Users get used
There’s much fuss being made about Google+ and Facebook’s ongoing determination to allow only ‘real’ names on their social networking services but much of the fuss does seem a bit naïve to me, at least in the way it’s expressed. Originally we, the users, were able to pick from a range of online products or services by paying subscriptions or by suffering advertising that the providers benefitted from – we were the customers, their main revenue source, and therefore in the most powerful position to make demands and influence the services we were offered. This relationship has been quietly reconfigured by social network providers. We are no longer the customer, we are now the product.
Most social networks offer their service free to the user but because we all know there’s no such thing as a free lunch surely the obvious question is who’s picking up the bill? Who is actually paying the millions of dollars it costs to build and maintain these data centres and networks and why are they doing it? Obviously the paying customer is now the advertiser, marketeer or corporation who want to tap the rich vein of personal information the social networks are now mining – and as the paying customer, the main revenue source, they now have the biggest influence on the services offered and not the end users. Facebook’s business is to satisfy the needs of their customer, the advertiser, and provide them with a product they’ll pay for – the product they want is reliable personal data they can use for marketing.
Of course Facebook and the others have to provide a service that users want to use, but the driving agenda here is not the needs of those users, it’s the data hunger of the real customer, the advertisers. The average Facebook user has about as much influence on the service they’re being offered as a battery hen does on the price of eggs. Facebook only has to keep their battery of hens happy enough to hang around and keep laying so they can continue to gather up the data-eggs and take them to marketeers to sell. They also have to pick out the rotten eggs, the ‘false’ or unattributable profiles and data, because they sour the mix rendering it potentially inedible to the customer. That customer will continue to crave accurate and bankable data and so Facebook and Google have to do whatever they can to maintain the supply and to convince the customer of the veracity of their data. In truth, the folks at Facebook probably couldn’t give a damn if the name you put on your profile is real or imagined – but they (have to) care that their paying customer continues to perceive that it’s legitimate.
So how do we the users really influence the service we’re offered by these data-mining corporations, for example by getting the option to use (or include) pseudonyms? We’d have to reconfigure our relationship with them back to what it once was, we’d have to become the main revenue source again instead of the product they resell. However, for many people, it may be too late for that – you can’t take your business elsewhere if they already have your data and refuse to delete it. The person calling the shots tends to be the one picking up the bill and the customer is always right – only we’re not the customer here anymore and complaining as if we are hasn’t achieved very much (yet).
Do we stop laying or start paying?
