<
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/10/social-media-platforms-business-models-dialogue-network/675655/>
"Many people have put forth theories about why, exactly, the internet is bad.
The arguments go something like this: Social platforms encourage cruelty, snap
reactions, and the spreading of disinformation, and they allow for all of this
to take place without accountability, instantaneously and at scale.
Clearly, we must upgrade our communication technology and habits to meet the
demands of pluralistic democracies in a networked age. But we need not abandon
the social web, or even avoid scalability, to do so. At MIT, where I am a
professor and the director of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication
(based at the MIT Media Lab), my colleagues and I have thought deeply about how
to make the internet a better, more productive place. What I’ve come to learn
is that new kinds of social networks can be designed for constructive
communication—for listening, dialogue, deliberation, and mediation—and they can
actually work.
To understand what we ought to build, you must first consider how social media
went sideways. In the early days of Facebook and Twitter, we called them
“social networks.” But when you look at how these sites are run now, their
primary goal has not been social connection for some time. Once these platforms
introduced advertising, their primary purpose shifted to keeping people engaged
with content for as long as possible so they could be served as many ads as
possible. Now powerful AI algorithms deliver personally tailored content and
ads most likely to keep people consuming and clicking, leading to these
platforms becoming highly addictive.
The unfortunate consequence of this model is that the best content for keeping
eyes glued to screens is often the most emotionally provocative and polarizing
content, regardless of quality or accuracy. Quieter voices get drowned out.
Most people quickly come to understand that silence is safest and shift into a
mode of passive consumption and emotion-driven sharing of content. Peer-to-peer
communication is largely reduced to inconsequential chatter, given the risks of
cancellation and trolling, which suppress meaningful conversation. Harms are
most acute for youth, who feel social pressure to be on social media yet
refrain from meaningful self-expression because of possible ostracism and
bullying.
The threats to democracy in an environment like this are clear. Social media
distorts our understanding of others, amplifying false and harmful stereotypes
that lead to dehumanization and violence. Moreover, the foundational
truth-seeking function of open dialogue and debate is nearly impossible.
One might think that by now we would have learned to naturally self-regulate
our use of social media, but the power of these platforms to capture attention
and provoke reaction is profound. In 1985, the media critic Neil Postman
famously wrote about his fears that a TV-centric culture meant we were “amusing
ourselves to death”—the entertaining nature of the television medium had, he
argued, subsumed its more serious uses for education and journalism. Postman,
who died in 2003, surely would have been horrified by our current state of
affairs."
Via
What Could Go Right? October 19, 2023:
https://theprogressnetwork.org/poland-election-results-tusk-opposition/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
