Future glimpses: Social dilemmas and the enclosure of media

A preview of some works in progress for 2024

Photo by Allison Saeng on Unsplash

So this audio is a bit of a ramble, I'd say very loosely based on the outline I have for a larger piece which has a place set aside in Beyond the Altar's schedule next year; and bringing this up was definitely brought about by recent events. I really never got fully to the reasoning behind my ideas on the "digital enclosure", or perhaps I did, but either way, I'd love to hear what you think! I have a full transcript of this audio clip but it's nearly 3000 words. If you would rather read, carry on below! To give a listen, just hit play!

Transcript for audio:

Hey friends! So today I thought I would jump way ahead in my material to talk about digital social spaces. As I've mentioned before I'm building a body of work and I have probably anywhere from 24 to 26 (probably more!) essays in progress—anywhere from just like, you know, a couple of sentences about what I want these essays to be; to full scale outlines, or in-progress outlines; to even fully written first drafts. While I am building up to a specific convergence of focused subjects in my writing, I'm also just trying to create some space or for jumping around; which hopefully reveals how all these seemingly disparate threads are connected.

But anyway, all that to say, I started an outline about a year ago called Social Dilemmas and the Enclosure Of Media and I am pulling the phrase “social dilemmas” from a documentary that came out in 2020 titled The Social Dilemma, which is about how the user base’s attention is economized and exploited, and how social media corporations strategize addiction into their platform’s design to keep people online, on the site, and to not leave or stray; because to leave the app-based platform would be to venture out onto the internet itself, and these corporations know how valuable their user base’s time and attention is and the profits that attention can bring.

So I basically just remarked that people have to leave a social app to go to the internet, and I know that for many folks, culturally, we call social media “the internet”. But I want to make it very clear that personally, I draw a very hard line—well, at least a distinction—between the internet and social media. I acknowledge that throughout the world social media has become the internet and that is part of the problem. People like me, who come in at the very end of Gen X or identify as Xennial , Millennial and Elder Millennials; we really do remember the social spaces of the internet as being slower community spaces—I like to call it slow internet—and app-based social media is the thing that changed everything. We went from spending time on maybe what would be considered more cumbersome sites like Livejournal, MySpace, and online forum boards which Discord really emulates; the kind of sites that people find cumbersome now because we are used to holding a device in our hands. Even the language changed with the handheld device from “social networking site” to a much more consumerist-informed “social media site”. The amount of hours in a day that we were looking at these sites increased exponentially, because suddenly we didn’t just have a place to share our work and our lives, but then we had additional amenities such as direct messaging and what seemed like a major benefit, emoji reactions that boosted our posts in the feed to leapfrog chronology. In fact, one of the most hilarious critiques of both Discord and Mastodon’ that I’ve seen in the last week was how “a like doesn’t do anything” — yeah, as it should be! The manipulation enforced by algorithms on our behaviors and expectations have severed us from each other almost completely. What we thought was a benefit, was ultimately one of our greatest downfalls in terms of being able to meet one another where we are, and how we expect our communication to be seen and interacted with. Algorithms have made communication transactional.

All these amenities combined with the immediacy provided through a device in our hand has quite literally captured our attention in ways that have really been good, and ways that maybe aren't so good. There’s a book by Astra Taylor called The People's Platform: Taking Back Power And Culture In The Digital Age that I found after I had started this outline; and it does an excellent job of breaking down many of the issues and problems, questions and critiques, of how social media corporations are stealing from their user base and profiting off our time, but also our creativity. I feel like any kind of critique about what social media is or does and how it really literally capitalizes off of our attention and exploits our production is something to really start examining. (acknowledging where this essay is showing up, is important, as well)

The takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk has really sharpened the collective focus on this issue a lot, so in this outline for this essay, some of what I’m really thinking about is who owns our community spaces, and/or where we build community space. There are several critiques about what happens when communities start moving over to Discord and Mastodon, and the potential of cutting off the opportunity for a diverse range of viewpoints. That said, the reasons why some people are getting excited is because they’re slower internet spaces, they facilitate conversation and therefore also community, and when well-administrated, they absolutely do open up the opportunity for people from multiple perspectives, views, and experiences to come together. Mastodon is also open source which means the code isn’t owned by a corporation, anyone can view, modify, add, change, improve it. It’s a collaborative, decentralized project that requires community review and engagement; and accountability. Discord isn’t (I don’t think) but it supports open source projects. I know some folks are asking questions about privacy issues on Mastodon in regards to who administrates each server; it’s a good question, and an ethical one; but it evades the larger issue that far more of our privacy is delivered over to social media corporations from our private communications to our data to our habits off the app across the rest of the internet. Personally, I’d rather spend my time in spaces that are nurturing diverse communities and points of view; on platforms that are minimally invasive, where I can keep private communication outside of them and therefore maintain control of my privacy; than hand over my data and my intellectual property over to a private or shareholder-owned company that profits off of human interaction in dangerous and questionable ways. And they're profiting off of all of us. That's really the biggest issue.

