Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Back to "normal"

As i see it, the adversity to change is a purely economical term used in management practices in order to describe the willingness of employees to adopt new strategies, their ability to adapt to new circumstances and their performance in unfamiliar situations.
In more simple terms, change makes people think, and we hate that. When one gets used to a certain procedure, to a certain way, he no longer wishes to move away from that certain warm spot where everything is clear and nice. Of course, this does not apply to all, but in general, i think that humans are not set to enjoy changes too much, as it creates risk, it brings out the unknown and the uncertain. There are numerous talks on the subjects and even more articles on the net, so i will not get into any of those.
To resume : Out of the famous statement " Are we good at what we like or do we like what we are good at? " i am at the moment inclined to believe more and more that we are extremely addicted to our own comfort and we hate change because it makes it harder to deal with previously known situations that now become difficult all of a sudden. Change of job, change of house, change of city, change of my online dictionary page layout that makes me extremely angry and, of course, the change of Facebook - all just examples...
I would say that given Facebook's estimated value of somewhere around 9.5 billion dollars ( my source is Unimedia, my internet is waaaaay too slow to look for other sources, sorry), dealing with adversity to change through this example is very representative : the most obvious proof are the "Change Facebook back to normal" groups on the site. These types of groups appear every time the social networking site changes its appearance, some of its functions or other aspects. And the users are not against the changes because the new version is worse, they are simply against CHANGE in general. The site suffers updates quite often, and the new version is ALWAYS worse than the old one... the OLD one being a version that was NEW at some point in time too, a version that had created its own "Change facebook back to how it was" groups. And yes, there are plenty of users to join the groups, the latter having as much as 1,772,241 members up to date. Names range from normal requests like "We Hate The New Facebook, So STOP CHANGING IT" to stuff like "Facebook will never change anything to the way we want it". No, because it is the CHANGE element that we hate, not the changes that are made. "Is it me or did facebook change again?" - Is it me or is change progress? And if you do sit in front of the computer all day, the least they can do to make you think is to change the locations of the buttons that you are now clicking automatically. And of course, you hate it. "Change facebook once more and we are going!!!!" - No you won't, you are addicted.
Further, i encountered comments like

"Pepple it is so important that facebook is changed back to normal, CHANGE IT BACK TO THE WAY IT WAS!!!" and

"My dad wz yelling at me cuz he didnt know about the whole news live feed thing and he thought i "befriended" him. CRAZY!!!!!!!!!" - Parents on facebook.. the new trend :) My sister said that in 2035 our children will make fun of us "is your mum still on Facebook? hahaha, that's sooooo last century!"

"I hate the new facebook. The old one I figured out and I don't have time to try and figure this one out... Please change it back."

"I'm sorry, it has been two weeks, i can't see my posts, i am confused and i hate this change in Facebook!!!!!Please change it back Please"
"the new facebook is gay."

"Now Facebook shows information that nobody really cares about. I want the old one back!!!!!!"

Funny, sad, true. I abstain from further comments, as i will set them down in another post. I use Facebook too. Not as much as others, but still a lot. And yes, i dislike the changes too, but i don't go creating groups like "Change my Google Logo to the one they had last year."

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