Giving Facebook The Chance To Say Face
You have likely heard Facebook mentioned in the news lately. Even with all the negativity, there are still almost 1.9B people using Facebook, who likely feel an increase in happiness staying connected to loved ones. Yes, FB makes a lot of people feel happy and do you know that Facebook can also decrease the amount of empathy people have?
As FB users, we get to expand our social circles by adding new contacts who are connected to us through mutual friends. Our new prospective “friends” likely live in or near the same cities, have attended the same kinds of colleges, and have interest in the same fields of work. Ultimately, we end up with feeds that never give us a chance to get out of our comfort zone.
While this feels good on the surface, on a deeper level, it is where the world ends up being more divided.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of FB, believes that FB creates empathy. In a Business Insider article, speaking broadly about “social networks,” he said, “first you connect over something that you have in common. So you recognize that the other person is a person.” In the same article, Zuckerberg gave an example of a group of people who come together on Facebook because they like fishing.
Dr. Larry Rosen, a research psychologist specializing in the effects of technology, confirms FB’s view that social networks do not decrease empathy. In 2015, Rosen, told The New York Times that spending time on the internet does not decrease real-world empathy. “
A lot has happened since 2015! In our last Presidential election we learned the hard way that “fake news” spreads faster between friends.
Issues like empathy, privacy and relationships were explored at today’s, Reverse Hackathon, held in San Francisco and organized by Hack Mental Health. Over 200 creative and passionate people attended not to bash on technology, but to appreciate its contribution and to reimagine how technology can improve our mental health and well-being.
We came, we brainstormed, we reimagined, we designed and we presented.
Our team was united around the idea that human connection is being compromised by social networks. We agreed that the set up of Facebook into echo chambers and information silos is dangerous because it leads to less empathy for “the other” and dehumanization which can turn into violence when we are not looking.
Our solution to breaking up the echo chambers is to add more diverse voices to our personal networks on FB through an engaging and surprising new experience in your news feed. We want FB to gamify getting out of our comfort zones.
The prototype design that resulted from our team’s 4 hour work session, shows the fun we could have if FB would occasionally add a post in our news feeds that prompts us to click through and discover relatable facts about someone who may or may not be in our current network of friends.
The first few facts would show what the two people have in common beyond city, education and work.
As the clues progress, we will discover that while we both like psychology and the movie “Ready Player One”, we might not have the same political ideas.
Our team kept an optimistic view that when presented with the opportunity to expand our human networks and include people with different world perspectives, FB users would take the chance to make new friends. FB could reward us by showering our screens with happy face emojis every time we added a friend who was outside of our current network.
Can it get any better than smiling emojis and more acceptance?
