Saving Facebook

NPR's Morning Edition had a segment this morning on the antitrust lawsuits against Facebook.  Host Noel King went after Connecticut Attorney General William Tong aggressively.  Her opening line was  "Facebook crushes the competition. That's one of those cliches we use to talk about big, successful companies."  In other words, it's not true, just a cliche, probably thrown around by envious losers who can't cut the mustard.

When Tong tried to explain how Facebook crushes competition and takes away users' freedom of choice, King interrupted.  (The transcript doesn't convey her snotty tone, so it's worth listening to the audio.)

Let me jump on you there. Facebook argues that there is competition. And I will tell you, the young people in my life - the teens, the tweens - they don't care about Facebook at all. They're all on TikTok. Is it possible that in five, 10 years, Facebook will be kind of irrelevant or at least not the behemoth it is now, and that this is just sort of panicking over something that - companies become dominant for a few years, and then they tend to fade? 

And so on.  Tong was stoical and answered King patiently.  But I noticed something unusual.  Ordinarily whenever NPR does a story about Facebook, the host begins by acknowledging that "Facebook is one of NPR's financial supporters."  This story, posted on Wednesday, includes the disclaimer as an editor's note.  But Noel King never mentioned it, nor was any note to that effect added to the transcript.

One of the other trials of my morning patience is Marketplace Morning Report, which also had a segment this morning on the Facebook antitrust actions.  Marketplace is an American Public Media product, so maybe Facebook isn't one of its underwriters and a disclaimer wasn't needed.  At any rate the program was clearly pro-Facebook, though not as stridently as Morning Edition was. Missing from the linked audio is an interview with an academic who predicted derisively that nothing was likely to come from these lawsuits and investigations, any more than the Microsoft antitrust case twenty years ago.  He neglected to note that what stopped that process, which began during the Clinton administration, was George W. Bush's accession to the presidency: he (or his lackeys, which amounts to the same thing) announced that the action would be dropped.

To belabor a dead horse, Morning Edition also had a brief segment on the December 21 Great Conjunction today.  They talked to a planetary geologist who gushed,

You cannot help but notice these incredibly bright stars. And every night, you can go outside, and you can see them getting closer and closer. And just a couple days before Christmas, they'll kiss. And then they'll wander apart again.

Noel King explained that the planetary geologist was "describing a phenomenon that's known as the Christmas star."  No, it's not, since this conjunction only happens every several hundred years.  Cohost David Greene continued:

The Christmas star, even though we're not talking about a star or two stars, it's actually two planets, Jupiter and Saturn, closely aligning in the sky. Astronomers call this a conjunction. And this year, its peak will come on December 21st. Jupiter and Saturn will appear to be right on top of each other.

 "Kiss"?  "Right on top of each other"?  Sounds hot, but it won't be, any more than it'll be a Christmas star.  Next up was an astronomer, who explained that "They are nowhere near each other. The separation between the two is something on the order of 400 million miles."  Just another Christmas Grinch, throwing the ice water of fact on people's lubricious fantasies.

Noel King concluded with another reference to "the Christmas star."  That can't be meant to suggest anything but the (probably mythical) star over Bethlehem at the time of Jesus' birth, which is not what viewers will see as Jupiter and Saturn align in the southwestern sky this month.  That's NPR for you: sober, just-the-facts, professional journalism.

Hey, Kids -- Leave That Noam Alone!

This article turned up on the Noam Chomsky page on Facebook today (multiple ironies there), featuring a charming episode of "Ain't It Awful."

"I get a ton of correspondence, mostly email," Chomsky said. "I’ll often get questions from high school students saying, ‘I have to write a paper Thursday on the French Revolution,’ or whatever it may be. I tell them, ‘Well here’s somebody you could look up. And the next question routinely comes back, ‘How can I find it on the internet.’ And sometimes these come from prep schools - places with good libraries, educated students[,] privileged students, I say, ‘Well walk across the street to the school library and look it up.'"

I love Chomsky, but he must surely know that this isn't a product of the Internet.   Long before the Internet, writers I know were complaining about students who wrote to them asking them to do their research for them.  Writing in about 1981, for example, the science-fiction writer and professor of English Joanna Russ recalled:

Years ago a very young (junior-high-school age) woman asked me to send her copies of all my work and the answers to three pages of questions about it for a paper her teacher had suggested; I wrote her, explaining that writers hadn't the time to fill such requests and referred her to her teacher, who ought to be teaching her how to do research.  Her older sister then wrote me, stating that she was going to expose me in Ms., that because of my bad behavior her sister, who had hoped to be a writer, had given up all such ambitions. *

So such demands have nothing to do with the Internet, computers, or social media.  And to be fair, Chomsky admits:

But, as laughable as it is, who in America hasn't felt that way before?

