Projected Polarization: what we really know about Facebook, Twitter and media
Algorithms. Machine learning. Best practices. Time-saving criteria. Niche. Audience. Reactions. Bubble, segregation, inequality, learning gaps. Priorities. Age. Mental health. Interests and relationships. When we think about social media, we most certainly avoid the word, unless we’re talking to kids. If they’re teenagers, you’ll want to be more specific. They don’t have to understand. But they make use of platforms that shape their whole idea of what the world thinks, what people feel, what they should expect from society. What they can give. How much. And when it comes to algorithms, it may look like they’re not thinking too hard—but are we? How do you separate these generations of readers, or rather, content consumers, from young people who just don’t know better? Should we separate them after all? Do they actually know better and we’re out here having useless discussions? All of these themes deserve our attention. But I just mentioned one of them: the thing that recommends you more of the same. I could say it’s a progression. They recommend you more of the same, because you indicated that’s what you like. Software makes a register. But that’s already a set of things: likes, comments, shares. There’s policy about that. And there are things we came to understand as a spectrum of the unachievable: nobody can learn everything about anything. The old talk of attention span reduction. Sometimes, one sentence says it all. It’s all you need to hear in order to feel seen. And then you reproduce it. You paraphrase it. People react, but in your inner circle, not outside of it. The content you see is part of your knowledge, but that’s very debatable. And you have to go through some filters you created for yourself. These may include age. Maybe you know how difficult it is to talk about lifestyle with a 60 year old, but we’ve known this all our lives. Except their struggles become our own. And we forget about why we came to the internet in the first place. We put family first, we put socially acceptable first, without realizing the convenient and the standard are problematic, or maybe we’ve been failing to do something about it.
Facebook was created stealing more than Harvard’s database. It stole Nokia’s slogan: connecting people. They also stole your friends. With the premise of making you build more relationships, with a complete disregard for quality for the sake of quantity, undeniably and shamelessly -- any argument against that lacks research on the FTC hearings, the EU lawsuits, the documentaries released, the whistleblower cases in the media and the obvious, yet transparent earnings reports—they want to have it all, and even the Federal Government calling them a monopoly sounds like just another screaming stranger on the street. We’re given more content, but not the content produced by our friends. And it’s not just about monopoly or payments; it’s not just about safety and addiction, but also advertising practices that our fast paced digital society can’t afford to address. You think Google, and then you think Mozilla. After Skype, Microsoft now respects your privacy. Facebook absolutely does not, but everything’s for free—except, of course, the ads. They told us to say what we were thinking about; the response, after years living under that premise that everyone wants to know that, is they already have this information, and now they offer their biggest product: tailored content, which is basically people who paid for meme reach while you’re still trying to manage home bills with an honest job and a pretty decent resume, you would think, unless machine learning they designed brings in a different perspective.
Twitter was created from a need to group people together for the same causes. Politicians took notice. Artists also did, but from the beginning, they’ve used it mostly to advertise their content through link sharing. If there was anything new, they’d post it on Twitter. The rest was people’s commentary. And through that commentary, a great deal of social engagement started to take shape as the brand’s new description: from your microblog to the conversation of the web—in its entirety. Twitter used to be just a cool place to be; it’s now closer to a solid institution of society, but we’d like to think people are cool. The platform gives people voice. It allows them to comment directly to anyone who’s a public person and has amplified reach, but more or less frequently, misses out on a given fundamental aspect, a story, a not so marketable perspective of growth that didn’t come because of the wildly mislabeled and tragically ill explored concept of influence, regardless of adjectives that became professions. Through comments, you find divergent opinions, but also fight them. Sometimes, there’s a lost battle that you didn’t ask for. Other times, it’s the last thing you’d want to witness. Visibility is a promise, not a premise; but they do ask this question: what’s happening? And nobody wonders if the simple log in is an indicator that you have something to share, or that basically you want to know how to make better sense of events in the world or your closest surroundings, and with that, we keep our humanity and the sense that IRL and URL have distinct meanings beside the semiotic theory realm. But when it comes to giving you opportunities, they suggest you to follow people with contracts and sponsorships. You might want to say you just lost your job, your home, your girlfriend or boyfriend; they’ll leave you crying alone. They teach you that nobody cares. And curiously enough, that’s precisely why they’re credible.
But there are some key differences between Facebook and Twitter that might not grab too much attention. As the years pass, and with the pace of updating technologies and debate around them, features of these platforms are discussed like somebody just released a new ice cream flavor—not a joke: take Starbucks as a trending topic. There are actual business models that are worth scrutinizing and educating people about. Notably, Facebook makes more money than Twitter; but the social relevance of each is very much a question of people’s behavior. Not much to do with introverts and extroverts, but that might be a valid argument to start comparing them. The small detail is Facebook isn’t called Facebook anymore, as of 2022, and is composed of many branches—not only WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. The Meta Business Suite or the Workplace app might be enough to prove they’re serious about what they do; trying to use these as essential tools to manage financial health, your services and your portfolio, might be a reason to take in some classes on the digital landscape, product placing, branding, funneling, keyword listing and the classic ROI (return of investment) and SEO (search engine optimization). On Twitter, in turn, you’re not thinking about how much money you’re likely to make with your content. You barely see it as content. It’s just you, and your identity, which is allowed to exist—arguably, not the case for the company headquartered on Hacker Lane 1, Palo Alto. If events can group people with a common interest, accounts of these events appear first on Twitter. Nobody cares much about pictures there; they do about videos, but that’s a recent development and mostly a strategy used by traditional media. The simple text is still working, and so is people’s creativity and uncanny skill in making the absolutely pedestrian into an extraordinary language phenomenon, generating profound transformations in people’s expectations and perception as they apply what they see to themselves, in this fecund field of abbreviated storytelling. Is Facebook catching up? Of course, they have money.
