Chris Peterson

pkoms sent me an editorial today from ThisIsMyNext by Laura June on the subject of “frictionless” sharing in the context of the new Facebook Timeline feature.

Excerpts:

The feature that I find most unsettling, however, is the connection which Facebook now has to applications such as Rdio, a streaming music service which already served as a type of social network: you can have friends and followers, and share your listening habits in a closed off network. Rdio is a tiny service compared to Facebook, but was already connected with it, and had the ability to share a song with the click of a button whenever you wished.

…

[The] one way I actually enjoyed using Facebook was to share, via Rdio’s little sharing button, a song or two a day, posted to my wall. To be clear, sharing that song was always a conscious choice, based on numerous other little choices I made within the blink of an eye: what time of day is it? How am I feeling? Have I shared this same song before? In effect, I was “saying something” with my click.

The new relationship between Rdio and Facebook — based on the nefariously named Open Graph which debuted last year — is one of “frictionless sharing.” What this means is that the same act of connecting my Facebook and Rdio accounts now presents me with only one real option: I will now share every song I listen to, automatically, via the news ticker on the right column of the Facebook dashboard, with every single one of my friends (or customized groups).

What we see here is a manifestation of the ideology of radical transparency and its effects on privacy-as-performance, performance-constituting-contexts.

Put more concretely:

Ms. June used to consciously choose which songs to share. She chose based on a variety of social cues, but always with some level of (sub)conscious awareness of the message the sharing of the song would send. And through each decision to share or not to share, she constructed her identity at that time, by arranging her data as a social performance.

Now, however, the process is automated. She can either choose to opt-in to all of the service, or opt-out of all of it. Granularity – temporal granularity anyway – is not an option.

If this example seems trivial – who cares about music choices? – take the principle and move it laterally to a parallel hypothetical. Facebook currently gives me the option to share any website I visit with my Facebook friends. I click a share button and it populates my News Feed. This is something I love about Facebook. In fact it’s one of the few reasons I still use it. It’s building a less-robust del.icio.us service into my social network. And I know a lot of people who use it.

Suppose, though, that you’re someone who loves the Share functionality. What if Facebook were to simply change the structure so that it automatically published, in your News Feed, every website you visited?

It’s perfectly technologically possible. Unless you take pains to block it, Facebook already tracks every website you visit that has a ‘Like’ button on it. They could very easily add this functionality to a published News Feed.

Now Facebook would have to be insane to do this, because the uproar would be fantastic. But here is the question: why would the uproar be fantastic? Isn’t the ideology of radical transparency in play in the Rdio example in play here? Sure, the spectrum of content might be different, but the mechanics of information dissemination – whether or not you have an affirmative role to play in constituting your identity, or whether it is automated – are identical.