Boleslav the Social Media Critic

I will now be posting my articles at Walt Whitman, where, as their Internet Critic, I will be playing the role of bitter old man wandering amongst the free-love hippies. Find me at http://walt.whit.mn/, although I might post the occasional self-promotional item here. And I shall continue to twitter apace.

Daniel Gulati makes significant progress illustrating how Facebook destroys our will live:

Since our Facebook profiles are self-curated, users have a strong bias toward sharing positive milestones and avoid mentioning the more humdrum, negative parts of their lives. Accomplishments like, “Hey, I just got promoted!” or “Take a look at my new sports car,” trump sharing the intricacies of our daily commute or a life-shattering divorce. This creates an online culture of competition and comparison. One interviewee even remarked, “I’m pretty competitive by nature, so when my close friends post good news, I always try and one-up them.”

I agree. If one of my competing feudal lords builds a keep bigger than the one in my castle, I grow restless with envy, even though I have two golden chamber pots for every chamber maid.

However, there is a compounding effect present within this phenomenon which Gulati does not do enough to single out. Let’s assume that you have at least 200 Facebook friends, the “Mendoza Line” for basic social skills. Odds are that at least two or three of those friends will be on vacation at any given time, posting check-ins from rollercoasters or pictures atop tibetan mountains. Since these pictures are more interesting than your other friends complaining about their shitty days, they get more likes and comments and are promoted by Facebook’s Edgerank to the top of your newsfeed. Thus, every time you log into Facebook, it seems like the rest of the world is constantly on vacation, while you are stuck slaving away. It is literally impossible to keep up with this, even if you have some perspective on what people tend to post or not post online.

The distinction is important. This is not a simple case of “keeping up with the Joneses,” where you’re jealous of the sports car your douchebag neighbor drives (in my case, it’s the Duke of Prussia’s bitchin’ hansom cab pulled by two coal-black steeds). Instead, you are keeping up with the Megagolem amalgamated from all the Joneses, unable to realize that not only, as Gulati puts it, are people hyper-sharing their happiness, but that your brain is combining these updates into a single middle finger lifted by the rest of your friendverse towards your boring, cube-bound existence.

TLimiting your Facebook access won’t help, because the best updates will still be there, waiting to depress you, whenever you log in. The solution, I think, is to severely restrict who shows up in your newsfeed, maybe to only 20 – 50 people that you care about (or who post interesting updates). Then goliath won’t seem so overwhelming, and you will be spared a constant stream of enviable updates from tropical locales.

Very dead, says Farhad Manjoo at Slate:

Why am I so sure that Google+ can’t be saved? Because there’s no way to correct Google’s central failure. Back when companies were clamoring to create brand pages on the network—or users were looking to create profiles with pseudonyms, another phenomenon that Google shut down—the company ought to have acceded to its users’ wishes and accommodated them. If Google wasn’t ready for brand pages in the summer, it shouldn’t have launched Google+ until it was. And this advice goes more generally—by failing to offer people a reason to keep coming back to the site every day, Google+ made a bad first impression. And in the social-networking business, a bad first impression spells death.

I know this sounds unfair: Facebook had years to add all the features it has now, so why should we demand that Google create a perfect substitute at launch time? But that’s just the thing—taking on a behemoth like Facebook is an unfair fight. Google seems to think about its social network in the same way it thinks of any other kind of software—as a “product” that it can design step-by-step, starting with a small number of innovative features and working up from there.

I agree that Google+ is idling without those crucial, must-have new features. I disagree that it’s too late to get them. Google happens to have one of the best, most pervasive social networks already under its control: Gmail. With its threaded conversations, integrated video, and the digital opiate of Gchat, Gmail fits virtually every definition of a social network, and its adoption by a certain range of generations is near universal. It can keep Google+ one click away from Gmail for as long as it wants. All it has to do is wait until it gets the unique and irresistible features that Manjoo is waiting for before it gives us Gmailers another push to try it out. And since we all circled up during the launch orgy, we’ll be set to immediately test whatever that feature is with our friends.

I doubt Google has consciously planned this out. A suitable analogy may be the FOX network. One might say that in its early days, without much quality programming, FOX had no hope of capturing the large audience that established cable networks held. But FOX was already there, on basic cable; as soon as it got better programming, it wasn’t all that difficult to push viewers over. Google+ is there, on Gmail, the equivalent of internet basic cable. It’s too early to say that they’ll never make it worth our while to change the channel back.

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