By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We’re facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes. What we need, so say these proud Luddites, is to turn our backs on technology and embrace not the keyboard, but the pencil.
Such sentiments, in the opinion of Dennis Baron, are nostalgic, uninformed hogwash. A professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Baron seeks to provide the historical context that is often missing from debates about the way technology is transforming our lives in his new book, “A Better Pencil.” His thesis is clear: Every communication advancement throughout human history, from the pencil to the typewriter to writing itself, has been met with fear, skepticism and a longing for the medium that’s been displaced. Far from heralding in a “2001: Space Odyssey” dystopia, Baron believes that social networking sites, blogs and the Internet are actually making us better writers and improving our ability to reach out to our fellow man. “A Better Pencil” is both a defense of the digital revolution and a keen examination of how technology both improves and complicates our lives.
Recently, Salon spoke with Baron by phone about emoticons, the way Facebook and MySpace make us better friends and a not-too-distant future when everyone is a writer.
Your book is about the digital communications revolution, so why did you decide to call it “A Better Pencil”?
OK, I can’t answer that very well because the publisher came up with the title. I had a different title, and they decided it wouldn’t sell. “A Better Pencil” is a line I use in the book, but I had called it “From Pencils to Pixels.” I think they wanted something shorter and, pardon the expression, pointed.
But what I’m dealing with is the way technology affects readers and writers when they communicate. And also how readers and writers help direct the way technology develops. So, what I’m trying to do is put the computer revolution into historical context to see how it fits with previous innovations in communication like pencils, like the printing press, like the clay tablet, like writing itself. A new communication technology does what old technology was able to do – sometimes better, sometimes in a little different way — and I’m looking at how we make sense of all of this.
How is the criticism directed at computers, instant messaging and Facebook similar to the negative reaction directed at previous communication advances, from pencils to typewriters?
Historically, when the new communication device comes out, the reaction tends to be divided. Some people think it’s the best thing since sliced bread; other people fear it as the end of civilization as we know it. And most people take a wait and see attitude. And if it does something that they’re interested in, they pick up on it, if it doesn’t, they don’t buy into it.
I start with Plato’s critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They’re not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down — the ultimate irony.
We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won’t have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there’s no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant — it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of “this is going to revolutionize everything” versus “this is going to destroy everything.”
You point out that means of communication we fear often evolve to become viewed as highly personal: Handwriting started out as a completely bureaucratic mechanism and it’s now thought of as a very personal means of expression. Why does this happen?
Handwriting could only become personal once handwriting no longer needed to be uniform because we didn’t have to worry about readability. Handwriting had to be readable when it was the only way of reproducing texts. Once the printing press took over, you still had several hundred years where documents, business documents, certain notes, letters, were produced by hand, not on print, because the printing press was only useful if you needed large numbers of copies of things. So you still had to have uniform, legible handwriting for office work until the early 20th century when office machinery took over. That’s when you start seeing the shift from everybody has to write the same way to expressing your personality.
But we also tend to romanticize the technology of yesteryear. There are always people who feel nostalgia toward the means of communication that have been usurped. What do you think causes this even when, in the case of computers compared to typewriters, say, the new technology has many advantages?
I’m going to have to guess at this because I’m not particularly nostalgic. But when you read this type of commentary, you have a sense that people are afraid of the new technology and think that somehow, things were great, why fix what’s not broken? Or I’m too old to learn this new technology. One of the things about new technology is that it tends to be more complicated than the older ones. So at least initially there’s a steep learning curve. When I started using a personal computer, they were not particularly plug-and-play. They were really user-unfriendly. You had to be a maniac to stay with it and a glutton for punishment. But I had the sense that eventually, this will be better despite all the difficulties I had to put up with. But the people who yearn for the good old days of older technology like typewriters don’t seem to realize there never were any good old days. At the same time, in looking at new technology, it never does everything that people promise it will.
