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Alyson Shontell writes at Business Insider that Peter Thiel, a longtime friend and mentor of Mark Zuckerberg, recently gave a talk that imagined what a Zuckerberg-less world would look like and it's pretty grim. According to Thiel, the web would be a not-very-safe, not-very-fun, totally anonymous place and it wouldn't be baked into our social lives at all. "You can imagine an alternate history in which people don't become comfortable using [the Internet] to meet their friends and family," said Thiel. "It could have remained a wild and dangerous place — maybe an exciting place to escape for a while, but maybe not part of your daily social life. Facebook has led a long and subtle but deeply important trend away from mob behavior, away from the kind of nastiness that hides behind masks and rules in shadow."
Thiel added that without Zuckerberg, information would be at the center of the Internet, not people. "If you could go back to the first years of the new millennium in Silicon Valley, you would hear a lot more about 'information' than about people. 'Organizing the world's information' was the idea of the age," Thiel told the audience. "While the implicit goal of computer science had been to build a machine that can do everything a human can do, Facebook has made software that only makes sense as a tool for humans. Its success in doing so has helped to gradually orient software developers away from the mania for replacing people." Thiel made his speech while Zuckerberg received the first-ever Axel Springer Award for being an outstanding entrepreneur (Google translation) in Berlin. Thiel and Zuckerberg have known each other for a long time and Thiel was an angel investor in Facebook who invested $500,000 in Facebook in 2004 and cashed out in 2012 for $1 billion.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday February 29 2016, @02:21PM
Facebook (as with any online tool) isn't actually about people at all. It's about personas, who may or may not bear much relationship to people that share the same name. Facebook as a company would sure like them to be exactly the same thing, because that improves the quality of the advertising targeting that is their entire business model, but they are most definitely not.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Funny) by meustrus on Monday February 29 2016, @05:40PM
The whole internet is about personas. The problem with Facebook is that you get exactly one with no chance to reinvent it ever, and everybody who ever knew you in real life can show up to harass you for it.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 01 2016, @02:18AM
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." --Kurt Vonnegut
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday March 01 2016, @11:00AM
I'll immediately start pretending to be filthy rich! ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday March 01 2016, @03:20AM
I think you're right about that: social media presences are constructs. I know I treat mine that way. If you don't have a social media presence you're discounted now, but you can certainly be selective about the persona you project. Years ago I read a novel by Heinlein, Friday I think it was, wherein the protagonist argued the merits of using cash versus credit in a world that tracked you intimately from your purchase history, and how having no purchase history (because you paid cash for everything) was worse than having a full, true purchase history because you paid for everything with credit. The trick was to leave a trail that you want others to find to conceal what you actually do. It made a lot of sense to me then and I've never forgotten it, and I find it's quite applicable to this age we find ourselves in now.
Create the persona you want others to see. People who really know you, know you. For all others, it's putting your best foot forward.
Washington DC delenda est.