Washington, Aug 4 (ANI): A former Facebook employee, who had risen to become founder Mark Zuckerberg's personal ghostwriter in the firm, reveals how she realised the dark side of 'sharing' through 'social networking', that made her develop skepticism for social technologies, altogether.
Katherine Losse believes that the explosion of social media has left hundreds of millions of users with connections that were more plentiful but also 'narrower and less satisfying', with intimacy losing out to efficiency.
"It's okay to feel weird about this because I feel weird about this, and I was in the center of it. We all know there is an anxiety, there's an unease, there's a worry that our lives are changing," the Washington Post quoted Losse, as saying.
In 2005, after moving to Northern California in search of work, Losse, 36, a graduate student in English from Johns Hopkins University, responded to a query on the Facebook home page seeking resumes, soon after which she became one of the company's first customer-service reps, replying to questions from users.
Subesquently, Losse's concerns over the social site grew after she learnt from a fellow colleague, who was developing, what they called "dark profiles", pages for people who had not signed up for the service, but who had been identified in posts by Facebook users, and if the person eventually signed up, those latent links would be activated to other users.
Losse's unease sharpened after another Facebook engineer, developing the capacity for users to upload video to their pages, started videotaping friends. On one road trip together, the engineer reportedly made a video of her napping in a car and uploaded it remotely to an internal Facebook page, on which comments started pouring in.
"The day before, I could just be in a car being in a car. Now my being in a car is a performance that is visible to everyone. It's almost like there is no middle of nowhere anymore," Losse said.
Losse, who moved to the heart of the company as Zuckerberg's ghostwriter, quit the firm in 2010 to move to a small town of Marfa, Texas and penned a book, "The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network", disclosing her journey and experiences while working at Facebook.
She reactivated her Facebook account, as she felt its 'impossible' to reject it altogether, but claimed that she has now realised the essence of human relationships, 'which aren't just pages of a site', the paper said. (ANI)
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