From The Boy Kings, by Katherine Losse, pg 200:
Most employees I talked with seemed not to be particularly bothered by the company’s decision to forcibly adjust people’s expectations of privacy, preferring instead to focus on the light and almost childlike- sounding goals of sharing and connecting people. “She just doesn’t get it,” a user support manager told me about one employee who was soon to be terminated. “She doesn’t believe in the mission. She thinks that Facebook is for people without any real problems and isn’t actually changing the world. Can you believe that? This afternoon I’m going to have to let her go.”
I wondered who the heretic employee was. I guessed that she must have been like all of the user support team members: well- educated in the humanities at an Ivy League school, and probably unaware when hired that she had walked into a new kind of technical cult. At any rate, her awareness of issues beyond Facebook was a problem. The company wasn’t paying anyone to be aware of the world beyond the screen. The only questions you were supposed to ask or ideas you were supposed to have at work, as a good citizen of the Facebook nation, were about new ways to technologize daily life, new ways to route our lives through the web.
Do other prominent social media companies have a comparable sense of mission? Do they demand and/or inspire similar loyalty amongst their staff?
Mark Carrigan 