Just a few days ago, Facebook announced a number of significant changes, the most important of which is the morphing of personal profiles into “timelines,” where each update, tagging, event, and photo is now a “story” of one’s life. The social network will now serve for each person who uses it as a chronological catalogue of events on a line, leading inevitably to death. This is the feature which has gotten the most attention, and I have much to say about it — such as the fact that I find it truly odd to encourage what I can only describe as “instantaneous” nostalgia about events which have just happened. But, in truth, Facebook has long been heading toward this use, and though I don’t really see the attraction personally, I understand that the need to document one’s life in detail has always been an alluring prospect for the human race. The fact that the Timeline is a dumbed down version of scrapbooking — usually the domain of retired people — is also odd to me, but I won’t pretend I don’t understand the draw.
The feature that I find most unsettling, however, is the connection which Facebook now has to applications such as Rdio, a streaming music service which already served as a type of social network: you can have friends and followers, and share your listening habits in a closed off network. Rdio is a tiny service compared to Facebook, but was already connected with it, and had the ability to share a song with the click of a button whenever you wished.
I have a close relationship with music, and a very strained one with Facebook. In fact, I’ve only been using it for a few weeks again after a long break, brought on by this article in Wired’s UK magazine. However, in the weeks since my return, the one way I actually enjoyed using Facebook was to share, via Rdio’s little sharing button, a song or two a day, posted to my wall. To be clear, sharing that song was always a conscious choice, based on numerous other little choices I made within the blink of an eye: what time of day is it? How am I feeling? Have I shared this same song before? In effect, I was “saying something” with my click.
The new relationship between Rdio and Facebook — based on the nefariously named Open Graph which debuted last year — is one of “frictionless sharing.” What this means is that the same act of connecting my Facebook and Rdio accounts now presents me with only one real option: I will now share every song I listen to, automatically, via the news ticker on the right column of the Facebook dashboard, with every single one of my friends (or customized groups). There is a convoluted and complicated way to duplicate my previous use of the services, but it’s clear that almost no one will do so, and that Facebook doesn’t want them to. And while I still have the option to “share” a song on my wall, one would assume I’ll probably be much less inclined to do so, since anyone who cares to have a peek at my timeline or the ticker will already be able to see what I’ve been listening to all day. What was once an action is now passively taken care of for me.
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