February 22, 2009 – The Dichotomy of Social Networking

Walking into Faz’s Restaurant in Mountain View—near where Highways 101 and 237 intersect—at noon on Thursday last week, the din of conversation, the line at the maitre d’s podium, the energy in the dining room as my companion Irving and I were seated; you’d never suspect that there was a full-on recession going on outside. Upon being seated I launched into the benefits of social networking, particularly services such as LinkedIn that help in finding job opportunities, in these precarious times of layoffs. Irving was reserved, expressing concern about the amount of everyone’s personal information being made public in such forums. But, it’s only your resume, I persist to a still unconvinced lunch mate.

I must confess to an earlier reluctant to dive into social networking over the same concern. And, my reservations have resurfaced in light of the recently rescinded attempt by Facebook to mine the personal information of its billion or so subscribers. The cautionary tale in Orwell’s ‘1984’ and a more up-to-date version in John Brunner’s “The Shockwave Rider” still resounds in my mind. However, my wife and I and both my daughters are on Facebook and everyone except my wife is on Linkedin. We all enjoy the benefits that derive from our participation: reconnecting with middle school, high school, and college schoolmates as well as with professional colleagues; sharing information with network connections that informs, entertains or helps one another day to day.

Having a place—where everyone knows your name—within the World Wide Web to hang out and commune with others provides incredible synergy. I liken it to the human race forming a collective intelligence with each user serving as a neuron in this virtual brain. And like the real brain, when an impulse hits somewhere within the consciousness of this intelligence, a wave of activity explodes outward across the entire network: the recent terrorist rampage in Mumbai as an example. Images, descriptions, video, and even recordings of what was transpiring were being broadcast real time throughout the network, always ahead of the international news gathering organizations.

However, the benefits come at a cost. I cite the example of “25 things about me” I recently received on Facebook and dutifully completed and posted. I chose to reveal more about my observations on life and the world around me than things that would have more commercial value to a data miner, such as age, physical description, taste in clothes, preference for automobiles, type of soul mate being sought or already found, taste in music, movies, food, drink, and entertainment. The type of information such an innocuous diversion collects is even more revealing than revealed by the discarded AMEX and MasterCard statements a dumpster diver might find. In the case of Facebook, this information is restricted to a select group of friends. Nevertheless, it is recorded and certainly available to enterprising hackers—not to mention the owners of Facebook.

The argument in favor of using this information is that advertisers can be more selective in what they bombard you with. The advertising dollars are not wasted and you are not subjected to what you have no interest in receiving. The economy, as a whole, benefits from resources being more efficiently consumed, e.g. eliminating tons of unopened catalogs and pieces of direct mail.

But, in the process the privacy of the individual is compromised, which leads to the question: what is the value of the average law-abiding citizen’s privacy? For many, the value is nil as they post a great deal about themselves and others on blogs and webcams. By contrasts, participants in reality television do receive compensation for their personal information. Ultimately, each of us determines how little or how much of ourselves we make public. In general, today’s young adults are inclined to share far more than their parents or grandparents, but the older generation is being increasingly conditioned by their young offspring to let it all hang out.

At the end of our lunch, Irving remained firmly opposed to the idea of large-scale disclosure. I would describe his LinkedIn page as minimalist. If Facebook decides to begin selling the vast amounts of its users information to ad agencies and large corporations, he may be right.