hyalineskies

As society separates into smaller and smaller niches, what we currently perceive as pop culture will fade into oblivion. After a small dark age, it’s the renaissance of communication that will be glorious.

When I accepted a “survey” in a University computing site, I was handed a six-page civics test, with questions ranging from Keynesian economics to Civil War history and democratic theory. While I fared alright, I wrote down my “source of most information” as being online encyclopedia Wikipedia. It made me scrutinise something I hadn’t originally considered: How many of my collegiate classmates aren’t passing this test?

When Facebook released a new news feed interface, the userbase revolted. After tons of media attention, multiple user protests, and two days’ worth of furious coding by Facebook’s developers, Zuckerberg apologises. Should Zuckerberg have to apologise for building a better interface? Regardless of the hit Facebook takes because of this, Facebook has taught all of us in social media design a new rule of the game: there is actually a threshold where social users feel uneasy about the ease of information access, and it’s closer than we would have guessed.