Warning Y'All - Douglas Rushkoff 'You are Facebook's product, not customer' (via Wired UK)

via wired.co.uk

Excerpt from Original Post by Olivia Solon:

"People need to understand that they are the product of Facebook and not the customer, according to media theorist and writer Douglas Rushkoff.

Speaking at the inaugural Hello Etsy conference in Berlin, the author of Program or Be Programmed said: "Ask a kid what Facebook is for and they'll answer 'it's there to help me make friends'. Facebook's boardroom isn't talking about how to make Johnny more friends. It's talking about how to monetise Johnnny's social graph."

He added: "Ask yourself who is paying for Facebook. Usually the people who are paying are the customers. Advertisers are the ones who are paying. If you don't know who the customer of the product you are using is, you don't know what the product is for. We are not the customers of Facebook, we are the product. Facebook is selling us to advertisers."

Rushkoff believes that this lack of understanding is a construct of software companies who don't want you to understand their inner workings. He explained that in the early 1990s, to use a computer was the same thing as to program a computer. He explained: "It took anywhere from a few hours to a day to learn how to use a computer back then, but then you knew the whole thing. You were using the computer. You weren't dependent on boxes of software you bought off the shelf, you were making that world as you went along. There was no such things as an 'end user', just a 'user'. We were all equals...."

Posted via email from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales