Users of Facebook are free digital labour


As we were assigned to bring up any relevant topic for this blog, I connected the most with this week’s topic of “sharing” through reading Nicholas A. John’s book “The Age of Sharing”. More specifically I see that we use the social media platform of Facebook unconsciously because of how little users pay attention on the information we share to others, especially third party individuals. When we talk, post or like a post on Facebook, we are unaware that we are doing free digital labour for companies that have advertisements on Facebook. Facebook is there to invade our privacy because it sees what we search on the web or watch. For example, if I was just searching up cameras on Google, Facebook will have a bunch of camera store’s ads on my news feed as soon as I log in. With this being said, I wonder how Facebook third parties finds my information through my searches on the internet. In John’s book he quotes, “the notion of sharing is extremely versatile” (John, p.62,2018). This means that Facebook is able to follow us and adapt to our searches as it focuses on what we primarily look for on the internet.  In our last class we learned that social media platforms, such as Facebook, has enabled the convergence of public and private communication. Necessarily, Facebook doesn’t share our information to others when we sign up for a tool but it does expand our information further giving us more suggestions on what we would like buying online. Moreover, John suggest that Facebook is a marketing expert in his quote, “Facebook make money through a model of advertising based on extremely granular knowledge about its users such that the more we share, the better for Facebook (John, p.56, 2018). This shows that we we are giving Facebook free digital labour. With this being said, we are the sold product of social media because companies hire them to gather data of user’s information to increase sales and awareness. Users of social media commonly don’t pay attention to social media as our surveillance capital and it has been an issue to jeopardize our personal privacy.

Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 21, 2018 at 1:35 PM

    Hi,

    Speaking to your point about being individuals that provide Facebook with free digital labour and a sense of advertising through sharing our interests, do you feel like there should be more options for personal privacy in order to provide the ability to not be exposed to advertisements that aren't in our interests, as well as have more control over who is allowed to obtain your information?
    Though Facebook does not share our information I believe there should be more control over who holds that information, and who they are expanding it to. Rather than being treated as a commodity and consistently being marketed too, I believe that with the way media, technology, and advertising are heading, it is crucial to be an advocate for our personal privacy. Overall, I agree with your statement that our personal privacy is in jeopardy which can relate back to our unconscious ability to participate and share in social media.

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