This is interesting because: 1. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) has reddit-like thumbs up/thumbs down voting for references. You can read someones citation and be like pfffft, stupid cite. How cool and refreshingly not stodgy! One brick in the ivory tower replaced with group intelligence--for better or worse. Now if we can just start doing academic writing in a way that doesnt require years of training to read. 2. The key is primary manner. From the paper: On Facebook, people frequently express emotions, which are later seen by their friends via Facebook’s “News Feed” product (8). Because people’s friends frequently produce much more content than one person can view, the News Feed filters posts, stories, and activities undertaken by friends. News Feed is the primary manner by which people see content that friends share. Which content is shown or omitted in the News Feed is determined via a ranking algorithm that Facebook continually develops and tests in the interest of showing viewers the content they will find most relevant and engaging. Thats my life, Facebook! How startling to think that Facebooks algorithms are determining what information from my facebook friends reaches me. I prefer to think that That God and deterministic nuclear-electromagnetic interactions do that, not a company whose stock I can buy. Where is my choice?! The less startling realization is that weve always allowed algorithms to choose what information reaches us. We call those other algorithms television and movies, pet politics (gay marriage! gun control!), and friends. You dont spend time with media, ideas, and people who say what you dont want to hear. And just as we used to change the channel, shake our head, or avoid interacting, we prune and subscribe to information feeds that would facilitate our individual notions of who we are. If were talking about it, its there for us. Theres our choice. 3. Again, from the paper: When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks. There are several scripts we can draw from when reading about this study. Which script will you choose? Distrust of corporations? Violation of privacy? Afraid of change? Dont understand; dont wanna? The takeaway I arrive at, having looked at those scripts from arms length, is a sort of dystopian convergance, which per my earlier point 2, is why we read an an article like this and pass it on to our friends by sharing, liking, or commenting. Certain individuals have a worldview that necessitates imagining a dystopian future. You can see this across the politically spectrum e.g., if we dont label GMOs Monsanto wins or if we dont uphold traditional marriage our childrens heads will explode. And dystopian futures are the mainstay of scifi. So, in our imagined scifi future, you could have some institute, either oppressive big brother government or aggressive well-financed corporatocracy, pulling strings on peoples social networks to placate the population and make people happy. Its a scary thought, and one which has a very clear linear beginning here, today on facebook. What is so frequently missed in scifi is that we are far more likely to opt-in to that sort of manipulated, false happiness than have it imposed on us by bad guys. Why would some dystopian outcome be forced on us when we will happily choose one for ourselves, as we do every day in the media, ideas, and people we choose? We opt-in to facebook. We want to be happy. So the more facebook makes us happy, the better off we are and the more we will continue to choose it. Our resulting happiness is not false or manipulated, any more than the happiness that results from our friends and significant others is false; because we choose them. Its realness is irrelevant. That a company is at the helm, steering our emotions? Thats nothing new. That has always been the case, and we prefer to keep it that way. You know this is true because Facebook exists in the first place. ---- Three paragraph summary of the study attached to this post. Link to the full 4 page paper in the first comment:
Posted on: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 17:52:54 +0000
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