Facebook makes us recall unwanted memories

Are you still in touch with all your exes? How about your best friends from middle school? More likely than not, your answer is no.

But what if I asked you what they did last weekend?

Jovanna Tosello | Daily Trojan

You could probably just look them up on Facebook.

That’s what’s interesting about Facebook. It claims to connect us to people, places and things we love;  it also connects us to people, places and things we loved when we were 16.

Facebook is designed so fragments from your past reappear and remind you subtly and persistently that they exist.

The site’s ability to take our focus away from the present is part of what makes it such a notorious time-waster.

Though a little reminiscing never hurts, college students’ love-hate relationship with Facebook would have a little more love in it if Facebook didn’t enable us to keep digging up the past.

To become more useful — and more meaningful, for that matter — Facebook should help us connect to what we care about right now. We should also strive to use it more constructively. Instead of using it as a way to cultivate our public image by showing our friends how much fun we are having via tagged photos, we should use it in a meaningful way to keep in touch with one another.

Facebook etiquette dictates defriending someone is an indication of strong dislike; if you have just been through a breakup, defriending can even brand you as the bitter ex who needs to “get over it.”

Therefore, many post-relationship relationships persist beyond their expiration dates. People exchange wall posts and status comments with others despite of the fact that, if they were to hang out for more than half an hour, they would have almost nothing to say to each other.

All this can result in a longing for a vague form of the past that never existed in the first place. It is nostalgia strung together by a few photos and wall posts.

Facebook is a wonderful tool, but to keep these issues at bay, the company should modify some of its features.

Consider the News Feed. Facebook is very secretive about the algorithms that decide what shows up. To peek behind the scenes, Business Insider ran a controlled experiment.

The results are quite revealing: Though people you currently interact with show up often, so do people with higher friend counts and people whose profiles are viewed frequently. If the person you are dating right now has 100 friends and barely posts links, you might miss their status updates in favor of updates from people you never see in person.

Although variety is nice, Facebook should make the news feed represent people’s physical realities more closely. In addition to measuring a user’s interaction with another, the algorithms should also prioritize people from the user’s region or workplace. Reworking a system like this would encourage people to make connections in their own areas.

The features that show status updates from a year ago or photo albums from 2006 are quite different. These bits and pieces appear without providing context. Facebook as a whole induces uninvited nostalgia, distracting people from whatever they were doing before.

Admittedly, no amount of programming can make people use Facebook for their benefit, but that’s why we should take the time to think about what we do on the site.

Even if you can’t stop yourself from checking in on people you used to know well, it would be good not to take their profiles too seriously. People usually don’t represent their lives objectively.

If Facebook were life, we’d be living a sad and two-toned existence. It’s not the real deal.

Maya Itah is a senior majoring in communication. Her column “From Behind the Screen” runs Thursdays.