One of the most common arguments against the digital revolution is that communicating via IM or Facebook or e-mail in some sense removes us from living in the world. Isn’t there some validity to that? When one of the main ways in which we socialize is done alone, in the privacy of our own home without speaking, doesn’t that indicate a dramatic communication change – and perhaps not for the better?
There are two sides to this. Computer socialization — is this putting an end to face-to-face human interaction? Or does it let us expand our social networks when face-to-face communication is not possible, either because of geographic distance or some other barrier? Obviously, there are people who will reject these kinds of things out of hand and say the only meaningful communication is the one that I can have face-to-face with someone, who say calling Facebook “friends” friends is the end of the meaning of friendship.
On the other hand, I survey my students all the time about this, and there’s confirming data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project that, in fact, what people are using programs like Facebook and e-mail and chats for is to reinforce friendships and to maintain friendships across distance. My students say I did this semester abroad and the only way I could keep in contact with my friends was through Facebook, and stuff like that. I don’t think for most people it replaces anything. I think it extends it. But certainly, there are people who want to say, look I have 15,000 Facebook friends and look how popular I am.
As a professor of linguistics, have you noticed the way your students write and speak changing over time? We hear so much criticism about emoticons and text-speak corrupting language, but do you find that actually occurring?
I don’t think it’s having a negative impact. The sort of scary stories you hear all the time about children at school putting emoticons in their book reports — that may happen from time to time, but I think students as writers quickly learn what’s appropriate in what kind of context. And so they adapt their writing. Particularly the successful ones. Some people are better at it than others, obviously. Some people are never going to write a good report whether there’s an emoticon in it or not, and some people are going to write dynamite stuff for school even if they use acronyms and little pictures. But writers learn what the audience expects, and they learn that for any successful communication there’s got to be an interchange between what the audience expects and giving them what you want to give them. Getting your message across in a way that they’ll pay attention to. I don’t see that as a big problem at all. My students are not making those kinds of errors, but they’re also in college, and we talk about this sort of thing in class and they say, I don’t even do that in text messages. They say that’s very junior high school, that’s very middle school. Once you mature, once you’re in high school, you look down on that stuff. We punctuate, and we check for spelling. They’re well aware of the conventions, and they buy into them. In fact, it’s kind of hard to break them away from being conventional.
If you don’t think the digital revolution is making us worse writers, do you think it’s making too many people writers? Just to play devil’s advocate, is it a positive that so many people can express themselves publicly online?
We have, through the history of communications, this whole tension between giving people the tools to express themselves and regulating that expression: Who should be allowed to publish? Whose manuscript should be allowed to appear as a play in the 17th century? In London, you had to have government approval before you could put on a play. Shakespeare had to get that approval from the authorities. So what the computer does is subvert those traditional gate-keeping facilities. You don’t need an editor, you don’t need a publisher. All you need is a Wi-Fi and an Apple laptop and a place to sit at Starbucks and you’re a writer. And the funny thing is that you could put anything out there, and somebody is going to read it. Writers spend their whole lives looking for readers and now with the computer, readers are there. They’re just waiting for people to put stuff online. Does this dilute the quality? That’s a matter of opinion. Giving more people the authority to write – people are doing it and they seem to find things to say and they’re finding readers and that’s one criterion for successful writing: having an audience.
A follow-up to that: You talk about John Updike’s fear about living in a world where no writer is ever paid for his work. When there is this much material online for free, while it’s easier for people to express themselves, is it harder for writers to live off their writing now? If writing becomes a hobby rather than a profession, what does that bode for journalism or even fiction writers?
The economical model is changing for journalists, no question. But I think that’s got less to do with the fact that people other than professional journalists can put stuff online. People are getting their news from other sources, from online news aggregators or directly from news sources or from “The Daily Show” rather than buying print. I think historically, professional writing is a relatively modern concept, and writers had to have independent incomes for most of history in order to be writers. They’ve had to have patrons. They’ve had to have day jobs. So what else is new? Most fiction writers don’t make a living from their fiction. A few do, but most of them have to get teaching jobs or some other kind of job to pay the bills. The economical model for publication is changing, but how it is changing and whether it is good or bad or simply inevitable, I can’t say.
