YES, I think this fracturing is good for our mental health - but personally this has made it much more difficult for me to promote ranked-choice voting (Voter Choice NJ) outside of people who already are similar to me or already interested in RCV. I have been asking everyone I know “how are you learning about new things”, vast majority is “heard from my friend via text/group chat”. We changed the default email follow up action for one of our petitions from “share this on social media” to “text this to your friends”. Even though the same amount of people clicked the links in our email, the referrals are way more effective via text, even though in theory they are going to a smaller audience.
This is *fascinating*. Thanks for sharing your perspective. I've also found that promoting some local art events (shows, theatre, etc.) has been way more challenging recently - as opposed to the heyday of Facebook, say - because people seem to be spending a lot less time in "general" online spaces that track with their geographical / physical location. It's not the only factor, obviously - whether we want to admit it or not, we are still reeling from the pandemic - but I do wonder how online fragmentation is contributing to real-world isolation.
@@Idefilmsmy own experience is that Discord and group chats make me feel far less isolated than social media - but nothing beats in person experiences.
is it better for your mental health? or was the other option deranged? what would actually be better for your mental health? maybe fixing broad issues keeping people polarized or isolated so more relatable people are available for you to reach out to?
and if that's the case being less able to change the system means actually be further from real progress and the positive feelings are just from getting your own little slice of control over the derangement.
I know for me- and a lot of other people I know- we're tired. We are tired of being bombarded all the time. It's constant. Constantly have to be connected. Constantly have to be "informed." Constantly have to be in centralized groups. It's so nice to have a few specific (fractured) hobby groups in Discord I can chat with when I need help or want to share ideas, and then I can go back to my life again and not look at social media anymore. I think part of the fracture is part of the physical divide in the real world. A lot of people are starting to log off or doing their "social media detox." I don't want to constantly hear radial ideas and claims. It's exhausting..
why is it exhausting? because it's designed to prevent actionability by getting people to focus with clear heads on a solution. everyone being tired and bombarded keeps everyone from putting together their feelings with one direction isolating and draining us all.
I actually stopped watching most of the news and cut all social media out in 2020 when the pandemic happened. Have NEVER been more content. @@LifeOfInsamity
I was reading the comments here, thinking "Wow, there are so many interesting, thought-provoking comments here already, to the extent that I don't know how or if I should add to the conversation... I'd better go check the subreddit for a thread on this video, it's usually a bit quieter and less overwhelming over there." And then I realized that thought I had is kinda what this video is about.
@@twelvecatsinatrenchcoatfunny to hear you say that. It certainly has gotten more left-wing, but Reddit contains some major right-wing communities that are quite active
@@FushishouI've voted party line Democrat up until 2022 when I voted for one Republican sheriff candidate. I've been a liberal for two decades. I was a registered card carrying Democrat who still gets emailed donation requests. Reddit is a leftist hivemind.
The most worrying thing about fracturing into Discord is that those communities get historically vanished when they fall apart, whereas old Forum communities like vBulletin back in the day got archived by places like WayBackMachine to go hunt down that knowledge even after the communities fall out of activity. There have always been a balance of good & bad about the larger centralized locations the way Radio & TV existed vs. Fanclubs or smaller local interest groups. I feel like it's just a natural ebb & flow of tides for the aspect of those things that we need most, as they change over time and those changes drives the success of the platforms on & in which those take place.
it's almost like that allows control of information by people allowing stuff like patreon servers with exclusive knowledge sharing. commercialization and commodification of our relations by trickle down abusability. woo!!
Yes but even radio and tv are also not so centralized when you consider local news or programs. Because some things only interest particular groups. Like podcasts, which can be super long and successful and you have never heard about them. And you don’t have to. I just started listening to an xmen podcast which has existed for several years named cerebrocast, for example
Yeah, Discord is a nightmare for the archival of institutional knowledge. I do a lot of videogame modding, and for older games you can easily find years and years of (googlable!) accumulated knowledge on dedicated web forums, neatly organised into subforums and comment threads. For newer games that just have a modding Discord, not only is it impossible to find anything right now, it'll all be gone for good once that particular community dwindles.
@@HeadsFullOfEyeballs _EXACTLY_ this. I've been involved with lots of game-related things and that's why even while the community I'm a part of has a Discord, the forums and site itself are a key part of that structure. Having migrated from forums during the years when admins would just up and pull hosting, a lot of the Google records and Way Back are still important backups of that data that Discord doesn't have at all, and islands of knowledge like that get WAY too easily lost.
People used to be in GEOGRAPHIC spaces, which will admit for diversity through people who connected across communities. Now we're in information spaces where people silo by thought instead, which makes it harder for people to gain perspective and change.
Yeah there are really good reasons to get out of your geographic communities now. But for thought communiti4es its really easy to stay in them an be content while at the same time being afraid of the thought-outside.
geographic space is still informational, keeping a map in your head and through which all things you knew related was useful we just don't have unassailed information flow to enable the same kind of relational tracking for these new communities which is why they are susceptible to social hierarchy.
@malteborgmanm2626 its worse because most people think there community is diverse of thought when really its just an echo chamber of probably 2 or 3 similar ideas. I think this stems from our real hesitation to accept opposing views as having any merit.
The algorithm is both a blessing and a curse here. It's helpful to find the things you're interested in. However, when you're not looking for information, but for affirmation, it will show you all the things that fit into your own world view. It stops the stimulation of thought and doubt. Considering most people don't want to admit or even realize they are wrong, that part is very detrimental to grow the willingness to change or discuss.
It's kind of funny to me that it's easy for us to think that we "used" to be in geographic spaces. I have to remind myself a lot that just because I spend a lot of my time in information spaces, I still live in a physical one. Remembering not to just broadcast myself in a digital town square, but to actually show up for local elections and city council meetings is a constant struggle. Still very important since that tends to have more impact than my ramblings ever did on Facebook and Twitter :P
I am fascinated by this, and also have been thinking about it lately to some extent. As someone who caught the last little bit of "everybody watches TV," before that basically stopped, I now contemplate how no two people seem to be watching the same shows. But I also wonder how the "fracture," if you will, appears different depending on generation. I am a young man, and media centralization is something I have taken for granted for years, and I hated most things about it. When I was a small boy growing up at the very bottom of the economic strata, the fact that everyone had cable and knew things from cable left me perpetually outside what people insisted was the zeitgeist. Later on, the fact that everyone was on social media not only made them seem significantly unhappier than me, but it meant they were catching particular shockwaves I wasn't. Interestingly, however-and I observed this both before, during, and after I tried social media myself-everyone was catching different shockwaves (not just two polarized ones, but many, many different ones, although polarization was certainly an element) and thinking they were catching the "main," centralized one they assumed I was on. I'm not sure what both of these things mean. From a systemic standpoint, cable actually is / was centralized, and people really were all largely aware of the same body of shows. Now we have UA-cam, and lots of different streaming services, and the last show popular enough everyone seemed to know about it was Mandalorian (which is the only show since Game of Thrones, it seems, to have achieved that, whether or not an individual happened to like either. I guess a lot of people knew about Stranger Things, kind of?). You could argue that the world of UA-cam and streaming services is far more fractured, or more spun into niches, but it's hard to say it's just worse (the fact I can choose what I want to watch, and when, seems to make it a lot easier to watch it with people I care about, as a matter of fact). By contrast, I know from a systems design standpoint the alleged "centralization" of social media platforms was a sleight of hand trick. While it's true most tweets on X-Twitter came from a small number of accounts, however that statistic is / was skewed by bots, the reality is nonetheless that what an individual account sees is tailored to them algorithmically. There was no "central" experience of Twitter, only individual ones that-here's the key part-were presented as the "main" experience of that social platform. "Everybody" posts like this, thinks like this, believes like this, and information that contradicts that one narrative was not only swept under the rug, but the fiction was maintained that this was the norm, and that you could definitely totally see under the rug, everyone saw the same nothing under the rug. So everyone and no one was right. When I think of how the fiction media space "fractured," nowadays I don't find myself in an echo chamber that assures me everyone is watching The Ghost and Molly McGee on Disney+ as a grown man, or Hermitcraft videos on UA-cam. It doesn't seem to matter if Grian gets a million plus views per video, no one I talk to anywhere outside of the Hermitcraft corner of UA-cam seems to have ever heard of it, which consistently reminds me that, well, I'm not the "norm," no one's the "norm." Speaking as an autistic who has spent most of my life as also visibly disabled, I know what being in a minority is like, and the problem is not being in a small group, it's the large one thinking they are "normal." It is normal to walk, so there's no ramp outside your building, it is normal to make eye contact, so if I don't you won't trust what I say as much if I'm interviewing for a job (or even, in many cases, if you're a doctor and I need time-sensitive medical intervention, potentially leading to long-term or lifelong complications. Medical neglect is one of the leading causes of death in autistics). The centralization of cable sucked to some extent as a kid growing up without it, but what sucked more was the assumption that I would and should be interested in SpongeBob, and that there was no need to learn about a show like WordGirl. The impression of centralization created by platforms like Twitter was worse, not merely because it was a social space, but because it was deceptive and yet compelling, so everyone really thought they were part of the majority. While I know some of these smaller platforms (cough, "Truth" Social, cough) absolutely facilitate extremism and radicalization, I also know most people only found them through places like Facebook and Twitter, and thought specifically that they were in the majority (and therefore "normal" and justified) because of those places (as a matter of fact, people who moved to them moved specifically because they already believed in that fictional rendition of reality and found it becoming unwelcome on "centralized" platforms because of attempts at moderation, although I personally struggle to believe those attempts were super effective anyway). If the social "fracture" actually does finally shatter people's impression they are the "normal" ones by doing for social media what streaming and UA-cam did for fiction media, where I'm standing from my anecdotal perspective as one member of diverse, overlapping minorities, I can only really see positives from that. I wear pins from the youtube Minecraft SMP Life Series almost whenever I go out and about, and whenever people ask about them I have to struggle to try to explain what the heck that even is, and mostly can't. I wish I could give people the same joy I get from the Life Series, but it certainly keeps me grounded to be reminded I'm just some guy, and everybody likes different stuff and is experiencing very different media spaces. If everyone had to be daily reminded they existed with very different perspectives and experiences, without a social hegemony to cling to (real or imagined), perhaps there'd be a touch less marginalization. Maybe it's silly to compare fiction and social media this way, and still sillier to hold such an optimistic hope, but a guy can dream.
Super well put! It was definitely a socially excluding experience not having access to eg the Disney channel in the 2000s for me, and as you’re saying-who says or even has the right to determine that Disney is mainstream to begin with? In the last couple years of Twitter i increasingly remember seeing takes that most of the folks on there didn’t really understand that the majority of people (apart from journalists) never even checked the platform.
I relate to this too even though the only point of intersection between “my media” and “your media” might have been Word Girl. My kids watched a lot of PBS Kids shows and Word Girl is one of the ones I enjoyed watching with them. I never had a Twitter account or watched Mandelorian, Game of Thrones or Stranger Things and often feel like no one else knows the same shows I enjoy.
You're focusing a lot on entertainment and your personal experiences grappling with identity and norms, and it's very insightful. But there's still the issue of spreading important ideas to large audiences. Maybe we don't need to centralize every conversation, but there are many problems that need attention from most of society. Political movements, environmental catastrophes, or just spreading awareness of marginalized people. Twitter wasn't the solution, but social media in general gives us the power to educate and motivate millions of people. Fracturing into thousands of niches and gated communities could make that impossible. Personally, I would like to have BOTH. Smaller online communities that allow you to connect with relatable people and have productive conversations. And a reliable centralized "public town square" to keep up with bigger issues and discover new interests and perspectives. But maybe I'm dreaming too.
I think I'm fighting two biases while trying to be neutral with my thoughts here. First is that change is bad and that what was, is better. Second is my personal attachment to resolving injustices. But I think having less of the public town square, publicly visible, searchable, and archived on the internet, is a net negative. Yes, we need more personal, smaller, tighter knit communities, but who's to say that wasn't available pre-fracture. It was always available, it just never was the town square. Then the town square existed, or was presumed to be existing. It wasn't _the_ town square, but it was a very large square. Then due to how much we're seeing voices boosted and abundant, specifically our own, as well as extremes, we couldn't handle that, so we moved away to find something better. I'm just not sure if we moved from the town square to a local gathering online or offline. Maybe there will be people more accepting of themselves as geeks. I just don't think that will help them understand others could be unlike them better at all. Historically that doesn't seem to be the case. I wouldn't be meeting trans or disabled or neurodivergent people at all if it weren't for the town square. I mean, in some cases I don't even know them or know that I'm one of them. The so-called algorithm led me to them. That said, I'm not that worried. A shift doesn't necessarily mean overcorrection, and the issues I mentioned can be solved in some capacity. There have been efforts to make the private "deep" web searchable and able to be archived. Things will evolve regardless, and if people at least try to be better, I'm sure we won't end up in a bad place. P.S. I like long thoughts but I believe your comment would reach more audience if you added more paragraph breaks to make it more easy to read.
The thing about social content fracture now versus when things were niche pre-internet is that we no longer have much in the way of mass culture outside of things like sports. This makes sustained, organized mass political action much more difficult to pull off, as the connective tissue of shared culture isn't really there anymore. Obviously, media fragmentation isn't the primary cause of social dislocation and atomization, but it certainly doesn't help.
Yes! I even feel this way about the entertainment we consume. You used to be able to make references to things and people would get it because we were mostly watching the same things. Now there’s so many options for entertainment, you don’t know if anyone else in the room watches the same movies and shows you do.
@@tarttooth6022 Seems to me, its the inevitable result of the sudden social *centralization* over the last couple decades. People weren't prepared to see the full spectrum of personalities, and all the loud stressful bickering invading every topic. The lowest common denominator on display, and our failure to educate them. Countless people that never learned the difference between argument and discussion. And the complete lack of accountability. It never feels like you're making progress when talking on the internet, so why bother? I figured we would get over this hump after society recalibrated together, but now it looks like everyone is giving up and retreating.
I feel like the primary difference between a highly fractured vs highly centralized social landscape is one of velocity. In a less connected environment you're exposed to new ideas and discussions less frequently and from sources more likely to be seen as in-group, where in a more connected social landscape you're just fed a firehose of every idea all the time and your brain has to try to deal with that accelerated pace. This definitely has some impact on odds of exposure to radical groups and such, but, I think more importantly, it means that in a less connected/slower landscape your brain isn't forced to rely so heavily on heuristics and cognitive biases to deal with the flood of new. You're more likely to actually consider opposing viewpoints when they're coming from in-group sources and infrequently, which hopefully means we can start to back away from the extremes of polarization we've seen in recent times.
I mean, isn't it better to have both? Have some intimate spaces, and have some public spaces, like a spoke and wheel model. And the most interesting/relevant things from the small group gets transmitted to the wider world, and vice versa.
@@antigonemerlin I actually don't think it is. The problem being that the "public" spaces are effectively poison to nuance. The more we're presented with information the less we can take time to process and think about what's presented. Especially if its easily dismissed as coming from "others", and especially if those public spaces select for outrage and disagreement, which every current implementation does. I don't think adding on less connected spaces does anything to blunt that harm from the highly connected spaces. Maybe I'm underestimating the ability for more private spaces to forge connections across dividing lines and thus blunt the divisive influence of highly connected spaces, but I'd argue we've been living in that model for decades now and it's fairly clear to see the damage the connected spaces have done to our social fabric.
This video works almost like an inner dialogue, but from someone else with different knowledge and ideas. I think this form of communication would work best for me. Fully air out thoughts and then see others’.
My concern about fracturing platforms is that it will further fracture news. The echo chambers of information are one of the driving parts of political polarization. I see this as a furthering of that
I thought the opposite had been shown to be true? Being bombarded with stuff you disagree with is polarizing (you are constantly pressured to oppose things). "Echo chambers" are comfortable and don't elicit the same reaction. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been super polarizing and they predominantly like to show you stuff that will make you angry, not stuff you agree with. (because engagement is maximized when you're shown stuff you disagree with)
They are already fractured based on what papers you read or channel you watch. I don’t think there is a single TRUTH that we can all agree with so nothing against fractured news. Some things only matter for particular groups or people who are curious about it.
The “echo chamber” goes both ways in that regard, we all hate the same thing or we all like the same thing, it’s the uniformity of opinion that’s the issue. And it’s not just a hard right problem. Look at someone like me, I’m hardcore liberal, especially by the standards of the southern U.S. I interact primarily with liberal media and I’m picky about where I get my science info. I react to, for example, Anti- climate change or even climate change neutral information as enemy propaganda, I can’t help it. But that makes it hard to have meaningful conversations with say my dad, who is a genuinely good person that I love very much but he exist in an entirely different world view because he has been given different information by sources that he trust. The echo chamber makes it much easier to dismiss people who have a different world view as irrelevant, it’s hard to work towards a solution with someone when you see them as the enemy and not a partner.
I don't know how to un-fracture news, but I see facebook as being a major force behind its fracturing. So its hard for me to imagine moving away from that kind of model as making the problem worse.
Its also worth noting that in this community we see this fracturing as a choice people are making (ie I am aware that I am training multiple algorithms to serve me vlogbrothers and minecraft content) while for a large majority of the population, particularly older individuals and those less technically inclined, it is being done for them without their awareness. It is one thing to be in a filter bubble and be aware that the reality you see online is just a small sliver of the world, but it is another to live in a place where everyone thinks like you AND see that everyone online thinks like you as well. This poses the danger that beyond just thinking that extreme ideas area acceptable, people may believe their ideas are mainstream and held by the majority. It would be interesting to see a poll of how many people over x age (say 40) know that even if they never sign into youtube, their home page is being entirely shaped by their search history after only a day or two. (The same people who may not distingish between the credibility of even Fox News compared to RealTalk with Jimmy853, especially when audio and video quality can be stunningly close to studio for $200 in lights and a good webcam.
Thanks Hank! This is so timely for me - I teach 18-19 year old students and we are currently discussing social media in politics, and you've articulated some excellent points very clearly. Ill be borrowing them to foster some debate!
I've been thinking about this a lot too. I have cut way back on social media, pretty much just youtube and twitch, keeping up with people I already know. In the last Philosophy Tube episode, Abi talked about social reproduction, which got me thinking about social evolution. More than 10-15 years ago, a much smaller percentage of people were regular/heavy internet users, so The Internet felt more or less like one very large community. Like back in the day when Rewind could capture the main highlights of a whole year, and my classmate's cousin was one of the first people in the partner program. As more and more people got internet access (a very good thing), more people with vastly different values were coming into contact with each other, in a way and at a scale that doesn't happen in meat space. So community values got more and more diluted as platforms tried to accommodate as many people as possible while following laws that haven't kept up with tech developments. Humans psychologically need safety and community, so that's what's driving the fracture. People are carving out their own communities. I think this is a great thing since now community isn't restricted by geography if say being queer or disabled gives one different values than one's geographically convenient community. And I think the goal for global understanding and empathy can be "different contexts give people different values and that's ok" rather than "everyone should agree on the Best set of values." As far as the fringe belief concern, it is very difficult and not recommended to get people to change their values through rules/laws/punishment. You can ban a bigot to prevent harm, but that doesn't make them not a bigot, they're just gonna go be terrible somewhere else. Values are best changed through community. "Hey you need to cool it with the racist jokes" is better received from someone in one's community rather than a stranger. Combating social isolation of fringe groups is the way to address fringe beliefs, easier said than done of course.
