If you're interested in social media - and these days, who isn't? - I urge you to read The Circle, the new novel by Dave Eggers. The central character is Mae, who has just got a job at The Circle, a Silicon Valley sensation. In five years, The Circle has grown from nowhere to become the world's largest digital company. Thanks to its universal identification system TruYou, which dispenses with the need for passwords online, The Circle more or less runs the internet. It has also bought most of its competitors - including Facebook.
Now The Circle is preaching total transparency. It believes everything should be shared. Every conversation, every act. It has convinced several politicians to wear web-linked cameras on necklaces, 24 hours a day. Soon its staff will do the same. The Circle's philosophy is summed up in three phrases: Sharing Is Caring. Secrets Are Lies. Privacy Is Theft. But the book also satirises the digital world's obsession with validation by numbers. Mae judges her every move by the number of "smiles" or "frowns" they provoke from her millions of followers. Only her ex-boyfriend, Mercer, seems to rebel. "You comment on things, and that substitutes for doing them...Voting and liking and disliking...and otherwise doing nothing much else." He worries about a society constantly monitored by private corporations. And by the end of the book, so do we.
