I’m old enough to remember the warning about social media, “if you’re not paying for the product, then you’re the product.”
In any social club, somebody’s got to pay to keep the lights on. With online platforms there is a process of growing a customer base, locking people in to the platform by making it hard to share content outside of the system, and then feeding the users an increasing stream of advertising. This is a process Cory Doctorow calls “enshitification.”
When you’re the product, it turns the interaction into a one-way stream, much like watching TV, where you may feel like you know a celebrity intimately, but they certainly don’t know you. Cornell professor danah boyd notes that “we now live in a world of parasocial media…where individuals keep tabs on the lives and movements of people – like celebrities – who do not know us and feel no pressure to reciprocate.”
This doesn’t mean we are at the mercy of the Zuckerbergs of the world. Glenn Fleishman suggests moving to the “Fediverse” where you “own” your own content and can, somewhat easily, move to a different platform if the one you’re on isn’t managed to your liking.
Another trick for making social media more sociable is to draw on an antique technology (27+ years old) and use RSS, (Real Simple Syndication) to thwart the algorithms and follow the people you care most about.
SEE ALSO
ActivityPub Brings Back the Early Days of the Internet
Rewilding the Internet: Bring Back the World Wide Weird
The Social Jeep (2008) Forums promote serious conversations.