Armies can win wars, but it takes committees to maintain peace. I mean humans have a group based psychology. Small groups are good at allowing members to better understand each other and thereby evaluate the group's motives and actions more objectively. Big groups can get more done, but a lot has to be taken on faith by the members. And that faith can easily be abused.
that faith is only required in big groups due to elites deliberately sabotaging the flow of information which can't be done as easily in small groups of well remembered relation. it's entirely possible the only thing preventing it is a willing blindness to the problem. are committees genuinely needed for large scale communal action or just handy when everyone is hierarchal?
I saw something recently that said "People in the 70s thought world peace was possible, but you don't hear that now." It's pretty telling that we could hold the ideals of a unified society until we started communicating in this manner.
Social media was a sudden and dramatic change in the grand scheme of history. It was shocking for a lot of people. But I don't think that tells us if we can overcome these issues and unite in the future. It revealed the worst of society to everybody else on the platform, but that's not an accurate representation of the real world. We just need to adjust and recalibrate together. Many people were dragged down by bullies and trolls and lunatics, but we can pull everybody back up together gradually.
I wonder about the cause and effect. It seems the fracturing is at least partially caused by the inability of people to engage in good faith. Platforms seem to be fracturing because of that, rather than causing people to have worse engagement. It's a much harder problem to solve bad faith arguments in general, than to address platform fracturing.
I was just thinking the other day about the Black mirror episodes and other sci-fi where we were talking about the horrors of online consensus and comparing them to this fractured model which is actually a lot more like what I grew up with in the '80s and '90s, and also sucked. A little bit like we had the potential for something and then we got super jaded about it and killed it. And I know we didn't actually kill it, so much as a bunch of Rich assholes decided to kill it because they didn't like press coverage, but I think there were things we could have learned there and hopefully we can still learn them. Having a centralized platform for news and media and fact-checking that everyone had access to was absolutely amazing. And it is still I think an admirable goal
Yeah but not having it be completely centralized let’s people curate the content and news they consume into things that actually interest them because otherwise it just becomes random noise
@@andrecarpenter2432It absolutely does, but It also disconnects people from Central stories. For example, there's an argument to be made that stories about major world events, current political issues, wars, things like that are important to basically everybody. And it would be weird if I had to go to a discord about running role-playing games and dig into their current channel to find that stuff. And I would rightfully question the veracity of those stories. When Twitter was working it gave me a centralized place to get that sort of news. Now I usually get it a day or two late. Or I get it from Reddit, but that's also very biased towards the sorts of stories that I choose to put on my dash.
I don't know if you've read An Absolutely Remarkable Thing or A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, but if not: They are very much Hank picturing the complex social dynamics of the internet, and examining their impact on individuals and society. They're _really_ good books.
Idk, I’m not a fan of the fracturing. I know it’s uncomfortable to see all the different sides of Us all in one place, but I think in terms of growing our awareness of each other and ourselves, it’s been pretty revolutionary. I also think that over time, we’re going to be able to more clearly track eras of internet time similar to eras of human time, how civilizations tend to form and tend to fall…
So I'm a sociologist and I've been studying extremism in American politics for several years now. Here my argument about centralized platforms and alt-right/ white supremacists is that it was far easier to study them when they were on centralized platforms. One could easily track their movements and see their content very easily. I think as a researcher and imo its better for social media to fracture because look at how big platforms handle extremists. UA-cam and Facebook, as you pointed out, normalized extremist opinions. I think when it comes to stopping extremists, its better to have fractured social media, however when it comes to informing the masses, it becomes harder to combat disinformation and report scientific discoveries.
I guess a sociologist is one of the few people who has a reason to keep tabs on people who share vile ideas. But, on behalf of the rest of us, I am very glad to have those people in their own fractured spaces, far away from me.
Aka you'd prefer centralized media to allow more controlling of the narrative and controlling what information is spread and read by the population? Who'd have thought a sociologist would hold that view??!?!??😂
I'm.. of the same, conflicting mind about it. I'm glad that people will be getting upset about niche things they don't need to worry about less because it'll be happening in a different space, and I'm also worried that maybe the practice of stumbling upon a niche community that you find gross and realizing it's harmless and you don't need to be upset about it is an extremely valuable practice as a human that one should have more opportunities to experience.
The fracture we're discussing, to me, is simply a more natural return to people discussing issues within their own community. I think for a long time we've thought about the internet as a layer above reality, connecting everyone into some massive network; and we simply could not have imagined just how loud it gets when billions of people are screaming, and people start getting paid and paying each other by volume and propensity. I truly think what's happening in this second, more skeumorphic era of the internet, is simply a parallel reality that matches the one we all grew up with, that typified society before the internet / tv / radio / printing press etc. Groups of communities that come together based around similar interests and beliefs, discussing the subtle differences in opinions without fear of some bizarre outliers and bad-faith critiques. Just like in high school, college, workplaces, gyms, bars, bathhouses and DIY spaces, we're seeing people with common interests come together to make friends and gently challenge one another to be our best selves, taking one another's situations into account, and reading each other charitably. I spend most of my online time in a discord whose main rule is "this is not a community, it's my house. Make yourself at home, don't be icky." We can get into the weeds on what that means to different people, but if everyone's reading that in good faith and positivity, then we all get to have a far more genuine experience than say, barking into twitter. That's my thoughts, at least at the moment.
This lines up with exactly how I feel. Thank you for articulating it. I guess my only concern now is that I feel like online life (plus a pandemic) smashed some of the IRL mechanisms which helped us feel less lonely and isolated. Don't get me wrong - online life also saved so many people who would have been marginalized/ostracized by their IRL communities. I don't have rose-tinted glasses for the past, here. I just know that loneliness is a generalized modern epidemic and it doesn't seem like online life is really helping with that. Thoughts?
@@Idefilms I've thought a lot about that, recently. My spouse and I have lamented that, while we're grateful to have each other and two very good friends we see often, on a broader scale it feels like we all used to go to parties, have more outings and third spaces. I'm sure you know the drill, the things I've recently discovered many, many people are saying online, not just us. I think the solution might require a little ego death, and really comes down to throwing themed parties as adults, asking friends to invite other friends, explicitly asking the nice clerk or funny waitress "Hi, I'm XXX and I like YYY and listen to ZZZ, and making friends is so stupid and hard, do you like ABC?" It's embarrassing and shameful by society's standards to just be a regular human, and I think that might be a reflection of our newfound internet anonymity, as opposed to real life where we have speech impediments and bad hair days and seasonal allergies. I don't have a perfect answer, but we've gone from one best friend to two by telling the grocery store clerk "you're so pretty and nice, please be our new best friend." Tomorrow we're throwing a Twin Peaks party in her honor. So far, it's working at least a little!
I feel that the fracture of social spaces was fine in the past because it was connected to how physically close you are to someone. I’m not sure how good it is for us to be in different social spaces, but live next to someone who exists in a different social space. It’s possible large social spaces online are better because youre more likely to interact with the social perspectives of your neighbor.
Hank, You're so socially aware and I love the efforts you and John put in to fighting TB and tackling the complex issue of education. If you could do one more thing, I would ask that it be the beginning of a new, loud conversation about solving homelessness and the ease with which we could do it here in the US. There are a myriad of issues that homelessness creates for communities and individuals which sicken our society. we have 30x more empty homes on a adaily basis than registered homeless in the us. please, help begin this serious discussion.
Homelessness isn't a breakdown of the system, it is deliberately practiced death politics in the name of maintaining "property/homes" as an appreciable asset and securing the "housing market". Property ownership is in itself a manifestation of the Tragedy of the Commons whereby groups of humans are deemed homo sacer (e.g. human sacrifice) for the sustenance of a known injust system. Homelessness is no more a solvable problem than suffering, greed, war, etc. Great for idealism and forming values, not so great as a subject of a solutions-oriented movement. Land ownership in its current form (i.e. the American legal definitions of property) is antithetical to any form of global human justice
The vacancy "issue" is a little bit a of a red herring. The existing vacant houses generally aren't where the homeless want to be. And for good reason! They're in the places without jobs (often because deindustrialization), or without social services, or they're far from where the people became homeless (most of California's homeless became homeless in the state). Moreover, the vacancy rate in the US is the lowest it's been since we started recording this data. We really need way more houses built in the places that people want to live. The bad news is that there's a large coalition of people on across the right (who hate change and want to exclude the poor and/or minorities from their neighborhoods) and left (who hate change and have a misguided fear that development causes* displacement). The good news is that there's a growing coalition of people who have succeeded at making it easier to build affordable homes in several cities and states over the last five years. *there's absolutely a correlation, but the vast majority of the literature on the impacts of development shows that new development reduces displacement pressure by slowing rent increases. Basically the causality arrows look like this: (1) increased neighborhood desirability + lack of houses -> displacement (2) increased neighborhood desirability + lack of houses -> development Of course, a lack of houses can be solved (in time) by sufficient development. But new development is largely illegal across the US, particularly in wealthier neighborhood. And the illegality of development in wealthier neighborhoods increases the desirability of neighborhoods where displacement is a concern.
@@42dotdotdot development is nice but a servile answer to socialite procurement. in truth state enforced scarcity is what we are talking about and it applied to more than housing, the only way to keep people procurable is artificial scarcity maintained by a monopoly on violence. the thought they couldn't find jobs to work at being the issue? where elites would be able to extract from them? come on, there are enough houses even accounting for people who really want to reserve any personally for more than pathetic greed.
My daydream tech startup idea for years and years has been a fractured internet as a product model that sells physical servers with the closest FOSS equivalents of all your usual major internet-y things (twitter, FB, instagram, reddit, discord, YT, netflix, etc etc etc) as well as a long tail of operational support for those boxes. All of this would have a moderate focus on shared theming. A community in a box sort of a thing, if you will. I bet someone's got that startup going right now. Hey, Hank, I hear you're always looking for a new project ^_^
Personally, I think that the promise of the internet of letting us communicate with anyone in the world at anytime was (and still is) really simplistic, because ultimately the places I find most fulfilling on the internet are places where I found communities of like-minded people (like nerfighteria) and I spent most of my time on platforms like twitter begrudgingly putting up with the rest of it so I could connect with people in the communities I was a part of. I think that having a fractured social media landscape where each platform has a set of implicit values that users agree to makes that kind of connection way easier because you wouldn't have to worry about your post reaching the wrong audience and being misunderstood or taken out of context. It also allows for much more nuanced content moderation because there could be way more platforms, in the same way that different subreddits have their own moderation rules. Now, of course this still has the problem of fractured realities but centralized social media didn't do much good in that regard either, maybe going back to having dedicated spaces for news and journalism would be good.
I've been worried about the balkanization of culture due to the internet for years now... The number of cultural touchstones we use just to talk to each other are becoming fewer and further between and it gets harder to find common ground with any random person you meet. Even though this may be a return to a more "normal" state for humanity, I suspect that large-scale conglomeration of culture may be somewhat responsible for the relative peace we've been having for the last several decades. The splintering of culture we're seeing now, in the worst-case may lead back to those troubling times...
Wrote about this in a newsletter that went out this morning - I would've linked this if it was up before! I talked about how more centralized online spaces made me a much better person - I grew up in an environment that was homogenous and bigoted in a very insidious way where I thought it was diverse and wouldn't have realized if it wasn't for being online and seeing what actual diversity looked like. That said, I hear you on fringe ideas being mainstreamed and the impact of that. But I'm also wary of centrist bias and how it's always center-right, potentially fueling a slow slide to the right, and so creating a situation where only majority-culture ideas can get airtime via legacy media and publishing and everything else is iced out seems bad. I have no answers but appreciate the questions.
Dang Hank, thanks for being so thoughtful I really had no idea 10 years ago when I started watching SciShow*** that your content would be more to me than learning about scientific phenomenons and important folks thru history. Your work and perspective has broadened my perspective on the world and given me tools to look things with more intrigue and granularity than I could have ever expected. Thank you for bringing topics that wouldn't otherwise come thru my orbit and talking about them in a way that reinforces the pursuit of better understanding the world we live in. ***also big thanks to everyone who helps/helped with SciShow!
The problem with the fracturing isolating fringe ideas, is sometimes the fringe ideas are the good ideas. Like , when the people on the fringe are Nazi's, yeah, its good to isolate those ideas, because as you said, it makes them look fringe. But it wasnt even that long ago that the majority of Americans thought interracial marriage was bad.
I noticed several comments saying that it's more natural for us to be divided into these smaller communities, and i wnat to argue that still okay to make value judgements on that. Just because something is natural doesn't mean i can't analyze and judge it. It's "natural" for many people witch chronic illnesses to die without medical intervention, but that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to think that's "bad" or make the argument that access to medical care shoudo be a human right and campaigned for. The fact is we don't just live in a natiral society, there are also "unnatural" developments and factors from the progress we made as humans as nd increasingly complexity of the world. We are now interconnected on an incredible level so when your go back to small fractured communities it isn't the same as just existing like modern humans were in the past. It's regression, and we also take the large scale information, international connections, and ideas we would've never had access to WITH us into these new fractured small communities online. I think it leaves out important dimensions of the social context of this development to just equate it to being "the same as living in small communities in the past."
we are only naturally limited in community size by the flow of information. elites spend so much effort extracted from us ruining the flow of information on the internet as they did in congregations and newspapers before explicitly to prevent such global community. don't think of what is natural but what relations build *relevant* context and then realize your active role in shaping it.
I think that smaller communities are nice because most people’s gut instinct is to fight when they see a post from a stranger that opposes their views - and since places like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok value extremity for their algorithms, there’s little room for non-polarized debates, and tempers are high. Posts are boosted best when groups are fighting each other tooth and nail. Moreover, I’ve found that my views change the most when someone I know - or someone I’m in a small group with - shows me their views and allows me to interact with them as a human being. Learning their experiences and seeing into their life’s what changes my mind. Still, echo chambers are bound to happen, and things can happen more in-the-dark. There’s an argument to be made that these groups had private chats even before then, but I understand the possibility of that becoming more regular and turning more people to bad ideas for the same reasons that I’ve been exposed to good ideas. It’s messy, but overall, I think it’s a bit more of a good thing.
smaller communities are nice because everyone is able to know how they relate. big ones are purposefully sabotaged to maintain social hierarchy over smaller communities and creating more stratas of socialite extraction
My sister, when she had long commutes, used to call me while driving them. That's kinda what this feels like. Not a bad use of walking time. Although when I'm walking in the cold, my nose starts dripping, so I wouldn't have a camera pointing at me from that angle! 😆😪 It's nice to hear something of a thought process rather than a written & edited piece. Lots of really important stuff in here. This just reminds me of what's happened with suburbanization (when people started geographically self-segregating) and, in somewhat different ways, with traditional media. (That worked through corporate conglomerations of media that ended up altering editorial content. Even looking at how TV has changed since I was a kid in the '70s & '80s - there used to be literal editorials given on TV news, for example; and another weird example, there used to be proper movie reviews too, not just reporting on box office numbers and gross income. Not to mention that journalists, knowing they had a broad audience, tried to be as unbiased as they could, although good journalism will always have a viewpoint.) I think we always find ways to fracture large communities. I wonder how much of it has to do with the fact that we really can only manage a handful of close relationships IRL, & our brains evolved w/us in small, fairly-related groups where anyone unlike us was an outsider and unknown, could be dangerous. We seem to keep bringing that up out of our DNA or something, even though in our better moments we rise above it quite a ways. Just thinking about this, and talking about it in a public forum, is a good first step. (Not that this video marks the beginning of that conversation; but this is precisely the kind of forum we need more of. Well, face-to-face conversations in geographic spaces where people who aren't the same as each other can get together & express differences with respect & empathy would be the ideal, I suspect, but this is-well, not a Wendy's, but the internet.) As a footnote, I am well aware I overuse parentheses and em dashes, lol.
I absolutely love your rational thought process; in this specific context, but in general as well! It’s very refreshing to hear someone express potential cons to what they may believe to be the better outcome, along with pros for the worse outcome, because nothing is ever perfect. Thank you for continuing to be an authentic person amidst the clickbait world we live in ❤
I like that you mentioned that ascribing character to all of a group is not helpful. The fracturing of social media definitely reflects the fractures within our society, and in that way it's not great. It would be nice to see another centralized platform to unite us again, maybe something surrounding our planetary plight (sharing ideas for sustainable living), which seems to be the only thing we all have in common anymore. Personally, im not as hopeful as i used to be....
We need some strong leaders to rally around. Our society had millions of unsung heroes, but very few powerful leaders we respect. Politics, religion, corporations, intellectuals, institutions, etc. have failed us in so many ways that we don't trust them anymore. Sometimes it feels like almost everyone who achieves power and wealth is corrupted by it, or was secretly corrupt from the beginning. I have asked around to see which leaders people find most trustworthy, and the answer is a resounding "NONE".
@@wildflower1397 Agree. Those who seek power aren't worthy of it. I can think of several strong leaders with good moral characters, but none are in politics.
@@tbella5186 Well, I can think of two people with strong moral characters, and who are an activist/legislators power couple in TN. My suggestion is that if you don't like our elected leaders, go run for office. Maybe you won't win, but you still change the world by showing others what is possible.
I think people want to be involved in groups/things (physical and online) where they feel seen, heard, accepted, and welcomed. It feels like the physical world has much more tolerance for being accepting of those not totally like you than online places. From the business perspective (Meta, X, etc) it feels like scale is their only consideration, and so things like consolidation end up making a ton of sense. So maybe a lot of the niches get combined into 2 or 4 websites/apps? People don’t love having 20+ options, they want like 5
fracturing means avoiding those who would avoid you in hopes of being seen yes, it is an answer servile to the problem rather than aiding solution of it.
In the physical world, we interact with more people through necessity, and there is tolerance embedded in that necessity, but that is different from acceptance. I actually started social media in the early '90s in order to find a community of acceptance, which I did, selecting from publically-available groups until I found one where I felt welcome and my niche interests were welcomed, and am sad that the changes in the social media landscape (usenet becoming separate websites that moved to Facebook then Instagram or Discord or Mastadon) mean that my friends from that time have separated and now you have to be invited to join. I'm not a person who is often invited, so I'm now shut off from social media (nobody posting on Facebook, whereas previously I could keep in touch with people, both local and distant, and feel like I was part of a community both of former friends and people from work/church), and still shut out of most in-person community because I'm weird. Having a couple options where you could see everyone was annoying at times, but still had its pluses.
