I watched literally 3 minutes of a recommended YouTube video on 70's Japanese Funk on vinyl yesterday...and today I'm getting ads on FB for Japanese Vinyl.
What an amazing coincidence!
Buy seriously, I can loosely comprehend how YouTube could make the recommendation based on my viewing habits (I have never searched for vinyl Japanese Funk explicitly but I can see the origin of the seemingly random recommendation).
But the transfer of that preference vector which is presumably in the YouTube/Google dataverse, over to Facebook/Meta is the bridge I'm trying to figure out and more so the speed of it (less than 24 hours).
More than 90% of my YouTube viewing (including this Japanese Funk video) occurs on AppleTV.
So presumably there is IP element and/or ISP element but what intermediary is in place to connect that ad to my viewing and deploy it so quickly?
I bring this up because it should open your eyes to the speed with which your attention, preferences, and biases can be played to.
Whether it is an ad service or a platform itself, tweaking an algorithm in short order to elicit an immediate and actionable response from you (outrage, buy now, misdirection, confusion, fear, paralysis) is the new media.
And then when you think of a platform like Twitter/X in the hands of someone like Elon Musk...and then about the rapidity of propagation across platforms through some black box interwebs backend....
Be wary of your feeds. Be wary of the emotions they elicit, satisfaction to rage.
Social media a reality but not reality.
It is a fog and fever dream, content to keep you in a waking coma until it wants or needs to you "do a thing".
(image created with the prompt "make me a picture of Japanese 70s vinyl funk)