There’s Nicole in my news feed again, posting with her usual wit: goofy nonsense in Target, exploring local caves, using a falafel as a hat, blurry party antics.
She posts often but it’s entertaining. Always up to lovely nonsense. So many others just do politics and cats–maybe we should combine the two (cat politicians, politics about cats) and cut the frequency.
I see my friend Nicole’s posts every time I log on Facebook, though I seldom see her in-person (usually once or twice a year).
We were at the same party last week, a gathering of college friends in the area. My girlfriend mentioned that even though she seldom sees Nicole she still knows her so well from her Facebook posts, a constant stream of recent adventures, falafels-as-hats, seemingly-candid shots. I feel like I know everything about her past year, including where she went on vacation and how she hated her birthday dinner but loved the cake (lemon-graham cracker).
Nicole and I spoke briefly at the party, I met her girlfriend, we joked around. She was very drunk and not up for conversation so I drifted and didn’t see much more of her for the night.
Yeah I saw Nicole last weekend at the party. You don’t remember her? Here, here’s her Facebook. I don’t know, I guess she really likes falafels. You don’t like falafels?
My in-person meeting with Nicole was just a garnish to my perception of her, dominated by the daily stream of musings, photos and links she puts on Facebook. During our brief conversation I was careful to not let slip how much of her past year I knew, careful not to ask her about the cake. Perhaps she felt similar about me.
Rob Horning, Executive Editor of the New Inquiry, writes, “Facebook Timeline, for instance, can be seen as an info graphic of our personality so compelling that we can comfortably overlook its formulaic nature.” The past year of Nicole’s posts are obviously a fragment of her life, just the things she chooses to put on Facebook (or that others choose to post about her). I know that I’m on Facebook when I’m on Facebook, and that Timeline is formulaic and fragmented, but still, Timeline Nicole is Nicole to me. My desire to form a complete picture of Nicole draws from whatever resources are available, and since in-person encounters are limited I turn to digital.
***
Facebook is working to make our digital depictions more and more compelling–more us. A March ’13 Carnegie Mellon study noted that in 2005 Facebook offered users 39 fields to describe themselves, which included basic information categories such as political views, hometown, education, and more (picture below). This rose to 126 available fields in 2012 to include detailed information about life events (broken bones, first kiss, birth of a child), employment (projects worked on, coworkers) and more.
One of Facebook’s main motivations for increasing profile depth is to give advertisers more targeting options, meaning more efficient spending. For example, in addition to being able to Like a book, users can now designate books that they’ve already read and ones that they’re planning on reading. Advertisers could potentially advertise the book itself to people who say they want to read the book and then advertise an author talk event to people who have already read the book, thus ensuring that ad dollars are spent more efficiently.
But from a user perspective, I question the value of such detailed profile information. Do I actually care about differentiating between books that I Like, have read, and want to read? And is this something that my friends care about seeing? The bulk of my Facebook time is spent on news feed checking out posts and photos from my friends. Occasionally I’ll click into a friend’s profile (Timeline) to check out their recent posts, but very rarely do I click to their about section to see more detailed profile information.
Instagram, Twitter and up-and-coming messaging apps such as Kik and Whatsapp all have very limited profile functionality. Users can describe themselves in a few lines and enter their location but aside from that it’s a very shallow description. The core of these networks is the communication, as is my experience with Facebook. Thus the question becomes whether Facebook’s profile efforts will result in value for users or just advertiser bait that flops because users don’t care.
Below are screenshots from the edit profile screens of Facebook,Twitter and Instagram, respectively. As discussed, Facebook provides many more fields for users to fill than Twitter or Instagram.
Facebook has also begun encouraging users to fill our their profile more. The below picture appeared atop my news feed last week, and I didn’t know whether to interpret it as a friendly reminder or spammy pop-up (but am leaning toward the latter).
***
Something in me wants to throw a gigantic wrench into my Timeline and watch the sparks fly. And start fresh, or just stop.
“Nostalgia for a never-existing time when one had total control over the development of one’s identity,” (Horning).
It’s impossible to completely delete my digital self. There will always be bits I forget or don’t have access to. And by deleting the stuff I do control, all of the information out of my control takes over and represents me. The weird write-ups in local papers, my information in the tax database, a stupid entry on Urban Dictionary posted by someone. Will other people realize that these aren’t things I control? Will this become a much less compelling picture, which won’t trick people into thinking this is me? Or will that still be me?