Facebook Paves The Way For Emotional Tech

In the future, Facebook may be able to understand how we feel – and let us share it with friends.
The Facebook sharing experience may be very different in the future if Mark Zuckerberg gets his way. “One day, I believe we’ll be able to send full rich thoughts to each other directly using technology,” said Zuckerberg during a recent Facebook Q&A session. “You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too if you’d like. This would be the ultimate communication technology.”.
The trajectory for internet sharing is clear: we’re moving towards increasingly immersive experiences. We started with sharing text back in the day; now we’re favouring photo sharing, and soon we’ll be sharing even more video. Zuckerberg’s idea of sharing “rich thoughts” is certainly taking sharing technology to the extreme.
While this idea has been described as something akin to telepathy, it makes more sense when considering that Facebook bought Oculus Rift, revealing its intent to inhabit not just the computer in front of us but also virtual reality. Odds are that Facebook users will eventually be able to use a virtual space to share everything we currently post on the site, including a more seamless way to share thoughts and feelings. Said Zuckerberg: “In the future, we’ll have augmented reality and other devices that we can wear almost all the time to improve our experience and communication.”.
This sounds amazing, or scary, depending on your outlook – but this emotionally charged technology future may not be as far away as it seems at first glance. Facebook has been asking us to share how we feel since April 2013, when it introduced emoticons as options in the text box. Then there are the subtler ways in which Facebook interacts with our feelings: the details around the Facebook algorithm remain mysterious, but the company uses it to show us things they think we’ll like.
Research from the University of California shows that feelings are indeed contagious: “If an emotional change in one person spreads [on Facebook] and causes a change in many, then we may be dramatically underestimating the effectiveness of efforts to improve mental and physical health,” said James Fowler, lead author of the study and professor at the School of Medicine at UC San Diego. “We should be doing everything we can to measure the effects of social networks and to learn how to magnify them so that we can create an epidemic of wellbeing.”.
Interjecting an emotional element may become necessary as technology advances, to ensure it can fully serve our needs. The question that often comes up when Facebook (or any other major company) presents an invasive technology is whether or not we can trust them to be the keeper of personal information. While the University of California study shows there’s potentially an amazing upside in sharing emotions on social media, there’s also the equal opportunity for misuse on the downside.
Having said that, Zuckerberg himself seems to have benign intentions, judging from his answers during the rest of the Q&A session: “I’m most interested in questions about people. What will enable us to live forever? How do we cure all diseases? How does the brain work? How does learning work and how we can empower humans to lean a million times more?”.
It’s also possible that Zuckerberg may also be using the Facebook algorithm to solve another one of this personal interests: “I’m curious about whether there is a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships that governs the balance of who and what we all care about.” This is a big question, but Facebook is sitting on a growing mountain of data about human interaction – there’s no one better placed for trying to work this out.