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How Facebook Has Flattened Human Communication
Online services demand easily classified content. Users have obliged.
“Since you are tongue-tied and so loath to speak,
In dumb significants proclaim your thoughts.” —Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 1“I feel so bad for the millennials. God, they just had their universe handed to them in hashtags.” —Ottessa Moshfegh
The primitive level of user feedback encouraged by online services is a feature, not a bug. It is vastly easier for a computer to make sense out of a “like” or a “⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐” than to parse meaning out of raw text. Yelp’s user reviews are a necessary part of their appeal to restaurant-goers, but Yelp could not exist without the star ratings, which allow for convenient sorting, filtering, and historical analysis over time (for instance, to track whether a restaurant is getting worse). This leads to what I’ll term…
The First Law of Internet Data
In any computational context, explicitly structured data floats to the top.
“Explicitly structured” data is any data that brings with it categories, quantification…
