WHY SOCIAL MEDIA SUCKS
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| WHY SOCIAL MEDIA SUCKS? |
It should make you feel sick. From its deliberately addictive design to its surveillance-based business model, social media represents the epitome of “Trojan horse design”: it’s meant to manipulate us into doing and sharing things we otherwise would not—often with negative effects on our mental health and society at large. And once you understand the forces behind social media, you may begin to think differently about many of the other apps and features on your phone, too.
Let’s start with a question: have you ever wondered why social media apps are all free? It’s not because their creators are driven by a philanthropic (পৰোপকাৰী) urge to help the world share selfies. It’s because we are not actually the customers, and the social media platform itself is not the product.
Instead, the customers are advertisers. And the product being sold is our attention.
Think about it: The more attention we devote to Facebook or Twitter or a dating app or other social media, the more chances there are for the program to show us a sponsored post. And the more information we voluntarily post, the more personalized, attention-stealing, and profitable (for the social media company) the sponsored posts and ads will be.
In the words of Dopamine Labs founder Ramsay Brown, “You don’t pay for Facebook. Advertisers pay for Facebook. You get to use it for free because your eyeballs are what’s being sold there.”
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| Facebook literally demands money for boosting my post |
I have a Facebook page named Gyapon, Facebook literally demands money for boosting my post. So in this scenario, I am advertiser, so I have to pay. Unlike you I am no longer a product, I became a consumer. As I have not paid, so my post are less suggested. My reach is limited. You can easily see the reach of any video or photo more than any link because people engage more with that type of post.
As we touched upon earlier, the prize these advertisers are after is “ engagement,” which is the metric by which companies evaluate the number of clicks, likes, shares, and comments associated with their content. Engagement is sometimes referred to as “ the currency of the attention economy,” and advertisers are willing to spend a lot of money on it.
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| once we’ve spent attention, we can never get it back. |
In other words, every moment of attention we spend scrolling through social media is attention spent making money for someone else. The numbers are staggering: a New York Times analysis calculated that as of 2014, Facebook users were spending a collective 39,757 years’ worth of attention on the site, every single day. It’s the attention that we didn’t spend on our families, or our friends, or ourselves. And just like time, once we’ve spent attention, we can never get it back.
This is a really big deal because our attention is the most valuable thing we have. We experience only what we pay attention to. We remember only what we pay attention to. When we decide what to pay attention to at the moment, we are making a broader decision about how we want to spend our lives.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with spending your attention on social media (or on any other app). There is also nothing wrong with a designer trying to make an app that’s fun, engaging, and profitable. But as users, we should be using our apps because we’ve made a conscious choice to do so—not because of manipulative psychological tricks that are meant to make money for someone else.
Once you’re aware of the motives behind social media platforms—namely, attention-stealing and information gathering—you’ll begin to notice how these motives are incorporated into their designs.
Thanks for reading, As Always, ANKURJIT KALITA
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