Book Review: The Boy Kings. A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network by Katherine Losse

Here is a story, or I think the author would like this more to be of an expose of facebook from her angle as an employee and a facebook user. 

Through this book, Katherine shared her journey from the beginnings of facebook until the rise of her corporate status working closely with Mark (which does not even cover 20% of the book by the way), and her inner thoughts and reflections of facebook worsening the humaness in all of us. 

What I think of this book - I find her writing infuriating. I do appreciate her honesty and profound insights from her experience of "outside looking in" and afterwards becoming them, and eventually not becoming them. But really, her flow of writing, and the way she described details or that memories of what she knew of facebook - I wish she could write better. 

Most times, I find myself skipping paragraphs, and in the end, I find it hard to appreciate her book except for a few anecdotes from the book. Other than that, I felt it could do more, but it just doesn't do it. All I can say is that, its a frustrating read. 

Also, I find Katherine quite contradicting in her relationship with Facebook. In the first 100 pages of so, she went on about how unhealthy Facebook is and how the culture of Facebook is just as bad. But later on, after she was promoted, she went to write this:

"Getting Facebook translated into languages other than English was an obvious move, and the need to extend the network to the world was something I always believed in."

Really? She has always believed in advocating Facebook worldwide despite her own reflections of how Facebook is lacking real intimate relationships? I told you, reading this book, I felt frustrated. 

The only thing I like her vulnerability in her views of the online world. I like to share some paragraphs from the book:

page 93: Facebook doesn't hurt people. People hurt people. This is true. But just as more cheaply, it makes it possible to hurt people faster, more efficiently, with less cost to themselves. It removes any sense of direct responsibility for our behaviour, for how what we do makes others feel. 

page 183: Facebook culture, by another name, then, might be a fear of adulthood, a desire to put off commitment, responsibility, and the difficult work of relating in real life and in real terms, forever. 

page 198: Facebook tells us to share "What's on your mind?" so it should have been easy, shouldn't it, to just say what I feel? But the prompt, and the system of liking and ranking that it feeds, always gave me pause. I was not sure whether the idea of sharing was that easy. 

All in all, its not a popular read, I kept procrastinating in finishing reading the book even though it wasn't that thick. It was slightly a put off, and I am just glad I can return this one back to the library and not feel bad for leaving it unread halfway.