Web of Choice: Social Media Info and Manipulation

While it seems as though I’m on a social media hiatus for the foreseeable future—at least until employers start questioning my character without a digital footprint to legitimize it—I have identified in the past as someone who keeps a pretty tight-knit group. I have tended to reside within a more centralized network, as the Orgnet blog would refer to it; playing a role of what I would most closely relate to “degree centrality.” The great thing about social media is that there is a substantial component of choice involved in it. As a user, you have a choice of whom to friend or follow—and for the most part—a choice of what content to access and acknowledge.  This keeps the variety of the posts in the feed more focused and personally applicable.

In terms of the posts that have traditionally appeared most often in my feed, I would attribute my friends for playing a role more consistent with “betweenness centrality.” These friends—who are my friends by choice because we share common interests, views, etc.—bridge information gaps, as my involvement is really limited to direct connection. My friends disseminate and proliferate information through their activity within the network—and because there is a lot of interest overlap—we generally share, retweet, and comment among ourselves. Because of this, they primarily influence me, and I influence them as well, albeit to a likely lesser extent due to their position within the network. They are more or less influenced transitively through cross-activity between nodes in the network.

As far as network manipulation, use of data, and targeting, I feel like the Face blog touches on this the best. Parkin writes: “Powered by Pulsar TRAC these could be people engaging in a specific conversation, individuals sharing a piece of content online, or the followers of an account on Twitter. Any group of people, in essence, as long as we can define that audience through some property of its behaviour in social media – such as keyword, user bio, or location.” This is where the idea of choice becomes murky and less optional, as sometimes you just can’t control what gets thrown at you on the web. However, when I actively participated in social networks, I didn’t really mind sites like Facebook having access to the data I generated because I pretty much figured that came with the territory and I knew what I was getting myself into.

After having built a more thorough understanding of how this information can be used to to manipulate my social networks moving forward—whether it be to strategically plant ads or emphasize certain information—I would say that it would lead me to be more cautious than anything. We can blame social media for utilizing our data or our network connections in a way we deem disingenuous, but it is ultimately on us and the choices we make at the end of the day.