← all posts
Make things better by making better things.
Facebook is very good at polishing the rough edges. We never see the full picture, the whole story of what is actually happening.
We don’t post ten pictures of the line at the airport, the overworked flight attendant, how the service was average, how our bags won’t fit in the overhead storage or the lack of sleep.
Because…
Because no one wants to give a thumbs up to someone being malignant.
And so, we post about average stuff, what fits in and, over time, the work is dumb down to please the masses. And, worst of all, we stick to the innocuous, unobjectionable and unexceptionable for cheap affirmations. We talk about what is trending instead of what is important. Somehow we always find time to watch the season finale of Game of Thrones, to post about it, but not enough time to learn a new skill that will help us leap forward.
The thing is, we will never get the reassurance we need online to overcome the challenges we face in the real world.
Have you noticed that looking through the Facebook lens, everyone’s life looks better than yours? Why? Because these programs are designed to make us just unhappy enough, to keep going back.
What’s interesting now is the power of lock in that Facebook has created. If you use Facebook to login to other websites, you have just increased lock in. If you use Facebook to keep track of memories, you just increased lock in. And if you use Facebook to store photographs or for job interviews or the news or to keep tabs with your family, again, lock in.
To move years of memories over to a new platform increases in difficulty the longer we stay with any product.
What’s difficult to accept is that we are no longer customers, instead, we are their products.