But these are topics to be explored in isolation, or at least one at a time. What follows is not as much an opinion piece as it is a collection of experiences coupled with official statements and updated terms, design choices and releases to the public, discussions that took place from politics to entertainment (and how these have been oddly mixed up), from philosophy to violence (and how these have been greatly boosted or refrained), from words to actions (and how one side has defended policy for one, but not the other; and the other way around). My hope is that we reach common ground on some of these issues, with a possible prediction of what comes next for the big players of social media, and without an absent mention of what’s taking place right now, as well as who’s tried to rise to the top, or at least the top of your minds, in the last few years—some of them with a push from giants like Google and Yahoo!
This post will be split into two parts. You get the first 5 now. Yes, because I’m still writing the rest and my head is blowing up, okay?
1. Transparency versus Accountability: a false dichotomy
Global companies have an immense deal of policy issues to look over, but I think it makes sense to explain how I saw the whole macro perspective building up from smaller events. In the midst of a scandal-ridden election cycle in Brazil, which had a liking to the Arab Spring protests that showed the power of social media in bringing people together against authoritarianism and displayed, locally, the various facets of the political spectrum in my country, 2013 was definitely an eventful year. The timeline is very blurry; but as we now know, banks are the biggest enterprises of Brazilian power, and later that would end up giving then president Dilma Rousseff an impeachment request voted by Congress and effected with the premise of fiscal responsibility crime—and the events have transformed into profit for Netflix, with more than one title on the documentary genre. Of course, the person who wrote down the articles of impeachment based herself in masters of Philosophy of the Law, but she had her own philosophy: the Constitution was the Bible. The biggest scandal Brazil had seen by then, as big media wanted us to believe, was a phone call where ex-president Lula called Dilma by an affectionate name, something like “honey”. And there we go, translators. I hear high ranking people in Britain calling their interlocutors Mister and Madam Speaker, but the environment during the impeachment voting was very, very different. And you wouldn’t really have to understand Portuguese if you wanted to draw a comparison between the British Parliament and the Brazilian Congress. Maybe, if Theresa May had called someone, instead of repeating herself tirelessly (or not) as to what the plan for Brexit was, using a popular and informal expression like “dear”, that would be an object of discussion; maybe if she’d said “darling”. But the word was “querida”, which roughly and literally translates to “wanted”—but since we understand that language is a cultural phenomenon, the word is “honey” (we, meaning people who study language, use it properly more often than not, and care a great deal about culture). You’ll just have to trust me. Honey lost the presidency. The next guy was called a vampire—a nickname, of course. He was also the man who cancelled the investments towards Education and Health guaranteed by State owned Petrobras, which deals with oil and gas, and established a “spending roof”; other decisions included the delaying of GDPR voting, which is all very interesting because of a number of factors. First off, the phone call was a phone call. Second, traditional media, as Glenn Greenwald has noted, covered this extensively. Fanfics were born—except they were all terrible. I’m not big on fanfics. I know that the leak was discussed in Brazil after Glenn Greenwald himself had been busy covering the American NSA (National Security Agency) and what Edward Snowden, former employee, wanted to disclose globally. Americans spied on everyone, anywhere, anytime. But coming back to Facebook: for a while, the company embraced the concept of accountability as a core value. That meant, of course, that you had to be respectful with older people, wash the dishes and not talk about distressing things at the lunch table for everyone to hear. Except if, maybe, the accountability needed to be a concept for parents. Parents who don’t take care of their children, parents who don’t accept who they’ve put into the world and what the world has become, after they got older. But Facebook is no parent. For a consistent amount of time, Facebook was a place where every post was a sort of continuum of social interaction. People wanted to know what was up—notably, not outside of their circles. But then came Instagram. Progressively, but still quite quickly in terms of culture and mindset change, accountability was not anymore a question of “respecting older people”, but rather a question of “respecting yourself”. Look at the size of that dress. The poses. The suggestive captions. We’re in 2022, but that’s what corruption is to the conservative family (and I haven’t even started talking about investors): a double standard that’s not really there. In the case of politics, they find a piece of legislation that says you’re not allowed to do something like delaying payments in order to fund something else. You took that money; the money belonged to someone else. In the impeachment case, however, it was a bank that didn’t consider food a priority. It’s not your son stealing five bucks from your pocket to buy cigarettes. Maybe if it were beer, you’d say it’s completely normal—but we know some people don’t even like beer. Facebook became what’s now seen as a big conservative zone, despite research indicating that free speech is what they defend now, and that being both a blind spot and an admission of guilt with no trial, while this policy has given rise to extremist groups: forget accountability, it’s all about privacy. Facebook is the conservative mother or father who says: don’t you dare. Actually, in recent years, it came to a point where you have to provide government issued identification in order to post about “social issues”. So I guess they’re not social media anymore. There are reports they wanted to become a bank—and WhatsApp, along with Facebook Pay and Marketplace, are operating in their own terms. Icons aside, the cultural debate is very loaded. But the thing with politics is that, in 2013, while surveillance was a word too difficult to pronounce or spell, people went to the streets in São Paulo, Brazil, because of a 20 cent raise in bus prices—mind you, in Brazilian real. So let’s talk about accountability? Who takes the bus: the working class or the investor? The banker or the receptionist, who probably ascended socially? The headhunter, tourism agent, broker, manager; or the cashier, waiter, cleaning staff, regular shop salesperson? Police intervened. We’re reminded of Federal and state levels of delegation. I still remember that as a great mobilization within the Socialism and Freedom Party in Brazil, with figures like Plínio de Arruda Sampaio and Luciana Genro as the main actors. But the right to mobilize was somehow twisted in so many ways that it might be comparable to both Kenosha and the Capitol insurrection at the same time—of course, nobody died, but what we see on TV sitting on the couch in Brazil is not what we see going out the street. Accountability has a practical side: anyone who earns more than 30 thousand real in Brazil needs to declare it to our version of the IRS. What’s happening today is countless reports of corporate card spending being released, including mansions bought in the midst of the pandemic, with the country nearly leading in cases; and in the meantime, memes circulate saying “Jesus is my face mask” and the president meets