This brings me to facebook Timeline. Try scanning someone’s Timeline. It’s a very unpleasant experience. When information is organized in a list, it’s trivially easy to scan it, but with Timeline your eye has to dart around and try to combine the layout into an understanding of what the person’s been up to. It induces cognitive strain and brings [the logical, slow thinking part of our brains] online.
There was an interesting post a few weeks ago about how Timeline’s core goal is to reconceptualize brands in the eyes of users, and integrate them into the stream of data we see. When we usually see ads, [the fast, shallow processing part of our brains] processes and largely ignores them. But if Timeline causes [the logical, slow thinking part of our brains] to come online, then displays ads to it, facebook will be changing the way our brains process advertising. Timeline also makes branded posts (ads) look nearly identical to the actual content we’re on facebook to see, so it follows that they’d be processed similarly.
This all reminds of a recent quote about the state of the world. Paraphrasing, “the smartest people in the world are working hard to come up with ways to get you to click on ads.” … And it’s absolutely true, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and the like are brain trusts. People recognize that advertising is about psychology, and the bible of psychological decision making was just published. Why wouldn’t these smart people try to use these new tools to make more money? Timeline is just awful, but these people are too smart and skilled to make something so bad accidentally.
” Jeff DeChambeau » Behavioral economics and facebook conspiracy theories
