The extended ‘chilling’ effect of Facebook (2016)
researchgate.net
researchgate.net
So the question to me becomes where is the line drawn between free expression and societal norms enforced by our culture. Once upon a time, that line was drawn by your family and your community, people who you saw every day probably. Now, it's being drawn not just by your close contacts but likely also by the anonymous data collection of social network sites.
That would seem to be the true scary part of this chilling effect, that it's no longer being enforced by people we know and interact with but instead by people who we may barely know at all as well as by the marketing and news information that we are fed through the algorithms of social networks.
That is a subtly insightful comment. As I am doing some self-learning on human history, I. wantes to expound on this point a bit.
It is true that one of the primary objectives of societies, communities, etc., is to restrain the individual ostensibly for the greater good. In the modern era, the greater good has become conflated with those who hold power. However, before we broke out of the Malthusian trap, self-actualizing and expressing one's real self could spell doom for a community.
In general, risk-averse behavior has been common among all groups that operated along the margins of survival. The sheer challenge of survival in premodern societies always constrained the behavior of the poor. Taboos and social constraints limited experimentation innovation, and self-expression. For example, the role of marriage and infidelity is the reverse of what it is today. Marriage was a contract, not an expression of love. Often, the only way to express true love was through an affair. Also, it explains the taboo on homosexuality. Since infant mortality rates were higher, couples tended to have more children than we do today. If the union didn't produce children, who would farm the next generation?
This was a rational reflection of the fact that experimentation increases the variability of results. Greater variability means not only potentially greater gains but more ominously for those at the very margin of survival potentially ruinous losses. A great part of the cultural energy of poor farming societies has always been devoted to suppressing experimentation and self-expression. This repression, in effect, was their substitute for insurance policies.
Personal ability and personal choice individual "pursuit of happiness," in the modern sense were suppressed by Taboos and social restrictions that have always been most emphatic among the poor. Such restrictions were usually superseded only in societies with high productivity.
This makes me really thankful I was born in the modern era or I'd be doing what my father did, as he would be doing what his father did and so on.
Including not only oneself, but all future current and future friends, lovers and offspring.
But the real kicker is that ultimately, it's not just about managing your presentation, but about the (impossibility of) managing the interpretations of others, according to rules, quotas and/or programs they defined and which they will always be somewhat in the dark about. So if in doubt, if you haven't seen others say it and be rewarded for it, maybe don't say it. How's that for a great outlook.
I try not to worry too much, but it's undeniably had an affect on my behavior.
I've been off of facebook for over 2 years. I used to log in occasionally to see if things changed. Now I log in to look in morbid curiosity.
The lens of facebook makes me feel that their users are a meat-based botnet propagating other people's content. I'm shocked that so many of my friends have devolved to this point. It is deeply affecting my parenting strategy.
I have occasion to log into Facebook on my phone occasionally, in which case I am exposed to the news feed, and I totally agree with you... It somehow seems really bizarre when you're not used to it. It's hard to articulate exactly what seems so off about it, but I can't help but wonder what people could be doing with that time that they'd enjoy much more (I don't personally know a single person who would say they enjoy their time on Facebook, rather than having it be the equivalent of a microwave burrito: you consume it because you don't have the mental activation energy to do that's less immediately at hand.)
And whose core motive is to make money.
I think It's not so much use of the social networks that makes people more careful. Just awareness how much of a WMD gossip machine they are.
In a level 3, you'll say anything. You don't care, you may or may not believe it, but you'll say it.
In a level 2, like social media, you'll say things you wouldn't say in real life, but you'll still moderate some of what you say because your peers will see it and maybe they'll disapprove publically.
Level 1 would be your in person communication. This is going to be highly moderated compared to l2 or l3. You certainly won't say things in person that you would say online.
To me this seems makes sense.
Social media are useless for any serious discussion unless you have pseudonymity (HN, reddit) or full anonymity (4chan).