world leaders with his entire staff lacking the garment. God above all; my lobster first. Before the last election, Brazil used to host political debates; Bolsonaro didn’t come to a single one of them, and hired Facebook ad expert Steve Bannon, who’s faced the justice system, to advise him during the campaign. But accountability in Brazil is not related to corruption, and nobody knows how to explain that in practice, unless they go to church. Of course, they think they can, but never mention that the Universal Church owner has 2 TV channels and billions in assets. They don’t know the concept of apology, but they’ve used it as a sort of system update: like a murderer’s letter supposedly making the victim’s family immune to grief and enduring trauma. Around the world, there are a lot of data sets showing Facebook and Instagram are not the favorite places to visit on the web, desktop or mobile, but mentioning competitors hits a nerve. As it turns out, accountability is for the socially acceptable to be maintained at all costs, regardless of which society accepts what. And the main concept now, as people think more and more about funding and monetization (the first when it’s governments; the second when it’s companies with contracts with the new entrepreneurs), is reputation—and don’t even entertain the possibility of talking about earnings: that’s restricted to those experts in finance, and you’re lucky some people want to raise the minimum wage in law, even though nobody says anything about the practice.
Words matter. Take the word transparent: an adjective to describe honesty. Transparency is a company duty. The tax example is a form of transparency: telling people how you’re making your money—actually, not people, but a branch of the government. There’s nothing transparent about the impeachment process in Brazil, and certainly not about the twice failed process in the United States. But that wasn’t always a core value for Twitter, on the other hand. We didn’t have private profiles, and now, Meta is private on the competing network. Is that a lack of transparency from Meta, Twitter or both? Who accounts for what? Sticking to the basic taglines: what’s happening and what’s on your mind are things we want to share, but not knowing what’s happening is always blessing and a curse, depending on the case; not being able to speak your mind is by all means a terrible circumstance. Except, in some places, it’s the law and religion—so the word risk, part of the financial vocabulary, takes on new meanings. Facebook and Twitter went global. But while people wanted to have thoughtful conversations, they also wanted to follow Katy Perry—to this day, the most followed person on the platform, with Facebook having the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo and Shakira ranking on the top of the list. It begs the question: where does entertainment meet politics? Maybe people could make a prediction saying that nobody would ever pay attention to anything serious, and so they elect, so to speak, figures to be talked about. Is that a carefully planned political strategy, or is it still about tech?
Relationships wouldn’t be the same without social media, and the greatest gap in between generations is expectations. Sure, some older people are on dating apps. But if social media is made up of people and the connection is made up of affection (then potentially romance, or sex), then the terms accountability and transparency need to be reassessed. Is that the corporate version of the Holy Sacrament? Are we all doing couple’s therapy with a robot? Because then we’d need a good organizational skill set to schedule everything, of course, and then make sure to include interpersonal relations, advanced problem solving and creative flow on our LinkedIn profiles.
2. Attack versus Protect: a media narrative
As its user base topped a billion, all marketing professionals had already heard the comparisons between Facebook and the biggest countries in the world. Twitter got somewhat stuck, but with its problematic formula: the weird mix of vibrant discussions and an almost unbearable, unhealthy stream of extremely important issues we all choose to ignore. Result: dumb memes, serious memes—but not quite. Facebook was a site, turned app, turned conglomerate. Twitter innovated, with privacy, with voice features, with stories, with topic organization and feed personalization. But Facebook had messaging on all its formats, or products. Because it doesn’t make sense not to call Facebook a product—technically; some might argue it actually gives a platform to allow product manufacturers to measure their reach and market influence. Over a decade later (Instagram was bought in 2012), teenagers have become the target audience, and adults agree, mostly: there needs to be protection from bad actors. But let’s be honest, because nobody will: what kind of actors? Instagram, its biggest product, is based on image. And that, coupled with identity verification, real user engagement and reputation, somehow ends up on reinforcing a world model based on who looks more attractive and therefore generates more likes. We don’t have to say nobody reads anymore (I’ve written about this academically), even though the platform’s name was Facebook, and you’d think they’d be boosting good texts and stories that mattered. But regardless of how much we give opinion, no, that’s really not what they did. Yet, the almost unmeasurable moderation scale has been pushed from third party company Cognizant to Accenture, and they operate in different countries. While people came up with data privacy laws, they haven’t been as clear and coherent about policy as they should have been about culture, real data and good practices, which should include problem solving, awareness and education campaigns; but they barely tell you what your options are if you’ve been hacked, impersonated, scammed, or maybe more broadly speaking, attacked. Twitter, on the other hand, was very straight forward—with eventual lapses of judgment and oversight. The decision to ban a sitting president in America was one of the great things they did, but you might want to take a look at the reasons, and the argument that there’s a sense of community there: most are communities of trolls, holding hands and making offensive jokes about millionaire media puppets, millionaire sports icons, billionaires going to space; the financially miserable, wanting to say things are not right, and the ethically miserable, who couldn’t care less when someone ends up dead. Are we supposed to be part of all such groups? Twitter is not activism: it’s a huge waste of time. Nothing you say matters, unless the sponsors are promoting you to say the opposite. On Facebook, by all accounts, what you say matters a lot: there’s a sense and atmosphere of judgment, a certainty of it. Twitter is supposed to be a free expression zone, but that meaning a space for creatives, not organized enemies. But they did set boundaries. Recently, the Google Play app rating went to plus eighteen. After the Tumblr community collapse, which would result in controversial niches like Pornhub sending proposals to buy it and then the company going from Verizon’s hands to Automattic, parent company of Wordpress, Twitter decided that adult content was okay. Search for an explicit act with just one word and be surprised, embarrassed or absolutely disgusted. But of course, that’s not what people use Twitter for—majorly speaking. It was never a place for messaging: it was public. Or not: if you ever thought your profile was getting too many readers with little concern for context and your personal history, or that the reasons why you might have had to worry, whether it was an angry tweet, any kind of otherwise reproachable discursive pattern, typos or sudden thoughts with no review and little to no research, then you’d just put the lock on it. But why did Meta do it?
