Facebook Is Playing Peek-A-Boo With Me

It's there and then it's gone, and then it's there again, and then it's gone again.... this new virtual game is brought to you courtesy of Facebook.

I was relieved on Friday when my News Feed suddenly reappeared in its normal state, but on Saturday it stopped displaying more than 4 posts, and ending the page with the sentence I have now come to hate:
"There are no more posts to show right now."

What's going on here?

I can post from other applications, and these posts show up, like the one I did from Dagens Nyheter this morning, but trying to enter something directly through Facebook doesn't result in anything, at least not on my News Feed/TimeLine.

And the Afternoon When It Came Back

I had almost resigned myself to a life without Facebook, which was not such a terrible thing after all, when I met our resident techie and told him about my vanishing News Feed. I turned around and followed me back to my office explaining potential solutions on the way. I logged in to my system and started Facebook to show what had happened, but quickly realized that something had changed. There was a new post at the top of my feed, and when I scrolled down, there was no annoying message at the bottom telling me that there  were no more posts to show. The problem had solved it self.

Don't worry! Procrastinate! Sometimes that all you need to do....

The Day When Facebook Stopped

I cannot see any of my new Facebook posts or any other than the four items that currently sit on my News Feed. At the bottom of the page, FB states that there are no more posts to display, which is obviously not true. Some people call it the "vanishing News Feed" others google desperately for a solution, and FB tells me that it will read my mail but not answer it. I never thought I would have FB withdrawal, but here I am, having just that.

And here is a popup I got when I tried to post a link to this blog post.

The Queen of Social Media Fights Fetishization

Arianna Huffington has written a very interesting and timely column for Huffington Post where she warns against "fetishization" of social media, where nothing matters besides catching up with the latest tweet, whatever it happens to be.

The title is a bit pompous - "Virality Uber Alles: Whatthe Fetishization of Social Media Is Costing Us All" - but it is a good read that makes you think for a minute of Marshall McLuhan. She is of course not against social media per se, but she cautions against falling in love with the tool, instead of using it to do good:

The media world's fetishization of social media has reached idol-worshipping proportions. Media conference agendas are filled with panels devoted to social media and how to use social tools to amplify coverage, but you rarely see one discussing what that coverage should actually be about. As Wadah Khanfar, former Director General of Al Jazeera, told our editors when he visited our newsroom last week, "The lack of contextualization and prioritization in the U.S. media makes it harder to know what the most important story is at any given time."

Our media culture is locked in the Perpetual Now, constantly chasing ephemeral scoops that last only seconds and that most often don't matter in the first place, even for the brief moment that they're "exclusive." 

(...)

These days every company is hungry to embrace social media and virality, even if they're not exactly sure what that means, and even if they're not prepared to really deal with it once they've achieved it.

(...)

Or as Sheryl Sandberg put it, "What it means to be social is if you want to talk to me, you have to listen to me as well." A lot of brands want to be social, but they don't want to listen, because much of what they're hearing is quite simply not to their liking, and, just as in relationships in the offline world, engaging with your customers or your readers in a transparent and authentic way is not all sweetness and light. So simply issuing a statement saying you're committed to listening isn't the same thing as listening. And as in any human relationship, there is a dark side to intimacy.

So, the road to social media hell is paved with well-intended hashtags -- as well as disingenuous or inauthentic ones.