“I’m not offering this as a critique of the internet, but there’s a lot of factors involved," Chomsky explained.

So why bring it up in the context of a discussion of social media and the Internet?  Alternet certainly packaged Chomsky's remarks as a "critique of the Internet" -- disseminated on the Internet, no less.

I think this kind of behavior has more to do with adolescence, and probably with the very privilege Chomsky refers to.  Of course privileged kids expect someone else to do their work for them!  What else are other people for?  But it also has something to do with a capability that language and human consciousness give us: to construct fantasies about people we've never met, so that we believe we know them and they know us.  It's also a product of writing and literacy.  If your encounter with stories and ideas takes place in face-to-face interactions, it's true that you are being addressed (though not individually) by the storyteller or the preacher.  People often feel that a written text speaks to them personally and individually, and may write to the author expressing that belief.  (Or they want a celebrity in sports or show business to grant them a wish.)  That's as much an illusion as thinking that a distant professor will do your homework for you.

* In Russ, Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts (Firebrand Books, 1985), p. 53.

On Not Getting Along

A younger contemporary from my high school days -- call him "Splendora" -- posted this meme on Facebook, which he'd found on another jerk's page.  I suspect that he posted it because some people (including but not only moi) had disagreed in comments when he complained about a report of two drag queens from RuPaul's Drag Race appearing in a commercial for Starbucks.  This was entertaining in itself, given Splendora's own fondness for drag and general bad taste.  (It was he, as much as anyone I know, who inspired my tagline "Oh Mary, it takes a fairy to make something tacky!")   Maybe I'll return to that little controversy another time; for now, I want to address this meme.

I've often seen complaints like this online, as I think I've mentioned before: when someone's posted opinions encounter disagreement or criticism, they may protest that "this isn't the right place for debate." (One obnoxious variation is the old quip "Debating on the Internet is like competing in the Special Olympics -- even if you win, your [sic -- they always seem to write it that way] still retarded!")   I've asked such people what is the right place for debate, but they never seem to have an answer for that, probably because they don't think there is a place for debate.  Usually it's they who are in a place that has been designated for debate, and are trying to stop other people from having a discussion.  They could just leave themselves, but that, of course, is unthinkable.

Facebook is a different case, I suppose.  I recently defriended an old friend of thirty years' standing when she deleted some comments of mine under a political meme she'd posted.  Facebook, she told me sternly, is not for "politics," it's "where friends and family come together."  She was, she said, already embroiled enough in debates in other online fora.  So why did she post a political meme on Facebook?  She said she had the right to post whatever she liked on her page, and to delete any comments she objected to.  True enough.  So I deleted her, as I've unfriended another nasty, illiberal liberal friend as well as obnoxious right-wingers.

I've also received angry messages from people I don't know, because some mutual Facebook friend had commented on some post of theirs, so the comments and the post showed up in my news feed, and I felt like putting in my two cents' worth.  Why are you posting on my page? they thundered.  You don't even know me.  If you don't like what I post, it's none of your business.  If it turns up on my page, it's my business.  If they don't want people to respond to what they post, they need to tweak their privacy settings so only their Facebook friends will be able to see it.  This is actually much older than Facebook, of course, the idea that what someone posts publicly isn't public, and only those responses they like should even be posted.  (In other words, If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all!  That stricture doesn't apply to them, naturally.  Usually I respond because they've posted something especially nasty and vicious.  But that's different.)

I've been seeing a lot of complaints (the one cited here, for example, but it doesn't stand alone) that social media like Facebook are an echo chamber where people only talk to people they agree with, and that liberals don't have any conservative friends and have no dealings with people of different politics.  (Conservatives like to claim that they have liberal friends, though it's hard to understand how they can do so if liberals won't be friends with conservatives.  And those liberal friends only seem to function as sources of stupid beliefs that the conservative writers demolish with contemptuous ease.  Admittedly, I use several of my liberal and conservative friends for that myself.)  This meme, of course, demands that Facebook be such an echo chamber.  (The earlier step in the transmission had the poster casting his stance as keeping toxic people out of his life; he seems pretty toxic to me.)

