Feeding My Ignorance

Its a common complaint and a justified one in my opinion that Facebook has too much "junk" and not enough content. I have been challenged over recent days over what I could do about that and this is my first attempt at formulating those thoughts.

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This post falls into a large number of the categories that I have outlined for this blog - not a surprise since there are a lot of different aspects of the problem that need to be challenged, addressed and considered.  The root of it all is that, for the most part, the facebook feed is full of data - and I choose that word carefully as being at the bottom of the pyramid.  There have been countless instances of "fake news" and the worrying reports of 'interference' in elections by foreign actors are - I think - almost certainly true.  The only conclusion is that we cannot rely on the data carrying any information.

Going higher in the pyramid - it requires some careful thought to reach knowledge and - some would argue - no wisdom will ever come out of facebook. For what it is worth I would greatly dispute that last point - but each and every person has to work quite hard to attain such a state.

In many ways the problem is no different to the pre-www days -what  has changed is that the spread of everything is so much quicker and the coverage is so much wider.  Once upon a time, if I said something to a friend it was very likely that only a few people would ever know.  Nowadays, something said to a friend can spread like wildfire around the world - even before you realise that, perhaps, it wasn't the wisest thing to say.

The limit on characters in a tweet is also a big driver on the "lack of information" - whilst forcing brevity on some people is - to be honest - a welcome relief (said many of my readers!) - it is often difficult - if not completely impossible to provide sufficient context in so few characters.

Equally there are plenty of people around who have an attention span that probably would be tested by twitter they need to be catered for as much as those who delve most deeply.  I must dig out the slide - in one of our presentations regarding systems engineering we talked about generalists and specialists.  Within the context of what we were discussing then we simply divided the community into those who knew a lot about a very specific subject and those who had a more superficial view of a much wider range of subjects.

The reality is that each person is a bit of a mix - and also within the generalist and specialist groupings there are those who have a greater understanding than others.  Then there are some who do not even seem to have grasped the basics of anything important - like those in America who were protesting lockdown (arguably a reasonable thing to protest about) with banners like "I need a haircut", "massages are essential" and "Give me Liberty or Give me Covid-19" (missing the point that it would more likely be "and" rather than "or".

For most of us though there are things we know about a lot and things that we do not have a clue about and lots of things in between.  Where facebook and the like fall down rather is changing that in any meaningful way.  It is predicated on a "you hear more of what you want to hear" sort of model where your own world view is continually reinforced by what you read.  A bit like Trump supporters who only watch Fox News or OANN I guess.  Unless you open yourself up to 'new' knowledge you will forever be stuck with what you think you know.

So - how to help - perhaps by posting some 'different' things on facebook - most won't read them or watch them - but maybe one or two will - and that one or two may also start spreading good stuff.

Don't get me wrong - I am certainly not saying there is no "good stuff" on facebook already - I belong to a number of groups whom I value - its just that in the daily grind that sort of thing is largely drowned out by stuff that is (probably) less important.

When I contributed a lot to LinkedIn I often saw people say to others "that doesn't belong here - take it to facebook" when there was something that was 'beneath' the standards (such as they are) of LinkedIn.  Perhaps a few links here and there would enable a few facebook users to say "give me some more of that" and click the like button.