Tag: Social Media

Bookmarked This Is a Simple and Satisfying Way to Fight Trump and Musk by Nitish Pahwa (Slate)

Two years after Musk’s takeover, we have a very different information ecosystem that’s fully passed the need for Twitter-as-it-was and that also presents new opportunities for liberals. Consider Bluesky and its related “fediverse” alternatives. These are burgeoning, decentralized, carefully mediated platforms where you can easily block turds like Catturd, and where users have more opportunities for customization and reach than ever before, thanks to an organically swelling customer base.

Source: This Is a Simple and Satisfying Way to Fight Trump and Musk by Nitish Pahwa

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I don’t think we will be making Twitter great again?

ᔥ “Jason Kottke” in Delete Your Account. For Real This Time. “There’s no need fo… ()

Replied to https://blog.edtechie.net/digital-scholarship/things-i-was-wrong-about-pt3-the-democratisation-of-social-media/ (blog.edtechie.net)

I was over-optimistic about the benefits of social media and insufficiently pessimistic about the downsides. However, if it was right for a little while, and now is wrong, the question remains, can it become a bit more right again? If so, how and where? Anyway for a little while there, we made some excellent cat memes.

Things I was Wrong About Pt3 – The democratisation of social media – The Ed Techie by Martin Weller

As I line up with all the other people to say how I too was wrong about the ‘democratisation of social media’, I am left reflecting upon my own experiences. I am particularly intrigued looking back upon Ian Guest’s research into Twitter and professional development.

I am assuming (as I am no longer a ‘resident‘) that Twitter is different to how it was when Ian was doing his research. However, I would also assume that it was different again in say 2010 when Clint was doing his research. We often talk about Twitter or social media as something stable, but surely it is something that is forever changing. That is one of the take-aways I took from Ian’s choice to use actor network theory as his framing.

For me, one of the changes that I noticed was a move from sharing to something else. It leaves so many questions. I wonder where people moved? Did they stop learning or just stop sharing, instead to become lurkers, keeping their ideas in their own gated communities? I feel that it is far too easy to say we were ‘wrong’ or ‘right’, I wonder if the more useful point of reflection is what ideas we might have been ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ about and how things have changed and what sort of ‘right’ is required moving forward. Is the ‘right’ needed a online parks? Here I am reminded of something from Angus Hervey about ‘letting go lightly’ to aide in moving forward:

Don’t say “I’m right, and you’re obviously wrong.”

Say “at this point, given all the evidence I’ve considered and having made a genuine effort to try and see if from the other side (point to some examples), the balance of the argument seems to rest on this side for these reasons, so for now that’s what I am going with. If new evidence, or a better argument comes along I am totally willing to change my mind about this, and I’ll also be pleased because it will mean I’ve gained a deeper understanding about the world.”

The Beauty of Being Wrong by Angus Hervey

Continue reading “💬 Things I was Wrong About Pt3 – The democratisation of social media”

Bookmarked When a mum breastfeeding her baby sparks outrage, we’re focusing on the wrong things by Virginia Trioli (ABC News)

What confused me was all this deeply felt concern for children, when I really hadn’t seen much anxiety similarly expressed for all the thousands of Australian kids who live in dangerous, damaging, high-risk circumstances and whose lives are being compromised and even cut short, all with our full understanding of their problems.

I guess I might take all the outrage a bit more seriously if I heard wails of anguish about the more than 15,000 children in Lyle Shelton’s state who need foster homes and can’t live safely with parents who I assume are mostly still the gender they were assigned at birth; the criticism would be easier to take if it came from people who daily expressed horror at the 1.3 million Australian children who went without enough food every day, or the more than 50,000 kids who don’t get to go to school.

State and territory child protection services responded to more than 178,800 children in 2020–21 — an increase from about 168,300 in previous years — and the issues ranged from child abuse or neglect through to care and protection orders, or placement in out-of-home care.

Virginia Trioli’s reflection on focusing on the wrong thing to me is another highlight to the challenges of having conversations in the modern world? This again has me thinking about Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens’ discussion of contempt. For me, this is all nicely captured in Tony Martin’s Sizzletown, a podcast that is hilariously funny, until you realise the truth associated with so much of the commentary. I guess here I fall back on my oft repeated quote from Peter Goldsworthy ‘Maestro’:

Cartoon descriptions? How else to describe a cartoon world?

