One day, when historians tell the strange story of the 21st century, this age of software and smartphones, populism and Pokemon, they will focus on a fundamental shift in the way people learn about the world. Within the span of a generation, we went from watching the same news shows on television, and reading the same newspapers in print, to getting a personalized feed of everything that our social network finds interesting, as filtered by a clever algorithm. The main goal of the algorithm is to keep us staring at the screen, increasing the slight odds that we might click on an advertisement.

I’m talking, of course, about Facebook. Given the huge amount of attention Facebook commands—roughly 22 percent of the internet time Americans spend on their mobile devices is spent on the social network—it has generated a relatively meager amount of empirical research. (It didn’t help that the company’s last major experiment became a silly controversy.) Furthermore, most of the research that does exist explores the network’s impact on our social lives. In general, these studies find small, mostly positive correlations between Facebook use and a range of social measures: our Facebook friends are not the death of real friendship.

What this research largely overlooks, however, is a far more basic question: why is Facebook so popular? What is it about the social network (and social media in general) that makes it so attractive to human attention? It’s a mystery at the heart of the digital economy, in which fortunes hinge on the allocation of eyeballs.

Read original article


Tags: