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Imagine you live at the end of a cul-de-sac in a subdevelopment that is only accessible by a single gate that leads out to a large, high-speed arterial road. \u00a0Your friends, your job, your kids\u2019 school are all outside of this development which means life is lived through and on the road that connects your subdevelopment to the rest of the world. Now imagine that, without warning or any kind of democratic process, the company that maintains that road (private companies are subcontracted to do regular maintenance on public roads all the time) decides to add trees on either side of the road<\/a> to reduce car speed. It\u2019s a relatively benign design intervention and it works. In fact the trees work so well that the company\u2019s engineers publish in a few journals which directly benefits the company financially, through prominence within the truly boring world of road maintenance. When the residents get wind of this experiment, and demand to know why they weren\u2019t even notified, the owner of the road maintenance company says, \u201cif you don\u2019t like it use a different road.\u201d That mind-bending response actually makes more <\/i>sense than what has been coming out of OKCupid and Facebook these last few weeks.<\/p>\n If we were to make the above analogy adhere closer to the Facebook or OKCupid studies we\u2019d first need to have the road maintenance CEO preface his remarks with something like \u201cI don\u2019t really know anything about how people drive.\u201d Then, instead of adding trees to slow traffic, the study was about placement of billboards for maximum viewership during rush hour. \u00a0Also, the study would have to be ambiguously conclusive, not generalizable to any other road, and yet still be the last in several thousand invisible studies that strove to change motorists\u2019 driving patterns in very small ways. Finally, these thousands of inconclusive traffic studies should be heralded as the biggest thing since internal combustion engines.<\/p>\n In fact, this is only barely an analogy. Millions of people live in the suburban environment I just described and for those that do not have regular access to a car (because they aren\u2019t of driving age or cannot afford one or are somehow differently abled such that cars aren\u2019t compatible with their bodies) social media can bring an out-of-reach world to their\u00a0fingertips. It can be\u00a0a portal to your friends and even your source of income. The American car-centric built environment is very unforgiving to the young, old, poor, and differently abled which has made the Internet a truly life-changing invention for the car-less. (That being said, it is worth noting here that social media still has a lot of room to improve<\/a> when it comes to differently-abled users.) When you consider all the people that rely on digital networks for their social life or their income you can\u2019t help but realize: Facebook and OKCupid are experimenting on captive subjects.<\/b><\/p>\n