LOL Interwebz: Ello ’Eartbreak

Every Thursday in LOL Interwebz, Luke T. Harrington explores the quirks and foibles of Internet culture from a Gospel perspective.

As a highly distinguished college student [citation needed] in the class of 2007, I was actually one of the first to hear about Facebook. Not the first, since I wasn’t Ivy League, but, y’know, one of the first few million.

Somewhat ironically (maybe? I don’t really know what irony is anymore), I first read about it in a print newspaper—the student-run newspaper for my alma mater, whose op-ed page was always a good read, if you enjoyed the inane thoughts of college students. One day my junior year, they ran a column entitled “Facing the Facts: Internet Can Be Addictive,” and it sang the praises of “thefacebook.com.” Like most college newspaper op-eds, it neglected to  tell me what its topic actually was, but I gathered it was some sort of next-gen-MySpace-ripoff-type-thing, and I thought I would check it out.

I tried to create an account and was blocked. “Sorry,” the Facebook told me, “we currently require a valid .edu email address.” (I didn’t have one, even though I was a full-time student. It was a thing you could do at the time. For real.)

“Oh well,” I said to myself (because I talk to myself). “I don’t have to do everything on the Internet.”

Flash forward to now-ish, and I probably spend more time on Facebook than on every other website combined—and not just for fun. Most of my professional and personal connections are made there; most of the articles I read come from my feed. It’s become my “hub” for pretty much all my communication and web browsing.

The thing is, though, I actually held out a long time before I finally joined up. For several years, Facebook was just One More Thing people expected me to expend time and energy on, and since my days seem to be half as long as everyone else’s, I resisted until late into my senior year. I finally relented because I realized that everyone else was exclusively using Facebook to communicate, and so I was missing all the important conversations and event invitations. I was perpetually out of the loop.

This, I think, is the main reason that most people who are on Facebook are there—not because they love Facebook for what it is, but because (1) all their friends, colleagues, and acquaintances use it to communicate, and (2) they’ve spent years molding it into the experience they want.

In other words, there’s a great deal of inertia in the equation—which explains why alternatives like Google Plus haven’t really caught on meaningfully. Yeah, Google Plus has some nice features, but I don’t log into Facebook for its features. I log in because the people I know and like are already there, sharing cool stuff. (And they won’t switch to G+ till I do, and I won’t switch, till they do, and…)

And then, here comes Ello.

Ello, in case you’re not hipster enough to know, is a not-for-profit-but-actually-totally-for-profit version of Facebook, with some elements borrowed from things like Twitter and Instagram. Its main selling point: they won’t sell your information to advertisers. They still plan to make money off of you; they just haven’t figured out how yet.

I have yet to get invited to Ello (it’s invite-only at the moment), but even if I do, I don’t know if I’ll sign up. It just seems like Yet Another Thing I’m supposed to sink time and energy into, and, like everyone else’s, my time and energy are limited. What if I put several hours into building a profile and a friends list and then the thing doesn’t take off? I’ll be like that dude who spent $1,000 on an HD-DVD player and some discs, except I’ll still have my $1,000. So, y’know, not exactly like him, but sort of like him.

I‘ve been pondering what made Facebook the runaway success it is, and I think it may have actually been a confluence of three factors. In the first place, they were basically first-to-market with a social network that was a genuinely useful communication tool and not just a pointless timesuck. In the second place, they were very careful about who they let in first—by starting with Ivy League students, they made sure it was a network for the world’s “cool kids” that everybody would want to be part of. And finally, they had the dumb luck of becoming popular around the same time as smartphones—which transformed social networking from a fun distraction you could mess around with on your PC to something you did almost constantly.

I can’t imagine that any future social network will have this much prescience and good luck. And so, Facebook continues to barrel on, regardless of how many people claim to hate it.

While I’m not “on” Ello yet, I’ve poked around some, and I can’t imagine it really “catching on” in any permanent sense. Its design is too minimalist for its own good—it gives the impression of being created for bohemian artist-types and no one else. It doesn’t seem ideal for browsing news stories or making birth announcements or chatting casually with a friend.

I might be wrong. I’d like to be.

And yet, like most human beings, I’ll probably continue to settle for things that are “good enough.” I’m already on Facebook. My friends are already on Facebook. No matter how badly Facebook behaves—selling my information to advertisers, spying on my personal conversations, drinking the blood of my firstborn—I’ll probably stay there, because moving somewhere else would take time and energy.

I’m convinced that this is what drives most of the evil in the world—not people deliberately messing things up, but people doing what’s easy. Facebook is a trivial example, but this sort of phenomenon shows up countless places. I don’t give to charity because it’s easier not to. I don’t talk to the new guy at church because it’s easier to go straight home. I don’t apologize to my wife because it’s easier to pretend I was never a jerk.

It’s enough to make me think, what if we all put just a little more effort towards making the world a better place?

I dunno. We’d all probably all just be tired and have less free time.

Image via Spencer E. Holtaway at Flickr.