Data Loyalty
The cloud knows what you did last summer!
Based on limited human input, companies like Facebook and Twitter attempt to figure out what content you want to see, to be your trusted filter. This does not always produce the desired results.
Eric Myer, noted web design thinker, ran afoul of what he calls “Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty” when he opened FaceBook and got his algorithmically generated “Your Year in Review…” With a photo of his recently deceased daughter smiling at him. Eric was upset, saying in an article about the experience “Yes, my year looked like that. True enough. My year looked like the now-absent face of my little girl. It was still unkind to remind me so forcefully.”
Algorithms cannot read emotion, only numbers. The algorithm could not have predicted that Eric would not want to see the most popular photo on his FaceBook wall that year. At least not today. How could it?
So why don’t we just leave? Leave Facebook, Twitter, or any other filter that we grow dissatisfied with. It’s the same reason it’s hard to simply move houses when our neighbors annoy us: our how is where all of our stuff is, and our social media outlets our where all of our data stuff is.
As George Carlin noted:
You know how important that is, that’s the whole meaning of life, isn’t it, trying to find a place for your stuff. That’s all your house is, your house is just a place for your stuff. If you didn’t have so much gad damn stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. You’ll just be walking around all of the time. That’s all your house is: it’s a pile of stuff with a cover on it.
And a social media platform is just a database with all of your stuff in it.
We are becoming Data Loyal to those place we are keeping our stuff. As they become our trusted filters, we find it harder and harder to break away from them. The obvious difference, though, is that with a house you can move your stuff to a different house, a storage shed, or anywhere you want. Not so with your stuff on social media.
Facebook does not provide moving boxes to take your stuff to another social media platform.