What is social media and is it social?
From the question, you might guess that we do not believe in today’s version of social media. In our informal poll of people in Ely, we have not found one person who believes social media is social; rather they call it anti-social media. Our solution to the malaise that is currently social media with Big Data is community-based, non-data-collecting sociality for the benefit of the community. ElyMinnesota.com and ElyMN.us is, to the best of our knowledge, the first community to experiment with community-based social media.
What is social media, or more importantly, what should it be? It is apparent that what is being offered on the internet is NOT social. On the contrary, it is quite unsocial, even though popular.
Sociality starts at home. Sociality is nurtured naturally by our families as we grow up. If the progression is as it should be, our educational systems further fosters our growth in appropriate social behavior. So far, so good. Then, interacting at work, with our community and at different levels of politics shows us that what we learned as social behavior is often ignored or used against us.
Then Facebook and social media hit the scene 14 years ago. So appealing, and FREE. Labeled as social media, Facebook was embraced by the masses, and Mark Zuckerberg made billions of dollars selling our data to anyone and everyone. Included were Russian political operatives who used the data to influence elections in the United States and are continuing to do so.
Europeans are abandoning Facebook en masse. Europeans are very concerned about their privacy, U.S. citizens not so much, for some reason.
“Social media users today are often asked to pit privacy against entertainment. With recent congressional hearings putting the practices of the highly popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat in question, people are feeling it’s time to switch to a platform that caters to their privacy needs.” (my emphasis). — You Tuber Magazine, June 3, 2018
Since the revelation of Facebook’s evolvement with Cambridge Analytica, we’ve collected news articles about Facebook and “social media” — 42 articles so far related to the debacle and how we were and are continuing to be used inappropriately. These articles have surfaced in many different sources, including magazines, television, and the internet. So far, other than Mark Zuckerberg’s proclamation of having learned from their errors and promises to do better (which public opinion so far says he has not), all articles lead to the obvious conclusion: It’s time for change!
If you would like to have more information on the present status of Big Data-based social media, send me an email and I’ll give you a link to the research. Here are a few of titles in that set:
“Socially responsible funds dump or rethink Facebook over data privacy”
“Lawsuit: Zuckerberg spied on users, stole data, & repeatedly broke the law”
“Facebook Users Are Unbothered by Privacy Debacle, Reuters Poll Shows “
“How does Google know everything about me?”
We believe it is time to try something less invasive and more useful to the individuals, families and local communities.