Back in the Snowden days, people used to talk about the deep web. And before that, 4chan posted uncensored, unflattering body images, to use a very neutral terminology. It’s good to remind people that the forum generated memes like young German dictators saying they’d eliminated all the juice, of course with a boy who had somehow grown a mustache at age eight and loved milk shakes before they were even invented, in a black and white picture. But another whistleblower, Julian Assange, reminds us that protection is a complicated issue. You’d really want to debate this in a class, but you’d fail, no doubt. The best chance to have intelligent debate would be to quote Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman: society wants freedom, but in order to have it, they renounce security. The discussion is profound, despite Bauman’s elliptical style; but the internet has an answer to everything. Considering commercial domains, what is marketing but a simplification of the complex, with a touch of unethical practice in psychology? That being said, of course it would probably be translated in an archeological scripture that read YOLO (you only live once). But we want all the kinds of life we can get, while not getting life at all—the one we’re supposed to live. Interesting to notice how many of the Holy Commandments would be cancelled, in pure 21st century’s second decade fashion, because everyone just wants to have fun—like the song used to say in the eighties, except now it’s not a statement: it’s a business model. And so we’re not interested in the wars, the crimes, the military spending budget, the financial policy to cover basic needs of marginalized and uninsured populations, or even the right to information access and ownership of information about yourself. There’s your polarization: the less, the better, or the more, the better? And where the hell does that apply, other than Tame Impala and Megadeth songs?
Let’s suppose we’re not here talking about family values. We’re talking about democracy. Enter political microtargetting and smear campaigns. Paid hashtags; intended or unintended ridicule; physical, emotional and discursive violence; at the bottom, despicable human behavior, except when it’s robots—but how old is the judge who’s to decide if a robot is able to be despicable? We might have to call on Steve Carell. Traditional media seems to have an obsession with top level marketing. When a network like CNN has the clarity necessary to create a program focused on Africa, there’s going to be an ad by Zenith Bank. Globo, Brazil’s audience leader for decades, shows a bank loan firm, Crefisa, as the sponsor of Jornal Nacional, or the National News—our prime time, but ask around in 2022. Their weekend host was approached for a possible run for office; another, signed with a competitor after decades of contract. Bandnews, in a series of reformulations after the tragic passing of Ricardo Boechat, one of the country’s boldest, most powerful voices in journalism, includes programs on agriculture, New York life, Chinese partnerships, city solutions debates and an entrepreneurship newsletter. Other networks seem to have profited large sums from models which are, at the very least, debatable. But some stuff changed in the TV landscape, with the inauguration of Brazilian CNN. The response from audiences was markedly negative—but few ever cared to watch the original programs, and of course, only 1% of the country speaks fluent English. The problem is we’re expected to have empathy, and the local branch of the network is actually backed by the owner of a religious giant franchisee—for lack of a better, less realistic word. Is traditional media ever going to address teenager life? You know, a good debate on the complexities in the lives of people who are going to shape the future, the tech, the solutions, the trends, the conversations, the policies and even the new laws? Finance isn’t a question of taking creator economy seriously; it’s really catching up with the stock market. Also, for the less ambitious, it’s about keeping your feet on the ground, and spending on actual needs—which might be easier to focus on if there aren’t so many offers from, guess what, advertisers. But isn’t advertising a deliberate invasion of privacy? Isn’t privacy a thing we should be protecting? Or do we need a police officer to review every social media account we create and knock into our attacker’s home with an assault rifle, asking what they meant when they said we were ugly? Is that the kind of attack people face? Because joking aside, I’ve heard some terrible stories, and that’s because I don’t talk much. Nobody needs to hear about mine. Protection on the web is associated with a certain mechanism that involves moderation at great scale, margins of error, systems that aren’t always effective and in fact can reinforce abuse of power, and eventually this discussion escalates to the argument of defunding the police. On the other hand, stay away from my daughter. I don’t know how young she was when she first saw genitalia, but better put God First on her Instagram bio (and nevermind if you stumble upon her friend’s profile, a kid gymnast stretching her legs up over 90 degrees, whose account is run by her mom) than to start talking about racism and minimum wage at 14 years old.
