One of the greatest conundrums of the digital era is why we ascribe almost magical capabilities of societal influence to social media when it is in reality smaller, slower and often merely a supportive mirror of traditional media? How did the very limited size and influence of social media become lionized into a fictional creation so powerful that it has become the very fabric supporting modern society and capable of destroying democracy itself? Perhaps the answer is that it in our metric-driven society we naturally gravitate towards the things we can most easily measure and social media’s embrace of firehoses and analytics has helped catapult it to stardom.
Why is it that we view social media platforms as being so large that they quite literally define the very concept of what it means to work with “big data?” It turns out that they are vastly smaller than their public narrative, due in no small part to their heavy investments in media strategies to promote their data sizes, while providing few public details that would permit external evaluation of those claims.
Touting the size of their data archives, social networks have helped convince the public to view them as critical drivers of the national discourse. After all, a site with hundreds of petabytes of datacenter storage must be at the core of everything we do, right?
Similarly, by creating artificial measures like “impressions,” social platforms have been able to concoct almost unimaginably large figures charting their impact on society without having to tie those numbers back to the things that actually matter, like sales. A company might have a billion “impressions” from its Twitter posts, but if its sales and brand awareness have remained unchanged, what is the value of all those “impressions” and how many of them involved a real human actually consuming a post, rather than the mere potential that each tweet could have been consumed by every follower?
Most importantly, social platforms have cultivated the journalistic class, ensuring the content producers of the mainstream media spend their days within their echo chambers speaking amongst themselves, leaving the impression that everyone on the planet must be on social media if they are.
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Answer:
One of the greatest conundrums of the digital era is why we ascribe almost magical capabilities of societal influence to social media when it is in reality smaller, slower and often merely a supportive mirror of traditional media? How did the very limited size and influence of social media become lionized into a fictional creation so powerful that it has become the very fabric supporting modern society and capable of destroying democracy itself? Perhaps the answer is that it in our metric-driven society we naturally gravitate towards the things we can most easily measure and social media’s embrace of firehoses and analytics has helped catapult it to stardom.
Why is it that we view social media platforms as being so large that they quite literally define the very concept of what it means to work with “big data?” It turns out that they are vastly smaller than their public narrative, due in no small part to their heavy investments in media strategies to promote their data sizes, while providing few public details that would permit external evaluation of those claims.
Touting the size of their data archives, social networks have helped convince the public to view them as critical drivers of the national discourse. After all, a site with hundreds of petabytes of datacenter storage must be at the core of everything we do, right?
Similarly, by creating artificial measures like “impressions,” social platforms have been able to concoct almost unimaginably large figures charting their impact on society without having to tie those numbers back to the things that actually matter, like sales. A company might have a billion “impressions” from its Twitter posts, but if its sales and brand awareness have remained unchanged, what is the value of all those “impressions” and how many of them involved a real human actually consuming a post, rather than the mere potential that each tweet could have been consumed by every follower?
Most importantly, social platforms have cultivated the journalistic class, ensuring the content producers of the mainstream media spend their days within their echo chambers speaking amongst themselves, leaving the impression that everyone on the planet must be on social media if they are.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/04/22/we-see-social-media-as-all-powerful-because-we-can-measure-it