David Fincher\'s the Social Network

¶ … David Fincher's the Social Network (2010) illustrate contemporary understandings of intimacy

Facebook and privacy

The birth of Facebook changed commonly-held notions of privacy with lightening speed. Now privacy is not just a right: it is also a setting. On one hand, people can choose to 'share' on Facebook. No one is required to make confessions online. But the apparently anonymous nature of the online format tends to invite more disclosure than takes place face-to-face. Also, because people must identify themselves by their real identities to fully participate in the Facebook community (which often revolves around renewing old acquaintances from high school and college) there is a greater risk of having one's privacy compromised. There is a constant trade-off between the valuable social interactions provided by Facebook with the need to protect one's privacy.

Advertisers can glean more information about a Facebook poster's age and interests -- as can potential employers. "The consensus seems to be that the development of interactive media and of computer processing and storage power enable the increasing economic exploitation of comprehensive forms of consumer monitoring" (Andrejevic 2002: 231) According to the movie The Social Network, at first no one believed that Facebook would 'work' because no one would be willing to share their intimate lives in such a public forum (Denby 2010). But personal privacy as a concept is culturally mutable, and constantly changing, as manifested in the creation of a 'private sphere,' separate from work, which did not exist before the modern industrial revolution.

Technology has already torn down the impermeable barrier between work and home -- now people are expected to check their emails and to do work from home computers, in a manner that connects them to the office 24/7 that could not have existed before the World Wide Web. Facebook has torn down notions of privacy regarding what is acceptable to share with a wide circle of 'friends.' There is often an ironic war of surveillance -- employers engage in surveillance of worker's Internet-surfing habits to encourage productivity, for example, while workers fight to post on Facebook while they are at work. Disciplinary surveillance has been hard-wired into capitalism since it began, according to the French poststructuralist theorist Michel Foucault (Privacy, 2011, PowerPoint). But Facebook is not a way of avoiding that surveillance, even though it has the feeling of being clandestine in quality, because of its prohibited nature at work. Facebook is merely a form of structuring the confessional to make the work of marketers far easier. Facebook is a way to solicit information from users in a manner that is uniquely advantageous to both employers and advertisers, in terms of what it is designed to reveal about the user's life. Much as employers claim to despise Facebook, it has become a useful way of screening employees.

For advertisers, who feared losing a captive television audience to the Internet, Facebook is a way to engage in careful market segmentation and targeting. It expands the methods of surveillance into bedrooms and homes, and makes the posters willing participants in the process. Interactivity seems to have the illusion of consumer choice (given that consumers can select what websites to interact with) but because online consumer buying and surfing patterns can be followed, the online experience can be invisibly tailored to reflect seller's knowledge -- everyone has had the experience of being 'followed' by an advertisement after searching the web for a particular product, such as a new pair of Nike sneakers.