Unprecedented: Mind your own business

Increasingly impersonal Facebook posts prompt network to up its game

Shocking as it may seem, an entire generation that once could barely make it through a meal without publishing it on Facebook has now taken to doing the opposite.  In fact, according to The Independent, the social media giant is quite terrified about the disturbing trend that is seeing people share less and less about themselves over the internet.

Of course, many are still posting plenty of updates on the site, according to a new report, but an increasing number of those posts happen to be about the outside world or links to other websites. That is probably so because people have more and more connections, many of them from long ago in their lives and they do not wish for all of their data shared with people from long ago.

But the change is worrying for Facebook because of a phenomenon that its people are said to internally refer to as “context collapse.” This entails people sharing less intimate information online and move, instead, to newer and smaller sites like Snapchat or Instagram to do so.

Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been encouraging staff to come up with new ways of encouraging “personal sharing,” according to a report from Bloomberg. Several of the recent additions to Facebook’s features are thought to have been a result of that push.

The “On This Day” feature, for instance, seeks to bring up memories from the same day in previous years and so, encourage people to share nostalgic updates about themselves. The site has also taken to reminding people about special occasions like mothers’ day so that they may post about their relationships.

The website’s smartphone app version has also been redesigned so that it sucks up all of a user’s photos and seeks to make it easier for them to upload them online. By accessing content from a user’s phone, the app can try and make people share photos or other information about themselves.

Some of that same move towards personal sharing is behind Facebook’s push towards live video. The site introduced a huge range of new features for streaming from users’ phones this week, intended to make people more happy about sharing videos even while doing boring activities.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 11^th, 2016.

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