Replied to Posting a Message Nobody Reads by Kin Lane (Kin Lane)

Why do we post messages with text, images, and video online? Do we do it for attention? Do we do it to help educate and inform others? There are many positive and not so positive reasons we post messages online. I do not think many people publish text, images, or video online without intending to influence and communicate with one or many other human beings. I do it to get my ideas out of my head. I do it because I like crafting stories, and having a real or perceived audience helps with this process.

My choice to change my habits in regards to social media and sharing has really led me to reflect why I do what I do. What I have come to realise is that at the heart of it, I share in my own space for me. With this in mind, I like your point about ‘getting things out of your head’.
Bookmarked s13e18: Mastodon, or What Happens When Your Software Has Opinions And Now You Have Choices (newsletter.danhon.com)

Some Thoughts About How And What Mastodon Is

Dan Hon suggests that the metaphor of towns and cities to explain the difference between federated spaces and social media platforms.

Towns and distinct places. There was a great analogy I saw, that Twitter is like a big city. It contains super interesting stuff, a lot of people, in some cases it is quite dirty and could do with being cleaned up, but there’s a mass there and the ability for serendipity that doesn’t exist in a smaller space. The city analogy feels much more apt than the town square, not least of which because a town square with tens of millions of daily active users isn’t something for which we have a mental model. A city, though? Yeah, that fits: they’ve even got people who’ll hurl abuse at you and, in theory, people who might have an opinion about whether that’s okay and do something about it. You might move to the burbs or to a nation state that has a better opinion about, say, paid family leave or not having a death penalty, but every so often you might still want to visit that big dirty noisy city just to have a look around.

This has me thinking about Dron and Anderson’s discussion of nets, sets and groups.

Bookmarked The credibility of science is damaged when universities brag about themselves by Freelance AuthorFreelance Author (bigthink.com)

About 25 years ago, it was predicted that attention would come to dominate the marketplace. The prediction was correct. Science is not immune to the “attention economy.” In fact, it plays an active role in it. However, the things that are seen as being of value to individual scientists or institutions, like media attention, are undermining public trust and devaluing science as a collective resource.

Adrian Lenardic and Johnny Seales argue that the rewarding of attention economy has corrupted scientific research. They explain how historically, scientists would distribute findings amongst their peers before going public with those that findings that were ‘breakthroughs’. Whereas these days the roles have been flipped. Results are firstly presented to public before going through the scrutiny of the scientific community. One of the particular challenges with this is that social media does not usually reward uncertainty and nuance.

Attention economy has changed the ecosystem. Results are now presented to the public as influential well before community assessment can take place. What often turns out to be small findings and/or non-reproducible results are hyped as significant enough to share with the public. The insatiable drive for attention leads to a framing of results in a way that downplays uncertainty, as well as viable alternative hypotheses. It also devalues studies that reproduce (or fail to reproduce) previous results.

This is something that I noticed with the release of pre-prints associated with COVID. For me this also highlighted my own deficiencies in regards to understanding of scientific research, but maybe that is a part of this wider change.

Liked The Monarchy, the Subaltern and the Public Sphere (ethanzuckerman.com)

In the age of participatory media, a predictable event like Queen Elizabeth’s death has at least three acts. There’s the pre-ordained reactions, the obituaries written years before they needed to run, the reactions from world leaders and luminaries. In the second act, there’s a set of unanticipated reactions to a news event, as people who weren’t booked years in advance take advantage of the event to promote narratives they feel are important, hooking an oped to the news hook, or using the historical moment to remind people of an underexplored chapter of history. And then there’s a third wave, in which we debate whether or not speech in the second wave is acceptable in a democratic society.

Bookmarked The Tricky Ethics of Being a Teacher on TikTok by Amelia Tait (WIRED)

While browsing teacher TikTok, I’ve seen a small child in a polka-dot coat clap along to a rhyme in class and another group of young students do a choreographed dance to a Disney song. I’ve seen a teacher list out the reasons their kindergartners had meltdowns that week, and I’ve read poetry written by eighth-grade students. There is room for debate about the benefits and pitfalls of all of these videos, though no one yet knows how the students featured in them will feel as they age.

Amelia Tate reflects upon the place of TikTok in the classroom. She discusses the trend of content created about and even with students. Although there maybe benefits in regards to engagements and relationships, but the question is at what cost.

“It so greatly depends on what is being shown and why,” Sharkey says. “If the content isn’t helpful and productive for student engagement or content, it should probably be discouraged or prohibited, due to the potential risk to students.”

