, but one bad picture on facebook can have this result.
Also though, the problem is as much our own fault as it is facebook’s. Our culture is becoming known for his impatience, narcissism, and indifference. Learning how to properly use and benefit from the privacy settings on facebook seem complex and will take to long, so no one uses them. We want everyone to see what were are doing every minute of the day, as if our lives are somehow unique or interesting enough to elicit some sort of special attention. Since we want people to see these things that we are doing so much, we do not care about the consequences of putting this information on the World Wide Web. Personally, I think Mark Zuckerberg’s idea that facebook will make people have to deal with the consequences of their actions and show their true self is completely back firing, but it is back firing onto all of us. While facebook grows bigger and more prosperous, we are becoming bigger and bigger narcissists who need to show our friends every aspect of our lives and feel that if something isn’t documented on facebook than it never happened. Our need to let the world know what we’re doing is overshadowing any chance we have at learning that we need to deal with the consequences of our actions. Regardless of Mark Zuckerberg’s goals for facebook, I think it is just making American culture make poorer decisions for poorer reasons.
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