I knew there were good reasons to dislike Facebook’s new redesign known as Timeline – nor does it appear that I’m alone in thinking it’s a visual mess, too. Or that it’s a bunch of new work for digital hamsters.
Lately, in my current vagabonding stage, I’ve been thinking hard about work. Working in someone else’s hamster wheel by running around to provide streams of content that makes corporate advertising wheels go ’round and ’round is looking less and less appealing. In fact, it’s looking more and more like something I was doing because I didn’t have better work to do, …or maybe I was unable to reach better work. Now that Timeline wants to prompt Facebook users into some kind of scrapbooking exercise of self-presentation, this feeling is becoming even more salient, …while at the same time my vagabondage has rekindled a sense of being able to reach better work.
(^ This dialectic perhaps helps explain why, in this relatively shitty economy where so many are stuck, people are spending a lot of time working on corporate-owned social media hamster wheels… Just sayin’… Dave Winer‘s repeated critiques of the hamster wheel economy are sinking in, I guess.)
With Timeline, the hamsters (we) are “incentivized” to work harder (provide more interesting self-branding content – which of course is sold as data, or rather, to use Johanna Drucker‘s term, capta), because who wants to have a pathetic “Brand ‘Me’!” timeline profile when much more energetic hamsters are pimping out “their” hamster wheels with bling?
This is looking less and less appealing.
A link to how to delete your Facebook account…