But then consider this article from The New Republic that another friend passed along.  The writer declares that Fox News's racism is too harmful for liberals to ignore.  He didn't, that I could see, show that any liberals had said explicitly that Fox should be ignored, not even Frank Rich, whom he quoted at some length.  The quotations supported my own distrust of Rich, who not so long ago was quite the liberal icon.  But they didn't really say much, nor did the writer of the article really say what liberals should do about Fox, except that "the ideas that Fox's [sic] peddles remain gross and dangerous, and as long as they are in circulation, they should be criticized, debunked and scorned."  "Scorned" -- that'll learn 'em!  I can't see that liberal criticism and debunking of Fox and other right-wing sources has done a lot of good, not least because liberals have their own blind spots that are harmful, gross and dangerous, and ostensibly liberal non-Fox media also mislead and misinform their audiences.

I know that trying to deal with people you disagree with isn't easy, or comfortable -- how well I know it!  But what do people think it means to live in a more or less free, diverse society?  We have to share our society, our country, our world with people we not only disagree with, but disapprove of.  And there's so much talk about "conversations" we need to have about difficult subjects, such as race (via).  But we can't have them if we insist on being comfortable, on not being challenged or criticized or disagreed with.  I understand why people shy away from these discussions, but I think we need to have them, to get used to being disagreed with, to learn how to disagree with others, if we're going to have the kind of society that most people claim they want.

P.S. I should also address the final line, the "If you don't like me, don't talk to me" bit.  Whether I like or dislike someone has little or nothing to do with whether I disagree with them.  But unhappily, it's a normal human response to personalize disagreement.  If I disagree with you, or criticize you, that means I hate you, right?  Well, no.  In many cases I've never met the people I talk to online, and that suits me, because what concerns me is the validity of what they're saying -- or the lack thereof.  I've often suspected that some people get upset in online discussion because they're used to letting their personal charm or cuteness or sex appeal or physical menace speak for them, and none of these means diddly online.  Since they've never learned to think critically and construct arguments, of course they freak out when they try to twinkle endearingly over the Intertoobz and it doesn't work.  Since they don't know how to answer an opposing argument, they throw a tantrum and fall back on personal attacks, because in their minds it's all personal.

Which is why the injunction to distinguish between "being a racist" and "saying racist things," though it's perfectly rational, won't work over the long haul.  Love me, love my racism.  But I'm not a racist, nobody's a racist, the accusation of racism is the worst thing you can call anybody!

Challenge Me Softly

I just read Alfie Kohn's new book The Myth of the Spoiled Child (Da Capo, 2014), which does a nice job demolishing the complaints about how Kids Today are overindulged, spoiled, etc.  You know the drill, I'm sure.  One of his starting points is something I've also noticed: that contempt for the young is a bipartisan affair.  Many social liberals start to sound just like right-wing frothers when they talk about children and education.  I may write more about the book and the subject later, but by happy chance I found an article online at The Atlantic.com that could have been grist for Kohn's thesis, "My Students Don't Know How to Have a Conversation," by one Paul Barnwell, identified as "a teacher, writer, and urban gardener based in Louisville, KY."

Barnwell blames it all on mobile phones.  "Recently I stood in front of my class, observing an all-too-familiar scene. Most of my students were covertly—or so they thought—pecking away at their smartphones under their desks, checking their Facebook feeds and texts."  And so on.  You can probably guess how the article progresses; I could have written it myself, just from the title. 

For example, one thing that was easy to predict was that Barnwell offers no evidence whatsoever that kids used to be more attentive in class, were able to converse, and so on.  When they get out in the real world, he fumes, with job interviews and asking for raises, they won't be able to fall back on Facebook!  And he concludes:

The next time you interact with a teenager, try to have a conversation with him or her about a challenging topic. Ask him to explain his views. Push her to go further in her answers. Hopefully, you won’t get the response [Sherry] Turkle did when interviewing a 16-year-old boy about how technology has impacted his communication: “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”

The next time you interact with an adult, try to have a conversation with him or her about a challenging topic.  Ask him to explain his views.  Push her to go further in her answers.  I do this often with my peers (I'm 63, by the way) on Facebook, all of whom have high school diplomas and many of whom have at least bachelor's degrees.  A depressing number are, or have been, schoolteachers themselves. They have no idea how to support their beliefs, and they aren't interested in doing it.  They figure that just saying what they think (or rather, feel), is all they should have to do.  Many of them express their views by posting memes that someone else concocted; they have no idea how to check, on or off the Internet, whether a claim they encounter is true.  Very few people are capable of having a conversation about a challenging topic, and as this article shows -- it's unfortunately not atypical -- that applies to people who get published on classy sites like The Atlantic. This is nothing new, however: it's as old as the hills.

