It's Not Technology, Stupid
“Facebook ready for biggest ever technology float”, the Guardian tells me this morning. But Facebook is not a technology: it is a social medium. If people get together in a social grouping, say, a book club or the freemasons or a political party, you wouldn’t call that a technology. Sure, cars and phones and roads and houses are necessary for people to get together but you don’t call these social groupings or the enabling of them technology or infrastructure.
I once thought that everyone understood the division in computing between hardware and software. The whole point of the computer is that it is a universal machine: it can be programmed to do things the hardware designer never thought of. Facebook is a software phenomenon, not a piece of technology. In the early days of the Syrian uprising a British/Syrian activist told Newsnight that the police rounding up demonstrators were asking: “where's your Facebook machine”, thinking it was a device.
Treating Facebook shares as a technology stock is only the latest and most prominent example of this confusion. For decades people who don't like using computers have been calling themselves “technologically challenged”. But negotiating a computer isn’t getting dirty under a car: it means following logical operations. You wouldn’t call looking up items in a book index “technology”, neither is poking someone on Facebook.
I once thought that everyone understood the division in computing between hardware and software. The whole point of the computer is that it is a universal machine: it can be programmed to do things the hardware designer never thought of. Facebook is a software phenomenon, not a piece of technology. In the early days of the Syrian uprising a British/Syrian activist told Newsnight that the police rounding up demonstrators were asking: “where's your Facebook machine”, thinking it was a device.
Treating Facebook shares as a technology stock is only the latest and most prominent example of this confusion. For decades people who don't like using computers have been calling themselves “technologically challenged”. But negotiating a computer isn’t getting dirty under a car: it means following logical operations. You wouldn’t call looking up items in a book index “technology”, neither is poking someone on Facebook.
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