I feel that these ethical questions are not necessarily new, but I wonder if algorithmically driven platforms like TikTok only amplify this?

Bookmarked So You’ve Decided to Unfollow Me – Cory Doctorow – Medium (Medium)

Find a writer you like and read them. If you can’t find the writer whose work you want to read, become that writer. That’s what I did. It’s great.

Cory Doctorow addresses the changing times in regards to challenges with being able to be able follow a particular part of someone’s interests or output.

If you loved a writer’s output of x but couldn’t abide their output of y, no problem — you’d just suck their feed into your reader and tell it to block stuff tagged as y.

That dream is mostly dead. Even on the Fediverse, your ability to follow someone for x but not y is crude as hell, hardly better than the web of the early 2000s.

Personally, what I find interesting about Doctorow’s discussion is whether you find a writer or are just interested in a topic. Although I am really intrigued by Chris Aldrich’s model, where you can easily put together a custom feed of the bits you you like. I fear that this sort of model still puts too my onus on the writer, not the reader. I also feel that maybe there is something of a reality of going crate digging. Maybe, feed readers will continue to evolve and become ‘smart’, but for now I will live with the practice of serendipitously sifting and sorting through feeds for the dots.

Bookmarked The Good Web (SSIR) (ssir.org)

The common ground behind the Good Web is the idea that social media must be taken seriously, not just as a problematic space in need of regulation, but a space that could ultimately help us be better neighbors, voters, and advocates for social change. What we must take from this conversation is the notion that it is not enough to fix existing social media. Instead, we must imagine, experiment with, and build social media that can be good for society.

Ethan Zuckerman discusses different proposals for making the ‘good web’:

  • Facebook Knows Best: The Centralized Web
  • Put Us in Charge: The Deplatformed Web
  • Put Nobody in Charge: Web3
  • Think Small: Decentralized Social Networks

Personally, I have sided with the decentralised solution. However, what Zuckerman highlights is the need to be open for alternative options.

Replied to The Rebel Wilson affair reveals how inadequate the humble columnist is in the new empire of the celebrity god by Virginia Trioli (ABC News)

The celebrities own the presses now, we in the media just get the notifications.

Although not ‘celebrities’ in the traditional sense, it has been interesting to read and listen to TISM announce themselves once again. Same same, but different? Yes, they were seemingly communicating via a video call, an affordance not as prevalent 20 years ago, but overall things were still as they were. Focus on anything but themselves. Maybe there might be some further campaigns to come, but seemingly always on their terms.
Bookmarked Slow Social (slowsocial.us)

Slow social is a social network built for people who want a place to connect with their friends online in a more intentional, sustainable manner. It is run and developed by a small team looking to make online communities more human and inclusive.

Slow Social places constraints on the practice of posting to reverse the gamification of platforms like Twitter. Although it creates a sustainable practice, I wonder if we really need another platform?
Bookmarked Elderblog Sutra: 13 (ribbonfarm.com)

I want to revisit the question of the future of blogging in light of the impending reconfiguration of the social media environment due to Elon Musk buying Twitter.

Venkatesh Rao reflects upon Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and what that might mean for the future. He explains that for more than a decade, it has been the main discovery platform. In addition, Rao argues that along with WordPress, it is last of the convivial platforms.

Pre-Musk twitter, for all its faults, was, along with WordPress-style blogging, the last holdout of a convivial kind of web. Not convivial enough to satisfy genuine Ivan Illich stans like L. M. Sacassas or Robin Sloan perhaps, but far more convivial than Medium/Substack/Patreon/Facebook type corporatized platform ecologies. And definitely convivial enough for a philistine like me who prefers (modulo Covid effects) Starbucks over indie coffee shops anyway.

Rao explains that if Twitter were to disappear, it is not something that can necessarily be replaced with something else.

In brief, I treat all these so-called options as part of the cozyweb, good for my cozyweb activities like the Yak Collective, but not meaningful substitutes as far as the more public affordances of Twitter, such as serving as a distribution medium for blogs, are concerned. Twitter is basically sui generis that way. Not only can nothing replace it, it cannot be built again either, since it was a product of a particular era of the web (like Wikipedia and Craigslist). If it goes away, or transforms unrecognizably, we just have to do without.

With the association between long form blogging and Twitter, Rao wonders what flow on effect that Musk’s proposed changes may have.

But perhaps, this time, it would be good for blogging to plot a course into the future that isn’t so vulnerable to these battles over aggregated discussion and distribution media.

