How to Solve the Facebook Problem

The number of meaningful relationships a person can have is far less than the number of people you can accumulate in a social network, and that's where the problems can start. Both genuine speech and misinformation gets smuddled together very quickly. Ian Bogost, contributing writer at The Atlantic and director of Film and Media Studies at Washington University, joins us for more. Thanks for joining us in. Thanks so much for having me. I'm gonna talk about a very interesting article you wrote

at The Atlantic talking about social media. So, you know, we've been hearing a lot about social media recently. It's such a big part of our lives. Really. The Facebook papers is hitting the news right now, and kind of the effects that they knew on people teens and all that. There's just so much right and that's kind of the big issue with social media is that there's too much And so the article you were working on talks about how people really aren't meant to talk to each other

this much. You know, we come from smaller social circles. The more important people in your lives often are much smaller in number, and through social media your message could be amplified to many, many more people, and it really becomes untenable in a way. So Ian, tell us a little bit about what you wrote and and why we

weren't meant to talk to each other so much. The idea that we ought to and that we deserve an audience with the whole world all the time, maybe multiple times per day, and that anything we think or say ought to reach as many people as possible. We gotta get as many followers as we can. That's that's the idea that I'm trying to call into question in this piece.

And if you look at the social science and even the biology of kind of how humans work, there's some debate about it, but it is clear that there are limits, or at least that most people before the internet interacted with a relatively small number of people, especially the most interactions they have might have been you know, five or ten or fifteen people, your family, your closest friends, and your extended circle of colleagues and friends that you really

engage with on a regular basis typically might be you know, a hundred hundred and twenty people, which is you know, suggestive at least of the fact that we just were never meant to have this many interactions with this many people, this frequent, and it's so interesting. You know that number of a hundred hundred and twenty. I think British psychologist Robin Dunbar had that number at a hundred and fifty. In my lifetime, I know I've met that many people,

But do I truly know that many people. That's a hard No. Yeah, somebody that would trust and agree with everything they say, that's a hard note. That's really tough. And and our most intimate, you know, connected relationships we have. This is obviously what psychologists would say, right maybe about one about five to fifteen close friends. One of the consequences of that is that online people just started trusting more and more people that they might not have known

or maybe shouldn't have trusted. And that is one of the things, not the only thing, that's one of the things that's allowed misinformation to spread more broadly. It's not just that the information out there is bad or that there's a lot of it, but people are more receptive to it. They're more willing to share it, and they're more willing to invest a belief in it than they

might have been previously. Yeah, you made a note in the article two which is pretty interesting, just kind of going over how online communication has grown, right from the Worldwide Web in the nineties to user generated content to

the social media that we have. And this was previously kind of exclusive to big companies, corporations, somebody that had the access to big, giant channels of communication, and now this is given to everybody basically exactly, and everyone believes that they deserve it too, and it's all free, which

is important as well. You know, it used to be that if you wanted to connect with someone, you'd have to you know, maybe print a newsletter or a flyer and then mail it out to your community, or even if you wanted to make a phone call, that used to have a cost to it. Even a text message

us to do do. So everything has been reduced that the friction has been reduced, the cost has been reduced, and We've been given this potential audience of millions or billions of people and told you ought to have the ability to address it. That's what free speech means now. And those were the intermediaries before the costs, the barriers, and you know, if you're going to publish a book, you know that you're publishers all that. Now the new intermediaries

are the social media companies Google, Facebook, Twitter. Talk about that a little bit. There's this myth I think in the technology industry that's sometimes called disintermediation, that what the Internet does is it removes all of those barriers. You no longer have to get a publisher to approve what you want to say. You can just post it on Facebook or make your own website or blog or whatever it might be. But if you think about it for even just a minute, you realize it's not that the

intermediaries such as publishers and broadcasters have been removed. It's rather that they've been replaced by the big technology companies. And now you've got to get your stuff into the hands or eyes of other people through a service like Facebook or Twitter, or you've got to make it rise to the top of a Google search. In order that

people can see it in the first place. And those companies, those kinds of companies make their money through engagement, by by monetizing data and attention, and for that reason, it's in their interest to have you interact with other people and other ideas and other units of content as frequently

as possible. Talk to me a little bit about mega scale, and you know, you were talking about those incentives, right these and metrics to encourage the engagement, the likes and share accounts and all that, the number of your followers, all that, But talk to me about mega scale and

how that just becomes this unwieldy thing. Mega scale is the term that my Atlantic colleague Adrian the France coined to name this assumption that big technology companies have that they have to grow as large as possible, as fast as possible, and they have not just a big user base, but a kind of unprecedented one. If you think about the fact that they Pacebook has billions of users, a

couple of billion users. Previously in human history, that is just unprecedented that a company, or that anyone or even a government would have direct access to control the information

