Hi there! This piece is about the way we discover content that interests us. There will be a second part about how this (new) type of content can be conceived and produced. The appointment is in a few days, precisely.
The tools that people choose to inform themselves, have fun, communicate, and learn are constantly changing. Those who work in communication know this well: the snapshot of the behaviors of the audiences we address becomes outdated in just a few weeks. And yet, in this constant change, a concept has become so familiar that it seems stable and everlasting.
It's a recent idea, made public in 2006, patented in 2010, and attributed to a group of eight Californians: engineers, developers, scientists, and students. Seven of their names (Sanghvi, Bosworth, Cox, Sittig, Hughes, Geminder, Corson) may not mean much to you. They are the people who, together with the eighth, Zuckerberg, took the first steps for Facebook. Sixteen years later, it's difficult to say how aware they were of the impact of their ideas, but they were laying the foundation for every new social network that would be born. With a rather insipid name, one of the most powerful ideas in the history of media was born: the news feed.
Once upon a time, there was the feed.
The change that this tool has brought to our online behavior is far from trivial. If you have experienced one of the primitive versions of Facebook, you may remember that updating yourself on your contacts to find out what they were thinking, saying, doing, or sharing required a certain intention, care, time, and patience. You had to visit each person's profile one by one. There was no single place to aggregate their updates. There were no rules or dynamics to bring them together: how could you decide what to see first and what content to leave at the bottom?
The news feed has been a straightforward solution from the start: giving an order of relevance to the stimuli that could reach us. The effectiveness with which the news feed did this created a cultural twist, so strong that today it is unthinkable for any technological application through which we build our image of the world not to be based on some system of content classification. Social platforms like Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, news aggregators like Apple News or Google News, but also entertainment applications like Netflix, Prime Video, or Disney Plus. They all use an algorithm that selects content to propose to us based on a ranking somehow attributable to the news feed.
Initially, it was an aggregator of information coming from the user's contact groups: the key element was the direct connection with the post author. In other words, your uncle's good morning post came before a New York Times article, which in turn was more visible than the program of the Teatro Verdi in Florence.
Over time, the functioning of the news feed classification has undergone radical changes. News has become increasingly important, becoming a fundamental ingredient for the algorithm and, consequently, for the billions of people who use it. In 2018, a new change occurred: the content of family and friends returned to the forefront, with a focus on the more "private" part of our social interactions. News feed simply became feed, but the logic of connections remained fundamental: if a content comes from one of my contacts, it will be privileged among the materials that the system chooses for me.
The tool we have chosen to inform, entertain, communicate, and learn has been pervasive in our digital behaviors. It represented the first, fundamental step that allowed us to overcome the linear dynamics through which content reached us via channels such as television, radio, and print media. For these "old" channels, customization possibilities were practically non-existent: a single content for everyone. Brands have taken part in this media revolution by studying what was relevant to people, adapting their point of view and approach, and building content proposals designed for specific groups of people rather than for a rather indistinct mass. Those who have been most successful have understood what mattered to people in that flow of content and have valued it, adapting to changes in the feed and people's priorities.
Reset
1938 in Cambridge was a time of economic collapse, market contraction, and unemployment levels never before seen. In the midst of this miserable year, a group of Harvard scientists decided to track the most elusive dimension of all: happiness. Or rather, they tried to understand what led human beings to live a healthy and happy life. They began by studying 268 university students and followed them for their entire lives. Over the years, the panel grew, including the children of the first participants, hundreds of men and women.
After 80 years, Harvard has published its conclusions. They did it with a comment from the director of the study, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Robert Waldinger tells the world that taking care of our bodies is important, but the study reveals something less obvious: taking care of our interpersonal relationships is a form of self-care. The most social activity is also what makes us feel better as individuals. It is our way of inhabiting the world. Specifically, it is the closest relationships that make people happy. Instead, money, fame, social status, or intelligence quotient are important but secondary aspects.
What makes us feel good are the closest and most meaningful relationships. It's not about the thousands of people we're connected to through relationships that have a low emotional impact and are infrequent. Weak ties, as sociologist Mark Granovetter called them in his book "The Strength of Weak Ties". During the pandemic, we collectively rediscovered the importance of stronger ties, even through social communication, at the expense of the importance of their counterpart.
In the early 2010s, the interaction mechanisms of social media platforms prompted many to focus on quantity, on the number of people we are connected with. In the early 2020s, however, the focus has shifted to quality, on the underlying dynamics of these relationships.
How do we choose which relationships are the most important? Several factors help us with this. Mainly: physical proximity and shared values. In practice, we develop close relationships only with a very small group of people: more easily if we frequent the same places and share the same principles.
In the United States, the average number of people considered friends has decreased over the past thirty years. It is not difficult to see a reflection of this trend on the structure of society, not only on social tools.
Social media platforms, which we use for such significant and prolonged activities every day, can only influence our behaviour. At the same time, the functioning of these tools is continually adapted to how we interact with the world. The goal of change is to try to remain relevant over time, even when people's habits change.
Start your engine
As we prioritise a smaller circle of friends, the time we spend online continues to increase. In this context, it's evident that the (News) Feed is no longer able to meet our content needs if it continues to rely on its previous assumptions.
With fewer people in our close circles, it's difficult to come across content that's relevant and numerous enough to satisfy our explorations, if we only or mainly think about what our smaller circles create.
In this situation, a new idea comes into play, a concept that Meta wants to use to replace the feed. If the focus can no longer be on broad knowledge and contacts, priority is given to content that the algorithm deems relevant not for proximity, but for topic. The discovery engine, as Zuckerberg has called it, is a tool that allows the evolution from a place to connect with friends and family to a place for entertainment.
The discovery engine is based on artificial intelligence. More precisely, a machine learning algorithm, which means that it learns from its own activity rather than programming. The discovery engine allows for the selection of recommendations, highlighting the most popular and relevant ones within a network (such as Facebook or Instagram), regardless of who shared them. Connections, or strong ties, become much less relevant in this case. Through the discovery engine, users can discover content from outside their own network of connections. The user experience will alternate between content from strangers to posts from direct connections, from that handful of strong ties at the core of our relationships.
We are not talking about a phenomenon exclusively related to Meta or Facebook, in fact. TikTok and ByteDance are the pioneers of this approach and the "discovery engine" has been one of the most important factors in their success. Social media platforms that offer a more valuable experience to people today help them discover interesting content, almost independently of its source.
New types of connections require new approaches to content. In the second part of this exploration, you will read about how we can think about content differently today than in the past. If you don't want to miss it, you know what to do⦠(subscribe).