Just gonna throw my two cents (or maybe more like twenty, oops this got real long) out here, since this is something I've been thinking about a lot on my own. Or at least, something adjacent to it. There was a Kurzgesagt video about something similar a while back, about the "fracturing of the internet", arguing that it was a good thing mainly because we as a species are not MEANT to be bombarded with all this information at once. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with that take (I think it's too nuanced to just say YES or NO anyways), but the main thing that has always stood out to me in these discussions is: Why are we not talking MORE about empathy and emotional intelligence/awareness in these discussions? Just to define that slightly before I continue, I mean "emotional intelligence" to mean things like, the ability to self-reflect, understand one's own emotions, self-awareness, knowing where your emotions are coming from, learning how to TAKE those emotions and control their direction, etc. And I'm using the word "empathy" to mean a lot of the same stuff but towards people other than yourself. In other words, understanding the emotions of the people around you, where they came from and what they're doing, how those emotions feel to others, etc. SO much of the conversation surrounding these bad "niche" communities is like, "How do we moderate them, should we allow them privacy and let it fester, how do we stop it from spreading", etc. But, and this is something I've been talking about with my therapist lately... The general emotional intelligence of the average person is... kinda low, actually? Probably a lot lower than you'd think, at least. To me, the real "issue" here (in my opinion) is that people with a lower emotional intelligence are going to be more likely to fall into these bad rabbit holes and niches, because they aren't looking very closely (by which I mean like, really really analyzing) at what they're doing or why they're doing them. Most of these bad niches, I think people gravitate to them more because of emotions like anger, fear, sadness, or grief. But crucially, the person isn't *aware* they are angry or scared or whatever. They are just rushing to the thing that makes sense for them at that moment, and this makes them easily manipulated by exactly the wrong kinds of people. So, perhaps if we gave these people the right tools, a lot of this stuff just... wouldn't happen in the first place? So like, why are we not giving them the tools? I'm not trying to say "oh let's just throw everyone in front of a therapist, that'll fix it". I don't think a lot of people want to do that, unless they're suffering from mental illness or struggling in their life in some way. And even then, recognizing that requires some degree of emotional self-awareness to start off with, so you're kinda back to square one there... So yeah, all this to say, I think we (as a society) should REALLY be focusing on this side of things more. I think we need better resources for people to come across ways to work on it, both at young ages (like being taught related things at school), and outside of that. It's one thing to go back and forth on what it means to talk in different places and different ways, and to be exposed (or not) to different kinds of information and opinion, but at the end of the day, each individual person has their own specific reaction to things for a REASON, and that reason (right or wrong as it may be) has an *origin* and a *cause* and most importantly, it made *sense* to that person when it happened. Nobody does anything for no reason at all, and it can always be traced back with enough determination. At least, that's what I always think about when I see someone deeply entrenched in some weird ideology. I know they got there for a reason that made sense to them in the moment, even if it's not helping them. Anyways, this message got waaaay too long so I'm just gonna cut it off here lol, I feel like I could rant forever about this stuff.
that's a false dichotomy as usual by kurz. we can't handle all this info so surely we should put blinders on!!! rather than ask why the info is too much and whose managing the rules and why. if i tied you to a chair and kept a spotlight on your face you'd rather be blind that doesn't respect your autonomy or any rationale it's the elites who shape our experience of the internet so i'd really doubt their flowchart for how to respond to the problem they maintain.
As someone who was surrounded by his "community" growing up and never felt like he fit in and always felt like an outsider and who only found his true community online I can say that no, it didn't work great before. Before you just didnt have any other choice, or knew other choices even existed.
This! And I am white and middle class, "just" neurodivergent, chronically ill, and disabled, but living in a Nordic country, thank goodness. More importantly still, black, brown, and indigenous communities have been violently and/or bureaucratically destroyed over and over again pretty much everywhere on this planet. So it REALLY didn't "sorta work" for for them. Still doesn't.
when and where did you live in a community that wasn't under social hierarchy? except for online... are you sure that wasn't society? a community would care about ac*comm*odating how you relate to it
@@Boardwoards Whom are you addressing? Asking because I can't find anything about hierarchy in either of the comments older than yours that YT agrees to show me.
@@ronjaj.addams-ramstedt1023 the op, they claim to have been living in community which only exist outside social hierarchy deep in the amazon and such or very temporarily.
@@Boardwoards how did you conclude that the wording 'he was surrounded by his "community" growing up' would attempt to convey that 'there was no social hierarchy where & when he grew up'?
I think in terms of the fracturing, it's net positive. The most problematic thing is a centralized platform with a focus on profits. In a world where we are fragmented or centralized, fringe ideas will still find fringe spaces. The Nazis will find somewhere to gather, no matter where everyone else is gathering. So, I think the decentralization and removal of power for corporate entities is the best thing for us. I would be less inclined to push for fragmentation if we had a non-profit, or a user owned platform (mastodon, in theory), that we could centralize on, allowing us to have the benefits of centralization, without the downsides of corporate and capitalist incentivize within that central platform.
I am concerned by social-group connection being primarily formed by politics/ideology instead of geography. I think a focus on local politics/advocacy and away from national politics would be an enormous good for society, but I don’t know if that will be encouraged by the current fracturing of social spaces.
But you won't get people motivated to improve their local community if they aren't encountering better ideas from far away places. My small town is oblivious to other cultures and possibilities. I primarily learned about modern social movements and new strategies through the internet. And social media allowed me to connect with relatable people from around the world, when most of my local community makes me feel like a threat for existing. It was painfully lonely before. Besides, we still need to work together on large-scale problems too. Not everything can be dealt with locally. Not every problem is nearby.
For me as a social media consumer: I kinda like the fracture. It's encouraging me to scroll less and read more books. For me as a content creator/creative professional: I don't like it. I grew a lot because of social media (esp. twitter), met so many great people and got great job opportunities. For me as a citizen of the world: not sure how I feel yet, though it does seem like we're all becoming more tribal.
My experience on X/Twitter has never been more positive. I chose to make it so. It's not difficult. You make choices about what you hear and who you hear from. And I can choose to look around into less positive places too, if I want to see what's happening. Doesn't mean I have to stay there. And I'll always hear or see it first on Twitter. Yeah, "X" is a silly name. I don't think I'll use that term.
Very natural flow to your thoughts (and from your nose due to the cold). I don’t see any real point on getting nervous about the current state of online communications because it changes so quickly. It could be a totally different situation the very nice day.
I've recently started drawing a distinction between the social web and the antisocial web. The social web involves two-way interactions between people; the antisocial web involves one-way interactions with posts. This is different from the distinction between social and parasocial - for example, a site like Facebook actually encourages you to interact in an antisocial way with people who you might have very social relationships with otherwise. Xwitter and Instagram are the most antisocial media giants by far. The problem with antisocial media is that this kind of structure encourages unhealthy social dynamics for the uncomplicated reason that there's nothing to gain or lose except momentary positive or negative perception by others. Why does Twitter take itself so seriously even though it's obvious that this is ridiculous? It's because of the antisocial context. Add to that the fact that Twitter structurally encourages short, quippy retorts, and you have a website which, entirely by accident, would genuinely be hard to make worse, and should unquestionably be deleted. On a note which may seem unrelated but will tie back in, what about more traditional, one-way dispersion of information where the channels for feedback are more limited, like TV? This has the entirely different problem of ridiculous power dynamics which create undue influence from small groups of people. Obviously this is a big problem. Letting large institutions determine what ideas people are exposed to is good for those institutions and bad for almost every single individual, often including the individuals who maintain those institutions. Fixing this power problem is one of the big upsides of the internet. We don't need antisocial media to do this, though. Prosocial media is fine for this. News giants are still annoying and a problem, but at least the tools for sincerely seeking out good answers are widely dispersed now. Nothing we change about the meta-structure of our media spaces is going to make politics less bad than it was in the pre-internet days. What has an impact is work to change our society's attitudes, values, and awarenesses. This is semi-impracticable of course, in policy terms. Mass media and antisocial media aren't going to go away just because they're awful, and they wouldn't even go away if a large section of people demanded that they do, because most people would still not see it as a problem. We are fully in control of our selves, right? Fully responsible for our beliefs and actions? Surely these structures aren't that big of a problem! People haven't gotten worse, it's just more visible now that they're terrible. Etc. And in fairness, mass media, unlike antisocial media, serves a legitimate function, and it's hard to do away with the bad without doing away with the good, there. But it's good to be aware of. To treat it as a personal prescription. Echo chambers don't polarize and radicalize nearly so much as malicious framing and cherry-picking do. The biggest echo chamber for the average person is actually their IRL social circle, very frequently. The idea that cutting ourselves off from all-to-all one-way post engagement will somehow hurt us is the lingering echo of the techno-optimism of decades past.
Part of the problem with our current "Many to Many" system is that, in practice, the algorithm turns it into Fringe to Fringe. The great hope of the internet (and of social media specifically) was that if we could all communicate with each other, we could all learn from and understand each other; but instead of many communicating with many, each individual primarily sees 1) stuff they agree with and 2) extreme, unnuanced, poorly communicated stuff that seems completely insane to them. In an isolated, fringe community, you learn that your community's ideas are normal and acceptable. In contemporary social media, you learn THE EXACT SAME THING, in addition to learning that anybody who disagrees with you is completely insane. Meta and X are just Fringe Community +
To be able to protect ourselves from bots and the inevitable onslaught of AI generated content which is already here but only getting significantly worse, fracturing will be necessary or you just get off social media all together. The avalanche is going to be overwhelming. Social media already is a big part of geopolitical espionage via social engineering. This will also become a much bigger part of future social media. Closed or restricted communities will be one of the options to protect oneself from all of this.
I learned a lot about marginalized communities I'm not apart of on Tumblr. Having centralized platforms is better for people that use those platforms to make money: artists, sex workers and big corporations alike. Though I think indie creators are hurt more by fracture since they have less bandwidth to post in a lot of different places. But having specific platforms for those markets probably makes more sense anyway. Idk I miss the old internet which was forum based and very micro anyway. There was more incentive to go *explore* the web to find weird little niche things
people are probably using Facebook a lot less because the feed algorithm is...not good. It's 2/3rds ads and you dont even see your friends posts until a week later? Simply not useful to people
I will say A lot of people had their numbers inflated by twitter I may be misremembering but it's all well and good having 1000 press 'like' on your art but if you want to be supported as an artist it's better to cultivate a smaller, more dedicated audience The ones who buy your art, sub to your patreon and go to your live shows A lot of artists who moved sites when twitter started falling apart found that the majority of fans weren't following them off platform but those weren't the true fans, the dedicated ones who bought stuff
I think about this kind of thing a LOT, and have most of my adult life. When I was in college, I remember quite clearly thinking that human history was inevitably moving to larger and larger socio-political structures: from city-states to nation-states to continent-states to multi-state coalitions, and I thought that was a 90% good thing. But I was in college in the 1970s-1980s, when the post-WWII era was still a defining influence, and liberal policies were still, if not dominant, at least the default condition in most places. I don't think that way anymore. I've also learned more history, and more about history, since my college days. I've learned more about practically every other subject since my college days. And, humans being a pattern-seeking species, I recognize both the attractions and the pitfalls of looking for patterns and trends. So here is my take: human society coalesces and de-coalesces in large, multi-generational waves, usually driven by things we're not conscious of. War, disease, and environmental change seem to be the biggest drivers, but their effects ripple out long after the culminating event(s). Think the rise and collapse of Bronze Age civilization in ~1100 BCE; the rise and collapse of the Roman Empire in ~350 CE; the huge shift from agrarian to industrialized society through the 19th Century CE. (There are non-Western examples, too, of course: one example being the rise and collapse of the Khmer Empire in the 15th Century CE, not to mention the pre-Columbian empires in the Americas that waxed and waned even before the Spanish invasions.) It seems to me that humanity at large, and Western humanity in particular, are in the early stages of a de-coalescent wave that will last well into the late part of the 21st Century. Environmental change is an obvious driver, but so is the coagulation (I use this word advisedly) of "finance" into an extremely predatory/parasitic structure where the people who contribute the least actual concrete "good" are the ones sequestering 90% of the resources - a situation that is simply not sustainable. Neither our environmental footprint nor our economic structure are sustainable, and I think humanity on some unconscious level senses that. De-coalescence speaks to that subconscious awareness: it seems intuitively, obviously, easier to provide stability and sufficient resources for smaller communities, where goods and services come from nearby rather than from the other side of the planet. So seeing the social media space become a one world/multiverse in less than a generation, and seeing it now shatter into disparate pieces even more quickly seems to be happening as part of that greater de-coalescence. A symptom rather than a cause.
Great video! Thank you, Hank, for your thoughts about the fringe spaces. That made me less anxious about a development of the social Internet, that I was watching with little bit of dread. But you're right, it kinda was always like this before the Internet. What's easier now is that you can find more people quicker that share your fringe beliefs. But that also applies to positive movements, fringe orless fringe.
Hank, it isn't about good/bad - it is about what IS. Historically the pendulum has always swung back and forth between decentralization and centralization. We are where we are because the majority of people no longer trust centralized channels. In time, once people are sufficiently bruised in new and interesting ways by decentralized channels, a day will come when centralization seems like a bright new hope. Round and round we go.
This immediately reminded me of the structure of Meetings (for those who know). I just had a conversation last night about the impact of different meeting groups holding the same collective consciousness, each being different and with its own merit but the same primary purpose. This echos and parallels social media in a micro scale. I'm sure many other well established social constructs similarly flow. Maybe this is the natural progression, to be able to be a part of many groups, each to express the parts of you that want to speak or need to be heard. In the same way, in meetings you get different fulfilments from different people and their energies, opinions, and words.
Thanks for sharing this nuanced thinking through (aloud) of how the Internet, social media and AI are sometimes helping and hurting simultaneously. How do we move forward? Hard to guess sometimes. I agree this is underdiscussed on a wide scale.
I think open, algorithm driven spaces mould us into pointless beings. Smaller social networks can give us a space and function in them. What is the purpose of being a consumer on tiktok? What do you add, what do you do? I think people need smaller systems where the leaders are more accessible and the people rely on each other more.
2:27 - 3:05 In Canada, when the government passed a new law around media and social media, Facebook responded by basically forbidding anything considered 'news content' on the platform. Users can't share news articles anymore, and news outlets (very broadly defined) can't post anything resembling news. At first, I was concerned, because I thought people would be less informed, and that our already struggling journalistic institutions would see their traffic plummet. But mayyyyyybe it turns out that NOT consuming news is still better for society than algorithmically-curated news feeds that optimize for attention and retention... ? I dunno.
@@leahwilton785 It took me a while, but yeah, same. I also feel way more intentional about it. What do you do? Go straight to a news website, or something else?
I feel like this is the type of stuff that gets talked about decades after it happened because hindsight is 20/20, but here Hank is dishin it out in real time and it's really insightful imo
the fracturing of media already happened once - the social internet from media companies controlling the narrative - and it was a net positive even despite the problems. I expect as communities continue to grow smaller it'll continue to be a positive change. Moderation goes up, marginalization decreases, insincere and corporate influence becomes more difficult and therefor falls. Outliers will continue to exist but will no longer be treated as equal parts to the whole experience. If your conclusion looks at centralized community and says "this is problematic because it enables problem X" and then looks at the decentralized community and your conclusion is IDENTICAL then either nothing has changed or you're predisposed towards your own conclusion. Personally, I subscribe to the idea that this is a change - it's too early to say one way or another what will happen from it, but it WILL eliminate the previous problems that centralized platforms created, even if it introduces them in new forms afterwards.
"Having fringe ideas in fringe spaces normalizes them." Absolutely. I've been feeling that for a while. I feel like there's some corollary between that idea and the bioaccumulation of toxins moving up to bigger and bigger predators. I haven't quite got it but those two ideas are shaped the same in m' brain.
I hadn't really considered what we're going through now as a fracturing, though it makes some sense to think of it that way. I'm not really opposed to finding more nuanced spaces to have conversations in as they feel more like a place. When I used Facebook and Twitter in the past, I never felt like I was walking into a place and sitting down for a conversation. I was usually on edge hoping what I'd say would reach people and get likes. When I'm on Discord, I feel like I'm sitting down with others and can ask questions about something I know will reach someone with some knowledge on a subject (I spend a fair bit of time in video game speedrunning discord servers). In a way, those kinds of places feel like an attempt to have an online 3rd place. Where I typify Facebook and Twitter as broadcast mediums, I tend to think of platforms like Discord and some small Twitch communities as places that I arrive at. On the topic of fracturing Twitter and Facebook traffic, I understand that the potential for audience reach is massive having allowed a couple giants to control the space, I don't want to defend the fact that we landed on a couple corporations monopolizing our online public squares for that audience potential, though. That arguably should never have happened in the first place, even if that audience potential is convenient (insert parallels to US cable company monopolies and fossil fuel dependency giving us great things, but should have been scrutinized much earlier). This comment is all over the place, but last thing is that I don't think that people receding to closer knit communities spells the death of online broadcast mediums like Twitter. It's a far better tool for the many-to-many relationship. Corporations and governments still want our attention and we still want them to change for the better. Whether that's Twitter or some combination of other places or mediums, we'll find each other because both parties kind of operate by applying pressure to each other. Love the thought you put into these topics and that you share them like this with your community :)
Aside from providing an answer that you understand/already know, Hank (i.e. "we don't know yet" and/or "some good and some bad"), here's a quick list of things that I think will be different for us online in the future: 1. Community/group work will be more important - your example of the different groups who are interested in more access/cheaper things to fight TB is a perfect example. There wasn't one specific person who created one group and led the charge. A bunch of groups started by different people got together, combined their efforts, and worked toward a common goal. That's how "the needle will be moved" in the near future online for a lot of things. 2. Creators who are online will have to do more personal work to figure out what they're doing and why - For a number of years, there's been this idea of a "one size fits all" answer for "being successful" (i.e. making a lot of money, getting a lot of views, etc.) for each online platform. That goes out the window as more and more platforms show up and creators have to choose where they want to share their content. Collaboration between creators (once again "groups coming together to do things") seems like it will become more important than ever, but that also is a standard answer for "how to be successful" or "how to grow your audience" online right now. So, that may not be correct. 3. There is potential for things to "fracture" *a lot more* in the coming years - Larger companies are all getting in trouble with governments for various reasons which they can't resolve with money. There's a growing global anti-trust movement right along side of the current lawsuits and we might see more in the future. TL;DR - put on your seat belt. We might be in for a ride that would make the "Ma Bell" anti-trust telephone lawsuit from the late 1970s look like kindergarten. 4. Not only are we running into a "fracturing" online landscape, we're just starting to figure out what the "end stages" of an "online career" looks like. Sure, we're talking about creators on UA-cam here, but what happens to someone in eSports when they "retire" as an example? Do they start their own team? Make another league? Become a coach for younger players? Do something else? Who knows? The landscape for creators is so incredibly different just because there's now a group of experienced creators with money and experience in the space. That wasn't there when the people who are now "retiring" started making content. 5. Lastly, having people who are over 35 that are actively engaged in online creative spaces also makes a really big difference. Our perspectives, wants, and the reasons that we're here aren't the same as our younger peers. That is going to influence everything in ways I don't even think we've thought about yet. We're the first group of people who are going to have an active, online experience as we age. No one has figured out what that looks like or how to support it yet.
