Update on Facebook video (Patreon)

Hey everyone, thought I'd give a little update on how things are going with my mammoth Facebook video.

Whenever I take on a large video project, I normally start off with a set of assumptions and a few ideas about how I'd like to structure things. Typically, my assumptions change drastically during the script writing phase and the video balloons into something completely different. This happened with both the Elitism video & Notation Must Die video.

With this Facebook vid however, I knew in advance that it was going to be long and that the research would be very complex. This has been the case, but my initial vision for video has largely remained intact.

Given that the video is going to be quite lengthy, I made a few decisions to help speed up the process, especially during the editing phase. For example, I think the personal touch will likely be better for this video, so I'm going to be appearing on camera a lot more. This will definitely speed things up. Beyond that, I'm going to avoid creating a myriad of complex animations for myself.

So, what's the purpose of the video? Well, to begin with, there's a personal connection. Facebook used to play a really important role for me in 2006 because it arrived at precisely the moment when I moved from Ireland to London, leaving all my friends behind and suddenly finding myself in a place where I knew nobody.

When FB hit the scene, it served as an amazing tool that allowed me to keep in close touch with everyone, participating in near real-time discussions and being able to share what I was up to in London. Later, I'd go on to work for a company who developed games for Facebook. In a short space of time, it became a fundamental tool that surrounded my personal and professional life. In the early years, I benefitted enormously from its existence.

However, as time went on, the service kept changing in ways that increasingly alienated me. The same happened with my friends too. By 2015, most people I knew had stopped communicating using FB. Quite a few deleted their accounts.

This prompted me to wonder: 'what was actually going on at Facebook HQ that led to all these changes?'. When I started pulling that thread, I realised two things:

First, there is no document out there that tries to provide a comprehensive overview of the company, in a way that I think is satisfying. The best documentaries generally outline the company's failures, missing out tons of details along the way and failing to ask deeper questions about whether or not these failures were inevitable or unique to the culture of Facebook.

Even the best books I've read (that aren't horribly out of date) solely focus on Facebook's failures too. That said, I should mention two books which are absolutely excellent and incredibly well researched:

Broken Code by Jeff Horowitz
An Ugly Truth by Sheera Frenkel, and Cecilia Kang

The second thing I realised is that for anyone close to my age, our experience of being in the 'first wave' of Facebook adoption is completely unique. We witnessed the true birth of modern social media and can remember what life (and the internet) was like before it appeared. However, a cursory check over my YouTube stats tells me that half my audience never experienced this. For them, social media has been a constant. They never knew the earlier internet and therefore, never got to experience those early years when the explosion of social media seemed like it was a force for good. The tool that helped launch the Arab spring in Egypt and Tunisia. A time when the only thing we had to worry about were some dodgy privacy practices.

Obviously, since I want the video to be a surprise, I won't give too much else away here. What I can say is that it is going to be quite a bit longer than my last video.

This has been the most interesting script I've written in years. In one respect, it has been a nostalgia trip. I can't believe how much from the period of 2006-2013 I'd forgotten about. In another sense, it has been quite dispiriting. The impact social media has on teen mental health and how it is used to amplify hate speech and violence in the global south particularly weighs on me.

Going back to the 2016 US election has been a trip too :)

But anyway, the script is almost down. And once it's down, the production will be significantly faster than my last video. I will probably start shooting the first section quite soon and will share it with you lovely folk soon after.

Peace,

Tantacrul