One can’t go anywhere these days without witnessing hand-wringing over the domination Facebook has achieved in the social networking world.  There’s even a dramatic Hollywood movie, The Social Network, set to be released in in the fall, which chronicles the site’s origins in the early oughts at Harvard.  Late last week, the news broke that Facebook will delay its much anticipated stock offering until 2012.  Perhaps there has been enough public scrutiny without all the disclosures that would come with an IPO?

While the Hollywood movie appears to push a dramatization of founder Mark Zuckerberg as a smart kid who overnight was overwhelmed by his own creation, other narratives about the Facebook phenomenon concentrate more on what drives Zuckerberg.  In a recent review of the new book The Facebook Effect, Richard Posner does just this kind of serious examination.  Posner quotes the book’s author, David Kirkpatrick, suggesting that for founder Zuckerberg, building a social networking empire is not about the money.

Since connecting hundreds of millions of people with their social and business acquaintances online requires thousands of servers, other equipment, and eventually a large data center and a highly paid staff, and since charging people a fee to join Facebook would slow the growth of the network, Facebook needs advertising revenues and so must operate as a business. … Not that an advertising-supported online social network could not in principle be operated in the not-for-profit form; but philanthropists would not have contributed funds to support a kid’s dream of what would have struck them as just an online dating service.

Instead, for Zuckerberg, Facebook is about a convergence of the private and public spheres:

[H]is vision is of people who build mutual trust, and enrich their lives, by revealing their inner selves to each other. “Facebook is founded,” Kirkpatrick explains, “on a radical social premise—that an inevitable enveloping transparency will overtake modern life…. Facebook is causing a mass resetting of the boundaries of personal intimacy.”

Suddenly it seems so appropriate that Facebook was invented on a college campus. The more one reflects on it, the more the Facebook experience resembles what goes on in the hallways of college dormitories at universities everywhere: personal boundaries are reduced, many try on new slightly new personas every other week, and late-night bull sessions abound (leading to bleary-eyed mornings that also happen after too many late nights on Facebook).  Like Facebook, in college we all had a “wall,” which enabled us to present ourselves to new “friends”—mostly through cheap posters purchased the first week of classes.  We even had those little note boards on our doors where passers-by, even if only of casual acquaintance, could leave messages for all to see.  Today, those non-digital forms of social networking all seem so 1999.

Concluding his essay on Facebook, Posner addresses the site has received for an initially relaxed attitude to privacy concerns.  Already famous for suggesting that lack of privacy does not exact “social costs” as high as the rhetoric of its defenders might suggest, Posner does not back down here.  As one of his interpreters describes elsewhere, the judge has a “theory of the self” that militates against privacy protections.

People create useful personas, he explains, that facilitate advantageous transactions. Privacy law protects these personas from being exposed as fronts. This deception, Posner argues, though not exactly fraud, is certainly not in the interest of the larger public good. Thus, legal thinking about privacy has reason to begin with a prejudice against privacy rights rather than in favor of them.

When it comes to Facebook, Posner pretty much tows the same line:

[The] question is whether the reduction in privacy that Facebook users experience—by the very nature of a network that invites people to share personal information, far beyond what is normal or even feasible when friendship arises from personal contact—is a social cost. I have my doubts. I do not share Zuckerberg’s utopian expectations for the creation of community by means of Facebook, but I do think that we tend to exaggerate the value of privacy. We do this by failing to distinguish its private value from its social value. Privacy is a powerful weapon that we wield to advance our personal interests. We reveal to others the information about ourselves that advances our projects (marriage, promotion, disability benefits, purchases, and so forth) and try to conceal the information that would retard them. Like actors, we present a manufactured self to the world.

One of Facebook’s virtues, as Posner is right to point out, is its requirement that a user is identified on the network by his real name. The question that Posner seems to miss—even as he points out the phenomena—is the way in which our sense of the boundary between private and public spheres is changed by the mediation of Facebook.  Unlike the minority of Facebook users who rigorously manage their privacy settings, most of us present the same online “manufactured self” to several hundred “friends.”  Is there really not a social cost to blurring the boundaries of intimate knowledge?

We’ve all heard the stories about recent college graduates embarrassed to find out that photos of their drunken revelry were visible to a potential employers.  They should have done a better job managing their privacy settings, the Facebook defenders retort.  But at least in college we could simply close the door.  In this new world of social networking, we’re all Madison Avenue marketers of our own public image—otherwise, we’re off the grid, which means party invitations are no longer forthcoming and old friends don’t know how to contact us.

As for his own public image, Mark Zuckerberg says that the new Hollywood biopic of his Harvard days is “fiction.”  I’m sure he’s right—the preview feels like the 1995 Sandra Bullock movie The Net, which over-dramatized identity theft enabled by an invisible (and then) new world wide web. But for the man who brought us this brave new world of social transparency, having to fight such an alternative public image while maintaining a degree of privacy must be incredibly frustrating.