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Stanely Mushava Literature Today
Book: The Facebook Effect
Author: David Kirkpatrick
Publisher: Simon and Schuster (2010)
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0211-4

Hands up whose planet is not the browser? Chances are you will also be signed up for this global netizenship on our next count.

For better, for worse, the world has been reconfigured around the Internet.

Hard times squeeze other industries to fatten Silicon Valley, now the interface and foremost industrial estate of the global village.

And the social network is, no doubt, the web-wide metropolis.

Predictably, not everyone is impressed with the mass migration to virtual space.

For the less impressed the social network is more phatic than social and the digital revolution more delusional than revolutionary.

Ironically, they have to pin up their scepticism to the digital public square if it is to find its way to the largest audience possible.

Now, Facebook seems to be the coolest fad in the metropolis, with over 1.3 billion active users, most of them home to virtually hosted communities of interest, geography and commerce.

Whatever criticism can be levelled against the social network, (and there is a lot, really) it is impossible to assign a demographic prefix to it.

Maybe astrophysics need to be updated for the information age. Stephen Hawking’s Theory of Everything can only be a fraction (four fifths, at least) in the absence of a cybermagnetical concept of the world.

Highly regarded technology reporter David Kirkpatrick’s book “The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World” attempts as much.

He shares the story of how a college dropout turned his dorm application into a global dragnet.

The account of the creation and accession of Facebook is given with detailed research for which Kirkpatrick acknowledges the cooperation of the company’s executives.

“The Facebook Effect” provides insight into the work ethic of Mark Zuckerberg, the Harvard nerd who, at 19, started Facebook along with Dustin Moskovits, Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes and Andrew McCollun.

Its biographical thread is a league apart from the sensational set, “The Social Network” and “Accidental Billionaires: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal.”

Zuckerberg raps the set, in a Computer Science Museum interview, as the fictional emanations of people who cannot get their heads around the idea someone can develop things because he loves to not because he wants to get girls.

Mindful of the Zuckerberg story, Zimbabwean youths will do well to stop making the state of the economy an excuse for purposelessness. Gaps in industry mean more business ideas, not necessarily less jobs.

ICT startups require more creativity than capital. There is no reason why young Zimbabweans are not rising to the occasion.

Most of our industries, particularly music and literature, are doing the right thing in the wrong era, precisely because no indigenous digiterati is on point with solutions.

Although “The Facebook Effect” was only written a few years ago, most of the statistics it presents have more than doubled, thanks to Facebook’s incredible growth mojo.

For example, Facebook was approaching 500 million users in 2010. As at 31 December last year, it had more than 1.39 billion active users.

Facebook has vastly altered social interaction, communication, marketing, democratic deliberation and individual sense of identity.

However, Kirkpatrick observes that the social network is not altogether a novelty. Zuckerberg is its heir not its author.

Minitel, launched by the French postal service in 1982, AOL incepted under a different name in 1985 and Prodigy started in 1988 were trailblazers. The services allowed people quasi-anonymous usernames for online interaction.

The email and instant-messaging services took interactivity further.

TheGlobe.com, Geocities, and Tripod enabled users to set up a personal home page that could in some cases link to pages created by other members.

In the mid-90s, Match.com provided a public board for pinning personal information while Classmates.com allowed users identified by their actual names to locate former school friends.

“The era of modern social networking finally began in early 1997. That’s when a New York-based start-up called sixdegrees.com inaugurated a breakthrough service based on real names,” narrates Kirkpatrick.

While Facebook built on this, its success is in its conscious solicitation of people to be the centre of its service – one frame of business that guarantees utility and sustainability.

Zuckerberg articulates this dynamic in his Computer History Museum interview: “Virtually every important service that you use online and eventually offline too is going to be remade and designed from bottom-up with people at the centre.”

He compares Facebook to Wikipedia based on this dynamic. Wikipedia, for making people the centre and power of its service, out-tops rival encyclopedias.

More than just a dump site of information, it is a potentially worldwide community. The information can be copied but not the community.

This people-centredness Zuckerberg attributes as the basis of his own company’s success.

Now, Facebook has taken a lot of flak for pushing the envelope on privacy.

Having every basic personal detail pinned up for public glare is not exactly a comfortable idea for some, this before even considering opening oneself up to potentially ill-meaning surveillance, criminal or political.

While Facebook is apparently on autopilot where value systems are concerned, Zuckerberg has serious opinions as to how people should communicate identity.

Zuckerberg, Kirkpatrick observes, emphatically shot down a suggestion for users to operate two separate profiles, one professional; the other, social.

For Zuckerberg, it should be one individual, one identity.

Integrity consists in maintaining that.

“The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly,” Zuckerberg says.

“Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity,” he says, remarking elsewhere that “the level of transparency the world has now won’t support having two identities for a person.”

Perhaps that explains his unCEO-like dress code.

Zuckerberg believes that open acknowledgement of who we are and consistent behaviour among all spheres of contact will help create a healthier society.

The digitally powered move to more transparency and openness is, for him, a way to guarantee accountability, hence responsible behaviour.

This ties in with the Facebook ripple in politics.

When “The Facebook Effect” was published, Barack Obama’s electoral victory had been attributed to his adept exploitation of the social network.

But Facebook was within a year of earning credit for facilitating the Arab Spring.

With the benefit of hindsight, some have played down as overrated the democratic agency of the social network.

A New African cover story, “Anatomy of Democracy,” observes the failure of Egypt to have an organised semblance of democracy subsequent to the now famous Facebook Revolution.

Morozov’s “Net Delusion” also suggests a speed trap for what he counts to be inordinate optimism in web-powered democratisation, citing Iran’s prematurely hyped Twitter Revolution.

Occupation with the sensational at the expense of the substantial, nuisance over news, ethical bankruptcy among a vast segment of the netizenry, unequal penetration of digital tools, failure to transpose civic participation from virtual space to the real world and political circumspection could explain why there is little to post home as far as results are concerned.

All the same, the power of the people remains a strong conviction of Zuckerberg.

“I mean, picture yourself – you’re in college,” he tells Kirkpatrick. “You spend all your time studying theories… Very idealistic… So a lot of these values are just around you: the world should be governed by people. A lot of that stuff has really shaped me. And this is a lot of what Facebook is pushing for,” Zuckerberg says.

Kirkpatrick repeatedly makes a case for Zuckerberg’s commitment to growth, precisely openness, ahead of profit.

“For most people there are plateaus and milestones you hit and it allows you to sit back and celebrate and feel a sense of accomplishment. That doesn’t really exist for Mark,” a Facebook executive tells Kirkpatrick.