Is the main point of social media now to sell cr*p to f8ckwits?

What with Google, Facebook and Blippy et al in the news for scraping and flogging user data to turn a quick buck, Steven Hodson asks the question that is on many observer's minds - what exactly is social media now for:

After all when you hear a bunch of developers cheering [at the f8 Conference] because Facebook has removed a key user data protection element in their insatiable quest to control as much of the Social Web as possible you have to wonder just who is the Web for anymore.

When you hear terms like we’re doing this to improve the social experience; which if anyone decides to look past the warm and fuzzy buzzwords, it is easy to see that this is more about improving the company’s social experience and ability to monetize our activity on the Web. What it isn’t about is us saying what will make our experience better and when we raise questions we are either lumped in with the open web freetards (like it’s a bad thing) or we’re some sort of troglodytes.

Sometimes it feels like Social Media is nothing more than one great big social experiment to see just how far we can be made to shift our perception of what privacy is. It isn’t a shift that is truly benefiting us in anyway. Is it really that important to know immediately what some person who has followed you is listening to? Is it really necessary that we know what some person who has friended you has spent or bought.

But a few short years ago, Social Media was for YOU! Remember that time? Yet now its all for THEM.

This is no longer your web or my web but rather the pitched corporate battle ground where things like privacy are looked upon as the mutual enemy and that we need to be coerced into believing that these companies know what is best for us.

It doesn’t matter that the Web is slowly becoming one or two off/on switches that control our online identity which can disappear should be ever be perceived to have stepped out of line. Our identity has become a commodity, which in itself is depressing but further compounded by the fact we don’t seem to care that it isn’t us controlling those switches.

The common refrain the past few days is that Facebook is on a march to take over the social web. The only problem is that the social web has already been taken over. It has been taken over by corporations, their marketers, PR firms and Facebook, and as much as they would love to con us into believing it is all about the conversation the reality it is all about funneling us into things like Facebook, Twitter and any number of cool networks.

Or, as Umair Haque, who has written much on this Zombieconomy and the Zombies within it, paraphrased it:

the "social web", built by marketers to force-feed "consumers" more toxic junk.

Or, as I put it a bit more poetically, to sell cr*p to F8ckwits