Looking for the Dark Truth: Welcome to the Deep Web

Factors that contribute to feeling connected to social media

Homophily, or love of the same, has been aided along by social media as it makes it easier to bond with like-minded individuals. Traditional factors influencing the bonding of like-minded individuals were gender, age, and social, economic status. Social media technology has made it easier to connect with like individuals by pooling them based on the agreement of moral values (Dehghani et al., 2016, p. 366). Cognitively, attraction to others within our environment is an innate desire that predicts how we respond others (Jacoby-Senghor, Sinclair, & Smith, 2015). Social media is popular in motivating the feeling of connectedness as it instills a level of implicit in-group favoritism among like-minded individuals. For example, a rich kid may get drawn to social media groups of other rich kids, for the benefit of interacting with huge egos which in-turn makes the kids ego to bloat.

The concept of homophily

This concept is best understood from the association theory. The perception that similarity produces affiliation (417) brings us to the realization that we are often comfortable around people we believe understand us. Homophily on social media has made it easier to market content to individuals depending on their search preferences identified by smart algorithms. Homophily on social media allows socially disadvantaged groups to come together and share information thus leading to better management of personal development therefore solid friendships form (429). It is also possible that being in an attitudinally and demographically homogeneous group gives one more option for addressing stressors that would take other members of the society more time to comprehend (Dehghani et al., 2016).

The contribution of platform algorithms to the development of homophily

Platform algorithms are pivotal to the increase in homophily on social media. Sites such as FaceBook track the content one accesses and predicts content they may consider entertaining. For example, if one chooses to read a suggested article purely based on the personal moral stand, then on the next login or page refresh similar content is likely to appear on their wall. Therefore, algorithm-friendly content has to be created creating a group of focused writers, which is homophily explicit of social media. Similarly, the algorithms suggest groups and friends that one could be interested in communicating with further growing the groups of like-minded individuals. It is imperative that the algorithms are seen as mere smart advertising tools with the right to buy squarely on the social media user.

References

Dehghani, M., Johnson, K., Hoover, J., Garten, J., Parmar, N. J., Vaisey, S., et al. (2016). Purity Homophily in Social Networks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 145 (3), 366–375.

Jacoby-Senghor, D. S., Sinclair, S., & Smith, C. T. (2015). When Bias Binds: Effect of Implicit Outgroup Bias on Ingroup Affiliation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 109 (3), 415–433.