…

And perhaps it is would be best if blogging were to fade away gracefully, without passing the torch of independent convivial media technology to a suitable successor. Maybe the future is about neither corporatized platform technologies, nor Quixotic indie conviviality.

Maybe it is about an entirely different kind of media environment.

This is a particularly interesting in regards to those who wish to find somewhere else to converse and what that might mean.

In other pieces written about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, Adam Serwer suggests that Musk’s purchase is less about free speech and more about politics:

“Free speech” is a disingenuous attempt to frame what is ultimately a political conflict over Twitter’s usage as a neutral question about civil liberties, but the outcome conservatives are hoping for is one in which conservative speech on the platform is favored and liberal speech disfavored.

Ben Werdmuller suggests that opening up the algorithm will not resolve the move to a more inclusive world.

Elon is right to want to open source, but he’s wrong about the implications. The world is moving in a more inclusive, more compassionate direction, and there’s no going back. Nationalism and traditionalism are firmly party of the 20th century, and that is becoming an increasingly long time ago.

Discussing the metaphor of the town square, John Naughton suggests that Twitter is just one small piece of this space:

Musk suffers from the delusion that “Twitter has become the de-facto town square”, which, frankly, is baloney. The internet, as Mike Masnick points out, is the metaphorical “town square”. Twitter is just one small private shop in that space – a shop in which hyperventilating elites, trolls, journalists and millions of bots hang out and fight with one another.

Ranjan Roy and Can Duruk theorise that Musk’s purchase is about diversification:

My mini-grand theory is that this entire sequence of events: The Twitter purchase, the SEC escalation, Tesla’s blowout quarter – it’s all about the next giant package. Musk saw an opportunity at the beginning of the year. Tesla’s business was on a roll, his pay package was almost complete, the SEC was threatening his Twitter account, and Tesla’s stock had stalled out for six months. Every great entrepreneur understands the importance of momentum and he decided to capitalize on this confluence of events.

Similar to Rao, Alex Hern believes a healthy social network is not possible:

I don’t think it’s possible for a site to be both a replacement for Twitter, and a healthy social network, because I no longer think it’s possible for a healthy social network to exist that connects the world.

Robin Sloan adds his thoughts in regards to professional engagement:

As a writer, looking for evi­dence of read­er­ship and engage­ment on Twit­ter makes you into the drunk look­ing for your lost keys under the street light.

A lot have spoke about Mastodon as an alternative. Alternatively, Chris Aldrich talks about syndicating for your personal website.

Alan Jacobs wonders if Musk might be a hero and close the platform down.

Elon Musk could become the world’s greatest hero by buying Twitter and then immediately shutting it down.

Bookmarked Online Learning Can Be Engaging and Effective – Howard Rheingold – Medium by Howard Rheingold (Medium)

I taught blended learning courses for ten years at UC Berkeley and Stanford — three hour face-to-face meetings each week, with forum, blog, and wiki learning activities spread over the week between classroom sessions. I came to learn that, combined with a co-learner-centric pedagogy, the use of synchronous (videoconference) and asynchronous (forums, blogs, collaborative documents, collaborative highlighting) media between classroom meetings can amplify and vivify the traditional college course. For eight years, I also taught my own online courses at what I called “Rheingold U.” In March, 2020, when Covid-29 led to the sudden, massive, unplanned advent of online classes, I published some advice about teaching and learning online. Now, a year and a half later, after hearing so many less-than-encouraging reports of online failures, I have more to say about how to make the learning experience more engaging and fulfilling — with more successful learning outcomes. I have included some of my 2020 piece in this present essay — and expanded upon it.

In light of necessity to move to online learning, Howard Rheingold reflects upon his own experiences of online learning in higher education across the last two decades. He unpacks both the pedagogy he employed and the various tools he used to make this more doable, such as forums, blogs, video and social bookmarking. He also ends his piece with a useful list of other resources to dive into.
Liked Why Mastodon Isn’t Great For Serendipity by Wouter GroeneveldWouter Groeneveld (brainbaking.com)

When I sometimes skim through lifestyle magazines my wife loves to read, and encounter an article that triggers another link to a problem I’m working on, that is serendipity. I love walking into book stores and going home with a new purchase that I didn’t foresee on a subject that I at first wasn’t interested in.

Bookmarked On the Internet, We’re Always Famous by Chris Hayes (The New Yorker)

Chris Hayes writes about the influence of television and social media on American discourse and celebrity culture, and about what happens when the experience of fame becomes universal.

