To understand what is happening right now we need understand how the world wide web has changed from when it was first invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. The web we see now is often called web 2.0 to mark this evolution. This transition was made possible by the pervasive use of computer algorithms. Prior to the advent of these algorithms, we explored the web like some new land. Now, in a very real way the web has begun to explore us.

The web burgeoned in the 1990s since it cost almost nothing to publish content with the already existing tools for word processing, image editing, and digital video. During this period, often called web 1.0, users had to actively search for content. There were plenty of options for active discussion and participation, especially for the web-savvy. But if you wanted to be self-supporting as a blogger or seller, it was very hard to build a large audience. Very few were lucky enough to attract many people to their site when it was just one of millions of others out there. The difficulty of attracting visitors was one of the factors leading to the dot-com bust in the late 1990s. Start-ups burned through their investment capital by spending it on newspaper, television, and radio ads, in order to drive people to their sites, so that they could make money through presenting even more ads.

YouTube solved this problem by making it easier for video makers and viewers to find each other. They did this by applying different classes of algorithms to increase the likelihood that visitors to YouTube would find videos that would interest them. This engagement model kept people on the site so that more ads could be presented to them. These algorithms also changed the flow of information. Web 1.0 was becoming Web 2.0. We no longer had to go out and search for content. Content was searching for us and arriving in front of us in a way that felt more like the familiar passive media consumption of the past but tailored to our personal interests.

Us

In his Wired article, Steven Levy draws from a 17-page chunk from the (mostly destroyed) journals of Mark Zuckerberg to examine a key point in the evolution of Facebook. One of the preoccupations within this journal was a product that he called Feed (later named News Feed). This signalled a dramatic change to the Facebook concept, which would later have real-life impacts on global events in war and in politics. At the beginning, Facebook required more active effort on the part of users to connect with friends. You had to go to your friends’ profiles in order to see what they were up to and post your updates on their “walls”. This was very much in line with the active participation that defined the web 1.0 world. The news feed changed all of that.

Now your friends’ updates were pushed to you without any effort on your part. The news feed would make it easy for people to see what was important among the friends with whom they were connected. Steven Levy notes that Zuckerberg used the word “interesting-ness” to cover the kinds of stories that should appear in a news feed. They needed to be “centered around your social circle.” There was to be an emphasis on changes in personal relationships and life events. The new feed was to favour these over interesting events or other information outside your social circle.

The news feed when it launched in 2006 appeared to be disastrous since it had major privacy flaws and people protested heavily against it. But it was also clear, once Facebook employees looked at the data, that people were spending more time on Facebook. It was the news feeds themselves that helped the protests to go viral. Facebook fixed the more serious privacy issues, the protests died down, and Facebook continued to grow exponentially.

The Advertising Model

The social media apps emphasized personal expression and personal connection. They developed classification and association algorithms to find friends and people for users to connect to. The rougher and less polished the content that you posted the more authentic you appeared to friends and followers. The recommendation engines brought the videos, memes, stories, and comments that would most appeal to you. The highly social nature of the apps and their ease of use attracted millions of users. And from these millions of users flowed massive amounts of content. The algorithms were needed to manage this content.

Facebook constructs a picture of you, starting with the biographical information that you supply—where you live, work, and play. Even more importantly, Facebook has a record of your social network graph. Who do you know? What is your social milieu? Is it primarily middle class or poor, urban or rural? Are you conservative or liberal? What do you believe in? All of this information can be gathered through what you post, share, and like. Advertisers uses this data to target ads to likely buyers. This data is fed into filtering and prioritization algorithms so that they surface the stories from your friend and follower networks that are mostly likely to keep you liking and sharing. The longer you stay glued to your phone the more ads you will encounter.