The thing about the reviling of social networks is it generally takes this sort of media as an upsurge that came out of nowhere and could somehow stop in a fashion that returns things to people making nebulous "face to face" contacts, in a world that's not changed since the pre-social-network era. Actually, there was an explosion of isolation before all this[1].
It seems to me that the world has become massively more socially isolated and social networks are as much a response to this as they are an addictive phenomena unto themselves - indeed, explosion of opioids, addiction and suicide has very much also been an effect of this social isolation and is naturally more destructive.
TL;DR; If one complains about social dysfunction, give us a path to social function, please.
The larger issue that your getting at is the rise of “individualism” over the last 40 years.
The first time I heard that I remember thinking what a ridiculous concept, people have always been interested in success and self-improvement in America.
But after hearing nearly every brilliant sociologist and conservative/liberal political commentator make the same comment, I started to see things differently. The loss of community in America has been really sad. As jobs have become harder to get, as social programs from the government have decreased, as people have turned away from churches, people have either lost the community embedded in those institutions or the financial guarantees that allowed them to pursue community without worrying about-side hustles or growth hacking.
Christopher Lasch’s The Age of Narcissism (1979)
or anything recently by Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Lind, or even Laura Ingraham all point to the same loss.
A really sad statistic I heard the other day was the experience in suicides of those 12-14 years old. It’s doubled in the last 5 years among boys and girls. I would think childhood would be a somewhat happier place but even it is engulfed by sadness.
EDIT: Just saw you mentioned Bowling Alone so I took that out. Also want to say community vs individualism is a recurring theme in the history of America, one tends to dominate for 40-50 years before succumbing to the other.
Probably the best example is the TANF welfare reform passed in 1996.
On the surface it had a very reasonable goal. Require workers on welfare to seek employment.
However, this, combined with the shipping of jobs to China (stuff that had been manufactured in the US was instead manufactured there and shipped back), businesses forcing citizens to compete with immigrants who they knew they could threaten with deportation, along with outright cuts to welfare, kind of destroyed the program.
In other words, welfare was cut while jobs were getting scarcer, and then they turned around and made getting a job a requirement to having / staying on welfare.
For a while when I was younger I naively thought Facebook would formulate my timeline in such a way that I could keep up with genuinely interesting and special things people who enjoy tech like me think and do, and likewise feel genuinely encouraged to reciprocate occasionally.
Why instead does my timeline have to be so precisely boring, mindless, impersonal, and yet addictive? Maybe because 1) incentive to post is largely motivated by lowest-common-denominator, broadest appeal rather than niche, 2) posting about specialized interests are therefore unincentivized, and 3) such posts from friends produces a positive feedback loop in the rest of the group?
Maybe it'd be worse if Facebook actually worked this way because it would be harder to avoid entirely.
> Why instead does my timeline have to be so precisely boring, mindless, impersonal, and yet addictive? Maybe because 1) incentive to post is largely motivated by lowest-common-denominator, broadest appeal rather than niche, 2) posting about specialized interests are therefore unincentivized, and 3) such posts from friends produces a positive feedback loop in the rest of the group?
Maybe some of the addictive effects you're feeling are out of habit. When's the last time you quit Facebook cold turkey, and for how long did you do it? I found that quitting for a few days -- by doing something as simple as changing my password to gibberish so that I could not login without going through the email verification process, thereby preventing me from "reflexively" checking FB -- could be enough to get me to forget about FB for weeks, even months.
Not silly at all. I think we as humans vastly underestimate the degree that we're influenced by small subconscious things, even though there's entire professional fields and countless dollars devoted to the practice (e.g. design, copy-writing, ui-ux). It feels better to see things as rational decisions, sometimes between good versus evil, rather than to admit our mundane weaknesses.
I do something similar to you, except that I log off at the desktop (except for HN, sadly). If I want to send out a pointless but time-consuming rant about something ultimately trivial, I'm going to have to do it on my phone's touchscreen. And the thought of doing so is often more than enough to kill the desire so I can just focus on real work and writing.