In regards to profit, who we are in regards to what we produce matters in all of this. One of the reasons that a lot of us push back on this idea of of labeling ourselves “content creators” is because firstly, this is a reductive label that doesn’t really mean anything. To say one is a “creator” isn’t really saying enough about what one does; but it does speak a lot to the reduction of attention not only in what we’re taking in but what we’re doing. Now, we’re forced to further economize our roles for the profit of others by removing the commas between our titles. Rather than tell you I’m a curator, essayist, writer, and educator—roles that have always entailed multi-media output in the form of long form and short form writing, graphics, audio presentations; but also, roles that point directly at what it is that I do and which come with communities and therefore direct lines of accountability—social media engines are encouraging me to simply say I’m a content creator, a non-specific role with no particular role or lineage and therefore no accountability.

This is really an exploited role—to be a content creator means that you are creating things that are then commodified by the platform upon which they appear; and it really speaks a lot to the producer/consumer binary, the producer/consumer dynamic. I question the collapse of our social engagement from exchange to transaction. It's gotten to a point where if you join a perceived community, you’re often valued on what you produce or how much you can consume; for example, people will attempt to determine whether or not to let you into that community based on what your perceived contribution is. Are you a consumer? Will you purchase goods or services? Or are you a producer? Will you provide goods or services and if so are those worthy enough of engaging with? Are you a worthy colleague or are you competition? There’s little to no value of humans simply showing up as they are, through shared interests, pursuits, ideas, or experiences. There’s little to no value of humans who have offerings outside the producer/consumer binary.

Anyway that’s a bit of a tangent but it all has to do with consumption, production, industrialization, and at the moment I'm not so interested in talking about the history of industrialization so much as I’m thinking about the ways current industrialized systems are shaping social interaction and behavior. I am thinking about the advent of media and social media and how there are always critiques in place about what media is and how it really affects communities, and how it affects society; from the Guttenberg Press to radio to television and the distribution of information and how dangerous that was to the State; the expansion of our freedom of expression and of speech; the democratization of information; free press; like all of these things are the same conversation that we have had over the past few hundred years. In the 20th century we raised questions about the impact of radio and television and the way people received information; we raised questions about the internet’s limitless potential. And in the 21st century, those questions about the internet’s limitless potential shifted to circulate around the benefits and the detriments of social media, information, privacy, capitalism, commodification, and human interaction in a fully digital age.

I think most of us acknowledge and value the ways in which social media has performed extremely valuable functions to society; we realize that it has done a lot for activists and activism; it has elevated and amplified marginalized voices; and connected people and communities across the globe. It has heightened our awareness of the impacts of climate change and systemic oppression in ways that I believe are ultimately helpful and that's really important. We have been able to find meaningful communities which have aided us in not feeling so alone. The good is that everybody is connected and reconnected; everybody has a platform; we are more informed now than ever with a more diverse array of sources. Access to information has increased exponentially, we can compare and contrast different streams of information to discern the truth or the lies, and social media does seem to lead to social change.

So that leads us to some other questions, like you know, as capitalism tightens its foothold on our social spaces, is it really true that our sources of information are more diverse? Or are algorithms tailoring those information streams in ways that actually narrow them and leave us with less broad of a view? Are we all really friends and for how long are we friends, is the process organic, is there room for acquaintance and colleague relationships? Does everybody have a platform or are only a select few able to battle the algorithms to be heard? Are individuals reliable news sources when we’re not reporting direct experiences on the ground, or are we becoming the tools of disinformation campaigns? Are we aware of our economies of attention and how they’re being spent? Are we spending those valuable resources to invest them—our words, our “content”, our attention—into economies of attention that are uplifting human connectivity, or the algorithm-fueled outrage machine? Is what we’re talking about worth our time, or is it taking our attention away from building something that will affect meaningful change?

