![\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3AFacebook_on_Nasdaq.jpeg;](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/533\/2017\/07\/Facebook_on_Nasdaq.jpeg\")
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Back in college, I was acquainted with a Star Trek fan and computer science major who combined both of those interests by running a BBS from his dorm room. \u00a0I remember this only vaguely, but it seems to me that he lived in a single room, so had no roommate to complain, and would, every night, connect the phone to the modem so that BBS users could dial in to his computer to access the BBS itself.<\/p>\n
It was, so far as I understand, a purely non-profit effort. \u00a0Perhaps he was funding college by earning money in the form of some kind of subscription, or getting a monthly check from the Star Trek fan club. \u00a0I don\u2019t know. \u00a0But it seems to me that at the time, there were plenty of such forums, where like-minded people gathered.<\/p>\n
The nearest descendant to the BBS would be, I imagine, the special-interest sites with forums of all kinds. \u00a0There are, yes, Star Trek forums<\/a>, and forums for Catholics<\/a>, and forums for expectant moms<\/a>, and forums for expats in Germany<\/a>. \u00a0And the general model seems to be that they pay their expenses, or perhaps earn a modest profit for the site owner, via moderate amounts of advertising.<\/p>\n But Facebook provides universality. \u00a0Your group of facebook-friends creates an instant, customized forum. \u00a0And facebook groups provide the same ability to chat with like-minded people, but far more accessibly, whether it\u2019s a large group like \u201cTea Party Conservatives for Freedom\u201d (which, yes, is chock full of genuinely fake news; I don\u2019t recommend them), or a small group like the local Boy Scout troop families. \u00a0And you can find the groups you want, and they can find you. \u00a0And especially for us homebodies and introverts and all-around nerds, they\u2019re great, and provide some semblance of a social life that would otherwise be much more limited.<\/p>\n It\u2019s great.<\/p>\n But there are costs.<\/p>\n Facebook is, after all, a corporation, and one keen on increasing its profit margin.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s a big plus \u2013but there\u2019s a cost: \u00a0it\u2019s a corporation. \u00a0Users are subject to increasing quantities of advertising. \u00a0As blogger Adam Frey\u00a0writes in\u00a0\u201cSocial Media is Turning Us All Into Billboards<\/a>,\u201d<\/p>\n Remember back when we all first got into social media in the last decade? It was a great way to catch up with people. Suddenly, the doors were open to communicate with high school and college classmates we hadn\u2019t talked to in years. If you\u2019re approaching 40 and geographically separated from your hometown, you probably wondered whatever happened to this guy and that girl and didn\u2019t feel like waiting for the next class reunion. Facebook seemed to fix all that. Suddenly, you could see who was getting married, having kids, getting divorced, going on vacation. People you hadn\u2019t seen in years were suddenly right there at your fingertips, and it was great.<\/p>\n Something\u2019s changed. Have you noticed? Seriously, look at your Facebook or your Twitter and see how many vacation or cat photos you still have. If you\u2019re like me, your Facebook is full of\u2026advertisements. Some are overt, some are a little more covert. There\u2019s a lot of ads for this movie or that TV show or concert or product or whatever. Sometimes it\u2019s our own fault: we were excited for Star Wars and \u201cliked\u201d their page and now we\u2019ve got lots of Star Wars crap in our feeds. Oftentimes it\u2019s a little more subtle. Your friend likes Game of Thrones even though you don\u2019t, so you get a notification that your ex-coworker in your friends list likes the show and Facebook makes a point of reminding you of that fact. Or maybe it\u2019s outright manipulation: your friend belongs to one or several Walking Dead fan pages and they\u2019re constantly sharing a funny meme or an article about the show as if to show you and everyone else that the show is great.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Facebook wants us to spend ever greater periods of time on the site, not for any grand social good, but so that they can sell more advertising, and sell those advertisements for more money. \u00a0Heck, as a blogger who has a facebook page (which I do a very inconsistent job of keeping current), Facebook keeps prodding me to advertise my facebook page. \u00a0Frey recommends unfollowing pages and using the options Facebook has to hide ads, but I suppose I\u2019ve always assumed that Facebook is going to give you a fixed number of ads no matter what, so that you can\u2019t really escape this. \u00a0(Though that\u2019s not to say I won\u2019t try this, and see what happens.)<\/p>\n Now, did Facebook have<\/em> to develop as a money-hungry entity? \u00a0There are non-profit major websites out there, or at least one that I can think of: \u00a0wikipedia. But Zuckerberg and his pals weren\u2019t interested in building a platform for community and socialization as a public service, they were interested in making big piles of money, and, let\u2019s face it, the latter is a more powerful motivator than the former.<\/p>\n And even if they were nominally a non-profit entity, they\u2019d still\u00a0effectively be a monopoly, due to the very powerful network effect.<\/p>\n A recent\u00a0BusinessWeek<\/a>\u00a0article cites an eyepopping statistic:<\/p>\n [Researcher Jonathan] Taplin pegs Facebook\u2019s share of mobile social media traffic, including the company\u2019s WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram units, at 75 percent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Figures are equally dramatic for other giants:<\/p>\n Alphabet Inc.\u2019s Google gets about 77 percent of U.S. search advertising revenue. Google and Facebook Inc. together control about 56 percent of the mobile ad market. Amazon takes about 70 percent of all e-book sales and 30 percent of all U.S. e-commerce.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Although actually it surprises me that 30% of e-books are sold outside of Amazon, and I also wish they\u2019d included e-bay on their list.)<\/p>\n And as a quasi-monopoly, Facebook has an enormous amount of power. \u00a0Even if we don\u2019t pay money to use the site, it can collect our data, show as many ads as it likes, dictate terms for advertisers, favor one political point of view over another, and so on. \u00a0Just yesterday there were reports<\/a> that they had blocked a number of Catholic pages, and the explanation<\/a>, that they had all simultaneously gotten caught up in spam detection, left some users skeptical. \u00a0Although the pages were restored, and an anti-Catholic agenda does seem unlikely to me, it does highlight the enormous power that Facebook has.<\/p>\n