Is it fair to say you chose to live in partial ignorance because it's less painful?
To give an example, one of my friends makes posts like a politician and thinks his views are always right - sometimes they are sometimes they aren't. But he is a friend with whom I don't want to have political discussions. I don't want to be the one criticizing him on his political views, but if I'm on Facebook that information is going to flow through me - I can't ignore it. So I choose to remain ignorant by quitting Facebook altogether.
In real life -- Is IRL coming back? -- we have many social circles and behave differently in them. Some folk invoke entirely new persona, but most of us have just the one. Nevertheless, people in those different groups will regard us differently.
For example, when you think of bringing two separate groups of friends or social groups together, it's often easy to establish why it wouldn't work. Often when you do bring them together, they split into the original groups, regardless. (Not always, I know; sometimes it works.)
IRL, you can "be yourself" and move between groups without creating a new persona. That's just normal life as it has been forever. Online, however, the only mechanism to move freely between different groups is to create a separate account and, perhaps, a separate persona.
However, the ad-sellers want to know all about the one person, so they discourage this behaviour. e.g. Forcing the use of real names and performing formal validation of id.
It's interesting to me that this was never an issue (at least for me) back in the days of Usenet (and to some extent IRC, still).
(Aside: It's in this area that I believe that Twitter missed its chance. It could have owned this space. Sadly, it chose to sell ads.)
[1]http://www.michaelzimmer.org/2010/05/14/facebooks-zuckerberg...
Any self-respecting person should not care what comes next.
[1] https://medium.com/chrysaora-weekly/three-moments-with-wecha...
There are many ways to observe.
In whose interest does Facebook observe?
i dont think you can generalize like that about an app that has more than a billion users
Satire is hard. It's hard to do right, and ironically, the better it's done, the harder it is to spot.
For a long time IMDB did not have a proper satire category. Obvious satirical pieces got lumped together with "dark comedy" and "parody". These days we are blessed with sub-categories, but originally, and certainly up until mid-noughties the concept was unknown. So either IMDB didn't see a user-driven need to include the category, or they didn't trust their userbase to be able to understand the difference.
Perhaps the biggest "problem" with satire is that it's an intellectually demanding form of expression, both for the creator and her audience. In a world where eliminating your target audience's need to think is considered a virtue, all less-than-bloody-obvious communication efforts will fall victim to Wiio's Laws.[0]
The most basic form of the laws can be distilled to: "all communication fails, except by accident". When the stated form of communication relies on subtlety and audience interpretation, it is guaranteed that a sizable segment will misunderstand both the message, and the point.
Makes one want crawl to a warm corner, curl up in a ball and cry.
I'm not advocating either way, just noting that one of the reason people drink is because it will lose inhibitions they usually have.
What's really concerning is that one cannot be sure which is the true persona.
In short, people I was interacting with on Facebook were, most of the time, not the people I knew in real life.
After I quit Facebook for 6 months, I attended family reunions and everything was back to the way it was. I stopped looking at them through the lens that Facebook presented them as and I felt no animosity or disdain towards them.
Maybe this is just my experience.