Mark Zuckerberg was clever when he decided to monetize popularity.
Like most initiatives, it was right there all along, he just was able to take two very specific, human issues and turn it into a billion-dollar industry: our need for popularity and our myopic thinking that what’s in front of us is the whole story.
Our culture is desperate to be liked and we are desperate to believe the ‘Still Photograph’ as if that’s the whole story. We interact with each other like still photographs even though we have the technology of moving pictures and multiple points of view, but our behavior is that of a still photograph.
We believe the smiling faces that are frozen in time is an accurate account of what came before, but it is no indication of that, and certainly no guarantee of what coming after.
Two significant deficiencies: the need to be liked and we believe what we see.