Another argument frequently cited against the computerization of writing is that there is now too much information, and it’s harder to find what you’re looking for. However, as you point out, people have been saying this about every communication transformation that has come before the digital revolution.
There’s always been too much to read. Nobody read all the books at the Great Library of Alexandria. Nobody was capable of doing that then. Nobody is reading all that’s online today. What we need and what we always seem to get is a way to make this glut of information navigable. We need search engines, we need indexing, we need reviews. We have all this apparatus to find the data we’re looking for.
How do you see this revolution continuing to change the way we write and read, and do you think the attempts to constrain communication, as we saw during the Iranian elections, can ever be lastingly effective?
Opening up writing to new voices can’t be a bad thing. We’re seeing this spiral. The more people use technology, the more people communicate, the more people in power become concerned with how to control that use. There are two forces pushing against each other. Whether it’s government or religious organizations or schools controlling what children do online or parents controlling what their kids are doing with communication technologies or groups online self-organizing and deciding how to control what does and does not get expressed — it’s similar to what happened when printing presses became a major means of communication or when radio and TV became major communication players. How do you license, how do you control what gets said on the air? There’s a lot of bad stuff online and there’s a lot of good stuff online, and it’s going to take a long time to figure out what standards and regulations are going to be acceptable that aren’t going to stifle creativity but that are going to give people some security as well.
A funny thing happened on the way to the Facebook IPO. The clash of competing economic ideologies at play in the 2012 presidential campaign got a lot more complicated.
With our first-ever private equity honcho running for president in an era of high unemployment and slow economic growth, it was always a foregone conclusion that this year’s election campaign would include an appraisal of whether Mitt Romney’s version of capitalism is good for America. It’s a debate the culture has been passionately engaged in at least as far back as Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street,” and the battle lines are well-drawn. Is Bain Capital a parasitic corporate raider or an engine for lean-and-mean capitalist renewal? You get to make the call, and then you can go vote.
Facebook’s botched IPO adds a new wrinkle. In contrast to Bain-style private equity wheeling-and-dealing, the Silicon Valley venture capital model for new firm creation has always enjoyed a much more positive public relations profile. Maybe it’s a West Coast vs. East Coast thing, but conjuring up the likes of Intel or Apple or Google from thin air is a lot more sexy than swooping down on a troubled firm, brutally slashing costs and stripping assets, and then reselling for a huge profit a few years down the line.
But the Facebook mess, with all the questions it raises about insider trading, and the clear abuse of small investors in favor of the big boys, reminds us that everybody’s got their warts and nobody should get a free pass. Facebook’s early venture capitalist investors and the big investment bank clients that got preferential access to new, and negative, information about Facebook’s future profits, were able to cash out while the little guy was left holding the bag. Sifting through the aftermath, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that a lot of people got ripped off. And coming right in the middle of all the back and forth about the merits of private equity, Facebook’s IPO raises a provocative question: Just how is it that capitalism, East Coast or West Coast style, currently serves the interests of the American people?
Because here’s the thing: Over the past 40 years, the venture capital and private equity buyout industries have grown dramatically, from basically nothing to becoming crucial drivers of corporate formation and growth. Last year, venture capital firms invested $32 billion in new start-ups in the U.S. while private equity funds raised over $100 billion for buyout activity. All along the way, government policy lavished both sectors with extraordinarily lenient tax policy — including massive cuts in the capital gains tax and the so-called carried interest rule that allows Mitt Romney to fork over only 14 percent of his income to the IRS — which has allowed financiers of every stripe to vastly increase their individual wealth. But over that same period, income inequality has grown and the average worker’s wages have stagnated, while the cost of healthcare and education has skyrocketed.
