By on February 13, 2014
Facebook just turned ten years old. A lot has changed in that decade.
We’ve grown accustomed to sharing details of our lives through a
single platform that tracks our likes, dislikes, friendships, and
interests and follows us when we leave the site to browse the web. We’ve
gotten used to using our Facebook login to sign up for other services.
We’ve grown resigned (to the point of indifference) to the panopticon
that corporations like Facebook have created by using our activity on
the Internet as our window on the world and their big-data window into
ours.
Apparently Facebook celebrated
by making videos of its members via photos and comments they’d posted. I
don’t know what these videos look like because I uprooted myself a few
years ago. I got a lot out of Facebook when I belonged. I could see what
family members were up to. I got to know more about what faculty at my
institution were doing and thinking and what they cared about. I got
links to articles that were terrifically interesting; Facebook became a
news source and a discovery tool. In fact, the company is building on
that function by launching Paper,
a customizable app that will aggregate the most-liked stories on
Facebook, edited by human curators and free of distractions. Who needs
newspapers when we have Facebook? Oh, wait—Facebook does, or where will
it get all that high-quality linked content? Read more...
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