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Baked In: Social Media and Tech Determinism

(this was originally published as Implausipod E0032 on May 26th, 2024)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/14896508-e0032-baked-in-social-media-and-tech-determinism

How much of your experience online is dictated by the environment you’re
in, and how it was constructed? What is you rebuild Twitter, and it
still ends up being toxic? Did you fail, or succeed without knowing it?

These are the kinds of questions that arise when we look at technology from a
deterministic point of view: that technology is the driver of cultural and social change and growth. And while this ideology has its adherents, many of the assumptions about technology, and tech determinism are already Baked In to the way we deal with tech in the world.

What if you rebuilt Twitter from the ground up, and it ends up being as toxic as the old one? Did you do something wrong, or were you just wildly successful? That’s the question we’re trying to address in this week’s episode, but perhaps we need to approach this from a different angle. So let me ask you, when you visit a website online, or use an app on your phone.

How does it make you feel? Do you feel happy? Amused? Upset? Angry? Enraged? And did it always feel that way? Did it used to feel good and then perhaps it took a turn for the worse? It became a little bit more negative? If it doesn’t make you feel good, why do you keep going back? Or perhaps you don’t, perhaps you move on to someplace new, and for the first little while it’s cool, it feels a lot like the old place used to be, but you know, before things changed, before other people came along, or before the conversation took a turn for the worse.

But the question is: How long before this place starts going downhill too, before the same old tired arguments and flame wars that seem to follow you around through the years and decades keep catching up to you? I mean, maybe it’s you, there’s always a chance, but let’s take a moment and assume we’re not slipping into solipsism here, as this seems to be a much more widely reported experience, and ask ourselves if maybe, just maybe, that negativity that we experience on the internet is something endemic.

It’s part of the culture, it’s baked in.

Welcome to The ImplausiPod, an academic podcast about the intersection of art, technology and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And in this episode, we’re going to address the question of how much of your experience online is shaped by the environment you’re in and how it is constructed.

Because there is no such thing as a natural online environment, all of these things are constructed at some point, but it’s a question of what they’re constructed for. We know that social media spaces can often be constructed for engagement, which is why it lends itself to rage farming and trolling. But how far back does it go?

We know we see commonalities in everything from Facebook and Twitter, to YouTube comment sections, to web forums, to Usenet, to email. Are these commonalities that we see related to the technology? Is there an element of what’s called technological determinism at play? Or are the commonalities that we see just related to the way that humans communicate, especially in an asynchronous environment like we see online?

Hmm. Or perhaps it’s something cultural. It’s part of the practice of using these tools online. And as such, it gets shared and handed down, moves from platform to platform to platform, which is what we seem to see. Now it could be a combination of all of these things, and in order to tease that out, we’re going to have to take a look at these various platforms.

So I’ll start with the one that was the genesis for this question for me. Mastodon, which is part of the ActivityPub protocol. Mastodon in many ways replicates the functionality of Twitter along with the look and feel with toots replicating the tweets, the short microblog posts that may include links or hashtags, an image or short video clips.

And depending on the client you’re using to access it, you’d hardly notice the difference. It’s this similarity that led me to the question that started off the show. What if you rebuild Twitter and it still ended up being toxic? So in order to explore this question, we’re going to take a quick survey of the field and look at the problems that can be seen in a lot of different social media platforms.

Then we’ll go into more depth on the potential causes that we mentioned, including the technology, the nature of communication online, as well as Cultural factors, and then conclude by seeing if there might be a more hopeful or optimistic way that we can approach this and our online interactions.

So when we look at these online platforms, you might want to see how they’re all just a little bit broken while we’re overwhelmingly a positive podcast here, and we try and accentuate the positive elements that exist in our society. I’ll admit. Sometimes it’s a little bit hard, and when we start looking at online platforms, we can see that much like families, each dysfunctional one is dysfunctional in its own ways.

However, that being said, we might be able to tease out a few trends by the end of this. Our baseline for all of this is, of course, going to be Twitter. Whether you call it X or Twitter, it’s been one of the most studied of the social media platforms, and that gives us a wealth of data. And it also allows us to make a clear distinction by calling it Twitter prior to the acquisition by Elon Musk and But regardless of whether we look at Twitter or X, the results aren’t great.

In a recent study of the University of Toronto by Victoria Olemburgo De Mello, Felix Cheung, and Michael Inzlicht, the authors find that there’s no positive effects on user well being by engaging with X. Even the occasionally touted greater sense of belonging by participating in the platform didn’t lead to any long-lasting effects.

Instead, what they found was an immediate drop in positive emotions, so things like joy and happiness are right out the window, and there was an increase in outrage, political polarization, and boredom. So using X, even if you’re a little bit bored, is probably a net negative. And this is just from a recent study.

It isn’t counting the systemic changes that have taken place on the platform since the acquisition by Elon Musk, and the platforming of hate speech, and the reduction of moderator tools, the increasing attack vectors by removing the ability to block harassers, and all the other changes that have taken place as well, including creators just upright and leaving the platform.

But that’s the state of things right now. The question is, Did Twitter always suck? And the answer is kind of yeah. The University of Toronto study we mentioned was collecting data back in 2021 prior to the acquisition by Elon Musk, and so if things have gone downhill since then for the reported outrage and lack of joy, then I can’t really imagine what the place is like now.

But enough about the service formerly known as Twitter. When looking at some of its competitors, what are their downsides? Are they as toxic too? There’s Threads, the Facebook owned offshoot of the Instagram platform, primarily focused on text-based messaging. Even though it launched in July of 2023, it came together rather quickly, seemingly as an attempt to capitalize on the struggles that Twitter was having, struggles that soon led to it being rebranded as X later that month.

One of the challenges with threads is they’re adding features as they go, and while they leverage their existing user base from Instagram, it hasn’t led to the same level of active retention that one might think. Despite the lack of explicit advertising, they still have issues with spam posts, for example.

And then there’s the whole challenge with Facebook ownership in general, which we’ve discussed on in previous episodes, like when we talked about Triple E back in episode 15. BlueSky, or B-Sky, was another Twitter alternative built on the prospect of having an open source social media standard, and up until May 5th of 2024, it had Jack Dorsey, a former Twitter CEO, on its board.

His departure is indicative of some of the challenges that lay there, that it’s somewhat lifeless with minimal community involvement, and that despite it being built as a decentralized platform, until that gets rolled out, it very much is a centralized form of control. Usenet, the almost OG social network, built off of the Network News Transfer Protocol, or NNTP, that we talked about a lot back in episode 10, still exists, technically, but on the text-based servers it’s mostly dead with tons of spam and minimal community, though there are a few diehards that try and keep it going.

The existence of the binaries groups there as a file transfer service is a completely separate issue far beyond what we’re talking about here. LinkedIn, the social network for business professionals, feels incredibly inauthentic and performative, and it feels like the functionality that you find there would be better served by being on almost any other social media platform.

Reddit, with all the pains that it had in 2023 with its shift to the IPO and the strike of the various moderators, is still a going concern with high user counts, but a lot of that content may be now fed into various AI platforms, turning conversations into just so much grist for the mill. Stack Overflow, the tech-based Q& A site, has done much the same thing, turning all that conversation into just so much AI fodder.

Platforms like Discord, which have, again, corporate control, and may lead to all the content they’re in being memory old. And that brings us back to Mastodon, which, despite all the promises of an open social web, can have, in certain places, an incredible toxic community. It’ll have Federation Wars, as various servers join or disband, based on.

Ideological differences with other active servers, there’s access problems for a number of different users, there’s differing policies from server to server, and there’s inconsistent moderation across all of it. And despite all these problems, it might be one of the best options when it comes to text based social media.

So this brings us back to our main question, why do they all suck? Is it something that’s baked in? Is it something that’s determined by the technology?

So let’s take a moment and introduce you to the idea of technological determinism. Tech determinism is a long running theory that’s existed in some form or other since the 19th century. Technological determinism posits that the key driver of human history and society has been technology in its various forms.

It leads to a belief that innovation should be pursued, sometimes at all costs, and that the solution to any issue is more technology, even if those issues are caused by other technologies in the first place. Tech Determinism exists on a bit of a spectrum, where its adherence can be more or less hardcore with respect to how much technology determines our history and how much attention is paid to any explanation outside the scope of technology.

According to technological determinism, all social progress follows tech innovation, and there’s a certain inevitability that’s part and parcel with that. If I was able to license music for this show, I’d queue up You Can’t Stop Progress by Clutch off their 2007 album From Beale Street to Oblivion. But, uh, in this case I’ll just ask you to go to YouTube or your other music streaming site, or grab your CD off the shelf and put it in and play along.