The solution is to help people connect, communicate, and care. It's not just about the where and how information is disseminated, it's also about what the people who consume it think and do. For most of my life, watching the media and social media has been like virwing a train wreck in slow motion. I can't help but wonder if this is how it feels when you watch the cracks form in society, knowing it's the start of the downfall of civilization itself. To see the insanity happening more every day, and realizing that we can't keep watching or it may drive us insane as well, but we can't look away or everything is lost. The only answer I see is reaching out to each other, holding tight to the love and light that connects us, and standing up for what we believe.
I love discord, but one of the things i worry about is communities because locked behind paywalls. How many creators do you know who have private patreon discords, and the like. There are a few creators who's community servers I would love to join, but to be frank I am very poor and do not have disposable income for such things. I worry if things keep going in this niche and paid direction I will end up blocked out of a lot of online spaces because I am poor
It may be a tangent but as a Gen Xer I feel this also affects the sense of shared culture. There can’t be “water cooler” talk about the latest shows as much now because of the fracturing of media into streaming sites which each have a paywall/subscription cost. If I want to discuss my favorite show with someone I have to hope they spend their money on the same streaming sites that my household can afford to join. Even pre-COVID there were shows that got a lot of buzz like This is Us. Lately I feel like for every five shows or movies that generate buzz I might have access to to one or two of them. The shows might be emerging out of the same cultural soup but the fracturing into streaming sites means we no longer have the shared vocabulary to say we connect to those ideas.
For better or worse we are a global society now. We NEED to have large centralized platforms. The problem is the platforms also need to be trustworthy. But who defines what is or is not trustworthy? What culture gets to make the call on what is or is not appropriate? We have NATO for politics and national security, so maybe we need a NATO for large centralized platforms. And then we have a commonality. A foundation for centralized information and online experience. We can still split off into our smaller, tribilistic online communities like discord and Reddit. That’s natural and mentally healthy to have smaller communities. But the larger shared environments need work, need foundations and need trust.
We don't need centralization. Open standards, interoperability, and federation is way better as you get the advantages of centralization and decentralization without the downsides. As a Mutualist, I will always fight against centralized authoritarian control in favor for direct stakeholder control.
"I just left negative 40, y'all--I don't care if it's raining." You managed to put the button on where I think this localizing of social scenes is going, right at the end there. That's what it's gonna feel like in another twenty to forty years. Flippin' artful
The large social media platforms are such a missed oppertunity for society. If only their keepers had optimized their algorithms for productive discourse instead of engagement, the world might look so different now
Thanks for you sharing your thoughts on this. Communication is everything, determines which ideas bubble up and find acceptance. We're in need of radical new solutions, but the fragmentation makes it hard for people to differentiate signals. This is good for finding a space where you can meaningfully interact, yet challenging when that space has maladaptive behaviors/ideas. It's a strange feeling trying to connect with people in my life when they talk about XYZ platform and its norms, which are utterly impossible to keep up with, making it challenging to find common ground.
You put into words something which I now realise I’ve been seeing (and getting anxious about) in all my spaces. Thanks for this video and I’ll voice just one of many thoughts I had- I wonder whether the fracture is a good thing for us interpersonally, because yes it’s how it used to be and arguably small group spaces are what our brains evolved to handle and respond to. But under information capitalism we now live in a society where any of those smaller digital are only impenetrable up to a price. Digital sequestered spaces can still be open to others who want to exploit them if they have the resources. I think in that fractured setting the impact of ‘exposing’ others views becomes outsize AND the power of those who have capital and own those digital resources to do so is enhanced. When people are less used to seeing others’ ideas I think it becomes even more harmful when say, a corporation with an interest in spinning someone else’s ideas to fuel a political motive, gets ahold of out-of-context material from ‘the other side’s’ sequestered space. It gets to be more shocking and more sensational, and is more likely to then go undefended. Of course one kind of user will always have more power to do so: we’ll see fractures along lines of race and class as we always have, which means there will still be the people who own the digital services and media (the narrative and power to ‘expose’) in certain spaces, and those who use it (and are always watched) in others. I think fracture will enhance the power imbalance because some folks will always have a bigger set of resources to spin other folks ideas their own way. Places like Twitter were far from democracy but it could be argued - like you implied- that they lowered the resource barrier for regular people with a cause to get a similar audience to, and defend against, those who literally own the narrative.
Queer here! I think it's good that all of social media is fracturing. It gives a lot more of that grey area where the powers that be can't get at us. They can't see us and filter us on here.
In British subculture the fracture has made people really discontent with their local communities. Parasocial relationships have become so intensely specialised that people are becoming disenfranchised with their local third spaces (at a time when supply is already on its knees because of Covid). Rural communities become more segregated so minorities flee to the cities, where gentrifiers jump to profit from the influx, causing deeper segregation within the cities too. Intersectionality is more valued than unity and everyone ends up feeling more and more isolated and mistrustful of anyone outside their immediate bubble, and local political mobilisation is slowly becoming impossible
I completely dropped out of all social media apart from the nerdfighter subreddit. I have no idea what the landscape of that world is anymore but my world is great. I talk to people when i want and read things i decide to.
Honestly, the fracturing has been a big relief for me. I'm worried about the negatives as well, but so far the upsides have been VERY BIG for me. I'm feeling so much better about people these days and humanity in general, even with everything going on. I'm back to spending more of my time on the things and people I care about, and it feels good. What this means for progression and information exchange I do not know, and that makes me anxious. But maybe we've just realized the way we've been using the internet, is not how we actually want to use the internet. Or maybe that's just me haha. Either way, I hope the fracturing is a sign of something good to come, instead of a step backwards. I think it's a good sign personally, but I'm just some guy
Actually. They could have corrected it to: "Love your work, Hank. You've been a great teacher over the years." You could at least do them right and show them how to fix the sentences they used. Your grammar isn't correct either since you have a capital letter after a comma. @@user-dh6bj2me5p
@@raptorhunter5549 In other words, you are not literate. Good on you? Enjoy being ignorant. By the way. You are NOT my "bro." Both of my brothers are educated and intelligent.
in one sense you're right about not being able to reach everyone as easily if things are more scattered, but I think there are two counters to that. The first and simpler one is that the people in the space where you can reach them are the most engaged so the most likely to do something like pressure people to reduce the cost of medicine. That's pretty simple. The other one will take a little while, but it's worthwhile. in the past one of the ways that people could tell people really cared about something was that they physically wrote a letter, paid money for a stamp and sent it to them. Because it was harder they'd assume that for every one person who cared enough there were many who cared, but hadn't written a letter. In more recent years people have gotten 100,000 signatures asking people to change the CGI in a movie and no one really takes it all that serious because they know how easy it is. So, if it's just a bit more difficult to reach everyone and get them together it will make it more obvious that people really do care about it when they do. Because while I can't speak for everyone I'm more likely to put in a bit of extra effort to get my voice heard if it's about saving a life than if it's about which version of a movie I get to see.
I'm optimistic about fracturing our social spaces. Imagine you lived in a small town with a local cult. In order to be recruited into that cult someone would first have to convince you to physically go to a meeting. That meeting will have some charismatic leader who uses practiced rhetoric and fear as motivation, and if they are also asking for money they will be very determined to recruit you. Hearing all those same talking points filtered through an acquaintance, a friend, or a family member just isn't the same experience and is much easier to say no to. Today, all of the fearmongering cult charismatic leader pitches you could generate are algorithmically sorted by engagement and the winner is at the top of your feed every morning. The fracturing of our social spaces could, maybe, increase that barrier to entry a little bit. At least, if you had to sign up for an account and browse another site to run into them, that's better than running into them randomly on the same site you browse for general entertainment or news. On the other hand there are many things I'm not optimistic about and don't think we currently have solutions for. We lost important things in the transition away from in-person social interaction. The filtering of ideas through many brains over one brain to many. Imagine if sharing something required you to rewrite the entire thing in your own words or video yourself giving your own speech. The nuisances of body language, pitch and tone that we use to detect lies and determine conviction of belief. Even on video platforms, I would argue that a recorded performance of a lie is not the same as lying in person to someone's face. The social etiquette and physical proximity that makes it hard to disengage from an interaction we find uncomfortable, forcing us to engage with each other even when we disagree. We also gained things that are arguably bad and hard to solve. The consolidation of complex problems into soundbite posts that degrade the arguments surrounding them into pointless shouting matches. Online anonymity that makes it easier than ever to harass and dehumanize each other. Sometimes I wonder if even the sheer amount of content is worsening our ability to communicate by decreasing the number of cultural touchstones we share. People often use media that resonates with them to talk about real problems. I'm old enough to remember a time when talking about the movies that came out recently was like talking about the weather, small talk that almost everyone could engage in. Now it's a major coincidence if I run into someone who watches one of the same UA-cam channels I watch.
"Fractured" is the true nature of the internet. It's always been like this, we just had a bunch of wealthy people pour billions of dollars into an experiment to draw everyone together, and it's a huge failure. We sowed the seeds for toxic meltdown and we got people inverting and completely watering down the most negative terms that we used to use to describe all of the worst kinds of people. The more social media breaks apart, the better the world will be.
In the late 90s a lot of us young delusional outcasts thought we could turn "online" into its own political territory with its own government and secede from the world. It's obviously ridiculous looking at it now but at the time it felt *so possible*.
One big difference between the fracturing now and the fracturing before social media is the size of the population that the fractures are created within. Larger populations can create more hyperspecific, hyper filtered fractures. I think that tends to feel good but can lead to echo bubbles and a lack of understanding. I much preferred going to a HS with 300 people in my class than the one I went to with only 20 because I got to choose my friends. We were more alike than different but those differences still existed. Now our class is the whole world and we can create groups without those differences at all.
There are upsides and downsides. I'm personally much better off mental-health-wise with my collection of various Discord servers than I ever was on Facebook. I don't know whether I should be afraid of what "those people I disagree with" are doing behind closed doors. Maybe it's pretty scary, but nowadays I basically never think about it. It's not as if I was actually helping by worrying and shouting into the void and stirring the pot before, so for my part, "ignoring the scary people" and "letting them say scary things unchallenged" is probably a net positive for the world.
You know I think a correct outlook on the organization of social systems should be thought of as having both types. Big for making sure people don’t get too violent minded and small so people can get creative. Social roles on the internet can be fluid
If there’s anything the larger platforms have shown me it’s that maybe some people shouldn’t have an audience. Idk. Is that wrong to think? I reached my own point of social platform saturation when facebook wanted me to download an entirely different app just to message. On facebook. So no, no I didn’t do that. I use one platform now to post photos occasionally, and once in a while check on my friends and family in the other. But I’m an introvert, who has kinda lost faith in a lot of society’s organizations (religion, social media, government) and am managing my own mental health by staying present and engaged with the people I interact with one on one (or in person, just living my life). People are a lot less obnoxious when they aren’t part of a mob with a cause :/ and yeah I am even saying that about my past self. I’m glad folks like you are still out there participating and speaking and listening though. It’s a little ray of hope.
I think it's good as a society to fracture up large thought monopolies as what Twitter was, even though as an artist I do now consider reaching an audience significantly harder since leaving it. Also, while this gained traction in the last few years both on the right (Truth Social) and the left (Mastodon) it's worth noting that niche spaces and social media platforms always existed. Forums were always a thing online, and smaller platforms like the aforementioned Mastodon were a thing for almost 10 years now, they're just more on the spotlight now.
Just want to push back a bit on the idea that Discord server conversations are private -- even if the server in question is invite-only, it can be a lot easier to get that invite link than you might believe. This kind of stuff is how activists got a hold of a lot of chatter from the Unite The Right organizers off Discord, for example. All that said I'm not sure if this decentralizing of platforms is good or bad. I think it would be better if it weren't happening along societal fault lines surrounding politics. I do think it's good for Twitter and FB in particular to have some competition, though, especially of the Fediverse sort.
Contemplating the concept of "niching" of online social spaces, it strikes me as almost an entropic shift towards the way culture was formed and information was shared before the initial rise of popular internet monoculture. I don't think it is good or bad, but I do think it is interesting!
i wish that like 6 years ago twitter would've just made a feature that's asks u after you engage with something like "did you want to engage with that?" with a y/n answer. cool ai application would be a follow-up question of "what did you not enjoy about it?" / "what's something you rather engage with?" and that refines the algorithm for u! that would make it so much better ugh
IT is GOOD to have separate social spaces for separate things. I am sure many people don't want the furry femboy content that I enjoy in their face, and I absolutely despise makeup tutorials. When I want to know what someone I hate is doing, I can simply search for them of my own volition without it being shoved in my face. It's not me or them being fringe or cringe, just a matter of us having different tastes.
I haven't been a Big Social Media person since 2015 so this influences my thoughts here, but it seems mostly a good thing to me. Following ~45 tumblrs and being on a discord of friends creates a social space that allows for connection and for connection across cultures and geography and to an extent across politics, without sitting in front of the Blast of Inflammatory Information and Opinions from Random People.
I'm old enough (59) to remember the former fractured world. I despise that the niche hate groups have found ways to connect. I loathe that conspiracy theories travel at the speed of light now. BUT... I prefer the interconnections that our social networks afford us. It has allowed marginalized groups to help and support each other. We just need to seek out those bad actors and keep an eye on them. Pity the justice department doesn't seem to consider it a priority.
Speaking as somebody that has been followed by a covert organization for over ten years, I feel that the fracturing was intentional. Keeping people divided is necessary in the current financial universe. Keeps people from building a parallel financial universe. One with the technology that enables a level 0 civilization, cooperation.
I have noticed that within the complex hierarchical social structures we've created as humans, that we are so specialized, that we no longer are connected to nor understanding the needs others are fulfilling for us, nor the needs of those others. This is then very easily exploited for the gain of a small group of people who manage to take control of the narrative. Bigger differences encoded into the societal fabric lead inherently to less mutual understanding and quite easily to more and bigger fractures between different groups. Lately I've really been thinking a lot about the tower of Babel, where people could no longer understand each other. Unless we actively and consciously do something about this, it might be very problematic.
Thanks for talking about this, I think this is a great topic of discussion. The thing is that it’s good to have a connecting place where you can feel safe. We also need to be pushed and stretched to battle with new and different ideas and learn from them. With everyone being able to see everything means a loss of (social) safety and increase of connectivity. With the fracturing there is an increase of safety and decrease in connectivity/exposure. So let me ask you this, Is it much different than subscribing to different newspapers? What would it take for the niche/fringe to “overflow their riverbanks” to affect society as a whole (positively and negatively)? Would that be better or worse? Gone are the days of consumption monopoly.
I think we need both types of space. Facebook fell apart because (IMO) the online experience became exactly like real life, with all of your friends and family on top of each other. Back in the day there was nothing /new/ to see. And stuff stops being cool when your parents are into it, so we needed more spaces to break out of those smaller groups. Having a giant arena where you're relatively anonymous and can find whatever information you're looking for is a vital part of the internet. Discovering new people, new things and new ways of thinking is important. But at the same time, there's no point in me discussing the nerdy stuff that I love with everyone online or the people closest to me if they don't care about it. So we need those little communities as well, where like-minded people can discuss their passions. And of course that comes with positives and negatives too.
I quite like this move away from centralized platforms, because I was very late to join those centralized platforms. I spent nearly 20 years living primarily on message boards and content-specific forums, and I only stopped doing that in 2016 when the last one I frequented got shut down. That was when I first investigated things like Reddit and Twitter, and I don't think I like them. What does it mean for culture? I've always thought culture is a choice, and all choices are made by individuals, so I don't see any collective aspect to culture.
I think in their current format the major platforms are not allowing for one of the things on your list: empathizing with more people. When we have in-person good-faith conversations with people we don’t necessarily agree with we can take more time to talk and listen. Even if we don’t agree in the end we treated each other like humans. Very short character-limited conversation doesn’t necessarily allow for that, it’s more point-tallying with external people egging or booing publicly. We have rules for politeness and professionalism and negotiation that rely on empathy in in-person conversations. We need to try to figure those out for online spaces, bring the empathy in. Maybe small spaces will help? Maybe not, but I like that people are trying?
YES, I think this fracturing is good for our mental health - but personally this has made it much more difficult for me to promote ranked-choice voting (Voter Choice NJ) outside of people who already are similar to me or already interested in RCV. I have been asking everyone I know “how are you learning about new things”, vast majority is “heard from my friend via text/group chat”. We changed the default email follow up action for one of our petitions from “share this on social media” to “text this to your friends”. Even though the same amount of people clicked the links in our email, the referrals are way more effective via text, even though in theory they are going to a smaller audience.
This is *fascinating*. Thanks for sharing your perspective.
I've also found that promoting some local art events (shows, theatre, etc.) has been way more challenging recently - as opposed to the heyday of Facebook, say - because people seem to be spending a lot less time in "general" online spaces that track with their geographical / physical location.
It's not the only factor, obviously - whether we want to admit it or not, we are still reeling from the pandemic - but I do wonder how online fragmentation is contributing to real-world isolation.
@@Idefilmsmy own experience is that Discord and group chats make me feel far less isolated than social media - but nothing beats in person experiences.
is it better for your mental health? or was the other option deranged? what would actually be better for your mental health? maybe fixing broad issues keeping people polarized or isolated so more relatable people are available for you to reach out to?
and if that's the case being less able to change the system means actually be further from real progress and the positive feelings are just from getting your own little slice of control over the derangement.
I definitely share things with friends via text. The social media I frequent is not always the ones they do.
I know for me- and a lot of other people I know- we're tired. We are tired of being bombarded all the time. It's constant. Constantly have to be connected. Constantly have to be "informed." Constantly have to be in centralized groups. It's so nice to have a few specific (fractured) hobby groups in Discord I can chat with when I need help or want to share ideas, and then I can go back to my life again and not look at social media anymore. I think part of the fracture is part of the physical divide in the real world. A lot of people are starting to log off or doing their "social media detox."
I don't want to constantly hear radial ideas and claims. It's exhausting..
