Yesterday I got another Facebook invite from a friend from long ago, and I was less than satisfied with my explanation for declining to participate. This morning good old Doc Searls makes all much clearer as he cites Adam Rifkin:
Facebook is a lobster trap and your friends are the bait. On social networks we are all lobsters, and lobsters just wanna have fun. Every time a friend shares a status, a link, a like, a comment, or a photo, Facebook has more bait to lure me back. Facebook is literally filled with master baiters: Whenever I return to Facebook I am barraged with information about many friends, to encourage me to stick around and click around. Every time I react with a like or comment, or put a piece of content in, I’m serving as Facebook bait myself. Facebook keeps our friends as hostages, so although we can check out of Hotel Facebook any time we like, we can never leave. So we linger. And we lurk. And we luxuriate. The illogical extreme of content-as-bait are the Facebook games where the content is virtual bullshit.(see Adam's post for some eloquent links within that passage). Posted by oook at July 16, 2010 06:17 AM