Here we go again: another Facebook controversy, yet again violating our sense of privacy by letting others harvest our personal information. This flareup is a big one to be sure, leading some people to consider leaving Facebook altogether, but the company and most of its over 2 billion users will reconcile.
The vast majority will return to Facebook, just like they did the last time and the many times before that.
Decades of research has shown that our relationship with all media, whether movies, television or radio, is symbiotic: people like them because of the gratifications they get from consuming them – benefits like escapism, relaxation and companionship.
The more people use them, the more gratifications they seek and obtain.
Aside from providing content for our consumption, Facebook, Twitter, Google – indeed all interactive media – provide us with new possibilities for interaction on the platform that can satisfy some of our innate human cravings.
Interactive tools in Facebook provide simplified ways to engage your curiosity, broadcast your thoughts, promote your image, maintain relationships and fulfill the yearning for external validation.
The more you click, the stronger your online relationships.
All these tiny, fleeting contacts help users maintain relationships with large numbers of people with relative ease.
The more you reveal, the greater your chances of successful self-presentation. Studies have shown that strategic self-presentation is a key feature of Facebook use.
In this way, you can curate your online self and manage others’ impressions of you, something that would be impossible to do in real life with such regularity and precision. Online, you get to project the ideal version of yourself all the time.
The more you click, the more you can keep an eye on others. This kind of social searching and surveillance are among the most important gratifications obtained from Facebook. Most people take pleasure in looking up others on social media, often surreptitiously.
Even privacy-minded senior citizens, loathe to reveal too much about themselves, are known to use Facebook to snoop on others.
The more you reveal, the greater your social net worth. Being more forthcoming can get you a job via LinkedIn. It can also help an old classmate find you and reconnect.
Being active on social media is associated with increases in self-esteem and subjective well-being.
The more you click, the bigger and better the bandwagon. When you click to share a news story on social media or express approval of a product or service, you’re contributing to the creation of a bandwagon of support.
In this way, you get to be a part of online communities that form around ideas, events, movements, stories and products – which can ultimately enhance your sense of belonging.
The more you reveal, the greater your agency. Whether it’s a tweet, a status update or a detailed blog post, you get to express yourself and help shape the discourse on social media. This self-expression by itself can be quite empowering.
In all these ways, social media’s features provide us too many important gratifications to forego easily. If you think most users will give all this up in the off chance that illegally obtained data from their Facebook profiles and activities may be used to influence their votes, think again.
While most people may be squeamish about algorithms mining their personal information, there’s an implicit understanding that sharing personal data is a necessary evil that helps enhance their experience.
The algorithms that collect your information are also the algorithms that nudge you to be social, based on your interests, behaviors and networks of friends.
Consider how many notifications Facebook sends about events alone. When presented with a nudge about an event, you may at least consider going, probably even visit the event page, maybe indicate that you’re “Interested” and even decide to attend the event. None of these decisions would be possible without first receiving the nudge.
What if Facebook never nudged you? What if algorithms never gave you recommendations or suggestions? Would you still perform those actions?
Facebook knows this very well. Just try deleting your Facebook account and you will be made to realize what a massive repository it is of your private and public memory.
On the top of the page were profile photos of five friends, including the lead author of this article, with the line “S. Shyam will miss you.”
This is like asking if you would like to purposely and permanently cut off ties with all your friends. Now, who would want to do that?
(The views expressed above are the authors’ own. FIT neither endorses nor is responsible for the same. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article here.)
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