Facebook's Limitations, RLST 245

Zadie Smith is a Human 1.0, as she says in her article "Generation Why?". And she feels surrounded by Human 2.0s as they scamper to utilize the social network of Facebook while she feels antiquated and behind the times and trends. But for all her curmudgeonly attitude towards Facebook, she makes a valid point in highlighting a major flaw in Facebook itself.

To begin with, she makes a statement remarkably similar to McLuhan's "The medium is the message". She says "Different software embeds different philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible" (Smith, 8). Here she makes it clear that software such as Facebook are coded in such a way that it carries with it the biases and shortcomings of its human programmers. Naturally, she looks straight to Mark Zuckerberg to find these biases. She points out that during Facebook's turbulent inception, Zuckerberg was a college student, with preoccupations of success, popularity, power, sex, and so on. Thus she concludes that these preoccupations likely influenced the coding of the functions of Facebook. And even with a simple glance, it's easy to see what she's talking about. Facebook loves to post activities as if they are triumphs of the poster, the "like" button, creating and moderating groups, gender identity, sexual orientation, relationship status, all these these frame Facebook as a site that often limits itself to those concepts.

So here we arrive at the crux of the issue Smith has with Facebook, not that online social networking is inherently inferior or even dysfunctional for human interaction, but just that Facebook is limited and biased in its scope of how it's structured. And here I find myself agreeing with Smith. For example, is it appropriate that Facebook has only a "like" button without a "dislike" button or "sympathy" button? Why does Facebook have ways for us to announce our triumphs, but lacks good ways to allow us to communicate troubled times without seeming to disrupt the constant feed of positive or funny posts? Why isn't it easier to choose who sees our relationships status, our gender identity, or our sexual orientation?

In this way, Smith highlights the issues of Facebook, but in so doing only reinforces the ways it needs to excel and innovate and improve in order to better network people on the internet. Because regardless of the preferences of Human 1.0s, even the Human 2.0s are ready for an upgrade.