Generation Like

Nick Cameron

Generation Like?

        It is perfectly natural for teenagers to seek gratification and express who they are. The middle school and high school years are very important for teenagers. As described in the PBS Frontline video, kids in this generation “seek empowerment through social media”. Social media provides instant gratification for users, as they can instantly see how many people like them. Facebook is a huge breeding ground for participatory culture, because the websites’ users also serve as marketers for many of Facebook’s advertisers.

        In the world of Facebook, consumers are responsible for sharing products to the world. Active users consistently post and re-post their favorite content, which helps the spreading of content without companies needing to spend money to promote it. The Facebook like button is a measure of just how successful a specific post is. For advertisers, the goal is to turn likes into money. Instead of using data research or handing out surveys to get results back, companies can measure how well liked a product is by observing the number of shares and likes it gets. Every day, millions of people view and interact with content on the web. In order for something to get a like, the user must feel like the content “expresses who they are” as Douglass Rushkoff states. Bonin Bough states that the idea of 1 million of people liking the same piece of content is “profound” because it means “one million people decided that ‘this piece of content speaks to me’”.

        Facebook uses user generated content to their advantage by selling information about their users to advertisers. This gives advertisers the power to “collect data about users’ behavior” (Fuchs,168) and use it to promote content that relates to them. Facebook is unique in the sense that users serve as marketers for the website. Facebook doesn’t need to decide which advertisements to show you, you already let them know, through the use of the like button, which things speak to you. Facebook uses a thing called instant personification in which they “share data with other platforms, with which it has entered business partnerships” (Fuchs,168). This creates a participatory culture where Facebook users basically become billboards for the companies they like. Likes can be turned into cash, and if a company creates a piece of content that many people enjoy, they reap the benefits of increased sales and awareness.