Zadie Smith Takes On Facebook

While you're waiting for Zadie Smith to come out with her next novel, you could do worse than reading her  New York Review of Books essay on Facebook, the life and the movie. Take a look at it here.

A couple of points that particularly intrigued me. First, the idea that programming happens haphazardly, but is easy to get locked in, because, though mediocre, it becomes too big, or in this case, too interfaced, to fail. I buy this. I work in a store where we are still working with IBID, a DOS-based program. Believe me when I tell you that we are not the only bookstore operating back in the dark ages. It is stable, but ridiculous. In the case of Facebook, Smith urges us to keep in mind that this program was created by and retains the traces of the desires of a college sophomore.

The second point I'll just quote:

To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook—if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large—this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.

So check it out. Although I wasn't that crazy about her third novel, On Beauty, she is one of those writers I will always read.