Friends are not Commodities

The New York Times ran an article recently that talked about how we are all now being scored on our "influence" factor.

Marketing firms are measuring and quantifying who listens to us and how much clout we exert through our presence in cyberspace. Vendors of all sorts can then buy this information to find out who are the leaders of the pack; who can sway consumers in their direction, and who can nudge steer the behaviors and thoughts of the rest of us.

While the metrics are certainly more sophisticated than this, most of us will undoubtedly think: the more "friends" we have on Facebook, the more Twitter followers, the more LinkedIn connections, the higher we will be rated. And whether accurate or not, these studies will likely have the affect of a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more people believe someone has clout, the more clout someone has. And sooner or later, someone is going to game the system and figure out a way how to buy or manufacture a veneer of clout.

Which just adds to an already bad feeling I have about social networking (despite all the true good it also does). It turns "friends" into commodities and allows online relationships to be largely transactional (i.e., what can you do for me?).

I always feel a bit chumpish and a bit used when someone I know "friends" me, and I accept (whether out of a sense of obligation or delight) and then find that all they really wanted was to bulk up their collection of contacts or push a pet project or organization or cause through me and my network. In other words, our "friendship" is all about them.

Of course you can say we have been commodifying people for millennia, what with slavery and armies and markets of all sorts. But this new step seems to take people-as-commodity to a whole new level.

Social networking is here to stay. It has already contributed mightily to the democratization of the world and I am not such a troglodyte to rail against it. But I am arguing against the culture that is turning all of us into objects to be used, and against the growing discipline that is manipulating the private tracings (or what should be private tracings) of our social relations so that they are read and studied for partisan (ie, one-side and well-funded) commercial or social engineering purposes.

We know who gets shafted in such a world.