I Oppose Communism. Including the New Facebook Kind.

When Facebook rolled out their changes last week, I wasn’t one of the people getting all wound up—I figured I’d wait until the dust cleared to see if a few cosmetic changes here and there really added up to much.

Well, the dust has cleared. It all really did add up to much. And now I am officially all wound up.

Folks, this isn’t about a cosmetic change here and there. This is about communism, pure and simple.

Don’t believe me? Here’s the dictionary.com definition of communism:

(noun)—a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state.

This “holding of all property in common”? This “ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole” business? This definition has just described my new (formerly personal) life under Facebook. Except in this case it’s not referring to terra firma property—it is referring to my personal experiences which have now become the community property of all Facebook users by mandated default.

I say “mandated” because unlike in the past, when sharing on Facebook was a voluntary choice, sharing has now become an explicit or implicit requirement—a forced component of whatever we happen to be experiencing. If I read an interesting article online early on during the Facebook experience, for example, it was a voluntary effort on my part to share the link with my friends. Now, however, depending on where and how I came across said article on the web, Facebook will automatically share my reading of this article with all my acquaintances. And if any of said acquaintances click on the article themselves as it goes by in the ticker, they will now be listed themselves as having read (or in real time, “reading”) the same article.

I don’t happen to believe in any form of mandated redistribution, often referred to as “communism”. Not of property. Not of money. Not of my life experiences. And certainly not of your property, money, or experiences, either. But that is exactly what this is: the mandated redistribution of my life’s experiences (and every other Facebook user’s life experiences) being force-fed to all other users, whether they want it or not.

I do not believe that all my Facebook acquaintances being forced to view my particular musical listening habits in real time in their Facebook tickers is a beneficial “holding of all property in common.” I do not see where my friends’ lives, my life, or the day-to-day work and living we all engage in in order to make a better world is benefited one iota by a minute-to-minute accounting of my shopping, driving, reading, listening, eating, work, cooking, religious, or political habits.

But as is almost always the case, this beast demands to be fed: ever-increasing levels of information about my web-related life and IRL life (“in real life”) has now become a seemingly endless stream-of-consciousness info overshare.

I can predict several negative effects happening due to this overshare:

1) As we become more and more inundated with useless information, we will start to tune out information streams in general because it simply takes too much time and energy to sort through the morass constantly. Due to this, we will sometimes miss out on truly important information in the future because we will have trained ourselves to ignore it. (This has been a documented response to other forms of media in the past—TV in particular—that shared far more information than we could process or keep up with.)

2) We are training people to focus on minutae and miss the bigger picture through the information overload, especially because we haven’t yet developed equally-usable ways of categorizing and managing such information. The results will be educationally detrimental for critical-thinking skills, logical ordering abilities, and categorization skills, to name only a few.

3) We are subconsciously encouraging people to take an unhealthy, voyeuristic interest in the minute details of other people’s lives—details that normally only those who live with them or who know them intimately would know or even care to know. So the type of fixation a man or woman would have on me to actually *want* to read those minute-by-minute tickers of what music I listened to, what store I checked in at while shopping for groceries, what news sites I read online, and what time I started for work and returned home from work—is indeed frightening to even consider.

And therein lies the rub—almost no one I know who utilizes Facebook wants to read such information about their own friends OR to have such information about themselves constantly broadcast in the Facebook ticker. These changes are completely unwanted by almost all Facebook users. These changes appear to have been made for purely financial reasons only—to benefit the company’s advertising prowess even more in preparation for their first public offering next year.

I oppose the forced redistribution of my particular experiences and preferences unto all of my Facebook connections. I also oppose the use of said redistribution by those nameless, faceless, shadowy non-Facebook-friended individuals who are harvesting my information for the good of their particular product line(s).

But in both these cases, I appear to have almost no personal control left.

At the moment, it appears that the only way to opt out is to refuse to use Facebook at all. And this presents a quandary: for those of us in particular who’ve had a number of geographical moves through the years, Facebook has provided the first real opportunity to be able to keep in touch—at however basic a level—with a much broader segment of friends and connections important in our lives in the past.

And so we are faced with a hard choice: walk away from Facebook with personal dignity intact and refuse the mandated overshare, but lose the quick and easy access to so many people whom you’ve known over the years? Will the lack of personal privacy be the determining factor? Or will the desire to remain in contact with various people who’ve meant something to you through the years be the trump factor? Will personal dignity and strongly-held ethics of personal privacy win out? Or will the equally-strong desire to continue geographically-interrupted relationships with others win out?

I don’t know.

It’s too soon to tell for sure. But no matter which way it goes, it will involve loss.

In the meantime, I have numerous invites left to pass out for Google+, the most viable Facebook alternative.

Anybody need one?