Partecipatory Web

In the f8 conference Mark Zuckerberg introduced new features, which help to interweave facebook more fluently in the life of users and vice vera.

Viel stärker als bisher wird das Profil Ausdruck des Lebensgefühls eines Nutzers. Diese Herangehensweise ist das komplette Gegenteil von Google+.

But it also inweaves personal interests and relations with content like news and commercial messages or offers. These come to each individual user based on profile, connections, behavior, etc. . Algorithms match everthing: users with users with contents with offers of all kind. So users get what they “want” without searching for it.

Auf Facebook werde ich auf mediale Inhalte aufmerksam, auf Google suche ich sie. Dort sorgt der Plus-Button zwar auch für eine Veränderung der Suche durch soziale Elemente – doch muss ich eben zunächst einen Anlass zur Suche haben.

Citations are form Thomas Knüwer’s article “Facebook Timeline, Facebooks Schicksal” (thanks to Klaus for link and exerpt).

All of this gets more suspicious to me when reading it on the background of the so-called filterbubble and the critique of Dean Eckles on “False Consensus” in his article The “friendly world syndrome” induced by simple filtering rules (thanks to Daniela for link and excerpt).

„Birds of a feather flock together. Once flying together, a flock is also subject to the same causes (e.g., storms, pests, prey). Our friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues are more similar to us for similar reasons (and others). (…) I take it as a given that people’s estimates of larger populations’ behaviors and beliefs are often biased in the direction of the behaviors and beliefs in their social neighborhoods. This is the case with and without “social media” and filtered activity streams — and even mediated communication in general. (…) In particular, filtered activity streams can increase the sense that my social neighborhood (and perhaps the world) agrees with me. Say that content produced by my Facebook friends with comments and interaction from mutual friends is more likely to be shown in my filtered activity streams. Also assume that people are more likely to express their agreement in such a way than substantial disagreement. As long as I am likely to agree with most of my friends, then this simple rule for filtering produces an activity stream with content I agree with more than an unfiltered stream would. Thus, even if I have a substantial minority of friends with whom I disagree on politics, this filtering rule would likely make me see less of their content, since it is less likely to receive (approving) comments from mutual friends. (…) Thus, I am much more likely to see people I follow replying to people I follow than to others (since the latter replies are encountered only from browsing away from the home page. I think this illustrates how even a straightforward, transparent rule for filtering content can magnify false consensus effects.“ (Eckles 2010)

Permanet sharing of your experience alters the experience itself, because you always also think about the public perception, you optimize your action in the light of this. This has subtle and severe consequences. In her article “Facebook’s new sharing is anything but ‘frictionless’” Laura June  on thisismynext.com compares the new “frictionless” sharing features of facebook with the concept of the Panopticon by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The basic idea of it is that the awareness of being observed all the time alters behavior and leads to conformity.