Generation Why?

Zadie Smith wonders about the biases built into Facebook for The New York Review of Books…

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.

I can not say enough good things about this essay. Give it a look. You’ll be glad you did.

Filed under: reduction  social media  technology