Yes! This! I think having to put everything into a place for everyone to see is a lot of pressure personally. I like having smaller circles.
why is it exhausting? because it's designed to prevent actionability by getting people to focus with clear heads on a solution. everyone being tired and bombarded keeps everyone from putting together their feelings with one direction isolating and draining us all.
"constantly have to be informed" I'm so tired 🥲
I actually stopped watching most of the news and cut all social media out in 2020 when the pandemic happened. Have NEVER been more content. @@LifeOfInsamity
I use subreddits the same way. I'm not "on Reddit". I'm a member of some niche interest groups that have spaces hosted on the website.
I was reading the comments here, thinking "Wow, there are so many interesting, thought-provoking comments here already, to the extent that I don't know how or if I should add to the conversation... I'd better go check the subreddit for a thread on this video, it's usually a bit quieter and less overwhelming over there."
And then I realized that thought I had is kinda what this video is about.
reddit is such a left wing hive mind it's obscene.
@@twelvecatsinatrenchcoatfunny to hear you say that. It certainly has gotten more left-wing, but Reddit contains some major right-wing communities that are quite active
@@brettjenkins1645 And all "quarantined" like they have a sickness.
Reddit treats conservatives the same way Chinese zoos treat gorillas.
@@twelvecatsinatrenchcoat I wish reddit was as leftist as right wingers thought it was
@@FushishouI've voted party line Democrat up until 2022 when I voted for one Republican sheriff candidate. I've been a liberal for two decades. I was a registered card carrying Democrat who still gets emailed donation requests.
Reddit is a leftist hivemind.
The most worrying thing about fracturing into Discord is that those communities get historically vanished when they fall apart, whereas old Forum communities like vBulletin back in the day got archived by places like WayBackMachine to go hunt down that knowledge even after the communities fall out of activity.
There have always been a balance of good & bad about the larger centralized locations the way Radio & TV existed vs. Fanclubs or smaller local interest groups.
I feel like it's just a natural ebb & flow of tides for the aspect of those things that we need most, as they change over time and those changes drives the success of the platforms on & in which those take place.
it's almost like that allows control of information by people allowing stuff like patreon servers with exclusive knowledge sharing. commercialization and commodification of our relations by trickle down abusability. woo!!
Yes but even radio and tv are also not so centralized when you consider local news or programs. Because some things only interest particular groups.
Like podcasts, which can be super long and successful and you have never heard about them. And you don’t have to.
I just started listening to an xmen podcast which has existed for several years named cerebrocast, for example
Bring back public web forums!
Yeah, Discord is a nightmare for the archival of institutional knowledge. I do a lot of videogame modding, and for older games you can easily find years and years of (googlable!) accumulated knowledge on dedicated web forums, neatly organised into subforums and comment threads. For newer games that just have a modding Discord, not only is it impossible to find anything right now, it'll all be gone for good once that particular community dwindles.
@@HeadsFullOfEyeballs _EXACTLY_ this. I've been involved with lots of game-related things and that's why even while the community I'm a part of has a Discord, the forums and site itself are a key part of that structure. Having migrated from forums during the years when admins would just up and pull hosting, a lot of the Google records and Way Back are still important backups of that data that Discord doesn't have at all, and islands of knowledge like that get WAY too easily lost.
People used to be in GEOGRAPHIC spaces, which will admit for diversity through people who connected across communities. Now we're in information spaces where people silo by thought instead, which makes it harder for people to gain perspective and change.
Yeah there are really good reasons to get out of your geographic communities now. But for thought communiti4es its really easy to stay in them an be content while at the same time being afraid of the thought-outside.
geographic space is still informational, keeping a map in your head and through which all things you knew related was useful we just don't have unassailed information flow to enable the same kind of relational tracking for these new communities which is why they are susceptible to social hierarchy.
@malteborgmanm2626 its worse because most people think there community is diverse of thought when really its just an echo chamber of probably 2 or 3 similar ideas. I think this stems from our real hesitation to accept opposing views as having any merit.
The algorithm is both a blessing and a curse here. It's helpful to find the things you're interested in. However, when you're not looking for information, but for affirmation, it will show you all the things that fit into your own world view. It stops the stimulation of thought and doubt. Considering most people don't want to admit or even realize they are wrong, that part is very detrimental to grow the willingness to change or discuss.
It's kind of funny to me that it's easy for us to think that we "used" to be in geographic spaces. I have to remind myself a lot that just because I spend a lot of my time in information spaces, I still live in a physical one. Remembering not to just broadcast myself in a digital town square, but to actually show up for local elections and city council meetings is a constant struggle. Still very important since that tends to have more impact than my ramblings ever did on Facebook and Twitter :P
I am fascinated by this, and also have been thinking about it lately to some extent. As someone who caught the last little bit of "everybody watches TV," before that basically stopped, I now contemplate how no two people seem to be watching the same shows. But I also wonder how the "fracture," if you will, appears different depending on generation. I am a young man, and media centralization is something I have taken for granted for years, and I hated most things about it. When I was a small boy growing up at the very bottom of the economic strata, the fact that everyone had cable and knew things from cable left me perpetually outside what people insisted was the zeitgeist. Later on, the fact that everyone was on social media not only made them seem significantly unhappier than me, but it meant they were catching particular shockwaves I wasn't. Interestingly, however-and I observed this both before, during, and after I tried social media myself-everyone was catching different shockwaves (not just two polarized ones, but many, many different ones, although polarization was certainly an element) and thinking they were catching the "main," centralized one they assumed I was on.
I'm not sure what both of these things mean. From a systemic standpoint, cable actually is / was centralized, and people really were all largely aware of the same body of shows. Now we have UA-cam, and lots of different streaming services, and the last show popular enough everyone seemed to know about it was Mandalorian (which is the only show since Game of Thrones, it seems, to have achieved that, whether or not an individual happened to like either. I guess a lot of people knew about Stranger Things, kind of?). You could argue that the world of UA-cam and streaming services is far more fractured, or more spun into niches, but it's hard to say it's just worse (the fact I can choose what I want to watch, and when, seems to make it a lot easier to watch it with people I care about, as a matter of fact).
By contrast, I know from a systems design standpoint the alleged "centralization" of social media platforms was a sleight of hand trick. While it's true most tweets on X-Twitter came from a small number of accounts, however that statistic is / was skewed by bots, the reality is nonetheless that what an individual account sees is tailored to them algorithmically. There was no "central" experience of Twitter, only individual ones that-here's the key part-were presented as the "main" experience of that social platform. "Everybody" posts like this, thinks like this, believes like this, and information that contradicts that one narrative was not only swept under the rug, but the fiction was maintained that this was the norm, and that you could definitely totally see under the rug, everyone saw the same nothing under the rug. So everyone and no one was right.
When I think of how the fiction media space "fractured," nowadays I don't find myself in an echo chamber that assures me everyone is watching The Ghost and Molly McGee on Disney+ as a grown man, or Hermitcraft videos on UA-cam. It doesn't seem to matter if Grian gets a million plus views per video, no one I talk to anywhere outside of the Hermitcraft corner of UA-cam seems to have ever heard of it, which consistently reminds me that, well, I'm not the "norm," no one's the "norm."
Speaking as an autistic who has spent most of my life as also visibly disabled, I know what being in a minority is like, and the problem is not being in a small group, it's the large one thinking they are "normal." It is normal to walk, so there's no ramp outside your building, it is normal to make eye contact, so if I don't you won't trust what I say as much if I'm interviewing for a job (or even, in many cases, if you're a doctor and I need time-sensitive medical intervention, potentially leading to long-term or lifelong complications. Medical neglect is one of the leading causes of death in autistics). The centralization of cable sucked to some extent as a kid growing up without it, but what sucked more was the assumption that I would and should be interested in SpongeBob, and that there was no need to learn about a show like WordGirl. The impression of centralization created by platforms like Twitter was worse, not merely because it was a social space, but because it was deceptive and yet compelling, so everyone really thought they were part of the majority. While I know some of these smaller platforms (cough, "Truth" Social, cough) absolutely facilitate extremism and radicalization, I also know most people only found them through places like Facebook and Twitter, and thought specifically that they were in the majority (and therefore "normal" and justified) because of those places (as a matter of fact, people who moved to them moved specifically because they already believed in that fictional rendition of reality and found it becoming unwelcome on "centralized" platforms because of attempts at moderation, although I personally struggle to believe those attempts were super effective anyway).
If the social "fracture" actually does finally shatter people's impression they are the "normal" ones by doing for social media what streaming and UA-cam did for fiction media, where I'm standing from my anecdotal perspective as one member of diverse, overlapping minorities, I can only really see positives from that. I wear pins from the youtube Minecraft SMP Life Series almost whenever I go out and about, and whenever people ask about them I have to struggle to try to explain what the heck that even is, and mostly can't. I wish I could give people the same joy I get from the Life Series, but it certainly keeps me grounded to be reminded I'm just some guy, and everybody likes different stuff and is experiencing very different media spaces. If everyone had to be daily reminded they existed with very different perspectives and experiences, without a social hegemony to cling to (real or imagined), perhaps there'd be a touch less marginalization. Maybe it's silly to compare fiction and social media this way, and still sillier to hold such an optimistic hope, but a guy can dream.
Super well put! It was definitely a socially excluding experience not having access to eg the Disney channel in the 2000s for me, and as you’re saying-who says or even has the right to determine that Disney is mainstream to begin with? In the last couple years of Twitter i increasingly remember seeing takes that most of the folks on there didn’t really understand that the majority of people (apart from journalists) never even checked the platform.
I relate to this too even though the only point of intersection between “my media” and “your media” might have been Word Girl. My kids watched a lot of PBS Kids shows and Word Girl is one of the ones I enjoyed watching with them. I never had a Twitter account or watched Mandelorian, Game of Thrones or Stranger Things and often feel like no one else knows the same shows I enjoy.
You're focusing a lot on entertainment and your personal experiences grappling with identity and norms, and it's very insightful. But there's still the issue of spreading important ideas to large audiences. Maybe we don't need to centralize every conversation, but there are many problems that need attention from most of society. Political movements, environmental catastrophes, or just spreading awareness of marginalized people. Twitter wasn't the solution, but social media in general gives us the power to educate and motivate millions of people. Fracturing into thousands of niches and gated communities could make that impossible.
Personally, I would like to have BOTH. Smaller online communities that allow you to connect with relatable people and have productive conversations. And a reliable centralized "public town square" to keep up with bigger issues and discover new interests and perspectives. But maybe I'm dreaming too.
I think I'm fighting two biases while trying to be neutral with my thoughts here. First is that change is bad and that what was, is better. Second is my personal attachment to resolving injustices. But I think having less of the public town square, publicly visible, searchable, and archived on the internet, is a net negative.
Yes, we need more personal, smaller, tighter knit communities, but who's to say that wasn't available pre-fracture. It was always available, it just never was the town square. Then the town square existed, or was presumed to be existing. It wasn't _the_ town square, but it was a very large square. Then due to how much we're seeing voices boosted and abundant, specifically our own, as well as extremes, we couldn't handle that, so we moved away to find something better. I'm just not sure if we moved from the town square to a local gathering online or offline.
Maybe there will be people more accepting of themselves as geeks. I just don't think that will help them understand others could be unlike them better at all.
Historically that doesn't seem to be the case.
I wouldn't be meeting trans or disabled or neurodivergent people at all if it weren't for the town square. I mean, in some cases I don't even know them or know that I'm one of them. The so-called algorithm led me to them.
That said, I'm not that worried. A shift doesn't necessarily mean overcorrection, and the issues I mentioned can be solved in some capacity. There have been efforts to make the private "deep" web searchable and able to be archived. Things will evolve regardless, and if people at least try to be better, I'm sure we won't end up in a bad place.
P.S. I like long thoughts but I believe your comment would reach more audience if you added more paragraph breaks to make it more easy to read.
💚💛❤️ I didn't have a tv at all growing up and I think it may have helped me, like you, to see that a lot of stuff will just float by eventually
The thing about social content fracture now versus when things were niche pre-internet is that we no longer have much in the way of mass culture outside of things like sports. This makes sustained, organized mass political action much more difficult to pull off, as the connective tissue of shared culture isn't really there anymore. Obviously, media fragmentation isn't the primary cause of social dislocation and atomization, but it certainly doesn't help.
even sports are more niche than they used to be. The percentage of America that watches the NFL has been declining for a while. There is no mainstream
young people love anime, that seems universally popular
Out of curiosity, what do you think is the primary cause of social atomization if media fracturing isn't it?
Yes! I even feel this way about the entertainment we consume. You used to be able to make references to things and people would get it because we were mostly watching the same things. Now there’s so many options for entertainment, you don’t know if anyone else in the room watches the same movies and shows you do.
@@tarttooth6022 Seems to me, its the inevitable result of the sudden social *centralization* over the last couple decades. People weren't prepared to see the full spectrum of personalities, and all the loud stressful bickering invading every topic. The lowest common denominator on display, and our failure to educate them. Countless people that never learned the difference between argument and discussion. And the complete lack of accountability. It never feels like you're making progress when talking on the internet, so why bother?
I figured we would get over this hump after society recalibrated together, but now it looks like everyone is giving up and retreating.
I feel like the primary difference between a highly fractured vs highly centralized social landscape is one of velocity. In a less connected environment you're exposed to new ideas and discussions less frequently and from sources more likely to be seen as in-group, where in a more connected social landscape you're just fed a firehose of every idea all the time and your brain has to try to deal with that accelerated pace. This definitely has some impact on odds of exposure to radical groups and such, but, I think more importantly, it means that in a less connected/slower landscape your brain isn't forced to rely so heavily on heuristics and cognitive biases to deal with the flood of new. You're more likely to actually consider opposing viewpoints when they're coming from in-group sources and infrequently, which hopefully means we can start to back away from the extremes of polarization we've seen in recent times.
I mean, isn't it better to have both?
Have some intimate spaces, and have some public spaces, like a spoke and wheel model. And the most interesting/relevant things from the small group gets transmitted to the wider world, and vice versa.
@@antigonemerlin I actually don't think it is. The problem being that the "public" spaces are effectively poison to nuance. The more we're presented with information the less we can take time to process and think about what's presented. Especially if its easily dismissed as coming from "others", and especially if those public spaces select for outrage and disagreement, which every current implementation does.
I don't think adding on less connected spaces does anything to blunt that harm from the highly connected spaces. Maybe I'm underestimating the ability for more private spaces to forge connections across dividing lines and thus blunt the divisive influence of highly connected spaces, but I'd argue we've been living in that model for decades now and it's fairly clear to see the damage the connected spaces have done to our social fabric.
This video works almost like an inner dialogue, but from someone else with different knowledge and ideas. I think this form of communication would work best for me. Fully air out thoughts and then see others’.
My concern about fracturing platforms is that it will further fracture news.
The echo chambers of information are one of the driving parts of political polarization. I see this as a furthering of that
I thought the opposite had been shown to be true? Being bombarded with stuff you disagree with is polarizing (you are constantly pressured to oppose things). "Echo chambers" are comfortable and don't elicit the same reaction. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been super polarizing and they predominantly like to show you stuff that will make you angry, not stuff you agree with. (because engagement is maximized when you're shown stuff you disagree with)
They are already fractured based on what papers you read or channel you watch. I don’t think there is a single TRUTH that we can all agree with so nothing against fractured news.
Some things only matter for particular groups or people who are curious about it.
The “echo chamber” goes both ways in that regard, we all hate the same thing or we all like the same thing, it’s the uniformity of opinion that’s the issue. And it’s not just a hard right problem. Look at someone like me, I’m hardcore liberal, especially by the standards of the southern U.S. I interact primarily with liberal media and I’m picky about where I get my science info. I react to, for example, Anti- climate change or even climate change neutral information as enemy propaganda, I can’t help it. But that makes it hard to have meaningful conversations with say my dad, who is a genuinely good person that I love very much but he exist in an entirely different world view because he has been given different information by sources that he trust. The echo chamber makes it much easier to dismiss people who have a different world view as irrelevant, it’s hard to work towards a solution with someone when you see them as the enemy and not a partner.
I don't know how to un-fracture news, but I see facebook as being a major force behind its fracturing. So its hard for me to imagine moving away from that kind of model as making the problem worse.
Its also worth noting that in this community we see this fracturing as a choice people are making (ie I am aware that I am training multiple algorithms to serve me vlogbrothers and minecraft content) while for a large majority of the population, particularly older individuals and those less technically inclined, it is being done for them without their awareness. It is one thing to be in a filter bubble and be aware that the reality you see online is just a small sliver of the world, but it is another to live in a place where everyone thinks like you AND see that everyone online thinks like you as well.
This poses the danger that beyond just thinking that extreme ideas area acceptable, people may believe their ideas are mainstream and held by the majority. It would be interesting to see a poll of how many people over x age (say 40) know that even if they never sign into youtube, their home page is being entirely shaped by their search history after only a day or two. (The same people who may not distingish between the credibility of even Fox News compared to RealTalk with Jimmy853, especially when audio and video quality can be stunningly close to studio for $200 in lights and a good webcam.
Thanks Hank! This is so timely for me - I teach 18-19 year old students and we are currently discussing social media in politics, and you've articulated some excellent points very clearly. Ill be borrowing them to foster some debate!
Does that come before or after you do the race privilege walk and tell all the yt kids they're evil?
I've been thinking about this a lot too. I have cut way back on social media, pretty much just youtube and twitch, keeping up with people I already know. In the last Philosophy Tube episode, Abi talked about social reproduction, which got me thinking about social evolution. More than 10-15 years ago, a much smaller percentage of people were regular/heavy internet users, so The Internet felt more or less like one very large community. Like back in the day when Rewind could capture the main highlights of a whole year, and my classmate's cousin was one of the first people in the partner program. As more and more people got internet access (a very good thing), more people with vastly different values were coming into contact with each other, in a way and at a scale that doesn't happen in meat space. So community values got more and more diluted as platforms tried to accommodate as many people as possible while following laws that haven't kept up with tech developments. Humans psychologically need safety and community, so that's what's driving the fracture. People are carving out their own communities. I think this is a great thing since now community isn't restricted by geography if say being queer or disabled gives one different values than one's geographically convenient community. And I think the goal for global understanding and empathy can be "different contexts give people different values and that's ok" rather than "everyone should agree on the Best set of values." As far as the fringe belief concern, it is very difficult and not recommended to get people to change their values through rules/laws/punishment. You can ban a bigot to prevent harm, but that doesn't make them not a bigot, they're just gonna go be terrible somewhere else. Values are best changed through community. "Hey you need to cool it with the racist jokes" is better received from someone in one's community rather than a stranger. Combating social isolation of fringe groups is the way to address fringe beliefs, easier said than done of course.
