Carl Dowse's List: Social Media

• in their online life, American teenagers were recreating what they knew from the physical world—separation by class and race
• A generation of digital activists had hoped that the web would connect groups separated in the real world. The internet was supposed to transcend colour, social identity and national borders. But research suggests that the internet is not so radical. People are online what they are offline: divided, and slow to build bridges.
• the ten most popular hashtags on Twitter and discovered that most were used almost exclusively by either black or white authors. The hashtag “#cookout” was almost entirely black; the hashtag “#oilspill” almost entirely white.
• All this argues for a cautious response to claims that e-communications abate conflict by bringing mutually suspicious people together.
• Almost every country reads all but 5% of its news from domestic sources
• Four websites most consistently account for links between countries: YouTube, Wikipedia, the BBC and, a distant fourth, Global Voices Online.

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• Mr Lanier lays into the Web 2.0 culture, arguing that what passes for creativity today is really just endlessly rehashed content and that the “fake friendship” of social networks “is just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical advertisers”.
• “but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction.
• Mr Lanier’s ability to connect with people, in order to connect people, is possibly his greatest asset. When describing him, his friends use terms like “huggable”, “jovial” and “humanist”. It is easy to see why the collectivism of Web 2.0 irks Mr Lanier. He regards it as impersonal, passive, anonymous and less than the sum of its parts, and calls it a “hive mind”. He has described VR, by contrast, as “the first medium to come along that doesn’t narrow the human spirit”.

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• Omnipresent cyber-gurus, often framed by colourful PowerPoint presentations reminiscent of stained glass, prophesied a digital paradise in which not only would commerce be frictionless and growth exponential, but democracy would be direct and the nation-state would no longer exist. One, John-Perry Barlow, even penned “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”
• Fifteen years after its first manifestation as a global, unifying network, it has entered its second phase: it appears to be balkanising, torn apart by three separate, but related forces.
• First, governments are increasingly reasserting their sovereignty.
• Second, big IT companies are building their own digital territories
• Third, network owners would like to treat different types of traffic differently, in effect creating faster and slower lanes on the internet
• Just as it was not preordained that the internet would become one global network where the same rules applied to everyone, everywhere, it is not certain that it will stay that way,
• The internet was able to develop quietly and organically for years before it became widely known,
• In other words, had telecoms firms, for instance, suspected how big it would become, they might have tried earlier to change its rules
• Whatever the cause, the open internet has been a boon for humanity. It has not only allowed companies and other organisations of all sorts to become more efficient, but enabled other forms of production, notably “open source” methods, in which groups of people, often volunteers, all over the world develop products, mostly pieces of software, collectively. Individuals have access to more information than ever, communicate more freely and form groups of like-minded people more easily.

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