Facebook connects billions of people.
That’s what makes it a vehicle for democratic voices like we’ve never had before. Comments on this post have ranged from mocking the equivalence I observed between deleting Facebook and walking away from democracy to observing how deleting social media will give so much time back to how we should try living in the real world instead. I figured I’d follow up here with a general comment to further explain my thoughts.
There’s no such thing as closing a Pandora’s box (or jar, as Stephen Fry might remind us) once it is opened.
Internet, particularly broadband, brought massive scale to pornography. Yet, it is fundamental to our living today — so much so that we cannot imagine a world without it, especially in the developed world.
A social graph has already partially replaced the fabric of connectivity for the Internet. There’s no running away from it. Sure, it provides scale to gamification of just about everything, including democracy. But the answer is not to run away from it.
We delete our social graphs and do what? If we believe that grassroots voice propagation will be an at scale replacement for social graph based propagation, we would be stupid.
Part of the problem is that, as adults, we fight change. We’re so slow to embrace it that multiple generations go by sometimes before the change is fully harnessed. Propagating voices via the social graphs is the future. Whether we like it or not.
And until we have another social graph that is at least half as connected as Facebook’s, this is the best we got to make our voices heard.
If we haven’t heard, democracy is experiencing a dangerous retreat.
Nothing other than people’s voices can save this. If we are not working on creating a safer, better social graph, we should at least be using the one we got to propagate the right voices.
Mark Gubarev, Light, James Moneti, Chris Witko, SooSin, Tiberiu Szocs-Mihai — I appreciate you all taking the time to share your thoughts.
