Facebook's Desperate Smoke Screen
calnewport.com
Facebook's Desperate Smoke Screen
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Re: Facebook's Desperate Smoke Screen
#2Outrage-provoking political content might have been good business for Facebook, but in its absence, this company’s attention engineers can tap into any number of other distraction wells to keep users compulsively tapping the little blue icon on their phone.
In other words, fixing Facebook’s negative impacts on democracy won’t necessarily hurt their bottom line, while admitting that their business relies on a foundation of addiction and exploitation definitely would.
Bingo. Unfortunately they can probably keep up the shell game for a long time, until enough people recognize what FB actually “offers” the enduser. While plenty of people here understand the downsides of FB, I don’t know that most people do, yet.
A “service” offering dubious rewards for the ability to try and monopolize your time and attention, track you, and actively manipulate you, is simply not fixable.
Re: Facebook's Desperate Smoke Screen
#3> authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe
He somehow never forgets to bring this up.
Re: Facebook's Desperate Smoke Screen
#4I honestly find myself scratching my head every time George Soros speaks. He almost comes across as someone desperate to be taken seriously, to be viewed as a visionary, a thought leader, a prognosticator.
But what has he down to justify this? Nothing as far as I can tell. He made a bunch of money as a currency speculator, most famously breaking the British pound. Sure. Good for him. But if we're going to talk about adding value to society...
Re: Facebook's Desperate Smoke Screen
#5I have read most of Cal's books and they are good. His fight against social media is... I don't know, extreme. The problem to me isn't social media per se. The real problem is self-discipline/control.
Cal crusades against social media, but I don't see him crusade against video games, or watching TV for example. I think a good/better metric is total screen time.
My children are given an allowance in the form of screen time. I kind of do the same for myself and I have decent self-control. That is the key, I think... limits and control by taking responsibility for yourself and those you are charged to raise.
Re: Facebook's Desperate Smoke Screen
#6I honestly find myself scratching my head every time George Soros speaks. He almost comes across as someone desperate to be taken seriously, to be viewed as a visionary, a thought leader, a prognosticator. But what has he down to justify this? Nothing as far as I can tell. He made a bunch of money as a currency speculator, most famously breaking the British pound. Sure. Good for him. But if we're going to talk about…
I think that he thinks that his philanthropy gives him legitimacy.
Re: Facebook's Desperate Smoke Screen
#7I have always compared Facebook's attention engineering to fast food companies making their food increasingly more addicting. Just as I stopped eating most junk food after college, I similarly came to a point where I would rather consume more quality information for my brain's diet than what Facebook serves up.
Re: Facebook's Desperate Smoke Screen
#8I'm rather bothered that I know nothing about Soros except a bunch of vague, negative feelings about him that have pop-culturally osmosed to me through constant usage of his name in 4channish/the_donaldish media. He's some kind of evil mastermind destroying civilisation with his vast wealth.
I know this is almost certainly not true, but I'm so bothered that this is my immediate thought. I feel like the alt-right has succeeded in partially hijacking some of my brain.
Mayb some of you will think I'm some kind of easily-manipulated idiot and that you would never fall prey to similar thought processes. That we're all too smart to really believe Facebook and that "critical thinking" is all we need. That the things Soros is talking about in this article could never happen to us. I in turn think that this kind of intellectual arrogance is a bit dangerous and precisely leads to the kind of manipulation that social media can have on us.
Re: Facebook's Desperate Smoke Screen
#9This is something I have a hard time understanding because I don't get how social media appeals to people to the point that they become addicted to it. I enjoy getting on once, maybe twice, a day to look at a few things. It just doesn't do that much for me, especially in the state it has evolved into. But if something unproductive is really sapping time and attention from masses of people, that seems like a problem.
Re: Facebook's Desperate Smoke Screen
#10Interesting article. The whole smoke screen idea is in a way interesting but at the same time; isn't it exactly what is to be expected from commercial providers of social media? I'm not sure if you catch my drift, but since when do we expect for-profit companies to act in societies best interest? To protect your brand does sometimes include admitting wrong doings or sketchy behavior - if we wish to browse through social media without secrets and/or intent to get the user to return as often as possible, shouldn't we accept the state of Facebook and Friends and look in other places?