Facebook Overhauling Your News Feed Again
At a dramatic unveiling in Silicon Valley today, Newark Public Schools activist Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the Facebook news feed is getting an overhaul. (One tech reported called it the “venerable news feed.”) It will be: more mobile friendly, more picture friendly, and feature some niche feeds where you can check out what music or photos your friends are ingesting, rather than having all genres of information dumped in one place. In this sense, the updated news feed is closer to the “personalized newspaper” Zuck said he envisioned for the news feed; now it has sections.
Unlike a traditional newspaper, however, the new newsfeed may further trap users in little silos of curated internet information (like partisan blogs, which exacerbate political polarization). In the olden days, when people read print newspaper and magazines–cover to cover, even!–very different sorts of articles bumped up against one another, basically at random. Merely by scanning a page, one would encounter a diverse array of topics. On the web, we can pick and choose what interests us, meaning there are wide pockets of information we almost never study. Likewise, in this newest iteration of the ‘personal newspaper,’ one will be able to see exactly what one wants to see. As someone who routinely removes annoying people from my feed, however, I’m not necessarily complaining. [Mashable]
