A Write Up about Facebook Reveals Shocking Human Weakness
September 18, 2017
What do I need with another write up about Facebook? We use the service to post links to stories in this blog, Beyond Search. My dog has an account to use when a site demands a Facebook user name and password. That’s about it. For me, Facebook is an online service which sells ads and provides useful information to some analysts and investigators. Likes, mindless uploading of images, and obsessive checking of the service. Sorry, not for a 74 year old in rural Kentucky, thank you very much.
I did read “How Facebook Tricks You Into Trusting Algorithms.”
I noted this statement, which I think is interesting:
The [Facebook] News Feed is meant to be fun, but also geared to solve one of the essential problems of modernity—our inability to sift through the ever-growing, always-looming mounds of information.
Why use Facebook instead of a service like Talkwalker? Here’s the answer:
Who better, the theory goes, to recommend what we should read and watch than our friends? Zuckerberg has boasted that the News Feed turned Facebook into a “personalized newspaper.”
Several observations:
- The success of Facebook is less about “friends” and more about anomie, the word I think used by Émile Durkheim to describe one aspect of “modern” life.
- The human mind, it seems, can form attachments to inanimate objects like Teddy Bears, animate objects like a human or dog, or to simulacra which intermediate for the user between the inanimate and the animate.
- Assembling large populations of “customers”, Facebook has a way to sell ads based on human actions as identified by the Facebook monitoring software.
So what?
As uncertainty spikes, the “value” of Facebook will go up. No online service is invulnerable. Ennui, competition, management missteps, or technological change can undermine even the most dominant company.
I am not sure that Facebook “tricks” anyone. The company simply responds to the social opportunity modern life presents to people in many countries.
Build a life via the gig economy? Nah, pretty tough to do.
Generate happiness via Likes? Nah, ping ponging between angst and happiness is the new normal.
Become a viral success? Nah, better chance at a Las Vegas casino for most folks?
Facebook, therefore, is something that would have to be created if the real Facebook did not exist.
Will Facebook gain more “power”? Absolutely. Human needs are forever. Likes are transient. Keep on clicking. Algorithms will do the rest.
Stephen E Arnold, September 18, 2017
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