Armies can win wars, but it takes committees to maintain peace. I mean humans have a group based psychology. Small groups are good at allowing members to better understand each other and thereby evaluate the group's motives and actions more objectively. Big groups can get more done, but a lot has to be taken on faith by the members. And that faith can easily be abused.
that faith is only required in big groups due to elites deliberately sabotaging the flow of information which can't be done as easily in small groups of well remembered relation.
it's entirely possible the only thing preventing it is a willing blindness to the problem. are committees genuinely needed for large scale communal action or just handy when everyone is hierarchal?
No committees, everyone who disagrees with me about anything is a racist sexist homophobic Nazi -The Left, Hank in this video
I saw something recently that said "People in the 70s thought world peace was possible, but you don't hear that now." It's pretty telling that we could hold the ideals of a unified society until we started communicating in this manner.
Social media was a sudden and dramatic change in the grand scheme of history. It was shocking for a lot of people. But I don't think that tells us if we can overcome these issues and unite in the future. It revealed the worst of society to everybody else on the platform, but that's not an accurate representation of the real world. We just need to adjust and recalibrate together. Many people were dragged down by bullies and trolls and lunatics, but we can pull everybody back up together gradually.
I wonder about the cause and effect. It seems the fracturing is at least partially caused by the inability of people to engage in good faith. Platforms seem to be fracturing because of that, rather than causing people to have worse engagement.
It's a much harder problem to solve bad faith arguments in general, than to address platform fracturing.
Twitter is twitter until they change the URL.
even then idk…
I was just thinking the other day about the Black mirror episodes and other sci-fi where we were talking about the horrors of online consensus and comparing them to this fractured model which is actually a lot more like what I grew up with in the '80s and '90s, and also sucked. A little bit like we had the potential for something and then we got super jaded about it and killed it.
And I know we didn't actually kill it, so much as a bunch of Rich assholes decided to kill it because they didn't like press coverage, but I think there were things we could have learned there and hopefully we can still learn them. Having a centralized platform for news and media and fact-checking that everyone had access to was absolutely amazing. And it is still I think an admirable goal
Yeah but not having it be completely centralized let’s people curate the content and news they consume into things that actually interest them because otherwise it just becomes random noise
@@andrecarpenter2432It absolutely does, but It also disconnects people from Central stories. For example, there's an argument to be made that stories about major world events, current political issues, wars, things like that are important to basically everybody. And it would be weird if I had to go to a discord about running role-playing games and dig into their current channel to find that stuff. And I would rightfully question the veracity of those stories.
When Twitter was working it gave me a centralized place to get that sort of news. Now I usually get it a day or two late. Or I get it from Reddit, but that's also very biased towards the sorts of stories that I choose to put on my dash.
I'm always impressed with the level of which you can picture these complex social dynamics. I'd really enjoy a book written by you on this.
i mean he did write a couple of fiction books that are about exactly this
I don't know if you've read An Absolutely Remarkable Thing or A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, but if not: They are very much Hank picturing the complex social dynamics of the internet, and examining their impact on individuals and society. They're _really_ good books.
@@holyflutterofgod Thanks for the tip ♥️
Idk, I’m not a fan of the fracturing. I know it’s uncomfortable to see all the different sides of Us all in one place, but I think in terms of growing our awareness of each other and ourselves, it’s been pretty revolutionary.
I also think that over time, we’re going to be able to more clearly track eras of internet time similar to eras of human time, how civilizations tend to form and tend to fall…
So I'm a sociologist and I've been studying extremism in American politics for several years now. Here my argument about centralized platforms and alt-right/ white supremacists is that it was far easier to study them when they were on centralized platforms. One could easily track their movements and see their content very easily. I think as a researcher and imo its better for social media to fracture because look at how big platforms handle extremists. UA-cam and Facebook, as you pointed out, normalized extremist opinions. I think when it comes to stopping extremists, its better to have fractured social media, however when it comes to informing the masses, it becomes harder to combat disinformation and report scientific discoveries.
I resonate with that. Like, there's no value "keeping an eye on" these people when no one really does anything about it.
I guess a sociologist is one of the few people who has a reason to keep tabs on people who share vile ideas. But, on behalf of the rest of us, I am very glad to have those people in their own fractured spaces, far away from me.
Aka you'd prefer centralized media to allow more controlling of the narrative and controlling what information is spread and read by the population? Who'd have thought a sociologist would hold that view??!?!??😂
@@jonnyd9351you just straight up twisted everything they said to suit your views in a paranoia fueled screed lol😂😂😂😂😂
@@princessjello No, they are insinuating that centralized media is better except it doesn't suppress ideas she dislikes enough. L
I'm.. of the same, conflicting mind about it. I'm glad that people will be getting upset about niche things they don't need to worry about less because it'll be happening in a different space, and I'm also worried that maybe the practice of stumbling upon a niche community that you find gross and realizing it's harmless and you don't need to be upset about it is an extremely valuable practice as a human that one should have more opportunities to experience.
The fracture we're discussing, to me, is simply a more natural return to people discussing issues within their own community. I think for a long time we've thought about the internet as a layer above reality, connecting everyone into some massive network; and we simply could not have imagined just how loud it gets when billions of people are screaming, and people start getting paid and paying each other by volume and propensity.
I truly think what's happening in this second, more skeumorphic era of the internet, is simply a parallel reality that matches the one we all grew up with, that typified society before the internet / tv / radio / printing press etc. Groups of communities that come together based around similar interests and beliefs, discussing the subtle differences in opinions without fear of some bizarre outliers and bad-faith critiques. Just like in high school, college, workplaces, gyms, bars, bathhouses and DIY spaces, we're seeing people with common interests come together to make friends and gently challenge one another to be our best selves, taking one another's situations into account, and reading each other charitably.
I spend most of my online time in a discord whose main rule is "this is not a community, it's my house. Make yourself at home, don't be icky." We can get into the weeds on what that means to different people, but if everyone's reading that in good faith and positivity, then we all get to have a far more genuine experience than say, barking into twitter. That's my thoughts, at least at the moment.
This lines up with exactly how I feel. Thank you for articulating it.
I guess my only concern now is that I feel like online life (plus a pandemic) smashed some of the IRL mechanisms which helped us feel less lonely and isolated.
Don't get me wrong - online life also saved so many people who would have been marginalized/ostracized by their IRL communities. I don't have rose-tinted glasses for the past, here.
I just know that loneliness is a generalized modern epidemic and it doesn't seem like online life is really helping with that.
Thoughts?
Love the post ❤
@@Idefilms I've thought a lot about that, recently. My spouse and I have lamented that, while we're grateful to have each other and two very good friends we see often, on a broader scale it feels like we all used to go to parties, have more outings and third spaces. I'm sure you know the drill, the things I've recently discovered many, many people are saying online, not just us.
I think the solution might require a little ego death, and really comes down to throwing themed parties as adults, asking friends to invite other friends, explicitly asking the nice clerk or funny waitress "Hi, I'm XXX and I like YYY and listen to ZZZ, and making friends is so stupid and hard, do you like ABC?" It's embarrassing and shameful by society's standards to just be a regular human, and I think that might be a reflection of our newfound internet anonymity, as opposed to real life where we have speech impediments and bad hair days and seasonal allergies. I don't have a perfect answer, but we've gone from one best friend to two by telling the grocery store clerk "you're so pretty and nice, please be our new best friend." Tomorrow we're throwing a Twin Peaks party in her honor. So far, it's working at least a little!
@@KattKirsch LOVE this. Thanks for sharing 😊
❤️
I feel that the fracture of social spaces was fine in the past because it was connected to how physically close you are to someone. I’m not sure how good it is for us to be in different social spaces, but live next to someone who exists in a different social space. It’s possible large social spaces online are better because youre more likely to interact with the social perspectives of your neighbor.
Hank, You're so socially aware and I love the efforts you and John put in to fighting TB and tackling the complex issue of education. If you could do one more thing, I would ask that it be the beginning of a new, loud conversation about solving homelessness and the ease with which we could do it here in the US. There are a myriad of issues that homelessness creates for communities and individuals which sicken our society. we have 30x more empty homes on a adaily basis than registered homeless in the us. please, help begin this serious discussion.
Agreed! Also! This sounds like an amazing p4a cause!
some problems are maintained deliberately with servile answers. how do you fight that?
Homelessness isn't a breakdown of the system, it is deliberately practiced death politics in the name of maintaining "property/homes" as an appreciable asset and securing the "housing market". Property ownership is in itself a manifestation of the Tragedy of the Commons whereby groups of humans are deemed homo sacer (e.g. human sacrifice) for the sustenance of a known injust system. Homelessness is no more a solvable problem than suffering, greed, war, etc. Great for idealism and forming values, not so great as a subject of a solutions-oriented movement. Land ownership in its current form (i.e. the American legal definitions of property) is antithetical to any form of global human justice
The vacancy "issue" is a little bit a of a red herring. The existing vacant houses generally aren't where the homeless want to be. And for good reason! They're in the places without jobs (often because deindustrialization), or without social services, or they're far from where the people became homeless (most of California's homeless became homeless in the state).
Moreover, the vacancy rate in the US is the lowest it's been since we started recording this data.
We really need way more houses built in the places that people want to live. The bad news is that there's a large coalition of people on across the right (who hate change and want to exclude the poor and/or minorities from their neighborhoods) and left (who hate change and have a misguided fear that development causes* displacement). The good news is that there's a growing coalition of people who have succeeded at making it easier to build affordable homes in several cities and states over the last five years.
*there's absolutely a correlation, but the vast majority of the literature on the impacts of development shows that new development reduces displacement pressure by slowing rent increases. Basically the causality arrows look like this:
(1) increased neighborhood desirability + lack of houses -> displacement
(2) increased neighborhood desirability + lack of houses -> development
Of course, a lack of houses can be solved (in time) by sufficient development. But new development is largely illegal across the US, particularly in wealthier neighborhood. And the illegality of development in wealthier neighborhoods increases the desirability of neighborhoods where displacement is a concern.
@@42dotdotdot development is nice but a servile answer to socialite procurement. in truth state enforced scarcity is what we are talking about and it applied to more than housing, the only way to keep people procurable is artificial scarcity maintained by a monopoly on violence. the thought they couldn't find jobs to work at being the issue? where elites would be able to extract from them?
come on, there are enough houses even accounting for people who really want to reserve any personally for more than pathetic greed.
My daydream tech startup idea for years and years has been a fractured internet as a product model that sells physical servers with the closest FOSS equivalents of all your usual major internet-y things (twitter, FB, instagram, reddit, discord, YT, netflix, etc etc etc) as well as a long tail of operational support for those boxes. All of this would have a moderate focus on shared theming.
A community in a box sort of a thing, if you will. I bet someone's got that startup going right now. Hey, Hank, I hear you're always looking for a new project ^_^
Personally, I think that the promise of the internet of letting us communicate with anyone in the world at anytime was (and still is) really simplistic, because ultimately the places I find most fulfilling on the internet are places where I found communities of like-minded people (like nerfighteria) and I spent most of my time on platforms like twitter begrudgingly putting up with the rest of it so I could connect with people in the communities I was a part of. I think that having a fractured social media landscape where each platform has a set of implicit values that users agree to makes that kind of connection way easier because you wouldn't have to worry about your post reaching the wrong audience and being misunderstood or taken out of context. It also allows for much more nuanced content moderation because there could be way more platforms, in the same way that different subreddits have their own moderation rules. Now, of course this still has the problem of fractured realities but centralized social media didn't do much good in that regard either, maybe going back to having dedicated spaces for news and journalism would be good.
I've been worried about the balkanization of culture due to the internet for years now... The number of cultural touchstones we use just to talk to each other are becoming fewer and further between and it gets harder to find common ground with any random person you meet. Even though this may be a return to a more "normal" state for humanity, I suspect that large-scale conglomeration of culture may be somewhat responsible for the relative peace we've been having for the last several decades. The splintering of culture we're seeing now, in the worst-case may lead back to those troubling times...
Wrote about this in a newsletter that went out this morning - I would've linked this if it was up before! I talked about how more centralized online spaces made me a much better person - I grew up in an environment that was homogenous and bigoted in a very insidious way where I thought it was diverse and wouldn't have realized if it wasn't for being online and seeing what actual diversity looked like. That said, I hear you on fringe ideas being mainstreamed and the impact of that. But I'm also wary of centrist bias and how it's always center-right, potentially fueling a slow slide to the right, and so creating a situation where only majority-culture ideas can get airtime via legacy media and publishing and everything else is iced out seems bad. I have no answers but appreciate the questions.
Dang Hank, thanks for being so thoughtful
I really had no idea 10 years ago when I started watching SciShow*** that your content would be more to me than learning about scientific phenomenons and important folks thru history. Your work and perspective has broadened my perspective on the world and given me tools to look things with more intrigue and granularity than I could have ever expected. Thank you for bringing topics that wouldn't otherwise come thru my orbit and talking about them in a way that reinforces the pursuit of better understanding the world we live in.
***also big thanks to everyone who helps/helped with SciShow!
The problem with the fracturing isolating fringe ideas, is sometimes the fringe ideas are the good ideas. Like , when the people on the fringe are Nazi's, yeah, its good to isolate those ideas, because as you said, it makes them look fringe. But it wasnt even that long ago that the majority of Americans thought interracial marriage was bad.
you mean like the nazis felt about communists? why not make those people better to others instead of enabling their feeling of resentment.
I noticed several comments saying that it's more natural for us to be divided into these smaller communities, and i wnat to argue that still okay to make value judgements on that. Just because something is natural doesn't mean i can't analyze and judge it. It's "natural" for many people witch chronic illnesses to die without medical intervention, but that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to think that's "bad" or make the argument that access to medical care shoudo be a human right and campaigned for. The fact is we don't just live in a natiral society, there are also "unnatural" developments and factors from the progress we made as humans as nd increasingly complexity of the world. We are now interconnected on an incredible level so when your go back to small fractured communities it isn't the same as just existing like modern humans were in the past. It's regression, and we also take the large scale information, international connections, and ideas we would've never had access to WITH us into these new fractured small communities online. I think it leaves out important dimensions of the social context of this development to just equate it to being "the same as living in small communities in the past."
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we are only naturally limited in community size by the flow of information. elites spend so much effort extracted from us ruining the flow of information on the internet as they did in congregations and newspapers before explicitly to prevent such global community. don't think of what is natural but what relations build *relevant* context and then realize your active role in shaping it.
I think that smaller communities are nice because most people’s gut instinct is to fight when they see a post from a stranger that opposes their views - and since places like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok value extremity for their algorithms, there’s little room for non-polarized debates, and tempers are high. Posts are boosted best when groups are fighting each other tooth and nail.
Moreover, I’ve found that my views change the most when someone I know - or someone I’m in a small group with - shows me their views and allows me to interact with them as a human being. Learning their experiences and seeing into their life’s what changes my mind.
Still, echo chambers are bound to happen, and things can happen more in-the-dark. There’s an argument to be made that these groups had private chats even before then, but I understand the possibility of that becoming more regular and turning more people to bad ideas for the same reasons that I’ve been exposed to good ideas. It’s messy, but overall, I think it’s a bit more of a good thing.
smaller communities are nice because everyone is able to know how they relate. big ones are purposefully sabotaged to maintain social hierarchy over smaller communities and creating more stratas of socialite extraction
My sister, when she had long commutes, used to call me while driving them. That's kinda what this feels like. Not a bad use of walking time. Although when I'm walking in the cold, my nose starts dripping, so I wouldn't have a camera pointing at me from that angle! 😆😪
It's nice to hear something of a thought process rather than a written & edited piece. Lots of really important stuff in here. This just reminds me of what's happened with suburbanization (when people started geographically self-segregating) and, in somewhat different ways, with traditional media. (That worked through corporate conglomerations of media that ended up altering editorial content. Even looking at how TV has changed since I was a kid in the '70s & '80s - there used to be literal editorials given on TV news, for example; and another weird example, there used to be proper movie reviews too, not just reporting on box office numbers and gross income. Not to mention that journalists, knowing they had a broad audience, tried to be as unbiased as they could, although good journalism will always have a viewpoint.)
I think we always find ways to fracture large communities. I wonder how much of it has to do with the fact that we really can only manage a handful of close relationships IRL, & our brains evolved w/us in small, fairly-related groups where anyone unlike us was an outsider and unknown, could be dangerous. We seem to keep bringing that up out of our DNA or something, even though in our better moments we rise above it quite a ways.
Just thinking about this, and talking about it in a public forum, is a good first step. (Not that this video marks the beginning of that conversation; but this is precisely the kind of forum we need more of. Well, face-to-face conversations in geographic spaces where people who aren't the same as each other can get together & express differences with respect & empathy would be the ideal, I suspect, but this is-well, not a Wendy's, but the internet.)
As a footnote, I am well aware I overuse parentheses and em dashes, lol.
I absolutely love your rational thought process; in this specific context, but in general as well! It’s very refreshing to hear someone express potential cons to what they may believe to be the better outcome, along with pros for the worse outcome, because nothing is ever perfect. Thank you for continuing to be an authentic person amidst the clickbait world we live in ❤
I like that you mentioned that ascribing character to all of a group is not helpful.
The fracturing of social media definitely reflects the fractures within our society, and in that way it's not great.
It would be nice to see another centralized platform to unite us again, maybe something surrounding our planetary plight (sharing ideas for sustainable living), which seems to be the only thing we all have in common anymore.
Personally, im not as hopeful as i used to be....
We need some strong leaders to rally around. Our society had millions of unsung heroes, but very few powerful leaders we respect. Politics, religion, corporations, intellectuals, institutions, etc. have failed us in so many ways that we don't trust them anymore. Sometimes it feels like almost everyone who achieves power and wealth is corrupted by it, or was secretly corrupt from the beginning. I have asked around to see which leaders people find most trustworthy, and the answer is a resounding "NONE".
@@wildflower1397 Agree. Those who seek power aren't worthy of it.
I can think of several strong leaders with good moral characters, but none are in politics.
@@tbella5186 Well, I can think of two people with strong moral characters, and who are an activist/legislators power couple in TN.
My suggestion is that if you don't like our elected leaders, go run for office. Maybe you won't win, but you still change the world by showing others what is possible.
He called a whole swath of the American population Nazis. He isn't very consistent in practice.
I think people want to be involved in groups/things (physical and online) where they feel seen, heard, accepted, and welcomed. It feels like the physical world has much more tolerance for being accepting of those not totally like you than online places. From the business perspective (Meta, X, etc) it feels like scale is their only consideration, and so things like consolidation end up making a ton of sense. So maybe a lot of the niches get combined into 2 or 4 websites/apps? People don’t love having 20+ options, they want like 5
fracturing means avoiding those who would avoid you in hopes of being seen yes, it is an answer servile to the problem rather than aiding solution of it.
