What if I don't want Facebook to decide what I see & which friends I hear from?

Facebook's News Feed uses algorithms to choose which stories we see and in what order, based on who posted them, who among our "friends" reacted to them, and how much they mesh with the "preferences" we signal by our own clicks. Is this what we want?

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Technology columnist Farhad Manjoo's " Social Insecurity: Can Facebook Fix Its Own Worst Bug?" (New York Times Magazine, 4/30/17) begins with this kicker:

Mark Zuckerberg now acknowledges the dangerous side of the social revolution he helped start. But is the most powerful tool for connection in human history capable of adapting to the world it created?

Manjoo interviewed Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook's headquarters in early January 2017 and again a month later. The article's primary concern is the effect of Facebook on national and global politics—especially its disruptive "echo chamber" distortion of public discourse on all sides during and since the November 2016 elections.

[Facebook has] become the largest and most influential entity in the news business.... It is also the most powerful mobilizing force in politics, and it is fast replacing television as the most consequential entertainment medium....

But over the course of 2016, Facebook’s gargantuan influence became its biggest liability. During the U.S. election, propagandists...used the service to turn fake stories into viral sensation....

And fake news was only part of a larger conundrum. With its huge reach, Facebook has begun to act as the great disseminator of the larger cloud of misinformation and half-truths swirling about the rest of media. It sucks up lies from cable news and Twitter, then precisely targets each lie to the partisan bubble most receptive to it. (40)

The News Feed

What most catches my attention as a retired reference librarian is Manjoo's discussion of Facebook's News Feed, the key algorithmic engine defining each user's unique experience of information access.

It's an easy guess that most FB users don't even know about this "default ON" feature—any more than they know that Google's default ON is its personalized search.

Personalization...may influence your search results...based on sites you have showed a past interest in through your browser or search history, [and] whether you are signed in or out of a Google account that houses more extensive information about yourself (including on your Google+ profile).

It's deeper than simple date, time, location. It tries to get at the heart of who you are, the kinds of sources you gravitate to, and the content that will most satisfy you as a searcher.

— "The Complex Web of Personalized Search," from TentacleInbound.com

[Note: To turn off personalized search in Google, log into your Google account, go to Search Settings at https://www.google.com/preferences, scroll down to Private Results, and select "Do not use private results."]

Here's how Manjoo describes the analogous personalization mechanics of News Feed:

Every time you open Facebook, [News Feed] hunts through the network, collecting every post from every connection—information that, for most Facebook users, would be too overwhelming to process themselves. Then it weighs the merits of each post before presenting you with a feed sorted in order of importance: a hyperpersonalized front page designed just for you....

For the typical user...News Feed is computing the relative merits of about 2,000 potential posts in your network every time you open the app. In sorting these posts, Facebook does not optimize for any single metric: not clicks or reading time or likes. (43)

Zuckerberg's aim for Facebook is to do global news distribution run by machines, ruled by engineering rather than editing, user preference rather than public good.

The people who work on News Feed aren’t making decisions that turn on fuzzy human ideas like ethics, judgment, intuition or seniority. They are concerned only with quantifiable outcomes about people’s actions on the site. That data, at Facebook, is the only real truth…....

But it is precisely this ideal that conflicts with attempts to wrangle the feed in the way press critics have called for. The whole purpose of editorial guidelines and ethics is often to suppress individual instincts in favor of some larger social goal. Facebook finds it very hard to suppress anything that its users’ actions say they want. (43)

[Note: You cannot turn New Feed's algorithms off, but you can—within some annoying limits—narrow their operations. See below for more details.]

But is News Feed "free access to information"?

Technically it is...sort of. Facebook users make the choices that feed the algorithms that drive what information the users see. Unfortunately, few of us realize that clicking on something—anything—triggers a cascading sequence of other machine-based choices. Choices defined by Facebook's aims, not our own.

In a sense Facebook's aims do match those of most contemporary users. We all want to have "news" and "information" and "opinion" and "entertainment" from people we "agree with." If I go to a library or bookstore, I decide what I want to read, right? If I don't want to see opposing views, I don't read them. Just like I pick PBS or FOX News or whatever, based on which slant on reality I want to have reinforced by broadcasters.

