There are all kinds of different business models.   I won’t pretend to be an expert in economics or business, but I am smart enough to know that a business that provides a service “for free” to a community of users is not usually in it for the feel goods.  They derive some economic benefit from the service.  The user community that avails itself of the “free” service makes up a key part of its base. It relies on those users to either provide content (as in the case of free blogging websites, forums, search engines, or social networking sites), or to view/use content and be subjected to advertising that the business sells (free magazines, webzines, television programming, smartphone apps).

In either case, while the user is not actually prying free dollars from his own pocket, he is an integral part of that product or service.  As such, his opinion regarding the quality of that service very much matters.

Facebook uses a model based on a hybrid of the two I mentioned.  It relies on user generated content for data mining. It also relies on advertising and a large user base to entice big dollar advertisers.  In addition it relies on the “buzz” generated by its users as marketing tools.  The more people Facebook  entices to use its product, the better.  Keep the peeps happy while maximizing your ability to mine even more information and get more eyes looking at ads.  It can be a truly win-win-win situation for pretty much everyone involved.

Facebook also has a history of pushing out modifications to its product that its management and engineering groups feel are “good” for its product, but they usually go about it in a ham-fisted fashion. They roll out the changes without much announcement — even fairly dramatic ones that significantly alter the user’s experience — and without much training for the user, and often with little consideration for all of the impacts the changes may have across the user community. They have, in the past,  compromised user privacy, and have also at times created usability issues for a variety of people.

Irrespective of how Facebook conceives, designs and implements its changes, and irrespective of the overall goodness or badness of these changes, there will be elements within the user base that object — vociferously — to the changes.  Some object simply because they dislike change. A person gets used to a way of doing something and even if the change ultimately improves the interaction, the fact that you’re asking a user to change at all causes distress.  That’s accepted.  That’s also somewhat minor.

When a change is not only unadvertised and abrupt, but is a significant shift with respect to how the product or service works (in terms of the layout, accessibility, and user experience), the outcry can be pretty overwhelming.

That sort of outcry is usually based on some valid, considered objections.

And that outcry is not only valid, but necessary, irrespective of whether the people who are complaining are spending money for the service.

There is a meme going around on Facebook and elsewhere wherein people respond to complaints about Facebook’s latest changes with generally snarky comments such as, “Hey, quit complaining! It’s free! Just use it, or don’t use it. Geez!”

While I respect the truth — Facebook doesn’t cost its user any money — and I respect the right of the individual to express this opinion, telling people to shut up and color because they haven’t opened their wallets is not only a rude and ill-considered comment, it is an irrelevant comment.

Companies that rely in this fashion on their user base actually need that feedback, especially when the feedback is grounded on genuine usability issues that hamper the experience.  An example of Facebook’s latest changes concerns the addition of a “ticker” that scrolls updates continuously on the screen that Facebook has algorithmically determined might be of interest to its user. Some people react badly to motion on their displays. It may feed attention deficit issues. In my case, I had to close the Facebook window simply to be able to conduct a conversation because the constant motion on the screen distracted my thought process.  There was no obvious way to shut off the ticker.  For others, they have organized the way they use Facebook to avoid negative impact to their personal productivity. Facebook rearranged the way the information is presented, undoing what the users had taken pains to set up for their personal usage cases. Again, there was no clear way to customize the organization to suit the user.

So Facebook has to rely on user feedback. Facebook would not want to lose a significant portion of its user base, after all. That would affect its revenue.

Granted, it would be more useful for the users who have issues to take their complaints to a forum set up for such feedback, and to make useful suggestions for improvement rather than just piss and moan about how awful it all is, yet there is still value to be had in simply whining.  A large enough groundswell of noisy complaint forces Facebook to sit up and take notice, and to take the usable suggestions seriously.  When the complaint is large enough that national news outlets are reporting on it, you can be certain the powers that be within Facebook are looking through the forums and feedback reports to find out how badly they miscalculated and what they can do to recover.

Using Facebook is not truly free for us.  We are trading our time — voluntarily and gladly in most cases — we are offering up our information, and we are viewing the ads.  We are providing Facebook the content they rely on to make their business work.  We are providing advertisement services when we invite our family and friends to join. We have a valid say in the usability of the service.  Our say can come in the form of a boycott, or in the form of a loud and bitter complaint.  It’s all good, and Facebook should welcome it.

The rest of you who are gluing yourselves to the easy meme of  “it’s free, so shut up and color”?

