Final Task part 1

I sort of lost focus/ got carried away with my presentation so I'll... try to go over it here.I'll go over some problems I have with current popular forms of social media and think about what sort of social media I'd consider fun to be involved in.

My first idea for a final task was to make an Instagram channel for a dog that doesn't exist. I use a lot of time thinking about social media and Instagram is the one that I use most . I don't post much though, and thought this could work as practice and a study of trying to get followers. I wasn't planning on getting any followers, just going through the motions and pretending that I might have them at some point. Basically playing a character, like everyone else.

Social media causes me anxiety. It's just normal social anxiety, but like, digital. I have a lot of neurotic thinking and in the digital realm it manifests just the same as everywhere else - as fears of destroying my or someone else's life by doing something stupid. It's been hard to post anything for some years because I'm too uncertain to press "send", and every time the machine asks me if I'm sure I want to - I'm never sure.

So what's the worst thing that could happen?

Well, you could be bullied and in danger of losing your job for one completely on-brand tweet. Lindsay Ellis made a speech in XOXO festival about how she was targeted by alt right trolls on Twitter for a year and what sort of effects it had on her personal and professional life. No one can just "go offline" anymore. If your job is online, that's where you've got to be.

I use Reddit as much or even more than I use Instagram, but I don't count it as a social media. It's much closer to a forum, and it's mostly anonymous. It's one of those places that you can actually leave and start over. Sure you'll lose your karma, but following doesn't exist in the same way as in other social medias.

One of my favorite subreddits on Reddit is r/hobbydrama - it contains interesting, long posts on niche subjects that I don't know much about, and it's usually entertaining as well as informative. It brings together everything I love and hate about internet communities and culture. Often the drama involves an online community completely imploding due to some controversy involving one person, people take sides and factions form.

Here's a post that's "2 days ago" today:

That's just the start, it's a long post. So basically some 19-year-old had a lighthearted Tumblr account about fish-related memes that got somewhat successful and now his real name will forever bring up hits about these thousands of people trying to goad him into committing suicide because they heard someone say he's a pedophile. It's an interesting read. The power of a mob is insane, and the mob has no morals, it just wants to be entertained. I understand that. I want to be entertained too. But the sheer injustice and unpredictability of it all is frightening as hell. What did user i-am-a-fish do to inspire all this hate? The going theory is that he wasn't negative enough about asexuals.

Why do people share this sort of information and use hours and hours debating about it? Boredom, I guess. I think at this point it's also fear. If you don't take a firm stand that is later on decided to have been the right one, that will be used against you in the future. You're either with us or against us, so what does it even matter what happens to be the truth, if you don't react in the right way quickly enough, you're on the wrong side.

People can't be reasonable because of the bad faith actors who spread information for the purpose of causing harm. Lindsay Ellis gets nazis because she has leftist views, so it's in their interests to try to deplatform her. So the nazis do everything they can to make something stick, and all those on "Ellis's side" are ready to jump ship on a moment's notice so that they won't get canceled by association.

 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-the-retweet-ruined-the-internet

So that would be my problem number one. Information is made instantly available and never taken back, spread in minutes before verified - so no one cares about verification. Constant reacting. Reacting and spreading information gets easier when you don't have to use actual humans for it, so you can build an army of bots to do your bidding. This is also a tactic you can use when you don't care about morals, because there's the idea that this is the "wrong" way to use social media.

 So these are what I think of as "griefer" problems - people making things less fun for others on purpose. I consider many old people griefers because the have all the time in the world to be angry online, but they may lack the desire to learn new things and educate themselves. They'll have an idea of a moment in past that was better, and the only thing they're interested in doing is constantly complaining about others moving on from that point.

Yes, I know. My sun sign is Boomer...

That's The Guardian. The text on yellow is a countermeasure to prevent one of the most common ways of spreading of false news - linking old articles. Periodically all the old news articles about, for example, crimes committed my an immigrant, will start going around again, whenever a vote is needed one way or another. For certain people it doesn't matter why the story is circling again, it's true, after all.

This leads us to my third problem - time. More specifically, time stamps. Time on the internet is pretty hard because everyone's living on a different timezone. The common design decision appears to be to show timestamps as "30 minutes ago". Now the problem I have with this that whenever a screenshot is taken or the post is archived as a picture, it doesn't show accurate time. After a year reddit timestamps have an accuracy of one year - so a post made in in December and April of 2018 will show show up the same way. You can see the accurate time on posts by hovering over the stamp with a mouse but that doesn't work on many, many third party apps. Why is this a problem? Well I HATE IT. I want to know when something happened, because the exact moment it was written in matters a lot.

Tumblr is the worst offender because by default they don't show timestamps AT ALL. That's insane! 

 

Here's a picture from Tumblr's announcement that they're changing the design of how reblogs look like, in 2015. Before that everything was atrocious and impossible to comprehend. (Could be that my unwillingness to join makes it look more confusing to me because I never learned the mechanics from within - but time moves forward, people will forget - and in a few years that picture on the left will be very puzzling to many people.)

And pictures will be all we have at some point, because it's completely opposite from what we were warned about as kids - everything on the internet will disappear forever. The Internet Archive is amazing for saving some of it for now, but it doesn't take much to destroy one non-profit. When Internet Archive and Wikipedia are taken over it's probably time to go off the grid.

So, time! But because timezones fuck things up a bit, we're committing to just the one. Finland time for everyone!

Now - the last few important things that I want my social media to have. I want fun, and I want relevance, and I want to have trust that users will engage with each other in good faith. There has to be a level of privacy between completely open for everyone, and completely private just for you. (In the current media landscape no one can assume that the things they share only with a chosen group of people will stay within that group of people - it only needs one of those people to disagree with you for all of your secrets to be out.)
 
People have to be free to be creative without worrying about things like copyright or if their content is "on brand". Also - not everything in the world needs to be turned into money the moment people like it. Liking can be measured by simply what becomes common culture and what doesn't.

Any sort of "liking", voting to curate content, is just a way to solve a problem of communities getting too big to be curated by hand. A community doesn't NEED to be too big for someone to be able to read everything. A larger community doesn't mean better diversity or quality of content - for example, the biggest subreddits are always rife with reposts, because there's always new people coming in who haven't already seen everything a hundred times. This is how time gets murky, everything mixes up into this disgusting paste of nowness, where everything is always new and old at the same time, everything is news and everything's always been the same.

In next post I'll go over the basic mechanisms of my social media and an idea of how I would want the user experience to be.