Sharing Across Networks
More social networks are rising, attracting new groups of people with their ability to express things in ways they can’t anywhere else. While Facebook is cultivating a social network around people’s personal relationships, many other social media networks are developing around people’s interests. Pinterest, Instagram, Thumb, and Foodspotting are some examples–they have many more limitations but a large number of users. Says Jay Jamison on TechCrunch, “these new interest-based social networks enable users to express their interests in new, engaging ways and offer authentic, high value connectivity with new people we don’t already know.” Each one reaches a different audience, builds on different ideas, expresses different things.
An article on Matter Solutions, “Time Saving Social Media Marketing,” describes the ways that your major social media accounts can be linked with each other–”social media for lazy webmasters.” If you connect as many social networks as you can–YouTube with Facebook with Twitter with LinkedIn with WordPress–you can relax, post anything wherever you want, and everyone will see it.
But people use these social networks to target different audiences, and frictionless sharing like this complicates matters. Something you post on Twitter may not be appropriate for your group of coworker friends on Facebook; your WordPress blog might annoy your Twitter followers who don’t want a link to every new post that you publish. Facebook is full of links to Pinterest and Instagram and blog posts, not always geared toward the same audience and annoying for those who follow you on multiple networks.
The more you share, the less people want to see. We want the choice to see your Instagram photos and your blog posts, but not your Twitter, and we don’t want to see all of those things shoved together on your Facebook. Practicing discretion when it comes to sharing, consciously deciding who to show things to and where they need to go, is the key to fixing this oversharing problem online.
Facebook, Open Graph, and Frictionless Sharing
Facebook is the center of our social sharing online. It’s unusual for someone to not have a Facebook nowadays; people look to it to connect with friends, join groups, share their lives, play games, and show off everything they’re interested in and doing. The things you can share through Facebook now are limitless.
In his f8 keynote, Mark Zuckerberg announced a few features that would expand Facebook’s sharing capabilities, seeking to add more options beyond “like” and “post.” The new Open Graph shares much more about Facebook users’ activity than they ever intended–instead of having to click individual buttons to share something (maybe even multiple buttons, if it’s a link outside Facebook), Open Graph just keeps a running update of everything you do on Facebook and shares all of that together. Ticker was designed to hold all the lightweight activity on the side, so only the most important activity makes it onto your news feed; everything else ticks by on the top right of your screen, a constant reminder that your friends are doing things on Facebook, too.
This works through a thing called “frictionless sharing.” At first, sharing was opt-in: you click “like” and the article or link is posted to your wall. With frictionless sharing, you authorize Facebook once (by logging in through your Facebook account, or linking your Facebook) and from then on everything you do on that site gets pushed to your Facebook feed. You don’t do anything to share that information beyond the initial authorization.
That’s how apps like Spotify share directly with Facebook, filling your Ticker with lists of songs that your friends are listening to. Games apps start telling your friends when you start playing, every achievement you make, etc. Keeping that information private has become next to impossible.
News sites are taking advantage of this frictionless sharing by creating Facebook apps that let you read their articles straight from Facebook (once you authorize it, of course). Every article you read, regardless of your opinion of that article, gets posted to a list on your Facebook feed. Jeff Sonderman’s article on Poynter exposes the problems of this kind of passive sharing: it takes the significance out of sharing.
“The fact that my friend read an article is not useful without knowing more. Did he like it? Did he think I would like it? Did it make him laugh, cry, gasp or sigh? Did he read it because his boss or his teacher told him to, or because he was genuinely interested?”
If Facebook is sharing everything mindlessly, how do we know what’s worth checking out and what’s not? The passive Open Graph method creates an endless stream of mindless activity without significance. “Sharing without intention is not social, it’s overwhelming, it’s noise. Not everything I read, I endorse. Not everything I watch, I like. Not everything I listen to, I want to share,” says Jeff Gibbard on his blog. Molly Wood of CNet agrees:
“Sharing and recommendation shouldn’t be passive. It should be conscious, thoughtful, and amusing–we are tickled by a story, picture, or video and we choose to share it, and if a startling number of Internet users also find that thing amusing, we, together, consciously create a tidal wave of meme that elevates that piece of media to viral status. We choose these gems from the noise. Open Graph will fill our feeds with noise, burying the gems.”
