Facebook

It's new, it's now, it's cool, learn how... everybody's on it, everybody's doing it. For some time now, we've been told you cannot build a business, find old friends or organize much of anything without the indispensable aid of corporate social media, especially Facebook and Twitter. But what if this is about as true as other stuff the supposedly wise and informed told us in recent years, like that real estate prices could be counted on to always go up? Human societies are based on lots of horizontal communication. What if corporate social media is little more than a gigantic scam to extract revenue from the otherwise ordinary communication the internet permits between groups and individuals, between people and businesses, and among communities of interest. What if corporate social media ultimately aims not to open up but to throttle and restrict those conversations to make them artificially scarce and valuable commodities. What if corporate social media's business model is to thrive on content its proprietors don't create, and to place itself between that content and prospective audiences, even to substitute itself for the web sites, email lists and media offerings of content creators?