The Very Purpose of School

Writing may be even worse than reading.  It takes very little time to notice and buy (or check out) a book that looks interesting, but it takes hours to read it.  It takes even longer to write a book or a blog post than it takes to read it.  I've got twenty-seven posts in my drafts folder now, and it would be longer if I hadn't simply deleted some of them as lost causes.  (I'm also carrying around some ideas in my head that haven't gotten as far as the drafts folder, but I still intend to write about them.)  If I finish this one today, there will be only twenty-six.   I'm making progress.

A couple of interesting articles went up at the Atlantic last week -- well, two weeks ago now -- and while I doubt the writers had consulted each other, their subject matter overlapped in a significant way.  I meant to write about this right away, and then my Right Wing Acquaintance Number One linked to one of the articles on Facebook, but then I was getting ready to go out of town for the weekend, so once again I'm behind.

The first article I read was Amanda Ripley's "The Case Against High-School Sports."  The lede reads, "The United States routinely spends more tax dollars per high-school athlete than per high-school math student—unlike most countries worldwide. And we wonder why we lag in international education rankings?"  The trouble is, the US doesn't really "lag in international education rankings."  We aren't Number One, which is of course vitally important to many people, but we do quite well given our general lack of interest in matters intellectual, and the hostility to public education among our political elites.

Ripley begins by telling us about a fifteen-year-old Korean girl whose family moved to the US two years ago.  She's bemused by the prominence of sports, especially extramural sports, in her new high school.  A great deal of "education" money is spent on sports, facilities for sports, and support for teams that compete with the teams of other schools.

By contrast, in South Korea, whose 15-year-olds rank fourth in the world (behind Shanghai, Singapore, and Hong Kong) on a test of critical thinking in math, Jenny’s classmates played pickup soccer on a dirt field at lunchtime. They brought badminton rackets from home and pretended there was a net. If they made it into the newspaper, it was usually for their academic accomplishments.

Sports are embedded in American schools in a way they are not almost anywhere else. Yet this difference hardly ever comes up in domestic debates about America’s international mediocrity in education. (The U.S. ranks 31st on the same international math test.) The challenges we do talk about are real ones, from undertrained teachers to entrenched poverty. But what to make of this other glaring reality, and the signal it sends to children, parents, and teachers about the very purpose of school?

These are good questions, but the way Ripley frames the issue makes me suspicious.  She doesn't name the "test on critical thinking on math" which ranks South Korea fourth, and the US thirty-first.  But those rankings shouldn't be taken at face value.  It sounds like Ripley might have been referring to the tests the late Gerald Bracey dissected here, particularly the Programme for International Student Assessment or PISA.  (I also found this commentary, which rebuts Bracey with an anecdote and a rhetorical question.)  There's too much information in that article for me to quote it, so I'll just urge interested readers to click through and read it.  If you find it useful, try this one as well, and then this one.  But the gist is that international comparisons based on average scores on standardized tests aren't worth very much, except as grist for alarmist attacks on public education.  But that's okay, we must maintain our international competitiveness: without world-class alarmist attacks on public education, America will forfeit its right to be a world leader.

This doesn't mean, of course, that I favor the current emphasis on sports, in schools at any level or in American society generally.  This is where I agreed with RWA1, who denounced the mandatory pep sessions in his high school: I also tried to get out of attending them and when that failed, refused to participate.  I've never gone to an IU football or basketball game, not on principle but because I just don't give a damn; indeed, I would prefer that IU lose all its games, and wish there were some way that its competitors could lose all of theirs.  (Just today, I read an interesting bit in Lawrence W. Levine's The Opening of the American Mind [Beacon Press, 1996]: the literature professor Lionel Trilling "surmised that the problem of diminishing social homogeneity and unity was behind Columbia's restoration of football in 1915, in 'an effort to create the sense of collegiate solidarity among the students" [59].)   I also remember seeing a rash of student op-eds in the IU newspaper some years ago, which declared that extramural sports were important, because "students need something to cheer for," which doesn't make much sense but fits with Trilling's speculation.

Then there's this report of a California high school that "awesomely crown[ed a] trans girl Homecoming Queen."  I'm sorry, but I just cannot get very excited about this historic breakthrough: not because I don't sympathize with trans girls, but because Homecoming Queen competitions are another aspect of American school life that needs to be abolished.  Becoming the first trans Homecoming Queen, as a life goal, is like becoming the first trans Heather -- though that milestone has probably already been passed too: no achievement to be proud of.  (This article appeared on a pop-feminist site that ordinarily would be sharply critical of beauty pageants; why did they change their tune when a trans girl wins one?)  But I digress.

