BLUESKY HAS BECOME THE happening place if what you want is to talk about Bluesky, as the well-trod joke goes. There's an ongoing exodus of people leaving twitter, as the result of the US Presidential election making stark, finally, what it is, to other microblog services (Bluesky, but also the fediverse), or to nothing. The experience of being part of a social network is always about the message you're receiving, by dint of membership, and sometimes, as is happening now, lots of people decide it's not very good. In 2022 I wrote that the then experience of twitter shared a lot with the 20th century experience of talkback radio, especially in the power of the choices producers made, to shape the message people heard out of the random chat:
The great imaginative leap was that talkback listeners took the broadcast for representation; that these people are saying what other people are thinking! The callers are the same as me, and people like me (for better or worse)! It was the classic genre for broadcasting in a society of masses... Alan Jones and John Laws in Sydney exercised gross influence over party and media by right of their pretense to ‘speak’ for their large audiences, to set media agendas, and to set the media cycle. Similar figures existed throughout the world. Donald Trump tweeting late at night through his Presidency may be the last true talkback mass broadcaster simulating (‘many are saying this’!) his own audience.
A single 'place' with a claim to be where important (meaning: culturally elite) public discussion happens, was, for a while, what twitter was; let's say between 2014 or so and the middle of the Trump presidency. Journalists used it as a proxy public, the proxy public returned the compliment to journalists, academics and public servants and celebrities and brands followed as though by a law of gravity, but as with all gravitational processes, there's an impact when you get to the bottom. As a Sun King-sized celebrity, Donald Trump has the extraordinary ability to make everything about him, and twitter for a time suited him perfectly, for the easily-indigestible bites of nastiness or surreality he'd punch into his phone late at night after cheeseburger dinners. Like the man himself, the network, lacking the will to moderate him, became superficial, shitty, mean, and fundamentally spectacular. Under Elon Musk it has followed its new owner's tendencies into white nationalism, corporate/crypto grifting, misogyny, conspiratorial lies, drugs, and esoteric occult Nazism, but in either guise, and this is the unpleasant bit, we're still living in the shadow of the radio talkback host. All of that---all of it---was very present in the days of the shock jock.
So I am in favour of a fracturing of social media into as many places as there are people. There's no reason to accept the fundamental immoderation of the simulated audience, it's unpleasant, it demeans us, especially when it so clearly is not ours, but a tool of power. We can do better by doing more diversity.
Add a comment