Facebooks fosters "me versus you" interaction

Facebooks fosters "me versus you" interaction

Interesting essay.

The most subtle and interesting conflict of interest at the heart of Facebook is user vs user. The promise of the net was originally positive network effects — the more people on a network, the better off each would be, not additively, but multiplicatively. Think Wikipedia in its early days, maybe. Only today, we’re finding out that didn’t turn out to be true. On Facebook, especially, heavy users face significant forms of mental and emotional harm: they end up sadder, lonelier, meaner, and dumber (to name just a few).
So Facebook turns the utopian promise of the 2000s turned on its head: it produces deep, systemic, and enduring negative, not positive, network effects. The more I use Facebook, the more miserable you are (and vice versa). But why is that? And why then do people keep using it?

Source: Can Facebook Redeem Itself? (Part 2) – Eudaimonia and Co

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