Thoughts on FaceBook's "Frictionless Sharing"

The question of Face Book's new "frictionless sharing" was asked in a recent Trends forum in LinkedIN. My contribution to it is written below. 


Yes, I consider myself a techno-utopian and believe that technology can help us immensely. Witness the emerging field of neuro-science and how it may be able to help us understand ourselves better and aid our poor decision making skills. 


On the other side of the coin, I have witnessed how technology has atrophied our social abilities: call it our "social curation" abilities. Regrettably, I think Facebook frictionless sharing will exacerbate this trend. Like the author says: there is value on what our friends write or say and we base a lot of our decision on this curation from our circles of influence.

Overall, I have mixed emotions about Facebook. It can be a great tool for communication but it can also blunt our humanness in ways we are only now experiencing. How many of us just "park" our friends in Facebook? I have "friends" in Facebook that I have not seen in years, although we are but 10 miles away and I have made repeated attempts to connect in 3D.

Let us face it, we are 7 billion humans now and if you think of us as a currency, we are being devalued just based on demographic growth. Technology and social networks play and additional role (ironic, really) in the acceleration of this devaluation by allowing us to create content (self broadcasting) that is competing with a lot more content contributed by millions of us. At the margins then, my specific contribution is devalued due to the shear amount of content being produced. Now, with the reduced value of my "curation" the content is devalued even more so.

Comments

Anonymous said…
First time I've heard the term "techno-utopian," but it captures nicely an idea I've begun to explore on my own blog (to date, it's only 3 posts deep!). Thanks for sharing, I'll be stopping back regularly as I work to fill in my own vision of what's to come.
24/4/12 2:42 PM
Unknown said…
First time I've heard the term "techno-utopian," but it captures nicely an idea I've begun to explore on my own blog (to date, it's only 3 posts deep!). Thanks for sharing, I'll be stopping back regularly as I work to fill in my own vision of what's to come.
9/1/18 12:16 AM
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