But back to our spectrum. Hardcore technological determinists don’t think society or culture can have any impact on technology, or at least the direction of it. And that goes back to that inevitability that we were talking about. There’s a softer form of technological determinism as well, where the technology can be dependent on social context and how it is adopted.

And this ties back to what Penelope Quan Haas talks about as social determinism. Social norms, attitudes, cultural practices, and religious beliefs are perceived as directly impacting how technology is used and what its social consequences are. This is a little bit more of a nuanced view and takes us away from the instrumental view where technology is seen as neutral and just a tool to be used.

But as pointed out by Langdon Winner back in 1980 in a rather famous article, Do Artifacts Have Politics?, that neutrality is something that’s very much circumscribed. The design of a tool can have very specific impacts about how it is used in society. And I think this starts bringing us back to those design spaces that we’re talking about, those online platforms.

Each of them present themselves in various ways and suggest various actions that might be taken. done. These are what Don Norman calls affordances or the perceived action possibilities of a certain piece of technology. When it comes to online spaces, it doesn’t matter whether that space is presented to the user on a smartphone or on a desktop computer, laptop, or some kind of terminal, the preferred form of action is going to be presented to the user in the most accessible place to reach.

This is why you’ll see the swipe or like or comment buttons presented where they are. On a smartphone, that’s anything that’s in easy reach of the thumb of a right-handed user. For X, it’s that little blue button in the right-hand corner, just begging you to use it. And by reducing the barrier to entry to posting, you get a lot of people posting really quickly.

Emotionally, reacting to things, getting the word out there. Because, heaven forbid, somebody is wrong on the internet. And this leads us to the second factor that may be leading to such horrible online communication. The very nature of online communication itself. And this has been recognized for a long, long time.

At least 20 years. On March 19th, 2004, in a post titled “Green Blackboards and Other Anomalies”, the world was introduced to the GIFT theory. And we’ll call it the GIFT theory because we’re on the family friendly side of the podcast sphere. As Tycho from Penny Arcade explained at the time, a normal person plus anonymity and an audience equals a GIFT.

And because that anonymity was kind of part and parcel with online interactions that you really didn’t know who you were dealing with. And that all identities online were constructed to a degree, it might lend people to say things online or behave online in ways that they wouldn’t if they were face to face with the person.

And because having an audience can allow for someone to get a larger reaction, people might be more predisposed to behave that way, if they thought their words could be traced back to them. Now, this is 2004, so pre social media. Twitter and Facebook would take off after that. And it became slightly more common for people to post using their real names, or at least a slightly more recognizable one.

And we found out that that really didn’t change things at all. So perhaps it has more to do with the audience rather than the anonymity. Regardless, the culture that had developed through early Usenet and then AOL chat rooms, through to online gaming, instant messenger apps, and IRC, kept encountering the same problems.

Which the tech determinants would take as a sign that suggests that the technology is the cause. But what if the social determinists are right? Social determinists being the flip side of the tech determinists, that all interactions that take place are due to social cues. This leads us to our third potential cause.

What if it’s the culture of online interaction? In 1993, Howard Rheingold published one of the first books on online societies, The Virtual Community, subtitled Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. This is based on his experience as a user in The Well, the Whole Earth Electronic Link, a BBS based in San Francisco run by computer enthusiasts that were part of the Whole Earth catalog.

Following up on his previous books on hackers and virtual reality, he wrote a book that took a wide-ranging survey of the state of the web in 1993. Or at least, what we now call the web, as much as the book focused on BBSs and other portals like The Well, terminal systems like Francis Minitel, commercial services like CompuServe, and email, all under the umbrella of CMC, Computer Mediated Communication.

Though this acronym is now largely forgotten, save for in certain academic circles, it bears repeating and reintroduction to those unfamiliar to the term, as it explains in the distinction it makes. And, open parenthesis, not that I’m saying that a term is acting with intentionality here, I’m not that far down the memetic rabbit hole, but rather that we can consider it as the focus for our agentive discussion. Close parenthesis.

Rheingold was looking at early implementations of the web. Cross cultural implementations, when there are largely local phenomena, national at best, and rarely the international level that we now expect. You looked at France’s Minitel at CalvaCom, as well as sites in Japan and the well on the west coast of the United States.

Yes, they could all be accessed outside of that, but long distance was costly and bandwidth was low. And time and again, the same phenomena was observed. Talking with Lionel Lombroso, a participant with CalvaCom in France, about his experiences with 80s, one of the biggest challenges was dealing with like the perpetual flame wars, in this case one involving Microsoft and the evils therein.

Lombroso goes on to state that, quote, I think online is a stage for some people who don’t have opportunities to express themselves in real life. Again, this is the late 80s, early 90s. HTTP is just being invented around the same time. The web as we know it doesn’t exist yet, but online communication, computer mediated communication, does.

And they’re seeing this already. Where arguments based on politics or ideology lead to intractable discussions, which invariably force decisions to be made between censorship and free expression, and attempts to limit the flame war will invariably shift to this regardless of the forum, as has been seen in the Well, Twix, Calva, and so many other sites as well.

So, if antagonism online goes back this far, if we can see the roots of the quote unquote Seven Deadly Sins Then perhaps we’re close to finding our answer. Antagonism online can largely be a cultural thing. And just as a parenthesis, ask me sometime about those seven deadly sins and I can tell you how you can tell if you’re stuck in a 7g network.

If online toxicity is well and truly baked in, being part and parcel of the culture from the very beginning, is there a way to fight back against it? One of the biggest problems is the expectations of use. People coming to Mastodon, for instance, which looks and feels a lot like Twitter in many ways, is a lot of the initial participants are coming directly from Twitter and bringing all their old habits and patterns with them, for good.

The tech is static, but the new tech looks like the old tech and provides the affordances of the old tech, so it gets used in similar ways by people who expect it to behave in a certain way. And they may not be entirely conscious of that. That, much like Taylor Swift sings, It’s me, me, I’m the problem, it’s me.

So how might this be combated? There’s a number of options, and they’re not mutually exclusive. The first is to change the interface in order to change the interaction. This may be productive, as it would shake the users out of assumed patterns of use. However, it’s double edged, as one of the elements that makes a new platform attractive is its similarity to other existing platforms.

And to be clear, Despite the similarity of interface, tools like Mastodon are still facing an uphill battle in attracting or retaining users that are leaving X and or Twitter. And I’m saying and or, that despite it being X, we’re talking historically over the entire period that, say, tools like Mastodon have existed.

The second option can be heavier moderation. And this can be one of the big challenges for the Fediverse, which largely operates under donations and volunteer work. This approach has been taken by some private entities and the DSA in the EU, that’s the Digital Service Act, has required large social media platforms to disclose the number of moderators they have, especially in each language.

And in articles on Reuters and Global Witness published in November and December of 2023, we got a look at what some of those numbers were. For example, X had 2, 294 EU content moderators, compared with 16, 974 for YouTube, 7, 319 at Google’s Play service, and another 6, 125 at TikTok. And those numbers are largely for the English moderators.

The numbers drop off rapidly for non-English languages, even in the EU. And if large multinational corporations are challenged by and struggling with the lack the ability to moderate online, the largely volunteer versions that exist in the Fediverse can have even less recourse.

So a third solution may be education on social norms and online toxicity. In this, networks like the Fediverse have some advantages, as they’ve been able to put in tools to assist users and creators that can modify the content in certain ways. Content warnings, which can hide certain content by default. Alt text for image and media descriptions for persons that need to use screen readers, using camel case for hashtags in order to increase readability.

But all of this is a long and constant battle as it’s on the user to institute them when they’re using it. And we’ve seen earlier forms of this happen online. As recounted in the Eternal September, and you can check out our old episode on that. But, as the name implies, it keeps happening as platforms need to acculturate the influx of new users in order to use the platform successfully.

And, as those new users still have all the same expectations of use that they’ve picked up in every interaction online that they’ve had up to that point in time. It’s still going to be a sticking point. So maybe we have to put it on the user, which leads us to our fourth option that the user needs to be the change that they want to see.

And I can see reflections of this in my own online interactions, that I realized maybe I wasn’t the best online citizen in the past, but, you know, we can all reflect about how we interact online and try and do better in the future. One simple method would be to follow George Costanza’s lead. And I’m serious on this, George Costanza in season 5 episode 22 on Seinfeld, this was the show called The Opposite, and Costanza tries doing the opposite of his instinct for every choice and interaction he has online, and his life ends up improving because of that.

He realizes that, hey, much like Taylor Swift, he might be the problem. And he tries to do better and make conscious decisions about how he’s interacting with people online. I don’t know if that’s something you can implement in software, but there are methods, like notifications that pop up when somebody’s going to reply to somebody they’ve never interacted with before.

Or, for instance, notifications for users when they’re going to post something online, letting them know that, hey, this is being distributed to a mass audience and not to your 12 closest friends. The other option for trying to be the change you want to see, you would just be actively working to try and make the internet a better place.

