Curation

Last week, Engadget founder Ryan Block published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled "Why I'm Quitting Instagram," wherein he explained that the recent flap over the social media giant's Terms of Service inspired him to jump ship. When news broke of the Terms of Service, Nilay Patel, a founding editor of The Verge and former patent attorney, posted this piece explaining that the updated Terms of Service was on its face no worse than any similar terms for many other social media or Web multimedia sites and that the real lesson over the uproar over Instagram's action was just that people ultimately don't trust Facebook¹.

I count myself among their ranks.

You may have heard the saying, "If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold." This underlines Facebook's entire revenue structure (well, approximately 85% of it or so): selling our personal information (minus the actual hard identification), or access to it, all compiled through mining data from every click and like and page-view from our years of Facebook interactions and activities. It's a bit discomfiting to many.

Having said all this, it surprises me then to admit that for me the issue isn't so much about privacy as I initially assumed. For starters, why single out just Facebook? Google unabashedly performs the same advertising voodoo with our personal data, and they are one of the few entities more ubiquitous than even Facebook (says Guy Blogging On A Google Platform). But the difference between my relationships to one Internet giant or the other currently boils down to a cost-benefit calculation [and all but certain to be an oversimplified and misguided one]:

I can go a day (or, ye gods, even two! or more!) without using Facebook without a major impact on my daily functions; the same cannot be said about Gmail or, to a lesser extent, Google Calendar. These are a part of my life that I don't pay for but actively choose to partake and otherwise maximize for my personal use. If the price paid for it is ... whatever-it-is-Google does with my data, it is so.

I am decreasingly likely to end up with the same outcome of this calcuation when it comes to Facebook. Let me try to unpack this:

1. What if I gave up on Google? No more Google searches or services conducted while signed into my Google Account. No more Gmail². No more using the incredibly handy Google Maps app³. No more wasting hours of my life on Google Plus⁴. But I don't want to stop using these "free" Google Services. I've integrated many of these services into my life⁵, and as yet I haven't been convinced that Google is so evil that I should discontinue allowing them to mine my web searches and page views in exchange for These Things That Are Useful To Me. For now, I am comfortable with this exchange rate. Let's face it: The Goog has me.

2. What if I broke up with Facebook? Or Instagram? (InstaFace? InstaFace.) What do I use these services for, anyway? The answer lies in a combination of typical Internet Era oversharing, nakedly abject like-mongering, incoherently and probably offensively impulsive rants and/or proselytizing, stalking, and in some rare instances, actual interfacing with other human beings. These usage patterns and their concomitant motivations draw me ever closer to the realization, Messr. Zuckerberg, that I'm just not getting a lot of actual usefulness from this relationship.

[Twitter is a different animal to me. I get my news largely from Twitter. I follow news outlets, newspeople, writers, sportswriters, "personalities", and friends on Twitter. All this time I've been MIA from my blog, I've been tweeting like it's my business. Twitter has been described as "micro-blogging", and I find that designation to be quite apt. I've got no beef with Twitter. As far as I understand, I have a satisfactory level of control over my Twitter activity. I've even forgiven Twitter for slipping this "Promoted Tweets" advertising nonsense into my feed. Those rascals!]

The flap over Instagram and its Terms of Service and its relationship to Facebook and their icky relationship to advertising based on our mostly-useless status updates or pictures of our dinner and pets got me aboard a particular train of thought--one that has yet to officially arrive anywhere, but--that is leaning heavily towards a gradual, intentional withdrawal from InstaFace. Being able to say, "Oh, I don't have a Facebook account" isn't the actual purpose of such an endeavor,⁶ rather it is the ability to wrest some not-insignificant control of my online presence back to me. I don't know yet what is the end game or end goal for my relationship with Facebook and Instagram; I do know that I, as a child of the Internet Age, have a blog, and I intend to use it. If I have thoughts to share, I can share them here, where I generally obsessively edit and revise the hell out of each posting. If I have photos to share, I don't need to give access or permissions to said photos to Facebook to do so; I can give them instead to Flickr post them here while I reconsider why I give them to Flickr. And so on.

I used the word "curated" in my last post re-re-reintroducing myself. And that word was used intentionally, too. Take it away, Dictionary.com:

to pull together, sift through, and select for presentation, as music or Web site content.

And that is the ultimate intention with my blog, here.

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1 - (Facebook owns Instagram).
2 - I could use my Verizon email account, currently untouched but part of our Internet/phone/TV package.
3 - which seriously saves my bacon on a regular basis.
4 - Just kidding. No one uses Google Plus.
5 - Oh yeah, and I swear by Google Chrome now! and Google Play Music! Look what I've become!
6 - Oh but what an explosion of smugness that would trigger!

[Is that too much footnoting? Cribbing off of Grantland too much? Probably. I'll need to come up with my own system.]