Mark Zuckerberg and Globalization
Can One Company Rule (and Ruin) the World?
Hidden in Zuckerberg’s Manifesto (2/16) is Facebook’s mission to dominate the world. His company has already influenced history and will continue to influence the course of humanity in dangerous ways.
I have serious doubts about the mission, goals, and feasibility of what Zuckerberg sets out to do (and how he lays it out in his letter) with and at Facebook.
Don’t get me wrong, Facebook does a lot of good for a lot of people. It certainly has for me. However, almost all of these times that I’ve felt that my relationships have been strengthened via the ability to connect online with Facebook have been the times where my online activities have enabled, expedited, or supported meetings with people with whom I interact in-person.
And these times are almost all connected with my direct messages (which I could very well accomplish via texting or calling) or membership/ participation in, as Zuckerberg validly mentions, “very meaningful groups.” It’s true, I’ve become acquainted with people through Facebook “groups” that I never would have without this platform. But, however much Facebook groups may add to my online life, very rarely is my membership/ participation in “the group” a source of real weight, with real ramifications in my offline, real-world life. (I certainly recognize and understand that for other people, the way they use Facebook groups could be much more useful and satisfying in their real, physical lives. I’m not disputing this point.)
I’m concerned about the many logical, internal inconsistencies in Zuckerberg’s letter and thinking. At the end of this post, I’ve included several segments of passages that illustrate some of the most serious I found.
I’m concerned that, of over 72,000 reactions to Zuckerberg’s post worldwide (so far, at the time of writing this), only 115 of them are “Angry” or “Sad.” That’s 0.16% of global audiences reacting to his post expressing something other than “Like,” “Love,” “Wow,” or “Haha.” This doesn’t bode well for his concern about sensationalism or the pressing need to do more to encourage and empower free, independent, diverse, and well-informed opinions. This, I submit to you, can only be accomplished through encouraging critical thinking, which Facebook as a whole does not do a particularly great job at, I would argue (and Zuckerberg would probably concur, given his statement:
Social media is a short-form medium where resonant messages get amplified many times. This rewards simplicity and discourages nuance. At its best, this focuses messages and exposes people to different ideas. At its worst, it oversimplifies important topics and pushes us towards extremes.
Following from the above, I’m concerned that it’s incredibly easy to be swayed by and participate in groupthink on the platform — in fact, groupthink, not individuality, lies at the heart of, and is the driving engine/ foundation for the business model of, Facebook — and Zuckerberg’s outlines for the company’s new direction do not suggest mitigating this underlying phenomenon.
In fact, I’d argue that he encourages it, by adamantly stressing the need to create a “collective,” “global community that works for everyone.” Yet, he also says, essentially, that we all have differences and that those local differences should be preserved and better served. His goal, nevertheless, is to build “the new social infrastructure to create the world we want for generations to come.” WE, as in ‘all peoples,’ with, as he admits, radically-opposing, polarized views on many issues? THE new infrastructure, as in ‘just one,’ to suit all? I applaud Zuckerberg’s ambitious goals here, but I’m too much of a realist to believe that we can or will achieve them. We certainly won’t by using Facebook. (If you’re interested on this point in particular, let’s have a discussion on Richard Dawkins’ concept of memes.)
But more than that, I’m concerned that social media is “changing the nature of human interaction,” skewing the “synchronicity of shared experience,” and, at best — not moving the needle — or, at worst — harming the quality of our efficacy — in light of the ‘Dunbar number’: the idea that, “Judging from the size of an average human brain, the number of people the average person could have in her social group [is] a hundred and fifty. Anything beyond that would be too complicated to handle at optimal processing levels.”
I’ve included some of the most salient passages from the above article:
“There’s no question, Dunbar agrees, that networks like Facebook are changing the nature of human interaction. “What Facebook does and why it’s been so successful in so many ways is it allows you to keep track of people who would otherwise effectively disappear,” he said. But one of the things that keeps face-to-face friendships strong is the nature of shared experience: you laugh together; you dance together; you gape at the hot-dog eaters on Coney Island together. We do have a social-media equivalent — sharing, liking, knowing that all of your friends have looked at the same cat video on YouTube as you did — but it lacks the synchronicity of shared experience. It’s like a comedy that you watch by yourself: you won’t laugh as loudly or as often, even if you’re fully aware that all your friends think it’s hysterical. We’ve seen the same movie, but we can’t bond over it in the same way.”
“With social media, we can easily keep up with the lives and interests of far more than a hundred and fifty people. But without investing the face-to-face time, we lack deeper connections to them, and the time we invest in superficial relationships comes at the expense of more profound ones. We may widen our network to two, three, or four hundred people that we see as friends, not just acquaintances, but keeping up an actual friendship requires resources. “The amount of social capital you have is pretty fixed,” Dunbar said. “It involves time investment. If you garner connections with more people, you end up distributing your fixed amount of social capital more thinly so the average capital per person is lower.” If we’re busy putting in the effort, however minimal, to “like” and comment and interact with an ever-widening network, we have less time and capacity left for our closer groups. Traditionally, it’s a sixty-forty split of attention: we spend sixty per cent of our time with our core groups of fifty, fifteen, and five, and forty with the larger spheres. Social networks may be growing our base, and, in the process, reversing that balance.”