And we can see this in things like the happiness project on March 20th, 2024, the second day of the third FediForum, an unconference where individuals can come together online to discuss things related to the Fediverse, the ActivityPub protocol, Mastodon and other ActivityPub tools. Evan Prodromou, a co-author of ActivityPub convened a panel on happiness in the Fediverse, and the discussion centered around what makes us happy when we engage online.

How do we build those strong social ties and positive engagement that we’d love to see in our own lives? How do we ensure that our social networks lead to positive mental and physical health and well being? positive mindset overall? Those are not easy questions, by all means. One of the things the participants noted is that happiness requires active work, in that posting positive things requires an act on the part of the creators there, and it’s not always easy.

There can be a number of very stressful things that are inherent in social media, and especially the ways we use them now. As I participated in the panel, I mentioned some of the things that have brought up previously both in this episode and in previous ones, letting them know that we may need to be much like George Costanza and try and do the opposite.

But also I left the panel with a question that I began this episode, how much of your experience online? is dictated by the environment you’re in and how it’s constructed, that we need to consider both the architecture and the practices. And perhaps this is ultimately the solution. We create community by building a better place, supplemented by the technology, but created through the culture and patterns of use.

It has to be explicit though, as good interactions may go unnoted. And those who are unaware of them, or those who are new, may not notice that things are done differently. Ultimately, all these things can be incredibly positive for community. However, what happens when your community is taken away from you?

We’ll look at that possibility in the next episode of the ImplausiPod.

Once again, thank you for joining us on the ImplausiPod. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at Dr. Implausible at implausipod. com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows at implausipod. com as well. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 share alike license.

You may have noticed at the beginning of the show that we describe the show as an academic podcast, and you should be able to find us on the Academic Podcast Network when that gets updated. You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program, and there’s no cost associated with the show, but it does grow through the word of mouth of the community, so if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two and pass it along.

There’s also a buy me a coffee link on each show at implausipod.com, which would go to any hosting costs associated with the show. Over on the blog, we’ve started up a monthly newsletter. There will likely be some overlap with future podcast episodes and newsletter subscribers can get a hint of what’s to come ahead of time.

So consider signing up and I’ll leave a link in the show notes. Coming soon, we’ll be following up on this episode with what happens with the loss of online community. In an episode titled, Tick Tock Tribulations. After which we’ll have some special guests join, for a two-part discussion of the first season of the Fallout TV series, followed by a look at the emergence of the dial up pastorale, and then the commodification of curation. I think those episodes will be fantastic, I can’t wait to share them with you. Until then, take care, and have fun.

Bibliography:
Chee, F. Y., Mukherjee, S., Chee, F. Y., & Mukherjee, S. (2023, November 10). Musk’s X has a fraction of rivals’ content moderators, EU says. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/technology/musks-x-has-fraction-rivals-content-moderators-eu-says-2023-11-10/

Drolsbach, C., & Pröllochs, N. (2023). Content Moderation on Social Media in the EU: Insights From the DSA Transparency Database (arXiv:2312.04431). arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04431

FediForum.org. (n.d.). FediForum | Happiness in the Fediverse. Retrieved May 26, 2024, from https://fediforum.org/2024-03/session/4-d/

Green Blackboards (And Other Anomalies)—Penny Arcade. (n.d.). Retrieved May 19, 2024, from https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies

Oldemburgo de Mello, V., Cheung, F., & Inzlicht, M. (2024). Twitter (X) use predicts substantial changes in well-being, polarization, sense of belonging, and outrage. Communications Psychology, 2(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-024-00062-z

Rheingold, H. (2000). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. MIT Press.

Hilarious in hindsight

Sometimes going through old9er) books can be quite revealing. Looking through Jenkins, Ford and Green (2013/2018) Spreadable Media, from the paperback version there was this gem of a quote:

The popularity of Twitter, for instance, was driven by how efficiently the site facilities [sic] the types of resource sharing, conversation, and coordination that communities have long engaged in. The site’s early success owes little to official brand presence; big-name entertainment properties, companies, and celebrities began flocking to the microblogging platform only after its success was considered buzzworthy
(p.30)

In light of the events of November 29th and 30th, 2023, this is revelatory, and somewhat amusing as well.

Implausipod E0013 – Context Collapse

Tiktok has a noise problem, and it’s indicative of a larger issue ongoing within social media, that of “context collapse”. But even context collapse is expanding outside its original context and evidence of it can be seen in the rise of generative AI tools, music and media, and the rise of the “Everything App”. Starting with a baseline in information theory and anthropology, we’ll outline some of the implications of noise and context collapse in this episode of the Implausipod.

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/13516713-implausipod-e0013-context-collapse

Transcript:

TikTok has a noise problem, and it may be due to a context collapse, something that’s been plaguing music, social media, and it’s even showing up in our new AI tools. And if you don’t know what that is, you’ll find out soon enough. We’ll explain it here tonight on episode 13 of the Implausipod.

Welcome to the ImplausiPod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. Now, when it comes to the issue of noise and context collapse, there’s a little bit more going on, of course. The problem for TikTok is that it started out with a pretty tasty signal, one that kind of really encouraged people to stick around. But as that signal amps up and it gets more and more noise in the system, it gets a little chunkier and crustier and maybe not as finely tuned as you’d like. Now, for some people that noise isn’t a problem, but for a lot of people it can be. And the reason it’s a problem for TikTok is that the noise can be actively discouraging from using the app. It can make it Unfun, and this is what I’ve been noticing lately. So let’s get into how context collapse is impacting life online.

When TikTok rose to prominence throughout the pandemic, it was a very tasty experience for a lot of people. I mean, if you had negative interactions there, there was probably reasons for it, but there was also ways to mitigate it. You could block people, you had a lot of control, and generally the algorithm would be feeding you content that you wanted to see. Or even if you know, you didn’t know you wanted to see it, you know that the joke goes. To that end, it was pretty good at sussing out what people found engaging. So TikTok had a very high signal to noise ratio. Yeah, there was some noise there, but that was because it was feeding stuff that it wasn’t quite sure that you liked. But once it kind of honed in on what your preferences were, it was really good system for delivering content to users.

Over time though, as more and more content goes out and more and more people start participating, the amount of tasty content, the amount of good content, the amount of interesting and novel content drops off. So you see less and are aware of pieces of information that everybody is seeing less, and less stuff – even within your niche from people that you’re following – gets shown to you. So this is all noise in the system. It’s the amount of stuff that you don’t want to see increasing.

Now we’re talking about signal to noise, and as we’re talking about a very old theory here, we’re talking about Claude Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication. Now, it was “A mathematical theory of communication” when it was published in 1948 as a paper, and then it was reworked as a book with Warren Weaver in 1949, where it was The Mathematical Theory of Communication as they realized that the theory was more generalizable, and this theory undergirds the entirety of the internet and most of our modern telecommunication systems, and it’s just a way of dealing with the noise in a system and ensuring the signal gets sent as it was sent from the transmitter to the receiver. And you can talk about it in terms of human communication or machine to machine communication. Device to device. Point to point, and this is why it’s generalizable. It can be pretty much black boxed, and you can see this in how it gets used in multiple contexts. The point of the theory is that there’s a certain throughput that you need where the amount of information is greater than the noise to ensure that the signal is “understood”. And then there can be systems that are used to error check or correct or whatever, what’s on the receiving end to ensure that you know what was transmitted comes through as an intended, and that’s the gist of it.

Now for something like TikTok as the signal, you know, the signal is the content that’s supposed to be delivered to the end user, and the noise is anything that isn’t part of that. It’s the stuff they’re not necessarily looking for or asking for. And as TikTok has branched out and provided more types of content, starting with the 15 second videos and then 60 seconds, three minutes, 10 minutes, live stream, stories, whatever, you get more types of content in there. Not all of it’s gonna be relevant to all users. If somebody’s watching for some quick videos, even a 60-second or three minute video is definitely not gonna be what they want to see. So we have a variety of content in there and that increases the noise, the amount of stuff you don’t want to see in a given block of time.

Now, couple that with the other types of content that get filtered in. It can include ad sponsored posts or posts that are just generally low value. This can include things like, oh, so-and-so changed their name, so-and-so signed on, or what we’ve seen recently is the retro posts like on this day in 2021 or 2022 or whatever, where people will revisit old posts, and a lot of times there’s nothing special about those unless you haven’t seen it before. It’s just whatever’s that person was talking about a year ago. So that feeds into the pipeline with all the current content that’s also trying to get out to the user base as the user base is increasing. So we have this additional content that’s coming through the pipeline, increasing the signal, but there’s also more stuff, more stuff that you don’t want to see.

