🎧 “Seeing New Worlds” danah boyd (Team Human)

In a conversation between danah boyd and Doug Rushkoff, she explains that at the heart of our current problems with media, facts and trust is capitalism. By design capitalism gives you what you want. The problem though is that capitalism and democracy are no longer constrained within nation states as they may have been in the past. There is neither the opportunity for nationalistic paternalism to moderate wants nor a means of managing different groups. Media in a multi-national environment has become confusing. We are now in a world of networks and graphs. All media companies are in the business for amplification, the problem has therefore become what is amplified, which as so many have pointed out is often at the extremes. danah boyd says that we need an intervention, but to achieve that we firstly need to be appreciate all the micro-decisions that got us to here. How do we deal with these well intended decisions when they have negative implications? One of the challenges is filling the data voids, rather than blocking various search terms we need to develop the content that maybe missing. This is particularly important for today’s young people, for

if we don’t support young people in building out a strategically rich graph, they will reinforce the worst segments of our society (1.10)

For those who may not have kept up with boyd’s work since It’s Complicated, this is a really good introduction.