that that many people see and to influence their behavior. Now, one of the things that happened around megascale that idea of the largest possible business is it became a tacit precept of the technology industry, so that if you want to go and get funding or start a company, you must grow as big as possible and as fast as possible. And that value made its way into the hands and hearts of ordinary people too. So everybody from a politician to you know, your your neighbor or the the influencer

down the block. They believe that their celebrities, right, and not just celebrities, but they have the potential to reach anyone on the earth immediately and all the time. So Megascale is first a kind of business model for the modern technology business, and then an ethos, a way of thinking about and interacting with the world that kind of comes on the heels of that business model. And that's where you know, a lot of this really gets problematic

right there. You know, the good messages, the bad messages, it all kind of just gets muddled together as just one big number. And it doesn't matter if it's good or bad or excuse one way or the other. Just the amount of it is kind of what everybody's looking for. So what do we do then to help with this? And I know, you know, to be clear, you're not saying, you know, communication is bad all that, and I think

you've made your point to that. It's just you know, so much of it, right, So what do we do? Do we how do we limit social media? A lot of people have talked about regulatory intervention, but even some of those things are just really difficult to implement and

to enforce. They are difficult. And you know, as these Facebook paper stories start to come out and we see more and more calls to regulate or to legislate Facebook and other social media companies, one of the things that sometimes comes up, and if you just break up these companies into small and it's too big, you know, it's it's a monopoly, is you break them up into smaller companies.

But that doesn't really help when you when you give it a real thought, because those smaller companies would still have the same structure, the same sort of mega scale at their hearts, serving billions of people and letting them talk to one another constantly. So one of the things that I started to think about is, well, what are the other ways that you can introduce limitations or constraints

on behavior. It's not just whether a company like Facebook ought to have a billion users or whatever, but what each of those individuals are allowed to do or constrained to do, and how maybe we might scale it down or down scale it into a more kind of human

sized experience. A way of trying to get back to that time when you know, you you talk to a smaller number of people less frequently, you made the most of the opportunities you had for communication, and because it had friction and cost to it, both financial cost and kind of opportunity cost, it was more considered, if you will. And so you know, if you think about this, we're constantly constraining ourselves on at all the time. Like you know,

Twitter says you can only post this many characters. You know, this is the way that that an image is supposed to look on Instagram, or it's it's square in shape at least it used to be, or the way at a Snapchat post can time out and disappear. Those are examples of arbitrary artificial constraint that we accept because we

understand it and we're willing to embrace it. And so while it's a long road from point A to point B. I think that refocusing our attention to technology services so that they embrace and design some of that artificial constraint and make it more natural. That's that's one way of thinking about how we might solve some of these problems, in addition to some of the regulatory conversations that are

that are on the horizon. One of the examples you mentioned too that not many people might want to go for is what if you can only post a Facebook once a day, a week, or a month even you know what I mean, just to limit all of that. You know, one of the examples that you listed to in all of this is Google Plus maybe a better way to kind of organize the social structures. And I personally never liked Google Plus, but maybe this is all

to your point, right. You know, it didn't work. It didn't work that way because you couldn't get the mass the main followers. But organizing things in those circles circles of importance, right, your family, your coworkers and then all the other people that you might have come in contact with, you know, could have been maybe a better model, like you said, but you know what happens with what we

have already. People don't want to lose their megaphones. People don't want to lose what we already have, and that's another hurdle to all of this. It's very, very hard to go back. And you know, you could look back on the design of these services, whether it's Facebook or Google Plus, and say, oh, if we'd known then what we knew now, maybe we would have acted differently, maybe we would have introduced some guardrails, and that made or

might not be the case. But knowing that we can't literally go back in time, we can still clean up the way that these systems work. And there may be some combination of factors, some of them regulatory or legislative, if we can manage to make that happen, and some of them, you know, driven by the marketplace, by people's desires and their willingness to change their behavior. And people don't necessarily know what they're willing to do either. But

where we acclimate to these new services relatively easily. You know, back when Vine, the short video service that the Twitter owned and shut down after a little while, back when that existed, it was six second video clips, right, And if I told you, you know, and even in the era of ten minute YouTube videos, you're gonna love six second videos. It would have been like that doesn't make

any sense at all, But they were delightful. So some of this has to do with what exists in you know, the competitive nature of the marketplace is supposed to give us more options, not just in the sense of more places to get the same idea or the same experience,

but different experiences. And while Google Plus may not have been a fantastic and it certainly wasn't a successful social network, it did offer a different way of organizing our relationships that was more in line with the idea that they're naturally limited to some extent, that the way that we talked to our family is different than the way that we talk to our colleagues, and that there's a finite bar of each Yeah. I mean, it's just an interesting notion.

And we've seen social media get so what in wieldy now, and we're trying to go back and put the genie in the bottle and it's so hard to do. I suggest everybody go and read Ian's article on this. There's so much stuff in there, very well thought out. Ian Bogos, contributing writer at the Atlantic and Director of Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. I'm Oscar Ramirez

and this has been reopening America. Don't forget that. For today's big news stories, you can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday Friday. So follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast