Re:The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media
by eksemplar on Thursday September 20, 2018 @07:33AM
(#18031431)
I’m an extrovert, I’ll never pick digital communication above face-face.
If we’re talking personality types I think it has more to do with people who are motivated by acceptance. I get that part of it, and I understand why the social media gurus and journalists are there, it’s basically their linked-in. (Which is basically management porn).
What I don’t get is why regular people join. I mean, I’m a manager, I play the “look-at-me” game on linked-in, in fact it’s part of my damn job to sell our stories to other managers - but I wouldn’t expect my neighbor to want to read about our approach to behavioral design and I’ve frankly never used it in any manner that wasn’t job-related either.
I understand it in context of professionals using it as their free sales/promotion channel (Trump, Cardashians or whoever is in vogue these days). There it makes perfect sense, not that I would like to anyhow participate or care about their opinions.
I use BBC Android app to read some news when having few minutes break ie in public transport. Over last years they started to put these tweets of random folks in the articles (so no Trump tweets iframe in the article about his latest tweets, but rather some random folks expressing their opinions about Brexit, olympics or anything else). Those articles really feel much worse because of this - I go to BBC for some serious journalism, not this.
It really feels like they try not only persuade me by stating facts in the article, but appeal to my potential 'sheepish' personality trait of accepting popular opinions of others, rather than making opinions from the facts on my own. My main issue - whatever narrative you want to push as a journalist (and they often do), you just look for tweets that you like in the sea of all possible opinions. Just give me the facts, and let me do the thinking and opinion making, please