5 Ways Social Media Tricks You Into Using Social Media

2. Mass Personalization

This is another trait of social media that is not exactly new, but it plays an important role in how we view ourselves in relation to the social network machine. Sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Wordpress, and Instagram allow users to personalize their pages in order to "make their mark" on the website they are taking part in. Facebook does not allow users to change the style of their page outside the cover photo, so users instead create a web of interests surrounding the pages that they like in an effort to construct a distinct identity through the osmosis of different pop culture works that "define" you. What's problematic about this isn't that there is an obvious irony in seeking to establish a unique identity on websites that are in their very nature conformist, it's that social media is (somewhat) tactfully finding ways to quantify and monetize the ways you identify yourself to the world. It's common knowledge that Facebook sells personal information to companies in order to advertise to individual users more effectively, but what people don't consider is their active participation in propagating that system. If the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people that he didn't exist, the greatest trick social networks ever pulled was convincing people that they were interested in your personality for anything other than data mining.