September 7, 2008
Brave New World of Digital Intimacy
By CLIVE THOMPSON
On Sept. 5, 2006, Mark Zuckerberg changed the way that Facebook worked, and in the process he inspired a
revolt.
Zuckerberg, a doe-eyed 24-year-old C.E.O., founded Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard two years
earlier, and the site quickly amassed nine million users. By 2006, students were posting heaps of personal
details onto their Facebook pages, including lists of their favorite TV shows, whether they were dating (and
whom), what music they had in rotation and the various ad hoc “groups” they had joined (like “Sex and the
City” Lovers). All day long, they’d post “status” notes explaining their moods — “hating Monday,” “skipping
class b/c i’m hung over.” After each party, they’d stagger home to the dorm and upload pictures of the
soused revelry, and spend the morning after commenting on how wasted everybody looked. Facebook
became the de facto public commons — the way students found out what everyone around them was like
and what he or she was doing.
But Zuckerberg knew Facebook had one major problem: It required a lot of active surfing on the part of its
users. Sure, every day your Facebook friends would update their profiles with some new tidbits; it might
even be something particularly juicy, like changing their relationship status to “single” when they got
dumped. But unless you visited each friend’s page every day, it might be days or weeks before you noticed
the news, or you might miss it entirely. Browsing Facebook was like constantly poking your head into
someone’s room to see how she was doing. It took work and forethought. In a sense, this gave Facebook an
inherent, built-in level of privacy, simply because if you had 200 friends on the site — a fairly typical
number — there weren’t enough hours in the day to keep tabs on every friend all the time.
“It was very primitive,” Zuckerberg told me when I asked him about it last month. And so he decided to
modernize. He developed something he called News Feed, a built-in service that would actively broadcast
changes in a user’s page to every one of his or her friends. Students would no longer need to spend their
time zipping around to examine each friend’s page, checking to see if there was any new information.
Instead, they would just log into Facebook, and News Feed would appear: a single page that — like a social
gazette from the 18th century — delivered a long list of up-to-the-minute gossip about their friends, around
the clock, all in one place. “A stream of everything that’s going on in their lives,” as Zuckerberg put it.
When students woke up that September morning and saw News Feed, the first reaction, generally, was one
of panic. Just about every little thing you changed on your page was now instantly blasted out to hundreds
of friends, including potentially mortifying bits of news — Tim and Lisa broke up; Persaud is no longer
friends with Matthew — and drunken photos someone snapped, then uploaded and tagged with names.
I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NY... http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.h...
1 of 9 10-02-24 9:45 PM

Facebook had lost its vestigial bit of privacy. For students, it was now like being at a giant, open party filled
with everyone you know, able to eavesdrop on what everyone else was saying, all the time.
“Everyone was freaking out,” Ben Parr, then a junior at Northwestern University, told me recently. What
particularly enraged Parr was that there wasn’t any way to opt out of News Feed, to “go private” and have all
your information kept quiet. He created a Facebook group demanding Zuckerberg either scrap News Feed
or provide privacy options. “Facebook users really think Facebook is becoming the Big Brother of the
Internet, recording every single move,” a California student told The Star-Ledger of Newark. Another
chimed in, “Frankly, I don’t need to know or care that Billy broke up with Sally, and Ted has become friends
with Steve.” By lunchtime of the first day, 10,000 people had joined Parr’s group, and by the next day it had
284,000.
Zuckerberg, surprised by the outcry, quickly made two decisions. The first was to add a privacy feature to
News Feed, letting users decide what kind of information went out. But the second decision was to leave
News Feed otherwise intact. He suspected that once people tried it and got over their shock, they’d like it.
He was right. Within days, the tide reversed. Students began e-mailing Zuckerberg to say that via News
Feed they’d learned things they would never have otherwise discovered through random surfing around
Facebook. The bits of trivia that News Feed delivered gave them more things to talk about — Why do you
hate Kiefer Sutherland? — when they met friends face to face in class or at a party. Trends spread more
quickly. When one student joined a group — proclaiming her love of Coldplay or a desire to volunteer for
Greenpeace — all her friends instantly knew, and many would sign up themselves. Users’ worries about
their privacy seemed to vanish within days, boiled away by their excitement at being so much more
connected to their friends. (Very few people stopped using Facebook, and most people kept on publishing
most of their information through News Feed.) Pundits predicted that News Feed would kill Facebook, but
the opposite happened. It catalyzed a massive boom in the site’s growth. A few weeks after the News Feed
imbroglio, Zuckerberg opened the site to the general public (previously, only students could join), and it
grew quickly; today, it has 100 million users.
When I spoke to him, Zuckerberg argued that News Feed is central to Facebook’s success. “Facebook has
always tried to push the envelope,” he said. “And at times that means stretching people and getting them to
be comfortable with things they aren’t yet comfortable with. A lot of this is just social norms catching up
with what technology is capable of.”
In essence, Facebook users didn’t think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other
people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing
and addictive. Why?
Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is,
they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things
he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer
alone in offering this sort of interaction online. In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for
“microblogging”: posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing. The phenomenon is quite different
from what we normally think of as blogging, because a blog post is usually a written piece, sometimes quite
I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NY... http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.h...
2 of 9 10-02-24 9:45 PM