[Infowarrior] - Brave New World of Digital Intimacy

[Richard Forno]

September 7, 2008
Magazine Preview
Brave New World of Digital Intimacy
BY CLIVE THOMPSON

On Sept. 5, 2006, Mark Zuckerberg changed the way that Facebook  
worked, and in the process he inspired a revolt.

Zuckerberg, a doe-eyed 24-year-old C.E.O., founded Facebook in his  
dorm room at Harvard two years earlier, and the site quickly amassed  
nine million users. By 2006, students were posting heaps of personal  
details onto their Facebook pages, including lists of their favorite  
TV shows, whether they were dating (and whom), what music they had in  
rotation and the various ad hoc “groups” they had joined (like “Sex  
and the City” Lovers). All day long, they’d post “status” notes  
explaining their moods — “hating Monday,” “skipping class b/c i’m hung  
over.” After each party, they’d stagger home to the dorm and upload  
pictures of the soused revelry, and spend the morning after commenting  
on how wasted everybody looked. Facebook became the de facto public  
commons — the way students found out what everyone around them was  
like and what he or she was doing.

But Zuckerberg knew Facebook had one major problem: It required a lot  
of active surfing on the part of its users. Sure, every day your  
Facebook friends would update their profiles with some new tidbits; it  
might even be something particularly juicy, like changing their  
relationship status to “single” when they got dumped. But unless you  
visited each friend’s page every day, it might be days or weeks before  
you noticed the news, or you might miss it entirely. Browsing Facebook  
was like constantly poking your head into someone’s room to see how  
she was doing. It took work and forethought. In a sense, this gave  
Facebook an inherent, built-in level of privacy, simply because if you  
had 200 friends on the site — a fairly typical number — there weren’t  
enough hours in the day to keep tabs on every friend all the time.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print