This is a series of posts. You may
wish to read the other ones first:
1. "Dimensions of Government"
2. "Symmetries of Responsibility"
3. "Stacking of Thresholds"
4. "Intermingling of Structures"
5. "Examples of Alignment"
6. "Monolithic Memetics"
What do different people see when they look at Facebook?
The user who goes there because their family or friends are there
sees a reproduction of their social circle. It isn't a very high
fidelity, though. The hierarchies that are in place in real life
are flattened when they are uploaded online. The user experience
is a reflection of the designer's view of the world. The user's
"friends" are a large anarchic socialist pool. This is a design by
someone who treats all acquintances as friends. There are no
distinguishing ranks of authority. Even family members are called
"friends". Maybe this design choice was made so no one would feel
bad for being miscategorized into a family that has in fact
disowned them etc. Maybe the hierarchies are too vague to put into
words. Even in that case it reflects an anarchic view of things.
It is a miscategorization made into the direction of least
resistance but doesn't go far enough to remove all categorization.
Facebook wants to hold hostage your "friends", not just "users".
The user who is on Facebook for discussion doesn't focus on the
anarchic pool, but instead the authoritarian socialist threads.
There is an author who makes a claim. Often this author is some
traditional authority, like the newspapers, quoted into the
facebook feed. It seems to me that the discussions are sort of
little gang wars, where a person stakes their claim in the
beginning. Other people come in to join this person. The
opposition arrives, trying to topple the local authority. The
problem is, there is actually no winning this match. The first
post is never edited to say "After three days of battle, I have
failed to keep my ground, and should no longer be considered an
authority. The new authority is my opposition." Since the battle
is not going to be won in a fair way, there are all sorts of
smear campaigns that can be used. These is sort of a guerilla war
version of the discussion. It can be pointed out, for example,
that the authority is not up to the anarchic socialist memetic
standards of the day, thus not fit to stay in the discussion.
Guerilla war uses environment to it's advantage, and the memetic
soup that surrounds the discussions is the environment.
The advertiser on facebook has written some message, being an
authority in the realm of the message. They peddle with the
large authoritarian capitalist system so that it tilts the
field in their favor. The advertisers message is within the
domain of other messages that are competing for attention, but
it will be lifted higher and more visible from that cacophony.
This is so far the most complex relationship I have tried to
describe. So, there are these parts in it (at least):
1) Advertiser is the socialist authority of the message
and discussion that will follow.
2) The message is among the large anarchic (mostly) socialist
collection of messages that come through the feed.
3) The advertiser is exchanging money with facebook in
authoritarian capitalist manner for advantages against
unsponsored content.
4) The capitalist / socialist value of the collection of
feed messages varies based on the amount of sponsored
content that is allowed in.
NOTE: The most interesting part of this
scheme is that we can see the
scalability being a real novel thing.
There are no examples of this large
singular domains of anarchy anywhere
in real life. The Dunbar's number
would make a large anarchic
socialist feed an unnatural way to
communicate. It should deteriorate
into smaller feeds that had more
authoritarian elements. Think Reddit.
In the case of facebook, they are
seeing the problem and are splitting
the feed in authoritarian capitalist
standard, creating the echo chambers
probably by accident.
I am not sure if I can relate enough, or know enough about the
overall authoritarian capitalist structure of facebook to say
much about it. I don't think that the most interesting lessons
are there, since the company structure is not that different
from old school Ford Motor Company style. If the company
structures were to be analyzed (hopefully by a more competent
person than myself), maybe Google's large anarchic socialist
workforce could be of interest. It seems that Google's capitalism
was in the beginning a lot more on the anarchic than authoritarian
side. That's the past, though, isn't it?
NOTE: It should be emphasized that my
framework is always trying to
categorize communication. In all the
above cases the domains are about
more than one person communicating
with each other in different ways.
If this focus is not taken into
account, the categorisation might
seem a bit random. Maybe "Domains
of Communication" would be a good
working title for this frame.
