Will Oremus assembles a shortlist of suggestions to fix social media drawn from answers to a Charlie Warzel tweet, and I just want to address the final one a bit.
(I should note that as usual, I do not synonymize social media and social network, as I believe these are two different things. I see Friendster and MySpace as social networks; Instagram and Twitter as social media. Facebook somewhat sits astride the two forms.)
Oremus’ final shortlisted suggestion is, “Let a field of smaller social networks bloom.” My issue with his framing, however, is that it’s mired in current contexts.
In a world of many smaller sites, he says when listing the upsides of this idea, “Facebook wouldn’t be able to brush off boycotts so easily if users and advertisers had more viable alternatives.” Notice how he’s stuck thinking about social media as avenues for advertising, when that’s not at all inherently required for smaller communities and places on the web.
On the downside, however, Oremus argues that “intense competition might further fuel the battle for engagement and data harvesting”—again showing only that he’s letting himself get stuck in thinking only about smaller versions of what we have now instead of thinking about things we don’t have now. Or even of things we used to have.
Mostly when people talk about smaller sites, people are talking about places rather than platforms, communities rather than feeds. Oremus seems to be thinking only about sites which continue to be platforms of indication and excitation, just on a smaller scale; most people when they talk about smaller—or slower—sites are talking about places of interaction and expression.
Oremus somehow thinks that smaller sites still would be about users instead of about people, and until we stop trying to replicate our current circumstances just in some allegedly more manageable way, we’re never going to get anywhere worth being.