Göran Bolin 106 Elsewhere, I have discussed some of the experiences of media users of removing metrics in terms of temporal, social, and value-related disorientations (BOLIN; VELKOVA, 2020), and in this context, I would like to expand on that analysis. The various disorientations are expressed in interviews, for example in relation to the ‘newness’ of posts: The time thing was actually very difficult. Auto- matically, when something appears on your feed, it is new. However, when you wanted to dig in, it was impossible. It was very difficult for me to know how old the post was. Oh, and also, I wanted to check someone’s birthday, and guess what! The date wasn’t showing up, so I was thinking: ‘Oh, no, what am I going to do now? This user expresses a felt frustration over not being able to orient in time due to the lack of the time stamp that each post is equipped with. As Facebook’s news feed is not chronologically organised as a default, posts uploaded at different times can appear in a random temporal order, and the knowledge of this makes us- ers confused about which post is new and which is not. Since social conventions for communication expects us to remember our friends’ birthdays, the lack of exact knowledge about when that is for each friend blocks the action and prevents the user from losing face by sending a congratulation on the wrong date. Temporal disorientation also relates to certain valu- ation practices among media users. The value of news, for example, is that it is new. Nothing is as old as yesterday’s goes a popular saying, and this is a practice that also relates to the so- cial conventions around newsworthiness. [I]t did change my perception of how newsworthy or important something was when just scrolling through. If you see that a post has 20 thousand likes and see something that has less, I at least, rank them, and some news will appear to be more important. Then I will read it before reading another less important article because there is so much information. I found that difficult.
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