ALBERTO PEPE

epistemological deliverance

or: how to disable the News Feed on the Facebook

The Facebook recently unveiled a new home page design. One of the new features* is the real time stream:

The stream lets you know what’s happening right now in your world by showing you everything your friends and other connections, such as celebrities, athletes and politicians, are sharing. **

But what if you don’t want to know “what’s happening right now in your world”? Luckily, the new version of the Facebook allows you (the user) to control fairly well what information about your friends goes into the stream and, importantly, what friends it comes from:

When you’re reading the stream to keep up with friends, you’ll see everything that’s happening. Of course, you may be more interested in certain friends. **

Yes, of course. But I am not going to tell the Facebook which friends I “may be more interested in”, especially because this (choosing friends) reminds me of Zizek’s account of love: a structure of imbalance. Following this line of thought, to ensure equality and balance, one has two options: a) to be updated on (i.e. to know about) ALL their friends or b) NONE of them. I chose the latter. I embarked on a social epistemology experiment and decided to (ab?)use this new feature of the Facebook, thus hiding all my friends from my news feed. Result (after some 400 clicks):

* Is this really new? Didn’t they call it “Live feed” in the previous version?

** Parts in Italic are from the Facebook Blog