Facebook Eloi?

My Facebook Friends tend to fall into two camps. In one camp are those who take all the quizzes, join all the causes, and send me lots of Southern Stuff and Poetry Stuff and Mardi Gras Trinkets. In the other camp are those who grump about all the clutter on their news feed from other people’s fun and games.

Like with everything else in life, I fall in the middle and am sometimes torn between wanting to play along with the players and wanting to stand on the sidelines and sneer with the snobs.

Terry at I See Invisible People feels no such ambivalence. She sees an altogether darker side to all this fun and games.

Take Poetry Stuff. It seemed fairly harmless to me to send people “Time to Write” or “Lilacs in the Dooryard.” Granted I thought “A Bell Jar” was a little out there but I just skipped it without thinking much about it.

Terry, though, didn’t see this as just a harmless game:

. . .tonight I got a �gift� from a friend through Poetry Stuff. This giving stuff is not really my thing, though I thought it was mostly harmless. Until the Poetry Stuff tonight. One of the things you can choose to send to a friend is �Lithium, a little salt for the brain.�

Lithium is prescribed almost exclusively for bipolar disorder and this treats it like a cheap joke. That pisses me off. Ask anyone who has ever taken it; it�s nasty stuff. I can�t decide which is worse � implying that poets, by being emotional, are mentally ill, or implying that BPD is something cute and harmless to be laughed at.

I was pulled up a little short by this post, forced to look at the issue in a different light. Playing the games didn’t seem so harmless any more. Then, a few days later, Terry posted about another game, one I hadn’t even seen:

I know I shouldn�t look at these things, but Facebook has another new application, this one called The Pharmacy Counter. No one sent it to me, but it came to my attention when one of my friends �gave� Effexor to someone. So I looked into it. At first my hackles came up over the number of psych drugs on the list, but as I thought about it I was more puzzled than angry.

. . .

What exactly is the point of this? It has zero humor potential, unless I�m really missing something, and while I can see that sending an anti-psychotic might give someone secret satisfaction at the �insult,� that pleasure is limited because, unlike lithium, you have to be taking most of these drugs to know what they are. Aside from the psychs, I had to look most of them up to see what they are used to treat.

So if it�s not humor and not insult, what is it? Then it occurred to me. This is advertising. I�d be willing to bet that the app designer is getting kickbacks from Big Pharma for product placement and like good little consumers, people are falling for it.

Well, of course, I thought. Facebook has to pay for itself somehow and this is one of the ways they make a living. Every time you play one of these games, you’re giving somebody somewhere a lot of marketing information.

An article in today’s NYTimes confirms that the popular RealAge quiz, one that has a Facebook application, is a marketing tool:

Americans yearn to be young. So it is little wonder that RealAge, which promises to help shave years off your age, has become one of the most popular tests on the Internet.

According to RealAge, more than 27 million people have taken the test, which asks 150 or so questions about lifestyle and family history to assign a �biological age,� how young or old your habits make you. Then, RealAge makes recommendations on how to get �younger,� like taking multivitamins, eating breakfast and flossing your teeth. Nine million of those people have signed up to become RealAge members.

But while RealAge promotes better living through nonmedical solutions, the site makes its money by selling better living through drugs.

Pharmaceutical companies pay RealAge to compile test results of RealAge members and send them marketing messages by e-mail. The drug companies can even use RealAge answers to find people who show symptoms of a disease � and begin sending them messages about it even before the people have received a diagnosis from their doctors.

I have a real problem with pharmaceutical advertising because the ads mislead people into thinking the magic pill will make them happy, will let them sleep with butterflies in their dreams, and then people ask their doctors for these drugs and the doctors prescribe them without giving the matter much thought. And Terry is right. These drugs are serious; they have serious side effects, and people who must take them must be ever vigilant. Their use is not to be taken lightly.

So it is not right to “sell” people drugs they don’t really need or understand.

Do I think Facebook is evil? No. Do I think games and quizzes are evil? No.

What’s more, I’ve already decided that, in this Brave New World (to mix metaphors) we live in, privacy is not going to be a possibility. I do not want to submit to an iris scan in order to board an airplane or travel abroad but neither do I want to become some kind of recluse trying to recapture the 19th century. Some hard choices await us.

But it’s good to remember that nothing is really ever free. And it’s good to know what games you’re actually playing and who the other players are.

And, as I See Invisible People points out, when you enter Facebook, you should not check your sensitivities at the door.

Me? I’ll probably continue to straddle the fence between the purists and the players. I value my friends on both sides.

See also: Your Online Clicks Have Value, for Someone Who Has Something to Sell

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The death of humanism

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