danah boyd and the facebook news feed.

danah boyd’s reading highlighted some issues for me about Facebook. Firstly I find Facebook as a useful tool to allow social behaviour between connections with people that would have otherwise not have existed or would have cease to exist in the first place. Secondly it is a great way for me to plan events, get invitations to events, join causes and see updates on pages that I have interest in. Facebook is like a social hobby. In this way I forget about its privacy functions or ‘lack thereof’.
I find this interesting in relation to dannah boyd’s argument that news feeds popped the privacy bubble that people thought they had on a social networking forum like Facebook. All of your activity would appear in a communal news feed among your friends, which made it easier for people to ‘keep tabs’ on you and see your associations and revelations about yourself. She mentioned that this scared people at first and that without the ability to ‘rank’ Facebook friends in accordance with the depth of the relationship, people became anxious about utilising the complete social networking tool that is Facebook. She also mentions that because we have such an overload of data flow constantly appearing in our news feed, and the mass of data we comprehend about our Facebook friends, via news feeds, gives us a sense of false intimacy with these people.
I half heartedly agree with her. News feeds have always been common place in the time I’ve been using Facebook, so I guess the factor of a ‘lack of privacy’ doesn’t register. It is part of the norm. In all honesty, half of my Facebook interaction comes from engaging with my news feed, so in all essence I would be a dull and introverted Facebook user without it. I also find that in knowing Facebook is a public network, I subconsciously correct and screen my information and posts before sending them- nothing that is explicitly personal or socially incriminating- therefore news feeds are not really a privacy issue.
What I do agree with is that news feeds, and the abundance of information you can receive from them, does allow you to be more ‘personally engaged’ with your friends; which is oxymoronic as there is nothing personal about Facebook. I guess it is because these people and their activity are constantly appearing, you feel this sense of a ‘personal connection’. Almost as if the tabs are being kept for you by Facebook. I see how this is a worrying factor in regards to Facebook applications. So in relation to a false sense of personal relationship acquired by the news feed application, I find dannah boyd has an interesting and somewhat truthful point.
Source:
Boyd, d. (2008) ‘Facebook’s privacy trainwreck: exposure, invasion and social convergence’ in Convergence,Vol 14(1): 13-20. Course Reader.