When I find myself lying in bed longer than I should because I'm touchscreen-typing these comments/posts, then I go cold turkey on my phone :).
I agree you're right, speaking from the perspective of someone who uninstalled the mobile app and checks Facebook every few days.
Nonetheless, I recently checked the 'recent/chronological' feed, as well as just profiles of individual friends and old friends that I cared about. In both cases I felt that the offering was better than the algorithmic and default news feed, and somehow a net positive to my life (I'll elaborate if necessary, but I really do believe this).
If I'd have to choose, I'd go for chronological feed of of friend updates. And if I could choose what 'categories' of friends to filter by, that'd be great, but that's basically Google+ with its circles.
Anyways, what surprised me most is that even though I only have a 'facebook browsing sesh' every few days (3+), the experience I've defaulted into, the regular feed, is nowhere close to the quality that of 'recent updates hose' or 'updates from specific friends, chronologically'. But at the same time good enough in a generic sense that I can see them optimizing for that. Not really all that far off from my experience with Reddit, by the way.
On the one hand I can commend the clever nature of Facebook to go for the current News Feed approach. On the other hand it strikes me as a prime example of the dangers of algorithms and optimizing for very specific things, and the growing anti-SV narrative (much as I've grown to hate these sorts of things).
The reason for this has to do with ‘variable reward’. Specifically, the brain quickly acclimates to a constant stream of rewards and gets bored. By contrast, spacing out rewards at unpredictable intervals is much likelier to keep the brain hooked. As someone else noted, this is the same principle that underpins slot machines.
The latest barrage of anti-SV articles from old media seem very focused on Trump. Where were these complaints before the election? I remember the press loving how Obama used social media to his advantage.
There's a simple answer to that, and it is before Trump, it wasn't obvious that social media of all kinds was dominated by propaganda. Now we are aware, now there's a reaction. You are missing the causality.
If there's a legitimate problem with society, why does it matter who points it out? I don't like the messenger was never a valid response to criticism.
> before Trump, it wasn't obvious that social media of all kinds was dominated by propaganda
There were tons of articles written about this before Trump, they just didn't get any page views until afterwards. (E.g. check my submission history from before the election.) It was very very obvious, but people didn't start caring about the issue until after the election when it started getting promoted by Democrats for propaganda purposes.
My point is that most people who aren’t politically motivated to say so don’t see this as a “legitimate problem”. I know I see no issue with social media. Is it really worse than TV or newspapers? I don’t think so.
The feedback loops inherent in attention based (advertising funded) social media content selection are potentially more problematic than TV or newspapers.
TV and newspapers have them, but they don't work as fast and it is harder to place content in those channels.
Seeing how the U.S. presidential election is one of the most important world events every 4 years, it's not surprising that people are perturbed about the possibility of tampering. But are you asserting that the media wasn't complaining about the effects and influence of Google and Facebook before Trump?
Honest question: do you think the main difference between how Obama used his Twitter account (IMO, very dry and vanilla and bureaucratically) and how Trump uses his is in their politics, i.e. we could take this Trump's tweet:
> Crooked Hillary Clinton is the worst (and biggest) loser of all time. She just can’t stop, which is so good for the Republican Party. Hillary, get on with your life and give it another try in three years!
And replace it Mad-Lib style with Republican targets:
> Crooked Sarah Palin is the worst (and biggest) loser of all time. She just can’t stop, which is so good for the Democratic Party. Sarah, get on with your life and give it another try in three years!
And you think we'd be able to find a similar tweet in content in @BarackObama's tweets during his time in office?
I don't use FB enough anymore to know how Trump uses it vs Obama/etc., but I'll take you at your work, mostly for the fact that I rarely (in fact, I can't think of a single time right now) have heard journalists making substantive (or even flippant) complaints about how Trump and his campaign uses FB. OTOH, most of the journalists I know, besides complaining about him, follow Trump on Twitter. Many even have his tweets get treated as Twitter Notifications.
To me the problem of Trump using Twitter is not political, but it's that he's using it for important, world-impacting communication when Twitter is inherently too reactionary of a medium for it. Both Trump and Obama have been heavily critical of North Korea. But there's a huge difference about Trump sending his thoughts via Twitter rather than speech/video address, or TV interview.