Facebook’s IPO and Bain Capital’s track record end up telling us exactly the same thing. State-of-the-art American capitalism works very efficiently for the 1 percent, and leaves just crumbs for the rest of us. Efficiency is good for them, but not for us. That’s quite the achievement.
“Forty years ago,” David Brooks proclaimed in a New York Times column earlier this week, “corporate America was bloated, sluggish and losing ground to competitors in Japan and beyond. But then something astonishing happened. Financiers, private equity firms and bare-knuckled corporate executives initiated a series of reforms and transformations.”
The specific purpose of Brooks’ column was to defend Bain Capital, Mitt Romney and private equity in general from demonization by Obama. But we can also throw venture capital into his “reform and transformation” pot. After all, strictly speaking, venture capital is a subset of the larger category of “private equity.” (Nothing’s “public” until the IPO.)
In pragmatic terms, there’s a key difference. What we typically call private equity generally involves a group of investors (i.e., Bain Capital) who borrow money to purchase an already-existing company — what’s known as the “leveraged buyout” — while venture capital typically focuses on investing non-borrowed cash for the purpose of creating or nurturing a new enterprise. The distinction is important, but we’ll come back to that later. For now, let’s assume that David Brooks is correct: 40 years ago, American businesses had forgotten how to compete, but today they’re much more fearsome operators. And let’s share the credit between private equity, headquartered in New York, slicing-and-dicing its way through old fogies, and venture capital, headquartered in Silicon Valley, relentlessly spawning new giants to stride the earth.
Again, the Silicon Valley venture capital model has always gotten better press (with the possible exception of the height of dot-com bubble insanity). The reason is obvious. It’s much easier to make the case that there are clear economic benefits to the country as a whole when new firms are being born and jobs are being created. It’s a lot more difficult to make the same argument about private equity, since it is very often the case that one of the ways in which the new owners “streamline” operations and make things more “efficient” is to cut costs by firing workers. To successfully defend the idea that private equity serves the interests of the general good, you have to fall back on hard-to-quantify things like the theory that weeding out the poor performers “frees up” productive forces to find better uses in the larger economy. That’s a hotly debated topic, and if you’re looking for a direct rejoinder to the assertions made in support of private equity by David Brooks, go read Josh Kosman’s new Rolling Stone Op-Ed “Why Private Equity Firms Like Bain Really Are the Worst of Capitalism.” Suffice to say, the story is not as slam dunk as Brooks would have us believe.
But never mind that. For our purposes here, it’s more interesting to focus on how the venture capital model and private equity models are similar — in the sense that the manner in which both types of investors encourage corporations to operate more efficiently and profitably can be argued to work against the interests of American workers. This is a critical point, because what have we gained from American corporations becoming less bloated over the last 40 years, if, at the same time, the fabric of our society has deteriorated and our upward mobility has become more limited?
I first really began to understand the extent to which Silicon Valley was no longer the vaunted job creation engine it had long been held up to be seven years ago when I visited the Santa Clara offices of PortalPlayer, a microchip designer riding high on Apple’s decision to use its premier product as the brains of the iPod. PortalPlayer was a state-of-the-art Silicon Valley venture-backed play. A significant portion of chip design and software development was outsourced to a fully owned subsidiary in Hyderabad, India. The chips themselves were manufactured in Taiwan. Less than half the company’s employees were located in the United States.
The visit was eye-opening. From a venture capital investment standpoint, PortalPlayer’s business model was an ultra-efficient application of resources. Indian coders were cheaper, and the time difference between Santa Clara and Hyderabad meant that PortalPlayer could develop software around the clock. Likewise, it made no sense for a small independent chip designer to fabricate its own hardware. But from an American software developer’s perspective or that of a prospective employee at a chip manufacturing plant, PortalPlayer’s model was discouraging: It clearly implied tough wage competition and fewer hiring opportunities. Repeat this model a few hundred, or a few thousand, times, and you start seriously hollowing out the United States semiconductor design and manufacturing capacity. Good for the V.C. investors, not so great for the country.
