With no end in sight & the possibility of infinite information & an infinite scroll in apps, I decided to take control of my social media usage. I was hooked on social media and constantly trying to absorb stream after stream of information & content. I found that the algorithmic changes implemented by tech companies worked too well. I now stick with Twitter & have closed down all of my other social accounts. I gave up Facebook completely over 6 months ago due to their algorithms & the febrile political and social atmosphere developing on the platform & I also deleted all Facebook apps from my smartphone. I personally felt like there was a rapidly diminishing return on the value of Social media. Our brains simply aren’t able to deal with so much data, leaving us lethargic & burnt out.
Numerous academics suggest that human beings simply haven’t evolved & developed the mental capacity to take in so much data. The ‘attention merchants’ as many like to call the social media companies & content creators are finding more ways to aggregate data & content in order to keep your eyeballs on their platform. I’ve read hundreds of books from the fields of tech & psychology which all suggest that we are suffering from information overload. I personally try to limit the amount of noise I see online. The simple & easy to follow timeline of the past is now an algorithmically controlled advertising & data mining leviathan.
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They have also introduced the quick retweet buttons and threaded conversations, meaning your timeline is now chock full of noise and junk. You literally can’t catch up on all of your tweets as it will just keep presenting you with content which you never asked to see. Combine that with sponsored tweets & Twitter have quietly achieved infinite scroll. You also have a selection of tweets you may have missed and a whole bunch of other crap tweets you have no interest in. If you use the official app or a web browser, you are presented with a hideous mess of tweets you may like, based on tweets liked by people you follow. It was social.įast forward to 2017 and Twitter is an algorithm infested quagmire. If you liked something, you either smiled to yourself, or you replied & started a conversation. This meant twitter was much less spammy as it took the actual effort to retweet. We didn’t have access to a retweet button, you had to do that manually with an RT and copy & paste. Tweets were shown in order of post time and it was impossible to miss a tweet. Back when Twitter started, we had a simple, chronological timeline. I was a major fan of the original Twitter for example. That dubious award goes to the likes of social media algorithms. However, on the whole, the Google search algorithms aren’t the ones I’m concerned most about.
Google results without google & their creepy data mining. I very much recommned switching to Page for your search. Their information retrieval techniques have always been astonishing & their ability to sort & serve data with algorithms is commendable, however, they are now straying into the murky territory of policing the information we see which is disconcerting. I take issue with the algorithms developed by the likes of Google, but more with respect to how they censor results & control information flows. There are times algorithms are of great use, such as those used by search engines to gather up millions of documents, sort them & hopefully present the one closest to your search term. I think there is a time & place for an algorithm but in many ways, they are failing us as users & failing us as a society. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about algorithms and their brute force introduction in to our everyday lives.
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