In the physical world, we interact with more people through necessity, and there is tolerance embedded in that necessity, but that is different from acceptance. I actually started social media in the early '90s in order to find a community of acceptance, which I did, selecting from publically-available groups until I found one where I felt welcome and my niche interests were welcomed, and am sad that the changes in the social media landscape (usenet becoming separate websites that moved to Facebook then Instagram or Discord or Mastadon) mean that my friends from that time have separated and now you have to be invited to join. I'm not a person who is often invited, so I'm now shut off from social media (nobody posting on Facebook, whereas previously I could keep in touch with people, both local and distant, and feel like I was part of a community both of former friends and people from work/church), and still shut out of most in-person community because I'm weird. Having a couple options where you could see everyone was annoying at times, but still had its pluses.
Just gonna throw my two cents (or maybe more like twenty, oops this got real long) out here, since this is something I've been thinking about a lot on my own. Or at least, something adjacent to it.
There was a Kurzgesagt video about something similar a while back, about the "fracturing of the internet", arguing that it was a good thing mainly because we as a species are not MEANT to be bombarded with all this information at once. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with that take (I think it's too nuanced to just say YES or NO anyways), but the main thing that has always stood out to me in these discussions is: Why are we not talking MORE about empathy and emotional intelligence/awareness in these discussions?
Just to define that slightly before I continue, I mean "emotional intelligence" to mean things like, the ability to self-reflect, understand one's own emotions, self-awareness, knowing where your emotions are coming from, learning how to TAKE those emotions and control their direction, etc. And I'm using the word "empathy" to mean a lot of the same stuff but towards people other than yourself. In other words, understanding the emotions of the people around you, where they came from and what they're doing, how those emotions feel to others, etc.
SO much of the conversation surrounding these bad "niche" communities is like, "How do we moderate them, should we allow them privacy and let it fester, how do we stop it from spreading", etc. But, and this is something I've been talking about with my therapist lately... The general emotional intelligence of the average person is... kinda low, actually? Probably a lot lower than you'd think, at least.
To me, the real "issue" here (in my opinion) is that people with a lower emotional intelligence are going to be more likely to fall into these bad rabbit holes and niches, because they aren't looking very closely (by which I mean like, really really analyzing) at what they're doing or why they're doing them. Most of these bad niches, I think people gravitate to them more because of emotions like anger, fear, sadness, or grief. But crucially, the person isn't *aware* they are angry or scared or whatever. They are just rushing to the thing that makes sense for them at that moment, and this makes them easily manipulated by exactly the wrong kinds of people.
So, perhaps if we gave these people the right tools, a lot of this stuff just... wouldn't happen in the first place? So like, why are we not giving them the tools? I'm not trying to say "oh let's just throw everyone in front of a therapist, that'll fix it". I don't think a lot of people want to do that, unless they're suffering from mental illness or struggling in their life in some way. And even then, recognizing that requires some degree of emotional self-awareness to start off with, so you're kinda back to square one there...
So yeah, all this to say, I think we (as a society) should REALLY be focusing on this side of things more. I think we need better resources for people to come across ways to work on it, both at young ages (like being taught related things at school), and outside of that. It's one thing to go back and forth on what it means to talk in different places and different ways, and to be exposed (or not) to different kinds of information and opinion, but at the end of the day, each individual person has their own specific reaction to things for a REASON, and that reason (right or wrong as it may be) has an *origin* and a *cause* and most importantly, it made *sense* to that person when it happened. Nobody does anything for no reason at all, and it can always be traced back with enough determination. At least, that's what I always think about when I see someone deeply entrenched in some weird ideology. I know they got there for a reason that made sense to them in the moment, even if it's not helping them.
Anyways, this message got waaaay too long so I'm just gonna cut it off here lol, I feel like I could rant forever about this stuff.
that's a false dichotomy as usual by kurz. we can't handle all this info so surely we should put blinders on!!! rather than ask why the info is too much and whose managing the rules and why. if i tied you to a chair and kept a spotlight on your face you'd rather be blind that doesn't respect your autonomy or any rationale it's the elites who shape our experience of the internet so i'd really doubt their flowchart for how to respond to the problem they maintain.
As someone who was surrounded by his "community" growing up and never felt like he fit in and always felt like an outsider and who only found his true community online I can say that no, it didn't work great before.
Before you just didnt have any other choice, or knew other choices even existed.
This! And I am white and middle class, "just" neurodivergent, chronically ill, and disabled, but living in a Nordic country, thank goodness.
More importantly still, black, brown, and indigenous communities have been violently and/or bureaucratically destroyed over and over again pretty much everywhere on this planet. So it REALLY didn't "sorta work" for for them. Still doesn't.
when and where did you live in a community that wasn't under social hierarchy? except for online... are you sure that wasn't society? a community would care about ac*comm*odating how you relate to it
@@Boardwoards Whom are you addressing? Asking because I can't find anything about hierarchy in either of the comments older than yours that YT agrees to show me.
@@ronjaj.addams-ramstedt1023 the op, they claim to have been living in community which only exist outside social hierarchy deep in the amazon and such or very temporarily.
@@Boardwoards how did you conclude that the wording 'he was surrounded by his "community" growing up' would attempt to convey that 'there was no social hierarchy where & when he grew up'?
I think in terms of the fracturing, it's net positive. The most problematic thing is a centralized platform with a focus on profits. In a world where we are fragmented or centralized, fringe ideas will still find fringe spaces. The Nazis will find somewhere to gather, no matter where everyone else is gathering. So, I think the decentralization and removal of power for corporate entities is the best thing for us. I would be less inclined to push for fragmentation if we had a non-profit, or a user owned platform (mastodon, in theory), that we could centralize on, allowing us to have the benefits of centralization, without the downsides of corporate and capitalist incentivize within that central platform.
I am concerned by social-group connection being primarily formed by politics/ideology instead of geography. I think a focus on local politics/advocacy and away from national politics would be an enormous good for society, but I don’t know if that will be encouraged by the current fracturing of social spaces.
But you won't get people motivated to improve their local community if they aren't encountering better ideas from far away places. My small town is oblivious to other cultures and possibilities. I primarily learned about modern social movements and new strategies through the internet. And social media allowed me to connect with relatable people from around the world, when most of my local community makes me feel like a threat for existing. It was painfully lonely before.
Besides, we still need to work together on large-scale problems too. Not everything can be dealt with locally. Not every problem is nearby.
Thoughts from paces ❤
For me as a social media consumer: I kinda like the fracture. It's encouraging me to scroll less and read more books.
For me as a content creator/creative professional: I don't like it. I grew a lot because of social media (esp. twitter), met so many great people and got great job opportunities.
For me as a citizen of the world: not sure how I feel yet, though it does seem like we're all becoming more tribal.
My experience on X/Twitter has never been more positive. I chose to make it so. It's not difficult. You make choices about what you hear and who you hear from. And I can choose to look around into less positive places too, if I want to see what's happening. Doesn't mean I have to stay there. And I'll always hear or see it first on Twitter.
Yeah, "X" is a silly name. I don't think I'll use that term.
Very natural flow to your thoughts (and from your nose due to the cold). I don’t see any real point on getting nervous about the current state of online communications because it changes so quickly. It could be a totally different situation the very nice day.
I've recently started drawing a distinction between the social web and the antisocial web. The social web involves two-way interactions between people; the antisocial web involves one-way interactions with posts. This is different from the distinction between social and parasocial - for example, a site like Facebook actually encourages you to interact in an antisocial way with people who you might have very social relationships with otherwise. Xwitter and Instagram are the most antisocial media giants by far.
The problem with antisocial media is that this kind of structure encourages unhealthy social dynamics for the uncomplicated reason that there's nothing to gain or lose except momentary positive or negative perception by others. Why does Twitter take itself so seriously even though it's obvious that this is ridiculous? It's because of the antisocial context. Add to that the fact that Twitter structurally encourages short, quippy retorts, and you have a website which, entirely by accident, would genuinely be hard to make worse, and should unquestionably be deleted.
On a note which may seem unrelated but will tie back in, what about more traditional, one-way dispersion of information where the channels for feedback are more limited, like TV? This has the entirely different problem of ridiculous power dynamics which create undue influence from small groups of people. Obviously this is a big problem. Letting large institutions determine what ideas people are exposed to is good for those institutions and bad for almost every single individual, often including the individuals who maintain those institutions. Fixing this power problem is one of the big upsides of the internet. We don't need antisocial media to do this, though. Prosocial media is fine for this. News giants are still annoying and a problem, but at least the tools for sincerely seeking out good answers are widely dispersed now.
Nothing we change about the meta-structure of our media spaces is going to make politics less bad than it was in the pre-internet days. What has an impact is work to change our society's attitudes, values, and awarenesses.
This is semi-impracticable of course, in policy terms. Mass media and antisocial media aren't going to go away just because they're awful, and they wouldn't even go away if a large section of people demanded that they do, because most people would still not see it as a problem. We are fully in control of our selves, right? Fully responsible for our beliefs and actions? Surely these structures aren't that big of a problem! People haven't gotten worse, it's just more visible now that they're terrible. Etc. And in fairness, mass media, unlike antisocial media, serves a legitimate function, and it's hard to do away with the bad without doing away with the good, there. But it's good to be aware of. To treat it as a personal prescription. Echo chambers don't polarize and radicalize nearly so much as malicious framing and cherry-picking do. The biggest echo chamber for the average person is actually their IRL social circle, very frequently. The idea that cutting ourselves off from all-to-all one-way post engagement will somehow hurt us is the lingering echo of the techno-optimism of decades past.
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I am so grateful you share your insight on stuff like this, you are one of the very few optimistic rational voices left in my life
Part of the problem with our current "Many to Many" system is that, in practice, the algorithm turns it into Fringe to Fringe. The great hope of the internet (and of social media specifically) was that if we could all communicate with each other, we could all learn from and understand each other; but instead of many communicating with many, each individual primarily sees 1) stuff they agree with and 2) extreme, unnuanced, poorly communicated stuff that seems completely insane to them.
In an isolated, fringe community, you learn that your community's ideas are normal and acceptable. In contemporary social media, you learn THE EXACT SAME THING, in addition to learning that anybody who disagrees with you is completely insane. Meta and X are just Fringe Community +
To be able to protect ourselves from bots and the inevitable onslaught of AI generated content which is already here but only getting significantly worse, fracturing will be necessary or you just get off social media all together. The avalanche is going to be overwhelming. Social media already is a big part of geopolitical espionage via social engineering. This will also become a much bigger part of future social media. Closed or restricted communities will be one of the options to protect oneself from all of this.
Thanks for your thoughts Hank. You’re such a valuable voice on the internet; you make it seem like a less scary place.
I learned a lot about marginalized communities I'm not apart of on Tumblr. Having centralized platforms is better for people that use those platforms to make money: artists, sex workers and big corporations alike. Though I think indie creators are hurt more by fracture since they have less bandwidth to post in a lot of different places. But having specific platforms for those markets probably makes more sense anyway.
Idk I miss the old internet which was forum based and very micro anyway. There was more incentive to go *explore* the web to find weird little niche things
people are probably using Facebook a lot less because the feed algorithm is...not good. It's 2/3rds ads and you dont even see your friends posts until a week later? Simply not useful to people
I will say
A lot of people had their numbers inflated by twitter
I may be misremembering but it's all well and good having 1000 press 'like' on your art but if you want to be supported as an artist it's better to cultivate a smaller, more dedicated audience
The ones who buy your art, sub to your patreon and go to your live shows
A lot of artists who moved sites when twitter started falling apart found that the majority of fans weren't following them off platform but those weren't the true fans, the dedicated ones who bought stuff
I think about this kind of thing a LOT, and have most of my adult life. When I was in college, I remember quite clearly thinking that human history was inevitably moving to larger and larger socio-political structures: from city-states to nation-states to continent-states to multi-state coalitions, and I thought that was a 90% good thing. But I was in college in the 1970s-1980s, when the post-WWII era was still a defining influence, and liberal policies were still, if not dominant, at least the default condition in most places.
I don't think that way anymore. I've also learned more history, and more about history, since my college days. I've learned more about practically every other subject since my college days. And, humans being a pattern-seeking species, I recognize both the attractions and the pitfalls of looking for patterns and trends.
So here is my take: human society coalesces and de-coalesces in large, multi-generational waves, usually driven by things we're not conscious of. War, disease, and environmental change seem to be the biggest drivers, but their effects ripple out long after the culminating event(s). Think the rise and collapse of Bronze Age civilization in ~1100 BCE; the rise and collapse of the Roman Empire in ~350 CE; the huge shift from agrarian to industrialized society through the 19th Century CE. (There are non-Western examples, too, of course: one example being the rise and collapse of the Khmer Empire in the 15th Century CE, not to mention the pre-Columbian empires in the Americas that waxed and waned even before the Spanish invasions.)
It seems to me that humanity at large, and Western humanity in particular, are in the early stages of a de-coalescent wave that will last well into the late part of the 21st Century. Environmental change is an obvious driver, but so is the coagulation (I use this word advisedly) of "finance" into an extremely predatory/parasitic structure where the people who contribute the least actual concrete "good" are the ones sequestering 90% of the resources - a situation that is simply not sustainable. Neither our environmental footprint nor our economic structure are sustainable, and I think humanity on some unconscious level senses that. De-coalescence speaks to that subconscious awareness: it seems intuitively, obviously, easier to provide stability and sufficient resources for smaller communities, where goods and services come from nearby rather than from the other side of the planet.
So seeing the social media space become a one world/multiverse in less than a generation, and seeing it now shatter into disparate pieces even more quickly seems to be happening as part of that greater de-coalescence. A symptom rather than a cause.
Great video! Thank you, Hank, for your thoughts about the fringe spaces. That made me less anxious about a development of the social Internet, that I was watching with little bit of dread. But you're right, it kinda was always like this before the Internet.
What's easier now is that you can find more people quicker that share your fringe beliefs. But that also applies to positive movements, fringe orless fringe.
Hank, it isn't about good/bad - it is about what IS. Historically the pendulum has always swung back and forth between decentralization and centralization. We are where we are because the majority of people no longer trust centralized channels. In time, once people are sufficiently bruised in new and interesting ways by decentralized channels, a day will come when centralization seems like a bright new hope. Round and round we go.
I’m pretty much housebound and I rely on UA-cam to keep me sane
This immediately reminded me of the structure of Meetings (for those who know). I just had a conversation last night about the impact of different meeting groups holding the same collective consciousness, each being different and with its own merit but the same primary purpose. This echos and parallels social media in a micro scale. I'm sure many other well established social constructs similarly flow. Maybe this is the natural progression, to be able to be a part of many groups, each to express the parts of you that want to speak or need to be heard. In the same way, in meetings you get different fulfilments from different people and their energies, opinions, and words.
Thanks for sharing this nuanced thinking through (aloud) of how the Internet, social media and AI are sometimes helping and hurting simultaneously. How do we move forward? Hard to guess sometimes. I agree this is underdiscussed on a wide scale.
I think open, algorithm driven spaces mould us into pointless beings. Smaller social networks can give us a space and function in them. What is the purpose of being a consumer on tiktok? What do you add, what do you do? I think people need smaller systems where the leaders are more accessible and the people rely on each other more.
2:27 - 3:05 In Canada, when the government passed a new law around media and social media, Facebook responded by basically forbidding anything considered 'news content' on the platform. Users can't share news articles anymore, and news outlets (very broadly defined) can't post anything resembling news.
At first, I was concerned, because I thought people would be less informed, and that our already struggling journalistic institutions would see their traffic plummet.
But mayyyyyybe it turns out that NOT consuming news is still better for society than algorithmically-curated news feeds that optimize for attention and retention... ? I dunno.
It’s an interesting take… I kinda miss casually getting news rather than having to actively seek it out.
Canadian here too. I prefer having to actively seek out my news. It feels a lot less overwhelming.
@@H3110NU Me too! It also might have been bad for me, though, haha. What do you miss about it?
@@leahwilton785 It took me a while, but yeah, same. I also feel way more intentional about it. What do you do? Go straight to a news website, or something else?
@@Idefilms I have one news website i check directly, and I have 1 newsletter that gets emailed to me (this one is exclusively good news!)
I feel like this is the type of stuff that gets talked about decades after it happened because hindsight is 20/20, but here Hank is dishin it out in real time and it's really insightful imo
the fracturing of media already happened once - the social internet from media companies controlling the narrative - and it was a net positive even despite the problems. I expect as communities continue to grow smaller it'll continue to be a positive change. Moderation goes up, marginalization decreases, insincere and corporate influence becomes more difficult and therefor falls. Outliers will continue to exist but will no longer be treated as equal parts to the whole experience.
If your conclusion looks at centralized community and says "this is problematic because it enables problem X" and then looks at the decentralized community and your conclusion is IDENTICAL then either nothing has changed or you're predisposed towards your own conclusion.
Personally, I subscribe to the idea that this is a change - it's too early to say one way or another what will happen from it, but it WILL eliminate the previous problems that centralized platforms created, even if it introduces them in new forms afterwards.
"Having fringe ideas in fringe spaces normalizes them." Absolutely. I've been feeling that for a while. I feel like there's some corollary between that idea and the bioaccumulation of toxins moving up to bigger and bigger predators. I haven't quite got it but those two ideas are shaped the same in m' brain.
I hadn't really considered what we're going through now as a fracturing, though it makes some sense to think of it that way. I'm not really opposed to finding more nuanced spaces to have conversations in as they feel more like a place. When I used Facebook and Twitter in the past, I never felt like I was walking into a place and sitting down for a conversation. I was usually on edge hoping what I'd say would reach people and get likes. When I'm on Discord, I feel like I'm sitting down with others and can ask questions about something I know will reach someone with some knowledge on a subject (I spend a fair bit of time in video game speedrunning discord servers).
In a way, those kinds of places feel like an attempt to have an online 3rd place. Where I typify Facebook and Twitter as broadcast mediums, I tend to think of platforms like Discord and some small Twitch communities as places that I arrive at.
On the topic of fracturing Twitter and Facebook traffic, I understand that the potential for audience reach is massive having allowed a couple giants to control the space, I don't want to defend the fact that we landed on a couple corporations monopolizing our online public squares for that audience potential, though. That arguably should never have happened in the first place, even if that audience potential is convenient (insert parallels to US cable company monopolies and fossil fuel dependency giving us great things, but should have been scrutinized much earlier).
This comment is all over the place, but last thing is that I don't think that people receding to closer knit communities spells the death of online broadcast mediums like Twitter. It's a far better tool for the many-to-many relationship. Corporations and governments still want our attention and we still want them to change for the better. Whether that's Twitter or some combination of other places or mediums, we'll find each other because both parties kind of operate by applying pressure to each other.
Love the thought you put into these topics and that you share them like this with your community :)
Super well said!!!!
Aside from providing an answer that you understand/already know, Hank (i.e. "we don't know yet" and/or "some good and some bad"), here's a quick list of things that I think will be different for us online in the future:
1. Community/group work will be more important - your example of the different groups who are interested in more access/cheaper things to fight TB is a perfect example. There wasn't one specific person who created one group and led the charge. A bunch of groups started by different people got together, combined their efforts, and worked toward a common goal. That's how "the needle will be moved" in the near future online for a lot of things.
