The other oppressive and authoritative thing about it -- completely aside from the whole surveillance and tracking aspect -- is that it obliterates the past. There was a time when, if you just met someone at a bar or some event or while traveling, there was still a bit of mystery to them. You had to interact with them a bit more until you found out about their family, their friends, and where they've been in life.
Now it's all "up there", but at a cost, in that although this information has become more available and transparent, it's also cheapened, somehow. It's like you suddenly "know" these people... but you don't know them, really. All you have are factoids about them... drowning in the sea of all the other factoids you're continually digesting about everyone else you've become "friends" with.
The sad part is, this "other" time -- before the intrusions not just of FB, but of the whole ecosystem of social media tools -- wasn't that long ago. But pretty soon no one is going to be able to remember a time when people had an entirely different sense of intimacy and space. They won't be able to intuitively and viscerally assess the tradeoffs of being "always" in reach, or at the very least, findable to anyone they've every come into contact with -- simply because they won't have any baseline to compare it to.
Now it's all "up there", but at a cost, in that although this information has become more available and transparent, it's also cheapened, somehow. It's like you suddenly "know" these people... but you don't know them, really. All you have are factoids about them... drowning in the sea of all the other factoids you're continually digesting about everyone else you've become "friends" with.
The sad part is, this "other" time -- before the intrusions not just of FB, but of the whole ecosystem of social media tools -- wasn't that long ago. But pretty soon no one is going to be able to remember a time when people had an entirely different sense of intimacy and space. They won't be able to intuitively and viscerally assess the tradeoffs of being "always" in reach, or at the very least, findable to anyone they've every come into contact with -- simply because they won't have any baseline to compare it to.