This is a really good analysis. Thanks!
Very interesting. I've seen this link, and I didn't bother to look into it.
Facebook's example is that the goal is to enhance social interaction. One interviewee described a resonance effect with people being fed self-affirming information feeds from like-minded people and fake news so that eventually a mirror is built for them by Facebook in which they figuratively gaze into and ask “Who is the fairest of them all?" and you get back, "You, you after all!”
Having lived inside the Facebook bubble for a couple of years and lived to tell about it
I wouldn't exactly call what Facebook does "enhancing" social interaction.
Real social interaction as humanity has experienced it for the duration of our species implies that you have to bargain, reason, cooperate and compromise literally
all of the time with other individuals who have their own problems and agendas. At the same time you often don't have much information on what others are thinking when they interact with you since in normal society people generally don't reveal their thoughts openly.
Facebook won't help with mastering any of that, in fact, it's counter to actual healthy relationships.
What Facebook does is hugely amplify your ability to interact with people who tend to create less friction with you than the run of the mill humanity, and who themselves are being affirmed constantly. At the same time people on Facebook visibly show in numerous ways how they reason and think and what they value. In other words with Facebook (or any other online venue, but to lesser degrees) you learn much more about the image that people want to convey about their thinking. But you
always have a big "off" switch to dismiss anyone who is disagreeably argumentative. You can't do that in real life.
That "building an image I want others to see" is pervasive on FB. It tends to foster unrealistic behaviors and it rewards bad behavior. It's both the home of virtue signaling as well as narcissistic preening. In real life you'd tell someone who is talking down to you to f*ck off. On Facebook if you stake a political position you get to use it as a hammer to show how morally superior you are.
From the comments on this board I know for a fact that everyone currently on the board (except perhaps Pxsant and of course me) is unaware of how it feels to participate heavily on Facebook. Y'all see it from a distance. The average citizen in society with a social media addiction isn't familiar to us here on this board.
I'm saying that to a specific personality type Facebook is as addictive as cigarettes or anything else that's bad for you. And FB instills a need to see others conform to your world view.
I could go on at length about other aspects... Facebook allows you to create "group hugs" that would look really foolish and out of place in real life. You can synthesize causes and you can then even convince the subsets of the normies on Facebook that your cause is just what they need to feel included and special. It CAN happen in real life but it's much harder.
Again, it's all artificial counterparts of real life social interaction.
Lastly I wouldn't say that Facebook ropes in stupid people... or actually maybe it does. It ropes in average people who get lonely and who need affirmation. Facebook is normie central.
I get very lonely and I need affirmation, but I know that FB has too many strings attached and distorts real life, so I stay away from it because it's just not for real.
FB is like an AI of real relationships.
