{"id":34858,"date":"2016-05-21T02:00:16","date_gmt":"2016-05-21T06:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=34858"},"modified":"2016-05-20T08:54:34","modified_gmt":"2016-05-20T12:54:34","slug":"social-media-needs-social-relevance-to-disguise-the-narcissism-at-the-center-of-its-appeal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/05\/21\/social-media-needs-social-relevance-to-disguise-the-narcissism-at-the-center-of-its-appeal\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Social media needs social relevance to disguise the narcissism at the center of its appeal&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/sultanknish.blogspot.ca\/2016\/05\/the-trouble-with-facebook.html\" target=\"_blank\">Daniel Greenfield<\/a> explains how Facebook got into the business of &#8220;curating&#8221; your user experience:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Despite the denials, the stories about Facebook\u2019s bias are real. But the bias isn\u2019t there because of the company\u2019s new technology. Facebook is biased because of its reliance on the biased old media.<\/p>\n<p>Facebook\u2019s trending topics wasn\u2019t the automatic system that the company wanted people to think it was. Instead it hired young journalists with new media experience to \u201ccurate\u201d its news feed. And plenty of them proved to be biased against conservative news and sources. Meanwhile someone at the top of Facebook\u2019s dysfunctional culture wanted to play up Syria and the Black Lives Matter hate group.<\/p>\n<p>Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s fundamental mistake was recreating the biases and agendas of the old media in a service whose whole reason for existing was to allow users to create their own experience. The big difference between social and search is that social media is supposed to let you be the curator.<\/p>\n<p>But, like Facebook\u2019s trending topics, social curation was another scam. Facebook users don\u2019t really define what they see. It\u2019s defined for them by the company\u2019s agendas. This includes the purely financial. It would be foolish to think that the fortunes that Buzzfeed spends on Facebook advertising don\u2019t impact the placement of its stories by Facebook\u2019s mysterious algorithm. And there is the more complex intersection of politics and branding in an age when business relevance means social relevance.<\/p>\n<p>Twitter piggybacked on the Arab Spring to seem relevant. Facebook has used Black Lives Matter. Social media needs to be associated with political movements to seem more important than it is. Zuckerberg doesn\u2019t want to head up a shinier version of MySpace that was originally set up to rate the attractiveness of Harvard girls. Being socially relevant is better for business. Especially when the business is vapid at its core.<\/p>\n<p>Social media needs social relevance to disguise the narcissism at the center of its appeal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Daniel Greenfield explains how Facebook got into the business of &#8220;curating&#8221; your user experience: Despite the denials, the stories about Facebook\u2019s bias are real. But the bias isn\u2019t there because of the company\u2019s new technology. Facebook is biased because of its reliance on the biased old media. Facebook\u2019s trending topics wasn\u2019t the automatic system that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,28,53],"tags":[97,391,593],"class_list":["post-34858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-media","category-politics","tag-advertising","tag-facebook","tag-socialmedia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-94e","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34858"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34859,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34858\/revisions\/34859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}