In other words, I don't believe that Trump (nor any human, president or not) is above the kind of impulsive communication that Twitter is designed for.
Before, MSM was able to tell people what to think and they were the gatekeepers of "the truth" and were able to set agenda. Now they matter less and less and people just don't pay much attention to them since there's so much choice now. And you can actually bypass them and go straight to the source of news. And that's a problem for them. So they're publishing all these kinds of anti-SV, anti-social media articles in hope of turning the tide.
Whilst there are obvious downsides to having a few powerful organisations pushing (their version of) "the truth", there are some upsides: those orgs rely on their reputation, and they're great big targets for lawsuits or even just competition (if newspaper A is too blatant with their lies/spin, newspaper B can call them out on it).
The difference with social media is that we still have a few powerful organisations, but they're no longer the source of content: if/when blatant lies are spread by Facebook, their reputation isn't at stake because everyone knows they didn't create those lies. With the amount of data moving through these systems, it also seems hard to blame them for not catching things effectively, since that's such a hard problem. Like people asking for YouTube uploads to be viewed by a human before approval: there's no way to make such a scheme workable, so we kind of let them off.
Another tricky aspect of social media is the ability to target the audience quite narrowly. With a newspaper, everyone gets the same content, so the news being read by the impressionable or vulnerable is the same as the news being read by the skeptical and the expert. The latter can complain when something seems off, and that protects the former.
Yet these days we can specifically target conspiracy theories, propaganda, etc. only to those we think will be vulnerable to it. The well-informed, skeptical experts won't complain, since they never even know it exists.
These days of online "newsmedia/newspapers" are not the same as the old days of print media. They are after clicks and they tend to write to their core audiences.
This means HuffPo, WaPo and WaEx write to their audience to the detriment of any semblance of evenness. When it comes to policy they all seem to have pet audiences whose agenda they push rather than examine the pros and cons --these days they seem to push agendas blindly or by cherry picking data.
> These days of online "newsmedia/newspapers" are not the same as the old days of print media
How "old" are we talking about? 10, 20 years ago? The newspapers that inspired the Founding Fathers to give explicit protection to the press? The days of Joseph Pulitzer? Because despite his namesake award, it sounds like he ran his newspapers about as upstandingly as the most clickbait service you can think of today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism#Hearst_in_Sa...
Even 20 years ago. Newsmedia tried to drive the issues of the greater society --at times that meant participating in Mockingbird ops, but I think they honestly did what they thought was for the benefit of the country at large. I think that fell apart during Clinton's second term where things got really partisan and we've not recovered from that. We used to cooperate on things like Gun rights/control, Abortion, Civil Rights, etc. Now there is no overt commonality. They retreat to their corner and vilify the opposing view.
Nowadays, it's more about driving issues at the edge --things that will get a rise out of both foe and friend.
Absolutely. I'm sure they are realizing that Trump's social media powered victory means that the entire center of gravity has moved and that next election all parties and candidates will mostly campaign online. Traditional media will be an afterthought.
It's less about Trump per se and more about this larger shift.
Perhaps they see where one candidate spent less than half the other on ads and in addition how one candidate greatly undermined the need to make media buys --so they see a heretofore uncontested source of revenue disappearing right before them.
The result is a double whammy of reduced spending and the spending that does occur goes to different kind of media.
I'm sure they're worried about their bottom lines, yeah, but clickbait web media is shallower, less informative, and more biased (in a variety of directions) than mainstream media was even at its worst. Everyone loses with the rise of clickbait news.
I don’t think that people would care that much that trump used social media to his advantage. The problem is that foreign governments are using it to do illegal electioneering activity. If you have some evidence that foreign governments were buying ads to support Obama, I’d love to see it.
People working in tech have long known the dangers (or, at the very least, the fakeness) of social media...I wouldn't be surprised if tech workers are some of the least 'engaged' in social media relative to other demographics...
