So here’s an interesting one. Facebook cares about you. Not only does the company/website care about you, they care about your feelings and your emotions, especially when it comes to romantic breakups.
According to Samuel Axon’s “Facebook stops showing you photos of your ex” (http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/10/20/facebook.ex.photos.mashable/index.html?iref=NS1) on www.cnn.com, Facebook “used to constantly show you photos of your ex, which might have reminded you just how great things were before he or she dumped you, but it has stopped that now. Exes no longer show up in the ‘Photo Memories’ box.” For those unaware, the “Photo Memories” box refers to that subdivision of your Facebook screen that appears in the top right corner of certain pages on the site, like when you’re viewing friends or photos.
Now, if I remember correctly from The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg certainly cared about algorithms. He definitely didn’t care about social relationships on the personal level. Rather, he was concerned about how they applied to other people and how he could capitalize on essentially helping technologically define other people’s social ties. But, hey, money talks and a good business person knows what their client is after. And Zuckerberg’s clients, we can assume, certainly aren’t after making their lives miserable and depressing through constant visual reminders of relationships past. Well, some of them might be, but here I’m assuming that we’re not all crazy emo people who strive to be depressed all day. Or at least I hope not.
Anyway, according to this source, a group of people made a Facebook group where they protested the “Photo Memories” box. Their efforts, it seems, made an impact as they got their way. Facebook developed a set of rules in their programing code to make it so that our exes essentially no longer pop up unwanted on our screens. What the code entails no one but insiders knows for sure; maybe the system recognizes when we used to click on someone’s profile all the time and then stopped, or perhaps it’s based solely on changed relationship statuses. As one of my friends said once, “I don’t question it, I just know that Facebook somehow knows everything.” Scary but somehow true.
Since Facebook already has way too much of my information (and I’m really the only one at fault for that) I’m not sure what I think. I can’t decide if I like that they’re using my clicking-habits to help me out or if I’d really appreciate that they stay out of my personal life. I’d like to think that when I feel as if the whole world knows I’ve just experienced a tragic breakup at least animals and non-human, inanimate objects, like the internet and our computers, are unaware. Apparently no long the case.
Now, I do have to say that it might bring on a sense of relief if an ex’s picture no longer pops up when we didn’t even go to their page. I mean, sometimes it’s unavoidable, especially if you two still maintain mutual friendships. He or she is bound to appear in a picture you’re looking at for an entirely different reason than to stalk him. My own algorithm helps me calculate me that there’s a good chance this will happen. (Funny role reversal here, I’m pretending to enter the mathematical/computer science world as Facebook and its developers try to edge into the realities of the social world.)
When it comes down to it, I think I appreciate the intentions of the company here. In the olden days (read: Y2K and before) we didn’t have to look at pictures of an ex unless we pulled out and dusted the photo box we kept under our bed. Now, with the prolific nature of social networking online, we have no choice but to keep seeing reminders of what was. If Facebook can even help me to avoid one of those hurtful moments, even just one, then I say all the power to them. I’d prefer to spend that moment not thinking about an ex, wouldn’t you?
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