I find a lot of Joan Westenberg’s commentary really insightful but this piece, to me, completely misses the point: online social networks don’t just reflect real world problems, they are new drivers of harm, with their own distinct causal effects.
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I find a lot of Joan Westenberg’s commentary really insightful but this piece, to me, completely misses the point: online social networks don’t just reflect real world problems, they are new drivers of harm, with their own distinct causal effects. Scale is fundamental to that and I see no substantive reason why we have to take them or their scale as a given in the way the piece does.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/stop-expecting-facebook-to-fix-what-we-cant-fix-in-real-life/
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@UlrikeHahn It also feels kinda self-defeating...
My POV:
Technology can't fix societal (and deeply ingrained) issues. But it can mitigate some (if done in considerate ways) and ultimately tech+people can lead to some pretty fundamental changes.
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Henrik Schönemannreplied to Henrik Schönemann last edited by
@UlrikeHahn
To quote:
"While uncritical enthusiasm is out of place and the challenges we face are indeed considerable, the confrontation with advanced software tools in our own fields can help us in formulating the theories and forging the disciplinary alliances we need to build a critical understanding of the infiltration of software into every pore of contemporary society.” (Rieder and Röhle, 2012, p. 82)
Digital Methods. Five Challenges
https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371934_4
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@UlrikeHahn Thanks for the link. The conclusions never question that the scale of the "platforms" is maybe the problem, and that the monetization of the social has a steep cost.
I've come across a different piece of incongruence this morning, other hidden costs of monetization, this time not of the social but of consumer behavior, which nothing if not dysfunctional. My conclusion was that we can only be observers.
The large scale monetization of the social worries me.
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@lavaeolus @UlrikeHahn I respectfully disagree - we can have the most valid understanding social media systems (in the socio-psychodynamic sense) but, I hold, their control is entirely in the political, outside of the ecosystem that they're part of. This is the case for so many things in the world that we created in the last 35 years.
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@tg9541 yes, we didn’t have social media platforms with millions, let alone billions, of users 20 years ago, there is no reason we have to have them 20 years from now. Nothing about this is inevitable.
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@tg9541 @lavaeolus I took Henrik more to be saying that we can help create better understanding of these systems (including designing alternatives) which would give political systems license and means to act? it sounded to me more like we were pretty much all on the same page here
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@UlrikeHahn One of the conclusions might be that societies will have to find a way to abolish these platforms. I see huge problems doing that since the illusion of participation is so strong that people confuse their interaction with automated feedback-moderators as a genuine social exchange. I've come to believe that the managed simulation of participation is at the heart of any large-scale social process that we call democratic, and it's this simulation that the large platforms have conquered.
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@tg9541 @laveolus I think abolishing very large platform outright would be a politically extremely difficult thing to do for democratic countries, but at the same time, I suspect it would be entirely possible to change the framework in which they operate in ways that would make them economically (or legally) unattractive to operate: greater liability for content and greater data privacy regulations, for example
