Refleciton #1 Edited: Social Media as News Source

We live in a day and age where a large amount of people get their news from social media like Facebook. While there is nothing wrong with getting news through a new medium, and in fact there are actually numerous benefits to doing so, this particular news source has plenty of issues.

                Facebook, for example, according to Kielburger, “will prioritize posts to your feed that you’re more likely to agree with based on your likes.” This can lead to people receiving a very one sided view of the world around them, where everything is seen through a single, shared perspective. This can effectively blind people to the views and reasoning of others with different perspectives.  Finding a well-rounded perspective on today’s issues is becoming increasingly difficult because of algorithms used by sites like Facebook that tend to show us what it thinks we want to see.

                We think we are in control of the technology we use, but Facebook is far from being a domesticated technology. Baym mentions that this domestication of technology occurs when “what once seemed marvelous and strange, capable of creating greatness and horror, is now so ordinary as to be invisible. Life without them can become unimaginable.” Facebook has certainly become an integral part of how we communicate and keep in touch, but it seems safe to say that it has more of a control over us than we do over it.

                Baym mentions that other “domesticated” technologies like the landline or cellular telephones do not have people arguing over their possible utopian or dystopian implications. Many social media sites still receive a mixed reception.  Plenty of sites want us to give our phone number, name, address, where we went to school, etc. so that they can better connect us to people we may or may not know. We are encouraged to share everything with everybody and to largely discard our privacy. What is shown to us is hand-picked for us based on posts and stories that we have liked and websites and links that we have clicked. Sometimes it feels that Facebook knows us better than we know Facebook.

                When we are being strictly fed what we want to hear and what we want to see, it starts to drive a wedge between people of opposing views. The disagreements people have with each other are only exacerbated through social media and the perspective it gives to us. Facebook is not a bad place to get news, you’ll get news faster than you would simply watching television, but it’s important to know that what you see and hear on Facebook is only a portion of the whole picture. You will have to delve deeper than your feed to truly understand a particular issue when it arises.

Baym, Nancy K. Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity, 2010.

Kielburger, Craig, and Marc Kielburg. "Let's Break Out Of The Personalized Internet Bubbles Dividing Us." The Huffington Post. February 17, 2017. Accessed February 20, 2017. http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/craig-and-marc-kielburger/internet-bubbles_b_14821482.html.