The Fall of Facebook - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...382247
social media Facebook social network information gatekeeper publishing technology
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When a research company looked at how people use their phones, it found that they spend more time on Facebook than they do browsing the entire rest of the Web.
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this weakens the basic idea of a publication. The media bundles known as magazines and newspapers were built around letting advertisers reach an audience. But now virtually all of the audiences are in the same place, and media entities and advertisers alike know how to target them: they go to Facebook, select some options from a drop-down menu—18-to-24-year-old men in Maryland who are college-football fans—and their ads materialize in the feeds of that demographic.
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when Google was the dominant distribution force on the Web, that fact was reflected in the kinds of content media companies produced—fact-filled, keyword-stuffed posts that Google’s software seemed to prefer.
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while, once upon a time, everyone with a TV and an antenna could see “what was on,” Facebook news feeds are personalized, so no one outside the company actually knows what anyone else is seeing. This opacity would have been impossible to imagine in previous eras.
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it is the most powerful information gatekeeper the world has ever known. It is only slightly hyperbolic to say that Facebook is like all the broadcast-television networks put together.
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Facebook is different, though. It measures what is “engaging”—what you (and people you resemble, according to its databases) like, comment on, and share. Then it shows you more things related to that.
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Facebook has built a self-perpetuating optimization machine. It’s as if every time you turned on the TV, your cable box ranked every episode of every show just for you. Or when you went to a bar, only the people you’d been hanging out with regularly showed up
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“In three years of research and talking to hundreds of people and everyday users, I don’t think I heard anyone say once, ‘I love Facebook,’ ”
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The software’s primary attributes—its omniscience, its solicitousness—all too easily provoke claustrophobia.
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users are spreading themselves around, maintaining Facebook as their social spine, but investing in and loving a wide variety of other social apps. None of them seems likely to supplant Facebook on its own, but taken together, they form a pretty decent network of networks, a dispersed alternative to Facebook life.