Sure, the site administrator, your ISP, or the NSA may know it's you posting, but the other users of the site don't. And you don't have a site wide identity that follows you around. Unless you explicitly choose so.
For me, it's got nothing to do with anonymity or some possible later repercussion; rather, it's being sensitive to short-term feedback. Effectively, the bandwidth of human communications through the internet is low and error-prone, and hence stressful for me to get my thoughts across. (It doesn't help that long-form replies -- which help me explain my ideas better -- have been grossly devalued.)
Sadly, it's gotten worse in the last few years -- perhaps due to Facebook, or perhaps due to societal changes that opened the door to mediums like Facebook.
I seem less and less capable of growing that thick skin that people always talk about...
Every tweet is like an underdetermined system of equations with infinitely many solutions (solution == what they really meant when they typed up the tweet, and everything else that readers project onto posters). Everyone has to choose how to interpret ambiguous statements all the time, and by nature our brains are more likely to choose interpretations that conform to our own expectations.
We can create our own private echo chambers if we aren't careful, where we always interpret what people who are on "our side" say in the most charitable way possible, and we always interpret statements from opponents in terms of the biggest strawmen our brains can come up with. This is a pitfall of any sort of communication, but it seems to be a vastly greater danger with online communication.
People tend to blame the lousiness of online communication on other people, and there's some truth to that, but I think it's just inherent in both the medium and human nature. In the long term I hope that digital mediums can evolve to support better communication and provide more fertile ground for more constructive discussions.
When you put it out in public online, it might persist unaltered for years or even decades. My most upvoted comments under an old pseudonym on YouTube caused me to decide to never, ever look up old posts on Usenet.
Online is an entirely different story. The barriers to communicating efficiently makes people default to pattern-matching instead of thought, which pretty quickly devolves into the lowest common denominator of conversation.
As you say, places like reddit are better for this, where people have a higher tolerance for longer conversation and the interface supports longer posts. I'm part of a subreddit that's probably in my top 3 fora ever for quality of conversation ever, but it relies heavily on the fact that the norms are pretty well-internalized by everyone.
Almost as though people exhibit adherence to a culture just to perpetuate that culture itself rather than their own identity (of which there is none).
I'd believe that habit of thought could transfer to offline life, e.g. worrying about getting caught at a strip club, as per the paper.
Maybe you've just gotten used to this idea? It is possible your data is vastly different from other individuals, even if it appears universal on the surface. It is very easy to feel exempt from scrutiny if one thinks their data is only included into "safe" or "popular" categories or topics.
(Not entirely related, but this type of uncertainty helped me rationalize the deletion of my Facebook account.)
The authors proceed to measure if this self-censoring behaviour extends into real life for people who are thinking about social networks versus people who are not. The method surveyed the participants about either a trip to an adult night club, or a theme park. Half the participants were "primed" with Facebook — meaning they were shown photos of the trips they could take as a mocked-up Facebook event, and they were told they would need to add the trip representative to their Facebook so their photos could be tagged for promotional reasons.
The measure they used to determine self-censoring behaviour is called Negatively Directed Impression Management (NDIM). Online this means removing yourself from tagged photos, deleting social media content that may be offensive, or other forms of removal.
To measure it offline they asked participants how much they would need to be paid to take part in the trip, and whether they would be interested in a follow up trip (the payment stuff was worked into their cover story).
The Facebook-primed group showed significantly higher offline NDIM for the adult night club trip. The theme park trip showed no significant difference.
The participants were composed of 80 male Facebook users at a UK university, about 20 years old.
I doubt it. IMO, Facebook as it is today is a fad that is already cracking -- FB constantly has to adapt to retain engagement with younger people and new users.
It felt like Snapchat except the timer was set to ten years.
https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674?helpref=relate...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/permanently-delete-f...
edit: lol for being slow on the draw.
(https://prism-break.org/en/categories/gnu-linux/#social-netw...)