Collegiate Times

Dieter Seltzer

Facebook is making a big change in the upcoming weeks — it’s reevaluating its entire layout, and I got a preview of it. Stemming from the old layout, Facebook is changing to a timeline-style system, showing a person’s whole Facebook career, and even life. The small timeline key in the top-right corner has tabs for the past few years. There is even a tab for a person’s birth and others available for uploading pictures, video and other media to memorialize an event on the life timeline.

This means past events that occurred before Facebook existed can be added to the timeline, with images and videos to further memorialize it as if the site existed since a person’s birth. In an interesting way, the new layout is a re-interpretation of every individual’s life history in terms of the social network culture’s norms and values. Users now don’t have to meticulously scroll through a person’s profile to find a past event, but can find it quickly and easily.  

In this sense, Facebook is changing its focus from the current to the past, but with higher value placed on recent events — bigger segments correspond with the timeline. In another sense, Facebook is focusing on archiving users’ lives through events on a changing timeline with statuses, comments, photos and other information.

In this light, it is almost scary how much information is compiled about users and given to the site’s maintainers to do with what they please — but of course we “agree” to this. 

The new Facebook puts our lives on record, into a portfolio and on display as a single product (commodity?) for the world to examine and judge. However, this timeline does not resemble Twitter’s interpretation of the timeline — Facebook’s motive to “keep up” with Twitter should be replaced with a push for surpassing the competing social network site with new and innovative ideas. 

Consequently, the new Facebook looks much less like Twitter than the previous version — Twitter is still primarily focused on text-based media (“tweets”), and Facebook is now equally focused on text-based media (“statuses” and comments), as well as digital image and video media (plus “events” and “likes”). Perhaps the new Facebook has a more complete social network site and more innovative interpretation of the social network culture.

So that’s the new, and possibly good. But here’s the bad: Why should these profit-driven social networking designers and maintainers be trusted with users’ life information? Putting a person’s life on display for the world to judge — even if it’s a select world — can be very dangerous, especially when these social network architects have access to the more than 800 million active users’ information. 

This is especially dangerous when faced with two realities: First, the nature of the Internet, specifically how fast and easy information — especially personal information — is transported and delivered. Second, the realization that users don’t know what Facebook architects and maintainers will do with their information in the future.

Not only are Facebook users more at risk to the profit-driven Internet’s exploitations, but they are also deeply invested into the individualistic — or selfish and self-centered —worldview mindset and attitude. This allows users to become even more self-centered and lazy. 

With the new Facebook, as well as subsequent revolutions and updates of social networks that will follow, users allow themselves to become self-perpetually more invested in themselves only. This makes us less likely to do things for — or become involved with — other people and society.

The Facebook changes mark a major event in the social network cultural movement, and a minor step in the larger technological, social and individualist cultural movements. In my opinion, however, this marks a movement toward decadence concerning society at whole.

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A version of this article appeared in the Oct 5 issue of the Collegiate Times.