If Zuck is right, I’ll miss the humanity of sharing

Recently I read this article on Fast Company: Mark Zuckerberg Might Be Right About Moore’s Law Of Sharing. What does this means for us as humans?

Mark Zuckerberg recently predicted that, following the logic behind Moore’s Law, content sharing is rising to levels we right now simply can’t imagine. Here’s Zuck, via Fast Company:

Sharing is not just about status updates doubling every year. It’s made up of all these different trends. In the beginning, people shared by filling out basic information in their profiles. Then we made it so that people could update their status. Then came photos. Now people are sharing through apps like Spotify.

At a very first glance, this means sharing is becoming more things in different ways. We no longer share “information” per se, we share very specific types of information. Our thoughts, but also our location, our tastes and interests, our photos, our home videos. But then it simply gets scary:

Three years from now, people are going to be sharing eight to 10 times as much stuff.

Not twice. Not three times. But eight to 10 times! This means if we now find our Twitter and Facebook feeds cluttered, uncontrolled, even claustrophobic, this means it’s only going to get worse.

This doesn’t necessarily mean we’re spending more time actively sharing our brains out, and there I believe lies the true root of the problem. This doesn’t really mean ten times more creators, more originality, more remixing of what already exists. We’re simply having ten times more stuff.

Worse. Ten times more robotic stuff. Why? Because all this will be greatly enhanced by what Facebook once defined as frictionless sharing. Still from the article:

One field could be the influence of wearables, the discrete devices like Fuelbands or Memotos. Through omnipresent sensor data, the information available for us to share could provide the sort of exponential growth needed to prove Zuckerberg’s prognostication correct. But with all that extra sharing would come a counterbalancing trend that would allow us to actually live our shared lives: Sharing would naturally become more passive in nature.

Such would be a fundamental shift in how we use platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. They’d evolve to be less editorialized, as decisions to share or not to share would be driven, not by our own taste, but by our customized algorithms.

Suddenly, we as individuals with self-expression skills and needs become nothing but the product of algorithms. Sharing stops being about our choices and predispositions, because it’s all automatic. Our humanity is there because we’re actively doing other stuff elsewhere, but the results in our own digital identity (which we can agree is mostly controlled by Facebook) suddenly get lost.

If most of the content we share will be automatic, will those people even be ourselves or mere assistants that flawlessly replicate to an audience what we’re up to right now?

Now, I know this doesn’t mean we’ll stop sharing significant things. I believe those will also increase, even if at a slower rate (I’m afraid we as humans don’t have such “processing power”). But they will be there. More projects, ideas and debate will come from this, because sharing is simply in our nature and the tools we have will increasingly allow us to do just that; that’s the good part.

The bad part is the amount of clutter we’ll have to crawl through to get to the juice, to what truly matters to us. What was once a “nice to have”, the ability to automatically share certain types of content, suddenly will become the norm. And if it does, I will relentlessly continue to look for something I know will be out there: the humanity of sharing. But at the same time I will dearly miss it.