Evan Selinger has an important piece up at Wired on the way social media are constructing mood graphs based on our use of emoticons.
We already know that with a social graph at its disposal, a mood graph would give Facebook an incredible edge over its competitors for customizing ads and recommendations, as well as predicting users’ future feelings. But consider this: Even if you’re someone who doesn’t share anything, Facebook could potentially reverse-engineer your emotional persona by filling in the blanks from your like-minded friends’ emotional states. In other words, the more your friends emote and translate their soulful moments into basic data points, the more Facebook can determine what makes you tick, too.
In short, thanks to persuasive interface design and non-transparent algorithms, we may be providing emotional labor without even knowing it.
Couple the social media framing and exploitation of self-offered emotional labor with the construction of "soft skills" profiles from MOOCs and we see some of what the Autonomia people are after when they talk about the social factory.
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