They say it doesn’t affect you until it happens to you. I’ll have to buy Manuela’s book—D’avila, the legitimate VP, depending on what you believe in. When a loved one is a victim of an online attack, with the critical observation that the digital isn’t everything (and then you can talk about the NRA, Rio, Syria, Sudan, Colombia, Yemen or any of your favorite skippable subjects), we need to know how to protect not just ourselves, but others. And the systems are failing us—while big media profits not only financially, but as their authority is elevated every day. The speedy conclusions, when we realize nothing can be done to fix these systems, are likely to make people enter a dark phase in their lives: pessimistic, hopeless, vengeful, filled with hatred that turns into a sort of numbness and despair that kills every source of joy the body could ever find. But there are data analysts: they’ll tell you a change of habit is all you need. That could be many things, like your diet, your sleep, someone else’s presence in your life. Or maybe, just maybe, no porn! Again, who’s to say? No more than 2 hours on social media! Educate yourself! Learn a new skill, and foster relationships! Be social, maintain respect, get informed! Always have saved links and a bank of images and documents to make reference of! Or who knows, try to create something, listening to your audience! Speaking of systems, nobody or hardly anyone ever made a convincing enough defense of long distance relationships, partly because that means explicit acts are suddenly going to be okay, partly because dating apps need to thrive at all costs. There’s your polarization again, and notice that it’s corporate money against love, literally. All the countless stories that tell us about the beauty of unexpected support, passion and expression, are all being forgotten, just like COVID victims—and I do apologize for the analogy, especially considering the dangers of my medical history and my stubbornness of self-medication and change of schedules. Medication protects your body, and so should you, regardless of what you’re taking. A good social media policy sets a precautionary set of resources for an eventual risk factor coming into play. But social media is not the remedy for society. On a different front, parents, with their own concerns, largely don’t even know what kids learn in school. And schools, in case anyone noticed, are not even there anymore. Much like the housing bubble, education is now the unsolved problem, and curiously, tech wants in—when all they’ve contributed with was code and design; not a lot of pedagogy, philosophy, theory, case studies and testing of methodologies. Empathy, happiness, clarity: new micromodels of communication are in vogue, but a friend is a person you sit together with for hours to hear them talk about anything, and everything’s fine, because that’s what you chose to do. Instead, we tell our problems to random strangers, and hear vague comments about people who have absolutely no reason to like us, and precisely because of that, could suddenly hate us, and maybe do something against us without us even noticing.
With conservative policy from Facebook and so called progressive policy from Twitter, you’d think the former is a place where you protect your reputation and the latter is where you destroy it. And you’d be absolutely right. Except that reputation on Facebook is fake, and the main concept for Twitter is noise. Nobody gives a damn about reputation. But you wouldn’t, on this or that platform, share what’s happened recently in your private life. Facebook tried. Life events, relationship statuses, WhatsApp statuses, even the stories. But isn’t it funny how Instagram doesn’t allow link sharing? It’s not your reputation that matters: it’s Instagram’s reputation. It’s not what’s happening that matters on Twitter: it’s how embarrassing you can make it when you share your opinions—and maybe they’ll try to do something about those haters, man. They’ll have your back: your friends, not the platform; unless you really love birds, because of how real they are. And some people will follow because they agree, but that doesn’t mean everybody else does. So the concept of bubble is completely inverted. While Facebook friends are mostly people you know and might be asking you a direct question (then never again), Twitter, the place where you can be yourself, is going to wish you dead one day. It’s not a polarization of platforms: it’s a winners and losers sort of thing, just like high school. That’s the internet. Business model? There’s no freaking business. Shops still exist. Of course Amazon wants to buy literally all of them, just like iFood wants to buy all the restaurants and Uber is probably aiming air travel at this point; but the person who invented the term personal branding was the biggest charlatan of recent history. We don’t sell who we are. We are who we are because of people who made us act and speak in a certain way. That’s what we’re supposed to protect. Sometimes, when people really want an antagonist, they won’t have to look for one: the platform presents it to us—but again, not necessarily the platform, but our friends. Are people protecting us or attacking us? Are we among the loving or among the hating? When it comes to media discussions, this is exactly what they work to present: a balanced view, impartiality, no bias, facts and investigations that enlighten and inform. But not everything on the news (and not everyone who delivers them) is a good representation of real life models and the feelings generated by the discussions they approach, considering how. In fact, tech companies are much more aware of this than anybody else. Google has the history of the most disliked videos ever, as well as the most liked. Facebook can list the angry reactions. But who says one individual person reads a depressive user’s tweets every day and offers them a drink and a comedy show to watch for free? Nothing is for free. Not even friendship—and some of your connections and even positive interactions can shift into hatred faster than you imagine. If social media is, by definition, a representation of society, it is not a representation of the world. Trees don’t have profiles on Twitter, but they’re set on fire. What else is happening that you have no idea of, and how much do you care? What do you want to protect, and who?
3. The players in messaging
It was maybe 2008 when South Park released an episode called “you have zero friends”, where Eric Cartman goes on Chatroulette and only finds waist down webcams of naked men, clicking to the next every half a second and finding more of the same—sometimes he waited 5 seconds, the guy waved, and then stood up without pants on. Around the same year, I started academic research, and I was responsible for transcribing informal conversations with accuracy, including markers for hesitations, prolonged vowels, emphasis, stuttering, laughter, pitch and everything else, which included embracing non-standard grammar and punctuation. One of my colleagues, in a different study group, had a project on the use of emoticons (punctuation markers for emotion on text messages), before emojis were introduced and smartphones even existed (as we know, the difference is they became yellow faces with different expressions). Now we have Snapchat, but the filters have been boring for a while. Somehow, what’s really popular is pictures of your ceiling.
