Musings on Social Media – Digital impressions

[Note: began this post a few weeks ago…  to take “tonight” to mean, some evening in time..]

A few weeks ago, I suggested I’d be taking a look at how we/I use social media, and what it implies in terms of the digitization of information.  Other than this blog, tonight I’ve looked up deviled egg recipes via Google, pulled up a particularly yummy-looking Bacon Cheddar Deviled Eggs one from AllRecipes, posted a comment about my enjoyment of my first pumpkin beer this year on Facebook, watched videos and submitted homework for a statistics course on Coursera, and added a goofy comment on Twitter.

That leaves behind a trail of both specific thoughts (my answers for the statistics homework and impressions of pumpkin beer) and sign posts to what things interest me (bacon cheddar deviled eggs, apparently).  The rub for anyone digesting all of that is to determine which of those are core or repeatable insights into me, and which were insights into a particular moment.  Even those momentary insights are pointers – the question is becomes how to interpret what they’re pointing to.  I think of Netflix movie recommendations or Amazon movie recommendations – they’re always heavily tainted by what I’ve last seen, whether or not they were core items or momentary insights.  Yes, I did watch a kids cartoon with my kids after they begged me.  No, I don’t want my feed to be perpetually filled with My Little Ponies.  But I also don’t care to point out which things are core versus which things are momentary.  I’d rather the systems be wrong most of the time than spot-on right.  Would rather not be quite that knowable.  Particularly not by computer systems…

 

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