Pardon me for a brief three-part rant, starting and ending with why Facebook and Twitter are ultimately mere signals of broader cultural and technological shifts; signposts without directions, stopovers instead of destinations.

Lost in the woods? Blaze a trail.
Facebook was designed to be closed, created its terms of service around the promise of privacy, developed a user interface and a set of “privacy constraints” that created a false expectation of privacy with its users, neglected the fact that the technological reality didn’t meet the promise, fought through numerous user interface (e.g. Newsfeed) and business model changes (e.g. Beacon, App developer platform) that challenged this misunderstood notion of privacy, implemented technological changes to bring openness to a closed platform, and now faces the unrealized realization that their path will be their own. Time to stop following and start blazing.

Will we still light fires once we’ve all been burned?
Deep within the conversations about Facebook and Twitter is a reminder: privacy is a cultural interpretation, a philosophical question rather than a technological answer, government mandate or legal certainty.

Privacy is a cultural expectation codified into law; technology creates new possibilities for culture to exploit, frame new realities, refresh our governments, rewrite the rules of law.

(A relevant digression: do you think copyright law will remain unchanged by a remix culture?)

What will happen once we’ve all been burned by a private foible becoming unexpectedly public?

Will we still rake our public figures through the coals? Or will be put our hot irons away and as a collective society merely shrug our shoulders, an unceremonious acknowledgment that humans make mistakes, a recognition that we are all public figures in our own spheres?

It’s not about what it does but how it’s used.
Why does this matter? Facebook, Twitter, email, macro-messages, micro-messages, data, the web, the Internet: it’s not about what it does but how it’s used.

Focusing on Facebook and Twitter on their own is a nauseating endeavor; Twitter and Facebook are the latest case studies to be misunderstood and misapplied, the latest incarnates of the broader technological and cultural shifts framing our lives:

• The shifting roles (and power) of individuals and companies, the clash between the economic returns available to individuals, non-structured groups and hierarchical organizations;
• The fundamental economics of scale butting up against its new technological realities, creating new strategies to capture the shifting returns to scale and scope;
• The mixing of the online and the offline, a rationalization of what a “real life” truly means;
• The increasing importance of ideals, the shift of returns from hard assets to soft assets, the decreasing returns from controlling differential access to an asset and the increasing returns from understanding what to *do* with access to an asset;
• Shifting transaction costs reframing the value created by communication, demonstrated by the shift of the time and attention spent between work, entertainment and communication, human nature’s hardwired quest for stimulation reaching the next plateau;
• Some things getting easier to create (content), some things getting harder (making sense of content), reframing our notion of experts, leaders, people, networks and connections.

Yet all trend lines break once we stress systems to their breaking points; as humans, we’re exceedingly good at tearing down our own systems.

Will economic returns always flow towards openness? No. Will we always care about privacy? Not in the same way. Will being connected always be important? Not in the same way. Will everything we believe to be true ultimately prove to be true? No.

Depression, recession, expansion, growth, decline; these are mere manifestations of greater subtexts, proofs of the continued existence of humanity. Facebook will not be the last social network, Twitter will not be the last communication platform; we have needs we have to realize, there are moguls and captains of industry we haven’t met yet, markets yet to be created, bubbles and bursts yet to be experienced, shocks to systems we have yet to create.

More importantly, why and how are people changing? Where is the value flowing? And where are you headed?

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Updated 5/5: Yes, I changed the title; the initial title “A brief rant: Three notes on privacy, communication, technology and culture” simply wasn’t that good.