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Social media are a trap

The difference between a community and a network is that you belong to a community, but a network belongs to you. You feel in control. You can add friends if you wish, you can delete them if you wish. You are in control of the important people to whom you relate. People feel a little better as a result, because loneliness, abandonment, is the great fear in our individualist age. But it’s so easy to add or remove friends on the internet that people fail to learn the real social skills, which you need when you go to the street, when you go to your workplace, where you find lots of people who you need to enter into sensible interaction with. Pope Francis, who is a great man, gave his first interview after being elected to Eugenio Scalfari, an Italian journalist who is also a self-proclaimed atheist. It was a sign: real dialogue isn’t about talking to people who believe the same things as you. Social media don’t teach us to dialogue because it is so easy to avoid controversy… But most people use social media not to unite, not to open their horizons wider, but on the contrary, to cut themselves a comfort zone where the only sounds they hear are the echoes of their own voice, where the only things they see are the reflections of their own face.
 Social media are very useful, they provide pleasure, but they are a trap.

  Zygmunt Bauman

 

"Your Face is Big Data" by Egor Tsvetkov

In order to show how easy it is for complete strangers to gather information about you, Egor spent six weeks taking around 100 pictures of subway commuters in St Petersburg before using a facial recognition app called FindFace to track down their internet profiles.
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What your Facebook use says about you

“What’s on your mind?” This is how Facebook greets its 1.7 billion active users every day.
 It’s also a question that countless psychiatrists, psychologists and counsellors have asked their clients at the start of a session; a question we instinctively ask of a friend or family member looking troubled. Our social media activity can give extraordinary – and often unintentional – insights into our mental wellbeing.
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Life on Instagram

Since its launch in 2010, the photo-sharing site Instagram has grown at a phenomenal rate, with nearly 100 million pictures and videos being posted everyday. The images capture everything from personal moments to be shared with friends and family to large public events, image curation on a global scale. Penguin art director Jim Stoddart has pulled together a selection of those that caught his eye, for publication in a book.

 

You Think You Know Me, Facebook, But You Don't Know Anything

How well does Facebook know you?
To the amusement — and possibly relief — of many, the answer seems to be not as well as it might hope. A recent New York Times article highlighted a new feature on the social media network that allows users to see what interests Facebook thinks they have, and what advertisements might be generated to target those preferences. Those targeted ads might spring up as the "suggested posts" you see on the sides of your news feed or scrolling down through your friends' status updates.
As websites like Facebook and Google have learned to track where users visit and what they search online, they can better sell to advertisers their ability to place relevant products in front of interested people. The Times found that Facebook could even pinpoint users' political leanings, based not just on which politicians' pages users liked but also on their interactions with websites and products that might have a partisan leaning.
 But people have noticed that not every targeted ad that Facebook picks is a gem.
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