There is a lot of work out there that is (often rightfully, in my mind) critical and suspicious of social media re: privacy concerns, surveillance, etc. These companies and their secret algorithms! But there’s not enough work that is critical and reflective of the love-hate relationship we have with social media. (Media studies scholars are so good at this!) Germaine, I love the way you explore both the affective dimensions of Facebook, the affordances of the platform, and your own strategies as a critical user managing your privacy settings and thinking carefully about your own visibility and presentation (i.e. boyd’s “social steganography”).

I think FB gets a lot of flack for the “river of viral links, quizzes, and badgering apps” (as one article you linked to puts it) as well as the ways targeted ads and sponsored content reach us. But sometimes I suspect we let the humans off the hook too easily. (I’ve been thinking about Doug Engelbart and his HLAM/T conceptual system from the 1960s… he believed humans needed to invest time in understanding their tech– experimenting with things like the “knee input device” as an alternative to the mouse–and that tech and interfaces shouldn’t necessarily be “intuitive” and all about usability. They might instead be things we learn to play, like an instrument.) Thanks for modeling the kind of critical inquiry that I want to see!