Decades of Facebook likes will explain how you became yourself
Originally published on 16 September 2014
The Facebook like button was first released in 2009. As of September of 2013, a total of 1.13 trillion likes had been registered across the earth, according to OkCupid co-founder Christian Rudder in his new book Dataclysm. Much has been written about how “likes” limit our social interaction or increase our engagement with brands. But these likes have another function, they’re becoming a source of data that will eventually tell social scientists more about who we are than what we share.
I am in greater agreement with the former argument, about how Facebook likes actually changes human behaviour. Let us not forget about algorithmic filtering, which results in the unnatural presentation of what a user has chosen to see based on the people he/she has chosen to virtually befriend.
Arguably, it’s probably still possible to quantify various human behavioural characteristics. But this would not be an observation from the purely-natural behaviour of users, which would make the results flawed and unsubstantiated.
Kinny tweets aviation, social media and technology on Twitter.
