Back in January, Facebook founder and CEO Mark
Zuckerberg called for people to celebrate Feb. 4, the twelfth anniversary of
Facebook's founding, as "Friendship Day." Now Mr. Zuckerberg is free to call for anybody to celebrate
anything, and I have no problem with that. The trouble came, at least in our case, when some anonymous
software engineers at Facebook had a bright idea inspired by the call and, as
software engineers often do, put it into action without telling the users what
they were up to in advance.
It was simply this: "Hey, why don't we take some pictures that people have
posted in the last year or two and send the pictures to them along with a
greeting like 'Happy Friendship Day'?
What could be wrong with that?" As it turns out, plenty.
Zuckerberg himself is only 31, and it's likely
that the average age of the technical staff at Facebook is somewhere around
that number. If you are a
well-paid employee of a giant software successful software company, death does
not occupy a large part of your personal horizon. You know it's out there somewhere, and you read about it
online with the other bad news, but it's not likely to have affected you
personally to a great extent, except perhaps for some old relatives whose
funerals you may have attended out of a sense of duty.
It turns out that in the last two years, my wife, who is 59,
has lost five relatives of various degrees of closeness, ranging from a cousin
she hadn't seen in years to her last remaining aunt, her sister, and her
father. And in the last few years
she had taken pictures of these people, and posted many of the pictures on
Facebook at appropriate times. You
can tell where this is going.
Imagine how she felt when a couple of weeks ago, she logged on to
Facebook one day and saw under the headline, "Happy Friendship Day" a
photo of her father in the hospital during his final illness. He died almost exactly a year ago.
For the better part of a day, it was like walking on eggs
around here. She rarely gets truly
angry, but if Zuckerberg had happened to stop by our house that day, he might
have come close to a personal encounter with mortality that he would never
forget.
A short time later, she spent several hours systematically
taking down every single photo she had ever posted on Facebook that included
anyone who has since died. It was
a lot of pictures, but she was determined that the machine was never going to
catch her by surprise that way again.
Sometimes I amuse myself by imagining how I would explain
various modern technologies to someone transported through time to the present
from, say, fifty or a hundred years ago.
Although Facebook shares some features in common with things that
existed in 1966—photo albums, high school annuals, and the postal system, to name
three—you could not express what it does simply by referring to those
things. And the main feature that
would be missing from that description is the way Facebook manipulates the
rules, and what happens to your Facebook stuff when they play games with it
like Happy Friendship Day.
Unless you happened to be living in the 1960s with a
busybody aunt who lacked any sensitivity to your feelings, I can't imagine
someone back then receiving a customized photo album labeled "Happy
Friendship Day" that contained pictures of some of the most intimate and
painful times in your entire life.
But that is exactly what Facebook did to my wife. At least if a nosy aunt did such a
tacky thing, she'd be standing right there where you could chew her out for
it. As it is, though, the faceless
System of Facebook is all she can blame, and her only defense against further
manipulations of this kind is to withdraw any possibly pain-evoking images from
the System so it can't fool with them.
Once my wife explained to me what had happened, in the heat
of the moment I thought that whatever numskull came up with that idea ought to
be tied to a chair and made to watch 200 hours of cat videos. I now think that is excessive. But certainly, some live person or
persons originated the idea of recycling pictures for Happy Friendship Day, and
as Zuckerberg himself has expressed enthusiasm for artificial-intelligence
solutions even to programming problems, it's virtually certain that some
algorithm the programmers wrote made the selection of which photos to
include. Despite the best
programmers Zuckerberg's money can buy, that algorithm did not have feelings,
and it was therefore insensitive to the psychic pain that such actions could
cause.
We are in a strange time in which former organizational
divisions of all sorts are falling down, and people who were trained to do one
kind of work—software engineering, say—find themselves doing very different
kinds of work—for example, manipulating on a massive scale items that have deep
and powerful personal meanings for literally a billion people or more. There is an old saying, "Fools
rush in where angels fear to tread."
It would have required the discretion and intelligence of many angels to
select only those pictures which would have been appropriate to accompany a
message such as "Happy Friendship Day" for each one of Facebook's
users. Unfortunately, software is
a poor substitute for angelic insight, and the result was in many cases
foolish, or worse than foolish.
For reasons of time and disinclination, I have no Facebook
page, other than possibly a dormant one my wife started for me in connection
with a book publication. If
anything happens on Facebook that she thinks I need to know about, she'll tell
me. It has had its good moments
for her, and we have reconnected through it with people around the globe whom
we had lost touch with. But in the
case of Happy Friendship Day, Zuckerberg blew it, at least where my wife is
concerned. And it's going to be a
long time before she posts personal pictures on that site again.
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