So Facebook's News Feed just automates the process of making sure I see mostly the web-based stuff I want to see. That's its whole point, right?

As a professional librarian I have to agree...unhappily. When I was still a public librarian, I always wanted to take those three-plus shelves of Ann Coulter books into the courtyard and burn them. But I didn't. It wasn't my choice what my customers read.

Given that ethic, I also have to accept Zuckerberg's business model: "Facebook finds it very hard to suppress anything that its users’ actions say they want."

Okay, but is News Feed an "information service"?

I don't think so. At least not in the library professional's sense of helping users find and evaluate authentic information. As with most other popular "news media," Facebook is basically in the entertainment business, not the business of keeping the public well informed.

Facebook is primarily an advertising agency. It gets its revenue by showing us what we want to watch, so that we keep watching...and see ads. And here's the key point: Facebook's vast market share (1.94 billion for first quarter 2017) hinges on its mastery of user data mining—and especially its sheer genius in persuading us to give it the data that tells it what we want.

This isn't about what they ask us to tell them. Every click, every search is a data point, allowing the machines to index, compile, and analyze our choices, and to redirect us to stuff we imagine we want to see...with ads attached that match closely the analysis of our unique, every-changing data sets.

By the way, all those intriguing "personality profile" quizzes on Facebook? Whenever we do any of these, we are giving Facebook and their advertisers—and who knows who else—a vast store of deep, intimate psychological profiling data about ourselves. Even better for precisely targeting machine choices of both stories and ads.

A change of heart at Facebook?

Manjoo shares a concern over the way algorithm-driven filtering can create blind spots in public discourse.

Scholars and critics have been warning of the solipsistic impressibility of algorithmic news at least since 2001, when the constitutional-law professor Cass R. Sunstein warned, in his book Republic.com, of the urgent risks posed to democracy “by any situation in which thousands or perhaps millions or even tens of millions of people are mainly listening to louder echoes of their own voices....

In 2011, the digital activist and entrepreneur Eli Pariser, looking at similar issues, gave this phenomenon a memorable name in the title of his own book: The Filter Bubble. (41)

Zuckerberg's own level of concern has shifted since the 2016 American elections. Manjoo tells of

the manifesto Zuckerberg wrote was in 2012, as part of Facebook’s application to sell its stock to the public. It explained Facebook’s philosophy...and sketched an unorthodox path for the soon-to-be-public company. “Facebook was not originally created to be a company.... It was built to accomplish a social mission: to make the world more open and connected."

What’s striking about that 2012 letter...is its certainty that a more “open and connected” world is by definition a better one. “When I started Facebook, the idea of connecting the world was not controversial...” [Zuckerberg told Manjoo]. “The default assumption was that the world was incrementally just moving in that direction. So I thought we can connect some people and do our part in helping move in that direction.” But now, he said, whether it was wise to connect the world was “actually a real question.” (42)

In February, Facebook staff gave Manjoo a draft of the 2017 manifesto, Building Global Community. The new manifesto, Manjoo writes, 

is remarkable for the way it concedes that the company’s chief goal—wiring the globe—is controversial. “There are questions about whether we can make a global community that works for everyone..., and whether the path ahead is to connect more or reverse course.”

[Zuckerberg] also confesses misgivings about Facebook’s role in the news. “Giving everyone a voice has historically been a very positive force for public discourse because it increases the diversity of ideas shared..... But the past year has also shown it may fragment our shared sense of reality.” (42)

Meanwhile, can I control my own News Feed?

What Facebook can and will do about these concerns, especially given its "prime directive" of avoiding human editing of user choices, is yet to be seen.

Meanwhile, here are some steps you can take to manage how your personal News Feed works, taken from Control What You See in News Feed (as of 5/20/2017).

1. On your Facebook home page, click the white triangle to open this menu
2. Select New Feed Preferences
3.  Use the options provided to manage how your personal News Feed sorts and displays information.

Keep paying attention. Add your human brain to what machine algorithms do.

