nanoramas

caseyagollan:

Facebook introduces profile subscriptions. This much requested feature is brilliant (just brilliant!) from a product / features / technological advancement / digital life simplification perspective — and intuitively designed to boot. But they’ve gone done what I had hoped they’d never do: it’s now possible to subscribe to a person without being their friend, or unsubscribe from certain aspects of a friend like, say, “LIFE EVENTS.”

Even if they haven’t activated it yet, Internet power users have been waiting for such a slick execution of this feature…and the rest of the world is about to catch on to the have-my-cake-and-eat-it-to-itiveness of selectively muting ones friends. This quote from John Taylor Gatto explains why I think introducing this capability is a step in the wrong direction for Facebook if they hope to foster whatever communities have managed to be carried by the previous, dumber version of the site:

A community is a place in which people face each other over time in all their human variety: the good parts, bad parts, and all the rest. Such places promote the highest quality of life possible — lives of engagement and participation….An example might clarify this. Networks of urban reformers will convene to consider the problems of homeless vagrants, but a community will think of its vagrants as real people, not abstractions. Ron, Dave, or Marty — a community will call its bums by their names.

If a network composed of status updates ever had a fighting chance at being a “community” in Gatto’s sense, this is eroded by the dehumanizing abstraction of people into facets that can be turned on and off at will.

As a bonafide content-creator I’m made anxious by how this forces me to think of myself as both a person with “friends” and as an entity that can be selectively subscribed to. Nothing about my profile was ever supposed to be that “real” anyway, but I’m suddenly encouraged to think granularly about what is being revealed to whom with each update. Facebook finally rivals Google Plus in the flexibility of its privacy controls, its refined design articulating my muddled discomfort with Plus’s circles. Too much control over privacy supposes distinctions in how I post to, in the simplest setting, friends versus followers that I think too much about already and I’d rather not have to think about at all.