Froth is Dangerous.

As we know it today, social media has been around for fifteen years, and in that time, it has gone from novelty to ubiquitous. We have given it our data willingly and for free and enabled eye-watering valuations for founders as we have become the product they sell. We are profiled and targeted at levels of detail that are either awesome or frightening, depending on our perspective.

I wonder, though, how much of substance has really changed. We have created a "froth" society, whole industries that feed off social media and a swamp of news sources with dubious, if not dishonest, motives and find ourselves technically connected but socially fragmented. However, we still have the same number of close friends at an individual level, the same number of good friends, and no matter what our tally says on social media, the same number of acquaintances as we had before we had heard of social media.

The thing is, people don't scale. Underneath all that froth, we still make our decisions the same w…