Dita Parker

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Love it or leave it

What's that smell? Can you smell that? Does anyone else smell megamarketing? Anyone feeling like a marketing tool? Or simply a tool?

At the risk of sounding cynical, I submit to you that most everybody is selling something on Facebook. Their brand, their personality, their view of the world, their passions, something that says something about who they are and what they're all about. That's fine by me. But from the very beginning I've felt that Fb is something someone created in their own image and everybody else has to adjust their image accordingly. Fit the circumstances, make do. It's the Fb way or the highway.

Now the highway is growing in width. It's growing in reach and going places it hasn't gone before. And we're being taken along for the ride. For a ride. At least that's how many users feel like. That if it's been hard to control your privacy from the get-go, it's becoming almost impossible. Will every page you visit somehow connected to Fb soon follow, record and telegraph your every move, automatically, unless you take certain steps to prevent it from doing so? What if you forget? Forget to log out, clear cache, cookies, history? Exit browser? Switch browser? Switch computer? It makes me feel quite paranoid just thinking about it.

Will all be revealed? I don't know of a soul who would want to share every single click with the rest of the world. What's the matter? Got something to hide? Oh everyone has their guilty pleasures and morbid fascinations. And everyone has a right to privacy. And yes, some have connections, secrets and associations to safeguard. They shouldn't be public by default. My toys aren't your property even if you own the playground.

I probably got it all wrong. Misconstrued poor Mark, misunderstood the altruistic intentions, blew the marketing thing way out of proportion. But you know what I'm thinking? If it's not like that, why does it feel like that? Should innocent fun and sincere networking make you uneasy, feel like this much work, like trouble? Wanna know what else I think? I'm gonna say it anyway. That bearded German might have missed the mark every now and then but he was on to something with the reification stuff. We'll not only sell our brand on Fb. That ship has already sailed. We'll each and every one of us be a fleet marketing an armada of stuff without thinking twice about it. (I for one can't stop thinking about it). And we're gonna do it for free.

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