A Networked Society: Promises and Paradoxes

 Good morning, my friends! I hope you've had a productive week. We're narrowing down towards the end of this semester, and with my Polestari's festival in about three weeks, I'm hoping that the weather calms down. We're looking towards another cold snap, which is unseasonably late. Global warming, am I right?

Which leads me (albeit somewhat sideways) towards this week's topic. When we were given this topic, I wasn't sure what it meant. After studying the readings, I have to say I'm fairly certain it deals with Social Networking Sites (SNSs) and their impact on society, which is tangential to other topics we've had, but this time we're going to center in. 

I'm an OG internet boi, which isn't quite the dinosaur age, but I remember the early days of Myspace and Live Journal. I wasn't one of the original UseNetters, but some of my friends were. I've watched social networks evolve and change, and their implicit commentary on how society is evolving is fascinating. What is acceptable? How do you create user-generated free spaces while protecting vulnerable populations? How is that mandate interacted with and supervised by powerful users/companies/collectives who use it to their advantage? How do those collectives topple when the masses no longer accept their supervision? Is social media a battlefield peopled by your neighbor's sister's kid doing TikTok challenges?

In science, observing a closed system is ideal for study. One of the papers this week was Robert Gehl's ethnographic study of a Dark Web social media site, DWSN. (source) In it, he conducted an observational study of how this social network functioned, and while it can't be termed a truly closed system (part of the appeal is that it is in relation to the clear web), some of his points are valid. However, his assertion that freedom is in contest with power is, in my opinion, flawed. The question of the internet, or society in general, has always been freedom vs. safety. 

Every decision, every law, has been determined by this fundamental question. How much freedom do we give up to acquire safety? And how much safety do we give up to acquire freedom? They are on the same spectrum, and they cannot coexist in a pure form. This is proven by Susan Wojcicki's editorial for YouTube, (source) where they outline the benefits of an open platform, but have had increasing protocols for editing out "harmful" content. This kind of embrace of content freedom is encouraging, but it begs a question - harmful by who's standard? The opening of Crawford and Gillespie's paper, "What is a Flag For? Social Media Reporting Tools and the Vocabulary of Complaint" (source), illustrates the problem clearly - a photo of two men kissing as though in a happy relationship was reported multiple times and removed, when a similar photo of a heterosexual couple would not have been considered problematic in the least, even possibly used as a family-friendly advertisement. The standards, and more importantly, the machine learning that reflects a broadly-valued society, are subjective. This is reflective of society's long relationship with the concepts of propriety and modesty, as well as "common sense". 

Perhaps I should clear any water that feels muddied, though I doubt my stance is left up to the imagination with my tone. I do not believe in propriety, modesty, or censorship. I believe that those are antiquated concepts used for subjugation, and that society has a mandate to evolve past them. There are sensitive populations, primarily children, and while it is our job to find age-appropriate ways to interact and speak with them, the age-old cry of "what about the children" has been used for the most ridiculous, vile, and hateful purposes historically. We are so wired to protect our young that our reason leaves us when a threat is modeled as being towards children. It is up to us, as adults, as citizens, and as members of society to realistically and compassionately raise and protect our children. Outside of that precious arena, however, adults are, in my opinion, capable of consent, and as such trying to protect us from ourselves is flat-out insulting. 

However, this is predicated on the idea that we as adults, that is to say a large group of us for whom a significant portion of the education system failed, are capable of thinking for ourselves and ferreting out who is talking to us and what we learn from it, but that is a post for another day. 

And why not talk about the children? Generation Alpha is wired in. They're not like us (being Millennial myself). They didn't come from the Age of Disillusionment that caused my generation's general malaise. They come from an era where they were never made The Promise. An age where the ship already sailed and they were never promised a seat. And they're doing something about it. Maybe not in a way most understand, but they are. More than ever, they're talking about social policy and moving the civic discussion online. (source) Where my generation didn't know who was President until after they graduated, these kids are talking about social policy across the country and the world in middle school and beyond. Just within the last month there were numerous walkouts and protests of the "Don't Say Gay" law enacted in Florida, with thousands of participants too young to vote. (source) I genuinely believe the kids will be alright if we let them.

When I write these posts, I try to hit points from all the readings and link them together across a major concept. There was one outlier, in my opinion, which was an article about Facebook lamenting the Apple application that prevented them from tracking data, costing them $10 billion in revenue. I find it difficult to care. If they're making that much income off of tracking data, they should reexamine their model. Their first quarter alone is 27 billion! What do they need more for, exactly? Corporations are not people; they're made up of people, and they are not "too big to fail" if we're living in an actual capitalist society. Citizens United was a mistake, and I do not care that Facebook doesn't like it when people opt out of having their data collected so they can be manipulated and brainwashed. Feh. 

This week, I'll leave you with a cat at a computer. I know I've done one before, but this one was really cute. Join me next week for a discussion on Copyright, which as a published author should be an interesting editorial. After that, it's the term paper! 

I'll be in tow!