Facebook can flip your entire social identity on and off at the switch; that is way too much power for any institution to have over us, says Oliver Luckett, and we handed it to them. Luckett’s book is “The Social Organism: A Radical Understanding of Social Media to Transform Your Business and Life”
Transcript – There’s been so much conversation recently about societal bubbles, echo chambers, media bubbles, personal algorithm bubbles. My newsfeed told me that everyone thought the same way I did. And there’s a conflict there. One of the biggest reasons that those emerged was that companies like Facebook at the end of the day you’re the product they’re selling. They’re actually selling you as a sale on that network; they’re selling you to advertisers and so they need to put a nice polite bow around or you and they need to find look-alike audiences that think like you and look like you.
And the easiest way to do that is algorithmically to focus on, and at the same time there was never the dislike button, there was the like button. And so if you have a positive based signaling system like that that is designed to create a polite community of like minded people so that I could be targeted easier by an advertiser because my information is what’s being sold, then the result of that is going to be a nice polite bubble echo chamber and we’re seeing that right now. And people are astonished that I didn’t see the other half of this community, literally half of them that thought differently than me. I don’t see the ideas of that. At no point in modern history or in any human history has one person had as much control over what we think, what we see, what we do than Mark Zuckerberg. Read Full Transcript Here: https://goo.gl/dWDouH.
More on the book below
The Social Organism: A Radical Understanding of Social Media to Transform Your Business and Life
“A must-read for business leaders and anyone who wants to understand all the implications of a social world.”-Bob Iger, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company
From tech visionaries Oliver Luckett and Michael J. Casey, a groundbreaking, must-read theory of social media — how it works, how it’s changing human life, and how we can master it for good and for profit.
In barely a decade, social media has positioned itself at the center of twenty-first century life. The combined power of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine have helped topple dictators and turned anonymous teenagers into celebrities overnight. In the social media age, ideas spread and morph through shared hashtags, photos, and videos, and the most compelling and emotive ones can transform public opinion in mere days and weeks, even attitudes and priorities that had persisted for decades.
How did this happen? The scope and pace of these changes have left traditional businesses — and their old-guard marketing gatekeepers — bewildered. We simply do not comprehend social media’s form, function, and possibilities. It’s time we did.
In The Social Organism, Luckett and Casey offer a revolutionary theory: social networks — to an astonishing degree — mimic the rules and functions of biological life. In sharing and replicating packets of information known as memes, the world’s social media users are facilitating an evolutionary process just like the transfer of genetic information in living things. Memes are the basic building blocks of our culture, our social DNA. To master social media — and to make online content that impacts the world — you must start with the Social Organism.
With the scope and ambition of The Second Machine Age and James Gleick’s The Information, The Social Organism is an indispensable guide for business leaders, marketing professionals, and anyone serious about understanding our digital world — a guide not just to social media, but to human life today and where it is headed next.
The Social Organism: A Radical Understanding of Social Media to Transform Your Business and Life
