I've been reading the page proofs for The Distraction Addiction, and should be done with it in a few days. As with any 250-page book, there are a few typos and the occasional bit of repetition, so while it's good (I'm very pleased with it, I have to admit), it's also good that I'm looking at it one more time.

I'm starting to think about the media campaign for the book, and the potential irony of using social media to promote a book about how to not be overexposed to social media. I'll have to figure out how to mindfully market the book. Of course, these days there's no such thing has just marketing a book: all marketing is self-marketing as well. I cut a lot of the autobiographical stuff from the book, but there's still plenty of me in it. So I was very interested to see Douglas Rushkoff, who has a new book out, saying goodbye to Facebook:

Facebook has never been merely a social platform. Rather, it exploits our social interactions the way a Tupperware party does.

Facebook does not exist to help us make friends, but to turn our network of connections, brand preferences and activities over time — our "social graphs" — into money for others….

The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and
influence us. They are Facebook's paying customers; we are the product.
And we are its workers.

This isn't much of a surprise. After all, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. But things are changing in ways Rushkoff finds even more disturbing. Now,

any of our updates might be converted into "sponsored stories" by whatever business or brand we may have mentioned. That innocent mention of cup of coffee at Starbucks, in the Facebook universe, quickly becomes an attributed endorsement of their brand….

Through a new variation of the Sponsored Stories feature called Related Posts, users who "like" something can be unwittingly associated with pretty much anything an advertiser pays for. Like e-mail spam with a spoofed identity, the Related Post shows up in a newsfeed right under the user's name and picture. If you like me, you can be shown implicitly recommending me or something I like — something you've never heard of — to others without your consent.

Now, of course everyone who doesn't radically overshare engages in some measure of self-fashioning and editing. But there's a difference between you doing this yourself, and someone else doing it under your name– and purposely obscuring they're tracks. (This even happens with dead Facebook users.)

This raises an interesting possibility. Come this fall, I could appear on Related Posts as liking Google Glass, or brain-building software, or some corporate motivational program– i.e., appear to "promote" or "like" things that run counter to what I argue in the book. Hmmm….