Facebook and the Imperative of Sharing

Chapter Three focused on Facebook where "the default is social" (van Dijck, 2013, p. 45). Mark Zuckerberg, in his Time interview from May 2010, noted that privacy is "an evolving norm." However, José van Dijck (2013) disagreed, stating that "sharing, rather than privacy, is the norm" (p. 46). The nature of what Facebook is, and can be, has been argued since its inception at Harvard in 2004. The foundation of Facebook centered on being social, transparency, and sharing information. As a result, Facebook's dominance of social networks has given it influence over perceptions of privacy in digital spaces.

The technology and users elements pointed to several instances where Facebook changed its policies and opened their user information to outside companies. On more than one occasion between 2009 and 2012, Facebook had to apologize for such transgressions after users voiced their outrage. As a result, it was becoming clear to its users that Facebook was serving the interests of "companies rather than its users" (p. 48). And with its IPO, a third conflict has arisen as stockholders enter the mix: whom does Facebook serve?

The content element dealt with the several redesigns and the current timeline where everything that anyone has ever entered into Facebook can be seen in a biographical lineage of interaction. Design choices, then, shape the content and the reaction of the user—design can shape/change the information (something that needed to be explored more throughout the book).

Ownership plays heavily into the influence of Facebook not just on users and content, but also on other businesses as well. Facebook was the SNS by 2009, with only MySpace holding a small market share. Before the IPO launch, Zuckerberg made a critical statement concerning APIs: "Every app is going to be social. If we build the best service, there's massive value there. If we don't, somebody else will" (p. 58). This deals with governance as Facebook has over five different terms of service levels, all difficult to navigate and all written to support the company's mission of making the world "more open and transparent … [which gives] individuals greater power to share and connect" (p. 59).

Van Dijck (2013) noted that Facebook's business model, right before its IPO in May of 2012, "is most certainly a contentious balancing act between stimulating users' activity and exploiting it; its success ultimately depends on customers' willingness to contribute data and to allow maximum data mining" (p. 64). It is a simple equation: users + data = money.

Facebook may someday lose its cool as a platform, but its structure and ideology have spread so easily throughout the nature of online sociality that its influence will remain for some time (just as the platforms it replaced can still be found in Facebook's original code). And yet, Facebook needs users for their content and data in order to be profitable—but how long before privacy concerns become big enough for users to leave the space for one they feel is less exploitive? A greater examination of an alternative within this chapter could have shed some light on where Facebook may go in the next few years, and while yes, this is critical history of social media, some speculation could aid in better understanding the past.