Any casual Facebook user could tell you that the news feed in Facebook makes it exceedingly difficult to not snoop in your friends' business. The news feed is in real time, updating a user on each new development of their friend's online lives. This news feed wasn't always on Facebook and its introduction was initially to a resistant and hostile public. Facebook users described the news feed as "creepy" and complained about their lack of privacy. The nature of the news feed is a completely observable environment in which all of someone's friends are easily monitored. None of their actions are hidden, but online there would always be a log of their activity.
The main issue that many people had with the news feed was that it brought their activity to the forefront of other people's Facebook experiences. As a person goes about their normal Facebook activities, the live news feed informs them of every move that their friends are making. That caused some alarmist cries of "Big Brother!" and an Orwellian fear of being monitored by the mysterious and illusive "them". But these reactions to what was perceived as such a radical shift in the way Facebook operates were overblown and had little legitimate foundation. Parallels can be drawn between these ill-advised cries about the "radical" change in Facebook's functions and Winston's theory of evolution versus revolution in the progress of technology.
Facebook's news feed was treated as a revolutionary idea in social networking and communication as if it had come out of nowhere. This is, of course, not true. The idea of communication with people outside of your immediate physical realm is a relatively new one. Communication for decades had been inextricably intertwined with technological advances in travel. Messengers on horses turned into messages sent by trains. Travel was eventually cut out of the evolution when the telegraph and, subsequently, the telephone were created. Information began to move faster and cost less to obtain. Communication shifted from a luxury to a staple of modern society. People began to expect faster ways to connect and more accessibility. This led to the cell phone, instant messaging and social networks like Facebook, which had to keep up with the world obsessed with instantaneous results by providing instantaneous results. And so, dear readers, it is the "victims" themselves who have created the monster we all know and love : The Live News Feed.
The main issue that many people had with the news feed was that it brought their activity to the forefront of other people's Facebook experiences. As a person goes about their normal Facebook activities, the live news feed informs them of every move that their friends are making. That caused some alarmist cries of "Big Brother!" and an Orwellian fear of being monitored by the mysterious and illusive "them". But these reactions to what was perceived as such a radical shift in the way Facebook operates were overblown and had little legitimate foundation. Parallels can be drawn between these ill-advised cries about the "radical" change in Facebook's functions and Winston's theory of evolution versus revolution in the progress of technology.
Facebook's news feed was treated as a revolutionary idea in social networking and communication as if it had come out of nowhere. This is, of course, not true. The idea of communication with people outside of your immediate physical realm is a relatively new one. Communication for decades had been inextricably intertwined with technological advances in travel. Messengers on horses turned into messages sent by trains. Travel was eventually cut out of the evolution when the telegraph and, subsequently, the telephone were created. Information began to move faster and cost less to obtain. Communication shifted from a luxury to a staple of modern society. People began to expect faster ways to connect and more accessibility. This led to the cell phone, instant messaging and social networks like Facebook, which had to keep up with the world obsessed with instantaneous results by providing instantaneous results. And so, dear readers, it is the "victims" themselves who have created the monster we all know and love : The Live News Feed.
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