2. Creators who are online will have to do more personal work to figure out what they're doing and why - For a number of years, there's been this idea of a "one size fits all" answer for "being successful" (i.e. making a lot of money, getting a lot of views, etc.) for each online platform. That goes out the window as more and more platforms show up and creators have to choose where they want to share their content. Collaboration between creators (once again "groups coming together to do things") seems like it will become more important than ever, but that also is a standard answer for "how to be successful" or "how to grow your audience" online right now. So, that may not be correct.
3. There is potential for things to "fracture" *a lot more* in the coming years - Larger companies are all getting in trouble with governments for various reasons which they can't resolve with money. There's a growing global anti-trust movement right along side of the current lawsuits and we might see more in the future. TL;DR - put on your seat belt. We might be in for a ride that would make the "Ma Bell" anti-trust telephone lawsuit from the late 1970s look like kindergarten.
4. Not only are we running into a "fracturing" online landscape, we're just starting to figure out what the "end stages" of an "online career" looks like. Sure, we're talking about creators on UA-cam here, but what happens to someone in eSports when they "retire" as an example? Do they start their own team? Make another league? Become a coach for younger players? Do something else? Who knows? The landscape for creators is so incredibly different just because there's now a group of experienced creators with money and experience in the space. That wasn't there when the people who are now "retiring" started making content.
5. Lastly, having people who are over 35 that are actively engaged in online creative spaces also makes a really big difference. Our perspectives, wants, and the reasons that we're here aren't the same as our younger peers. That is going to influence everything in ways I don't even think we've thought about yet. We're the first group of people who are going to have an active, online experience as we age. No one has figured out what that looks like or how to support it yet.
The solution is to help people connect, communicate, and care. It's not just about the where and how information is disseminated, it's also about what the people who consume it think and do. For most of my life, watching the media and social media has been like virwing a train wreck in slow motion. I can't help but wonder if this is how it feels when you watch the cracks form in society, knowing it's the start of the downfall of civilization itself. To see the insanity happening more every day, and realizing that we can't keep watching or it may drive us insane as well, but we can't look away or everything is lost. The only answer I see is reaching out to each other, holding tight to the love and light that connects us, and standing up for what we believe.
I really like Federated spaces enabled by technologies like the ActivityPub standard. It's not fully centralized, but it's not fully decentralized.
I love discord, but one of the things i worry about is communities because locked behind paywalls. How many creators do you know who have private patreon discords, and the like. There are a few creators who's community servers I would love to join, but to be frank I am very poor and do not have disposable income for such things. I worry if things keep going in this niche and paid direction I will end up blocked out of a lot of online spaces because I am poor
It may be a tangent but as a Gen Xer I feel this also affects the sense of shared culture. There can’t be “water cooler” talk about the latest shows as much now because of the fracturing of media into streaming sites which each have a paywall/subscription cost. If I want to discuss my favorite show with someone I have to hope they spend their money on the same streaming sites that my household can afford to join. Even pre-COVID there were shows that got a lot of buzz like This is Us. Lately I feel like for every five shows or movies that generate buzz I might have access to to one or two of them. The shows might be emerging out of the same cultural soup but the fracturing into streaming sites means we no longer have the shared vocabulary to say we connect to those ideas.
more people need to think about this. nice things are not kind things
For better or worse we are a global society now. We NEED to have large centralized platforms. The problem is the platforms also need to be trustworthy. But who defines what is or is not trustworthy? What culture gets to make the call on what is or is not appropriate? We have NATO for politics and national security, so maybe we need a NATO for large centralized platforms. And then we have a commonality. A foundation for centralized information and online experience. We can still split off into our smaller, tribilistic online communities like discord and Reddit. That’s natural and mentally healthy to have smaller communities. But the larger shared environments need work, need foundations and need trust.
I think the Fediverse might be, at least, part of that solution
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
We don't need centralization. Open standards, interoperability, and federation is way better as you get the advantages of centralization and decentralization without the downsides. As a Mutualist, I will always fight against centralized authoritarian control in favor for direct stakeholder control.
"I just left negative 40, y'all--I don't care if it's raining."
You managed to put the button on where I think this localizing of social scenes is going, right at the end there. That's what it's gonna feel like in another twenty to forty years.
Flippin' artful
This is one of the themes I touch on in my books, but especially in the novel I'm currently querying.
The large social media platforms are such a missed oppertunity for society. If only their keepers had optimized their algorithms for productive discourse instead of engagement, the world might look so different now
Thanks for you sharing your thoughts on this. Communication is everything, determines which ideas bubble up and find acceptance. We're in need of radical new solutions, but the fragmentation makes it hard for people to differentiate signals. This is good for finding a space where you can meaningfully interact, yet challenging when that space has maladaptive behaviors/ideas.
It's a strange feeling trying to connect with people in my life when they talk about XYZ platform and its norms, which are utterly impossible to keep up with, making it challenging to find common ground.
You put into words something which I now realise I’ve been seeing (and getting anxious about) in all my spaces. Thanks for this video and I’ll voice just one of many thoughts I had- I wonder whether the fracture is a good thing for us interpersonally, because yes it’s how it used to be and arguably small group spaces are what our brains evolved to handle and respond to. But under information capitalism we now live in a society where any of those smaller digital are only impenetrable up to a price. Digital sequestered spaces can still be open to others who want to exploit them if they have the resources. I think in that fractured setting the impact of ‘exposing’ others views becomes outsize AND the power of those who have capital and own those digital resources to do so is enhanced. When people are less used to seeing others’ ideas I think it becomes even more harmful when say, a corporation with an interest in spinning someone else’s ideas to fuel a political motive, gets ahold of out-of-context material from ‘the other side’s’ sequestered space. It gets to be more shocking and more sensational, and is more likely to then go undefended. Of course one kind of user will always have more power to do so: we’ll see fractures along lines of race and class as we always have, which means there will still be the people who own the digital services and media (the narrative and power to ‘expose’) in certain spaces, and those who use it (and are always watched) in others. I think fracture will enhance the power imbalance because some folks will always have a bigger set of resources to spin other folks ideas their own way. Places like Twitter were far from democracy but it could be argued - like you implied- that they lowered the resource barrier for regular people with a cause to get a similar audience to, and defend against, those who literally own the narrative.
Queer here! I think it's good that all of social media is fracturing. It gives a lot more of that grey area where the powers that be can't get at us. They can't see us and filter us on here.
In British subculture the fracture has made people really discontent with their local communities. Parasocial relationships have become so intensely specialised that people are becoming disenfranchised with their local third spaces (at a time when supply is already on its knees because of Covid). Rural communities become more segregated so minorities flee to the cities, where gentrifiers jump to profit from the influx, causing deeper segregation within the cities too. Intersectionality is more valued than unity and everyone ends up feeling more and more isolated and mistrustful of anyone outside their immediate bubble, and local political mobilisation is slowly becoming impossible
I completely dropped out of all social media apart from the nerdfighter subreddit. I have no idea what the landscape of that world is anymore but my world is great. I talk to people when i want and read things i decide to.
Honestly, the fracturing has been a big relief for me.
I'm worried about the negatives as well, but so far the upsides have been VERY BIG for me.
I'm feeling so much better about people these days and humanity in general, even with everything going on.
I'm back to spending more of my time on the things and people I care about, and it feels good.
What this means for progression and information exchange I do not know, and that makes me anxious. But maybe we've just realized the way we've been using the internet, is not how we actually want to use the internet.
Or maybe that's just me haha. Either way, I hope the fracturing is a sign of something good to come, instead of a step backwards. I think it's a good sign personally, but I'm just some guy
Love your work hank you've been a great teacher over the years ❤
"Love your work, You've been a great teacher for years."
3rd grade grammar...
@@user-dh6bj2me5p lmao ok bro I could use proper grammar in comments but why would I it's an informal message board 🤣 but that's for the lesson ❤️
Actually. They could have corrected it to:
"Love your work, Hank. You've been a great teacher over the years."
You could at least do them right and show them how to fix the sentences they used. Your grammar isn't correct either since you have a capital letter after a comma. @@user-dh6bj2me5p
@@user-dh6bj2me5pWe don't do that here.
Perhaps they are quite young. NerdFighteria is a place for sharing ideas, not tearing down, or mocking.
DFTBA
@@raptorhunter5549 In other words, you are not literate.
Good on you?
Enjoy being ignorant.
By the way. You are NOT my "bro."
Both of my brothers are educated and intelligent.
It hit 50F here yesterday and I said out loud "it's too damn hot out here", younger me would be appalled
in one sense you're right about not being able to reach everyone as easily if things are more scattered, but I think there are two counters to that. The first and simpler one is that the people in the space where you can reach them are the most engaged so the most likely to do something like pressure people to reduce the cost of medicine. That's pretty simple.
The other one will take a little while, but it's worthwhile. in the past one of the ways that people could tell people really cared about something was that they physically wrote a letter, paid money for a stamp and sent it to them. Because it was harder they'd assume that for every one person who cared enough there were many who cared, but hadn't written a letter.
In more recent years people have gotten 100,000 signatures asking people to change the CGI in a movie and no one really takes it all that serious because they know how easy it is. So, if it's just a bit more difficult to reach everyone and get them together it will make it more obvious that people really do care about it when they do. Because while I can't speak for everyone I'm more likely to put in a bit of extra effort to get my voice heard if it's about saving a life than if it's about which version of a movie I get to see.
Thanks for this video Mr. Green 💪🏻
I'm optimistic about fracturing our social spaces. Imagine you lived in a small town with a local cult. In order to be recruited into that cult someone would first have to convince you to physically go to a meeting. That meeting will have some charismatic leader who uses practiced rhetoric and fear as motivation, and if they are also asking for money they will be very determined to recruit you. Hearing all those same talking points filtered through an acquaintance, a friend, or a family member just isn't the same experience and is much easier to say no to.
Today, all of the fearmongering cult charismatic leader pitches you could generate are algorithmically sorted by engagement and the winner is at the top of your feed every morning. The fracturing of our social spaces could, maybe, increase that barrier to entry a little bit. At least, if you had to sign up for an account and browse another site to run into them, that's better than running into them randomly on the same site you browse for general entertainment or news.
On the other hand there are many things I'm not optimistic about and don't think we currently have solutions for. We lost important things in the transition away from in-person social interaction. The filtering of ideas through many brains over one brain to many. Imagine if sharing something required you to rewrite the entire thing in your own words or video yourself giving your own speech. The nuisances of body language, pitch and tone that we use to detect lies and determine conviction of belief. Even on video platforms, I would argue that a recorded performance of a lie is not the same as lying in person to someone's face. The social etiquette and physical proximity that makes it hard to disengage from an interaction we find uncomfortable, forcing us to engage with each other even when we disagree. We also gained things that are arguably bad and hard to solve. The consolidation of complex problems into soundbite posts that degrade the arguments surrounding them into pointless shouting matches. Online anonymity that makes it easier than ever to harass and dehumanize each other. Sometimes I wonder if even the sheer amount of content is worsening our ability to communicate by decreasing the number of cultural touchstones we share. People often use media that resonates with them to talk about real problems. I'm old enough to remember a time when talking about the movies that came out recently was like talking about the weather, small talk that almost everyone could engage in. Now it's a major coincidence if I run into someone who watches one of the same UA-cam channels I watch.
"Fractured" is the true nature of the internet. It's always been like this, we just had a bunch of wealthy people pour billions of dollars into an experiment to draw everyone together, and it's a huge failure. We sowed the seeds for toxic meltdown and we got people inverting and completely watering down the most negative terms that we used to use to describe all of the worst kinds of people. The more social media breaks apart, the better the world will be.
In the late 90s a lot of us young delusional outcasts thought we could turn "online" into its own political territory with its own government and secede from the world. It's obviously ridiculous looking at it now but at the time it felt *so possible*.
One big difference between the fracturing now and the fracturing before social media is the size of the population that the fractures are created within. Larger populations can create more hyperspecific, hyper filtered fractures.
I think that tends to feel good but can lead to echo bubbles and a lack of understanding. I much preferred going to a HS with 300 people in my class than the one I went to with only 20 because I got to choose my friends. We were more alike than different but those differences still existed. Now our class is the whole world and we can create groups without those differences at all.
There are upsides and downsides. I'm personally much better off mental-health-wise with my collection of various Discord servers than I ever was on Facebook. I don't know whether I should be afraid of what "those people I disagree with" are doing behind closed doors. Maybe it's pretty scary, but nowadays I basically never think about it. It's not as if I was actually helping by worrying and shouting into the void and stirring the pot before, so for my part, "ignoring the scary people" and "letting them say scary things unchallenged" is probably a net positive for the world.
You know I think a correct outlook on the organization of social systems should be thought of as having both types. Big for making sure people don’t get too violent minded and small so people can get creative. Social roles on the internet can be fluid
If there’s anything the larger platforms have shown me it’s that maybe some people shouldn’t have an audience.
Idk. Is that wrong to think? I reached my own point of social platform saturation when facebook wanted me to download an entirely different app just to message. On facebook. So no, no I didn’t do that.
I use one platform now to post photos occasionally, and once in a while check on my friends and family in the other.
But I’m an introvert, who has kinda lost faith in a lot of society’s organizations (religion, social media, government) and am managing my own mental health by staying present and engaged with the people I interact with one on one (or in person, just living my life). People are a lot less obnoxious when they aren’t part of a mob with a cause :/ and yeah I am even saying that about my past self.
I’m glad folks like you are still out there participating and speaking and listening though. It’s a little ray of hope.
I think it's good as a society to fracture up large thought monopolies as what Twitter was, even though as an artist I do now consider reaching an audience significantly harder since leaving it. Also, while this gained traction in the last few years both on the right (Truth Social) and the left (Mastodon) it's worth noting that niche spaces and social media platforms always existed. Forums were always a thing online, and smaller platforms like the aforementioned Mastodon were a thing for almost 10 years now, they're just more on the spotlight now.
Just want to push back a bit on the idea that Discord server conversations are private -- even if the server in question is invite-only, it can be a lot easier to get that invite link than you might believe. This kind of stuff is how activists got a hold of a lot of chatter from the Unite The Right organizers off Discord, for example.
All that said I'm not sure if this decentralizing of platforms is good or bad. I think it would be better if it weren't happening along societal fault lines surrounding politics. I do think it's good for Twitter and FB in particular to have some competition, though, especially of the Fediverse sort.
Contemplating the concept of "niching" of online social spaces, it strikes me as almost an entropic shift towards the way culture was formed and information was shared before the initial rise of popular internet monoculture. I don't think it is good or bad, but I do think it is interesting!
i wish that like 6 years ago twitter would've just made a feature that's asks u after you engage with something like "did you want to engage with that?" with a y/n answer. cool ai application would be a follow-up question of "what did you not enjoy about it?" / "what's something you rather engage with?" and that refines the algorithm for u! that would make it so much better ugh
IT is GOOD to have separate social spaces for separate things. I am sure many people don't want the furry femboy content that I enjoy in their face, and I absolutely despise makeup tutorials. When I want to know what someone I hate is doing, I can simply search for them of my own volition without it being shoved in my face. It's not me or them being fringe or cringe, just a matter of us having different tastes.
I haven't been a Big Social Media person since 2015 so this influences my thoughts here, but it seems mostly a good thing to me. Following ~45 tumblrs and being on a discord of friends creates a social space that allows for connection and for connection across cultures and geography and to an extent across politics, without sitting in front of the Blast of Inflammatory Information and Opinions from Random People.
I'm old enough (59) to remember the former fractured world. I despise that the niche hate groups have found ways to connect. I loathe that conspiracy theories travel at the speed of light now. BUT... I prefer the interconnections that our social networks afford us. It has allowed marginalized groups to help and support each other. We just need to seek out those bad actors and keep an eye on them. Pity the justice department doesn't seem to consider it a priority.
Speaking as somebody that has been followed by a covert organization for over ten years, I feel that the fracturing was intentional. Keeping people divided is necessary in the current financial universe. Keeps people from building a parallel financial universe. One with the technology that enables a level 0 civilization, cooperation.
I have noticed that within the complex hierarchical social structures we've created as humans, that we are so specialized, that we no longer are connected to nor understanding the needs others are fulfilling for us, nor the needs of those others. This is then very easily exploited for the gain of a small group of people who manage to take control of the narrative.
Bigger differences encoded into the societal fabric lead inherently to less mutual understanding and quite easily to more and bigger fractures between different groups.
Lately I've really been thinking a lot about the tower of Babel, where people could no longer understand each other. Unless we actively and consciously do something about this, it might be very problematic.
Thanks for talking about this, I think this is a great topic of discussion. The thing is that it’s good to have a connecting place where you can feel safe. We also need to be pushed and stretched to battle with new and different ideas and learn from them. With everyone being able to see everything means a loss of (social) safety and increase of connectivity. With the fracturing there is an increase of safety and decrease in connectivity/exposure.
So let me ask you this, Is it much different than subscribing to different newspapers? What would it take for the niche/fringe to “overflow their riverbanks” to affect society as a whole (positively and negatively)? Would that be better or worse?
Gone are the days of consumption monopoly.
I think we need both types of space. Facebook fell apart because (IMO) the online experience became exactly like real life, with all of your friends and family on top of each other. Back in the day there was nothing /new/ to see. And stuff stops being cool when your parents are into it, so we needed more spaces to break out of those smaller groups.
Having a giant arena where you're relatively anonymous and can find whatever information you're looking for is a vital part of the internet. Discovering new people, new things and new ways of thinking is important.
But at the same time, there's no point in me discussing the nerdy stuff that I love with everyone online or the people closest to me if they don't care about it. So we need those little communities as well, where like-minded people can discuss their passions. And of course that comes with positives and negatives too.
I quite like this move away from centralized platforms, because I was very late to join those centralized platforms. I spent nearly 20 years living primarily on message boards and content-specific forums, and I only stopped doing that in 2016 when the last one I frequented got shut down. That was when I first investigated things like Reddit and Twitter, and I don't think I like them.
What does it mean for culture? I've always thought culture is a choice, and all choices are made by individuals, so I don't see any collective aspect to culture.
I think in their current format the major platforms are not allowing for one of the things on your list: empathizing with more people. When we have in-person good-faith conversations with people we don’t necessarily agree with we can take more time to talk and listen. Even if we don’t agree in the end we treated each other like humans. Very short character-limited conversation doesn’t necessarily allow for that, it’s more point-tallying with external people egging or booing publicly. We have rules for politeness and professionalism and negotiation that rely on empathy in in-person conversations. We need to try to figure those out for online spaces, bring the empathy in. Maybe small spaces will help? Maybe not, but I like that people are trying?