Ripley's article was probably written as a companion to an article in the print version of the magazine, Hilary Levey Friedman's "When Did Competitive Sport Take Over American Childhood?"  That's a good question, but Friedman doesn't really answer it.  Less obviously related, until I read it, was a post by James Fallows: "What the CEO of Facebook Has in Common with a Michigan School Administrator."  It was built around the eponymous gentlemen's agreement on the matter of immigration reform.  Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress that he came to support immigration reform not because of "the usual (and correct) tech-world argument that U.S. companies do better, and so does the U.S. as a whole, if America continues to attract and welcome an outsized share of the world's talent."  Rather, his Road-to-Damascus moment came

after he began doing volunteer-teacher work in a local public school. He found that one of his best students wasn't interested in going to college, not for any academic reasons but because of a legal barrier. The student's parents had made their way to the U.S. illegally when he was little. He grew up here and sounded and looked like other American students. But because of his undocumented/illegal status, he would not be eligible for admission to most colleges or for financial aid if he did get in. As Zuckerberg learned, this limbo affects a lot of students who are already in America, whose only legal transgression was to have been brought here when little, but whose gray-zone status keeps them from taking a major step toward future employability.

Funny thing here, though: although Zuckerberg protested, perhaps too much, that he didn't want immigration laws to be changed so as to get more international talent on his payroll, his argument seems to have circled back to just that point.  And there are problems with that.  Not because it isn't heartbreaking that young people who grew up in the US are being excluded not only from higher education but from many other important aspects of American life; of course it is. It's because it isn't just about their "employability."

After all, it's likely that as US citizens, these kids will be unattractive to many American employers anyway, because they'll cost too much.  One reason why American businessmen are calling for "immigration reform" is so that they can import highly-qualified college graduates, who were probably trained at the expense of the governments and therefore of the taxpayers in their home countries, on special visas for lower pay.  Guest workers, despite their legal immigration status, are still highly vulnerable to exploitation and mistreatment by their employers.  All this reinforces my sense that competition and the "competitiveness" that our wise leaders love to stress is harmful, not only to this country but to others.  It siphons from other countries the trained people they need to make better lives for the people who remain at home, after their governments have paid for their education, either at home or in the US and Europe.

But the specter of "employability" also raises questions that have always been contentious in discussions about education.  What is the purpose of a college education?  Is it to make its graduates "employable" in giant corporations like Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, the financial sector, and so on?  It's a pious commonplace that education is not supposed to prepare students for employment, but to make them better, wiser, more rounded, citizens.  This kind of education isn't practical in the sense that would interest a captain of industry, but it's certainly practical in terms of dealing with business and with government, to ask not simply how to do things but why we do them, and then how to do something else if that seems desirable.

Just about everybody pays lip service to this ideal, but much of the discussion of higher education today focuses -- sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly -- on whether there's any point in going to college if it won't land you a better job when you graduate. And I fully agree that it's important to be able to support yourself when you reach adulthood.  But should schools and universities serve primarily as vocational schools for future employees at the public expense?  Why shouldn't big corporations train their own workers, at their own expense?

There's a lot of discussion and handwringing over skyrocketing student debt (desirable from the employers' point of view, so that employees will be afraid to lose their jobs for fear they won't be able to keep up their loan payments), and the more visible problem of unpaid internships (also desirable from the employers' viewpoint, all that yummy free labor -- contrary to the principles of free-market economics, most employers have never been able to see why workers shouldn't donate their services gratis rather than demanding to be paid for their time), and rightly so, but it misses the point.  Why should (merely potential) employees be paying to get the training that might get them a job?  If education were merely supposed to pasture and improve students' minds, they wouldn't be racking up debt in such amounts to get it; I imagine that there would be a good deal less demand for higher education in that case, but at least there'd be less confusion as to why students were seeking it.  And those who weren't interested in it should be trained in explicitly vocational programs, after they are hired.  (Some years ago a spectacularly foul person complained online that American schools are worthless, because a cashier at the drug store didn't recognize a newly-minted US coin.  But how could any school teach its students to recognize money that didn't exist yet?  The schools hadn't failed -- it was the management of the drug store.)