Facebook doesn’t fit as neatly into the the offshoring/outsourcing screw-the-American-worker model as do so many of today’s new technology start-ups or a Bain Capital outsourcing company. But the details of how the IPO was bungled illustrate another important way in which the wealthy benefit far more from how modern financial markets work than the general public. The emerging story of how top investment bank clients were told directly that Facebook had adjusted its revenue projections downward due to trouble selling ads on cellphones is evidence of a broken system. It calls to mind the string of dot-com frauds brought to market in the late ’90s that had no revenue at all or even the barest rudiment of a sane business plan, but still ended up delivering millions to the early V.C. investors before the newly public companies went bankrupt. For a few years, sure, there was a lot of job creation — but then everyone was laid off. Similarly, with Facebook, the earliest V.C. investors, the Greylocks and Accel Ventures, were able to cash out long before the clouds started to darken. Where Facebook is headed now is not their problem.
The private equity model of capitalism results in eerily similar outcomes for workers. One of the ways in which the new private equity owners of a firm streamline costs is through “business process outsourcing” — a bloodless phrase that means, in practice, hiring cheaper workers (either domestically or abroad) on a contract basis to perform tasks previously kept in house. Call center support operations move to the Philippines or Bangalore. Manufacturing goes to China. Et cetera.
All of these measures clearly succeed in cutting costs in the short run, which is important, because the new owners have added a lot of debt to the company’s bottom-line that needs to be paid off. But they’re not the same as making investments in the future. It’s not analogous to pouring money into research and development or taking risks developing new markets. Short-term “efficiency” is easy to maximize at the expense of long-term growth but it’s a very open question as to whether the benefits of that efficiency are broadly shared.
Bain Capital, it should be noted, didn’t just apply cost-cutting strategies that involved outsourcing to the companies it bought; Bain invested in at least two companies, Stream.com and Modus Media, that specialized in providing outsourcing services to Fortune 1000 companies. This is how American capitalism eats itself. You buy the companies that you use to carve up the other companies that you buy into little pieces.
Facebook’s IPO reminds us that even the most high-profile venture capital plays are often rigged in favor of the big investor — something that we should never have forgotten after dot-com boom became bust. But enraging as the behavior of investment bankers and Facebook executives might be, those run-of-the-mill shenanigans obscure a deeper problem. Whether the engine is powered by private equity or venture capital, we’ve created a machine that generates wealth for the few, while actually exerting downward pressure on the many. And that’s not something we’re likely to hear much about from either presidential campaign.
Could there be a bigger public relations debacle for an aspiring technology colossus than the Facebook IPO? It’s bad enough when the stock price doesn’t “pop” at all on the first day of trading, but it gets a lot worse when the financial press spends the following week debating whether the machinations behind the scenes leading up to the botched public offering constitute outright evidence of securities fraud or merely a toxic mixture of greed and incompetence.
Here’s what we know: Sometime in the run-up to the IPO, Facebook realized that it needed to downgrade its revenue projections for the second quarter because of difficulties selling ads on mobile phones — which are increasingly the access point of choice for Facebook browsing. This news was buried deep in an SEC regulatory filing, but it also may have been communicated directly to Facebook’s underwriters who, in turn, may have told their big clients — the institutional investors who usually make out like bandits on IPO day by buying stock at the offering price and then selling on the pop. The big investors accordingly decided that the price was a little too high and dumped their stock as quickly as they could. Thus: no pop. The closing price was essentially the same as the opening price, and that wasn’t supposed to happen.
There’s a lot that’s hazy here. But it smells to high heaven, and lawsuits have already been filed. As Heidi Moore writes in The Guardian:
U.S. securities laws are very strict about what a company can say while it prepares to go public – which is to say, almost nothing. Executives maintain a “quiet period” for months. If the company has to disclose anything, it has to do so to all investors, at once. The fact that sophisticated investors knew the company was warning them about its prospects could have been enough to account for the determined selling of the stock from almost its first minute. Wall Street investors are far less patient with changing the goalposts than are the 900 million users of Facebook who accede to every whim of the company’s changing user agreements.