Appealing to worst instincts (and shaming those who are folly to them) is a real classic. Shaping products towards maximum capital extraction instead of holding that secondary to some kind of human-focused philosophy is also called 'efficiency' nowadays.
I would welcome a decrease in social networks, and hope they're burning out soon. IMO we've become so desensitized to in-person communication, that it's lost a lot of its importance. When was the last time someone called you to find out how you're doing, rather than just liking a facebook post? Perhaps I'm too old fashioned...
I'm playing a bit coy here, so play along or don't read this:
How is facebook different from the internet as a whole? In a way is it a mirror of the internet? Everyone has a presence, they surf pages, they make comments, they have pages, games, etc. In some countries where internet access is new, they don't even know the difference between facebook and the internet, because they never use anything else.
In a way, facebook is like the dark web. It's a version of the internet with different rules. We think the dark web is bad, and now people are starting to think facebook is bad. If we start to hate facebook, what's separating us from hating the internet as a whole?
Is it the separation? On the main internet, your real world friends won't know what you posted. You can let off steam, express your interest in nerdy topics, etc.
Is it because facebook is like public speaking, but without the emotional signals that scare you into being on your best behavior, so you're very likely to say something that could offend the whole room ( and you won't even know you've offended them! )
Is facebook like a dating site? One where you can play 'under the radar' because it's not exactly a dating site? You can be yourself without being yourself.
Facebook is an aggregator. It's like someone took the internet and boiled it down, reduced it, and increased its strength.
When I used to use the internet, I used to think of what I wanted to look at, then search specifically for that, or go to a website that has a niche interest, like nintendopower. Now, I go to a 'generalist' website, like facebook, and I let it suggest something I'd be interested in seeing. There was discovery in the old method, but I was still at the wheel. The search had an aim before, and is now aimless.
Aimlessness, purposeless, nihilism, these are all related. They are all related to having no responsibilities. On facebook, the question is: are you responsible? Sort of. Sort of not. Sometimes you should like a post, sometimes you shouldn't. It's very unclear. It's very discouraging. The "shoulds" are very poorly defined, because everyone has different rules for what good manners are.
Winning on facebook is what, more friends? Until you have so many friends that it dilutes your real friendships into a sea of acquaintances. Or, until you feel like a slave to faux-fame.
The alternative is: don't use facebook. You ditch everyone who uses it, and they think you're a snob, or worse, they think you specifically unfriended them and only them, because they don't know you quit. It's like the whole world jumped off a bridge. Sure, it's the wrong thing to do, but literally everyone did it.
A better alternative: a bot that auto responds to things and tells people you aren't on facebook anymore, and how to reach you. This may be the best way to quit.
"There was discovery in the old method, but I was still at the wheel. The search had an aim before, and is now aimless."
The real issue here's the increased personalization. Echo chambers, filter bubbles and alternative facts can thrive when you give each user a different gatekeeper that attempts to filter to their preferences.
Rather than using your personality to drive a system for locating information, the system locates information which ends up driving your personality. The fact that the algorithm's choosing before you begin the search adds a reverse coupling coefficient, which is too strong.
By attempting to show you only things you want to read, the system inadvertently creates barriers to communication between people who disagree.
My search used to have a query, now it has a history. No longer do I type a string, now I'm tracked, monitored, and suggested to. My search query is my mouse-move, how long I hover, how fast I scroll, what I click on. So, by using facebook, I'm building a search-profile, whereby I'll get results based on this data. It's ever-continuing, but never comes to fruition. Facebook is like typing a novel into google search, and never hitting enter. You continually refine your search parameters, but you never find what you're really looking for.
But people who disagree generally don't communicate, regardless of whether they use Facebook or not. I find the notion that without "filter bubbles" people would have rational discussions that would be concluded by the truth being discovered and accepted by both parties a bit of a stretch.
It seems to me that the world has become massively more socially isolated and social networks are as much a response to this as they are an addictive phenomena unto themselves - indeed, explosion of opioids, addiction and suicide has very much also been an effect of this social isolation and is naturally more destructive.
TL;DR; If one complains about social dysfunction, give us a path to social function, please.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone