The end of the man's love affair with Web 2.0?
1. Blogs
The man does not fear the blogosphere. News Corp cares about Automatic Bzooty! as much as the Vatican cares what some 10-man cult is cooking up. Over generations, the truth-creation industry has created the truth that the most correct source is the one with the most money behind it, on a sliding scale from Hollywood to Channel 9 to Murdoch papers to community rags to blogs. (I don't doubt that you, discerning reader, can see through this construct but if you think that this makes you impervious to it you are akin to the psychologist's patient who leaps up and exclaims, "Now I understand everything! You've cured me doc!" halfway through his first consultation.)
Indeed, blogs have received official sanction courtesy of our culture's worship of the new and the man's lust for fresh advertising acres.
2. Myspace
Myspace is a global shopping mall in which thousands of small business owners (account holders) entice customers (friends) to their shopfronts (profiles) to inspect their wares (mp3s, glamour shots) with, in most cases, a view to profit. All dealings exist within the realm of trade and commerce: "Thks for the add! Check out my band's page - new mp3z just added xxx" and so on. The usual tendency towards monopoly has become apparent with major clothing and entertainment brands now dominating.
A few heroes of the people like Corey Worthington (Delaney) (why does he have two names and why is one of them in brackets?) have made use of the Myspace mall's potential for community and play, just like skateboarders turned physical malls into true leisure parks. However, like skateboarding, any rebellion can be co-opted - witness Corey being made to play the teenage Uncle Tom and gurn self-mockingly on advertisements for youth events - and, with the aid of Myspace, this recouperation occurs faster than ever. Myspace brings not only tweenage likes/dislikes but also underground cultures (music being a prime example) into full view of the man, who copies their business models, assimilates their signifiers and eventually destroys their communities altogether. This is why no black market is possible. Everyone is a consumer or a salesperson and all profits go to the man.
3. Facebook
Facebook is a different story. Facebook caused the man to come out swinging from the get-go. His get-go, that is - of course we all knew about Facebook months before he did.
The first attack came by way of the mainstream press, a matter of weeks after most of your friends had been engulfed by the exponential explosion of Facebook subscriptions in mid-2007. Superficially, the interest was obvious: Murdoch's MSN/Hotmail/Myspace (and Fairfax's equivalents) had enjoyed a sweet cross-marketed monopoly on most people's idea of what constituted community, news and entertainment on the internet and now that empire was threatened. Anti-Facebook news reports were placed in the financial sections of all major publications and aimed squarely at the bosses. The hysterical tone was identical to Soviet anti-alcoholism posters. "Experts" made calculations of the billions of man-hour-dollars that would be lost to this new time-waster. Most offices of which I am aware banned Facebook within 48 hours.
Now, we all know that the man wants you to consume more than he wants you to work* - how else to explain the tolerance afforded to gossip magazines and all manner of other mindless internet distractions? I don't recall seeing front page headlines quoting expert reports about the billions of dollars lost through coffee pots, Who Weekly or baby photos. Obviously, the manufactured concern about productivity and efficiency was just a ruse to get your boss on side and GET YOU OFF FACEBOOK. The real motivations must go much deeper.
[*I have made an assumption here that "you" are a typical member of the blog-reading class with disposable income. There are plenty of people whom the man requires to work more than consume, simply because someone has to do it. The man gets what little disposable income they have through cigarettes, slot machines, alcohol and unhealthy food.]
Facebook is, essentially, an area of free play and human interaction. Its success is a kick in the eye of the nay-sayers who, applying the idiotic economic theory that continues to rule the world, predicted that a participatory Wold Wide Web (called "Web 2.0" by old people who pretend to understand computers and write books that don't sell but are quoted at length and who earn their meagre income from grants and being interviewed whenever an event such as Y2K or Facebook is picked up by the media) would not succeed because "rational" users would refuse to contribute for no compensation when they could get a free ride on the work of others. These theorists forgot that people are people and they like to talk and do stuff. This blog, which will probably never be read, is a perfect example of that natural motivation, as are the folk heroes who distribute music in breach of copyright and in the face of immense penalties for nothing more than satisfaction or popularity.
The reasons why Facebook evolved this way are partly class-based. Again, consider music as an example. What socio-economic background is likely to lead a person to money-burning high art (hint: rich/entitled); labour-of-love indie purity (hint: middle-class/encouraged); money worshipping bling-hop (hint: poor)? Exactly. Facebook's ivy-infested background is the same one that gave us not-for-profit college radio, "uncommercial" indie music and of course blogs, all products of the margins of the man's control of the leisure time of the leisure class who have at their whim the innovation of skilled workers. As usual, perhaps because of some instinctive understanding that these services emerged from our future rulers in their youthful benevolence, the rest of us latched on as soon as we were allowed.
The problem for the man is that we are the people on whom he must rely to keep the money rolling in, particularly when the silver spenders slow down. He is happy for us to exchange lunchroom banalities taking cues from the open newspaper next to the water cooler while the ads do their subliminal work. He does not want us re-forming micro- and macro-communities, re-learning friendship and, most importantly, engaging in real play. The advertisements in the sidebars, the "My First Networking" vibe and the wealth of demographic data are no solace when Facebook users are essentially doing something totally uncommercial at the level of loitering (the most noble crime).
Of course, it is a matter of time before the man applies his usual war tactic of crushing the enemy using a working-class army (careerist bands and unemployed depressives trying to "EARN BIG BUCK$ FROM HOME!" by distributing gigabytes of marketing material) before forming a new kingdom from the usual big businesses jostling for a slice of the pie. The rot has already begun from within - have you noticed more and more of your friends acting like online Amway salespeople?
This is no problem. It is healthy to move on and it is imperative to do so before Facebook becomes a sanctioned part of consumer leisure time and another method of mind-control. At best, we can hope that the friendships rekindled and the joy discovered in "wasting" time will ripple on into the world at large.
