90-year-old sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, interviewed in El Pais:

The question of identity has changed from being something you are born with to a task: you have to create your own community. But communities aren’t created, and you either have one or you don’t. What the social networks can create is a substitute. The difference between a community and a network is that you belong to a community, but a network belongs to you. You feel in control. You can add friends if you wish, you can delete them if you wish. You are in control of the important people to whom you relate. People feel a little better as a result, because loneliness, abandonment, is the great fear in our individualist age.

But it’s so easy to add or remove friends on the internet that people fail to learn the real social skills, which you need when you go to the street, when you go to your workplace, where you find lots of people who you need to enter into sensible interaction with. Pope Francis, who is a great man, gave his first interview after being elected to Eugenio Scalfari, an Italian journalist who is also a self-proclaimed atheist. It was a sign: real dialogue isn’t about talking to people who believe the same things as you. Social media don’t teach us to dialogue because it is so easy to avoid controversy…

Andreas Birkbak & Hjalmar Bang Carlsen, “The World of Edgerank: Rhetorical Justifications of Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm,” in Computational Culture:

We found that prudent action in the world of Edgerank is to be authentically engaged and able to engage others. It follows that a central tension in the Edgerank grammar is that between authenticity and automation. The automated calculation of relevance is on the one hand necessary for users in a world filled with signals, and on the other hand always in danger of flattening the world to a point where the user is unable to be affected by it.

[Edgerank is a name, now somewhat deprecated, for Facebook’s scoring system that determines what you see in the newsfeed.]

David Heinemeier Hansson (in Signal v Noise) sees the upside in wanting to be like people you admire:

‘Just be yourself!’ is commonly served as encouragement for people facing challenges in life. Whether that be in personal relationships or job hunts or speaking at a conference. If you’re already the perfect person, that’s sound advice. If not, it’s worth closer examination.

Whoever you happen to be right now, at this very moment, is highly unlikely to be the person you ultimately want to be. Maybe you occasionally have a short temper. Maybe you don’t know as much about programming or speaking at conferences as you’d like to. Maybe you procrastinate too much.

Whatever it is, you could probably stand to be more like other people in a bunch of areas. Being content merely being ‘you’, and whatever incremental iteration on that concept you can scrape together, is a sigh of resignation.

Don’t assume readers know anything at all about who you are or what you think. James Fallows on his Atlantic blog:

I have never before received anything close to this volume of response on Twitter, and it has never been more vitriolic. And all of it from people taking obvious (to me) sarcasm right at face value. Live and learn. I have learned that on Twitter, you cannot assume that you know the audience. In particular, you cannot assume that an audience beyond the one you intend will recognize the difference between sarcasm and sincerity.

Rob Horning in the New Inquiry, July 10 2015:

“Much like cable television narrows our exercise of choice amid the field of possible information to flipping channels, Facebook narrows it to the single action of ‘scrolling down’ through the programming it has seen fit to algorithmically supply….So the problem is not that Facebook users have insufficient control over the algorithm that displays content; it’s that users are willing to use Facebook as their primary gateway to the world, a kind of television with the minor improvement that the local news always includes reports on people you know. This leads to seeing the world only as so much content that Facebook can sort and prioritize and reify and sell. Facebook becomes (much like television had been before it) the medium that confers reality on experience. Until the News Feed algorithm has processed something, revealing its overall significance in our social graph, it really doesn’t properly exist. The moment the algorithm assimilates it is the moment when something actually happens.”