Here is an interesting article by Tom Hodgkinson on the personal and social implications of Facebook. Most interesting is a review of the politics of the people behind Facebook.
It is becoming clear that political and philosophical agendas, often of an extreme form, are driving many the online applications making headlines today. For other examples, see Valerie Steeves recent presentation on children’s’ online playgrounds.
Facebook is a well-funded project, and the people behind the funding, a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearly thought out ideology that they are hoping to spread around the world. Facebook is one manifestation of this ideology. Like PayPal before it, it is a social experiment, an expression of a particular kind of neoconservative libertarianism. On Facebook, you can be free to be who you want to be, as long as you don’t mind being bombarded by adverts for the world’s biggest brands. As with PayPal, national boundaries are a thing of the past.