The social networking website Facebook has come out with new version, popularly referred to as “New Facebook.” Their new makeover has sparked controversy amongst Facebook users, and over 100 million users are unhappy with the results. According to a September 10 blog post on the site, Mark Slee, the product manager for Facebook, said, “With your feedback and participation…we believe we’ve gotten to the best Facebook yet.” What is unclear is what was wrong with Facebook in the first place.
According to CNN.com, Co-Founder Mark Zuckerberg said, “Facebook is a work in progress. We constantly try to improve things, and we understand our work isn’t perfect.”
Often times it seems that Americans think in business terms; every accomplishment is considered a profit and the goal is to always increase revenue.
Everything is considered a work in progress and improvements are valued, even though sometimes the revisions do not prove to be as precious as the original. In today’s society, “classics” or originals are never cherished as much as the new and improved, updated and more efficient. Negative campaigning ads are concerned with how many vicious attacks against a politician they can achieve in thirty seconds. Americans want a technological contraption in which they can take pictures, text, call, get directions, and listen to music on. It seems like every time a song gets popular on the radio, there is a remix that is released, and in the process, what made the song treasured loses its spirit.
After movies like Spiderman, Superbad, and Garden State became popular, four more mediocre versions of the original are released.
Moviegoers have conditioned themselves to be suspicious of sequels of successful film originals. Thus ensues a series of chain reactions where one “improvement” or remake leads to another and another. Instead of valuing individuality, the result of such values is a culture in which any idea that is good or decent loses its integrity because all its competition is just numerous copies of the same thing.
“So what”, many would argue, “self-improvement is always useless; it is not like one does not take and use the original product to make revisions.”
While this is true, what many Americans, businessmen, directors, and inventors do not realize is that in every step of the long and at times painful process of self-improvement, the original idea loses a bit of its spark in every copy that is made.
There seems to be a preconceived notion that constant competition is prevalent in all aspects of society, and the American lifestyle must always “keep up.” It is the reason there is so much investment in the technology and communications sector and it is the reason America is such a fast-paced nation; this country holds the world’s position of superpower and is afraid to ever step down.
As a result, this competitive attitude trickles down to all aspects of society. While keeping up for the sake of efficiency and competency is practical in business, when it influences art forms like films and sites like Facebook in a way that serves for no financial advantage, it is obvious that the competitive attitude and obsession with upgrading is getting out of hand.
Perhaps it is not just a website change that needs to take place, but a reassessment of priorities and a serious attitude change. Instead of stressing efficiency, more emphasis could be placed on originality, because it is originality that allows great ideas to blossom, not just in the academic world and the art world, but also within businesses. The shift of priorities should begin in schools; instead of placing so much worth on test performance, highlighting the significance of individuality and self-expression in every work a person completes.
It is time for this generation to establish their own “classics” and to break away from older generations that encourage us to continue the same attitudes that have fueled American society in the past and in the present.
