The faces of Facebook – Archive
Written by Crow's Nest Staff, Mar 7, 2011, 0 Comments
Nicole Miller
Contributing Writer
There it is again—that blue and white color scheme and personalized ad bar that fills whichever digital screen you’re using that minute. Facebook is entertaining, like a free game that all your friends are playing too. It’s habitual, especially when notifications can be delivered straight to your cell phone.
But it can be like a mosquito carrying a strain of malaria, infesting almost every part of your life, whether it’s on a computer screen, on a smartphone or at Starbucks, listening to the latest web drama via The Face. It’s a love-strangle relationship—if only you could get your hands around the neck of the most addicting social network in the world).
The situation is like this: Welcome to Facebook. Please type in your unique thoughts of self-expression to make a cool profile like everyone else. Good Job.
A century passes.
Hey, Nicole. We bet you’re wondering what happened to all that stuff you typed. Don’t worry; your information is safe with us. We’ve deleted your sentences of self-expression to make room for these cool fan links. Now, every profile’s aesthetics can look the same.
Fast-forward.
Oh, hey Nicole. Thanks for stopping in again, just thought we’d recommend these fan pages for you: Alkaline Trio rules all, Hunter S. Thompson is my hero, Lava Lamps, Thinking. Not only are these exact words from your original profile, but we’ve now morphed them into Like pages, with selected photographs to accompany your ideas. You’re welcome.
According to a blog post by Facebook’s Alex Li, “Instead of just boring text, these connections are actually pages, so your profile will become immediately more connected to the places, things and experiences that matter to you.”
And that was the first time I deactivated my Facebook account.
I was fine the first few weeks, occasionally typing in facebook.com by accident when I actually got online to check my school e-mail. Then, the scrutiny began. “What? You don’t have a Facebook? That’s stupid—you can’t not have one, Nicole. Everybody has a profile.” I’ve deactivated my account two or three times now, but I always end up back in this web vortex with the other half billion users.
“[Facebook] will introduce a new product—invariably, it makes peoples’ profiles more public,” said Chris Hoofnagle, who runs the privacy programs at UC Berkeley and studies Facebook, in CNBC’s special “The Facebook Obsession.” “And then once there is some public objection, they draw back a little bit, but not much. They’re still opening up peoples’ profiles to the world.”
Users have gotten more comfortable sharing different kinds of information, according to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in a USTREAM interview with Mike Arrington of TechCrunch.
“That social norm is just something that’s evolved over time,” Zuckerberg said. “We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.”
Watch out, kids.
My predictions for Facebook in years to come:
When you type anonymous song lyrics into your status, Facebook will match the words up to a lyric search engine and feed you ads for that band or artist.
Facebook will gather data from the past three years and tell your friends how many times you’ve viewed their profile.
Facebook will start tagging brand names in your status that link your words to that product’s Like page.
Facebook will become a uniform ant farm with limited privacy, omnipresent spyware and such convenient networking features that no one will walk away from it. Oh wait.
