I don't have much to add to Evan Seliger's Wired piece about Facebook Home and the message of its advertising videos:

to be cool, worthy of admiration and emulation, we need to be egocentric. We need to care more about our own happiness than our responsibilities towards others.

Take, for example, this advertisement for how to make dinner more fun– by ignoring your family:

There are several things that jump out at me in this.

First, no one, and I mean NO ONE IN THE UNIVERSE, can't tell when you're looking at your phone under the table. That thing where you put both hands under the table, and there are little clicking noises, and your face glows? Yeah. People can tell.

But the conceit that she's getting away with it is part of the bigger point of the ad. Not only is it egocentric, it's a celebration of a certain kind of psychopathic entitlement: the idea that if the mark is dumb enough to trust you, he deserves to be taken. Getting away with it is proof that it's okay to do it. 

That casual cruelty is what lets her ignore her boring aunt in the first place, of course. But I wonder: what's the aunt's story? Is she just a terrible, boring person? Or is there something else here that inspires everybody else to be patient and polite to her? Is she getting over a stroke, and only recently recovered the ability to talk? Maybe this is the most social she's been in ages. Maybe she's a widow and has no one to talk to. Maybe something else is going on, and everyone recognizes that this performance, boring as it looks to us, is actually kind of a milestone. 

Well, almost everyone.

But I detect a note of melancholy that runs in this ad, and the companion piece "Airplane," that Evan missed.

Selfish Dinner Girl is at home, trapped in conventionalized normative bourgeois paradigm of the family dinner. Airplane Dude is settling into the Economy (otherwise known as "self loading cargo") section of a plane. As Airplane Dude checks to make sure his seat back and tray table are in their full and upright position, one set of friends chillax on the beach, another seem to be doing a burlesque show in drag, his nephew is ODing on chocolate cake, and some other friends are raving in Norway's answer to Ibiza. Selfish Dinner Girl's friends are rocking out, dancing with the Bolshoi, having a snowball fight outside their condo in Vail.

And while Selfish Dinner Girl is hitting Like like it's going out of style, part of her is thinking, You're not there. You weren't invited.

She's got to wonder: When your friends come in from the cold, settle into the oversized leather sofa, mugs of hot cocoa, and Facebook Home, what will they see from you?

Stuck here with boring family :-(

If in the attention economy your role is to be a distraction for your friends– if they see you the way you see them– are they going to be impressed? If you're not delivering tasty treats for their monkey minds, what value are you creating for them?

Enjoy your "friends" while you have them, Selfish Dinner Girl. They're having lots of fun without you. Sooner or later, they're going to realize they don't need you any more than you need your boring family.