Poole took Facebook and Google for failing to acknowledge that a person’s identity is constantly in flux, not static, as it appears to be in social media.
[Nick Bilton/The New York Times]
Chris Poole, founder of 4Chan (which birthed Anonymous), recently spoke at the Web 2.0 Summit, speaking about personal identity, social media and anonymity.
He had a few criticisms for Facebook and Google.
“On the one hand, you have Facebook. Facebook purports that you have one identity: who you are online is who you are offline. On the other hand, you have anonymity, which to most represents something that’s chaotic and unknown. And so it makes sense when people build we products they build it for the latter.”
Poole then spoke of Google +’s “circles” and Facebook’s “smart lists,” both failing to “understand the core problem there—it’s not the audience, it’s your context within that audience. It’s not who you share with, it’s who you share as.”
He notes that we have a multiple identities or “prismatic,” with various lens through which you are viewed by others, whereas Facebook and Google believe that we are mirrors, “that there is one reflection” that we have or “one self.”
Poole humorously, and rather sarcastically, notes that he has more options for a toothbrush at a supermarket than ways of expressing himself online.
It’s an interesting talk. Watch the video below.
November 08, 2011 at 9:47 pm, A10643104 said:
“And so it makes sense when people build we products they build it for the former*.”