How about a channel that tunes into you, instead of the other way around?
At the same time that it’s taking steps to combat the spread of fake news and bogus content, Facebook has revealed that it is in talks with TV studios to create programming for the massive social network.
The admission is surprising given that Facebook has repeatedly argued that it is not a media company.
Except now it is.
The addition of “unscripted, scripted and sports” programming, which, like Facebook’s core “newsfeed” technology, will likely be tailored to individual users, is just the latest step in the social network’s attempt to completely pervade every aspect of our digital lives.
And like the Borg, the robotic “Star Trek” aliens who warn all their victims that “resistance is futile,” there will be no escape. Call it the Faceborg.
Whatever the company cooks up will surely be engineered to appeal to our own individual and particular tastes and arrive directly into our posession on our own smartphones.
Facebook already uses similar technology to provide its users with news stories.
Only that’s where it’s been getting into trouble.
In fact, admitting that they are a media company has been something Facebook executives have fought against even as critics have been blasting the site for disseminating “fake news” – foreign propaganda and bogus reports dressed up to look like the real thing – that may have had an impact on the presidential election.
“We do not think of ourselves as editors,” Patrick Walker, Facebook’s head of media partnerships, said during a recent journalism conference in Dublin. “We believe it’s essential that Facebook stay out of the business of deciding what issues the world should read about. That’s what editors do.”
Wrong.
Last week Facebook took steps to vet the news content, essentially turning themselves into editors and confirming that the social media site has transformed into something else. And with some sort of entertainment programming now in the pipeline, served up just for you or me or any one of the other nearly two billion users, Facebook is poised to become far more than just a media company — it’s on the verge of transforming into a television-industrial network of the future.
Resistance is futile.
