How many of us have considered the ways in which popular social media services — which admittedly are hugely appealing in many ways  — are doing an effective job of killing the world wide web and undoing the early promise that it offered of direct and open access, along with visibility proportionate to quality, and critical disintermediation?

A few years back there was this astonishing, exciting, powerful, accessible thing called the world wide web, on which virtually anyone could share their story, their creative work, their business — and we saw the beginnings of the great disintermediation as boundaries were broken and the middlemen who had stood between content producers and consumers began to disappear. This was a world filled with promise. Those who produced valuable and interesting content (as differentiated from those who simply channeled it) could connect directly with a world of people who found that content compelling, and those looking for content could easily find it and follow it. Word got around, and it did so fairly directly, with little or no intermediation by those who had controlled traditional media.

Social media applications are seductive things, especially during their start-up phase, when the typical approach has involved giving away (or at least appearing to give away) a great deal of access by means of what seem like very open platforms. In fact, many who jumped onto these platforms early on did manage to leverage their initial power to their advantage. However, virtually without exception, these applications have morphed in directions that do not enable our own control over what we see and who we connect to, but which instead take control out of our hands and begin to determine for us what we will see, most often based on generating advertising revenue — a old model that takes us back to (to coin a term) nondisintermediation.

Facebook is a prime example. I joined in the early days before it was widely known, when it opened to academic users. The early Facebook seemed altruistic, providing a platform that let individual users construct their own circles of interest by following others that interested them, providing complete personal control over how connections were built, and rewarding those who provided the content that Facebook relies on (Facebook itself cannot exist without content generated by others) through the belief that good content would lead to “organic reach,” a process whereby quality was made visible.

But bit by bit, the core promise of the original Facebook (and this is not unique to Facebook) has been carved away. Today, if you really work at it and understand the system fairly well, you can almost maintain that sort of relationship with a small number of other Facebook users. However, organic reach (which is how the original web succeeded) is essentially gone, as anyone with an eye on their Facebook page view statistics can easily see — and Facebook is instead pushing a pay-to-play model where what you see is affected most significantly by who pays Facebook to show it to you and by how much they pay. In fact, many people who actually want to see what you share are prevented from seeing it, and you no longer see a great deal of what you came for.

Facebook, of course, has the right to operate its business as it wishes. However, the rest of us should think long and hard about what these changes mean. How far has Facebook diverged from providing the resources that were part of its original core promise, namely the ability to build our own web of connections, to use it as a way of linking to the rest of the web, and to share our content openly with the world? And, as Facebook has growth to become the behemoth of the internet, how has this affected/degraded the promise of the web itself, which for many people is now more and more “intermediated” by the private, for-profit goals of Facebook?

In my view, one of the most dangerous outcomes of these services is that their goal seems to be to supplant and then own the services that formerly came through an open and democratic web and internet. For example, any Facebook user and content producer who is paying attention understand deeply that Facebook devalues posts that link outside of the Facebook world and to the full web. Yes, you certainly can post links and share stuff from the web, but if you share the content directly from within the Facebook system it will be seen by far more people and it will be presented in a more attractive and complete form. It is no accident that Facebook posts are designed in such a way that you cannot include embedded links, which are arguably the heart of the web.

• The image at the beginning of this post is a screenshot from my 1997 teaching we site, created two or three years after my first website creation work.

Morning Musings are somewhat irregular posts in which I write about whatever is on my mind at the moment.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.