52 Books in 52 Weeks: Book 29: "The Facebook Effect" by David Kirkpatrick

"Facebook was our headquarters.  It was the newspaper.  It was the central command.  It was the laboratory.  Facebook was all that, right up to the last day.”  Oscar Morales, owner/operator of the Facebook group “Un Million Voces Contra Las FARC” (One Million Voices Against FARC). 

Kirkpatrick opens with Morales’ story of the Facebook group he created in January 2008 against the Columbian guerrilla organization, FARC.  One month after he created the group, it had gathered 350,000 members, and sparked worldwide demonstrations against FARC, in which an estimated 12 million people participated.  His success, Kirkpatrick says, is due to the Facebook Effect.

“As a fundamentally new form of communication, Facebook leads to fundamentally new interpersonal and social effects.  The Facebook Effect happens when the service puts people in touch with each other, often unexpectedly, about a common experience, interest, problem, or cause.”

Kirkpatrick spends most of this book telling the detailed, in-depth story of Facebook’s beginnings in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room at Harvard in 2004, and its subsequent rapid growth.  In the last 3rd of the book, he has chapters devoted to Facebook’s impact around the world, and what he expects to be its future evolution.

As you would expect, there is also a chapter devoted to the issue of privacy, which was one of the most interesting to me.  

“You have one identity,” (Zuckerberg) says emphatically three times in single minute during a 2009 interview.  He recalls that in Facebook’s early days some argued the service ought to offer adult users both a work profile and a “fun social profile”.  Zuckerberg was always opposed to that. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly,” he says. 

Zuckerberg has two reasons for this view: one idealistic, and one practical.  He views having two identities as a lack of integrity.  He believes we all have one true identity and if we will be transparent and reveal that to the world, it will inspire more responsibility and accountability.  In short, it will make people behave better.  Secondly, he believes that as technology advances, keeping anything about ourselves private and hidden is going to become impossible.  I’m inclined to agree with him on this 2nd point.  His first point - the idealistic notion of maintaining one transparent online identity for the world to see, and that leading to integrity and moral behavior has a bit of merit.  A little bit.  But, in my view, the main reason he can hold so fervently to such a pollyanna idea is that he is 26 years old.  It was very helpful to me to gain this perspective on Zuckerberg’s views on privacy.  I do not agree with him, for the most part, but I understand where he is coming from.  I will no longer accuse him of having a careless disregard for people’s personal privacy.

A very interesting read for anyone who is active on Facebook.  


Sojourner