Blessings,
Mike Shell

Addendum

Of course, one way to counterbalance the "filter bubble" effect in your own New Feed is to "like" and "follow" commentators and news sources with whom you usually disagree.

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Image & Author Notes

Image: "Mark Zuckerberg." Credit: Spencer Lowell for The New York Times. Illustration by Mike McQuade.

Image: "Is This Story Relevant to You? How We Evaluate," from Facebook's introduction to its News Feed.

Image: "Which FORMER PRESIDENT Would You Have Been?" screenshot of Facebook "click bait" quiz from Quizony.com.

Image: "News Feed Preferences" made up of screenshots compiled on 5/20/17. See Control What You See in News Feed for more options.

Technology columnist Farhad Manjoo is working on a book about what he calls the Frightful Five: Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft (see "Tech’s Frightful Five: They’ve Got Us," NYT,  5/11/2017).

"The kids are alright"—Danah Boyd's It's Complicated: the social lives of networked teens

Danah Boyd is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Research Assistant Professor at New York University, and Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

I've just started reading Danah Boyd's brilliant new book, It's Complicated: the social lives of networked teens (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2014).

From 2005 to 2012, Boyd toured the United States, "talking with and observing teens from eighteen states and a wide array of socioeconomic and ethnic communities," as well as conducting 166 formal, semi-structured interviews with teens.

She writes that this book is her

attempt to describe and explain the networked lives of teens to the people who worry about them—parents, teachers, policy makers, journalists, sometimes even other teens....

As I began to get a feel for the passions and frustrations of teens and to speak to broader audiences, I recognized that teen's voices rarely shaped the public discourse surrounding their networked lives. (x)

Coming of age

Boyd brings to the discussion a deep respect for teens, in the place of adult mistrust.  Her key insight is that

Most teens are not compelled by [social media] gadgetry as such—they are compelled by friendship. The gadgets are interesting to them primarily as a means to a social end....

Teens' preoccupation with their friends dovetails with their desire to enter the public spaces that are freely accessible to adults. The ability to access public spaces for sociable purposes is a critical component of the coming of age process.... (18)

Boyd reminds the reader that teens are challenged to envision themselves as young adults. Their efforts to set their own agendas and "to a be with friends on their own terms, without adult supervision, and in public," are part of coming of age.

Paradoxically, the networked publics they inhabit allow them a measure of privacy and autonomy that is not possible at home.... Recognizing this is important to understanding teens' relationship to social media.... [Their] engagement with public life through social media is not a rejection of privacy. Teens may wish to enjoy the  benefits of participating in public, but they also relish intimacy and the ability to have control over their social situation.... [Teens] go to great lengths to develop innovative strategies for managing privacy in networked publics....

Social media enables a type of youth-centric public space that is often otherwise inaccessible. But because that space is highly visible, it can often provoke concerns among adults who are watching teens as they try to find their way. (19)

The Significance of Networked Publics

To focus her work, Boyd broadens and sharpens the concept of "networked publics" first introduced by Mizuko Ito in the "Introduction" to Networked Publics (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2008, 1-14).

Networked publics are publics that are restructured by networked technologies. As such, they are simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice. (8)

Using this concept, Boyd normalizes teens' use of social media.

Teens engage with networked publics for the same reasons they have always relished publics; they want to be a part of the broader world by connecting with other people and having the freedom of mobility. Likewise, many adults fear networked technologies for the same reasons that adults have long been wary of teen socialization in parks, malls, and other sites where youth congregate. (10)

She then introduces Donald Norman's concept of "affordances" as a way of exploring the new social possibilities offered by technology. [See The Design of Everyday Things, (New York: Basic Books,1988).]

The particular properties or characteristics of an environment can be understood as affordances because they make possible—and, in some cases, are used to encourage—certrain types of practices, even if they do not determine what practices will unfold. (10)

 There are four affordances which Boyd argues make social media appealing to teens:

•  persistence: the durability of online expression and content;
• visibility: the potential audience who can bear witness;
• spreadability: the ease with which content can be shared; and 
• searchability: the ability to find content. (11)

 Boyd then addresses adult fears more directly, saying that the social lives of teens are far less different from those of their parents than many of us believe.