I reject your suggestion, but thanks for offering it.

Dr. Alex Lickerman is a physician and former Director of Primary Care at the University of Chicago and has been a practicing Buddhist since 1989.
– from the “About” page of http://www.happinessinthisworld.com/

Dr. Lickerman wrote about some of my favorite things: technology and relationships. A while back a good friend linked to this article on Facebook; some interesting conversations ensued, and oh my gosh, I have so many thoughts about this. Some of the thoughts are spurred from the FB conversations, but some arise from my navel. I don’t know about yours, but my navel is a demanding body feature. It has let my fingers know they’d better get busy putting some of these thoughts down, or else.

Ruining Relationships, or The Chicken/Egg Conundrum
I can’t be certain without spending time I don’t have looking it up (aka “Googling”), but I believe the notion that the Internet is addicting arose in the 1990s and has been with us since. The American Society of Addiction Medicine has this definition for addiction: “Addiction is a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry. Dysfunction in these circuits leads to characteristic biological, psychological, social and spiritual manifestations. This is reflected in the individual pursuing reward and/or relief by substance use and other behaviors. Addiction is characterized by impairment in behavioral control, craving, inability to consistently abstain, and diminished recognition of significant problems with one’s behaviors and interpersonal relationships.”
There are stories. Find them in your newspaper, in women’s magazines, and on Dr. Phil: Children whose schoolwork suffers, partners who split, scary tales of desperate people meeting up with psychopathic axe murderers in the hopes of finding true love; the list goes on.

Like any addiction, the real cost, for those of us who are truly addicted, is to the number and quality of our relationships with others. [...] The problem, however, comes when we find ourselves subtly substituting electronic relationships for physical ones or mistaking our electronic relationships for physical ones.

I have a data point of one. I am divorced. I admit that my relationship with my former husband was worsened by my obsessive use of the Internet and I further admit I could have and should have paid a lot more attention to my children during their teen years. With respect to the marital relationship, however, I contend that there is a race between the chicken and the egg. Had my relationship with my ex been more whole to start, would I have sought comfort hitchhiking along the Info Superhighway? More to the point of Dr. Lickerman’s article, did I increase my isolation as a result? My marriage had lots of issues that, perhaps with time and determined effort, could have been worked through. Or perhaps not. Irrespective of its demise, did the friendships I gained during my years of heavy Internet involvement cause me more problems? Or did I increase the number, and perhaps the quality of my personal interactions?
I have a large number of genuine, in-depth conversations with people I know almost exclusively on-line. They share candid details of their lives in thought-provoking ways, and often spur a lot of soul-searching within me. I have grown in ways I never did with my physical-world relationships. I contend, here, that it was the access to a richer field of possible friendships that made this possible. The folk to whom I had intimate access in my locale, while wonderful and worthwhile people, were not people with whom I resonated. Is this, again, an egg and chicken thing, though? Did I decrease my interactions with local friends so that I could pay more attention to my “safe” and on-line friends? Did I derive a feeling of isolation from my local, physical environment, choosing not to pursue more in-depth interactions with these people because of my addiction to the on-line life?
I am convinced that I have always been prone to a more hermit-like, solitary existence. I have already written about having imaginary playmates as a child, and being painfully shy and withdrawn. The Internet provided me with a way to let my real personality bloom and I credit my years playing with trolls on the InterThingie with giving me the spine to let that personality shine in my real life.

Interestingly, The Pew Internet Research Center reported researchthat finds that people who regularly use social networking sites such as Facebook have significantly more close relationships and higher social support than the average American.

Isolation and the New Work Place
If, as Dr. Lickerman contends, too much reliance on on-line interactions is indeed fostering a growing isolation among us, how does this translate to how we conduct our day to day lives? What is the impact to our psychological well-being?

[...]we write things like “LOL” and “LMOA” to describe our laughter, but they’re no real substitute for hearing people laugh, which has real power to lift our spirits when we’re feeling low.

Dr. Lickerman is exactly right with that observation. No matter how truly warm my Internet relationships have seemed, there is no replacement for real laughter. In that picture-worth-a-thousand-words sense, so much can take place when you simply exchange glances with a real person sitting across from you. No amount of imagination or written words can ever fill the need for the reassuring touch of a hand, or the warmth of an embrace.
What about the work-place? I have had some experiences with remote and computer-based interactions at my former company. There, as the local work force was thinned and the global work force expanded, office and project communications moved from the physical meeting rooms, hallways, water coolers and cubicles to the telephone and the computer, and even then began to move from cubicles in the office building to home offices. We moved from having to dress decently and congregate under the fluorescent lights to an isolation that brought with it the potential for hunkering, unshowered and semi-clothed, over the keyboard in a darkened, sealed room. Interactions with other human beings could now take place via instant messaging and e-mail.
I hailed this as finally permitting me to be more efficient. Gone were long commutes, time and effort spent on making myself presentable, walks to distant restrooms. I could focus on my work, even while in a meeting! Multi-tasking was king!
I think Asimov had a society like that in one of his series.
Anyway, moving from there to a different company that still operates using 90s technology and 70s mentality was quite a culture shock, but I was very pleased to actually see people again. And the big change was that these people were smiling and laughing and even hanging out with one another doing stuff on weekends and after work. The village was back!
Along with the village came the personality conflicts. I had been there but one day and already I had a parade of people coming into my cube and whispering to me. “Watch out for so-and-so. She is quite the little back stabber. If she gets pissed off at you, she’ll escalate instantly.” Such-and-so had “issues” and was “difficult.” Meanwhile, Such-and-so came to me to let me know that the person who had just cautioned me had “issues” and was “difficult.”
Is the As The World Turns mentality really necessary for our personal growth?
Confrontation

People are often uncomfortable with face-to-face confrontation, so it’s easy to understand why they’d choose to use the Internet. Precisely because electronic media transmit emotion so poorly compared to in-person interaction, many view it as the perfect way to send difficult messages: it blocks us from registering the negative emotional responses such messages engender, which provides us the illusion we’re not really doing harm. Unfortunately, this also usually means we don’t transmit these messages with as much empathy, and often find ourselves sending a different message than we intended and breeding more confusion than we realize.

If you weren’t sitting at your computer right now reading this, but were instead in my house as I type this, you’d see me raising my hand. (Side note: makes typing more difficult.) I am a warrior when it comes to on-line confrontation. In person? Not so much. Don’t make eye contact, they’ll sense your fear and go for your throat!
I’ve had mixed results here. I have enjoyed successes in dealing with conflict and confrontation when I handled it via e-mail. We got to martial our defenses, didn’t feel like we were put on the spot, had time to consider our responses, and both found relief by expressing ourselves in what we felt was our best light. No reddening of the face. No tears in the voice.
I have also had it go badly, badly bad. I’ve had something small explode with nuclear force because the wrong emotion was read into the statement. I’ve seen my words come back to me, turned inside out because the context was not understood, or was filtered through the emotions and expectations of the recipient.
I took a class offered by my company on how to have effective conversations and one of the conversation types they focused on was “confrontational conversations.” They suggested a strategy of putting together a 60 second pitch outlining the issue to be discussed, its impact on others(presumably you, maybe your family, your project, your community, whatever), an explicit example of the issue, how you personally feel about it, and maybe what you hope to resolve concerning it. Then you ask the confronted person for his or her thoughts on it, and you listen. You ask questions designed to get the two of you to the resolution. You may resolve it. You may end up, after a few moments of dialogue, realizing you’ll never meet eye to eye.
I wonder if sometimes a combination of e-mail and this … talking thing … might not be effective. Draft the 60 second pitch into an e-mail and set up a meeting to discuss it?
Dunno. I’ve tried the confrontational conversation exactly one time, and it was very difficult for me, with my personality. Red face. Difficulty making eye contact. Wanting to apologize for daring to be irked. That sort of thing.
And Finally, Same Ol’ Same Ol’

The Internet is an amazing tool. But even as it’s shrunk the world and brought us closer together, it’s threatened to push us further apart. Like any useful tool, to make technology serve us well requires the exercise of good judgment.

But this is not new stuff. I was researching this and finding the same cautionary words back when I was writing a monthly column on parenting in the computer age. The list of do’s and don’ts Dr. Lickerman provides could have come from one of those “How To Use E-mail” courses they made us take back in the late nineties at work.
And yet … we do seem to be withdrawing from one another as a society, even as we expand to embrace one another through all this online social interaction.
Even as a person should not overeat (except when it comes to bacon, or chocolate, or cupcakes), perhaps a person ought not overdo his on-line life.
If you made it this far, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Meet at my house, 5PM, bring goodies, I’ll provide the beer, wine and dog hair.
Hugs!