Japan's Rugby Union team bow after their defeat by Samoa. (Credit: John Giles / PA)
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In Japan it is customary to bow in situations where westerners would shake hands. The depth and duration of the bow embodies the degree of respect due to the person being bowed to. The precise etiquette is so complex that western visitors are sometimes advised to not bow at all.
Oh, those excrutiatingly subtle Japanese! How lucky we are in the West to have the straightforward, egalitarian handshake.
Sorry, a bit of (British) irony there. Japanese bowing etiquette is, of course, a formal expression of what we all do informally i.e. modulate our behaviour towards others according to how we evaluate our relationship with them. This applies as much to the organisations we interact with as it does to individuals. And, as with individuals, we like to know where we stand – especially with those organisations that have the greatest presence in our lives.
Given how much of our lives are now lived online, our relationships to social media companies are correspondingly important – and yet the nature of that relationship is notoriously unclear. You may be a Facebook user, but as you don’t pay for the service can you really think of yourself as a Facebook customer? But if not a customer, then what are you?
The newly received wisdom is that ‘you are the product’, but is that true?
In a thought-provoking essay for Slate, Will Oremus tracks down the origin of the phrase and goes on to question its validity:
“It’s easy to see why ’you are the product’ is so resonant these days. In a time of confusing data-privacy scandals and mysterious machine-learning algorithms, it offers a deliciously simple explanation for internet companies’ alleged misdeeds. Facebook doesn’t really care about its users, the saying implies, because they’re not the ones ultimately opening their wallets; advertisers are. We’d be fools to expect otherwise from a free service!”
It’s not that Oremus entirely disagrees. The problem with being ‘products’, however, is that products don’t fight back:
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