Whatever happened, one thing is indisputable. The little guy (by which I mean the retail investor, who probably isn’t really a “little guy” as compared to someone who’s on unemployment or facing foreclosure) got screwed. And along with Facebook, the key parties involved in the screwing included Facebook’s three biggest underwriting banks, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan.
Why do those names sound familiar? Oh that’s right — they were key players in wrecking the economy of the United States by screwing around with mortgage-backed securities. And if you want to go even further back, they were all hip-deep in the IPO scandals that made the dot-com boom such a minefield of fraud and get-rich-quick scams. (Indeed, one of the weirder ironic twists to the Facebook story is the sight of Business Insider founder Henry Blodget, who was himself banned for life from the securities industry for fraudulently hyping dot-com stocks, waxing aggrieved at the improprieties involved in the IPO.)
Never mind the stock price. Never mind the fact that Facebook itself made out like a bandit. The real scandal here is that Wall Street investment banks never change their stripes. Their insatiable greed inflated both the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble, and the closer you look at either episode, the more evidence you find, not just of reckless irresponsibility, but of clear criminal misbehavior. And yet their punishments — if they even get punished, which is rarer and rarer — never fit the crime and never dissuade further misbehavior. The Facebook IPO might seem like a weird flashback to the days of dot-com excess, but what it really demonstrates is business-as-usual in the financial sector.
In a world that still asks women if they’re “mom enough” and debates our “obsession” with our children, Pam Broviak this week showed us what an awesome mom looks like.
Last fall, Broviak says, her 13-year-old daughter’s suburban Chicago school forced her to let them access her Facebook account and scour her private information, a policy Broviak says is commonplace in the Geneva Middle School South. In a blog post in April, Broviak added that when the incident happened, “the vice principal called me to demand I come to the school immediately to read through [my daughter's] private messages.”
Broviak told MSNBC Friday, “What a violation of my daughter’s privacy this whole episode was,” adding that the experience took “a huge toll on my daughter, who ended up crying through most of the rest of the day and therefore missed most of her classes. She was embarrassed and very upset.” She says when she confronted the school about the issue, they told her it was routine policy to investigate students’ social networking pages and cellphones.
Geneva schools superintendent Kent Mutchler told MSNBC Friday that Broviak’s version of events is inaccurate, stating, “We would never demand someone’s password. When you have someone’s password, you open yourself up to other issues.” But alarmingly, he added, “If we have a disruptive situation, a school [official] will ask to see the page, and if the student refuses, we call the parents … There are different levels of concern. If there is a drug trafficking suspicion, we’ll get the police involved. If it’s something like cyberbullying, we’ll say, ‘This has been reported to us,’ and ask to see the page. We ask, ‘Is there something you want to show us?’ that sort of thing. And they volunteer.”
Oh, they just up and volunteer? Let’s think about this a minute. You’re a 13-year-old. It’s implied you’re in trouble for something, and your teacher or principal suggests that if you have nothing to hide, why wouldn’t you share what you’ve been doing online? That’s a fantastically intimidating and pathetic abuse of power, wielded against the kids you’re daily teaching to comply to your requests.
And, as Broviak points out, that kind of behavior isn’t just a violation of the student’s privacy – but that of anyone in her social media circle. “Some families communicate through Facebook,” Broviak told MSNBC. “What if her aunt was going through a divorce or had an illness? And now there’s these anonymous people reading through this information.”
Sadly, this kind of repulsive invasion isn’t an isolated incident. Last month, Garrett, Ind., high school student Austin Carroll was expelled for using profanity on Twitter. And, mind-bogglingly enough, earlier this month 4,000 New Jersey third-graders were asked “to write about a secret and why it was hard to keep” on a standardized test.
