2-WAY COMMUNICATION: PARANOID WEDNESDAY NIGHT THOUGHTS

I thought Andy made a very compelling point about social media companies making enormous profits from their platforms, though the content itself is actually produced by the platforms' users. Since the platforms are typically accessed for free, the financial reward for companies like Facebook and Google would come from things like advertising and collection of data. Every keystroke we contribute to social media might be part of a very effective, participatory form of communication, but it is also being trawled by these companies, and I believe that we cannot yet comprehend the way that this will shape life in the future. When we use social media, we can, to a degree, select the audience we wish to transmit our thoughts to, but we are also ALWAYS transmitting to the platform. And the platform might give feedback in the form of weirdly relevant advertising, or by banning your account for content it deems distasteful... or perhaps it will just continue to listen quietly as we tell it more and more.