09-07-2006
The “Rising Cost” of Facebook Friendship
Friendship on facebook just got a lot more expensive. Or so people seem to think. Have you see the new facebook “news feed” interface? Go check it out. I’ll wait.
Back? Best. feature. ever. right? This makes facebook at least 10 times more useful/interesting. Judging by the number of groups opposing this change, not every one agrees. As I started writing this post I was going to speculate that these people were really just a vocal minority, but after seeing one group with over 400,000(!) members, I’m not so sure. The jokes based on the irony of protesting facebook on facebook pretty much write themselves, pick your favorite.
So assuming that there really are a ton of people opposed to this my question is “WHY?” First, I wonder how many people are not really opposed to it. The simply don’t care, see no reason why it’s useful to them and mindlessly join up with the mob in opposition. Great Plan! That’s never turned out badly before.
Consider what’s really changed here. Since you can restrict any/all information to your friends, what’s changed is how your friend’s see changes to your profile. That’s it. So any complaints about how “all of facebook can see my every move” are patently ridiculous. Now why are people irrationally afraid of this simple change? I’m thinking too much like an economist these days, but I think it’s because they believe the cost of facebook friendship has risen. The added cost being that more information is available to one’s friends. To see the fallacy, imagine that a store decides to make its customer’s lives easier by including sales tax in its prices. Invariably, some jackass is going to go running around screaming about how they raised the prices. *waves at the jackasses.* Caching profiles and diffing them is something that could be done pretty easily before. There was already a firefox extention to do it. What this change is done is make plain how much information is made available to one’s “friends” (or extra-network friends, depending on privacy settings). Suddenly friending that random guy yoy met a frat party 3 years ago(and thereby providing him access to personal infromation), seems like a bad idea. Somehow, this facebook’s fault. I’m gonna take a quick look at what seem to be the most common issues.
“Stalking.” Obviously there are 2 kinds of stalking, “facebook stalking” which is as harmless as ever and actual stalking using information to cause physical and/or emotional harm. That ship pretty much sailed when you posted stuff on facebook and didn’t properly control your privacy settings and/or friends. To posit the existence of “super lazy stalkers” who weren’t going to bother before there were feeds and are going to now is absurd.
Privacy rights. To invoke something as important as privacy rights here is patently absurd. Real privacy applies only in one of two cases 1)information the government can discover for the purposes of criminal indiement without reasonable suspicion and 2)information you provide to some other party with the guarantee that it will be kept private. Neither of those cases applies with facebook where you VOLUNTARALY provide information with express purpose that that information be distributed to others. The minimum amount of information you need to have is your name, and by implication that fact that you’re affiliated with that network’s organization in some fashion. Super secret stuff, that.
“It’s Creepy.” Now there’s an articulate objection. Could someone explain exactly what’s creepy about it, or, more precisely, what’s creepier than how it was before?
The interface. Yep, I agree the interface could use a bit of work. The ability to hide feeds when not looking at them would be nice. The ability to filter feeds by event type and/or friend type would be even nicer. I’m sure both will happen soon enough. In any case, I don’t see what disliking the interface is reason to oppose the concept of the feature. We need to separate the debate there.
People don’t like it, so they should change it back. At what point exactly, did facebook become a democracy? Are you costumers paying for a service? Did you have forge an online community like Wikipedia? Are you partly responsible for it’s existence, like an open source project? No? Then, shut the fuck up. You’re free to either change the way you use facebook, or leave. I don’t care. But this sense of entitlement that users, simply by virtue of being users get to dedicate how a piece of software ought to work is ridiculous. That’s what facebook is, a piece of software.
Finally, let’s be serious about what these people are really worried about. I’ll call it, regardless of the participates education or gender, High School Girl Drama(HSGD). They’re worried that because their friends are apparently both stupid and shallow some heretofore public but not blindingly obvious relationship/wall post/favorite book change will incite a chain of events so that someone yells, someone fucks someone’s boyfriend, someone loses an eye. You know how it is. Grow the fuck up. These people are not my problem and I shouldn’t suffer because of their idiocy.
Seriously,why do people use facebook in a way that makes this feature not wonderful. I know why I use it.
1) to communicate information and interests to my friends and (pontentially other interests) and 2) to discover interesting things about my friends and potentially new people. There are at least two people I wouldn’t have befriended if it weren’t for facebook. I call that a useful tool That what social network’s are FOR. I’m not only “ok” with the information in my facebook profile being readily available, I WANT it to be. That’s the point. If it were possible to allow everyone from any network to see my profile, I would.I’m not quite sure why other people feel so drastically different about this. If you have a reasonable argument please email crazyivan1024 AT gmail dot com(sorry I can’t deal with the comment spam).
-CI
