With friends like these ... Tom Hodgkinson on the politics of the people behind Facebook. ⇒
14 January 2008, evening time
"We are seeing the commodification of human relationships, the extraction of capitalistic value from friendships." This link was found via MetaFilter.
This is a post from my link log: If you click the title of this post you will be taken the web page I am discussing.
The reddit comments on this were really good. Basically everyone said the sane thing, which is: it’s a tool, and you can use it how you please. You can set everything private, add whatever friends you want and remove or deny anyone you don’t want, and guess what? It doesn’t require you to sit at a computer and fester and never see your friends in real life.
I’ve been on two 12 hour pub crawls that were organized among friends on Facebook. It’s almost like (gasp!) people can use this tool TO SEE EACH OTHER or in any way they please. Like they aren’t… I dunno, slaves to the Internets?
by Ben on January 15 2008, 1:06 am #
Shima and her friends use it to organize nights out as well, like a super-charged evite. That said, If the focus of the discussion on Reddit was simply people trying to defend their use of Facebook, i'm guessing they didn't actually read the article. The article would have been better had Hodgkinson not written it in such a curmudgeonly fashion, but it's still an interesting look at the creepy money backing the project and Facebook's lame privacy policies more than anything else. He should have kept his opinions on whether the service itself is worthwhile to himself.
by ramanan on January 15 2008, 7:45 am #