Reload the love!

I liked all of the pieces that Ben Grosser presented in class on Thursday, but found I could relate in particular to "Reload the Love!" I have thought before about how the aesthetics of Facebook condition us. First, there's that soft warm blue theme. That's the same color they paint on the inside of insane asylums to calm the patients down. And then bam! It's punctuated with an exciting pinch of hot orange-red, a chip of chocolate in the vanilla theme. I am entirely aware of how my eyes are magnetized to the top right-hand corner of the screen every time I load my Facebook page; of the fact that I get a little rush each time I see one of those little red virtual goodies light up.

But I never really thought about the totally consumerist pattern of the Facebook notification system. As Grosser points out the crucial thing about notification is that once you click on them, the exciting red number goes away. It works exactly the same as any other mechanism that powers the consumer-culture machine: it conditions you to want something that is short-lived, so that you buy into a system that will supply you with more. So, it conditions you to want notifications -- and the way to get notifications is to post frequently. Facebook thrives off of people posting; the more posts they make, the more time they spend on the site, the more ads they click on, the more brand-pages they "share."

That's all pretty obvious when you think about it but what I like about Grosser's piece is how he hones in on one tiny detail about web-design that essentially powers the whole beast. I think it's a beautiful example of, to use his words "how software [in this case, UI design] prescribes behaviors." It's also intensely creepy. In the past, I've put myself on Facebook-post hiatuses in order to limit my opportunities for time-wastage. It's a lot more boring if you never get any notifications. Now when I do that I will with the consciousness that I'm resisting their system. Which I suppose I can use as an excuse for complying with it in the first place.