View From the Phlipside - Facebook's Bad Week

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, Radio, the Movies and more.  I love them and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View From the Phlipside.

Last week was an interesting week for the folks at Facebook.  It’s not often even the leader in social media gets quite this much attention.  And I’m quite certain they’re not accustomed to getting this much NEGATIVE attention.

First off we have the debut of the long awaited Facebook move “The Social Network” at the New York Film festival.  The early reviews are very positive, unless you’re Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg.  Zuckerberg isn’t shown in a flattering light in the movie.  To counteract that vision of him he just happened to choose last week to make a 100 million dollar donation to the Newark, New Jersey school district.  The company maintains the timing was coincidental.  Let me assure you that I don’t believe in coincidence quite that large.

But things kept going badly for Facebook.  Last week marked the biggest service glitch in four years for the social media site.  Those of us who spend a fair amount of time there (I was in fact challenged just this past week by a friend who asked how I managed to post “so often”) were extremely annoyed to go several hours without access twice last week.  Reactions ranged from annoyance to some borderline “It’s the end of the world” type stuff.  The fact that it happened on an otherwise slow news day did nothing to help.

Which brings me to the last little bit of piling on.  Last week Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten announced that Facebook was “useless” and, this is my favorite part,  it is “an ocean of banalities shared among persons with lives so empty they echo.”   That’s you and me he’s talking about there Sparky.

Some folks are comparing Facebook to the Model T Ford on the innovation scale.  Some people become apoplectic at the very thought.  I don’t know why Mark Zuckerberg and who ever else invented Facebook.  Maybe it was to make the world a better place or maybe it was to meet girls.  I understand both rationales.  The invention sometimes outstrips the inventor.  Henry Ford moved the world into a new direction.  One that he soon discovered he couldn’t control.  Facebook is taking us into a new place, to a new way of sharing and connecting.  Maybe it’s a way for us to deal with lives that echo a bit too much.  Or help us to understand the emptiness.  Either way it will have provided us with a service.  And that’s not a bad thing.

So here’s hoping next week is a little nicer for the current king of social media.


Call that the View From the Phlipside.

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010