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READINGS 15
Lecture on Prolonging the Interim, a watercolor with collage by Mary Anne Kluth, whose work was on exhibit last fall at Frey Norris Gallery, in
San Francisco.
to buy whatever the advertiser is selling for motivation was to find a way to package peer
their whole lives. pressure as a service that could be sold to ad-
The situation with social networks is lay- vertisers. But it meant that, for example, there
ered with multiple absurdities. The advertis- was no longer a way to buy a surprise birthday
ing idea hasn’t made any money so far, be- present. The commercial lives of Facebook
cause ad dollars appear to be better spent on users were no longer their own.
search-specific placements and on relevant Personal reductionism has always been pres-
Web pages. If the revenue never appears, then ent in information systems. You have to declare
a weird imposition of a database-as-reality your status in reductive ways when you file a
ideology will have colored generations of teen tax return. Most people are aware of the differ-
peer group and romantic experiences for no ence between reality and database entries when
business or other purpose. If, on the other they file taxes, yet you perform the same kind
hand, the revenue does appear, evidence sug- of self-reduction in order to create a profile on a
gests that its impact will be negative. When social-networking site. You fill in the data: pro-
Facebook has attempted to turn the social fession, relationship status, and location. In this
graph into a profit center in the past, it has case digital reduction becomes a causal ele-
created ethical disasters. A famous example ment, mediating between new friends with
was 2007’s Beacon. This was a suddenly im- whom most information is exchanged online.
posed feature that was hard to opt out of. That is new.
When a Facebook user made an online pur- It might at first seem that the experience of
chase from a variety of participating retailers, youth is now sharply divided between the old
the event was broadcast to his friends. The world of school and parents and the new world of
READINGS 17
READINGS 19