It’s noisy,

and that noise, as we stated earlier, makes it unfun. It’s like it directly interferes with the stickiness of the app, the ability for it to engage the audience and have them participate in what the actions that are going online. And as that’s directly part of what Tiktok’s business model is: capture an audience and keep them around, then that can be a problem for them.

But it also brings us into that idea of the collapse of context. Now context collapse is something that was theorized about by a number of media scholars in the early 2000s, including danah boyd and Michael Wesch, and a few others. In its most simplest form, it’s what happens when media that’s designed for one audience or a single audience gets shared to multiple audiences, sometimes unintended. For early social media, and in this case, that means like MySpace and Facebook and Twitter, media that was shared for a particular group – often a friend group – could go far beyond the initial context. And while those websites or apps, along with blogs and web forums were co-constitutive of the public sphere, as we talked about a few episodes ago, along with the traditional media. Context really didn’t start smooshing together until Web 2.0 started shifting to video with the advent of YouTube and the other streaming sites, and that’s the technical term, smooshing. You can update your lexicons accordingly.

But the best way to describe context collapse was captured by cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch in a 2009 issue of Explorations in Media Ecology. He describes it and the problem as follows, quote:

“The problem is not lack of context. It’s context collapse, an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon one another into that single moment of recording. The images, actions, and words captured by the lens at any moment can be transported to anywhere on the planet and preserved the performer must assume for all time. The little glass lens becomes the gateway to a black hole sucking all of time and space, virtually all possible contexts in on itself.” End quote.

So he is talking then about the relatively new phenomenon of YouTube, which had only been around for about four or five years at that point, and what we now call creators producing content for viewing on that platform. It was that shift to cam life that had started previously, obviously, I mean there’s a reason YouTube was called what it was, but it went along with that idea of democratization of the technology, of the ability for pretty much anybody with a small technological outlay to produce a video and have it available online for others to see. Prior to the YouTube era, that would’ve been largely restricted to people with access to certain levels of broadcast technology, whether it was television or cable access, or a few other avenues. It wasn’t really as prevalent as we saw in, you know, the 21st century. And now with the growth of YouTube and the advent of Snapchat and TikTok, it really has completely taken over. But this is why it’s also still useful to look at some older articles because they give us an idea of what was novel at the time, what had changed, and this was really what was different with what was going on.

Michael Wesch is really drawing a lot from Goffman here and that idea of “the presentation of self in everyday life”, that we have different behaviors and there’s different aspects of ourselves that we will bring to the forefront in different contexts. So whether it’s at school or work or with our family or parents or friends or loved ones or what have you, we’re all slightly different in the way that we act around them. And this has been observed for a lot of different people in a lot of different contexts. But with the rise of what I’ll call here the mediated self and the complete flattening of all contexts due to, you know, Snapchat and Reels and TikTok, it has really taken a new turn.

Now, that idea of presentation of self for multiple audiences through vlogging, through YouTube, it isn’t exactly new because there was other versions of that before. In a presentation by Dr. Aiden Buckland, he goes into some of the critiques of this, that a media archeologist or media historian could draw a pretty straight lineage from diarization and life writing as a practice that occurred on blogs through to the modern practices that we see with video logs or just TikTok and Snapchats. This, in turn, is drawing heavily on the works of Dr. Michael Keren, who wrote a lot about blogs and their political action in the late nineties and early 2000s. But I digress. I’m starting to get a little bit further afield.

One of the ways to theorize Context collapse is that it’s like if every moment that you have that is recorded was available for instant replay at any time. And with the advent of video services moving to the cloud and having everything accessible (and looking at YouTube’s archives, now you can go back to basically when they began), we have that idea of instant replay. So it isn’t just a context collapse in terms of anything might be available to multiple audiences, but it’s also a Time collapse in that everything is always available to all potential audiences, and this extension of the context collapse to encompass multiple times or at least all times that are recorded and stored in the cloud has been discussed by authors Petter Bae Brandtzaeg of Oslo and Marika Lüders. Now there’s a very obvious link to this, to the rise of what’s called cancel culture, and I’d be remiss if I went without mentioning it, but that’s kind of beyond the scope of what we’re discussing here. That’s a different thread, a different track that we will have to pursue at some time in the future. The other implication of this time collapse is something that we’ve discussing here on the podcast more recently, namely media, especially music, and AI.

In terms of media, this context collapse, this time collapse is happening because obviously everything is available everywhere, all at once, at least for the most part. Things are currently in a state of flux, especially when it comes to television and film. The advent of the streaming services where each carved off a particular portion of the IP catalog that they happen to own has really changed how things have been interacting, but when it comes to music where streaming can basically all be done through one particular service, Spotify, with a few additional ones with minor catalogs, the impacts of that time collapse and context collapse are much more noticeable.

In an article published on The Atlantic in January of 2022, author Ted Gioia asked “Is old music killing new music?”. The author found that over 70% of the US market was going to songs that were 18 months or older, and often significantly so. Current rock and pop tracks now have to compete with the best of the last 60 years of recorded music. And while it is possible to draw some direct comparisons between the quality of the music as YouTuber Rick Beato did in a live stream on August 26th, 2023, where he asked: “Is today’s music bad?”, and looked at the top chart toppers from 50 years ago in August of 1973. You can argue that the overall production of music may be significantly better in 2023, but the overall composition, songwriting, and other elements may lack that magic that we saw, you know, 50 years ago. The most popular trend in music right now seems to just be a remix, a sample, a cover, or an interpolation of an older song. Even a chart topper like Dua Lipa draws heavily on the recreation of a seventies dance club aesthetic and sound. So context collapse, even if it isn’t necessarily killing new music, is definitely changing the environment in which it may be able to, you know, survive and thrive. The environment’s almost getting a little polluted.

It’s very noisy there.

However, one of the other places we’re seeing the impacts of this noise, this context collapse, is in the generative AI tools, or at least this is one of the places that the noise is being put to use. On a post on his blog on July 17th, 2023, author Stephen Wolfram talked about the development of these generative art tools and the processes that it goes through to actually create a picture. We work through the field of adjacent possibles that could be seen in something like a cat with a party hat on, and a lot of those images that are just a step or two removed for being a image that we as humans recognize shows up as noise. It turns out that what we think of as an image isn’t necessarily that random, and a lot of the pixels are highly correlated with one another, at least on a pixel-per-pixel basis. So if you feed a billion images into one of these models, in order to train it, you’re gonna get a lot of images that look highly similar, that are correlated with each other. And this is what Wolfram is talking about when he is talking about the idea of an “inter concept space”, that these images generally represent something or close to something. It’s not an arbitrary one either, but it’s one that’s aligned with our vision, something that we recognize, so a “human-aligned inter-concept space” that’s tied to our conception of things like cats and party hats.

But this “inter-concept” space is not only like ‘representative of’, but ‘fueled by’ the context collapse. It requires the digitization of everything, like a billion images that go into it in order for it to be trained. But it also, you know, squishes everything together. Again, our technical term, smoosh. And this smooshing brings us back to TikTok because everything is there. That’s part of what’s contributing to the noise, but it also is why there’s such a volume of a signal that’s there. You can likely find something and it’ll get algorithmically delivered to you if you like it enough or you interact with. But this is also how it’s captured so much of the public sphere in a way that the owner of Twitter wishes it could, and that idea of the context collapse seems to be made manifest in these apps that are trying to capture the public sphere, that they have to capture everything, everything all at once.

And so we’re seeing the rise of the Everything app, the everything website, much like we talked about a few weeks ago in episode 10 with the rise of a o l and how it as a portal was for a lot of users. The internet, it was the entirety of it. And we’ve seen subsequently with Facebook, we’re seeing a number of competitors, sometimes in different places around the world, catering to a particular locality, but all of them trying to capture that “One thing to all people, to all customers”. In China, we see it with the rise of WeChat, which allows for calls and texts and payments as well. In Moscow, we can see it with the various apps that are run by Yandex, where you could use it for everything from getting a taxi to communications to your apartment, and there’s a lot of tools built-in and it actually has its own currency system built-in as well. A user by the name of Inex Code posted a list of everything that you can do with Yandex in Moscow. In North America, we can see it with not just Facebook, but also with Apple and Google and Amazon too. The breadth of services that they have available, and the continual expansion of services that they’re adding to their apps and platforms. And when Elon Musk bought Twitter, it was theorized that one of the things you wanted to do was turn it into a WeChat like app. His recent comments about LinkedIn and the option of adding that kind of functionality to the app now known as X indicate that he may well be headed in that direction. And finally, the continual expansion of TikTok now include texts as well as a marketplace and music sales indicate there’s still more growth in that area too. As each of these walled garden “everything” apps try and gather up more functionality, we can see that this is one response to the context collapse: to provide a specific context within their enclosure.

