Our Social Feeds Achieving TV Singularity
The more scrolling I do through Facebook, the more I notice that my feed looks a lot like what one would see when watching TV. I scroll and scroll, and the majority of what I see isn’t from friends. It’s from publishers, advertisers and media companies. My feed is content is media, broken up by advertising. Content from my friends and real people is there, but it’s not the main event.
There are a lot of reasons for this. First, my activity has clearly been observed by Facebook, and apparently, the content I interact with is articles. Facebook’s algorithm has responded to deliver more of this content to me. The other reason is Facebook has made a point to emphasize third-party publisher content on its website. Facebook isn’t alone either.
Twitter has for some time been about real-time news, and the more I visit that platform, the more I see people sharing articles and links. I’m guilty of this, too. Then there’s Snapchat, which started as a messaging platform but with Discover, Snapchat aims to be a media platform.
The Race to Become the Next TV
Social networks are becoming less focused on being social and more focused on being our televisions—distraction-filled deliverers of content. It’s part of why video is a huge emphasis for Facebook and Twitter alike. Video fills our feeds with content we can consume but not necessarily respond to.
Major social networks have gone from being lean-forward platforms to lean-back experiences where publishers deliver our content to us. They’re starting to feel a lot like the Yahoo homepage.
An Opportunity for New Ways to Connect
This isn’t an indictment on Facebook, Twitter or any platform. They’re responding to their audiences’ behaviors and doing exactly what they should be doing—optimizing. What’s exciting is that this creates a whole new opportunity for lean-forward, person-to-person communication. That’s where social messaging platforms like Kik, Line and WhatsApp come in. They allow people to connect with each other, create and share. The focus is on relationships with other people, not publishers.
Platforms are What We Make of Them
This point of view isn’t true in every situation. Platforms and our relationships with them are a combination of how they work and what we make of them. I could easily unlike many pages on Facebook and go back to getting content primarily from my friends (and ads), but social platforms want us to view them, not as places to connect with people, but as all-in-one media platforms. So I’ll continue to scroll through my feed as I would channels or skim along as I would the homepage of a news site. I have no problem with them being my TV. That thing’s mostly used for video games anyway.