| Would no news really be good news? |
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| Written by Adam Sass | |
 The social networking site Facebook.com now seems even more so to be used for stalking our friends. Just like millions of other twenty-somethings around the world the other night I logged onto Facebook and realized it was different. It said that my sister, Elisabeth, was now in a relationship. Being the older, caring brother that I am, I decided at 11:32 p.m. to call her and ask her about this. Sure enough relationship was in fact there. I would not have learned any other way.Her time-stamped acknowledgment of her relationship was posted on my Facebook homepage in the new feature called “newsfeeds.” This newest feature posts bulletins on everyone’s wall whenever a buddy makes a change to their site or posts something, theoretically making your stalking job much easier. This is much like a news brief on my friends, reporting everything from tweaks to a buddy’s wall — Erin and Molly posted on Meghan’s wall. (9:40am) — to the slightest change — Jeremy removed “muttering alone" from his favorite activities (11:41 a.m.) — Newsfeed was launched Monday and there was an immediate outcry of hatred towards the news feed. Many groups across the country formed immediately following its release. I joined a few of the groups, notably one lead by Benjamin Parr from Northwestern called “Students Against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)," which calls for students to refuse to update their profiles. The group amassed 500,000 members by the weekend and over 600,000 by the following week. I mean no harm to anyone who was/is upset about the new features and as a matter of fact, last check of my news feed shows that 15 of my friends have joined groups similar to Parr’s some titles included, “Bring back the old Facebook” and “This newsfeed creeps me out.” I am sorry to you guys for feeling this way, but Facebook has always been a little “stalker-ish” if you ask me. Stalking is by definition from dictionary.com “To pursue by tracking stealthily,” and seems to me that logging onto Facebook at least once a day is stalking. I mean, we see what our friends are doing and what they have changed, this news feed just gives us an easier way to track that. When we are on Facebook we look for friends changes anyway, and notice things like new girlfriends of our exes and groups that people have left. By plopping all of this information out on the table news feed makes this mildly voyeuristic process easier for everyone and definitely more enjoyable. This is a huge plus in the convenience level. So I ask, what is the problem with the news feed? I mean we all like to know what’s going on, on the Big Brother shows and other reality TV, but it’s only the nutcases that go on the shows. We are a little creeped out when it is us in the hot seat of life. Maybe it’s a bit too personal. But, I befriended 173 people and Facebook decided to broadcast my every move to all of them. Most of the news feed updates originally were pretty lame like “Mike is in bed” at 1:34 a.m., but some were interesting. “John added burritos and franks red hot to his list of interests” at 4:47 a.m. is definitely an odd thing and I probably would not have noticed without the news feed. We get to watch as our “friends” update their public persona in real time. Quite frankly, this outrage surprised me. I mean we have grown into a society of vain children with a demanding or insatiable appetite for self-expression. There are plenty of places to help quench this such as Facebook, Myspace, blogs, AIM, and forums. My personal outlet is on www.themissouriminer.com under the Sasshole’s blog. Did this drastic change open up people’s eyes to the fact that people are watching? The comfortable thing about Facebook is that it is limited to people that we have befriended unlike some of the other online networks of friends. Perhaps we could follow the advice of a Facebook member that added “don’t do stuff online you don’t want everyone to know about” to their list of interests at 8:45 a.m. this morning. When does enough become enough; when do our private lives being watched by everyone get given back to us and become private again? The answer is probably never, especially when people put their private lives on the internet. I know that some people have not gone down the Facebook road yet, but those people can be found in pictures of people who have. Unless you plan on living the rest of your days in a dark room with no friends, you should accept the fact that people are going to be watching you and you will appear in front of people. Hopefully, my peers will agree and the news feed protests will peter out. As Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote Tuesday, “Being able to know what’s going on in your friends’ lives is [cool]. This is information people used to dig for on a daily basis, nicely reorganized and summarized so people can learn about the people they care about. You don’t miss the photo album about your friend’s trip to Nepal. Maybe if your friends are all going to a party, you want to know so you can go too.” If this news feed survives the out-lash against it I hope that it will earn a place in our society as a convenient albeit quirky way to do what Facebook was made for, stalking out friends. |
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