I know that there's sort of some rhetoric about how Elon Musk is showing us how stupid rich people actually are but I think that’s a mistake to believe. If we were really going to learn that lesson we would have learned it from the 45th president. But these people are scandalous and outrageous because they know how spectacle works on social media; they know the algorithms pick up outrage more than they pick up peace and introspection; they know that getting people mad is a classic strategy to get people talking since the beginning of mass media. And the amount of material, breath, ink being spilled across all social media platforms right now tells us how cunning Musk and 45 and people like them are in this regard; because we are collectively talking about little else. I'm even spending time here to point at this (though you’d be hard-pressed to see me talk about it on social media).

So I don't know I feel like we have a lot of things to unpack about the information we exchange receive or give, our ability to discern its value and how it aligns with our own values and goals, how exhausted we are, and what's really happening when we are spending so much of our lives and in community with others on app-based social media.

Is it a digital enclosure? What does that even mean? Is it feudalism or capitalism or both? When I'm talking about the digital enclosure of social media, what I'm thinking about is how we believe that this is a commons, we believe that this is a free space to speak, to roam, to play together and that it belongs to us but it doesn't. It doesn't belong to us, it belongs to these corporations. And a question for me is like where do we build online, now? Where will the spaces be that are built by us and for us in ways that are not being algorithmically manipulated, in ways that are not siloing us away from each other, but where we're not being held hostage by addictive strategies and marketing; places where we're not pressured into capitalist /consumerist defined roles; where we could just be in community with people where, how, and as we are…I am aware that we must always be grounded in communities of people offline, physically. But I am also aware of the value, the meaning, and the importance of online communities and contact with others outside our neighborhoods, cities, and countries. It’s important to have these connections for any number of reasons, from the inclusiveness and accessibility to the need to hear the stories being told globally.

I think there's something to be said about coming back to this idea of community and  what it means to be in community and without fail, it always comes back to relationships. Like with whom do we have relationships are those relationships and what are those relationships based on, why are we here together? What are we trying to do? How can we use these powerful tools to support the reasons why we’re here?

Personally, I still very much want to meet new people, to have conversations with people, to be in community with people. I'm interested in what other people have to say, I'm interested in expanding community beyond my physical location—I'm also chronically ill and disabled and I get a lot out of the inclusion of online space. So that's why I'm there, and why I will continue to be there. I will continue to hold on to my limping redux Twitter account I will keep Instagram because that seems to be where I've made the most community. I’m on Discord—we are on Discord together, if you're listening to this, and I’m really into that. I think that there are a lot of questions that we don't have answers to now, but as we are more open and honest about how we are being exploited as people spending time on app-based social media, I think that we will find that there is a huge sea change occurring among a tremendous number of people who are tired of of the social and political manipulation of corporate-owned social media. I think we will find that we are truly looking for viable alternatives that actually build, hold, and nurture community, that actually allows space for creativity without having to monetize it; places where we can truly share our work and our interests; and really just be together.

So this has been a long ramble. It's almost 15 minutes long now—it is 15 minutes long now. I didn't go through my whole outline, I really just gave you a little insight into a future essay and rambled and riffed off this outline that I have. And if  you want to talk about this more, please let me know and I would love to talk more about it! I just feel like this is a topic that I'm always circulating around and have been for a while—former students of mine from Cornish College of the Arts will attest to my absolute preoccupation with digital space, black mirrors, spectacle, and the hyperreal so it’s all just kicking around in there right below the surface, always.

I hope you have enjoyed this and yeah! It's Autumn! Go find some leaf piles. I don't know, it's just really amazing out there in the world right now. Enjoy the Fall colors, enjoy the crisp air, enjoy whatever moments you find that are pleasurable and in community outside of social media and thank you for listening!

---

Further reading for those interested, some texts which provide the undercurrents to this essay:

Astra Taylor, The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2014

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967), Princeton University Press, 1994

James Morris, Simulacra in the Age of Social Media: Baudrillard as the Prophet of Fake News, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 45(4), 319–336, 2021

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), Translated by Sheila Glaser, University of Michigan Press, 1994

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McGraw-Hill, 1964

The Social Dilemma, Directed by Jeff Orlowski; Written by Davis Coombe, Vickie Curtis, and Jeff Orlowski, Netflix, 2020