Think About It:
News Feed piques existing curiosity

What we have here is failure to communicate. Well, not really; in fact, it’s just the opposite.

Back in the day (i.e. any time before Sept. 5), any registered Facebook member could easily spend more than an hour on Facebook.com, pouring over the pictures, wall postings and favorite activities entered by their friends, their friends’ friends and their friends’ friends’ friends and feel not the least bit stalker-ish. It was a pleasant diversion, a good way to find out who liked the same bands you did and an alternative method of making friends. For some of us, it might have been a little bit of an obsession, but nothing atrocious.

Something happened on Sept. 5 though, which I’m sure you know about. Facebook mastermind Mark Zuckerberg created the Facebook News Feed and Mini-Feed, both with essentially the same purpose. The idea is simply to give us easier access to the information that would previously have taken us an hour or two (or more) to find on our own.

In its original form, the News Feed would let you know everything that your immediate friends did, Facebook-wise, for the previous day or two. Mini-Feeds work in much the same way, only they were specific to individuals. Bear in mind that none of the news you could get through the News Feed was information you couldn’t get on your own. News Feed simply made it easier.

The backlash was enormous. Numerous Facebook protest groups were formed; the largest one, Students Against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook) approached three- quarters of a million members. Eventually, Zuckerberg and his team reacted by giving us the option of keeping a good chunk of our Facebook actions invisible on News Feed.

I, for one, was quite confused.

Facebook was designed to facilitate the easy sharing of personal, possibly even semi-private, information over the Internet. I could post my religious views, political opinions, even my cell phone number on Facebook with the express intent of having said statuses viewed by others. The reverse was true, as well. I’ve found out about old high school friends coming out of the closet, hookups and breakups and plenty of other personal tidbits through Facebook.

It seemed like an unwritten rule, both from a pragmatic viewpoint and in the “spirit” of Facebook, that you’d only post what you wanted to be known. No one ever forced you or me to include our relationship status, accept every friend request, or to join any groups with which we did not want to be associated.

So what’s the problem with making it a little easier?

Perhaps that’s oversimplifying a bit. Of course the News Feed has problems. Of course it simplifies stalker-ish behavior. With a few clicks, we can find out everything that a member has done on a daily basis, without having to go through the tedium of re-reading an entire profile.

There’s also a strange feeling that comes from receiving information on old acquaintances. Friends we made three years ago and not thought about since then are suddenly re-introduced into our lives without either their consent or ours. “X broke up with Y? I didn’t even know they were going out!”

Also, some of the new information is just plain unnecessary. Let’s face it, you really don’t want to know that “John Doe cares about Save the Rainforest,” or that “Jane Doe joined Family Guy Fans.”

In the end, though, the News Feed and Mini-Feed aren’t giving you anything you couldn’t have found on your own. If anything, I’d say they’re helping to achieve Facebook’s original purpose, which was to facilitate the spread of personal information from individual to individual.

Remember the whole to-do about companies checking the profiles of potential new employees? “They don’t have any right to check on my Facebook! That’s my personal space!” If anything, this entire fiasco can serve as reminder of just how public Facebook is. What we put there is meant to (and going to) be read, and we cannot always choose our readers.

As Facebook users and as citizens of a connected world, we might want to think more carefully about what we choose to display about ourselves over a medium as cold and impersonal as the Internet.

—JP Krahel