Edited images with positive messages on the WhatsApp group are for a certain age; memes are for another—but linguists haven’t been very conclusive on how to make a meme, who it represents or why. Abbreviations, reaction images, gifs. Oh my Lord, gifs. I promised not to tell my stories. But it’s hard not to think of Tumblr. Every social media endeavor made use of internal messaging. One of them was Gifyo, the network that may or may not have inspired the creation of Instagram—way before they allowed booty. A constantly updated feed of gifs, most of them sexual or at least provocative, some of them funny, a lot of art and effects—but everyone knows TikTok rules now. And the audiences were younger too. But who’s able to analyze youth conversation without sounding like either a coward conservative or a nosy nonce? God forbid, maybe both. But there goes polarization again: send memes, not nudes. Go to any chatroom and you’ll see conversations aren’t about politics, sustainability, energy, finance, social integration and assistance—now Bytedance has oversight of that; YouNow had given us a glimpse, and Faceflow still does, but very unfortunately. Group chats are a thing on Snapchat, Discord successfully ditched Skype, and Kik couldn’t survive even after creating lives, but maybe that was a problem with the attitude: a tweet from the company bragged about having been the first with an in-built browser and apps. Whereby came before Zoom, and it has better features, but not better servers—so connection quality lags behind, even though you don’t have to pay for group calls and the time is unlimited, along with integrations from the likes of YouTube, which is a feature that’s supposed to make the internet more fun, and also the classroom. When I was in college, however, the talk was that virtual learning was a scam. The phrase they used was “the scrapping of education”. Were they right? When I saw that the college professors that had inspired me and given me enough confidence to apply some of the stuff I’d learned in their two hour lectures in my one and a half hour classes—sometimes five or six on the same day plus a two hour meeting and a possible extra—were suddenly less trusted than the guy with an HD camera teaching third person singular, I really wanted to change jobs. And I did: here I am, writing. But does machine learning imply that the user has actually absorbed everything the moment they hit the like button? If I were allowed to post both the result of my bike crash and the result of my midnight entertainment frenzy, would people post comments saying they were worried and also that they wanted it freakier? That’s no polarization, folks! That’s diversity! And we embrace it. Of course, the internet police members have very diverse profiles, making it possible—and politically correct, which is not even the urban definition of “internet police”—to intervene saying that, if people are dying and you want to focus on pleasure, you need to find Jesus.
WhatsApp promises that your messages are end-to-end encrypted. That implies there’s a path. It’s only logical: everything has a beginning, middle and the end. That’s Aristotle. But the Greek philosopher would be very confused when he found out that another version of the entire plot, so to speak, is saved as a backup (as standard) on your email account. Telegram is an option that personally I’ve never explored very much, but merely tested. The same for Signal—and I wonder what really happened there. As of February 2022, people are talking about a thing called Wickr, but that’s not widely popular, despite being an Amazon product. The nature of conversations, though, isn’t a thing to debate, unless you’re a communications specialist—which everyone wants to be. There’s Slack. The issue at hand is today’s definition of privacy. Of course, if you really think nobody’s looking—paraphrasing the slogan of an abominable file hosting platform. I’ve written about identity and freedom, but the specialists are saying that the future is less trust and more truth—clearly, Trump fans. And who’s to say what kind of exchange is acceptable, when and where? It really is the big question looming over every parent’s head, but also the subconscious of teachers; employees and employers; teenagers and kids themselves; society in general. But very few are interested enough to talk about diversity with data. If Phony Texts, Snapchat’s initiative to make people aware of how teenagers talk (or how they don’t, and the definition of the word cringe) had come to be viral, you’d have to hire a lot of people to explain the language subtleties and also the limitations each community can impose—and what do we really know about WeChat or Line? What do we know about VK? The fact is that people don’t spend their entire day watching YouTube or Netflix. Maybe TV isn’t the conversation anymore; but great, because if people really started to believe that the person on the screen was speaking to them, with them, I guess psychologists would be rich instead of tech companies.
Except tech companies hire psychologists. The Netflix series Billions portraits precisely that: a coach helps people make profits on behalf of a company so hungry for money they’ll do anything it takes, and the results matter a lot more than their families, their feelings, their relationships with each other, their ideals. OnlyFans didn’t kill conversation; audacious dudes didn’t either (and I’m definitely not a guy who never even googled feminism). But here’s another polarizing perspective: your grandma hates Baby Shark and also BTS (or whatever comes next), and they’d rather see you find a good playmate when you’re a kid or a good romantic partner when you’re a teenager (or, in some cases, after you’re eighteen). But that is absolutely not what’s happening, and I’m not sure why I’ve never put this in text, but nobody else did, to my knowledge. The players in messaging are also the players in video calling: you’d much rather see who you want to see and interact, whatever you do, than keep staring at a screen; but people are different. And people will talk to different people—but they’ll say they don’t, because ethics isn’t taught in regular schools. Even worse: the politically correct is abandoned for the sake of authenticity (a cold and passionless analysis of Brazil), all the while education is rewritten by pastors, literally. But that’s just us, right? I mean, did Betsy DeVos incentivize younger people to visit museums or did she want them listening to rap? I think neither: she wanted them to study, but only the people who had potential—that is, the people who would go to Harvard and all. And guess what happened in Harvard? There’s a black and orange website that gives you a good perspective, depending on how much you scroll. Well, okay, I’m just teasing with the Biohub initiative; but again, we all saw the movie ending with the constant F5 on the dude’s ex, and now there are anti-stalking laws. What if they were retroactive?
