Plus ça change: social media's broken promise
Alice Emily Marwick · The New Scientist · 2014
Web 2.0 was heralded as a radical game-changer that would level the playing field. On social media, people have to create personas that appeal across different contexts, self-censoring based on what they think the audience wants to see. In business contexts, this means that people create work-sale personas, often removing political or personal content to focus on their Industry and remain relentlessly upbeat about their own work. Here, Marwick reveals that rather than encouraging openness, transparency or authenticity, social media has re-inscribed a limited view of success and a surprisingly narrow range of acceptable behavior. While this may differ between social groups, cultures and nationalities, social media's early, revolutionary promise has been replaced by a jockeying for popularity and status that is far from world-changing