Self-Construction in a New World

In the previous article in this series, we proposed Identity Reinforcement as the fundamental cause behind most of what we do –and the reason for Facebook’s addictive power and overwhelming success. Throughout their lives, people try to build and reinforce a certain identity. This need for reinforcement conditions us to favor information that confirms our worldview, and social interaction in which our identity is approved. What Facebook does is that it gives its users a physical place for displaying their persona and receiving positive social feedback on themselves. The idea is not particularly new, but it’s an incredibly powerful one, and FB implements it well.

Yet, not every user is fully satisfied with Facebook’s impact on their time and social lives. Besides the usual critics such as FB being a time waster, lacking privacy options in the release of personal contents, etc., an interesting comment that I keep hearing is that social interaction on Facebook feels empty, pointless –fake, even.

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On Facebook and the Identity Reinforcement Theory

Have you ever asked yourself the question, « why do I keep coming back to my Facebook page » ? Why do so many people spend so much time on Facebook ? Is it for the usefulness of the thing –to keep up with information that’s vital for your social life? But then, how come most people’s Facebook refresh rate is dozens of time higher than what would be needed to just “keep up”? Where does this compulsive usage come from?

First there is this one idea, most often put forward by Zuck and Co, that we have a stalker-like crave for trivia regarding people we know in real-life.

“It’s not like an intellectual thing, it’s hardwired into humans that you need to focus on what the people around you are doing.”

Mark Zuckerberg 

But I think stopping there would be a little over-simplifying. The fact that we find « interesting » to read the latest news about our friends doesn’t explain why we ourselves are putting so much info about us for them to read, and wait so eagerly for these little red dots to pop up in our browser next to the Facebook logo.

There’s another reason. And it’s perhaps not an entirely obvious one, though you might have guessed it by now.

But first, let me tell you a few things about yourself. 

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Escaping the Tyranny of Mediocrity

In a world that is evolving at an exponential rate, we’re facing new and extraordinary challenges. Whether energy, climate, world economy, anywhere you look at, we’ve got a world to build. But today communication technologies empower us to do the impossible, and we’re now able to tackle these future-changing questions armed with the most powerful tool of all : collective intelligence. Yet it seems to me that the power conferred to each of us through this small pixellated window you’re staring at has not been followed by a corresponding will to act. We have instant access to the entire knowledge of humanity, we can reach in real time nearly anyone on the planet, and yet we seem to have piano-playing cats on our minds. Why is it so? Are humans intrinsically passive and interested in terrible things?

I don’t think so. I think it’s all about the system.

The way I see it, we’re really just using some awful content-propagation structures. Today, information, ideas and cultural contents are being shared through media corporations –TV-based, paper-based and increasingly Internet-based– and through social platforms such as Facebook, gaining in influence by the day. They determine who’s going to be exposed to what, and thus, they are what defines the nature and quality of the available content. They set, alone, what is going to be on people’s minds. Editorial boards, content aggregators

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The Piano Playing Cat Paradigm

What’s the common point between Youtube’s future tools for serendipity-based browsing, and the social browser RockMelt?

Both were presented to the public sometime last October, and both presentations humorously featured the infamous Youtube piano-playing-cat video as the archetypical example of the sort of content that we users like to discover and share out there.

Now that’s just an example. What’s a bit more striking than the piano-playing-cat reference is the overall pointlessness of the social sharing and content exploring featured in both presentations. If I were to judge from the kind of product pitch I come across every week, I would say that startups and big companies alike are currently devoting their energy to engineering the technological solutions for a world even more cluttered with useless garbage coming from your friends and from automated recommendations. Garbage that is “fun”. Isn’t that exciting?

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