I think everyone these days recognizes that placing social media on such a pedestal can have damaging effects on social and emotional areas of our life. Did we know that it could have this deep of an effect?
Jordan Hall says the the problems with social media can be reduced down to four main categories (read the full article here):
- Supernormal stimuli
The way I am understanding this concept is how we revolve our lives around what will get the most likes on a post. If a picture doesn’t get enough likes, many people will remove it because it doesn’t keep up with their standards.
2. Replacing strong link community with weak link affinity
This section discusses how we have come to value online relationships versus in person formal contact. By having such a high affinity for obtaining likes and comments we form a connection with our online audience rather than ‘physical proximity.’
3. Training people on complicated rather than complex environments
For this concept, Hall uses the example of Facebook emotions which I think is a great representation. You think that you have complete control over your actions, but in reality you only have the choice of 6 reactions. On other platforms you have even fewer, this strictly limits what you are able to do and makes it a much less complex environment.
4. The asymmetry of Human / AI Relationships
This was a concept a bit tougher for me to understand but i’ll take a go at it. Essentially, we have entered into a “relationship” with Facebook. We provide information (posts, friends, our details) and in exchange it produces content that it thinks we would like. The way we interact with this content, (ie. scroll past, open, remove) will alter this algorithm. This is a form of collective intelligence that is used on us without our knowledge.
Carson Whitford 
I definitely agree with you in the sense that we as people rely on social media so much and may care about our perception over the internet than we do in person. That we care so much that we even delete a post that didn’t keep up to internet “society’s standards”. One thing that I would like to question though is if collective intelligence already involves artificial intelligence in this day and age. I wrote in my blog post that I will attach.. “connected are heaps of ‘people’ that are all interested in the same thing”. My question is do you believe that collective intelligence already involves artificial intelligence or are we not quite there yet?
https://kennycichon.home.blog/2019/04/07/collective-intelligence/
LikeLiked by 1 person