Sixty years ago in his novel Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut playfully (but prophetically) called faux (virtual, familial) ‘connections’ a “granfalloon” — a group of people who choose, or claim to have, a shared identity or purpose, but whose mutual association is actually meaningless. The author offered two examples, Daughters of the American Revolution and the General Electric Company; if Vonnegut wrote the novel today, the examples could just as easily be Facebook or Twitter. Indeed, Microsoft’s own marketing aims explicitly at the “ego” and the ‘Look at me!’ mentality as the largest driver of online participation (‘free’ immaterial labour): people contribute to the corporation’s self-created system (for profit) in order to “increase their social, intellectual, and cultural capital.”  -  Jerold J. Kreisman