Facebook’s Vision: Our Identities as Brand Identities
In today’s social media-saturated world, our online identities have essentially become personal brands – commodities that can be marketed and monetized. With over 2.96 billion monthly active users, Facebook pioneered features that allowed people to pay to promote their posts and events. While this generated backlash initially for “commodifying friendship,” it has now become an accepted and widely used practice across social platforms.
The Rise of Influencer Marketing
The Influencer Industry Boom
People with large social media followings now earn incomes rivaling A-list celebrities by promoting brands and products. Instagram launched its own paid partnership feature, allowing influencers to explicitly tag sponsored content. What began as users organically sharing aspects of their lives has been entirely subsumed by financial incentives.
Strategic Self-Marketing
Our personal brands today have marketing budgets, campaign objectives, and monetization strategies. Entire industries of coaches, consultants, and agencies have sprung up to help ordinary people optimize their online presence for fame, followers, and fortune. We’ve internalized the need to strategically curate our posting habits and digital footprints.
A New Era of Social Stratification
Widening Disparity in Visibility
In the early idealistic days of social media, it was seen as an egalitarian space – a great equalizer where ordinary people could gather, share, and be heard. However, the introduction of money has created stark status hierarchies dominated by those able to invest in self-promotion.
Paid Prioritization Algorithms
Platforms now prioritize paid and promoted content in feeds and algorithms. Reach, engagement and visibility directly correlate with economic privilege rather than community value. Those unable to pay are relegated to digital obscurity.
A New Aristocracy
Thus a new era of digital inequality has emerged. A type of aristocracy akin to pre-WWII social stratification has taken form online. An underclass unable to compete languishes in obscurity and irrelevance while the wealthy dominate attention and visibility.
Preserving Authentic Human Connection
Declining Organic Reach
Despite monetization, many still value social media for authentic human connection – sharing life’s mundane moments and milestones. But even sincere interpersonal connection relies on visibility – the ability for friends and family to actually see your posts. As more users pay to promote content, organic reach declines for those who don’t.
Distorted Social Values
We must be vigilant of how these dynamics distort relationships and community values. Features that privilege the wealthy risk undermining the promise of online spaces as level playing fields. Social platforms seem destined to become glorified advertising boards if left unchecked.
Preserving Egalitarian Ideals
Perhaps new norms and regulations could preserve the ability for genuine human connections to take primacy over financial warfare. If not kept in check, a dystopian scenario emerges of a highly stratified and inequitable online landscape catering primarily to the elite.
Summing Up
As social platforms increasingly commoditize identity, we approach a decisive moment — either accepting self-presentation as a marketed product or reasserting ideals of authentic connection. New regulations offer hope that social spaces need not devolve into pay-to-play echo chambers that marginalize less privileged voices. However, realizing the emancipatory vision that drove early enthusiasm for online community requires reintroducing moral imperatives of equal access and influence back into the engineering ethos. Only a conscious recommitment to designing platforms that answer to richer values than revenues can rescue social media from its otherwise destined fate as a consolidated digital feudal kingdom auctioned to an elite nobility armed with nothing but credit cards as the glimmering badges of their rule.