Schools are — not without justification — scared witless about the ease with which kids commit all kinds of wrongs via social media. They’re concerned about how they interact, and the consequences of their communications. Great. But that doesn’t mean ignoring the basic fact that kids are entitled to privacy, too. They’re entitled to complain about their homework load; they’re entitled to post silly pictures of themselves; they’re entitled, in short, to express themselves on their own turf in their own terms. Sometimes that notion that kids are out there behaving in ways we’re not privy to can be terrifying for adults. Tough. How about working with them to include empathy and conflict resolution in the curriculum, instead of cracking down on their extracurricular lives? How about talking to them? Because snooping around in people’s private lives, coercing them into compromising behavior – it’s called bullying. And isn’t there already enough of that in our schools?
NEW YORK (AP) — Don’t try to friend MaLi Arwood on Facebook. You won’t find her there.
You won’t find Thomas Chin, either. Or Kariann Goldschmitt. Or Jake Edelstein.
More than 900 million people worldwide check their Facebook accounts at least once a month, but millions more are Facebook holdouts.
They say they don’t want Facebook. They insist they don’t need Facebook. They say they’re living life just fine without the long-forgotten acquaintances that the world’s largest social network sometimes resurrects.
They are the resisters.
“I’m absolutely in touch with everyone in my life that I want to be in touch with,” Arwood says. “I don’t need to share triviality with someone that I might have known for six months 12 years ago.”
Even without people like Arwood, Facebook is one of the biggest business success stories in history. The site had 1 million users by the end of 2004, the year Mark Zuckerberg started it in his Harvard dorm room. Two years later, it had 12 million. Facebook had 500 million by summer 2010 and 901 million as of March 31, according to the company.
That staggering rise in popularity is one reason why Facebook Inc.’s initial public offering is one of the most hotly anticipated in years. The company’s shares are expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market on Friday under the ticker symbol “FB”. Facebook is likely to have an estimated market valuation of some $100 billion, making it worth more than Kraft Foods, Ford or Disney.
Facebook still has plenty of room to grow, particularly in developing countries where people are only starting to get Internet access. As it is, about 80 percent of its users are outside U.S. and Canada.
But if Facebook is to live up to its pre-IPO hype and reward the investors who are clamoring for its stock this week, it needs to convince some of the resisters to join. Two out of every five American adults have not joined Facebook, according to a recent Associated Press-CNBC poll. Among those who are not on Facebook, a third cited a lack of interest or need.
If all those people continue to shun Facebook, the social network could become akin to a postal system that only delivers mail to houses on one side of the street. The system isn’t as useful, and people aren’t apt to spend as much time with it. That means fewer opportunities for Facebook to sell ads.
Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, says that new communications channels — from the telephone to radio, TV and personal computers — often breed a cadre of holdouts in their early days.
“It’s disorienting because people have different relationships with others depending on the media they use,” Rainie says. “But we’ve been through this before. As each new communications media comes to prominence, there is a period of adoption.”
Len Kleinrock, 77, says Facebook is fine for his grandchildren, but it’s not for him.
“I do not want more distractions,” he says. “As it is, I am deluged with email. My friends and colleagues have ready access to me and I don’t really want another service that I would feel obliged to check into on a frequent basis.”
Kleinrock says his resistance is generational, but discomfort with technology isn’t a factor.
After all, Kleinrock is arguably the world’s first Internet user. The University of California, Los Angeles professor was part of the team that invented the Internet. His lab was where researchers gathered in 1969 to send test data between two bulky computers —the beginnings of the Arpanet network, which morphed into the Internet we know today.
“I’m having a ‘been-there, done-that’ feeling,” Kleinrock says. “There’s not a need on my part for reaching out and finding new social groups to interact with. I have trouble keeping up with those I’m involved with now.”
Thomas Chin, 35, who works at an advertising and media planning company in New York, says he may be missing out on what friends-of-friends-of-friends are doing, but he doesn’t need Facebook to connect with family and closer acquaintances.