Now, the unwanted interaction is a topic we all want to be able to address a lot less often; but nobody, literally, talks about the wanted interaction. And here’s what most tech companies do: they suggest you people to meet, based on whatever. I’m here thinking of their next moves, some of which are already happening in apps from Wink to Bumble: instead of saying you have mutuals, they say you both like the same music or work in the same area, so you’ll probably get along. But given the quality and quantity debacle, it’s a thumb swiping left or right, not a deep soul connection—let alone the death of business as usual.
4. Disruption versus Reputation: the bets on convenience
My dad loves taking pictures of the sky. The shades are truly beautiful—after Photoshop, of course. He’s always judged my entire music career (since 2004), and one of the ways he decided to make something up about what I did against him was to silently judge me because I used some of his best pictures as cover albums to my singles. How dare I? That’s outside of the point though. The pictures, they’re pretty generic. You can post a tree on Instagram. You can search for “happy” on an image bank and see pretty models smiling in fancy clothes and perfectly clean living rooms and kitchens. Not a lot of subways, alleys with graffiti, abandoned houses. These would make for very interesting representations of subjugated cultures. People in the subway are invisible anywhere in the world: not everyone has Happn, but are people really thinking about these possibilities? I don’t even pay for data. Too expensive. 3 bucks and I get a pack. But you see, vaping videos are totally fine on TikTok. And so we have a sort of mix. I think colorful pictures are especially interesting because neither of my phones could ever capture too much color, because they never had very powerful cameras. If I edit the pictures, they’re either boring or obviously saturated and grainy, low quality. Which is not, of course, something you’d want when you’re doing a close up of juice being poured into your blanket—excuse me, your glass.
Reputation, it’s important to stress, is the concept behind what’s been called surveillance capitalism—one of my references is Shoshana Zuboff. I’ve seen a number of people comparing the first computer experiments with mathematics and logics achievements; but see how it already started out wrong. Recently, I saw a report that said one of the first supercomputers ever created mapped out food distribution and population growth. Yes, it makes sense to call in someone who can handle numbers. But I think the pandemic proved us that curves mean nothing. You have all the right to disagree, but most places in Africa are way below the vaccination goals, while America exports and creates new versions of the product. It matters to ask: what defines American reputation? I won’t make an argument about Snap scores, that’s not my intention here. The argument is already obvious to me anyway, and I’m more interested in things that sort of intrigue me. How is it possible that COVID policy was widespread on social and traditional media, but nobody cared to tell us you could disable ad personalization on Google? Mozilla isn’t talked about anymore, let alone The Pirate Bay—albeit for different reasons. You don’t have to be a nerd or geek to understand that technology is corporation power, coupled with political power, and that access to culture and entertainment is actually a need and a right. But the reality is artists struggle in every possible way, all around the world, while their reputation gets completely destroyed; and privacy is just an issue everyone looks at in different ways. I guess when you realize people are paying attention, you go through that fight or flight thing. A lot like COVID, by the way. But the scale? What about Klout? Remember that? Alexa is closing down, so now we can’t all look to see whether or not Pornhub passed Facebook on the world’s most visited sites (last time I checked, it was in the 8th position). And we choose to ignore it. It’s so much easier, right? And that’s irony. Easy for me is to whip my thing out and spend time with a girl on camera. That could start a number of debates, but that’s another problem: debates I’d be having with myself, because that’s my freaking life, not anybody else’s.
So yes, let’s assume that sexual content is a disruption. Man, witches got burned. But that was centuries ago. And it’s such a generic category. Disruption, in the minds of conservative media in Brazil, is a gay couple kissing. Let me say that again: kissing! And they also show artist biographies on TV, very frequently. None of them mentions orgies. I remember when Jennifer Lawrence talked about butt plugs on a talk show, and then, not satisfied, said the words rape and anal leakage. There’s Louis CK, there’s Sarah Silverman, and there’s even Chris Rock doing perfectly common sense stuff; but somehow, they get cancelled. Who’s heard of Pascal? So much for British diplomacy. There’s no deep web, man. There’s just your personality and your respect for others. The big secret isn’t what your girlfriend is doing when you’re out, it’s whether you choose to trust her or not, because of a thing called love. Which could be related to butt plugs! If she feels something different, more stimulating with that, great. But no, disruption doesn’t have so much to do with sex. It does, a lot, in a lot of places; but I’d like to address some other stuff.