So I don't think I believe Mark Zuckerberg's professed reasons for his interest in immigration reform.  But just as good education doesn't mean supplying American business with job-ready workers, immigration reform isn't primarily (or at all?) about the future employability of young immigrants.  Well-educated, thoughtful graduates might be less interested in joining a corporate "family," after all.  Amanda Ripley's article is built on the same confusion about the purpose of education, expressed in confusion about the impact of school-based athletics on education.  (I think corporations -- which are often sponsors of sport at all levels -- would see sport's solidarity-building as a good thing.)  And come on, James Fallows: why should other countries care if "U.S. companies do better, and so does the U.S. as a whole, if America continues to attract and welcome an outsized share of the world's talent" -- especially at their expense?

Let me go back for a moment to the rhetorical question with which one writer rebutted (but didn't refute) Gerald Bracey's critique of international comparison testing.  After repeating an anecdote about a Chinese classroom in which a foreign visitor was dazzled by 40 students who explained "how to demonstrate two lines are parallel without using a proportional segment”, the writer asked: "Ask yourself two questions: Wouldn’t you want American kids to know geometry that well? Wouldn’t you want them disciplined and paying attention in class?"  My answer would be more questions:  Why would I want American kids to know geometry that well?  What else would they be learning in school besides geometry?  Could the author of this article explain that theorem?  Since I presume he couldn't, does he feel that he's uneducated, and can't get through life successfully as a result?  And does he think that "discipline" is the essence of education?  That article embodies a lot of what is wrong with the debate on schooling in America.

Reality Kicks Sand in the Face of Satire Once Again

When I started up my browser just now, I found this message underneath the Google search box on the home page:

Security and privacy are not optional. Stand with a broad coalition to demand that the NSA stop watching us.

Watching "us"?  What do you mean, "us"?  Google, Facebook and other big computer-related companies have, it's true, had user data seized by the Feds.  But that's partly because they were watching us, collecting data to sell to advertisers, or for their own use.  What I find most depressing, though, is that it's probably going to help to have these big, rich, powerful companies on the side of ordinary citizens in the coming struggle to make the government back down.  Obama will listen to big corporations; he won't listen to us.  But if and when that battle is won, the next one will be to get some control over corporations, which as Noam Chomsky has always warned, are totalitarian organizations without even as much accountability as government has.  They're at least as big a threat to American freedom as Big Government, because they aren't limited by the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.  When you step onto private property (and much of not most of what used to be public space is now privately owned), or get a job with a private business, you leave your civil liberties behind you.

Alien vs. Predator?

The image above has begun making the rounds on Facebook, and while I appreciate the point, it's mistaken in some important ways.

Most important, I think, is that Wikileaks has primarily published information on governments, not corporations. Oh, there was a flurry of corporate panic at the end of 2010 when Assange announced that Wikileaks would release a trove of documents on corporate malfeasance, but nothing seems to have come of it. The big story about Wikileaks is and has always been the government secrets -- military, diplomatic -- that it has put on the table. The fact that the person who constructed this image got things so far wrong indicates that he or she doesn't really understand what Wikileaks has done; the intent seems more to bash Facebook and Zuckerberg rather than to praise Assange.

Was the information Wikileaks released "private" in the first place? No, except in the narrow and circular sense of "secret." It was public in the truest sense of the word: it concerned events that were paid for by the public dime, and then concealed from the public by public agencies. Governments do not have a right to privacy, especially when they are engaged in criminal enterprises; nor do government officials in their role as government officials. Whether Barack Obama wears boxers or briefs, for example, is a matter I'm happy to leave private, though it's just the kind of fact that many Americans, and the corporate media, would claim that the public has a right to know. (I suspect that Obama would address the boxers vs. briefs question more readily than questions about dead Afghan or Pakistani children, however.) But what our government is doing with its weapons and its troops and its vast amounts of money is what the public has not only a right but an obligation to know. I would include the world, not just Americans, since so much of our crimes are committed on foreign soil.

The original meaning of the word "private" is "secret," and it still often has secrecy as a connotation. Much of what is considered private nowadays is not secret: one's marital status (registered at the courthouse), one's birth date (ditto), the number and names of one's children, and so on. Most people, I think, never consider what they're agreeing to when they join a social network like Facebook, nor despite all the ballyhooed tech-savvy of today's teens do they have any idea how such a system works, or what "privacy" means as a technical term on the Web. But then, neither do most Americans. Even most tech geeks in the 1980s, when I first got online, knew how data packets worked on networks but had little idea what privacy meant on the Net. I shocked the (gay, heterosexually married, closeted) SysOp of a bulletin board system in those days by registering under my own name and posting as an openly gay man; but I knew what I was doing. Other people I knew were outraged to discover that their e-mail wasn't protected by Federal law as their Postal mail was, and that the administrator of a system could read any "private" messages he or she chose to; whatever protection existed was internal to the system.

