Face-ing the Music

In my continued attempt to examine rhetoric in social media, I'm logging on to Facebook. Easy enough, the site is already listed in my bookmarks bar. It probably ages me to say as much, but I'm extremely familiar with the platform and after over a decade of utilizing it, it's comfortable. It has a clean, mostly straightforward interface. In Mark Zuckerberg's words, "Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission - to make the world more open and connected." As I scroll, I'm seeing a blend of targeted ads for clothes, tropical resorts, supplements and beauty products, posts from friends and neighbors about cheer competitions and a pet goldendoodle who escaped his yard, group announcements and occasionally a suggested article or local event. The articles are typically pieces from The New Yorker or Texas Monthly about relationships or fascinating bits of local history. Staring rather blankly into my iPhone's screen, I'm not sure if connection is being fostered.

Lately, I've had to deliberately search to see information about current topics or news, and occasionally I'm unable to find any up-to-the-minute information at all. Even when I search for "headline news," my feed populates with posts from the groups that I follow that happen to feature bits of information. Where has all the rhetoric gone? Maybe it's just the Meta algorithm learning over time that I typically turn to social media to retreat from current events or stay on top of specific, local information like neighborhood happenings, but Facebook's rhetoric is difficult to pin down because, well, it's difficult for me to find at all. I stumbled across a comment today in a local mom group that gave me more information about the current CrowdStrike outage than a news brief I'd read. Unfortunately, that sort of random gem is few and far between, and still requires verification. To scroll through my feed, past advice for making sourdough bread, tips for finding cheap flights to Europe and an embarrassing amount of cat photos, one would get the impression that the netizen in question occupies her own planet. I've created a cozy, innocuous, unproblematic space for myself on a site meant to inform in one way or another. I've insulated my page from the world at large with every click of the unfollow and hide buttons. It makes me wonder if at some point, I unintentionally taught this algorithm, and others like it, something pretty significant… that I simply don't want to know.

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