‘“In the sandpit of life, when somebody kicks sand in your face, you can’t get out of the sandpit. You have to deal with it, learn, compromise,” he said. “On the internet, you can pull the plug and walk away. There’s no forcing mechanism that makes us have to learn.” If you spend most of your time online, you may not get enough in-person group experience to learn how to properly interact on a large scale — a fear that, some early evidence suggests, may be materializing. “It’s quite conceivable that we might end up less social in the future, which would be a disaster because we need to be more social — our world has become so large,” Dunbar said. The more our virtual friends replace our face-to-face ones, in fact, the more our Dunbar number may shrink.”
And now, for some of the contradictions, impossibilities, internal inconsistencies, and otherwise worrisome points that I found, couched in positive-sounding language, in Zuckerberg’s letter.
We recently found that more than 100 million people on Facebook are members of what we call “very meaningful” groups. These are groups that upon joining, quickly become the most important part of our social network experience and an important part of our physical support structure.
More than one billion people are active members of Facebook groups, but most don’t seek out groups on their own…
If groups are the most important part of our social network experience and physical support structure, why aren’t we seeking them out on our own the majority of the time, as we would in natural human communities/ social infrastructure we built moving “from tribes to cities to nations”?
In the same way connecting with friends online strengthens real relationships, developing this infrastructure will strengthen these communities, as well as enable completely new ones to form.
Our goal is to strengthen existing communities by helping us come together online as well as offline, as well as enabling us to form completely new communities, transcending physical location. When we do this, beyond connecting online, we reinforce our physical communities by bringing us together in person to support each other.
So completely new communities, transcending physical location, on Facebook. But this reinforces physical communities by bringing us together in person? What’s the point of transcending physical location then? Reinforcement? Okay maybe, but doesn’t meeting in person reinforce physical communities enough, far better than online reinforcement could? What truly meaningful extra good (worth the effort) can come from online reinforcement? (I admit there is some. But it seems to me that online ‘group’ discussions, to have significant meaning, are always in service of action in physical communities; online reinforcement only marginally or slightly strengthens existing communities.)
Our greatest opportunities are now global — like spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science.
I want to emphasize that the vast majority of conversations on Facebook are social, not ideological. They’re friends sharing jokes and families staying in touch across cities…
In other words, (and ramifications for physical community aspects aside), Facebook cannot hope to help us make meaningful headway towards our greatest, global opportunities today? No matter one’s specific views, “spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science” all sound pretty ideological to me — with each presenting both drastically-varying ideological understandings AND culturally-appropriate approaches for achieving them.
But our goal must be to help people see a more complete picture, not just alternate perspectives.
Research suggests the best solutions for improving discourse may come from getting to know each other as whole people instead of just opinions — something Facebook may be uniquely suited to do. If we connect with people about what we have in common — sports teams, TV shows, interests — it is easier to have dialogue about what we disagree on. When we do this well, we give billions of people the ability to share new perspectives while mitigating the unwanted effects that come with any new medium.
Sure, “getting to know each other as whole people [on Facebook]” sounds lovely, but it is also very unlikely, especially if our views that we make immediately obvious on Facebook do not align with those of another. If this is the case, we are more likely to “unfriend” or “unfollow” them, so that we don’t “stay connected” to learn more about them, let alone “share new perspectives.” And as the increasing number of ads for roommates screening for Trump supporters attest, social preferences expressed on Facebook may prevent contact at all depths and levels of human interaction, from the most superficial to the most intimate.
Facebook is not just technology or media, but a community of people. That means we need Community Standards that reflect our collective values for what should and should not be allowed.
This suggests we need to evolve towards a system of personal control over our experience.
The idea is to give everyone in the community options for how they would like to set the content policy for themselves. Where is your line on nudity? On violence? On graphic content? On profanity? What you decide will be your personal settings.
Basically: “We must all agree! We’re all in this together! But we must personalize! Everyone is different!” And, “It’s not okay for us to be offended at what each other is posting! We must prevent this from happening! But it’s not okay for us to stop each other from posting what we want to post! We must prevent this from happening!” Am I just missing the cohesion here? What am I not understanding?
I admit, as Zuckerberg does, that these are tricky issues, and I applaud Facebook for investing in advanced tools and resources to help them do a better job at what they want to do in the future.
But, is what Facebook wants to do in the future feasible or good for each one of us? I doubt it.
What does it mean to live in a globalized society? What are my responsibilities as an individual, and is it possible to fulfill them?
My hopes, in a Facebook World, lumped in a paragraph:
Please read these and other credible sources in-depth for yourselves. Please do not mistake participation in social media as participation in society. Please don’t mistake your “friends” for friendships. If you’re not taking action, you’re not acting; if you’re not being a friend, you’re not in a friendship. There is no substitute for critical thinking, human connection, and leadership. Do not go passively into that good anything. You do not have to believe or do things for which you don’t have a sound basis. Don’t abuse your beautiful right to a mind. Use Facebook (and all social media) responsibly, informedly. Knowing it for what it is and does. And what your use of it is and does.