It’s an effort to reduce the noise, or at least to turn it into something that happens outside their walls.

But setting up a wall may not be the only solution. It’s one way, obviously, that element of enclosure that’s taking place, but there’s other ways to deal with it as well. One way is a way we looked at with the Fediverse, where an everything app can be developed as long as it’s open. and there’s a lot of opportunity and possibility there, but that openness requires a fair amount of work by the user. It requires curation. It lacks the algorithmic elements that drive the enclosure of the other apps. Now, that doesn’t mean an algorithmic element couldn’t work for the Fediverse, it’s just that currently it’s not set up for it and may require a lot of effort to bootstrap something like that and get it going.

And absent an algorithm, it kind of points the way to the last two solutions that we have. The first one is just to lean into it to accept that there’s this change that’s happened to our society with the advent of digital media and everything being available. If the context collapsed, that’s fine. That’s just the way things are now, and we just have to learn to deal with it. And that leads into the second option. The one David Brin called The Transparent Society. And just that everything is available, and we’ll have to change our patterns of use. If we recognize that aspects of our culture are socially constructed, then we learn to live with that and we can change and adjust as necessary. Things haven’t always been the way they are currently, and they don’t have to continue that way either. Because the last way forward to deal with context collapse is to look at some areas of our culture that have already experienced it and seen how they’ve dealt with it. Because context collapse is intimately tied with that idea of availability of everything as well as in video terms, what Wesch is talking about was the instant replay.

And the two areas that have managed that and have continued to succeed in an era of streaming media and context collapse are pro sports and pro wrestling. The way they’ve succeeded is recognizing that they have their particular audience, that their audience will find them, that they don’t have to be everything for all audiences. And they’ve also succeeded by privileging the live, the now, the current event, something that revels in the instant replay, the highlight reel, the high spot, but also is allowed to continually produce new content because there might be a new highlight reel or a high spot in the very next game or match or show or finals or pay-per-view. There’s always something new coming down the pipeline and you best not look away. It turns out that the best way to deal with the noise is to create something that cuts right through it.

Once again, I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. It’s been a pleasure having you with us today. I hope you join us next time for episode 14 when we investigate the phenomenon of the dumpshock. In the meantime, you can find this episode and all back episodes at our new online home at www.implausipod.com, and email me at Dr. implausible at implausipod com. Until the next time, while you’re out there in the busyness and the noise, have fun.

References and Links:

Brandtzaeg, P. B., & Lüders, M. (2018). Time Collapse in Social Media: Extending the Context Collapse. Social Media + Society, 4(1), 2056305118763349. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118763349

Gioia, T. (2022, January 23). Is Old Music Killing New Music? The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-killing-new-music/621339/

Shannon, C. E. (1948). A Mathematical Theory of Communication.

Wesch, M. (2009). Youtube and You: Experiences of self-awareness in the context collapse of the recording webcam. Explorations in Media Ecology, 8(2), 19–34.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-claude-shannons-information-theory-invented-the-future-20201222/

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305118763349

Generative AI Space and the Mental Imagery of Alien Minds

Implausipod E0010 – AOL, Fediverse, and Eternal September

Introduction:

What does the relationship between a 40 year old game console company, and ancient internet protocol, and American Online have to teach us about the current issues faced by new users to the Fediverse? Let’s find out on this episode of the Implausipod.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1935232/episodes/13373854

Transcript:

Welcome to the Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. September is almost on us again, and with it the 30th anniversary of the Endless September, the date when the internet changed forever. Join me on this deep dive on the Implausipod.

So if I told you that a video game service developed for the Atari 2600, back 40 years ago in 1983, had implications for the future of social media in 2023, you’d be like, okay, that sounds a little implausible, but uh, “give it to me straight, doctor, I can take it!” and I’m like, “alright…”. That company, Control Video Corporation would about a decade later as AOL allow its users unfettered access to the nascent internet, especially Usenet, and that has direct parallels to the mass migration of users that were seen in 2023 due to the social media meltdowns of the former Twitter and Reddit, and researchers that are investigating the user experience of that migration are uncovering some things that have parallels to that transition in 1993. So the lessons learned back then are still relevant to us today.

So this episode will cover all three, the history, the recent research, and how we can apply those lessons learned. So to begin with, let’s take you back to a dark and scary time called the eighties. Ooh, frightening.

In 1982, the Atari 2600 was the absolute market leader in home video game entertainment. It was pretty much everywhere. They had sold about 10 million copies of the VCS in North America, and while there was competitors like ColecoVision, Atari still had like 60% of the market. Now those who know their video game history are aware that 1982 was not the best time to be getting into the market, but at the time things looked rosy. There was an upcoming game called ET that was due to come out for Christmas that year, and things were looking pretty good. Pacman had just sold like 7 million units, and while it didn’t quite replicate the arcade experience (to put it mildly), you know, sales are sales, right?

And it was into this tech landscape that Control Video Corporation was born. What the company was working on was developing a system that would deliver games over telephone lines for the Atari 2600 video game console. The service called Game Line would allow the users to download the game and keep playing it as long as the console stayed on.

It was basically they sold a modem to the users and allowed them to use it. And it’s a reminder that there was a lot of really interesting things happening with computers long before the era of the internet. I mean, you also had like the Mintel system in France that was contemporaneous with this, and I think Mintel will absolutely deserve its own episode in a little while.

But while CVC was getting the product up and running and actually delivering games to customers, they hit a bit of a road bump, and that road bump just happened to look like a landfill out in the New Mexico Desert where all the unsold ET cartridges were dumped. So as the video game console market came to a screeching halt in 83 and 84, CVC began to hemorrhage cash, and by 85 they had reformulated into Quantum Link Corporation, or Quantum Computer Services, and they began to leverage and market their online technologies, which were innovative by all means. And they provided these online services to other computing companies and manufacturers with names like Commodore and Apple and Microsoft, and this ability of theirs to diversify and to provide services to multiple vendors allow them to thrive in a turbulent market where larger competitors that were tied to a particular vendor would fail if that vendor failed.

Quantum Computer Services was able to tailor their product to the various manufacturers that they were dealing with. So you’d have QLink on the Commodore or Apple Link on the Apple machines. And the product that they’re offering was basically what we now think of as an online portal. They were like a BBS front end. It had graphics and chat and you could do a little bit of research or play some games, which could max out at an amazing 320 by 200 resolution. But often the games were in the text mode version, which is usually 24 across and 21 down, and it just used a lot of built-in sprites and pixels, and it looked a lot like playing DwarfFortress or a retro game like that.

And we can see versions of this portal with a still and everything from Yahoo to Google to Facebook to any of the social media sites. And that kind of gives us a hint of where we’re going with this. But in the meantime, Quantum Computing Services was having some success with the product, and in 1989, they rebranded it as America Online as part of their approach to attract new users to using online computing, and they’re pretty innovative in this approach as well. I mean, there was other competitors like Compuserve, but they focused the AOL experience on the new user, and that paid off because there was a lot more people not using the internet in 1989 than there was anywhere close to it. Computer use, especially online computer use, was very much a minority proposition at this point in time.

We might wanna say that everybody at this point was an early adopter of the internet. I mean, that’s not precisely true based on Roger’s diffusion curve, but it’s close enough, especially when compared to the size of the market now. And one of the ways they approached getting these new users was probably their biggest innovation, which was the mass distribution of their software through the floppy disks.

And I wanna be clear, that was an innovation because marketing innovations totally count. And AOL wasn’t technically superior to any of its competitors, especially the ones on like university campuses and government departments. And the funny thing is, it totally worked, it allowed for a ton of new users because at the time, I mean the floppy disks was still a useful, you could rewrite on them and they cost money at the store. So gather them up and you had something that you could go with. But for a new user that’s unfamiliar with the internet, it was software. All you need is a modem, and here you are, you’re connected and going on the internet as quickly as possible. And when I say “internet”, I wanna be perfectly clear because I’m not sure the air quotes that I’m currently miming are coming through clear over the podcast, but you know what I mean. ’cause it was a walled garden. Using America online in 1990 was a lot like logging on in 2023 and thinking Facebook is the entirety of the internet. I mean, for some users it may as well be, but you know, there’s a bigger world out there. But that being said, Quantum Computer Services was incredibly successful with their America online product and rebranded the company after the product.

In 1991, it became AOL, and at the time AOL was super successful with their floppy disc campaign. They were maintaining growth of anywhere between 36 to as high as like 197% year over year. That’s amazing. For a lot of people, America Online was the internet, but one of those other parts that was outside of its walled garden was Usenet.