School looks remarkably familiar, and many of the same anxieties and hopes that shaped my experience are still recognizable today.... All too often, it is easier to focus on the technology than on the broader systemic issues that are at play because technical changes are easier to see.

Nostalgia gets in the way of understanding the relation between teens and technology. Adults may idealize their childhoods and forget the trials and tribulations they faced.... They associate the rise of digital technology with decline—social, intellectual, and moral. The research I present here suggests that the opposite is often true. (16)

Having seen this introduction to Boyd's study, I'm eager to learn from the teens she paid attention to how they understand their own use of social media...and how we adults might nurture rather than fear this aspect of their coming of age.

Non Sequitur, by Wiley Miller

No comment.

Multi-tasking overload?

If you need to do a self-check to find out if you've been doing too much computer multi-tasking, click here.

Technorati: or, Digital Immigrants

Unlike del.icio.us, which helps me keep track of sites and pages I am interested, Technorati seems less useful to me personally.

I do have an account, and I have claimed my blogs. Again, this is a tool I learned about in the "Social Software in Libraries" course, so I tried it out during that course and have puzzled over it since.

For my purposes, Technorati would mainly be useful in pushing my blogs to other readers, something I'd very much like to do, since I'd like to increase my readership.

However, its main purpose seems to be finding blogs or blog posts on the various tagged subjects. That's a very valuable resource, yet not one I personally would use very much.

My experiment of searching Technorati for “Learning 2.0” did give me a taste of the huge variety of blogs, fields of interest, etc., which intersect on that tag. As a professional observer of the Internet, I'm fascinated at how rich and multidimensional this cyberworld has become, and how much the human race has advanced in the free sharing of information—the very thing which Public Library was invented to do.

However, for an old geezer like me, its just WAY TOO MUCH INFORMATION.

I'm glad it's out there, I'm glad people are sharing it so freely, I'm glad there are all these free social software tools for pushing and finding the information. It's just not my speed.

My mid-20th century brain was programmed to use books and pens. I've managed to get it to use PC screens and keyboards...but I don't do downloadable media or MySpace or any of the vast online social-connection stuff, I don't use a handheld device or a laptop, and my cellphone only makes phonecalls. I don't even have a TV.

This is no judgment against all that technology or the people who use it. It's a personal choice, based on how I've learned to nurture my thinking and learning and creative work.

I'm comfortable being a pre-computer person, a "digital immigrant."

One catch: my job is speeding away from me at cyberspeed! That's part if why I value this JPL Learning 2.0 course.

Thanks.

Note: Several times now in doing these assignments, I've stumbled across Tame the Web: Libraries, Technology and People. It looks like it's worth subscribing to in Bloglines.com.

del.icio.us

I've been using del.icio.us for almost two years, ever since I learned about it in the "Social Software in Libraries" course I mentioned in "#8: RSS and Bloglines."

Since I'm often browsing away from home and/or away from my own workstation, it's extremely helpful to be able to quickly bookmark a website or web page in my del.icio.us account.

I don't always use the bookmarks. Often I don't even go back to look at them.

But the great thing is I don't have to remember where I saw such-and-such online. I have my own tag cloud and tag bundles, and these let me browse again later.

Now there's a catch to using deli.cio.us: the default for bookmarks is that they are public, unless you save them as private.

I didn't know this when I started using deli.cio.us, so all of my 120+ bookmarks are public. Though there's nothing I particularly want to hide, I'd rather not have all of them public. I just haven't had the time to go back and edit 120+ bookmarks.

>:-[

So...I'm not going to give out my deli.cio.us username here. Sorry. Maybe after I edit. (I also won't do a Network Badge till I've edited.)

Anyway, I looked at PLCMCL2's Bookmarks, and found this one: Welcome to the Blogging Libraries Wiki. Looks like a handy resource.

A neat Web 2.0 tool!

Footnote: I'm ambivalent about the whole tagging phenomenon, partly because I probably was an "old fashioned librarian" the moment I was born.

I've spend fiftysome years creating and using hierarchical classification methods: both paper and email filing systems, library classification and cataloging, etc. It's how my mind has learned to work.

