FROM: http://www.firstpost.com/tech/will-2102-see-the-beginning-of-facebooks-decline-169929.html
Tens of millions of people globally are still getting to grips with Facebook’s latest, and delayed, idea — the timeline.
A friend discovered that the social network had interpreted some past posts into a “significant” life event: the “death of a loved one”.
He was angry. Of course the death of someone special would be a “significant” life event, but for a computer to remind you of that fact is as cold and detached as, well, a computer.
But it warrants asking whether Facebook has now gone too far in trying to replicate our hearts and minds online, and control our information.
Facebook ads appearing down the right-hand side of the “newsfeed” once asked me if I was “feeling suicidal?” Where did it get that from? What thought did I offer to prompt an ad for help?
We’ve turned over a great deal of personal — DEEPLY personal — information to Facebook, Google and a host of others, but might the timeline idea have reflected that fact back to us so effectively that we turn away from the social media mirror?
This year will be, as last year, defined by the ongoing battle for information. People like Kapil Sibal and a court in Delhi want to preview and screen it in advance. Countries such as Syria and China want to limit its flow. And companies will fight tooth and nail just for your Twitter followers.
Individuals have largely given up control of their own information, whether voluntarily or otherwise. We provide our birth dates for everything, supply our most immediate opinions for anyone who will read them, and pictures of everything, including the inside of wombs when expecting children.
Home follows us on our phones to work, and work follows us home. Some companies have started to limit the all-pervasive flow of information, such as Volkswagen announcing last month that they would switch off Blackberry email after work hours. Employees didn’t want the constant presence of work, erasing any concept of the so-called “work-life balance”.
On social networking, it’s a clash between information offered to the websites, and websites interpreting and using that information. What we offer is unlimited. What computers can do is not.
Emotions and the core thoughts in your head — the pure ones before you attempt to formulate them into written words — are largely inaccessible to computers. Algorithms within sites such as Facebook instantly assess your status updates and change the ads to suit your thoughts. That’s not quite the same as emotion. Equations can’t sense satire. They have no sensitivity.
Look critically at the ads that appear when you make statements online, or even the order of Google search results. Consider what news is being presented to you on some websites and whether it is deciding for you what news you see.
Having recently been on holiday in Canada, the news presented by the BBC online is vastly different from when I’m based in Glasgow, Scotland. It knows where I am and presents me with US news first, above anything global. It judges what is important to my brain simply by location.
The timeline is a brilliant invention, sorting all the thoughts, photos and statements we throw online into a digital copy of ourselves. It’s not an album that you flip through, it’s a summary of your life. Except you can’t summarise a life. You can view snapshots from moments across a lifespan, but that’s not the same thing.
Maybe a younger generation can’t tell the difference between the digital snapshots we offer the world, and what’s still in our heads and hearts — something that’s infinitely more complex.
But even amongst a close circle of friends online, I sense a growing dissatisfaction with Facebook in particular. It isn’t about all the changes the site makes, constantly, or even the mistakes it’s made over the privacy controls on a profile. There’s a sense that Facebook is trying too hard to grab us by the throats and plug us in.
Google is trying it with “circles”, to mimic our real-world association with different groups of people. While useful in terms of how an individual offers thoughts and shared articles etc to others, it doesn’t really offer any great understanding of ourselves.
All Facebook and Google want really, is to understand what’s going through our heads so effectively that it can nail you to a wall with its advertising, and make money.
Will people leave Facebook in droves because of the timeline? No. As has been said before, with so many of our friends and family on the site, you’d need everyone to leave to another site with you to effectively stay in touch (unless of course your friends are all in the room with you currently). Facebook has us by the jugular, but increasing numbers of us don’t like the choking sensation.
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