Omigosh Michael I LOVE the Facebook as shopping mall analogy. Every analogy breaks down at some point but let me run w parts of it (including addressing your point about medium/message which we all know is a both/and not either/or and I realize sometimes it sounds like I am saying Facebook is *just* a tool but yeah….we all know it isn’t just that)
So Facebook as shopping mall. Both are a “third place” (social space. Neither home nor work) that is commercial. You go there for leisure and to get things done, and your path is partly under your control and partly not. You don’t control which shop is where and which smells from food shops waft your way, but you have agency over which direction to go, whether to enter a shop (how well to resist the sales sign, the person offering samples, the beautiful decorations, etc). There’s a lot done by the mall to tempt you to behave in certain ways but you are agent. You have agency. The more aware you are the better. E.g. If u know where Nordstom is u can park near it if it’s your destination. If ur dieting and u can’t resist the smell of Cinnabon u can avoid passing by it to get to wherever ur going. Right? And sometimes around xmas time the xmas music playing at Macy’s will make u stay there longer than expected and buy silly things u know u didn’t need. And u will bump into ppl u know coz everyone is doing xmas shopping. But you choose to stop and say hello or rush right by. You choose to browse at leisure or ask a salesperson for help or do an internet search for what u want.

There’s a heck of a lot that’s not within ur control but a heck of a lot that *is*

Now. If there were private spaces to meet some friends inside the mall where u could congregate relatively privately and freely… But the larger mall had issues… Would you still go? It depends on how valuable the private spaces were and how horrible the mall is otherwise.

I don’t want to go down the slippery slope path of “they are harming X and X isn’t me, but eventually they will go after me too”. I was once offered a funny (as in HIGH) amount of money to write for Facebook some short pieces. I refused because I do not approve of much of what they do. I refused to consider Google sponsoring vconnecting even tho we use hangouts (not really endorsing them, but actually inevitably doing so, right?)

So it’s i think here about two things
A. Where is the line? That’s different for each of us. Where the line is. Because also
B. What are the limits of our agency?

The last one is critical and the point I made about music is v personal. Most ppl would probably remember the xmas decorations at malls during xmas time. I enjoy them too. But they don’t tempt me much. I am a morw musical person and music can stop me and keep me captive and influence me so much more. Smell of food doesn’t annoy me if i am dieting – i pass by Cinnabon for the beautiful smell and most days i can resist it.

Do you get what I mean? I think dealing with attention and info overload and worse things that Facebook helps happen (ugly political discussions, to me, are almost worse than the fake news) – we all have different strategies to deal w them. And we are differently invested in different spaces so we will make more effort to make some work for us.

Many of us work at institutions who do ugly things. To us even. Definitely to ppl more vulnerable than us. We buy products made by entities that don’t always follow ethical codes we agree with.

And that’s why alternatives matter. I don’t have a better alternative than my institution right now and its pros far outweigh its cons (it’s a non-profit btw). Facebook is currently something whos cons haven’t (yet) outweighed its pros but I am always on the lookout for alternatives that may some day be viable and allow me more control. Like the idea of Mastodon 😉