Usenet was a distributed discussion forum, think Reddit, but not really owned by anybody and people just ran their servers for it. It used the NNTP protocol, the network can use transfer protocol, and it was really similar to like email, which was using the SMTP or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. So similar but with like a few extra features that allowed for grouping and threading and, uh, distribution of the messages. Servers running the software would store and forward the messages to other servers in the network so that everybody had a copy that was pretty much local. Now there was rules for it, so not everybody carried everything, but by and large, you could get news or information from around the world depending on what, what the users were posting. So it was all user generated content in a way similar to TikTok and Twitter and everything else nowadays. It was almost the original social media network, but there was a lot of academic stuff on there as well, because a lot of the servers were on universities. There weren’t that many ISPs out in the world at the time.

One of the big things within NNTP over email was it allowed for threaded communication, so if you’re ever wondering where Facebook got the idea for their current app, well there’s a hint. Over time, the group self-organized based on topic and interest and a culture of the internet kind of grew up around it.

There was a hierarchy to it where you had higher level domains that were structured around broad interest groups like comp or sci, or news or rec, and then lower-level domains that were more specific to a given topic like science fiction or wrestling or Linux or whatever. Some of these news groups were moderated, but most weren’t, and because of the way they were structured, they were very much those recursive Publix that we talked about in the last episode. NNTP was originally proposed in 1979 and became the dominant form throughout the eighties. It was basically what the internet was, along with bulletin-board systems and a few other servers.

And because of this, it developed a culture all of its own. A lot of the things that are still central to how we deal with things online, like flaming and spam, and FAQs all came from Usenet. The fact that some of those enduring elements are kind of negative maybe speaks a little bit to what the culture was like. Even though it was all text-based, it could be on occasion incredibly toxic. The lineage to 4chan is probably closer than a lot of your more highbrow forums. And when I say all text-based for the purpose of this discussion, I’m not getting into the binaries news groups at all. We’re just really focusing on the conversation now because these servers were mostly academic and a culture had developed around them.

Every year something wonderful happened, and that is in September, there was a bunch of new admissions to university who got access to the internet or to Usenet for the very first time, came online and started talking like they owned the place. And all of a sudden, the Flame Wars started developing again, as people got told. In a text-based forum, your options for communication are somewhat limited, so the communication could be somewhat terse, and your options for going to another server or rolling your own are well, “Hypothetically” there: you could engage with the protocol, set up a server; but at the time, and especially given the cost of these things, it was highly unlikely and there’s few limited commercial options.

You had your CompuServe, or Prodigy or Delphi, but really there wasn’t a lot of options that you could use to get onto Usenet unless you had access through your institution, so people either learned and became accustomed to it, and over the month or two, you know, by November you became good net citizens or they left. And when they left, they left. For other systems that had different cultures, either a BBS or like the private walled gardens, like the ones run by AOL. And that was fine. People could find a place where they fit in a cyberspace, where the culture worked for them and, you know, go about their business of being online.

This changed in 1993. As we said earlier, AOL was experiencing massive growth, and in September of 1993, they opened up the floodgates by allowing full access to Usenet for all their customers. So the influx of newbies far exceeded the capacity for the community to bring new people in and acculturate them to the process of the way things were done. And so things kind of changed. Forever.

This was the Eternal September, and for the rest of the nineties UseNet that was radically different than what it was before.

So if that’s where we were in 1993, what does that have to do with now? What does a 30 year old change in the internet have anything to say about social media in the 21st century? Well, let’s run through it at a high level:

We have a distributed system of servers, running communication groups that are mostly text-based with an incumbent population, and they’re dealing with an influx of new users coming from various online communities that have different cultures, and they’re struggling to deal with the changes.

Well, let me ask you, does that description cover Usenet in 1993, or Mastodon and the larger Fediverse in 2023 following the implosion of Twitter and Reddit? Right. Maybe they’re a lot more similar than we think. So the lessons learned from the 1993 Endless September may have some implications for how the Fediverse can deal with incoming new users in 2023 and beyond because the Fediverse, and Mastodon in particular, are not without their problems.

It’s a relatively young protocol with ActivityPub being developed in 2018, and for the most part of that, it’s had relatively small user count, similar in a lot of ways to Usenet back in the nineties. And for the most part, the implementations that are built on top of the ActivityPub Protocol are trying to replicate various other social media sites or networks in a more open or friendly or accessible way to break out of the walled gardens of Facebook or Reddit or Twitter, in a similar way that AOL was a walled garden back in 1991. While some of these implementations are focused on videos or images like PeerTube or PixelFed, I’m gonna focus on the text-based ones like Lemmy, kbin, and most notably Mastodon.

Mastodon is one of the Twitter-style micro blogging implementations of the ActivityPub protocol in the FediVerse, and it’s the most prominent one. In 2022, following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, it saw a significant spike in its user base. The number of people that were looking for ABE, or Anything But Elon, found Mastodon (including yours truly, even though I wasn’t a significant Twitter user for the prior 15 years).

In 2022, not being on Twitter seemed prudent, but for people looking for ABE, Mastodon isn’t the only option. There are other alternatives like BlueSky, which is a new Microblogging service currently in beta, headed up by Jack Dorsey, the former honcho of Twitter, and there are some users that have moved to BlueSky as an alternative to Twitter who found that Mastodon wasn’t the thing for them, that BlueSky presented a more “Twitter-like” experience.

And for an example of some of the reasons why users might have opted for BlueSky instead of Mastodon, writer Erin Kissane did a survey of some of those “ex-Mastodon, now BlueSky” users and posted them to their blog. The piece is titled “Mastodon is easy and fun, except when it isn’t”, and it’s a really excellent piece that they posted up on July 28th, 2023, and in the Post, Erin includes some of the excerpts, the thick description that we’d expect to see in some qualitative research. And as I know from my own research in grad school that description is really where the meat of the responses can lie, and it allows you to uncover those insights as to what’s actually going on.

Erin groups the responses in four main categories, as well as a fifth meta category. I’ll give you the rough taxonomy right now, they are in order:

One: Got yelled at, felt bad.

Two: Couldn’t find people or interests people didn’t stay.

Three: too confusing. Too much work. Too intimidating.

Four: Too serious. Too boring, anti fun.

And then the meta category is the complicated high stakes decisions that go into the choices that have to be made when you’re engaged with the Fediverse.

So let’s look at those in order with an eye to everything that we’ve previously discussed about AOL and Usenet, as well as the idea of publics and communities online in the previous episode, and we’re gonna break those four into two groups because I think there’s a little bit of natural overlap between groups one and three and two and four.

So for groups one and three, the got yelled at felt bad and the too confusing, too much work, too intimidating group, w absolutely see echoes of Eternal September, the onboarding of new users to usenet and the acculturation process that took place. Now, what Erin captures here is a moment in time, and I want to stress that by way of example: between starting recording this podcast and wrapping it up, which sometimes takes me a day or two, there was a significant change to the Mastodon software with search being added (note: in beta), and that’s been one of the things that’s been discussed for quite some time as a missing feature, but that can also cause problems, s there’s been a lot of debate. Anyways, the point being is that conditions may change, and what we’re talking about at any given point in time may have changed by the time you’re listening to this, whether it’s weeks or months later.

Now, a lot of the scolding that was coming from the incumbent Mastodon users was on content warnings and etiquette, things that have been a bone of contention on various servers and software platforms for forever, for at least the 30 years, since the Endless September, and honestly since the dawn of the internet. Some of these may be endemic and some of them may be just people overreaching their authority on what other people can do on a given platform, as it may come down to the mods or administrators and what their particular preferences are, but the federated nature of the servers on just one implementation of the ActivityPub on, you know, Fediverse – Mastodon – means you’re gonna have a lot of different versions of what is acceptable and they may not scale across the entire thing, but finding that out, finding where your particular group is, is speaks to the second half of this, the intimidating and potentially confusing nature of it. But again, this is something that the devs and admins are aware of and making changes to, and in the nine months that I’ve been observing Mastodon, there’s been remarkable improvements in that onboarding process, even though I don’t think it’s still a hundred percent where it needs to be.

Now, as for the second group of responses, the ones that I’ve grouped together, which are Erin’s responses two and four, the “Couldn’t find people or interests” and the “too serious, too boring, anti fun” groups. I think I’ve covered a number of these in my Locally Boring post on the blog, but I’ll go into the details here.

I recognized a fair amount of my own experiences in the responses that Erin captured in their survey, and what the survey captures is that notion of what I call locally boring, that absent an algorithm or the ability to import a social graph and have a preexisting group of connections, there might not be a lot of content there. It functions very different, and “it’ being here, Mastodon, and the way it displays the information that’s available. Unless you’re following a specific hashtag or a specific group, you may only be seeing local information and depending on what’s available on your server, that might be not necessarily something you’re interested in. Now, you’re not tied to the feed from your server, but that might not be initially obvious. It’s a lot like, you know, starting a new online role-playing game and all your friends decide to stay on World of Warcraft, you’re gonna be doing a lot of questing alone, and depending on a combination of your personality and the software, it may be a lot more or less fun.

