Oct 7, 2024
The always-probing Mandy Brown muses on some findings about human behavior as it meets technology in The Ordinal Society. Brown picks up the book’s data on social media that complicates two generalizations in most commentary about this technology: Neither “it just depends on how you use it, for good or ill,” nor “the algo-plus-profit-motive is the sole culprit” will suffice. As always, human behavior, including very ugly behavior, is both incentivized by design but also inventive on its own, thereby shaping design. To wit:
[V]ery common design patterns — retweets, quote tweets, replies, mentions — are all behaviors that users originated, and which where then captured by Twitter. Fourcade and Healy, again:
Often, users introduce wider aspects of sociality and social practice into this world, and then the company realizes this is behavior that might be fashioned into something more delimited, organized, data-generating, and ultimately profitable: something that can generate a manageable order, fit for an algorithm to digest, analyze, and sell to advertisers.
The race to the bottom of human relational patterns, it seems, is both driven by ethnographic behavior observation and managed, top-down style. What does that mean for those of us looking for alternatives? I’ve written before about a common lazy cognitive bias around social media and behavior — “I can spot the bad actors out there, which thereby confers immunity to me” — but really my questions are also Brown’s:
I’m not interested in paternalistic nudges or vapid prompts to think twice, but rather, something like the way a well-designed park creates space both to gather and to wander — quiet benches tucked under trees alongside open fields fit for games, pathways for walking in ones and twos, blooms and birdhouses that invite a moment of rest. What if our social spaces had more ways to get lost? More places to sit a spell? What if we brought more intention to the way we contribute to these patterns? To the way our own choices overflow the container, and push on what’s possible. What is it that we are making together?
For me, micro.blog and Finite Photos have been good places to start. Eli Pariser also offered the park inspiration a few years ago, an idea that became the engine for New_Public.