Week 1 // ' You are the Product' // John Lancaster
John Lancaster an ex – town planner, most famously known as a writer and poet, is a recent recipient of the first Arnold Bennett Book Prize in its recent launch. He also previously wrote an article for the London Review of Books titled ‘You are the Product’, it was a review of 3 books that focus on Silicon Valley digital companies, involved with social media and the collection of information, namely Facebook. Facebook has an appeal to a deep longing that we all have for acceptance, it is a mask behind which we can hide and use to artificially beautify our present lives not only manipulating what people see but also how they perceive us. For many it has become a replacement for reality, but is the principal of Facebook a new phenomenon? Looking back to ancient roman times we can see traces of a prehistoric Facebook but not like the one we know today, absent of cyber connectivity and digital gadgets however reliant on physical interaction. The Roman baths in a literal sens...