Facebook: A Simplistic Way of Sharing
Everybody who uses a computer for more than solitaire knows about Facebook, so I’m not going to talk about the history, how many users, blah blah blah… Facebook has. Instead, we are going to jump right into Facebook’s meanings to people, and what it is doing to people. This understanding of Facebook will give insight into what you should be taking away from Facebook, and that is not just cat videos.
Let us take a journey back almost 10 years. Remember when Facebook was strictly updated statuses, pictures, and the occasional home video? Facebook was a calm place to go and share your experience with friends and family. That’s how it all started, yes? Now let’s jump back to 2017. Scroll through your Facebook feed, what do you see? Videos, article links, and advertisements. I’m sure nobody remembers exactly when this change occurred (I know I couldn’t tell you), but we are all aware of what Facebook is (and what it used to be if you have been a member since “the beginning.” So what has changed?
I think the first place to start with, is what hasn’t changed. Why did we all like Facebook in the first place? I believe it was due to the ability to share statuses and pictures with friends and family, but not only that, the ability to receive immediate feedback from them via comments or likes. It is my belief that many users began to take advantage of Facebook’s ability of immediate feedback. When you know that if you post something funny, or cute, or cruel, you will get a human response, you will continue to post for the responses you believe will follow (and they do). This became a motivating factor for many people. Clay Shirky believes “If intrinsic motivations are fundamental to human nature, and if satisfying them satisfies us, then the use of tools that satisfy those motivations should spread. In particular, if social media provides a platform for creating and sharing at a low enough cost, then participation in activities that reward and intrinsic motivation should rise, even if the satisfaction lasts only a brief moment” (Shirky Cognitive Surplus 86). It was this low cost sharing that satisfied our needs that came about specifically with the creation of Facebook, that allowed Facebook to grow as it has.
José van Dijck wrote that there are two kinds of “sharing” in terms of technology. The first is “directing users to share information with other users through purposefully designed interfaces.” The second is the “aim at sharing user data with third parties…” (Dijck The Culture of Connectivity 46–47). Dijck called these two kinds of sharing connectedness and connectivity respectively. It is my belief that Facebook (and its users) have shifted from the prior to the latter. That is to say, we have gone from directly sharing our own information with each other through Facebook, to sharing our information to third parties by sharing third party information. I believe this because when you log into Facebook, you no longer see content created by the person sharing things (at least not on the top of the page). All you see now are third party pieces either trying to sell you something, bringing awareness to a cause, or teaching you a cooking recipe. Users have let third parties enter the top of our news feed and become the new source of information about each other. We no longer get so see people’s opinions because they outright say them, instead we must infer their opinions based on whose video/article they are sharing.
I think one of the biggest reasons people have joined this movement on Facebook is because it is further lowering the cost of satisfying out needs on Facebook. We no longer need to spend the 5 minutes of typing up a post, or uploading a photo to get the likes and comments we have come to desire. Now, we only need to scroll through our own feed, click two buttons, and we have shared our opinion with our friends and family. The simplicity of Facebook is what attracted people to it in the beginning, but the even more simplistic way of acquiring likes and comments to satisfy our “needs” of today is what makes people stay.
