English National Opera has commissioned a great little viral video. A comedian wanders around London, engaging in Facebook-style interactions.
"Do you want to be my friend?" he asks some tourists. "Would you like to comment on my relationship status?" he invites a bemused stranger.
Well, it made me ROFL. I "like" it. And I'm looking forward to the opera it promotes, Two Boys, by the 29-year-old New Yorker Nico Muhly. A macabre tale of internet obsession, it looks set to be a timely hit for ENO - as it's not just hipster composers who are questioning the way we interact online.
Techies have been warning about Facebook's cavalier attitude to data for years now, and it seems we're finally getting the message. While Mark Zuckerberg's empire continues to grow in the "early adopter" countries, we're mostly logging off. In the UK, the number of Facebook users fell by 100,000 between May and June; in the US, about six million people quit.
Looking at my own feed, it's notable how few friends update their status any more. Many are leaving altogether. Some are frustrated with the interface. Others complain about vanity, privacy and companies profiting from their personal lives. "It's all about exploiting people to make Mark Fuckerberg money," one summarised.
Reading the Terms of Service offers little reassurance. As one blogger points out: "Essentially, they see their customers as unpaid employees for crowd-sourcing ad-targeting data."
In Jennifer Egan's sharp new novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, the character of Alex has a moment of anguish when he realises this: "[He] never could quite forget that every byte of information he'd posted online was stored in the databases of multinationals who swore they would never, ever use it - that he was owned ... having sold himself unthinkingly at the very point in his life when he'd felt most subversive."
Such realisations won't change Facebook's fortunes by themselves. However, the brief history of social networking suggests that once the tipping point is reached, there's no going back. Remember MySpace? Or Friendster?
Why should Facebook be any different? Its appeal lies in its very popularity: when everyone's logging on daily, it's a great tool for staying in touch. Once a few people lose interest, it ceases to serve its main function. If you are, say, organising a party or sharing photos, you may as well send out an email or use a site that everyone can access, hopefully with a more reasonable approach to copyright.
I suspect most people remain on Facebook as most of their friends are. So surely we just need to mobilise everyone to quit, all at once. How about we start a campaign - on Twitter
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