Facebook has pushed hard to consolidate your presence across multiple websites to one login through Facebook Connect. Most sites only allow you to login or comment using Facebook Connect and the recent revamp of how content is shared to your friends brings what you do on the web in to what was a personal space. Facebook’s unification of logins and comments may be killing your authenticity.
Steve Cheney thinks Facebook’s move to broadcast your every move on sites that supports its Connect feature puts you in to a crowded arena where your voice must compete to be heard:
Facebook is no longer a social network. They stopped being one long before the movie. Facebook is really a huge broadcast platform. Everything that happens between its walls is one degree away from being public, one massive auditorium filled with everyone you’ve ever met, most of whom you haven’t seen or spoken to in years.
The idea that your Facebook identity, something that would normally be confined to a semi-private environment is now your public face can have other ramifications. The beauty of Social Media is that you can bring your own identity to each network and choose how far you blur the line between your personal and public identity. This is further encouraged as different networks call for different levels of interaction.
Facebook wants to rule that out and instill its own (albeit convenient) universal way of identifying someone. This forces us to rethink content sharing and interaction. If I comment or interact on a site about a topic that my friends aren’t interested in, they may think its spam or noise while seeing my multiple, unique identities across the web. I’m still me but that me is now the culmination of my online activity that is broadcasted without a filter.
It isn’t just me, this can be applied to any one of your friends whose genuine conversations may be drowned out by their conversations on outside sites. The small price to pay is choosing not interact with content your friends don’t want to see while your small contribution is lost.