In the good old days, not so very long ago, anyone could walk into a public library and look through a published street directory, which contained such information as who lived at each address, including children. These directories had many uses, but prominent among them was marketing. A marketer or salesman could check out a neighborhood prior to trying to sell things there. It looks to me as though Facebook and other Internet businesses are just vastly bigger versions of those directories, with all the information organized and searchable by computers. That's just one of the wonders of our Electronic Age, and much of the "privacy" people seem to think they've lost to Facebook's commercial interests was lost long ago; never mind that they themselves freely gave the information to Facebook when they signed up and filled out their profile. Or when they clicked "Like" on this or that corporate product.

Apparently they believe their personal likes and dislikes are "private", hidden in the dark depths of the Intertoobz. But why do they think that all those corporate products are there to be "liked" on Facebook? Nothing is free, and certainly not a vast technological network with hundreds of millions of members. You can't have it both ways, though I suppose in our world you can't even choose the other way. If you want your online "privacy," then you'll need to find another way to pay for the servers and the storage and the programmers; they don't come cheap, especially not on the scale of Facebook. If you want Facebook to be free of charge, then how do you propose to meet its costs? If you want your privacy, then what kind of fool does it take to believe that you can post pictures of you passed out drunk on a global information network and still have any privacy at all?

In another sense of the word, of course, Facebook is private: it's privately owned by Mark Zuckerberg and other shareholders, including its employees. You didn't think it was "public," did you? Like Zuccotti Park? You didn't think it just grew into existence all by itself, like the flowers in the park, available to be picked and/or peed on by anyone who comes along? Truly, the thoughtlessness of many people about the public and the private boggles my mind. But then, it's probably no coincidence that my Facebook friends from Teabag Nation are the ones who always fall for, and pass along, the urban legends about Facebook starting to charge for its services.

There's an Echo in Here!

Ah, I knew there was something else I'd been meaning to write about.

Kim Brooks, whose reflections on the uselessness of high school English classes I discussed some time ago, returned to Salon last weekend with weeping and lamentation over ... erm, well, her own narrow-mindedness and intolerance on Facebook. The given title was "Is my Facebook page a liberal echo chamber?"

She'd found herself in what is probably a common situation for us older people who've been out of school for a few decades and didn't construct our school environment around the Internet from the start, because it didn't exist back then: she was re-establishing contact with people she knew in high school. She questioned the decision at first but then figured, What the hell, why not? I did pretty much the same thing when I began getting friend invitations on Facebook from high school acquaintances a few months after I joined.

She quickly learned why not.

President Obama had just given a televised speech on the economy, and this particular gentleman, someone I’d never known well but with whom I’d shared a neighborhood and a classroom for most of kindergarten through 12th grade, a fellow I remember as being pleasant, a bit on the quiet side, a member of the marching band, certainly not a bully or a jerk, had written, “Just turned off the t.v. More lies from B. Hussein Obama.” Within a few minutes, 10 people had “liked” this comment. Within a few more minutes, others had begun to add comments of their own, nearly all of which made reference to the president’s skin color, “questionable” national origin, or socialist death-panel agenda. I nearly fell out of my chair. My heart was racing. I squinted at the screen. I read the comments again and again. This was the real deal, not on Fox News but right here on MY computer, on MY Facebook page. I’d invited it in, that horrible place I’d left the day I graduated from high school. I looked down at my keyboard and saw that my hands were shaking. I decided to add a comment of my own: “Don’t like! Boy, am I glad I don’t live in Richmond anymore. You are un-friended!”

My own situation was different. I expected to see such things. But then I've been using the Internet for twenty-five years. I've spent a lot of time reading the subliterate ravings of people I hadn't gone to school with, but might have, and learning to deal with them, to call them out when they lie, to point out when they've passed along a well-discredited legend, to read with care what they replied, and to try to answer them without jerking my left-wing knee too much. I've also debated people who fall on the same place of the political spectrum as I do; there's no guarantee that we'll always agree with each other. This has been useful, if only to hone my own arguments, but also to make sure that I hear the views of people with different perspectives.

But I also had the advantage of spending thirty-seven years working with college students from all over the world (and contrary to popular stereotypes, not all college students are liberal hippies), but also with plenty of good old boys and gals from Southern Indiana (and contrary to popular stereotypes, not all good old Hoosiers are right-wing rednecks). Not only that but working on, and eventually running, the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Speakers Bureau put me regularly in front of audiences that included everyone from raving homophobes to the children of gay or lesbian parents. Since we provide panels, not solitary speakers, I was sharing the stage with gay people who ranged from fellow Gay Liberationists to the (former) president of College Republicans. (He was kicked out of the organization and pulled from school by his parents when word got around that he was gay.) A lot of those people are in my Facebook friends list now. So my Facebook page, let alone my world, is not a liberal echo chamber.

I can't say the same for Our Ms. Brooks. Not only her Facebook page, but her life is evidently structured so as to protect her from people with differing values and opinions.

As an angsty teenager and college student, I used to mock people who lived in gated communities, who were so afraid of the unfamiliar world they had to erect a physical boundary to keep it at bay. But now I wonder, aren’t the boundaries we draw with Facebook just as secure as a man-made moat or an underpaid security guard manning a booth? Was the daily back-and-forth on my Facebook feed really a conversation, or was it no more than an echo chamber?

... In a world of friending and unfriending, the 99 percent versus the 53 percent, Obama as antichrist against Obama as savior, who, I wonder, has the tolerance anymore for such messy contradictions, such tainted, imperfect kinships? Who has the patience?

The most pertinent response to this, I think, would be "What do you mean 'we', white woman?" The only person in her article she really can point to who fits this picture is herself. Not that she's alone -- far from it. I've been unfriended for True Political Incorrectness by a few people on Facebook myself. The only person I've unfriended was a former co-worker who moved to another state and sent me a friend invitation before he found Jesus and began spamming his feed with Bible quotations, self-pitying inspirational soundbytes, and overtly racist anti-Obama material. He attacked me when I commented critically on his postings, so when I found that blocking his Bible feed wasn't enough to stem the flood of swill, I finally unfriended him.

As those who read this blog will know, though, I have plenty of contact with other right-wingers on Facebook, such as my two Right Wing Acquaintances. They've given me a lot of material, which saves me the trouble of browsing the Right's propaganda mills; RWA1 especially gives me what he considers the cream of the crop, the serious commentators, so he can't accuse me of cherrypicking ignorant yahoos. Then there's my Tabloid Friend, who's one of several Obama stalwarts in my Friends list. I've also got my high school friends, most of whom are simple Republican fundamentalists, though there's also the middle-of-the-road minister and his wife and a Randite high school teacher who recently moved from teaching Army brats in Europe to a different environment in Africa. I don't respond critically to everything they post, but when it seems proper, I do. Some have defriended me, others ignore me, and I'm having real (though virtual) conversations with some others. With War on Christmas Season less than a month away, I'm sure things are going to heat up again.

Who has the tolerance, who has the patience? Well, I do, for one. But so do the people who put up with me, online and face to face. Kim Brooks is overgeneralizing and oversimplifying from far too small a sample: a sample of one. What disturbs me is that she's not just a Salon pundit; she's also been a college writing instructor -- might still be, for all I know -- and not in the Ivy League, but in community colleges, which aren't exactly liberal hothouses either. She must have been a really involved, empathetic teacher if she never noticed that her students didn't always agree with her politics.

One more thing, though: there's no reason why anyone's Facebook page has to be an arena for debate or the broadcast of opinions (whether your own or your friends'). That's one reason, apart from shyness, that I usually wait until people I knew in high school invite me on Facebook; and when I accept their invitations, I don't grill them on their political or religious positions to ensure they meet my high standards. They'll see some of my opinions expressed in my newsfeed soon enough, and they're welcome to react. I wait to see how they use Facebook, and if they only post photos of their grandchildren and Youtube videos of cute kittens or Top 40 hits from our youth, then butter won't melt in my mouth. If they start posting stuff about Illegal Immigrants Who Don't Pay Taxes, or the Kenyan Usurper banning Christmas Trees from the White House, though, they've entered the arena of debate.

So I don't object to Kim Brooks defriending anybody whose politics she dislikes, any more than she should object if they do the same to her. What I object to is her projecting her own hatred of difference onto everyone else, as though she weren't responsible for her own opinions and actions. (I suspect her freakout over commas is not entirely unrelated to this.) I realize that many people think of stating their opinions in public as an invitation to social bonding: You and I both agree that Meskins are dirty and should go back home, right? The homosexuals want to bring America to her knees and force their radical agenda down her throat, don't they? They need to learn that they won't always get the agreement they seek. I've gotten used to it; so can they. And now that I think about it, that's probably what Brooks was doing in this and her other essays for Salon: We're all intolerant, aren't we? All mothers are Jewish mothers, aren't they -- really? People who can't use commas correctly are low-class and stupid, aren't they? Well, since you ask ...