> Zuckerberg praised context collapse as a force for moral cleanliness: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”
What a twisted view of humanity. No wonder people joke the guy is a robot.
What a twisted view of humanity. No wonder people joke the guy is a robot.
I have read posts on Facebook help pages from people who have had to deal with the consequences of Facebook forcibly breaking down the walls between a person's mutually exclusive cliques, e.g. a girl complaining that hijab-less photos of her posted and tagged by her friends were appearing on the Facebook feed of her conservative Islamic family members (the pre-approval option for tagging only controls whether it appears on your Wall; posts you are tagged in can still appear on your friends' feed even they are not directly friends with the poster).
I have always wondered why Facebook designed it this way, or why they did not fix it, since they already know all about your cliques. Zuckerberg's comment suggests that they had almost an ideological reason for it.
But look, I don't have a complicated social life, and I still can't fathom this idea that you share the exact same same stuff with all friends/co-workers/family/acquaintances.
There are some people I talk about politics to and some I don't, some people I talk to about music or books and some I don't, some people I talk to about technology and MANY I never would.
So Facebook became the lowest common denominator of what I was willing to share: my dog. He's a good boy.
Anyway my feed withered down to everyone's lowest common denominator (pets, travel photos, some children, often just nothing) and a few vocal armchair activists do didn't get the memo. Which in some ways is great, it's so boring I can just deactivate my account on a whim.
I think it's rather that we have one identity and different aspects of this identity show when interacting with different people (think: projection of a higher-dimensional object onto a lower-dimensional screen).
The amount that I'm really trying to hide from somebody is fairly small for me... your mileage may legitimately vary for any number of reasons... but selectivity is still necessary to function. Even if I were perfectly content with absolutely everybody in my life seeing a total stream of everything, none of them would want it.
This is primarily what made it so I never got on Facebook, and for most of Facebook's life, what kept me off of it. Now you couldn't pay me enough to get on it for other reasons, but those are more recent. This is the ur-reason. I already had multiple online personas and no interest in collapsing them.
I think it's possible a group can form a sort of "exoself" and allow you to believe and perceive different things than you usually might.
Not a sociologist, just anecdata. I suppose you could still consider this a lensing effect (aka your whole self includes this subset) but I'm tempted to see the group as a sort of extension or prosthesis.
So, I agree the statement is a bit robotic (specifically because it points out a natural part of human behavior as a character flaw), but not that it's twisted.