Having a Facebook Account Is to Beg to Be Manipulated | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/media/having-facebook-account-beg-be-manipulated?akid=12021.108806.Q4wCTa&rd=1&s
The average Facebook user sees only 20 percent of the 1,500 stories per day that could have shown up in their news feed. The posts you receive are determined by algorithms whose bottom line is Facebook’s bottom line. The company is constantly adjusting all kinds of dials, quietly looking for the optimal mix to make us spend more of our time and money on Facebook. Of course the more we’re on Facebook, the more information they have about us to fine-tune their formulas for picking ads to show us. That’s their business model: We create and give Facebook, for free, the content they use and the data they mine to hold our attention, which Facebook in turn sells to advertisers.
John Kenneth Galbraith called advertising “the management of specific demand.” Ads tell us stories, which are all variants of: If you buy this, you’ll be happy. Their words and images were tested on audiences even before Don Draper was a boy, and now digital analytics gives marketers new attention management techniques to use on us. Today, every tweet, every YouTube or blog post aspires to be viral, and when that happens, no one complains that some cat or cute kid or Kardashian has used Orwellian mind-control to manipulate our mood.