A few weeks ago, I posted an essay about basically this. The commons that social media is enclosing is our attention, our socialization, and therefore our ability to organize. They are in the business of converting attention directly to capital and vice-versa on a scale that didn’t exist prior. And of course, our interests are fundamentally misaligned.
The network effect is the tendency of certain commodities to become more valuable as more people have access to them. Phones lines are like this. Importantly, so are the commodified images of celebrities all the way from the Kardashians down to Vaush. So we give our attention to social networks and the networks then lend that attention who are capable of producing more. For example, if your favorite streamer is on a social network, you may visit more often, so the network lending that streamer your attention will be a net gain in attention overall.
Since these companies are looking to maximize engagement, the attention centralizes on a small number of people because, thanks to the networking effect, that attention is more valuable when centralized than it would be if it were distributed evenly. And of course they can’t let any of the highly-viewed figures be too revolutionary, so you have a manufactured-consent-style filter going on.
As it turns out, organizations are more resilient and capable when connections between people are redundant and plentiful rather than centralized, so this is a model that fundamentally disrupts our ability to organize and larger proportions of human time are spent on corporate social networks.
A few weeks ago, I posted an essay about basically this. The commons that social media is enclosing is our attention, our socialization, and therefore our ability to organize. They are in the business of converting attention directly to capital and vice-versa on a scale that didn’t exist prior. And of course, our interests are fundamentally misaligned.
The network effect is the tendency of certain commodities to become more valuable as more people have access to them. Phones lines are like this. Importantly, so are the commodified images of celebrities all the way from the Kardashians down to Vaush. So we give our attention to social networks and the networks then lend that attention who are capable of producing more. For example, if your favorite streamer is on a social network, you may visit more often, so the network lending that streamer your attention will be a net gain in attention overall.
Since these companies are looking to maximize engagement, the attention centralizes on a small number of people because, thanks to the networking effect, that attention is more valuable when centralized than it would be if it were distributed evenly. And of course they can’t let any of the highly-viewed figures be too revolutionary, so you have a manufactured-consent-style filter going on.
As it turns out, organizations are more resilient and capable when connections between people are redundant and plentiful rather than centralized, so this is a model that fundamentally disrupts our ability to organize and larger proportions of human time are spent on corporate social networks.