I’m working on a few new blog posts but I’ve been sidetracked by the new Facebook updates. Last week (as soon as Google+ went public) Facebook revamped their News Feed, profiles, and more. I’ll let Naomi explain it:
There have been a lot of responses and I am tempted to reserve any judgment until later in the semester once I have more readings under my belt, but I wanted to post something as a way to bookmark an article that I found interesting over at Slate. So the following post will be pretty rough, but I’m taking advantage of the medium and using it as an extension of my memory. You’ve been warned.
Farhad Manjoo responds to the changes Facebook has undergone and, more specifically, the philosophy behind the changes – which was explicitly spelled out by Mark Zuckerberg at the recent F8 Conference. Below is the introduction to the F8 keynote which combines comedy and information through Zuckerberg impersonator, Andy Samberg.
In a moment of actual information-transmission, the pseudo-Zuckerberg says that the more people share on Facebook, the closer people get to your authentic identity. As Manjoo reports, Zuckerberg’s goal is “frictionless” sharing:
What he means is that I don't have to bother with the "friction" of choosing to tell you that I like something. On Facebook, now, merely experiencing something is enough to trigger sharing. Once I sign up for Spotify's Facebook app, my consent is assumed: When I listen, I share. The same goes for the many other apps that Facebook's partners are launching. When I watch something on Netflix or Hulu, when I read something on the Daily, or when I play a game like Words With Friends, Facebook will tell my friends. Everyone I know on Facebook will now have a running log of my life.
After getting feedback from users, Zuckerberg created a specific place (the Ticker) for updates that are more trivial – so as to encourage people to share information they might otherwise deem unnecessary. Manjoo suggests that this kind of indiscriminate sharing ruins taste.
For as much as he's invested in sharing, though, Zuckerberg seems clueless about the motivation behind the act. Why do you share a story, video, or photo? Because you want your friends to see it. And why do you want your friends to see it? Because you think they'll get a kick out of it. I know this sounds obvious, but it's somehow eluded Zuckerberg that sharing is fundamentally about choosing. You experience a huge number of things every day, but you choose to tell your friends about only a fraction of them, because most of what you do isn't worth mentioning…
…I welcome any method that makes it easier for people to share stuff. If you like this article, you should Like this article. And even if you hate this article, you should Like this article (add a comment telling your friends why I'm a moron). But if you're just reading this article—if you have no strong feelings about it either way, and if you suspect that your friends will consider it just another bit of noise in their already noisy world—please, do everyone a favor and don't say anything about it all.
First of all, I think that Manjoo is rather generous in explaining why people share what they share. Not that users don’t share things because they think their friends will like it, but in a digital space where you can manipulate your identity with the click of a button, I think the primary reason that people share things is so that their friends will like them (or, better: the them that they have constructed). I, for example, will happily share that I like all kinds of indie-bands that my friends like – and I do – but I will not share my guilty-pleasure-love for all things Katy Perry. The internet does not need to know about that information beyond what one would glean rather easily from my YouTube viewing history. Good thing nobody reads this blog.
In any case, it seems to me that Zuckerberg is probably right in saying that the more we share about ourselves the more our online identity will mirror our “authentic” identity in the real world. But I wonder if that is what we want as people-knowers or peoples-known. To some extent we are always on guard – sharing bits of ourselves while hiding others even when we are with those who “know us best.” Do any of us want others to know us authentically? I realize I’m taking a rather pessimistic route here, and maybe I’m alone in my concern, but I know myself pretty well and I’m not crazy about other people having that kind of insight. Also the only things that can be frictionlessly shared at this point are internet activities – which will just widen the space within which we create identities. If I know my friends know what I do on the internet I’ll have a browser dedicated to searching and sharing the kind of webpages I want to share, and another dedicated to Katy Perry. All the world is a stage and our identities are performative constructions - Frictionless sharing might make that performance difference, but we'll do what we have to to keep the show moving.
Regardless, frictionless sharing goes further in shaping relationship expectations: I should be sharing more and interested in what others are sharing regardless of its relative importance.
Interestingly, while the new design lets me ignore certain types of people (through “lists”), and choose what is important (out of what Facebook deems important, mind you), the Ticker – that conveyer of all things unimportant – doesn’t discriminate in that way. That means that now I have to be subjected to the most trivial of updates from the most trivial of friends; at least before the Ticker I could choose whose trivial updates I am subjected to.
So I want to quickly end with Manjoo’s last statement (quoted above). Don’t we have enough “noise” to deal with already without having to siphon through those frictionlessly shared items? It seems to me that frictionless sharing is not frictionlessly received. In other words, it seems to me that I often am forced to interact with people’s updates more than they are, under this sharing model. For example: if an old middle school friend that I haven’t interacted more than accepting their Facebook friendship is listening to Spotify in the background of their card game – every song that is played for the next four hours is shared on my Ticker. This trivial friend’s trivial updates are being broadcast without any effort on their part, and yet I am confronted with it no matter where I go within Facebook – and I’m supposed to care.
There is more that I could and want to say – but the lack of structure demonstrated so far is driving me nuts. So I’m done for now and will continue my regularly scheduled blog topics soon.
((perhaps I should have let Michael Scott address this question from the beginning))
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