15 January

I have many conversations about how FB should be used. That FB is where people mostly go to update each other on what they’re doing in life. Like an interactive set of social pages from the old local newspaper. And that if you want ‘engagement’ here, that’s what you should target. Here’s a gratuitous picture of me at Christmas time. Those types of posts are certainly far and away the most popular. You could post about taking a crap here and it would get a lot more interest than your passion for beekeeping, or whatever. It’s like a platform to peer through everybody else’s windows, a universal busybodyness. But. The big but. Social media is not social networking, it long ceased being that. Connecting people was the bait, in a bait and switch. We’re now many years into the switch, now peoples’ personal and social lives are locked in here. The switch is horrendous, and in my view the end of our societies. That sounds a big claim, from something so cuddly and harmless as just sharing what we’re all doing. But these platforms take that, and use it to make money. And they do that by weaponising your personal and social life. By driving people into various teams, who then fight one another. That drives ‘engagement’, and then revenue, for the platforms. People are literally living their lives, through these platforms, they can’t look away. Everything becomes a curated part of a feed, your phone is the link, which you carry with you everywhere. The phone transforms your ‘real life’ into social media life, and social media and its ‘fight fight fight/compare compare compare’ algorithms then shape your real life in return. It’s a vicious bubble.