I keep pondering the semiotics of the images when I visit Facebook
Having
been through the process while working on marketing documents for
institutions, I feel that I have an understanding of some of those
decisions.
There are a disproportionate number of people of colour, above the statistical average, which signifies diversity.
The
heart and smiley icons are significant symbols within the Facebook
ecosystem, but here signify passions and humour -- rather than the
angry-looking emoji that also plays a role in these responses.
Significantly
for a platform that has been shown to promote negative emotions to
drive engagement for advertisers, the site promotes itself as a happy
place for friendship.
It seems ironic given how much of the newsfeed is now occupied by pages we didn't choose to follow.
The
timestamp is where the darker aspects of Facebook's surveillance are
acknowledged, but it is as much something that users engage in as we can
see when our messages are seen by recipients as well as getting a sense
of what they're doing and with whom.
Of all the roles that Facebook now plays in users' lives, it's the image of the knotted blue rope that prompted my reflection.
Why would a twisted thread be significant enough to go on the homepage of Facebook's website?
It looks sorta like a germ photographed under an electron microscope!
Yet the connotation must be that we are tied together through the website.
Although,
now that I think about it, maybe I am the germ within their clean
user-interface and attempting to infect your experience with some
skepticism.
Facebook has been central within
our societies and the suppression of journalism in favour of knee-jerk
emotions and rage-baiting shows how dangerous it continues to be for
democracies.
Journalism used to be known as the
fourth pillar of democracy and we're still getting a sense of how
communities can operate without a sense of the facts that profession
would establish and interrogate.
So the deeper significance of the knot is that we're tied together by a US-based corporation as it dismantles democracies.
