http://www.switched.com/2011/04/11/jonathan-franzen-new-yorker-piece-hides-behind-facebook-like/ Switched Comments for Jonathan Franzen's New Yorker Piece Hides Behind a Facebook Like Wall http://www.switched.com/media/feedlogo.gif http://www.switched.com en-us Copyright 2013 Weblogs, Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only. Blogsmith http://www.blogsmith.com/http://www.switched.com/2011/04/11/jonathan-franzen-new-yorker-piece-hides-behind-facebook-like/http://www.switched.com/2011/04/11/jonathan-franzen-new-yorker-piece-hides-behind-facebook-like/
What the New Yorker is doing, letting Facebook become a Gatekeeper to the New Yorker's business, is a mistake I think. Facebook is positioning itself to be the ultimate puppeteer...let's slow this behavior down!

What is with Facebook’s special treatment with search engines? I use the Meta Search tool “Dogpile”. When I used the search term “Facebook” I expected many pages of results because of all the hype and activity around Facebook and Zuckerberg. I got ONE entry – facebook.com !

I wanted to see the criticism about Facebook because in one of my searches I found that Facebook has imported all of Wikipedia’s free content about cities and states and loaded it into FB!…. Imperialistic if you ask me! FB is a for-profit company raiding all the open source software and free contributions of the Internet user community - they are the internet "mafia" if you like...

Facebook was aided in its monopolization of information by using a citation of Creative Commons.com (which is less than enlightening about its role and relationship with its clients like Facebook) to legitimize its lifting of all the free work of Wickipedia’s participants so that FB can make even more profits. Facebook is milking the millions of its participants for personal info and behavior patterns which FB mines and/or turns around and sells to other databases and clients for whatever human engineering and marketing tasks they want to do. Money is being made by all, except for us poor chumps who keep the info flowing endlessly.

People do not understand the overarching goals FB has for controlling information, marketing and communications in the world…. we are too trusting and too naive to try to see where this seduction is going to take us, as individuals and as cultures and businesses. We are like kids with candy – eat and be happy.

A hint of the non-friendly nature of Facebook is the lack of any way to Contact the FB staff. They probably think that their monitoring of user attitudes based on the info found on Walls is all the information they need – why slow down the FB gravy train with customer service and feedback?

On the FB website is there any link to a human where I can comment or complain to FB? No!

Say I want to evaluate what smarter people than me have to say about Facebook….when I do a search on "Facebook" as the keyword, I get only one entry – Facebook.com…..no citations about FB vis a vis any other topic on any other site! How does FB suppress any commentary about itself when this simple search is executed? Does FB pay someone to have this lone, single item – their Homepage - show up on a Search on their name? I think SEO is working overtime for FB.

When I input the keyword “MacDonald’s” for the food vendor, I get pages of information I can follow, positive items and negative items – NOT just the MacDonald’s homepage!

So I have to put in more search keywords – eg. “Facebook criticism” to get a broader picture of news about Facebook. Why the special treatment? Also notice that there is no place for you to Contact Facebook or Creative Commons – they do NOT want to listen to customers, questions or criticism. Their business model is profit from links and from the manipulation/containment of links – to hell with the public’s privacy and participation rights.

FB considers its participants as sheep going to the slaughter...they have no idea what is really going on behind the FB business curtain. So of course, no need to share the profits or advantages with the stupid sheep.

FB is stingy, as well as manipulative. You cannot download FB data for your own use or delete (only archive) your data, yet FB can sell your relationships, behavior patterns, friends, thoughts, apps, links, likes, dislikes, birthdate, etc. to whomever they want for as long as they want to and can keep their profits for all of that.

That is not fair business, not fair use of a common resource - the Internet - nor is it good world citizenship. Who owns our brain, our relationships and thoughts? We do. Not Facebook….so why are we letting ourselves be robbed of the one unique thing we possess - our brain, knowledge and experiences?
What naive people we, the business community and our government are to let Facebook get away with this hijacking of relationships and communications.

Facebook is using the Insurance Industry and banking model – put yourself at the center of a group of relationships and get locked in so that every time there is a transaction you not only get paid but you have a chance to control who gets what and when. Do Business Schools or the streets teach this sort of manipulation? We didn't notice the insurance industry's scope creep in health insurance from the 1940's until now until it was too late and our healthcare system and economy became dysfunctional because of it.

Why are we ignoring the long term effects of Facebook's information hoarding now? Have we not learned anything, as a society, from history? Can't we use our imagination to analyze the possible impacts of technology and to avoid the worst abuses of that technology? Or are we forever locked into the immature need for immediate gratification and the commercial exploitation of every human characteristic and desire on the human planet? Is it human progress to let yet another new technology enslave us in the absence of common sense and care for humanity?




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