Facebook Privacy

By: Steve Cheney

We all know that the delineation between public and private was eroded by Facebook a long time ago. Over. Done. But now Facebook’s sheer scale is pushing it in a new direction, one that encroaches on your authenticity.

Facebook is no longer a social network. They stopped being one long before the movie. Facebook is really a huge broadcast platform. Everything that happens between its walls is one degree away from being public, one massive auditorium filled with everyone you’ve ever met, most of whom you haven’t seen or spoken to in years.

Last week a bunch of massive sites across the web, including TechCrunch, adopted Facebook commenting. The integration of the formatting and fonts is so strong that when you’re reading comments you actually feel like you are on Facebook, not a tech focused vertical site.

This latest push by Facebook to tie people to one identity across the interwebs is very troublesome.

The problem with tying internet-wide identity to a broadcast network like Facebook is that people don’t want one normalized identity, either in real life, or virtually.

People yearn to be individuals. They want to be authentic. They have numerous different groups of real-life friends. They stylize conversations. They are emotional and have an innate need to connect on different levels with different people. This is because humans are born with an instinctual desire to understand the broader context of their surroundings and build rapport, a social awareness often called emotional intelligence.

In the beginning, Facebook catered to this instinct we all have. But FB in its current form, a big graph of people who may or may not know anything about one another, does not.

And forcing people to comment – and more broadly speaking to log-on – with one identity puts a massive stranglehold on our very nature. I’m not too worried about FB Comments in isolation, but the writing is on the wall: all of this off-site encroachment of the Facebook graph portends where FB is really going in pushing one identity. And a uniform identity defies us.

Face it, authenticity goes way down when people know their 700 friends, grandma, and 5 ex-girlfriends are tuning in each time they post something on the web.

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2 Responses to “Is Facebook Harming Your Authenticity?”

  1. barcoding generator says:

    I agree with this, FB is place where lots of unknown people connect together and in some way this is harming authenticity.

  2. Often while on Facebook I can not place comments on pages of friends, but instead am forced to place this as on my mind on my own page. Thats OK but the message was not meant to clutter the pages of those not associated with the comment. This transfer from a selected recipient, to the general comment status cluttersmycommunication of channels by confusing messages associated with the comments of others, and becoming dis-ambiguous due to their direct dis-association with relative content. This demises the relevance, and thus the reduces the authenticity of my comments.

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