Yes, I feel a bit stalked on Facebook now. I *hate* the new feeds, but I can see where people will grow to like them. As Zukerberg on Facebook's blog ( http://blog.facebook.com/ ) points out, you can still keep "outsiders" from seeing what you're doing. It reminds me of the old "6 degrees" kinds of pages where your social nets become transparent. Anyone who thinks she can engage in private acts while on a computer has a serious wake-up call in her future anyway. This is good for my dissertation, which is about seeing computer writing as a variable level of writing in a public space. This, to me, is just more ammunition for my argument that readers hold more control over the new technologies than writers do. Readers want information even when writers are loathe to give it. :-D. Deanya ps. I have 28 friends today who have joined the "NOT HAPPY WITH FACEBOOK" group, LOL! If you want to Friend me there, I'm Deanya Lattimore at Gardner-Webb University. On Wednesday, September 6, 2006, at 10:01 PM, Ledbetter, Andrew Michael wrote:
Just wondering if anyone had any thoughts on the recent changes at facebook and subsequent user response:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71739-0.html?tw=rss.technology
Briefly, facebook recently enabled "news feeds" which allow anyone's friends to immediately see changes to profiles, friendship networks, etc., a feature which cannot be deactivated. In response, many users have formed protest groups, one of which has approximately half a million members (and there are thousands of other protest groups)---the users claim the changes are "stalker-ish". Media is framing as a tension between the transparency of social networking sites and desire for privacy.
Andrew M. Ledbetter Doctoral Candidate Department of Communication Studies University of Kansas
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