Things I was Wrong About Pt3 – The democratisation of social media

(Remember FriendFeed?)

Following on from QR Codes and The Death of the VLE, I offer the third in my potentially never-ending series of Things I Was Wrong About. This one requires more of a serious face.

In a week when the richest man in the world is using the global communication platform he purchased to undermine the government in the UK, promote the idea of civil war and push right wing ideology, the very idea of democratisation through social media seems naive and ludicrous. But reader, imagine if you can the heady days of 2007-2010. Web 2.0 is in its heyday and we are considering the concept of digital scholarship and how these new approaches will change fundamental academic practices.

I wasn’t alone in witnessing the power of social media to do the following:

• Elevate voices with interesting things to say
• Highlight the value of inout over prestige
• Provide new ways to discuss and critique ideas
• Remove some of the barriers (time, geography, finance) from what could get shared
• Make connections with people in different countries, institutions, disciplines, professions
• Value people for their contribution to the network as a whole

Many of the people I know now as respected scholars and thinkers were people I met through social media, and who, like me I think owe their career in some respects to the types of benefits listed above. So I think this “Thing I Got Wrong” is an example of where I was right, partially, for a while. Of course, we always knew it wasn’t a smell the flowers utopia, but several things happened on the 2010s in particular that saw mild reservations become full blown dystopia. The first of these was the success of social media itself. When it’s just a bunch of nerds talking to each other, no-one cares, but when it’s everyone, then it becomes worth subverting and controlling. This led to the second detrimental development which was the aggressive use of algorithms that could be manipulated to spread misinformation and hatred, and which explicitly encouraged outrage. The last is the consolidation of this power into the hands of dubious individuals with fragile egos, with very little governance and pushback against their power.

All of this seems obvious now. I do wonder how inevitable it all was. Perhaps very, because, hey, capitalism and power. I’m sure lots of people will now declare they always knew it would end this way, but I don’t think that’s true. There were reservations and inklings, but this shift happened fairly quickly. In conclusion, I was over-optimistic about the benefits of social media and insufficiently pessimistic about the downsides. However, if it was right for a little while, and now is wrong, the question remains, can it become a bit more right again? If so, how and where? Anyway for a little while there, we made some excellent cat memes.

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