Chris Hayes uses the super hearing ability of the fennec fox to paint a picture of life on social media.

Imagine, for a moment, you find yourself equipped with fennec-fox-level hearing at a work function or a cocktail party. It’s hard to focus amid the cacophony, but with some effort you can eavesdrop on each and every conversation. At first you are thrilled, because it is thrilling to peer into the private world of another person. Anyone who has ever snuck a peek at a diary or spent a day in the archives sifting through personal papers knows that. Humans, as a rule, crave getting up in people’s business.

But something starts to happen. First, you hear something slightly titillating, a bit of gossip you didn’t know. A couple has separated, someone says. “They’ve been keeping it secret. But now Angie’s dating Charles’s ex!” Then you hear something wildly wrong. “The F.D.A. hasn’t approved it, but also there’s a whole thing with fertility. I read about a woman who had a miscarriage the day after the shot.” And then something offensive, and you feel a desire to speak up and offer a correction or objection before remembering that they have no idea you’re listening. They’re not talking to you.

Borrowing from Alexandre Kojève’s discussion of the masters desire for recognition by the slave, Hayes suggests that the star desires recognition from the fan. However, as the star does not recognise the fan’s humanity, all they can ever receive is attention.

We Who Post are trapped in the same paradox that Kojève identifies in Hegel’s treatment of the Master and Slave. The Master desires recognition from the Slave, but because he does not recognize the Slave’s humanity, he cannot actually have it. “And this is what is insufficient—what is tragic—in his situation,” Kojève writes. “For he can be satisfied only by recognition from one whom he recognizes as worthy of recognizing him.”

I’ve found that this simple formulation unlocks a lot about our current situation. It articulates the paradox of what we might call not the Master and the Slave but, rather, the Star and the Fan. The Star seeks recognition from the Fan, but the Fan is a stranger, who cannot be known by the Star. Because the Star cannot recognize the Fan, the Fan’s recognition of the Star doesn’t satisfy the core existential desire. There is no way to bridge the inherent asymmetry of the relationship, short of actual friendship and correspondence, but that, of course, cannot be undertaken at the same scale. And so the Star seeks recognition and gets, instead, attention.

The Star and the Fan are prototypes, and the Internet allows us to be both in different contexts. In fact this is the core, transformative innovation of social media, the ability to be both at once.

In this sense, the ‘star’ can come in many shapes and sizes, it is for this reason that we all have the prospect of being ‘famous’.

This relates to Brendan Mackie’s discussion of podcasts and parasocial activity.

Liked Raya and the Promise of Private Social Media by Kyle Chayka (The New Yorker)

A private social-media platform like Raya can certainly be safer. It is also by nature less open and more stratified than we’ve come to expect social networks to be. The future may look more like hundreds of Rayas, each with its own paying members and rigorous community regulation. But those users who don’t fit the mold or can’t pay may be left outside the walls, to continue living in a digital landscape that looks even worse than it does now.

Replied to Your phone is not a book – David Preston (David Preston)

To paraphrase Professor Faber from Fahrenheit 451, is it the book itself or what’s in the book that we admire? Would the history and the philosophical ideas in the book come through if it were presented in a different medium? Would the digital version be the same or different? I devoured Clive’s article and reflected on how his first-person account brought these issues to life.

Reflecting on Clive Thompson’s article about reading a book on a phone, David Preston turns his attention to the differences between phones and books. He explores some of the affordances associated with phones (and their data) and celebretes the opportunity to connect and share.

Our world works better when people connect in systems and contribute value by sharing personally relevant ideas. Even when we disagree – especially when we disagree – communicating with each other forms bonds that lead to deeper understanding and more value. We are way beyond “keep your eyes on your own paper.” We face complicated problems that require collaboration and community to solve. Schools must adapt and prepare young people to thrive in an interdependent, interdisciplinary, interconnected world.

I am left thinking about the idea of ‘sharing as caring‘:

Maybe it is just me. Maybe sharing online just works? However, I agree with The Luddbrarian that where we need to start in regards to Facebook and social media in general is ‘expand our imagination’ in this area. I think that this starts by asking questions. What does it mean to be digital? How are we really caring in online space? Does it have to involve sharing? As always, comments welcome.

Liked At best, we’re on Earth for around 4,000 weeks – so why do we lose so much time to online distraction? (theguardian.com)

The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is to stop expecting things to be otherwise – to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold.