Liking Facebook

In a story entitled  “Coming Soon to Facebook: A ‘Dislike’ Button," (NYT, 9/15/15), Mark Zuckerberg is quoted thusly, “Not every moment is a good moment, and if you are sharing something that is sad, whether it’s something in current events, like the refugees crisis that touches you, or if a family member passed away, then it may not feel comfortable to like that post. So I do think it’s important to give people more options than just like.” But what will these be. Of course the obvious default mode to like, as the Times headline indicates, would be dislike. However, that doesn’t adequately address the palette of human emotions which is supposedly Facebook’s currency. Why not offer three categories in descending order: love, like, hate. It’s similar to what Hamlet says about Claudius,  “a little more than kin and less than kind”-- as love is more than like and hate is the opposite of love. Here also you're offering Facebook users a chance to avoid equivocating and play upon their passions. Like is really a namby-pamby word. It’s so easy to hit the “like" button but much harder to love or hate unless you're a liar. Of course you can always make a negative comment about a post, but how about making it easy to show revulsion? Similarly people often wax enthusiastically in response to pictures of children and pets, but such responses take, time and energy. Love can be exhausting. Here you see someone’s favorite dog and you can instantaneously embrace the creature with  “love." And there are people like Donald Trump who elicit basically love/hate reactions. You don’t “like” something Donald Trump says. You either love it or hate it. In introducing two more passionate options, Facebook would be diminishing the importance of that mealy mouthed middleman, “like.” And isn’t it true that even if you don’t like someone, you may deeply love them.

If Only John Dillinger Had Memorized His Multiplication Tables

John Dillinger

It used to be that if you wanted to get rich quick, you’d rob a bank. Now all you have to do is to become a math wiz. Here’s how much you can make as a math wiz. The Times reported that Maxim Kontsevich “who works at the Institute of advanced Scientific Studies outside Paris, won the 2012 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences an honor accompanied by $1 million award. Then a couple of months later, he was among nine people who received a new physics prize—and $3 million each—from Yuri Milner, a Russian who dropped out of graduate studies in physics and became a successful investor in Internet companies like Facebook. A few weeks ago, Dr. Kontsevich heard from Mr. Milner again. Mr. Milner told him he was one of five inaugural winners of the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, financed by Mr. Milner and Mark Zuckerberg” (“The Multimillion-Dollar Minds of5 Mathematical Masters,” NYT, 6/23/14). The Breakthrough pays $3 million. So that’s a total of $7 million which is not a bad payday. On a salary scale it almost puts a top mathematician on par with the CEO of a major bank, though not quite. Jamie Dimon, the top dog at JP. Morgan Chase got $20 million in a year in which his bank was forced to pay out over $20 billion in settlements (“Dimon Gets Raise After Rough Year,” WSJ, 1/24/14) But surely the kind of math involved in derivatives would be small potatoes for someone like Kontesevich. If you’re a math wiz you're going to be able parley your winnings into the kind of big bucks earned by Hedge Fund honchos like SAC Capital’s equally embattled Steven A. Cohen. What math wizs like Kontsevich have over bank chairmen and hedge fund meisters is that they don’t have to issue questionable securities or fall under suspicion because of their subordinates off color trading practices.  For them making a fortune is even easier than robbing a bank.

The Social Network

Marshall McLuhan famously said, "The medium is the message." "Style is content" is another shibboleth of the modernist movement, which began to recognize that context—the way in which the images and text that make up so-called content are ingested and regurgitated—is as important as the content itself. Think about what you remember when you recall a movie or television show and it will soon become apparent that style outweighs the message. You may not remember the plot of The Manchurian Candidate or Psycho, but you will surely remember the paranoiac style. This emphasis on cultural context is at the heart of the deconstructionist view of literature, in which texts are value-free products of the psychosocial moments that produce them. Thus it is a curiosity that The Social Network, which purports to deal with the latest revolution of the Internet medium, a revolution which some experts believe is tantamount to the invention of email itself, is such an anachronism. The Social Network, directed by David Fincher, whose Seven was one of the most terrifying essays of style of its decade, approaches its subject almost entirely in terms of gossipy content of the litigious variety (the plot is structured around the suits that have been filed against Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, by three of his Harvard classmates, the Winklevoss twins and Eduardo Saverin, who helped found the company). Facebook may have been started as a dating site (with gossip correctly identified by Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the screenplay, as the grist for its mill), but its implications have phenomenological consequences that far exceed any of the intentions delineated in Fincher’s movie, which is full of girls at parties in Cambridge and Palo Alto drinking too much and taking off their clothes. Not the least of the concerns is the nature of personality itself. The concept of transparency, which Facebook introduces into the cyber universe, runs in direct contradiction to the previous anonymity of Internet life, with its avatars and screen names. Facebook presents human personality as a series of surfaces defined by preferences that become apparent from the consuming habits of its members. The comparison between the view of personality that Facebook espouses and that of modern depth psychology, with its notion of unconscious life, is equivalent to the comparison between the kind of language philosophy advocated by a different set of Cambridge thinkers, almost a century ago, and the metaphysics propounded by German idealist philosophers in places like Freiberg, Marburg and Heidelberg centuries before that. Sadly, The Social Network totally trivializes the significance of the revolution it heralds.