Several prominent people are up in arms about Facebook charging for access to users who have already Liked their page. I believe this debate is missing the big picture, and what we are in fact witnessing is the unfurling of the full-fledged... “Blurring the lines between advertising and content is one of the most ambitious goals a marketer could have.” (I just pasted the link and noticed: this Dalton Caldwell guy seems to understand Facebook quite well, and at the same time doesn't know how to configure a proper open graph for his website... hm.. 2017 repost: open graph fixed.) .... Facebook newsfeed is an embodiment of our war on noise. We depend on the newsfeed optimizer to protect our limited attention span, and as a consequence, Facebook gets to choose what stories we do and don’t see, just as Google chooses which search results we do and don’t see. Conceptually, this seems very lucrative: Facebook is auctioning off our limited attention span to the highest bidder, as long as the bidder has a candidate newsstory to promote. This is what Like-gate is about. Welcome to the attention economy.”

information age anxiety, Facebook, oligarchy