IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016 - 45

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Commentary

[18] J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, 1863 (open domain), University of Adelaide, eBooks@ Adelaide; http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/mill/john_
stuart/m645u/, accessed Dec. 14, 2015.
[19] I. Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals,
(T.K. Abbott, tr.) University of Adelaide, eBooks@Adelaide, (open domain);
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[20] R. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York, NY: Basic,
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[22] P. Vallentyne and B. van der Vossen, "Libertarianism," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, E.N. Zalta, Ed., Fall 2014; http://
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Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, p. 230.

(continued from page 28)

of these companies has ceased to
be advertising, but an unremarkable
way in which one communicates
with the public.
Can or should any thing be
done? One can imagine competition regulators stepping in to break
up Facebook, or compelling social
networking services to interoperate
so that individuals can join the provider of their choice without fear of
losing their friends on other networks. Scandinavian regulators
have, in fact, have taken action to
curb undeclared advertising of
social media companies on their
public broadcasters [4]. One can
further imagine public broadcasters
establishing public social networks
(see [4, p. 152]). But these are all
relatively heavyweight solutions,
and perhaps some lighter-weight
options deserve consideration first.
Firstly, to be fair to the ABC, it also
invites its audience to communicate
through text messaging and (sometimes) telephone, allowing those
who choose not to join its favored
social networks to participate.
Secondly, to be fair to my hobby
group, the previous branch to which I
belonged had a policy that all official
june 2016

announcements were to be made via
email, and that its Facebook group
was only for social chit-chat. This policy ensured that everyone with email
knew what the group was doing, and
served to remind Facebook users
that not everyone read it.
My last point requires me to tell a
quick story first. I was once a member of LinkedIn, having received an
invitation from a colleague back
when social networking services
were new and I thought it worth a
try. After a few years of failing to find
anything I could do with it, and hearing little or nothing from "connections" via LinkedIn or otherwise, I
began replying to new invitations
with a personal email explaining
that I didn't really use LinkedIn. In
response to one such email, my
would-be connection admitted that
she didn't really use LinkedIn either;
she just felt compelled to click on
the "Do you know?" button.
In a later conversation about the
worth or otherwise of LinkedIn, one
of my colleagues observed that it
felt rewarding to accept connection
requests, and rude to decline them.
I countered that this was exactly
why I'd deleted my LinkedIn profile:
∕

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

it seemed superficially rewarding to
accept connection requests, and at
first I thought they might lead to
something, but this quickly turned
to disappointment when I realized
that I wasn't actually connected to
these people in any meaningful way.
I wonder if we instead ought to feel
rude for allowing Internet companies to exploit our relationships in
order to build their customer bases,
and to present contrived social networks built up by automated messaging and idle button-clicking?

Author Information
The author is with the Singapore
Institute of Technology - Infocomm
Technolog y Cluster, Singapore
138683, Singapore.

References

[1] D. Eggers, The Circle. London: Hamish
Hamilton, 2013.
[2] S. D. Eldridge, "The circle," IEEE Technology and Society Mag., vol. 34, no. 1,
pp. 4-5, 16, 2015.
[3] T. Berners-Lee, "Long live the Web,"
Scientific Amer., vol. 303, no. 6, pp. 80-85,
2010.
[4] J. van Dijck and T. Poell, "Making public
television social? Public service broadcasting and the challenges of social media,"
Television & New Media, vol. 16, no. 2, pp.
148-164, 2015.

45

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/mill/john_ http://www.fastcompany.com/3050250/what-makes-uber-run https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kant/immanuel/k16prm/complete http://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/ http://www.Tech.AD http://http:// http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/ethics-deontological/ http://http:// http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/libertarianism/ http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/livability/fact_sheets/transandhousing http://www.Tech.AD http://http:// http://autonomous-driving-tech-detroit2015.we-conect.com/en/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/the

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