The New York Review of Books

The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal, by Ben Mezrich, Doubleday, 260 pp., $25.00

Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America, by Julia Angwin, Random House, 371 pp., $27.00

Reviewer Charles Petersen talks about two new books which, together, enable the reader to understand, really understand, the Facebook phenomenon as well as My Space, too. How did they come to be? What did they do then and what are they doing now? How did accidental fortunes get created this way? Finally, why do they matter?

If the books are as interesting as the reviews, pre-digital generation members will find it enlightening and useful. This is no screed, wailing about the march of the megabytes of information about our children loose on the web.

However, simply realizing these social networking sites are old enough and powerful enough to lead to the publication of “biographies” of them is slightly startling.

One of Petersen’s most useful observations:

“Given the common fatalism about the ‘death of privacy,’  I find it encouraging that Facebook’s problems have resulted not from a complete lack of privacy, but rather from a widespread paranoia about whether the site’s privacy system could be trusted.“ (Emphasis added)

There is hope yet for privacy when that is true. There is hope for the digital generation when that is true.

You will see that there are a lot of very smart cookies here—inventing, using, reacting, rebelling, changing and moving on online in their social networks.

Oh, yes.

And friending.

Source: New York Review of Books, Volume 57, Number 3, February 25, 2010