All your <data> base are belong to us

Abstract

Abstract Using McLuhan and McLuhan’s tetrad of media effects, I analyse some of the challenges posed by limited label choices in social media environments. While social media programmers develop their platforms with a dual intent of usability and as a data-gathering instrument to aggregate useful demographics and psychographics for monetization purposes, users seeking social connections are not necessarily interested in programmer constructs resulting from assumed norms in database logic, particularly when those constructs limit the user in a way that is inappropriate to the users’ needs.