“If we’re going to go out to do stuff, we organize it (outside) of Facebook,” he says.
Some people don’t join the social network because they don’t have a computer or Internet access, are concerned about privacy, or generally dislike Facebook. Those without a college education are less likely to be on Facebook, as are those with lower incomes. Women who choose to skip Facebook are more likely than men to cite privacy issues, while seniors are more likely than those 50-64 years old to cite computer issues, according the AP-CNBC poll.
About three-quarters of seniors are not on Facebook. By contrast, more than half of those under 35 use it every day.
The poll of 1,004 adults nationwide was conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs and Corporate Communications May 3-7 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
Steve Jones, a professor who studies online culture and communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says many resisters consider Facebook to be too much of a chore.
“We’ve added social networking to our lives. We haven’t added any hours to our days,” Jones says. “The decision to be online on Facebook is simultaneously a decision not to be doing something else.”
Jones says many people on Facebook try to overcome that by multitasking, but they end up splitting their attention and engaging with others online only superficially.
Arwood, 47, a restaurant manager in Chicago, says she was surprised when colleagues on an English-teaching program in rural Spain in 2010 opted to spend their breaks checking Facebook.
“I spent my time on break trying to learn more about the Spanish culture, really taking advantage of it,” she says. “I went on walks with some of the students and asked them questions.”
Kariann Goldschmitt, 32, a music professor at New College of Florida in Sarasota, Fla., was on Facebook not long after its founding in 2004, but she quit in 2010. In part, it was because of growing concerns about her privacy and Facebook’s ongoing encouragement of people to share more about themselves with the company, with marketers and with the world.
She says she’s been much more productive since leaving.
“I was a typical user, on it once or twice a day,” she says. “After a certain point, I sort of resented how it felt like an obligation rather than fun.”
Besides Facebook resisters and quitters, there are those who take a break. In some cases, people quit temporarily as they apply for new jobs, so that potential employers won’t stumble on photos of their wild nights out drinking. Although Facebook doesn’t make it easy to find, it offers options for both deleting and suspending accounts.
Goldschmitt says it takes effort to stay in touch with friends and relatives without Facebook. For instance, she has to make mental notes of when her friends are expecting babies, knowing that they have become so used to Facebook “that they don’t engage with us anymore.”
“I’m like, ‘Hmmm, when is nine months?’ I have to remember to contact them since they won’t remember to tell me when the baby’s born.”
Neil Robinson, 54, a government lawyer in Washington, says that when his nephew’s son was born, pictures went up on Facebook almost immediately. As a Facebook holdout, he had to wait for someone to email photos.
After years of resisting, Robinson plans to join next month, mostly because he doesn’t want to lose touch with younger relatives who choose Facebook as their primary means of communication.
But for every Robinson, there is an Edelstein, who has no desire for Facebook and prefers email and postcards.
“I prefer to keep my communications personal and targeted,” says Jake Edelstein, 41, a pharmaceutical consultant in New York. “You’re getting a message that’s written for you. Clearly someone took the time to sit down to do it.”
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Associated Press Deputy Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta and News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius in Washington contributed this report.
Facebook founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, center, rings the Nasdaq opening bell from Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif on May 18, 2012 (Credit: AP/Zef Nikolla) 
Mark Zuckerberg (Credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder) 
(Credit: Goodluz via Shutterstock) 
FILE - In this Feb. 29, 2012 file photo, a graphic display of a Facebook network is shown at a Facebook event for marketing professionals in New York, where the social networking giant demonstrated new advertising opportunities as a prelude to its initial public offering of stock. Insiders and early Facebook investors are taking advantage of increasing investor demand and selling more of their stock in the companys IPO, which is set for Thursday, May 17, 2012. But plans for the IPO were unfolding amid a debate over the effectiveness of Facebook advertising. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)(Credit: AP) 
