Let
us imagine a Facebook user named Jack who decides to think very
deeply about some topic – perhaps a moral topic or a philosophical
topic. Let us suppose that Jack does quite a bit of research and
reflection on the topic, and then writes a 2000-word essay displaying
some original thinking on the topic. Then Jack posts his essay on
Facebook. He imagines that his Facebook friends will recognize the
depth of thought in his essay, and respond with quite a few likes or
comments.
But
Jack will have no control over the way this essay appears on the
Facebook feeds of his friends. He will be at the mercy of Facebook's
news feed presentation algorithms. Facebook will treat this essay in
a way that almost guarantees it will receive little attention. On their news feeds,
Jack's friends will see a little block of text giving a few words
from the start of Jack's long reflective post, with a little link at
the bottom leading to a page giving the entirety of the text. But
these friends of Jack's will be given no initial indication of how
long Jack's post is. So unless they click on the link, Jack's
friends won't know that Jack has bothered to put down 2000 words of
deep reflection on some topic. Probably almost all of them won't
bother to click on the link, and will suppose that the link only
gives a few more words, rather than many paragraphs of prose.
Facebook will do nothing to highlight Jack's long post in the news
feeds of Jack's friends. Jack's long essay will be given the same
size in those feeds as trivial little 50-word posts, and may get
smaller space in those news feeds than trivial run-of-the-mill
selfies.
Jack
will then probably find that his thoughtful 2000-word essay has been
largely ignored. But if instead he puts up some shallow little post
with a photograph (perhaps a selfie or a picture of some little thing
he bought), he will probably get just as much attention as he got
from his long thoughtful post.
Before
long, Jack will kind of realize that Facebook is not a platform that
does much to reward complex reflective thinking, and that he can get
much more “bang for his buck” by putting up shallow little “look
where I was” or “look what I bought” posts. Jack won't be
likely to put up many more deep, reflective posts. Looking at how
his friends post almost nothing but short, shallow posts, Jack will
probably follow that way of using Facebook, rather than being a
“Facebook oddball” who posts long, thoughtful posts.
Facebook
is a good platform for expressing emotion, particularly short-lived
emotions caused by events in the news. Facebook is good for venting
little bursts of anger at things that annoy you, by writing tiny
little posts like this:
The
Giants blew a 10-point lead in the fourth quarter. How much can a fan
take?!
Facebook
also can be good for expressing sadness at things that happen in your
personal life. Facebook is also an almost ideal platform for anyone
who spends lots of money, and who wants to brag about his conspicuous
consumption by posting lots of little “look what I bought” posts
and “look where I went” posts.
A typical "buy-brag" social media post
You
might put it this way: Facebook is a fine platform for feelers and
spenders, but it's not a very good platform for thinkers.
Particularly appalling is the lack of control a Facebook user has
over his own Facebook page. If you happen to have written a long
Facebook post detailing your philosophy of life, there is no way for you to highlight that post so that it always appears prominently
to anyone who comes to your page. Such a post will get “lost in
the stream” after you post ten or twenty trivial little posts
and photos.
If
Facebook may encourage us to produce short and shallow social media
contributions, the same thing can be said about Twitter. By
limiting the length of a tweet (a message posted on Twitter) to 140
characters, Twitter has rather been encouraging people to make short
soundbites about topics, rather than deep, complex reflections. This
problem has only been slightly alleviated by the fact that Twitter
recently increased its maximum tweet length to 280 characters. It's
all but impossible to state an argument of any depth or complexity
using only 280 characters.
A
platform such as Twitter is ideal for someone who rose to public
prominence despite a lack of depth, a type of person who might cringe
at the idea of writing a complex thousand-word essay, but who enjoys
the opportunity to vent his ire at various people or things that
annoy him, by tweeting short little bursts of angry prose.
Thankfully
we still have the blogosphere, where people can write posts that
appear in a way that the author can control, without being at the
mercy of some automatic formatting process that makes everything you
post look like some blip in a stream of consciousness, with most
people seeing your stream of consciousness getting all mixed up with
other people's stream of consciousness. If you want to do some
serious online writing about something, put it in your own blog, using easy-to-use tools like blogger.com, rather
than relying on Facebook presentation algorithms that disfavor the reflective thinker and favor instead short little brags and outbursts.
The blogosphere is deeper
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