Imagine you and your parents still had a really close relationship. Anybody there? I don’t think anybody would search for what their parents are doing online, let alone ask. But we have this feeling that they do that when it comes to us—the asking is a fact; the searching is what makes everyone sick. Is two-factor authentication a form of disruption? Absolutely not. That’s the bare minimum that tech companies could do for users. Disruption is taxing the mega wealthy, for example. Bill Gates famously said, after becoming a philanthropist with a biopic on Netflix (that curiously starts exploring his concerns over poop, not butt plugs), that he’d happily pay taxes, but he wanted to be left with something for himself. I mean, how much? We live in a world where people on TV are disappointed because Facebook made 4 billion dollars less than the same period of the previous year. Facebook! Do I have to explain? I’d love to. I’d totally explain the reasons why they’re the greatest company ever created—if I had a 4 billion dollar annual salary; but who am I, right? Their CEO only makes a dollar a year, the poor man. And besides the misinformation hypocrisy, be reminded: that was just Q1 (meant to be the first quarter of the year). I think disruption is Neil Young calling out on fake news in a music platform that thought audio was just a product, or rather, a form of technology, and defended a man who was not a fan of protecting the population against disease, fostering debate on some kind of conspiracy. Someone should check out how much money Joe Rogan makes. Disruption is when people listen, think, and they agree that there’s something that needs to change, but then they don’t just like a post and move on: they take action—like cancelling a subscription and literally pulling money off a platform. Disruption is a Black man as the president of a racist country. Disruption is female-fronted Russian punk. And for many Americans, however uncomfortable they might be with it, a network like Red Fish Stream. Disruption is not so much telling an elected official to stuff their hole with a baseball bat, and certainly not to ask for someone’s hanging, much less to offer scholarship for a teenage murderer displaying an assault rifle in the midst of a public demonstration against oppressive law enforcement agents—and there are many. Disruption is having a different plan. Disruption, in minimalistic terms, is a lot more like eating soy milk and homemade bread instead of eggs with bacon. The tradition? We all know what that is. White male, wealthy and powerful. KFC. It gets complicated in the ideological spectrum. A person isn’t nice just because they’ve read a book and you haven’t. They don’t deserve more respect. Especially if they learned nothing, and applied nothing. Disruption is education—because people expect and bet on the absolute numbness of all critical capacity, even about what we can or cannot do with our own freaking bodies; even in the air we breathe. You could say: electric cars are a sort of disruption. You’d be right. But where’s that money going right now? You could say: crypto is disruption in essence. But where’s that money going right now? You know what would really disrupt the trends? Giving shelter to the homeless, instead of making people like Adam Neumann fill pockets and briefcases by offering high tech office rentals.
5. The players abroad
Japan is famous for its distinct cultural richness. Illustration, animation, painting, architecture: all that might seem like just a piece of online content to click on—or binge watch. Anime has a major audience across the world, and the videogame industry is one of the most profitable of all. But how does Japan talk? The discussion isn’t going to progress very much if you start it with a Pokémon meme: their language is different, including the alphabet. While people might already know that, there’s a question worth asking: do we know how the Japanese use the internet? One clue might be on the messaging app statistics: Line is the most popular in the country, and in terms of social media, Amebo ranks first. But that’s not the only example: while most people are too busy discussing China (given circumstances, I guess), Russia also has a distinct cultural richness, and a slightly more familiar, but still very different written communication standard. Over there, social media is VK, while messaging is Telegram. And in China, people talk on WeChat, but Facebook is actually banned. Other countries, not even in the Islamic world, since we’re talking about the alphabet, have populations that speak in their own language, but can’t seem to find reach; within those populations, there are languages at risk of extinction, along with culture and even the people who tried to preserve it.
Technology has interesting ways of manifesting its influence in our lives. While Yahoo, American, was founded in 1994, UOL, Brazilian, came in 1996. Today, they’re absolutely not mainstream in terms of traffic, but their credibility isn’t questioned as much as the newest YouTube sensation—a great point, if only everyone agreed on it. Google would be founded in 1998, and a name that tech enthusiasts will not fail to remember is Marissa Mayer, whose career can tell us a lot about what the internet could give us and take away from us. After her time at both Google and Yahoo (and having been the latter’s CEO), finding the balance probably means more to her than she’d be able to disclose; however, her new project (Sunshine Labs) pinpoints an aspect of both internet culture and technology infrastructure that most people ignore: your contacts. If someone created a pop-out window (today’s notification tab or on site terms agreement) telling you that two emails belonged to the same person and you could group them together with one click, good for the engineer. Or is that the UX researcher’s role? Developer? Designer? Programmer? In Brazil, there’s a joke around the culture of code that says if you know Java, you’re a prostitute. And you’d never know, with that friendly coffee icon. The programming language first appeared in 1995, developed by Oracle, a world giant dating back from 1977. But it’s not really about listing events, is it? The joke is funny because “program girl” is a poor translation of a term in Brazilian Portuguese that corresponds to “sex worker”.
But tech is serious business. While Fordism and quantum computing or AI might have very little in common (which T.S. Eliot would probably agree with), this century brings questions on the essence of human nature and our interactions, with little care for explaining and regulating compensated with lots of incentive for expanding and liberating. That is precisely the crossroads we’re at: more possibilities for a chaotic-good informational overload or fewer possibilities for a safe and organized ideological and emotional environment? Both would take place on the web; but another question is that not being a pre-requisite—not in existential terms, since we’re all here eating food instead of microchips, but definitely in mental health terms. What does tech do to care for user well-being? Regulation isn’t a violation of the American First Amendment, but we’re really going back in the centuries to realize you can’t just do whatever the hell you want. A First World problem?
Maybe the idea that the average Brazilian will never interact meaningfully with the First World has to be analyzed in more detail, and that means people whose work is only acknowledged in small circles needs to be praised and passed around like we do when it’s a good blunt—sorry, my college was Humanities. It’s not true that the Brazilian people don’t have contact with the foreigner: the fact alone that we’re ranking first on app consumption and hours of usage, coupled with our culture of following references in entertainment and even international brands and companies, without forgetting attempts to interact with people (very common in gaming and streaming, a behavior that is definitely not exclusive to Brazil), are enough proof that we’re part of globalization in a somewhat active manner—but the problem is that “somewhat”, or “partly” active, in a constant glass-half-empty state. And if these interactions are long enough, good enough to actually mean something other than just realizing that there are countries outside of our own, modes of thinking, modes of living and organizing society, among other elements, then filling up the rest of the glass will depend on the other side saying: “that water is better than what we have here!”
Next up: the good side of being watched; the new and the official; definitions of culture; categorization; beyond mainstream.
#academia #discourse #policy
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