Last night was Lost's. Not only for devotees — who dominated Twitter's trending topics — but among apostates and abstainers, too, Sunday evening conversation was rife with tweets like, "really jealous of everyone doing LOST final parties... i've never even seen one episode. i wanna be a part of it."
But interestingly, a third camp emerged — shall we call them the Others? — who bemoaned the giant ash cloud lingering over their feeds.
"Twitter is useless tonight," tweeted Nick Bilton, the technology writer for the New York Times. "I've never watched Lost & don't plan to start now."
Then, Bilton linked to an article of his, "Twitter Needs More Filters." Irked by his friends and followers' migration to SXSW, but speaking also of "the Superbowl, Oscars, Michael Jackson's death and the Tiger Woods scandal," Bilton complained, "Some people just aren't interested, yet if you want to use Twitter, you can't look away — you are forced to rubberneck."
Rubberneckers, of course, are those who gawk at often-horrifying roadside scenes, and thus slow up traffic for the rest of us. Rubberneckers also are the type of people Virginia Heffernan wrote of last week, in her fascinating piece on the web's incipient suburbanization. Building on earlier research that the social web is actually reifying race and class divisions, Heffernan wrote that the iPad's advent signals "a way out, an orderly suburb that lets you sample the Web's opportunities without having to mix with the riffraff." Facebook's walled garden, Apple's app store, and any number of behind-paywall sites represent, to Heffernan, the "online equivalent of white flight."
And rubberneckers are also the kind of people Mark Zuckerberg thought made up his clientele, but actually do not. Writing in today's Washington Post, Zuckerberg explained, "Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark." On Facebook, less can be more; sometimes we'd rather conform than form our own settings. Like Heffernan's suburban migrators, Zuckerberg's user base would just as soon avoid the highway clutter, and speed along to suburbia untrammeled.
All of which makes Bilton's plea for filtering on Twitter more germane. Take a look at the methods available for filtering. There's Filttr, which allows you to "blacklist" and "whitelist" certain keywords; there's MicroPlaza, which isolates popular links among the people you're following; and TweetDeck, which can filter out people, words or sources "until physically removed." Heffernan's warning of "virtual redlining" starts to ring clear.
Remember that earlier this year, it was Bilton who championed Twitter over George Packer's objections. Twitter represented a "metamorphosis" for Bilton, after which "everyone will benefit from the information moving swiftly around the globe." How to reconcile that sweeping, ubiquitous and unfettered vision with Bilton's tweet last night, that the "beauty of Twitter" — and the social web in general — "is the ability to get granular content & personalized info. culled by type of people/genres I follow."
When Bilton and Zuckerberg talk about "granular," they are approaching the issue from opposite ends. But the Facebook creator who wanted his users to share more and the Twitter user who wants to be shared with less are two sides of the same coin. Facebook's simpler privacy controls and Twitter's impending filters reach for the same goal: a private garden, secluded from city noise, nosy neighbors and the stories and collisions we would rather not see. In other words, the suburbs.
Follow Rob Fishman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rbfishman
The problems haven't changed, only the method of transmission.
Personally I see that the FB privacy options are extensive, but with my own filters such as "Plausible Deniability" for certain areas of my life, or other filters that protect part of the population on my page from things that would probably not sit well with each of them personally (but can be grouped generally) I can control the input on the validity of my garden. It is after all MY garden and I am quite happy with it. I'd like to keep the relationships I have without going to battle over personality differences when I rather enjoy the diversity of the flowers and greenery that they offer.
People don't want to "work together". They want to compete the bejezzus out of each other. It's not about being all "social" -- it's a bunch of people putting up individual billboards, competing for attention.
It's a Personal Marketplace! It's not You Tube. I don't give a darn about YOU. It's...it's.....
ME MEDIA!
It's ME ME (ME)DIA!
It's for me, by me and about me! I want what I want delivered to me. And if I put it out there, I want you to read it! When did all of sudden Mao Tse Tung take charge of our labels for computer stuff and start making everything the People's Network.
No.
It's Me. Or if it's you. It's still Me...from your perspective. Which I don't give a tinkers cuss about!
Considering the links put in by the author of this article and social media's fabled "reputation management" software that alerts people and companies when they are mentioned, one wonders why the principals and other online media experts don't comment on this very important conversation. This is why social media is so disconnected. Where are the thought leaders like the Jay Rosens of NYU and the David Weinbergers from Harvard's Berkman Center. This is a story that old school journalists would say needs legs. But apparently people care more about Palin and Maddow yakking than watching their privacy turn into 1984 2.0.
Boyd and Hargittai could tweet some kids at Sidwell Friends, where Washington's political class pay $45,000 a year to educate their children, and see how many of those elite kids can actually define what reification means. The wall is there so they don't hit the wall in real life.
Just because its free and anybody can join doesn't mean that Dunbar's curve casts a wide enough net to appeal beyond the race, class and culture represented by Mark Zuckerberg and others who concepted Facebook. They didn't ask you what you wanted, they gave you what they thought you needed. And each time a government like Canada raises objections on the part of its citizens, there is a negotiation and a tactical retreat and then another advance two. The onus is always on the user, not Facebook.
Steve Rubel and his boss Richard Edelman see public relations at the new journalism and Twitter as its conduit for buzz. But Twitter is as much of an elite information class as the Soviet nomenklatura was and behaves similarly. Vladimir Posner, who ran the Kremlin's pre-internet version of socialist media, runs a nice French restaurant in Moscow and can tell you what information elites are all about. It's not free, but its open to anybody.
That said, a single location where I can set clearly defined Privacy settings in Facebook would be great. I hate that the Privacy settings are hidden all over the place and Facebook regularly messes with your settings without letting you know.
From soccer moms to Christian dads, lovelorn Japanese teens, Eastern bloc gamers, retired Web surfers, inner-city partiers, rural partiers and more... what an awesome web the world weaves!
Frankly, I don't tweet much. I read a lot but post less. It's also cuz I spend too much time on Facebook. I should balance them more.