Pick A Side

I've come to realise that social media in general doesn't like it when people make observations.  That might sound like an odd statement to make, but let me explain what I mean by this.  Most social media platforms have gone from being a place where you share how you feel, or what you're thinking about, to being a place where people comment on anything and everything.  Facebook statuses once took the form of "is..." that was hard-coded into the platform, if you wanted to post a status update, it had to take the form of an "is..." statement, "John is bored", "Jane is thinking of ordering pizza", "Alex is packing for Paris" etc.  This had its limitations admittedly, but it forced the user to post statuses that were actually about the person behind the profile, or at least it put you in a position where what you posted wouldn't make sense if it wasn't.  That didn't last that long in terms of the evolution of the site's design, it was abandoned relatively early.  Eventually you were able to post anything you wanted that would simply appear beneath your name, rather than being part of a grammatical syntax.

When that design change occurred, Facebook moved from being a platform where you shared details about yourself specifically, towards being a platform where you commented on things you shared, or issues in general.  This wasn't unique to Facebook, the same evolution occurred on other social media platforms.  Twitter in its infancy was designed to be used to post short text based messages as statuses, they were always called tweets but they were intended to be single, stand alone posts.  This functionality also evolved like that of Facebook to include the ability to share links with previews of the content, embed content like youtube videos, and now the platform allows you to string tweets together into a thread, this combined with the character limit being raised from 140 characters to 280 characters all imply the same underlying change in mentality - namely that the platform expects you to comment on something.  I don't mean this in the way that comments appear on a blog or beneath a youtube video, although those share the same desired interaction.

No, what I actually mean by this is that these platforms have gone from being places where you share information about you specifically, your interests, and your life, to being a place where you are expected to comment on current events, on links and content others have shared, and in response to others attempts to engage with you.  You might be thinking now, so what's the issue here?  Well, the issue is that this change although subtle, has a much greater impact on your behaviour than you think, the subtlety of this change also makes it remarkably easy to monetise and commoditise what you are sharing.  By this I mean, tweets and status updates about how you feel today are useless to these platforms, what is useful to these platforms is why you feel that way.  Again this is a subtle change but it all comes down to money at the end of the day. 

"John is happy!" is a status that offers no profit to these platforms, "I love this! <link>" with the link being a link to any product or consumable item, movie, music, games etc, is a profitable status because it tells the platform what you like, which can be used to profile you, build correlations between products and demographics, and ultimately to sell you products, whether that be through the platform or through advertising partners that might not even be targeting you through the internet at all.  If a high volume of tweets in the London area talk about loving a new chocolate bar for instance, that company would benefit from slapping a massive poster on the London Underground - you might find yourself asking why there would be a correlation but that's irrelevant with this type of data mining, you don't need to understand why two products are often bought together, all you need to know is that it is common, so you can stick them side by side and watch your sales rise.

What all of this has to do with social networks is the realisation that your view on anything and everything is what these platforms want.  They don't actually care about social interaction, they don't care about making their platforms beneficial or detrimental to their users, they only care about profit.  If you have a social media account where you do not comment on current affairs, current trends, or engage in a "fandom" then you likely won't get far.  Or to put it bluntly, no-one cares about your private life or anything about you as a person, all they care about is what you think of X - where 'X' is whatever their focus is.  To give you an insight into how prevalent this is, there is a hashtag on twitter - #OnBrand - which is full of people either telling you what they think their "brand" is and what defines it, or what they perceive others' brands to be and what define them.  You can trawl through this hashtag and see for most accounts you can quite quickly pick out one or two focal points for their tweets.  In other words you can quickly stereotype twitter accounts into being fan accounts of a given artist, music, type of event etc

So you might find yourself asking now, if social media wants you to comment so much, why doesn't it like observations?  Well, the reason is because making an observation is passive, whereas commenting is active.  If you make an observation about a particular issue it doesn't commit you to an opinion or a view point, it doesn't tell the advertisers or the platform how to profile you.  If you try tweeting "wow there's a lot of porn on twitter" - a simple observation, something that doesn't commit you to an opinion of approval or disapproval, it's an observation nothing more; do this however and you'll see adult content slowly filter its way into your feed.  This happens because the platform is designed to interpret everything you say as either an endorsement or a protest.  You might think I am paranoid for saying this but as someone who has been using twitter for quite some time I am well aware of what the platform and specifically the API behind it can actually do.  The twitter API is capable of discerning emotion from your tweets.  There was a time this feature was public knowledge and publicly accessible, those who are twitter veterans will remember twitter's advanced search page once included the option of searching for positive tweets, negative tweets, retweets, or question tweets; this functionality although no longer part of the interface still exists, as a developer you can access it, there are even third party apps that provide access to it.

You might notice if you are eagle-eyed that these options do not contain a "neutral" option - that's because the platform assumes if it's not negative then it's positive by default, hence the interpretation of your ambiguous tweet as being one of endorsement.  You might have also experienced this if you have ever tweeted something sarcastic about a product or brand and then found it creeping into your feed, again this is because the sarcasm is missed and the tweet is taken at face value as being a positive comment.

Posting observations or anything that is neutral in general is not profitable, and these platforms have evolved to the point where their design influences your behaviour and actively encourages you to "take a side" on anything and everything.  Knowing this, it's not surprising that these platforms are filled with love and hate but no middle ground.  You find people that are either completely devoted to something or hate it with a passion, those in the middle never tweet about the things they are indifferent to because they know in the negative they will be attacked or in the positive they will get swept up and included with a fandom they actually have no interest in. 

But that's just an observation, and notably one I did not make on a social network, instead I chose to write a post about it where I can actually explain the concept.