Posts tagged socialmedia

Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and became its vice president for user growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” about the company he helped make. “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he told an audience at Stanford Graduate School of Business, before recommending people take a “hard break” from social media. Palihapitiya’s criticisms were aimed not only at Facebook, but the wider online ecosystem. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”

via https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/11/16761016/former-facebook-exec-ripping-apart-society

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto, penned clearly in response to accusations leveled at the social network in the wake of the bitter U.S. election campaign, is a scary, dystopian document. It shows that Facebook – launched, in Zuckerberg’s own words five years ago, to “extend people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships” – is turning into something of an extraterritorial state run by a small, unelected government that relies extensively on privately held algorithms for social engineering.

via https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017–02–17/mark-zuckerberg-s-manifesto-for-facebook-offers-a-social-dystopia

When it comes to talking about social media, it’s easy to get trapped in utopian and dystopian rhetorics.  My goal is not to go down one of these rabbit holes, but rather, to critically interrogate our participation in the culture of fear.  Many of you are technologists, designers, pundits, and users. How are we contributing to or combating the culture of fear?  What are our responsibilities with regard to the culture of fear?  What kinds of things can and should we do?

http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2012/SXSW2012.html

For the past six months my research group has been looking into an app that explores social dissonance on Facebook. Today we are announcing the public release of EnemyGraph. The project was developed principally by graduate student Bradley Griffith with invaluable help from undergraduate Harrison Massey.

EnemyGraph is an application that allows you to list your “enemies”. Any Facebook friend or user of the app can be an enemy. More importantly, you can also make any page or group on Facebook an “enemy”. This covers almost everything including people, places and things. During our testing testing triangles and q-tips were trending, along with politicians, music groups, and math.

http://bit.ly/H5yEjZ