The real lesson to be learned from the recent Facebook Terms of Service Change (and reversal) is that people have too much time on their hands… and a lot of that comes from not paying attention in the first place. Participation in Facebook is a kind of digital sharecropping to be sure, but sharecropping isn’t necessarily a bad thing… in the digital form it allows people to perform actions in–and derive value from–a system that they can’t or won’t create and maintain for themselves.
Facebook provides a complex system from which many, like myself, derive great value. That value is different for different users: I stay out of Facebook itself as much as I can and use it primarily for the connectedness; others use the system as a social hub the same way others use their blogs. Either way we cede certain rights to our content for the power, flexibility and convenience of the system. The missing ingredient here isn’t less control by Facebook over distributed content, but more education of users regarding the reality of choosing a sharecropping system vs. one they have more control over. And understanding that, in reality, even if they avoid all of those distributed systems and avoid Facebook and Twitter and MySpace, that the minute they put it out there it is no longer under their control, even in the most limited of social applications.
I believe Facebook’s intent with their change to the terms of service was to recognize some realities about social network applications like theirs, particularly the fact that once your information “goes out” it is practically impossible to retrieve. The minute you publish a web feed, you’ve lost control over that content. You can alter the information in items or delete the feed itself, but that original content remains out there. Similarly, much of Facebook’s functional operations depend on (at least) the triad of the social connection between two people interacting around some kind of social object. It isn’t realistic or reasonable to expect that when a person decided to abandon the system all of their content, all of their distributed content will go with them. And by and large, people know that–consciously or intuitively. Most users of Facebook know that even if they leave, parts of their content remain: messages to others, their pics saved into other albums, their presence in a variety of Facebook apps, etc.
It seems extremely unlikely to me that Facebook intended to assert rights beyond the ones that in reality they already have, but sought to protect themselves in the event that someone didn’t understand what they were getting themselves into when they signed up. And that’s the real problem– the protest against Facebook now seems a bit feeble given that the protestors have long since given away what the now argue Facebook is stealing.
Here’s my analogy: imagine a group of people getting together and keeping all their horses on a great pasture, abundant with grass, replete with a fantastic barn and whatever else it is horses need… but a barn without any locks on the doors and a pasture with only a single strand of wire as a fence. Their horses are constantly disappearing and reappearing, some being stolen and others being borrowed, with nary a complaint. This goes on for years. Then one day a note is tacked to the side of the barn from the horse thieves, asserting that they won’t be returning the bridles and saddles from any of the horses they’ve stolen… and that’s when a protest erupts. Kind of ridiculous, no?
The Facebook protest now seems disingenuous, a loud attention-seeking “oh my” being uttered when directly confronted with something that, until then, most knew about but chose to ignore. It’s particularly disappointing when it comes from long-time users and teacher of (and with) such systems who are taking this opportunity to grandstand.
