Not All Sharing Is Caring

Last week Face­book announced a host of “enhance­ments” to their plat­form. Many of these changes revolve around the con­cept of fric­tion­less (forced) shar­ing. The way this is intended to work is that when you con­nect an app like the music site spo­tify or The Wash­ing­ton Post to your Face­book pro­file, your activ­ity will auto­mat­i­cally be shared with oth­ers. No more hav­ing the ago­niz­ing frus­tra­tion of find­ing a share but­ton and click­ing it. You do things on the web, your friends get a play by play update of all of it. In short they decided to turn it up to eleven.

This is of course good for Face­book. More shar­ing pro­vides both the plat­form and other users infor­ma­tion about the true iden­tity of the per­son attached to the pro­file. This sur­faces new oppor­tu­ni­ties for con­nec­tion, con­ver­sa­tion, and of course more data than your brain can imag­ine with­out explod­ing. But is good for Face­book the same as good for the users of Face­book? In this instance I don’t believe it is.

I love it when I am lis­ten­ing to a song that moves me, read­ing an arti­cle that speaks to me, or view­ing a real life event that is some­thing of sig­nif­i­cance. Often, when I feel like some­thing is worth telling other peo­ple about, I will post an update or share a link on Face­book with my friends. I’m using the plat­form to say, “hey I dig this (or despise it) and per­haps you will too.” It is a con­scious deci­sion to start a con­ver­sa­tion, or at least try to. If I “like” some­thing or share some­thing, I am in some small way pro­vid­ing an endorse­ment of it. I am send­ing a sig­nal that check­ing this out might be a good use of the most pre­cious com­mod­ity in the world — time.

Now, on any given day I may check out dozens of songs, view hun­dreds of arti­cles, read dozens of blog posts, and visit count­less places, online and in the real phys­i­cal world. Most of these things are not truly remark­able. Most are mun­dane, mod­er­ately inter­est­ing, or just ok. I don’t share every­thing because not every­thing is worth you know­ing about. If I am not moved by it, why would I rec­om­mend you spend time on it? My eval­u­a­tion of con­tent, my thought about it, rep­re­sents a large part of the “fric­tion” that face­book is seek­ing to remove. With fric­tion, I am con­sciously send­ing a sig­nal. With­out fric­tion I am sim­ply cre­at­ing noise.

Con­sider that the aver­age per­son on Face­book is con­nected to approx­i­mately 130 peo­ple, and turn­ing it up to 11 for every sin­gle one of them cre­ates a sig­nif­i­cant amount of noise, thus mak­ing it more chal­leng­ing to dis­cern the true sig­nals my friends really want me to see, explore, and talk about. Fric­tion has a pur­pose is conversation.

The beauty of fric­tion is that is can slow things down and even stop them from mov­ing entirely. Con­tent that lacks the abil­ity to over­come fric­tion the fric­tion of per­sonal judge­ment is not prop­a­gated, and con­tent that mat­ters to us helps to add con­text to our lives. I don’t want to know every song you lis­tened to today, but I do want to know the one that gave you goose­bumps and pos­si­bly why. That is the mak­ings of a good conversation.

I am fre­quently wrong about things, and per­haps I am way off on this idea. How can a com­pany like Face­book with so many users be wrong? Surely they know more than I. Per­haps I am cling­ing to old world views of pri­vacy and human behav­ior. Maybe I am stuck in a mind­set of fric­tion that I am not yet able to over­come. For the time being I will do my best to care about what I share. Now to post this to Face­book so that my friends can talk about it.