Scary how a computer is now telling us, which posts by friends are newsworthy and in real-time, based on an algorithm and the amount of time that has passed since our last login. According to Rob Spiegel in TechNewsWorld, the new update made by Facebook on Wednesday is likely a more convenient setup, but people are often used to the way things always were and resist to even subtle changes with social networking sites.
One aspect of new media I find so fascinating is the ever-changing mediums used to present information. A newspaper has (and likely will) always appeared, smelt, felt, and worked the same as newspapers did many years ago. Yet, with new media, a social networking site could change hourly, even daily if the programmers thought necessary. New media is something that will leave those who cannot quickly adapt feeling lost when they revisit the medium after a six-month break. This could be considered a bad thing because it could alienate some users, but the instantaneous consumer society we live in today forces constant change to keep the attention of our easily distracted minds.
~T
Should you be interested in perusing this article yourself, try this link:
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Facebook-Goes-Under-the-Knife-Again-73332.html
I thought it was a little funny how many people on my newsfeed posted status updates to share with the world how upset they were over the changes Facebook made. The same thing happened last time there was a change and I think we all adjusted fairly well (at least, I can assume so, since most of my friends are still using Facebook, haha).
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with you about how weird it is that an algorithm can determine what posts are most relevant to a user. I've never really enjoyed the "top stories" aspect of the newsfeed, since I usually like to look at updates in timeline format so I can get a sense of what happened in what order, but maybe the almighty Facebook developers know something I don't ;)