This video from Veritasium explains why Facebook’s business model makes interactions on the site feel scummy sometimes. It’s sad for a lot of independent creators, businesses, and organizations whose livelihoods depend on the effectiveness of their social media activities. And it’s also disturbing to think of our role as content producers — and now advertisers — for this business who most definitely does not have our personal best interests at heart.
A lot of the links I post on Facebook are about issues that I find important. I hope it hits my friends’ radars, so that conversations around feminism, racism, consumerism, community etc. start to permeate our cultural zeitgeist. Of course, I also post photos and inspirational stories and things I think would make people laugh.
But I wonder about the reach of most posts. Photos naturally get a lot of views.
More substantial topics that I want people to actually pay attention to…? Not so much.
(Seriously, you should watch this video about moving the race conversation forward.)
Maybe it was just bad timing–maybe I should have posted this during lunchtime instead of late Wednesday night, for instance. Or maybe posts like this are only seen be my friends who typically already tend to “like” posts about social justice. The ones who see these links are already thinking about these things; I want to reach people who aren’t normally thinking about these things.
Our carefully-tailored and carefully-curated social media streams reinforce our own beliefs; we essentially create echo chambers for ourselves and reinforce our confirmation biases. Facebook is baking “preaching to the choir” straight into the algorithms.
Lately, I’ve been paring down my Twitter stream back to a manageable amount. I have to make decisions about who to follow and who to unfollow, and I find myself wondering if I’m curating myself away from complexity. I want a myriad of inputs, and I want to sometimes hear and read things that don’t fall under my current interests. Because that’s what fuels delight, surprise, and rich synthesis.
And some other questions I will continue thinking about as new projects emerge this year and I have to decide where to post what… Who owns our content? Who makes money off our (credited/uncredited) content? How do the system players encourage or discourage independent creation? How do we best support independent artists, and how can our content best feed our own communities first?
Onward, into this Wild Wild West.
Filed under: Food for thought
