Modern Quill

SMC and Twitter Posted: 14 Dec 2008 06:07 PM CST Does anyone at SMC use twitter? I’m not too keen on getting started, but I figured it would have caught on. Dennis Jansen at No. 634 pointed me towards this NYT article . . . I thought the article was interesting, but perhaps a few degrees away from the actual user experience. The beginning of the article said that FB was the “digital commons” and that its main function was to track people’s activity on the Internet. I respectfully disagree. My memories of Facebook back in the day was that it was a way to meet people and learn more about them: hence its name. It was something of a sophisticated bulletin board where wall posts, photos, and events were posted in their own peculiar ways. When I first started using FB, groups were the main thing. Reunion groups were ways to meet new people and share experiences. On the beginning of the stalker-feed: "Everyone was freaking out," Ben Parr, then a junior at Northwestern University, told me recently. What particularly enraged Parr was that there wasn't any way to opt out of News Feed, to "go private" and have all your information kept quiet. He created a Facebook group demanding Zuckerberg either scrap News Feed or provide privacy options. "Facebook users really think Facebook is becoming the Big Brother of the Internet, recording every single move," a California student told The Star-Ledger of Newark. Another chimed in, "Frankly, I don't need to know or care that Billy broke up with Sally, and Ted has become friends with Steve." By lunchtime of the first day, 10,000 people had joined Parr's group, and by the next day it had 284,000. Ok, I dig it. But dig this next paragraph: Zuckerberg, surprised by the outcry, quickly made two decisions. The first was to add a privacy feature to News Feed, letting users decide what kind of information went out. But the second decision was to leave News Feed otherwise intact. He suspected that once people tried it and got over their shock, they'd like it. Uh huh. I know many people still don’t like it. This is really more of an instance where the users can’t be trusted with how to use the product, isn’t it? A few weeks after the News Feed imbroglio, Zuckerberg opened the site to the general public (previously, only students could join), and it grew quickly; today, it has 100 million users. I still wish they hadn’t. This was a big shift. I remember the summer before college, eagerly waiting to get my school email to get a facebook account. It was a college thing to do. The focus was on your “network.” Now, I’m getting friend requests from Melbourne because someone saw that I was a hypnotist. I don’t have the time for studies and managing my facebook presence. In essence, Facebook users didn't think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Sigh. There is a major bias in that assumption. “Right now, Facebook is a way to follow other people’s lives, therefore that must be what we wanted all along. The thousands of people who used Facebook before that were just confused.” Once, Facebook was about communication. If I needed to get into contact with someone, Facebook was often times less crufty and more reliable. I could email them, or let Facebook email them as well as posting on their wall. Again, groups were a big function of Facebook then. If good design choices were made, Facebook could still be about communication. Unfortunately, I think this is all just academic. I don’t think anyone used to the Stalker Feed could imagine using Facebook without it. Jansen’s comment was especially interesting: It's the flip side of the small-town feel of microblogging: everyone is up in your kool-aid: This is the ultimate effect of the new awareness: It brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your business. Young people at college are the ones to experience this most viscerally, because, with more than 90 percent of their peers using Facebook, it is especially difficult for them to opt out. Small-town life? Not really. You see, I haven’t posted a picture to Facebook in over eighteen months. My status updates just point to this blog. I don’t send bumper stickers, snowballs, pokes, gifts, etc. My wall posts are carefully considered. The NYT explains that the stalker-feed is the digital equivalent of body language. You watch all these subtle cues, and suddenly you know everyone better. That theory of aggregate information has got to be true in face-time. It would be impossible to measure every single body movement during a social interaction. Just ask a poker player. But remember: digitally, we represent ourselves as constructs. We omit more than we present. We lie with impunity. How many times have you seen two best friends “married” or “engaged” to each other? One of my professors wrote his dissertation on Lord Byron’s letters, and required that my class read the letters also. They are carefully construct, succinct, and acutely self-conscious. I was told that Byron wrote to a family member as a child and added the postscript, “This is the first letter I ever wrote.” He was aware that his letters would certainly be circulated. We’re the same way on the Internet. We that we need “to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” It’s when people break down that firewall, which comes more through ignoring its presence than accidental gaffs, that we get into trouble. But unlike body language, this aggregate information is stored, syndicated, and publicized. All it takes is one malicious person to take advantage of that . . .

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