Project
Social Media Paradox
Social Media Paradox is a bilingual interactive learning experience about social media, wellbeing, attention, platform incentives, and healthier public choices.
The project maps social media as a system rather than only a personal habit, showing how human needs, creators, platform companies, governments, recommendation algorithms, advertising revenue, engagement goals, wellbeing risks, and regulation interact.
It invites visitors to ask what social media might look like if it were optimized for people's happiness, and to imagine healthier platform design, public policy, community life, and personal choices.
What the project explains
Social Media Paradox explains why social media can create connection, knowledge, creativity, and opportunity while also producing anxiety, polarization, attention capture, comparison, loneliness, and harm.
The project treats social media as a system rather than a simple personal habit. It looks at the needs people bring to platforms, the incentives creators respond to, and the business models that reward engagement, advertising revenue, algorithmic prediction, and constant return.
Incentive structures covered
- Recommendation algorithms that optimize for engagement and retention.
- Advertising models that monetize attention, prediction, and behavioral data.
- Creator incentives around visibility, metrics, novelty, identity, and emotional intensity.
- Platform governance, public policy, regulation, and the limits of individual responsibility.
What someone will learn
Visitors learn to see social platforms as civic, psychological, economic, and technical environments. The experience invites them to ask what social media could look like if it were optimized for wellbeing, healthier public choices, better community life, and less extraction.
Marianne's role was to frame the system, connect the human and institutional layers, and turn the topic into an interactive public learning experience.