Tag: C Thi Nguyen

Bookmarked How Twitter Gamifies Communication (philpapers.org)

Twitter doesn’t just provide a speaking platform, nor are its effects confined to algorithmic filtering. Twitter shapes our goals for discourse by making conversation something like a game. Twitter scores our conversation. And it does so, not in terms of our own particular and rich purposes for communication, but in terms of its own pre-loaded, painfully thin metrics: Likes, Retweets, and Follower counts. And if we take up Twitter’s invitation and internalize those evaluations, we will be thinning out and simplifying our own goals for communication.
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> Twitter gamifies communication by offering immediate, vivid, and quantified evaluations of one’s conversational success. Twitter offers us points for discourse; it scores our communication. And these game-like features are responsible for much of Twitter’s psychological wallop. (Page 1-2)

C. Thi Nguyen discusses how Twitter gamifies communication. He explains that games are about creating agency within a contrived structure.

In contrast, gamification is about adding goals to real-life activities:

Nguyen raises the question whether gamification really is an ‘unalloyed good’:

With gamification, the focus then becomes about the greatest number:

The problem with such a focus is that things like slow appreciation of ideas and diversity of perspectives is often overlooked in light of the short term instant focus:

Along with this, the focus is also on what can be counted.

Focusing on what can be counted tempts users to change their goals to match.

Overall, Nguyen summarises the situation by comparing gamification, moral outrage porn, and echo chambers with junk food and nutrition.

This reminds me of danah boyd’s questions about the merit and meaning of measuring endless amounts of stats online.

It is also interesting to consider this whole discussion of numbers in regards to education and what discourse looks like in places like Twitter.

Listened Are We Measuring Our Lives in All the Wrong Ways? by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’ from nytimes.com()

The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen believes that to understand modern life, we need to understand how games work.

In an interview with Ezra Klein, C. Thi Nguyen discusses how Twitter gamifies communication. He explains the way in which games tell you what to care about and how they are usually about something beautiful or interesting.

In contrast, platforms like Twitter use gamification to funnel our values without giving us space to step back. This manipulation occurs through the use of points. Although this quantification is useful for ‘seeing like a state’, it does not account for choice and nuance. For example, Fitbit can capture your steps, but not your life.

The conversation ends with a discussion of conspiracy theories and what Nguyen describes as ‘game mindfulness’. He basically summarises this as a suspicious of pleasure.

The idea of social media as a game is something Tom Chatfield has also touched upon in regards to play in the digital age.

It is interesting to think about other platforms like micro.blog and what ‘points’ actually count. Also, the way in which such games can be subverted for other means, as is discussed by Ian Guest in his research on Twitter and education.

ᔥ “Austin Kleon” in Winning time – Austin Kleon ()