Inside the Walled Garden

As the time pass and the Internet develop, some rule is setting up, and the walled garden is building by social media.

Walled Garden, is an environment being created and controlled by Web content and services. It is guiding the users to a particular area. Users are allowed to access the selected materials and prevented to access the other materials. (Rouse, 2005)

The walled garden can easily find in our daily life. All social media is the garden with a wall, controlling what we discover on the Internet. For example, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Weibo. Each of them has their manner on what kind of information should not appear in the content, like violence, bloody, and porn. It seems like everything is going great as the user is being protected by the wall.

Photo by Interesting Engineering.

However, things get different by combining the garden with the stack. Users are going to be trapped by the wall. Take Facebook as an example. Facebook will keep on retarget the users by three steps. The first step is to track users. Second, explore them with the related message and the third is to monitor the performance to ensure it is worth it. (Poulpiquet, 2017)

This means that social media is collecting data from the users by using the stack. With the data, similar information will be provided as a recommendation for raising the attention of the users. And they are going to be traped by social media as it provides content that those users are interested in. Leading the users to stay on the same topic and keep using the same social media.

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References:

• Rouse, M. (2005, September 21), ‘Walled Garden’, Search Security, viewed 13 October 2020, < https://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/walled-garden >.
• Poulpiquet P. (2017, June 7), ‘What is a Walled Garden? And why it is the strategy of Google, Facebook and Amazon Ads platform?’, Medium, viewed 13 October 2020, < https://medium.com/mediarithmics-what-is/what-is-a-walled-garden-and-why-it-is-the-strategy-of-google-facebook-and-amazon-ads-platform-296ddeb784b1 >.