So facebook:
It’s gotten to be a bit more like the real world, yeah? I mean, I can try to keep stuff hidden, but it always gets out because as soon as I interact with another person, I am public. When I put those interactions into an archived database–and others put their interactions with me into the same–I’m ratcheted up to a new level of public-ness. I don’t own the air or the soup or the cloud or whatever other metaphor I can devise to describe the social glue that binds us together in community. If I do anything that brings me into contact with any member of the community, I run the risk of that information about me becoming part of the community consciousness.
The marketplace wants me pinned and wriggling against the way. The marketplace wants to dissect every little bit of me so that it can best sort out how to sell me something. Zuckerberg is interested in the marketplace, not in the creation of a space that will be responsive to my individual desires to maintain multiple identities. Very few people, I might add, are actually going to be upset enough about this public exposure of self to actively protest, and so it will just continue on. Everyone else is doing it. Blah blah blah.
Slate.com on the latest round of facebook shenanigans
Crooked Timber and Michael Zimmer on the same.