bird feeder
This is my neighbor’s bird house, and I pass it every time I go on a walk.
It’s funny this is called a bird house. Some people more accurately call it a bird feeder. Birds can’t actually live here, and there’s only enough seed to keep them there long enough for a person’s entertainment. In fact, walls and a roof mean nothing to a bird. It’s just a colorful food box to them.
So what about social media? Every app has a homepage, but we can’t actually live there. Social media is also only a feed. There’s only enough validation to keep people around long enough for companies to collect their data. Pages aren’t real places. These are just nominal projections from the reality we come from onto the digital worlds we strap ourselves into.
It’s crazy that we’ve created hundreds of programs that can learn about us, decide what we’d want to see, and feed that information back to us. We’ve created a post-modern Cupid’s bow and pointed it right at our pupils. Just because it’s not a physical object doesn’t mean it’s not real. If anything, it’s even more menacing.