There are some similarities. The interesting thing about circles was the recognition that you are many people, and you don’t want to necessarily have political arguments with your soccer friends. So many people seem to have given up on the promise of the internet to connect people. We’ve tried a few different modes of communicating, I still have hope the problem can be cracked.
Yeah that's online, that has been solved, I should have mentioned offline. Connecting like-minded people offline is the problem nobody has achieved to solve yet.
Yeah we have a long way to go to creating a true digital town square.
Because in a town square setting you have to hear opposing opinions sometimes, and you can't silence the people, you can't de-federate from them. You can simply move away and talk to someone else, form cliques. And that is exactly what is happening in the fediverse, drawing borders, borders of opinion and political context.
I don't think it's healthy to dismiss large swathes of humanity though. I think it's better if we communicate and find middle grounds.
Which is easier to do when you're stuck with someone IRL. Online it's much easier to reach for that block button.
Ideas would spread the exact same way. Most people follow their friends and relatives. Most of those people usually live near you. It wouldn't take much for ideas to spread on a sort of mesh network of these interconnected groups.
That’s what’s challenging about this situation. We’re experiencing a fairly new problem. It hasn’t before been possible for a member of society to communicate with all other members of society at the same time, nor has it been possible for a member of society to get addicted on a curated feed of random (sometimes anonymous) folks spreading their ideas globally.
All of these things seem new to me:
- Global, direct communication with all members of society.
- Addictive design patterns in software.
- AI-curated news feeds based on increasing engagement.
- Anonymous conversations.
Since it’s new, society doesn’t have frameworks to think about this kind of stuff yet.
This is a great point, and I’m curious to hear what would be better alternatives. Like obviously there’s something great about having online connections with other people, but how could we do it better without surrendering to some big platform?
I see. I don’t agree! The municipalities, national parks, etc, could communicate just as well on their own websites as they do on social media.
As for the Internet as a “gathering place”, I don’t think I can put it better than I did elsewhere in this thread [1]:
> The Internet (or really the Web) is a common area. You tweet something, I write a blog post and embed your tweet in it, Alice emails my post to her friends, Bob writes a post in response and links back to me, Charlie submits Bob’s post to Hacker News or Reddit, David and Eve discuss in the comments, etc.
Most of the problems facing the world today (climate change, inequality) can only be addressed with large communities of people working in concert.
By contrast, most of the communications technology out there right now is social media that has algorithms which encourage outrage over action, and division over community building.
I personally would love a not-for-profit tool to connect with like-minded folks and organize for social change, by region and by subject area, without all of the manipulation inherent in social media today.
As the article explains, the Internet is just a tool, and it's been aggressively used as a way to control user behavior to mostly benefit advertisers, producers, or conform behavior to governments. Even worse, political warfare is very easily imposed on today's social networks because they are designed to be echo chambers that receive outside messages from the highest bidder.
However, this doesn't NEED to be the case as we can design online experiences that bring people together. The last two years I've self-funded a foundation [1] to work on on precisely this problem of using the Internet to try to unify people together. Today we have two platforms we are providing to the public and organizations.
The first [2] service organizes people at physical events by maximizing the diversity of auto generated discussion groups, and we're having a fair amount of success in schools and events in the US and Austria. The other service [3] is purely an experimental free public social platform that matches people who have different viewpoints to have a timeboxed live discussion to chat about their views.
I'm not sure if what we've built so far can make a big impact online, but I hope it can serve as an example of what kind of tools that could be built if the focus is squarely aimed at unifying people instead of stuffing them into echo chambers with pay-to-reach walls between groups of people.
You are correct, but you forget that a technological solution like this one can help bringing around the actual social change you are looking for. It is kinda difficult to bring a social change when your major communication and information distribution methods are gutted.
Those are vague slogans, and I don't think they're true (or more precisely: they rely on conditions that won't exist in the contexts where you're trying to apply them).
For instance: put a committed extreme left-liberal in front of Fox News opinion programming for 8 hour a day, and they'll be more likely to die of an aneurysm due to constant rage than to moderate.
If the distance is too great, throw-em-together online contact isn't going to do anything to bring people closer together. At large ideological distances, the only kind of contact that can bring people together is a very slow, deliberate, and personal kind (e.g. the opposite of social media). That's why my comment was about engineering smaller-distance contacts.
Looking at this thread, it looks like we run into problems because we jump to solutions quickly, then thoroughly waste our time debating them.
Perhaps we'll have greater success if we can first agree on common ground?
There's a fundamental force at play here that extends far beyond the internet. I'm not entirely sure what it is.
Attention and mind share can be bought. This causes some weird outcomes in the Internet and politics.
It has to do with how we obtain/exchange value in our society - speech, information, material goods, attention, justice, etc. Perhaps how we make people produce value: labour, creation, votes.
Could we get closer to a solution if we spent more time understanding the root cause?
Yes that’s my challenge to the community more or less. It’s a problem that can be solved. But you shouldn’t expect people with a journalism degree to figure it out. They spent their time partying and making friends and stuff while we were studying cryptography and distributed systems wishing we could be invited to a party or have a friend.
The ability to keep track of more than 100 social connections in our head would probably solve the lions share of problems, as that's normally how we keep things civil. So far our only method of dealing with more than that many people has been bureaucracy and rule sets. Bureaucracy crushes and alienates, and rules are cheated.
Huh that's a cool comparison. I guess society will have a rough patch when a new, more accessible medium of communication is mass released to the public.
I'm not saying that all, but I think that part of the solution will be finding ways to get people interacting with each other directly in more ways either through direct outreach (going door to door or talking to people in public) or civic engagement. You don't have to be exposed to everyone, I had some really positive conversations when stuck at jury duty last time. A lot of people just go find a corner to hole up in but I ended up sharing a corner of the courthouse with a group of people that preferred to chat and it was a really nice way to while away the time (we had a 2 hour discussion about gun control that was very civil and diverse in ideology which the internet would lead you to believe was impossible).
I'm not saying any of this to detract from this tool or any of the other interesting tools linked here, I think its great to try to find as many solutions as possible but its just been my observation recently that humans interact best face to face, hopefully we can find a more scalable solution though.
It strikes me that enabling people to connect with one another is fundamental to most governments as a public service. Cities and states make and fund roadways and public squares and parks. Social networks seem like an approximate digital parallel.
The roadways, public squares and parks are under the direct control or ownership of the government, the virtual/digital parallel doesn't really exist.
one thing in particular resonated with me in the article. and, if i may paraphrase it, it's that these platforms in their quest to connect the last billions are amplifying problems we already have in society.
maybe we not ready to be massively connected. maybe we need to step back and think about how we are connecting people and not who to connect next.
I think this is going to be the next big challenge in social tech:
Contact: The consequences of growing up amid diversity just discussed bring us to the effects of prolonged contact on Us/Theming. In the 1950s the psychologist Gordon Allport proposed “contact theory.” Inaccurate version: bring Us-es and Thems together (say, teenagers from two hostile nations in a summer camp), animosities disappear, similarities start to outweigh differences, everyone becomes an Us. More accurate version: put Us and Thems together under narrow circumstances and something sort of resembling that happens, but you can also blow it and worsen things.
Some of the effective narrower circumstances: each side has roughly equal numbers; everyone’s treated equally and unambiguously; contact is lengthy and on neutral territory; there are “superordinate” goals where everyone works together on a meaningful task (say, summer campers turning a meadow into a soccer field).
How do we bring people who disagree back together? Technology is really good at getting people to do things which are individually gratifying so how do we encourage individuals to do something which is individually difficult but will have a strong positive effect on society?
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