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“If you get something for free, remember, you are not a customer. You are a commodity.” Opinions of a Philosopher and Media Researchers.
Kirill Martynov, philosopher
“The famous book The Filter Bubble by the American Internet researcher Eli Pariser begins with the epigraph: “If you get something for free, remember, you are not a customer. You are a commodity.” Facebook introduced the new emoji because it will allow it to collect more information about user preferences and behavior, which in turn will enable it to sell more ads and make more money. The short answer to the question of why Facebook “killed likes” is: to sell their product more expensively – us, users.
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- How do you talk?
- Why do you react like that to everything?
Moreover, this must be done in such a way that users as a whole are satisfied. The social network has been moving towards “modernization of communication” for a long time, text chat and comments were supplemented by emoji sets, clearly aimed at a teenage audience. Instead of answering the interlocutor in a personal message, you could send a “like”. But until February 24, these innovations were optional. Now we should all enjoy the Zuckerberg emoji. For a mass audience that used a social network to play “farm” and communicate with friends, this is a completely natural move – now it has become beautiful.
The key problem is that in Russia Facebook is not perceived at all as a social network for teenagers to discuss the latest Marvel movie (as is the case in the US). Here, Facebook users saw themselves as members of an elite community, busy searching for the meaning of life, discussing politics, and even publishing investigative journalism. This applies not only to Russia, but also to Ukraine, where this fashion was also picked up. In the Russian-language segment of Facebook, politicians make official statements, Ukrainian ministers swear among themselves, and there is a special representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova.
Read more:
- Facebook and others: the pleasure formula
Many right inside Facebook are uncompromisingly fighting American capitalism. From a network for a mass audience and teenagers, a club of political intellectuals, writers, philosophers was made – a “unique thinking community”, an ersatz of the public sphere. It is clear that one of the reasons for this is the decline of the real public sphere, in particular the absence of a free media market in Russia.
Emoji Zuckerberg dealt a powerful aesthetic and ideological blow to the Russian-speaking public sphere – worse than Russian state censorship. They showed that the difference between Facebook and Odnoklassniki only exists in the imagination of the Russian creative class. In fact, the social network is not concerned about the “maximum repost” of Russian political activists and not the sophisticated discussion of literary critics, but targeted commercial advertising. Which is best sold among funny videos, photos of cute cats and statuses that you are “in a relationship”. The “elite” Russian community is driven to children’s carousels with horses. On which you can laugh, sob and resent, but in any case you have to spin. If the Facebook interface develops in the current direction, we will face numerous calls “it’s time to quit”, but the experience of migration from LiveJournal shows that the “Russian thinking public” could really quit only if there was a free and obvious alternative – which does not exist. So “put a (creative) class!” And welcome to the people: we have been demoted.
Read more:
- “Friend” on Facebook: add or reject?
The problem is wider than the fate of the Facebook community, as this is not the first time something like this has happened. Since Roman Leibov made his first entry in Livejournal in 2001 (“funny thing, let’s try it in Russian…”), nothing has changed in the relationship of the Russian intelligentsia with content on the Web. 15 years have passed, but we still give away our content to free sites, instead of creating our own sites and blogs. And we are not particularly worried that the policy of the owner of the site at any moment can slam our entire “blogosphere”. In the world, in particular, in the USA, this is not the case – Tim Cook did not publish his appeal about pressure from the FBI at all on Facebook, there are tens of thousands of popular bloggers who write on their own websites. We, unlike the Americans, do not care about the creation of such institutions, attempts like Mikhail Verbitsky’s “Tipharetnik” remain the lot of the marginalized, and we rush from LiveJournal to Facebook, then to Telegram channels, and then everywhere. Our intellectual blogosphere is actually and to the extent of responsibility teenage, not only in terms of emoji.
Read more:
- How does Facebook affect people with depression?
Like appeared on social networks only six years ago, in 2010, and it was Facebook that was the trendsetter here. During this time, it has become the standard of digital culture, a method for assessing active audience engagement for the media, and a kind of universal virtual currency. Many are so accustomed to it that they think that it has always been there. Now this era is over. Other networks will follow the example of Facebook, and if today the Vkontakte publishing interface looks almost like a model of conciseness and rigor, everything can change very soon – everyone will have to compete with Facebook for advertisers’ money.
Digital culture somehow adapts to the tricks of Facebook marketers, some stay on their “fun farm”, some really migrate to better worlds – projects like Ello, social networks with a minimalist design, appear all the time. It is possible that emoji in the interface will not be very popular and marketers themselves will have to abandon them. But it’s time for our “unique community” in Russian, which ended up in the short pants of the global Odnoklassniki, to somehow grow up.”
Read more:
- Better post cats!
Varvara Chumakova, culturologist, media researcher
“One of those who dreamed of virtual reality even when it was not mainstream and continued to talk about its features when it was closely intertwined with ordinary reality, Jaron Lanier in his book “You are not a gadget. Manifesto lamented that social networks accustom the user to standardize their experience – from the spectrum of feelings and emotions they offer to use a limited set of states.
This is not just a situation of limited choice, it changes the very principle of constructing the world. Drop-down lists of statuses, marital statuses, education levels, or anything else where you can’t choose your own option, order the world roughly, driving it into a Procrustean bed of “in a relationship” or “actively searching” states. The boxes for entering “your own version”, albeit less rudely, but also make users a homogeneous database, only a little more difficult to compare with each other, but still comparable in principle. This is not a crowd, not a mass, this is a database.
Read more:
- How does social media influence us?
The limited set of emoji emoticons is a continuation of the trend of standardizing feelings and emotions, and by no means a new degree of freedom. If an “ordinary” like could have many different feelings it meant – approval, support, sympathy, attention, now the user is asked to narrow down the set of emotions that he can express with one sign.
The key word here is “offered” as the language of new media is rapidly changing to include new signs. And it can be assumed that from each “shoot” torn off from the “trunk” of an ordinary like, over time, its own branched tree of signifieds can grow.
Read more:
- Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you who you are
Anton Gumensky, communications and media researcher
“Facebook has been promising something like this for a long time. As a result of the fact that the developers at one time refused to use the “execute” button – the legendary “dislike” – with a thumbs down, many users expressed their dissatisfaction with the fact that they were asked to react to news both joyful and sad in the same way.
“Like” turned out to be a truly brilliant invention – it supplemented the cold verbal environment with the ability to express itself with real gestures, or rather, with one gesture – for all occasions – which at some point became obviously not enough.
Read more:
- Why are we looking for old friends
It is noteworthy that, firstly, Facebook introduced a series of new ways of responding not “instead of”, but “together” with likes – completely replacing your like with something new would be too radical for a commercial company, and that, secondly, Facebook did not return the “thumbs down” – after all, the company’s services should be associated with joy, with good emotions. That is, by default, Facebook makes us love each other rather. Of course, we can shout capslock, swear in the comments, but if we get too carried away, we may be banned. This again brings us back from the abstract heights of media theory to the mortal commercial land.
Finally, Facebook is experimenting. It’s the good old trial and error method. So far, new icons evoke conflicting feelings – some are amused, others are hindered. Over time, the company will accumulate statistics and will be able to adjust its actions. Let’s say they definitely need more work on icon design.”
See the original answer at TheQuestion service.