The Feed Effect: How Your Online World is Built for You, a campaign by NAMLE’s Youth Advisory Council
Keeping up with popular culture is nearly impossible nowadays. In what feels like an endless loop, one swipes and swipes and, in return, it feels like you are bombarded with a media overload. If I heart a video of a cute panda rolling around in a zoo, I know that I will be invited to watch 20 other videos of pandas rolling around. Most of the time, though, I believe that one panda video is enough. For my generation, a great challenge is juggling an everlasting amount of content to consume. The insatiable “doomscroll” becomes hard to resist when every video on your feed feels like it was made for you. That’s because it was.
Media scholars define personalized feeds as “content based on users’ inferred interests.” Your behavior and tendencies are reflected through your data. Media platforms’ steps to derive personal data help create unique feeds for users. They have the potential to make media platforms more enjoyable and useful. It makes sense that you would want to watch videos about shows that you have watched, trends that are popular, and influencers to which you can relate. Agreeing to share your personal data, often as part of the terms of services, allows platforms to improve your individual user experience, so it becomes important to understand how feeds can affect you.
Personalized feeds can influence what you think, feel, and buy. When companies have access to your data, they create and individualize your feed, as well as the advertisements that appear on your feed. The impact of users’ personalized feeds on their well-being is well-documented — including by Facebook’s “emotional contagion” study, which showed that changing the emotional content people saw in their feeds was associated with changes in the emotional language they subsequently used.
A feed often consists of aggregates of items, such as writing pieces, photographs, and videos. Main parties involved in the experience of interacting with a feed include: you (the user), the media creator, and the technology platform’s company. Media scholars have observed that the use of media platforms for spreading content shapes “the terms on which participants interact with one another.”
When I download an app, I agree to a platform’s terms when creating or using an account. Platforms control what content and advertising is presented, and users have limited control over their digital space. In my experience, it is hard to navigate a “Terms and Conditions” page, when it feels like you are looking at hundreds of pages. Online, our feed comes off as a neutral platform, but in reality, there are monetized videos and third-party interests. It thus becomes increasingly important to use media literacy skills when analyzing personalized media content because one of the objectives of a recommendation system is to optimize engagement—so there is an emotion-influencing component involved.
Personalization can be used positively when a user is fully aware of how their feed is created. I would rather be seeing content that is relevant to my generation than some of the videos my grandparents watch. That said, it is important to take into consideration the age of a platform’s users. A child has different interests than an adult and needs more time to grow into developing media literacy skills to understand and evaluate content. That is why parents, caregivers, and educators can help young people develop media literacy skills and understand how children’s data is used to create their feeds. To preempt any harm, parents and teachers should focus on helping young people understand and navigate the media environments they use.
One pitfall of unique feeds is the potential effect of only recommending opinions that align with the user’s beliefs, creating an echo chamber of information. Unique feeds are as powerful as the platform that controls them. Your feed acts as an automatic topic selector. If you tend to lean more towards certain political opinions for example, your feed will tend to give you reaffirming content with your beliefs or drastically-opposite content from your beliefs. Unique feeds can create a silo of information for users.
In my own life, I see how my friends are heavily influenced by companies selling “trending” items and how that influences their purchasing decisions. Following the recent release of the movie “The Odyssey,” my feed was filled with advertisements for paraphernalia related to it. When a platform is, for example, monetizing a video for a new movie, that can be advantageous to the selling of tickets to the movie theater. Remaining aware of the different influences on your feed is necessary in navigating your true interests versus what is being advertised towards you.
Everyone has a unique feed. I have learned that there is great value in understanding your role as a consumer of content on platforms. Platforms can be designed to optimize engagement within their audiences, and it is important to use media literacy to consider who is responsible for what appears on your feed. Especially as you grow into a more media-literate citizen, you should dedicate some time to understand the responsibilities that joining different platforms involves. Personalization can be used to connect you with communities; but, especially when there are emotions involved, it is important to reflect on that fact.
So, the next time your feed gives you a video of a cute dog, be hesitant of clicking the heart button without preparing to see about 10 more cute dog videos.
This blog was written by NAMLE Youth Advisory Council member Flora Uslaner, as part of the campaign, “The Feed Effect: How Your Online World is Built for You“