NOBODY likes change. And if there’s one thing Facebook users really don’t like, it’s change, especially this week.
There is a global battle going on for our information and it’s being fought out between Facebook and Google, with the social networking behemoth launching the latest changes this week to stay ahead of the game.
Facebook, where users go to see what their friends are up to, announced new features that the company hopes will shape what users watch, hear, read and buy. James Best Jr./The New York Times
So far the adjustments are relatively cosmetic, but with the impending introduction of their “Timeline” and deals with music service Spotify and film house Netflix, and features such as video chat, Facebook wants to control even more of your time than it does at the moment.
Google, with its opening up of social networking Google+ beyond the limited experimental run during the summer, doesn’t just want your random searches or emails – it wants to take a cut of the time you’re using on Facebook.
Both are highly dependent on you dumping as much personal information as possible and a healthy (or not, perhaps) obsession with the lives of everyone around you, every day of your life.
That maximises your time on those sites and their potential for earning advertising revenue off you.
This is profit through time control.
Facebook and Google now dominate so much of our lives that most struggle to remember what we did before we could look something up on Google or “like” a friend’s status on Facebook. Both are constantly expanding, and it’s getting a bit worrying. Google already concerns me for its filtering of information and near monopoly on web advertising. The tracking of your search habits and the translation into advertising is endemic on Facebook too, and has now migrated to the “news feed” of the site.
When you individually turn off one of Facebook’s “top story” designations, it tells you, “We’ll try not to put more stories like this at the top of the page”. So they’re predicting what I see, not letting me filter information myself? For those with 1000+ friends, maybe that’s useful. But I’m human – I decide what I most want to see and read and acknowledge, not a computer.
The “information age” is as much about control of information as anything else.
My local council in Scotland recently asked for some details before sending a refund for too much money paid to them in error.
To “protect against fraud” they wanted every address at which I had lived since 1993. I would not give them that information for the same reason Facebook and Google make me nervous sometimes – I don’t trust the control.
Obviously information isn’t exactly a possession in the same way you protect your wallet in your pocket. But what the information in that wallet represents is privacy, the sense of personal space which we each believe we are entitled to control.
Yes, we all put too much on Facebook about ourselves, sometimes just to friends and family, sometimes to the whole world.
The most contentious changes made by Facebook in the past year or so have been how we decide what is public or private, whether Facebook in fact owns any of the material we post, and how they guide what we see.
Now, my mother can vouch for the fact that I have, since I was a child, tried to organise things. I might have a very cluttered desk and even more cluttered computer desktop, but within that are various experiments with organising files, photos, ideas and anything else.
Facebook is doing the same experimentation, except that rather than trying to organise one individual’s information, it’s trying to co-ordinate what is approaching one billion people.
Their upcoming design, announced this week, of a “Timeline” will radically change how we sort and access information. Rather than having to go back through hundreds of updates in chronological order, you can dip back into the past and see what are supposedly pulled out as significant “posts”.
It is interesting that Facebook is throwing you back in time, rather than emphasising the immediacy of the digital age, ie “what’s happening to you right now?” such as on Twitter. Reminiscing might be fun and way to dominate your time, but it is a different direction to the pull of “now now now”.
Like Microsoft before and Google now, we have to start wondering whether Facebook will eventually attract attention for quashing competition by simply trying to do everything.
Are they making other social networks impossible by virtue of the fact that everyone is on it? I could go elsewhere, but as has been said many times before, I would need all my friends and family to go with me, or lose those connections. Facebook knows you need it and those links, and Facebook feeds off the information.
One friend, when told of the upcoming changes, said, “I can’t be bothered anymore – I’m just going to leave it”. And that might happen. Facebook’s greatest threat comes from our human need to be in physical contact, not just digital. No app or timeline has managed to replicate that. Yet.
Tech 'n' Logic 