Think about how social media has changed since you first joined.
I remember when you needed a college e-mail address to join Facebook. You had to be part of a college's network as the idea was to be able to meet people at your school. Looking back Twitter, for me, became a thing because it was the platform my high school friends and I used to talk and send funny tweets to each other. You probably have a similar experience with both social media sites in its "early days" (boy I feel old). But look at what these sites have become now. Facebook has ditched the college only audience to become global. Your parents are most likely on Facebook. Your little cousin. Your uncle. There's TV shows on Facebook now too (I see you Ball In The Family!). Even Twitter, my personal favorite of BIG SOCIAL, is filled with bots which either have 90 numbers in their Twitter handle or a dog avatar as their photo. What used to be a site where you may have gotten news from and attempted to get your favorite celebrity to reply to your tweet has turned to something where you're arguing with people that don't even exist! While you may long for the site you initially joined, the companies themselves are currently at an all-time high. What I mentioned above speaks to the influence of each site growing tremendously. Especially Facebook which owns Instagram and WhatsApp. Now that Facebook and Twitter have moved eons away from where they started, the big question is: how do you keep them in check? As you'll come to know from these I'm not able to go more than a few minutes without some sort of sports analogy (I warned you in the Intro). These social media companies remind me of a Barry Bonds or Alex Rodriguez story. For the uninformed, these are two baseball players that were All-Star caliber players going into and approaching their prime but due to pressure and greed turned to performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) to sustain their output. While PEDs came with a lot of consequences to the players' health and legacy, the money and expectations led these players to decide to turn heel. The heel turn for Facebook and Twitter? Allowing these outside forces to not only have a place on their sites but to play a role in manipulating the election. While the consequences of PEDs here is blatantly obvious in the crumbling of ethics and any bit of integrity Presidential elections ever had to begin with, the money flows and shareholders are happy.
While Facebook has tried to respond to the flak its received about its political handling by giving Alex Jones and Louis Farrakhan the boot, what's become even more alarming is the data collection. By now most people are probably aware of this and I'd imagine some are fine with it. I know I'm not the only one that's accused Facebook of listening to my conversation and then sending me an ad. The name of this website is to point out the idea that sports organizations want to sell parity. Not only is there not as much parity as we're led to believe but we as consumers don't really like it to begin with (i.e. NHL playoffs). Each season we as sports fans play into the illusion, when at the end of the day the outcome is typically one that's par for the course. So I ask you to re-examine your opt-in to BIG SOCIAL. Clearly this isn't the same site you signed up for years ago. Its audience has changed and with it has come a new agenda for what to do with you and how to monetize it. For some its fine and for other its the title of Cardi B's debut album. You decide what works for you. Yo! Thanks for joining me here. I guess this is probably where I should do some explaining. I'm basically a wordy person that has too many opinions to flood my Twitter. I operated a blog very much part time since 2010 that mostly featured sports stories and while sports is almost always going to be part of how I see the world--hence the idiom used for the title--I've reluctantly entered adulthood and want to also write about other happenings in America and society overall.
Allow me to answer some questions, maybe. Name of the website
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Ty FosterQuestion everything. WQHC Archives
June 2020
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