Zuckerberg's Law of Useless Information

Now that the election is finally over, it is safe for people in the media to talk about other things, even though there are a few stragglers who think they can still turn heads by trying to call the hotly contested race for first dog. Normally this would be the sort of thing to set me on an acid spewing rant, but I am really sick of politics, so I shall refrain.

Instead I draw your attention the Web 2.0 Summit, or as I like to call it, the meeting of the G2.0 (that's a foreign relations joke, if you are wondering why you are not laughing). There Mark Zuckerberg, president of the illustrious nation of The Facebook, has made a feeble bid for a place in real-people history by positing a defining law for the stalwart science of social networking. "Zuckerberg's law," as the coinage goes, states that every year from now on people, in the general sense, are going to be willing to share twice as much about themselves as the year before.

Despite the fact that this is a terrifying revelation, this statement has been met with a surprising reverence. There is the slight criticism, that this law bares some similarity to Gordon Moore's Law which points out that the number of transistors in a micro chip roughly doubles every two years. This is not to be confused with the Dalton/Moore hypothesis that the plot gets twice as dumb every two Bond movies. Aside from this, all across the Blog-o-sphere, people are bowing down to this chip of "wisdom" from the mother-of-all bloggers, the person who reincentivized staying in on a Saturday night, Mark Zuckerberg.

Now, in the tradition of Einstein, let us perform a thought experiment —Think of everyone you know, not just your friends, everyone. Now ask yourself how many of them do you want to know twice as well? Take a second.

Exactly.

What Mark doesn't seem to ask "is there a point when we just cannot share any more about ourselves?" Some have claimed that we will be stuck in a Zeno's Paradox style loop of never quite making it all the way to total disclosure. However, I believe, which is corroborated by the existence of catbook, that Zuckerberg is wrong about the information we share on the internet.

While it may be true, that we will post/share/twitterize exponentially more information each year, it won't be information about ourselves. Instead we will make up information to feed into the ever-growing social network system, in a "keeping up with the Joneses" fashion. For example, a couple of years ago, someone might not have even thought about their cat's favorite movie, but today we post, for all the world to see, that Wall-E really changed the way the Snuggles thinks about his carbon paw-print.

I will end by noting that Google's spellcheck offers "bloodsucker" as an option for correcting Zuckerberg's name, touché.