It’s weird reading The Facebook Effect today, because already it feels like ancient history. It celebrates Facebook having 400 million users, when today it has two billion. It was written before the iPhone became the world’s dominant computing platform, so the many references to PCs feels odd. There are bromides like, “Facebook is bringing the world together,” which may not even be meaningful enough to evaluate as true or false. Yet many sections still seem relevant and fortuitous. The suspenseful sections about early fundraising are about humans, incentives, and game theory. The tension between short and long term remain in terms of both companies and individual lives. Others could be listed.
To me Facebook is still kind of boring; I don’t think people’s real selves, to the extent there are such things, get posted often, and when they do, the result is often embarrassment. And I find that the more I see of people on the site, the less I like them, implying that maybe knowing “more,” or more without context, isn’t so good. Yet its sheer popularity is clear, and I expect questions about what that means to persist, maybe throughout my life. “Generation Why?” is one good take in the genre but likely not the last.
The Facebook Effect doesn’t much answer that question and it probably can’t. The “why?” is embodied in millions if not billions of individual choices. But The Facebook Effect has lots of insight, as long as one’s willing to tolerate sentences like, “Facebook is bringing the world together.” For example, if you’re somewhat into photography, like I am, you’ve probably seen people debating various issues around megapixel count, lens quality, and image quality. Except no one cares about photo or picture quality / resolution. People only care about their friends and people they know. These may seem like dumb assertions but Facebook reveals evidence for them.
In 2006 Facebook introduced photo tagging, and one decision “the photos team” was particularly important:
They took a gamble and decided to compress photos into much smaller digital files, so that when they appeared on Facebook they were significantly lower in resolution than the originals. That meant they would upload faster, so users could select a number of photos on their PC and see them online within minutes.
Would people accept low-resolution photos? Would they use the tags?
The short answer to both is “yes.” People don’t give a damn about resolution. They care about the photo’s semiotics: “Ordinary photos had become, in effect, more articulate. They conveyed a casual message. When it was tagged, a photo on Facebook expressed and elaborated on your friend relationships.” Outside of very small sites occupied by photo nerds, like 500px, the photo isn’t about the perceive image quality; it’s about what the photo depicts of the person (and it’s almost always a person) in it. We import our groupishness from real life to photos. Which seems totally obvious now to everyone except people on photography forums yet wasn’t so obvious during Facebook’s earlier forms.
People also relentlessly use Facebook to… criticize Facebook: “As with any Facebook controversy, the viral distribution tools of Facebook itself were used against it.” But in the crucial terms of exit, voice, and loyalty, almost no one exits. Which tells Facebook as much as it needs to know. The company is a case study in stated vesus revealed preferences. However much people may say they revile, distrust, or dislike the company, or however much they may acknowledge that most of Facebook is a time waste, they keep going back. We have clichés like “actions speak louder than words” for a reason.
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