Just Commodities

A few years back I posted a Facebook update declaring my growing annoyance with the “find singles near you” ads that seemed to be multiplying daily on the right side of my profile page. One of my self-righteous “friends” commented immediately: “ you have no right to complain…Facebook is free. You have to take the bad with the good.”

His naïve and short-sighted attitude irked me, but rather than engage in a meaningless back and forth (I try to stay positive and somewhat politically neutral on my page), I’ve been mulling the “free” aspect of Facebook, Twitter and the other networking sites ever since.  
Now that the dust has settled on LinkedIn’s ginormous Wall Street opening, (it was the largest internet IPO since Google and the company is now valued at $8.9 BILLION!), I’m still wondering how users can go on blindly believing that social media is still free. I don’t know about you, but despite the fact that I’ve been using LinkedIn for more than a year, I didn’t get a personal invite to the IPO or a special offer for LNKD Series A preferred stock. That’s because to LinkedIn CEOs, users are not customers, they’re commodities. A commodity is “a basic good used in commerce that is interchangeable with other commodities of the same type. Commodities are most often used as inputs in the production of other goods or services. The quality of a given commodity may differ slightly, but it is essentially uniform across producers.”  Bet you felt more special than that, didn’t you?

As commodities, our value is determined not just by how many of us there are, but by the real price we are paying for social media: the amount of personal information we freely give out over the networks to companies' actual customers, their advertisers. We pay every time we divulge our opinions, our relationship and family ties, our photos, our work history, our likes and dislikes, our emotions, our videos, our memories – and another precious resource, our time But now with empireavenue we can actually see our own value and buy and sell in other commodities thus promoting our own social status that in turn could lead us to be more valuable commodities and worth larger investments ( or something like that )