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Facebook and the Rise of Anti-Social Media
Urie, Rob
http://www.counterpunch.org/2018/04/02/facebook-and-the-rise-of-anti-social-media/Date Written: 2018-04-02 Publisher: CounterPunch Year Published: 2018 Resource Type: Article Cx Number: CX22179 For those who haven't thought about it, the internet is insidious because of the very capacity that Cambridge Analytica claims to be able to exploit: customization. Users have limited ability to confirm the authenticity of anything they see, read or hear on it. Print editions can be compared and contrasted-- technology limits print media to large-scale deceptions. With the capacity to create entire realms of deception -- identities, content, web pages and entire online publications, trust is made a function of gullibility. Abstract: - Excerpt: ARPA / DARPA), is transmitted through telecommunications channels controlled by companies acting in concert with the Federal government and was partially funded by the CIA through venture capital funds. The fantasy of spontaneous generation comes from the generation of children too enamored with technology and ignorant of history to have known that they were entrusting their publics ids to deeply malevolent forces. More broadly, Americans have long had a paradoxical relationship with the idea of the 'social.' Social media is a claim about human being through the posture that the social is an aggregation of individual representations (postings). The architecture of social media reifies Reaganite / Thatcherite individualism complete with the paradox that deep and historical social contexts are needed to make individualism possible. Social media is a logical extension of this tendency complete with the murky motives that drove Reaganism / Thatcherism. It is only superficially ironic that this 'individualism' was / is a strategy for social control. As freedom from political coercion, economic coercion was (1) de- politicized and (2) simply assumed away. The value of Facebook to the CIA, NSA and FBI is political and to Facebook stockholders it is economic. In both realms value is the measure of social control that can be garnered from it. Subject Headings |