I'm also used the searching value of "controlled vocabulary."

This means that the newer approach of non-hierarchical tagging sometimes feels too amorphous and slippery to me.

My mental style of managing information is usually by visualizing it in spatial relationships. Until I can imagine such a spatial display, it's hard to wrap my mind around what I'm learning or using. It's still more difficult for me to do this with non-hierarchical systems...even though they, too, can be displayed visually (witness the tag clouds).

On the other hand, to me the real potential in tagging appoaches is that we get to see how "real people," not only professional catalogers, sort and label things in order to find them again.

That's the key: findability (check out this blog by Peter Morville).

A very interesting new challenge for all of us.

Post-capitalism

I was talking with my friend and colleague Johnny at the reference desk this afternoon, showing him another neat online toy, del.icio.us, a social bookmarking tool which lets you save and tag your favorites in a web-based environment.

We were marveling over the rich and complex online resources like LibraryThing, Technorati, Blogger—plus all the open source stuff, from Linux on—all of it available for free.

It occurred to me that we are seeing a global social revolution, in which millions of people are disconnecting work from pay and intellectual/artistic creation from property.

I think of this even in terms of my own "work." I do a job for pay—thankfully, a satisfying job which I really enjoy— but what I "really" want to do is write and publiish.

For years I didn't try "what I really want," because I doubted I could make a living at it.

Now, however, thanks to this vast social cyberspace world, I've been sharing stories by email for over a decade and blogging for over two years. I get to write, I have a readership, I don't have to convince someone to publish me....

Money for my writing would be nice, yet the real satisfaction comes from the feedback I get from readers.

And there are millions of people around the world now doing this: writing, coding, designing, photographing, inventing...and sharing it online.

Working at what they want to because they want to.

Neat!

LibraryThing thing

This is a very interesting resource. I can see how could be valuable in various ways.

However, I don't see it as serving immediately important needs for me. I need to explore it over time.

I'm not concerned to have other people know what I read (though it's not a secret), and I'm not necessarily interested in knowing that about others (particular people I don't know).

Perhaps looking at similarly tagged titles and the automated recommendations could serve as a sort of Readers Advisory. I'll experiment with that.

I'm also accustomed to the strategy of organizing information into categories—though I know the limitations of that approach. (For example, my Outlook email account now has almost 200 folders and sub-folders...and sub-sub-folders...and I sometimes forget which overlapping category I've filed emails in.)

Since I've been blogging for several years, I'm familiar with tags (presumably a popularization of the more formal meta-tagging done by coders and catalogers of digital information.)

For me the challenge of relying on tags is that I need to visualize organization of info, and I have not yet found a way to do that with tags.

The closest I get is the device of "tag clouds." Here's mine from LibraryThing:


But this only shows frequency of tags, not relationship of tags.

There's another approach which I first saw around 2000 in a library school cataloging course. It's a different sort of cloud:


This is a great Readers' Advisory tool, because it displays relationships visually. The text says:

What else do readers of Karin Lowachee read?
The closer two writers are, the more likely someone will like both of them.
Click on a name to travel along.

This "author cloud" comes from Literature-Map, a part of Gnooks, a self-adapting community system based on the gnod engine. The whole thing is created by Marek Gibney.

In any event, here's my catalog. It's not necessarily what I'm reading now or what I recommend, but it's drawn from a list of "most influential books" which I've published elsewhere.

Mike

#8: RSS and Bloglines

I've actually been using Bloglines for about two years.

NEFLIN had a course in 2006 called "Social Software in Libraries," which introduced us to blogging, RSS and newsreaders, wikis, etc. That's when I first entered the "blogosphere."

I currently subscribe to about two dozen blogs: comics, political blogs, Quaker blogs, library blogs and others.

I just went through the process of marking each as either Public or Private, and I tried to create a blogroll on this blog, or at least to have a URL by which I could give access to my public Blogline's account.

Unfortunately, both methods show the titles of folders which have private subscriptions. I haven't found a way to block the folder names, so I'm not making any of this public for now.

I'll keep trying....

Mike