Shoq 🌿Dec 11, 2022

What drove the internet in the 90s and 00s was that it was so cool to be doing good shit with it. Social media was like a giant manure dump all over that culture. We've never recovered.

The Fediverse and the death of Twitter promise a rebirth of that culture, if we don't let the cool kids and a lazy press bury the public in vapid bullshit again.

We wasted 16 goddamn years enduring Facebook and Twitter. In the end, they were both toxic and regressive. Can we please not go back there? Please?

Show threadCassandrichDec 11, 2022
@shoq Can we please also not idealize a mythical past? This is a fundamentally conservative worldview and there was no time in history when anyone but the privileged enjoyed a mythical golden age. Yes Twitter was wielded to do a lot of bad things but it was also instrumental in speaking truth to power and making it so the privileged couldn't ignore injustices they otherwise would have.
Show threadCassandrichDec 11, 2022
@shoq We should be learning from the good and the bad to create systems that will push us into a better world not trying to go back to an imagined better time.
Show threadCassandrich
@shoq Wow. Some figures on just how white this attitude is: https://tldr.nettime.org/@festal/109490467887417091
felix stalder (@[email protected])

"80% of Black Americans said social media help shed light on rarely discussed issues; the same share of White Americans said these sites distract from more important issues." This probably reflects the degree to which the traditional media have historically addressed their issues. Remember that when you do you're next social media critique (which remain necessary, of course). https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/07/11/public-attitudes-toward-political-engagement-on-social-media/

tldr.nettime
Dec 11, 2022 at 1:07pmWeb
Show threadShoq 🌿Dec 11, 2022
@dalias Nothing in statement said there were no positive impacts of social media. There were. And most them created their own dynamics, and we haven't come to grips with most of those changes yet. What society does with technology as a whole is of much greater interest to me that the impact it has on each of our many parts. Fortunately, many others are focused on those parts. I'm interested in tools that serve the parts collectively—and equally.