And if it’s less fun, you’re less likely to stick around. And if you don’t stick around, you’re unlikely to build a community or find one. So depending on your tolerance for these things, your ability to endure through the fallow period, or the “Desert of Boredom”, or whatever you wanna call it, it may be tough to get to the other side and actually reach the Promised Land, but there are some solutions that you can use to mitigate these.

Now Erin gets into a number of these in that amazing blog post, but I wanted to get into it, especially in context of what we were discussing at the start of the episode: AOL and Usenet. You see, I wanted to provide that context because I think it’s really important to realize that a lot of these issues are not new and that these problems have existed and that solutions have been tried over time.

What we’re seeing with the Fediverse is a period of decentralization in response to the centralization that occurred with the walled gardens of the various social media platforms or what Deleuze would call deterritorialization and reterritorialization, and that this happens cyclically over time, and it’s just the newness of the internet, (even though 30 years can feel like several lifetimes on the internet), but the relative newness of what we call new media on all of its platforms means we’ve only seen a few waves of this. Honestly, given the rapid developments of media as a whole during the 20th and 21st centuries, we often only see it once on any given platform like radio and film and television and the internet, so seeing it twice is kind of interesting, but I digress.

Any of the solutions that have been introduced over time have come with their own host of associated problems, and this is common with any study of technology we see this time and time again, regardless of the sphere. If the problem is discoverability or lack of content in showing up in people’s feeds, then you can use an algorithm to drive that content, but that could be gamed with potentially tragic results.

Similarly, if there’s low engagement, then you can add tools that increase shareability or spreadability, but that can lead to the development of parasocial relationships and potentially stalking and harassment. So there’s always a trade-off, and this is what Erin Kissane notes in their commentary about the meta-topical issues that we see in these spaces, that the divide between health and safety, and personalization and control, can lead to compromises being made that end up satisfying no one. So choices need to be made and in the Fediverse, that often happens at the server or instance level rather than at the aggregate level. Though that can happen as well when changes are made to the software or the apps or the overall user experience.

But it’s an ongoing and recursive process as we discussed last time. So for those making the decisions at those higher levels, maybe – just maybe – something can be learned from America Online of all places, about how they improved on the Usenet process. Back in the day, one of the things that AOL did was basically a process of “McDonaldization for the internet”, to borrow George Ritzer’s term, and what that process is, is a process of rationalization, to borrow a very Weberian approach, and it happens along four main dimensions, which are efficiency, countability, predictability, and control.

What AOL did was really cultivate the experience for that new user, catering to them and developing something that a complete beginner would be able to get working with minimal effort and make it easy enough that they could share it with their friends, becoming Spreadable Media in an era before Spreadable Media. The service had large, easily identifiable buttons and a very predictable interface from the standpoint of the customer. There was very few major version changes and even the minor version changes didn’t really have an appreciable difference in appearance.

The most unpredictable thing was the connectivity issues that plagued dial up in the nineties, and part of that was just due to the rapid growth that they had and having to bring onboard new servers. But even then, a lot of the service was calculable and knowable. They (the user) could know how much they were gonna be billed for based on time, and engage with it, uh, to the extent that they needed to. AOL minimized the number of options available that were presented to the customer, but still made them available under the hood if needed. And a lot of this beginning experience could be totally ported over to the Fediverse. And here I’m gonna stray away from the site its sources a little bit and talk about more of the overall view of the Fedi verse.

A lot of the existing implementations of the ActivityPub protocol are replicating already existing apps, programs or platforms, there’s a point of confusion, not just on picking the right server on Mastodon, but whether they should be on Mastodon at all as opposed to kbin or Lemmy, or PixelFed or PeerTube or whatever. From the outside viewer’s perspective, a lot of the different implementations appear to be a distinction without a difference. And if they can all talk to each other, what does it matter that you’re choosing one rather than the other? So it’s a stressor, it’s a point of confusion.

And the other thing that I’d like to point out is an observation. We’ve talked before about how the social web and online platforms in general treat the audience as a commodity and present ads to them. And for the Fediverse that lack of the commodification of self may be the very thing that the audience is missing. It lacks the warm all-encompassing goo of what Michael de Zengotita calls the “blob of post-modernity” or late capitalism.

Now, I’m in no way arguing for the introduction of advertising on the Fediverse. It is perhaps not a thing to be wistful or nostalgic for. But the Dumpshock that can be felt can be very hard to take, especially for those who have grown up swimming in the flood of capitalist realism. Now, this isn’t a call to action, there’s no need to introduce that. It’s just an observation that the people experiencing that might be feeling something very different when they enter the Fediverse for the first time.

So as September draws near, this has been one of our longest episodes yet. If you’ve made it this far, thank you for hanging around. Hope you’ve enjoyed it and maybe learned a little something. I’d like to give a shout out to some of the sources that I’ve used, including Kara Swisher’s work on AOL from the nineties, Erin Kissane’s blog, as well as a number of other academic texts that I’ve referenced in the bibliography.

As always, I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. The show is licensed under a Creative Commons, share-alike 4.0 license. Music is by me, production is by me, research is by me. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausi dot blog or on whatever Mastodon instance I happen to be on this week. If there’s anything you found interesting or would like me to expand on, please let me know.

But in the meantime, have fun.

Links and References:

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

De Zengotita, T. (2006). Mediated: How the media shapes your world and the way you live in it. Bloomsbury

Kissane, E. (n.d.). Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t—Erin Kissane’s small internet website. Retrieved July 29, 2023, from https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt

Op’tLand, R. (2009). Another Endless November: AOL, WoW, and the Corporatization of a Niche Market. Journal For Virtual Worlds Research, 2(3). https://doi.org/10.4101/jvwr.v2i3.660

Ritzer, G. (2000). The McDonaldization of society (New Century). Pine Forge Press.

Swisher, K. (1998). AOL.com: How Steve Case beat Bill Gates, nailed the netheads, and made millions in the war for the Web. Random House.

Implausipod EP009: Recursive Publics and Social Media

Introduction

What are “recursive publics” and “social imaginaries”, how have they impacted the development of the modern internet, and what impact do they have on the state of the internet in 2023 with the implosion of Twitter, Reddit, and the rise of the Fediverse? Stay tuned as we take a 50000 foot view of the rise of the public sphere of geeks.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1935232/episodes/13329924#

Transcript

Welcome to the Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible, and today we’re gonna follow on from our last episode and stay in the social media sphere and look at the idea of a recursive public, a form of a social imaginary, and see how they’ve impacted the development of the modern internet.

What is a recursive public? Well, if you’re using the internet and if you’re seeing or hearing this, I’m gonna guess you are, you’re impacted by one because recursive publics are the driving force behind a lot of the tools of the internet. And they’re also now driving the future of social media through the ActivityPub protocol.

And I’m also gonna hazard a guess that you’d never even heard of them before, even though the idea has been around for nearly 20 years. So let’s get into it: let’s find out how geeks build communities online and what that means for the future of the internet. Now, when we last spoke, Threads had just come out, Twitter was still called Twitter, and we were worried about Facebook possibly engaging in something called EEE with respect to ActivityPub. Since then, Threads has cut its user base in half, Twitter’s now called X, and Google’s the one engaged in EEE with respect to something called W E I or Web Environment Integrity, which will be D R M on all chromium browsers.

So, we might need to have a look at that sometime in the future, but like Ferris Bueller said: “life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” But that was back in the eighties and life was moving way faster now in the 21st century. So let’s try and get caught up a little bit.

While the goal is to be weekly with this, there’s some challenges with that, so I’ll just work on improving my workflow and iterating through a process of, uh, additive manufacturing, so to speak, and getting better over time. We’ll increase the frequency as things improve, but that brings us back to the topic at hand because that idea of improving through iteration is core to what the recursive public is.

What exactly is it? Well, as Christopher Kelty explained in 2005, a recursive public is a group, or rather a particular form of social imaginary through which this group develops the means of their own association and the material form that this imagination takes the technical and legal conditions required for their association.

So, in other words, it’s a bunch of geeks that get together and say: “Hey, how can we use the internet to talk?” and developed tools and processes by which they can get together and talk. It’s a little circular, and those tools can be things like, you know, a chat room or email, but they can also be the underlying tools like the operating system, Linux or something for sharing things like Napster, and those are the things that Kelty was originally looking at, and that kind of makes sense.

But wait a second. You’re asking. What’s a social imaginary? Well, we’re at the risk of defining things by using other things. So, um, let’s drill down a little bit and see if we can get to a base level of understanding. Social imaginaries are ways in which people imagine their social existence and how they fit together with others.

