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I think I was going in the wrong direction with this paper. What I was trying to say, but didn't succeed in saying, was that I don't think there is much hope to get people off of Facebook (regardless of whether it's off social networking entirely, or just off this particular social network), because I don't think people outside the realm of our classroom and a limited number of other people even realize that privacy issues exist in the first place. And even when you try to explain it to one of these people (at least just my own experience), people don't seem bothered by it at all. It seems really, really hard to get the message across in any kind of meaningful way. So I started to think either (1) people don't get it, or (2) people get it, but privacy isn't important to them. If people don't care about privacy or if they don't understand it (not understanding it is what I was focusing on here), then it doesn't matter what you try to tell them - no argument is going to work. Plus, when you add in the fact that facebook is pretty addictive to begin with, that's even more of a force purshing against making users question it. It seems like when people love something this much, it's hard to make them see that it could be bad. So I was trying to think of a way to convince people to question it and become more skeptical without using the privacy argument, because I don't think the privacy argument has the right kind of mass appeal to do something as powerful as getting people to give up something they love (ie, facebook). I also don't think it's powerful enough to even get people to switch off of Facebook and onto a different site...I think Facebook's consumers are very, very sticky. So I thought...what would people value more than Facebook? If they had to choose between Facebook and something else, what would be the "something" else they would pick that they like better? Facebook satisfies a desire that is in my opinion, extremely powerful. All I could think of that could hold a candle to facebook, if privacy isn't want people care about, is money. Everyone loves money and it's pretty tempting...maybe as tempting as the strange social satiation that people get from Fracebook. So this draft was my initial attempt to say that maybe we can use money to make people rethink things if privacy isn't what they care about.

But I don't know if there's even a point to exploring that, I'm not sure how practical it is. I am really committed to the idea that you can't make people care about something unless they care about it, and I don't think there's more than a small minority out there who care about this issue. I think people are wrong not to care about this, but that doesn't change the fact that when I speak to intelligent people about what I've learned in this class I get replies like "well, it can't be that bad if we're all in the same boat."

I think for people to start caring or start understanding, something really bad would have to happen first. I was trying to think of a new way to prevent that from happening without relying on legal protections, and all I could think of was money.

In terms of your comment regarding getting Facebook's users off Facebook and onto a non-spying social network, how would we do that? How do we convince them to leave behind the virtual worlds that they've built on Facebook and start from scratch? Facebook is no longer just a place to connect with people - it's becoming a place where people are creating a visual imprint of their lives. The new timeline seems to me to be getting right at people's sentimentality. A person's profile is no longer just a series of sequential photos, comments, and thoughts...now facebook is coming in and changing the layout of the profile reminding us when we got married, when we got our first job, when we had our first baby, etc. I don't even know and don't want to know how facebook deals with death, but I'm guessing it is or will be used in a similar way to build upon peoples' inability to separate their physical selves from the virtual world of this website. Even if everyone can rebuild this in a new and safer space, how do we get people to leave this all behind in the first place?