About Face(book)

I know it's unpopular with some people to listen (or pay any attention) to smart people, but I get a lot of it. While those who choose to ignore people whom they consider elite (usually after calling them that name and others and otherwise dismissing what they have to say even before considering it) yell pretty loudly, I don't pay much attention to their shouts and, instead, often end up thinking about things in a new way.

The last couple weeks I've heard things about Facebook that make sense to me and let me look at it differently than I had.

Instead of seeing it just as way of being insulted by people who sought me out for friendship, trading "likes" with others I have no hope or chance of meeting, or letting others know what's caught my eye on the Internet or what I'm thinking about at the moment, Facebook also serves the valuable service of letting people know that I'm still alive and have survived whatever latest calamity the desert has decided to throw my way.

It's also, first and foremost, a business.

And that's where it's sorta the opposite of most of the things I think of as businesses, by which I mean stores. When I go shopping, I buy something that someone has made and while I lose money in the process, lots of other people get some. The people who actually made it get some, the people who employ them get some, the people who advertise it get some, the people who deliver it to the store get some, the people who employ the ones doing the delivering get some, the people who work in the store I bought it in get some, the people who own that store get some, and probably others I'm not thinking about.

I buy a shirt, a whisk broom, a chair, or some groceries or whatever, and other people make money on the deal. I'm a consumer in this case, and the product I buy is the product.

But capitalism works in other ways, too. Sometimes, such as when I'm watching TV, it gets a little more complicated. For one thing, I'm paying someone to provide me those channels, a service, but the channels I watch get most of their money from advertisers. The channels spend some money producing the shows and then sell to advertisers some time to try to convince the people watching the show to buy whatever is being advertised. So, yes, channel or network makes its money by selling my eyeballs to advertisers and, well, that makes me the product being sold.

With a few exceptions such as HBO, that's the business model. The networks sorta let you watch for free, but make their money by selling the audience for their programming to someone who's interested in selling you gold or car insurance.

And that, increasingly, is how Facebook is working. While I think of it as way of showing people what my dog looks like lying in the sand, Facebook could care less about that. What they've decided to do is to make me a product, not a consumer, and to make their money by selling my eyeballs to those who think I might want to buy a matchmaking service.

When I use or visit Facebook, I'm not a consumer, I'm a product. And, yeah, I have very mixed feelings about that.