sciencetech-blog

comments

One in every 13 people on the planet check Facebook the moment they wake up - leading to reports of Facebook addiction and social anxiety.

And, according to one researcher, the fault lies with the little red notification icons and the numbers that litter the social network.

Software expert Benjamin Grosser recently created a plug-in to remove all metrics, including likes and share numbers, from the site – and discovered that their removal improved a user's enjoyment.

Software expert Benjamin Grosser recently created a browser plug-in to automatically remove all metrics from Facebook, including likes, shares, comments, number of events, group notifications, friend requests and numbers, message count and more. The vast number of metric is shown ringed in red

The browser plug-in can be installed to Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

It automatically removes all metrics from the site, including likes, shares, comments, number of events, group notifications, friend requests and numbers, message count and more. 

'Over the last few decades, we have become increasingly subject to mechanisms of measurement, a constant push to assess performance from a quantitative perspective,' said Mr Grosser from the School of Art and Design, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Grosser.

'Within the context of Facebook, however, this culture of audit plays out differently.

'It is no longer a form of self-surveillance where the few watch the many, or the many watching the few.

Instead, today's social network-based culture of audit is more similar to 'the many watching the many,' where everyone watches everyone else.'

Mr Grosser said that this creates a new mode of surveillance known as graphopticon.

'While one Facebook user can't know if their friend count is being observed at any one moment, they know that any number of users could be looking at any moment,' continued Mr Grosser.

'Their Timeline is open to all of their friends, and in many cases to all of the world.

Therefore, he said users need to appear to have multiple likes, shares and friends to look more popular.

This need for numbers is also influenced by how Facebook's News Feed is organised.

The more a user interacts with likes, comments, and other objects, the higher the News Feed algorithm rates those posts, and thus shows them on the news feeds of their friends.

More interaction leads to more visibility.

Visibility therefore becomes a prerequisite for getting more likes, shares, and friends.

Mr Grosser discovered that Facebook is designed as an 'endless interaction loop' which draws on the user's need for more likes, shares and comments.

A user clicks the red number to read the notification, but this causes the metric to disappear.

The left-hand image shows how likes and share metrics appear. The right-hand image reveals how the site looks after the Demetricator plug-in has been enabled. Research has revealed metrics create an 'interaction loop of checking', similar to compulsive behaviour, but this is manageable when numbers are removed

Similarly, this image reveals how the site looks when the metrics are removed, without removing the names or other details from posts. By removing the metrics, Mr Grosser found that people were less competitive, anxious and preoccupied with the numbers

The quickest way to then get new notifications is to post statuses or comments that attract attention, or by adding friends.

And the more content and posts a user makes, the higher the potential for likes, shares and comments.

'This interaction loop of checking, reading, and generating resembles compulsive behaviour in the way that it sets up a cycle that can never be satisfied,' said Mr Grosser.

'The user's desire for more craves higher notification metrics, but the system's design clears those metrics every time the user checks them.

'In the case of notifications, metrics want more attention from the site's users.'

He continued that these numbers also homogenise Facebook users because individual thoughts and ideas are combined into a single number, and whole groups of friends are reduced into a value.

Equally, individuals become lumped together as a group, because they liked the same product or page.

And by making people all appear the same, they strive to stand out from the crowd by posting more statuses and comments.

By removing the metrics, Mr Grosser found that people were less competitive, anxious and preoccupied with the numbers.

One user said: '[Facebook is] so much more enjoyable without constant (subconscious) pressure to compare when numbers are involved,' while another said '[Notifications] simply became a nervous addiction for me, inadvertently.

'But, that all changed when I downloaded the add-on.

'No more ridiculous liking stats, no more mounds of notifications or the number of comments on other's statuses. 

'It added a Zen element to the entire format, and I finally feel at ease.' 

Mr Grosser's paper 'What do metrics want? How quantification prescribes social interaction on Facebook', is published in the journal Computational Culture.