The New York Times published an article today called “Facebook at 5: Is it Growing Up Too Fast?” Like many recent articles about Facebook, it explored the meteoric rise of the site, its exponential expansion into the adult community beyond its foundational college audience, and the current controversial changes to policy and layout.
But the article had a key quote that cuts to the heart of FacebookWatch’s purpose.
“It’s not a democracy,” Mr. Cox says of his company’s relationship with users. “We are here to build an Internet medium for communicating and we think we have enough perspective to do that and be caretakers of that vision.”
No one thinks that Facebook is a government, and no one is asking that Facebook require a quorum before it can go ahead with any corporate policy. However, Mr. Cox is fundamentally mistaken both about the needs of users and what Facebook’s response should be.
danah boyd, in her insightful dissertation, outlined how Friendster was repurposed by its users who created “Fakesters” to advertise their bands and businesses. She identifies Friendster’s habitual quashing of the Fakesters as one of the primary reasons that people were driven from the site. The users had an idea of the social utility they wanted Friendster to serve, and Friendster did not allow them to meet their goals. Similarly, users have a similar idea of what they’d like Facebook to do. People use Facebook for very specific social purposes, and this new design has made it more difficult for people to use Facebook.
That is the root of the anger – not that Facebook has done something without consulting its users, but that Facebook has done something that gets in the way of what its users want to do, and now ignores their demands because they can.
But Cox is right. Facebook is not only not a democracy – it cannot be, as long as users do not have a way to effectively voice their complaints. Facebook cannot respond to the demands of the market if the participants in that market cannot make themselves heard.
Join the conversation at FacebookWatch. What should we, the users of Facebook, do to make ourselves heard – and perhaps more importantly, to make Facebook listen to us?