Friday, July 14
What I wanted to do was look at some halfway decent nudes and posts about Napoleonic Italy. Now instead what I have is The Poster's Responsibility to Intervene and listen, no.
The point of the telephone is to be able to talk to people you can't see or who are not nearby at the speed that electrical waves can carry the information. Most everyone is familiar with the story of Bell spilling acid on himself in his lab and exclaming loud enough that his voice was heard on the receiver he and his assistant Watson were testing. Rarely do we talk about the second set of words. Or the third. Or the tenth. After all, its those accumulation of words in total that determine the culture of a usage and what we all find acceptable and what we do not.
I got my old head ass onto Bluesky a few weeks ago, and was honestly delighted to find a lot of the people from Twitter I had grown to enjoy and even in some cases actually meet and become friends with. It really did feel like the Twitter of old, if ever briefly. The app looks nearly identical in the first place, and I don't believe thats an accident. Something felt like it got, or was taken, away in the original interations of Twitter in the previous two decades.
There is no publically controlled space for social media. There is no PBS of posting. Honestly, I cannot fathom one existing considering the type of culture that has developed around social media in the preceeding decades. That I can use the word posting, and that you know exactly what I mean by it, illustrates the depth of the culture, how quickly it has taken root, and how incompatable with any kind of civically oriented discorse. A public library is a civic institution. I mean, I could go down to the local coffee shop and start exclaiming to an acquaintance about dialogue between Richard Nixon and one of his advisors as if they were commenting on the fourth quarter decision making of Sean McDermott, but I would be put on a watchlist. Due to that, we are at the mercy of using this communication platform subject to the whims of those with the means to keep it functional. Those who keep it functional seem to always make claims to wanting their product to become a necessity for public discourse. People will need their product based on how well crafted and tailored the experience of typing to a public forum will be. A very neoliberal thing to think that the necessary can only be created, maintained, and supplied by the free market. My experience in accessing the free market for things that are necessary for my life is a bit more hit and miss, and I would be more comfortable ensuring things that we all needed as a public remained in the public.
What You Say In Public and What You Say Online is a Venn diagram with two very different and unique circles on it. Expressions of power, race, sex, gender, equality, hate - these all have very different protocols depending on who is around and who controls the space you are speaking in. Different spaces have chosen different paths. Some of those paths deliberately shun the responsibility that the word civic or public embues on the company to keep the peace. Funny thing about running a public forum in a democracy that talks a big game about liberties, expression, and active participation in government.
These kinds of moderations of how and what you say, almost be the necesstity of the size of the operation and how many people are involved, comes from the culture rather than an arm of an organization or control group. There are laws, and then there are norms. The norms come from all of us and what we tolerate and what we don't. That's the real problem with creating a public forum and getting everyone excited about it. What you are actually doing is creating more work for everyone. Now I have to know about people putting racial slurs in their handles. Now I have to do enough to make the place seem unwelcome to people like that. Ugh. What I wanted to do was look at some halfway decent nudes and posts about Napoleonic Italy. Now instead what I have is The Poster's Responsibility to Intervene and listen, no. We have let too many engineers and thinkfluencers with no understanding of what The Public is creating public goods for public use and I am begging anyone just anyone to ask somone with a humanities background how these things work. Maybe then they would have seen the obvious on the way.