Apr 19, 2016

Facebook is worried about users sharing less: Anna Lauren Hoffman explains why

From The Guardian

Facebook is worried about users sharing less — but it only has itself to blame

By Anna Lauren Hoffmann

Facebook is worried that its more than one billion daily users are sharing less with one another.

It’s not that we are sharing less overall; we’re still sharing lots of links to news articles and commentary, cat pictures, and hilarious Vines. But instead, a dedicated team at Facebook is trying to work out why we are sharing less about ourselves.

After more than a decade of picking up “friends” – everyone from your BFF to your grandmother to that guy who lived down the hall in your dorm way back in your first year of college (what’s his name again?) – we’ve decided that maybe we’re not 100% comfortable sharing intimate details of our lives with such random and disparate groups of people. Or, maybe we’re just all on Snapchat now – another major anxiety of Facebook’s.

Facebook employees are blaming something called “context collapse”: where people, information or expectations from one context invade or encroach upon another. Despite its elegance as a term, it’s a complicated and nuanced phenomenon – one that evokes norms of behavior, communication, sharing and privacy all at once....

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Anna Lauren Hoffmann is a postdoctoral scholar and instructor at the Berkeley School of Information.

Last updated:

October 4, 2016