McLuhan is laughing in his grave. This is what he meant by that cliché and cryptic 'The media is the message.' The content of the media doesn't matter, the way the media warps our brain into thinking about it (and the larger world) is what matters.
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But leaving that aside and focusing on FB, yes, I think we often obsess over the wrong things re: FB. There have been so many headline topics in this busy FB media cycle, I almost can't keep track. First, supposedly 'micro-targeting' was the horrifying bogeyman.
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Cambridge Analytica could swing an election using provably ineffectual keyword targeting in FB, but hey 'psychometrics'. Well, where'd that story go? Targeting system is the same as before. Now it's not worth worrying about?
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Or privacy as the big deal, and GDPR was the great savior. Well, GDPR didn't do shit, and if anything, solidified FB/GOOG's market position in the EU (which I wrote about extensively, to much jeering). Nobody gives a shit about privacy really, so I guess that's gone.
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Now, it's disinformation, something that's unavoidable in any disintermediated system with free(ish) speech where Joe Tin-Hat can beat the reach of a NYT piece if he's inflammatory enough. But maybe since FB is blocking marginally more than it used to, that story will die.
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I'm cataloging two years of talking points to illustrate that much of the conversation has been as mimetic as the FB platform itself, with questions rising and never quite resolving, and being dictated by whim and viral happenstance.
End of conversation
New conversation -
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The 3 of us agree on it, but the handful of people who control the social internet don't seem to. What do you think are the chances of convincing them? It would only take changing 5 minds, maybe 6, to meaningfully improve our ability to confront all those other problems.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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