Or maybe we need to leave this corporate media behemoth, one that is openly about selling our sociality, desires, and fears to the highest bidder, which every four years will happen to be political campaigns. Did you like Trumpism? If so, that bit of data is fed back to you in an increasingly intense form. Were you so convinced of another Clinton in the White House that you liked a campaign slogan? Then you get those marketing messages fed to you to confirm your beliefs. Now we get to go back to having particular brands of shoes and cars presented to us, but rest assured, in the next election cycle it will shift back to reductive political slogans and clickbait conspiracy theories. Trading away our thoughts, fears, desires, and preferences for the chance to connect to one another remains a terrible exchange. Previously, we humans connected with one another just fine without having to bare our souls to a corporation. So the answer to the quandary of Facebook and the 2016 election is not more open data. It's less. And it's up to us to recognize this and leave Facebook for something better. - Rob Robert W. Gehl Associate Professor, Department of Communication Affiliated Faculty, Department of Writing & Rhetoric The University of Utah www.robertwgehl.org | @robertwgehl www.socialmediaalternatives.org Sent from our OS on our Internet Please read my book: Reverse Engineering Social Media Winner of the 2015 Association of Internet Researchers Nancy Baym Book Award http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2275_reg.html On 11/12/2016 09:27 AM, Jeff Pooley wrote:
Facebook needs to open up its data to impartial, outside researchers: the future of democracy in the U.S. may hang in the balance:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2016/11/11/we_can_t_know_whether_fac...
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Jeff Pooley, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Media & Communication Muhlenberg College 2400 Chew St., Allentown, PA 18104 484-664-3677 jeffpooley.com _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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