Eventually, we just start to tune it out, blocking the apps like Washington Post Reader and Spotify that deliver constant updates of activity or even unfriending people who do too much. We have to choose between seeing everything and seeing nothing.
is the internet making us share too much?
How do you interact with people on the internet? What media do you use to interact with people? What does that media do with the information you give them to help you interact with others?
Facebook, of course–and Twitter and blogs like WordPress and Tumblr. You post things online about your life and people talk to you about it; when they post things about their lives, you talk to them about those things. But what happens when sharing basic facts about our lives becomes sharing more detailed events, to sharing every action we make online with everyone we’re connected with?
Social media in all its forms is a wonderful thing for connecting people, documenting your life, sharing with friends and building relationships. But what you share online should be monitored, and not just for propriety: the internet is trying to make you share too much about yourself.
Ideally, everyone would pick and choose what they did on the internet and no unnecessary activity would slip through the cracks, but the sporadic nature of everyone’s social media usage makes that impossible. With Facebook’s Open Graph features, frictionless sharing, media linking and syncs between profiles, the internet tracks our every move and shares the majority of it with everyone we know–unless we take steps to stop it and curb what it has access to.
You’ve probably seen this excess of sharing all over your Facebook feed. It’s on Facebook that this oversharing issue is so prevalent, because of the way Facebook has designed itself to become the hub of all of your information and activity on the internet; everything on Facebook that they can make into a social activity becomes a social activity, and everything that could be a social activity gets added to Facebook. Because of social media sites like Facebook, we share so much of our lives that it becomes a constant stream of spamming needless information about our unimportant activities.
Everything we do, online or offline, doesn’t need to be broadcast across our social media sites, but we’re slowly losing the control over what we can choose not to share online. Digital culture and social media want us to think that everything we do is too important not to share, so they can find new ways to make us share more.
Instapaper
Instapaper is, according to its FAQ, a “simple tool to save web pages for reading later.” It doesn’t just save the link to the article as a bookmark—it takes only the text content, the important part of the page, and lets you peruse the article without distractions, on whatever device you want and wherever you want.
There are few things that encourage cyberliteracy, specifically reading online content, more effectively than Instapaper. Digital literacy is so fast-paced that online articles have become little more than brief descriptions of important points, designed for the multitasking user who skims instead of reads. Marco Arment, Instapaper’s creator, explains it best in this interview:
Since text is so easy to skim and is so often browsed while multitasking in a busy personal-computer environment, people have grown accustomed to skimming through web articles quickly, leading to high demand for (and therefore even higher supply of) shallow, skimmable content such as “listicles.”
Instapaper solves both of these problems: it dramatically increases legibility and reduces distractions when reading, and it makes it easier to attentively read long, detailed, or nuanced writing. And while it won’t change entire industries, Instapaper has succeeded, to at least a small degree, in increasing demand for (and therefore, slowly, increasing supply of) more of this sort of writing online.
Using Instapaper, you can save anything from a short blog post to an entire novel, and the free online account syncs to the iOS app on iPhone or iPad. It works on nearly every device, including mobile, and doesn’t always require internet access. Once saved and synced, the text is available anywhere. You can save articles using the “Read Later” bookmarklet (when on the webpage, the bookmarklet saves the text to your Instapaper account); email links or long messages to your account; save articles directly from Google Reader; send them to your Kindle; or save them through one of the many iOS apps that support sending pages directly to Instapaper, such as Reeder, Twitter, Flipboard, the Guardian, StumbleUpon, and many more. It also converts any online text content to an “Instapaper text” view, free of any distractions or ugly formatting on the page.
Instapaper makes online reading more user-friendly and convenient, combating what technology does to make reading a drive-by “skimmable” experience. It can’t turn non-readers into Jane Austen fans, but it will help those busy internet users who “just don’t have the time” to read a one-page article in addition to the other twelve tabs they have open. Instapaper opens us up to reading again: reading quality text, instead of skimming, and taking the time to understand it.
