First, there was Myspace. We were young and innocent things, just trying to create our ideal personas on what proved to be the beginning of a social media craze. Then, along came Facebook.

“What’s on your mind?” we were asked every day. Some people chose to be honest. Others exaggerated, and some simply ignored the question.

Facebook used to be about an extremely personal connection with your real friends (it was originally Harvard-exclusive, anyway) and has since become something like 10 percent personal connection, 15 percent sharing multimedia, 25 percent bitching or arguing viewpoints and 50 percent advertisements. Facebook has become a mega-marketing tool for pretty much anyone who has the initiative and the money.

It is also another medium in which people excessively share their self-fulfilled personal prophecies that they have acquired through various quizzes that simply tell them exactly what they want to hear. Of course, the Disney character you embody most is Pocahontas—she’s only been your favorite Disney princess for, like, ever.

Is Buzzfeed really going to let you down and tell you that, surprise, you’re actually more like Belle when you’ve obviously hated “Beauty and the Beast” since you were a little girl? No. Buzzfeed is going to feed you whatever will make you more inclined to come back to its website and take more of its quizzes, view more of its advertisements and make them more money.

I’ll admit that I’ve been a sucker for certain quizzes that pop out at me. “Friends” has always been my favorite show, so when an opportunity to find out which character I’m most like came up, I took it out of boredom and interest. (I got Phoebe, which is by far my favorite character, and, honestly, who I thought I would get anyway.) So why did I take the quiz? So that I could share it and point out to everyone on my friends list that, “Hey, guess what? Phoebe is basically my alter ego.” Never mind that if I had gotten Monica, I would have closed that tab with urgency and continued scrolling through my news feed, looking for another quiz to take. Surely, I must be Robin from “How I Met Your Mother.”

So what purpose do these quizzes and all the other crap that seems to have taken over our news feeds serve? They are simply advertising tools. The Facebook news feed is where all of your friends share their posts, videos, pictures, everything. It’s not often that I open a Facebook tab so that I can look at the advertisements off to the side.

Corporations need to be a lot cleverer than that. They pay big bucks for access to our Google searches and frequently-visited websites so that those ads on the side of each page pertain to our personal interests. Just the same, they pay even bigger bucks to make sure that quizzes and other sneaky forms of publicity make it to where your eyes are already focused.

Last year, a study of 160,000 people by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that adults in America have a “low (and declining) reading proficiency,” according to an article by Hector Tobar for the Los Angeles Times. Americans don’t want to read an essay-long status post. Instead, they want efficiency and ease of interpretability. It’s all about “The 15 Foods You Should Be Eating Right Now,” not a 1000-word, in-depth article dissecting new discoveries in nutrition science.

The problem with Facebook’s current state in the social media sphere is that it only adds to the statistic. In order for issues like literacy to improve, the majority of corporations will have to stop dumbing their audience down and offer different gateways to information that actually matters.

arildefonso@mavs.coloradomesa.edu