I wrote about Mastodon the other day. Here's the piece I wrote on ZDNet :
http://www.zdnet.com/article/is-mastodon-the-new-social-media-star-or-imploding-black-hole/
I'm impressed with its growth and stability so far. I'll be watching closely as brands try to work out how to monetize this new audience
@eileenb As @woozle noted, when epistemic (media) systems gain significance, the attract attention:
"Because of a high percentage of the population being present, there is now substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place."
Or more accurately: as there are /returns/ to influencing an audience, those influencers will appear: direct & brand marketing, propagandists, polemicists.
So yes, the brands ... will come, like it or not.
@woozle @eileenb I see a fairly common progression of interests within a new media channel. Not necessarily in the following order, but close:
1. Technicians -- "shop talk"
2. Artistics and creatives, avant garde.
3. Organisations for internal use: business, government, academia, religion, etc.
4. External comms, management, monitoring, discussion.
5. Direct marketing.
6. Mass entertainment.
7. Mass marketing.
8. Propaganda and polemicists.
Merely changing platforms changes nothing.
@crecca TV didn't exactly bring forth a vast intellectualisation of the populace. Facebook (and Google and Twitter and Reddit) seem to be directly attacking liberal democracy themselves, with the help of #brands and #advertising.
If you want to look at where the Internet's been taking us in the past few years, look at what danah boyd's been writing at Medium, she's on fire.
https://points.datasociety.net/hacking-the-attention-economy-9fa1daca7a37
@crecca boyd's recent posts, all worth reading: https://medium.com/@zephoria/latest
Eileen Brown ☑️
Doc Edward Morbius ❌
Rafał Piątkowski