How things go on between them and their fellows, and the expectations that are normally met. And the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations. Now, that’s a direct quote from Charles Taylor in 2004 who described them as meta topical spaces or topical spaces. The place where a conversation takes place, and not just conversation, but also pre 20th century also where like rituals and practices and assembly takes place.

And as I’m talking here, I realize I need to put a pin in that idea of “where a conversation takes place”, and we’ll circle back to that in a little while. But we’re defining things with other things again. So, topical spaces, if that’s where the conversation’s taking place, then who’s having that conversation?

Well, a public. Not the public mind you, just a public, that’s having that conversation. So I think we’re getting somewhere. If we have multiple conversations taking place, then that must be happening in the public sphere and that is where the public is. And when we’re looking at the difference between these publics, we’re looking at the work of Michael Warner who talked about Publics and Counter-publics in 2002.

The public is the social totality. It is, in other words, the social imaginary and that differs from a specific instantiation, which would be a public. Publics are happening all the time. They form, they’re swirling together, they achieve a specific mass and through discursive address, and performed attention in quotes, guilty before dissipating, and either achieving critical mass to become a movement or, you know, drifting off into the either.

So a discussion would be a topical public and a public constituted through the imagined participation in a discussion is a meta topical public, and all of these together, that social totality, they’re engaging in the public’s sphere or this is where the public sphere happens, and if we’re situating those within the public sphere, then that brings us all the way back to Habermas.

Wonderful. I think I’ve managed to make this as clear as mud. Fantastic.

Let’s diagram this out a little bit and see if we can make some sense of all this. Whenever you have a group of people involved in a discussion that creates a topical public, it doesn’t matter whether it’s face-to-face or through the media or online, it’s a public. That’s it. That’s the minimum. We need a public that’s constituted through the imagined participation in that discussion. So that includes the audience basically is a meta topical public, and you can have multiple of those together to create that public.

Each of these discussions amongst the publics occurs in a particular topical space. So if it’s online, we could think of these as like subreddits or discussion forums or ABNs or what have you. And then if you have multiple of those together, it would be a meta topical space. This would be like the platform itself, whether it’s Twitter, Sorry, X, Reddit, Facebook, TikTok. These are what Taylor calls “non-local common spaces”. And again, that’s particular to the internet, but it happens in broadcast and other media as well. And then if you have a particular group, which can. Change the place of the means of their association. That is a recursive public. And so that’s like your geeks in Linux or what’s happening right now with Mastodon, ActivityPub and the Fediverse in general.

And that was the big change: the way a recursive public, one that’s on the internet, can actually make changes to the way they get together and communicate. You see, those meta topical common spaces had already existed long before the internet, prior to the 18th century. We called them things like the Church and the State. But in the 18th century, we had the idea of this new social imaginary that showed up. That would become, what was the public sphere? It was the coffee house society. It was the discussion that would take place within the newspapers, the letters to the editor within the salons. So all this happened well before the internet.

What these spaces are is they’re, they bring about by like a common understanding that like, this is how we talk, this is where things take place and this is how we can discuss things. And this public sphere is made up by, it’s like an extra political space, right? It’s not brought about by any legislation or political maneuver, the government or the church, but through the practices and the media of that society, through the way they’re able to communicate with each other, and it’s a self-organizing space through the conversations that are taking place.

One of the things that made it really powerful was that it was seen as apolitical or extra political that it took place away from the discussions of power and had a place that was seen outside of that. Because it’s outside of that power, it has power. Which is kind of weird, I know, but it’s like why you’ll see politicians engage on Twitter or TikTok and try and be trendy just because they need to court the power that’s there in the public sphere.

It’s also why you’ll see like authoritarian states try and fake the existence of a public sphere by having news media or what have you. That gives the appearance that there’s a discussion going on. And there’s amazing scholars that have done work on like, the role of media in Eastern Bloc countries and the like, and how that, you know, legitimizes that power.

But that’s way outside of our point of discussion. The main point is that these social imaginaries, these ways that the public imagines society to be, have existed for a long time. And while it’s classically been defined by the activities like speaking and writing and thinking and having that discussion, we now need to change that a little bit in the internet era and include things like building and coding and compiling and redistributing and sharing and hacking.

And this is what Kelty is arguing, is that this “argument by technology” can create a new way of building a public space, a recursive public. You can contrast this with like a non recursive public, which would be like a newspaper or a political gathering. There’s the organizers or the people who write or publish the newspapers, and occasionally there’s like a letter to an editor or they’ll have somebody get up, but by and large, they’re locked into way that it allows them to engage with the public in the first place.

A recursive public allows for the feedback and for that public to remake the means of that gathering. In their own terms and their own terms include their shared common understanding, the way they imagine the world works. And how do they imagine the world works? How do they come up with the ideology that they share?

Well, myths and narratives and folklore. The shared fictions that they have pre-internet. This would be things like, uh, tall tales like Paul Bunyan or George Washington not being able to tell a lie. Those kinds of things. Anything that would be a fodder for like a Disney movie or TV show. Post internet, this can include things like, you know, the “net treats censorship as damage”, or “show me the code” or the idea of a singularity, or the ideas behind free and open-source software In the general, or even some of the underlying myths about cyberspace or the images and beliefs that go into like the identity of a hacker.

These are all elements that constitute the social imaginary of a recursive public, of a public on the internet. But there’s a twist. And the twist is social media. See, as I said, Kelty was writing in 2005 and he was talking about Napster and Linux, and he did some ethnographic field work with groups that are engaged in that, you know, in different parts of the world.

But, Since 2005, there’s been some changes to how the internet works, so let me read off some names and dates. Facebook, 2004. Reddit 2005, Snapchat, 2005. Twitter, 2006, Instagram 2010 GitHub 2008. YouTube 2005, TikTok or Douyin. 2012, and even the ones like Facebook that were before 2005, before Kelty was writing, were much smaller then.

So when Kelty was writing the internet was a radically different place than it is now in 2023, we’ve had the rise of these platforms, these. Social networks, but within walled gardens that all seek to recreate the public sphere. Having learned some of the lessons from the dot.com boom and bust, and from AOL and the other crashes, you could call them all medic topical spaces because they allow for multiple discussions and in their totality make up a public sphere.

Not “the” public sphere because the old public sphere is still there and they still interact with the online one as well, and none of them on their own make up the public sphere are constituted of it, even though just by dint of size, Facebook probably comes close. And it’s within this framework that Elon Musk with his purchase and subsequent rebranding of Twitter tried to buy into and Twitter’s role within it, even though it was smaller than most of the others, was the extent that it was legitimized, because that’s where journalists and academics and politicians would go to have those discussions.

That was where the conversation was taking place. But in 2023, that place has shifted, and this has been going on for a while. In the mid 20 teens, the geeks were chafing at the various restrictions, digital rights management and other, uh, issues with the various walled gardens and platforms. And because the geeks constituted a recursive public, they set about creating their own version of these walled platforms, of these social networks, one that fit their needs better.

They recognize the utility of those social networks and that they could be used for good, but they recognize that there’s also serious limitations with the way they’re constructed and the way they commoditize their audiences, as we discussed last time. So in 2018, the ActivityPub protocol was created and it became a standard upon which new applications and communication networks could be built.

Like a lot of these tools and especially the early Linux tools in the nineties, it’s been worked on part-time by a lot of volunteers, occasionally funded, and even though it’s been a little rough, it’s gotten better over time, over the intervening five years. So in late 2022 when Elon Musk purchased Twitter and in 2023, when Reddit and various other social networks started having massive problems, an alternative existed.

A new recursive public built by the geeks that mirrored some of the forms of the platforms of the previous 15 years of the social networking era. Different but familiar enough that it allowed for use. Thus, once again, the geeks have remade the internet, building a community that they can use, and we are moving.

Into the era of the FediVerse, but we’ll have to explore that in a future episode. For now, let’s wrap this up. I’m Dr. Implausible. It’s been a pleasure to join you. Transcripts should be available on the blog sometime soon, within a day or so, and we’ll also try and get a video version of the this up on the YouTubes.

The whole show is produced under Creative Commons 4.0 Share Alike license. Audio is by me, music is by me, and all the writing and stuff is too. No generative text or large language models have been employed in the production of this episode, and the world is moving pretty fast. So get out there and enjoy it. Until next time, I’m Dr. Implausible. Have fun.

References:
Anderson, B. R. O. (1991 [2006]). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso.

Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (T. Burger, Trans.). MIT Press.

Kelty, C. (2005). Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics. Cultural Anthropology,_20(2), 185–214. [https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2005.20.2.185](https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2005.20.2.185)

Taylor, C. (2004). Modern social imaginaries. Duke University Press.

Warner, M. (2002) “Publics and Counterpublics”. Public Culture 14(1): 49-90.