Where the problems with social media come from and the big result, part 1
I’ve meant to start developing a view for a while but I keep not starting because I haven’t fully developed it. I’m going to bite the bullet and write a few ideas down, not yet complete and coherent. Sorry if it ends up confusing.
When the internet was starting to become mainstream, say the 1990s, people looked forward to it democratizing communication compared to the press and broadcast since anyone could communicate to anyone else. Yet today social media creates many problems. Two of the top ones are (again, speaking loosely as I’m developing my thoughts)
- Cancel mobs
- Algorithms determining what messages to propagate determine culture
These problems seem tyrannical. How did what seemed moving toward democracy became that way?
Dominance hierarchies form when there is a necessary resource that can be controlled and no alternative.
Businesses seek competitive advantages and customer captivity. The first couple chapters of Competition Demystified explain why. The rest of the book explains how.
Print, broadcast media, and other traditional media limited the number of competitors in a market. It couldn’t have too many since there were only so many stations to broadcast and so many printing presses, but most markets could sustain more than one, so they didn’t result in monopoly, even if one had a major advantage.
I don’t think people foresaw it, but social media enabled network effects that created customer captivity and barriers to entry. They created a situation with a necessary resource with no alternative, at least within the biggest social networks like Facebook and Instagram.
The second result, about the algorithms shaping culture, resulted from this corporate situation. The company operating the platform could tyrannize its users. I don’t mean torture them or treat them badly. I mean it could dictate terms of behavior and could act how it wanted within limits of not pushing people off.
The first result, about some groups being able to shout down others, once a group had enough followers, it created its necessary resource that it could control: access to that audience. That group could dictate terms to its audience too, within limits too.
The Big Result and What Empowers It
The big result is what happens with nearly all technologies. Technologies aren’t good or bad. Like sharp knives and fire, they augment the intent and values of those using them.
These technologies require a lot of resources, especially energy and power. While an individual or small group can create a new social media company, and many of the big ones were started by a small number of entrepreneurs, keeping it going requires a lot of power.
The big result is that social media empowers groups with the most access to resources—that is, with rank in a dominance hierarchy. It makes them stronger relative to others.
What drives it is power and energy from nature. The big picture is that absent democratic protections, technology that requires controllable resources that can be controlled, such as power or some distribution channels in general augments and accelerates smaller numbers of people to dominate over, coerce, and control everyone else. It makes dominance hierarchies steeper, with fewer people at the top, and more enduring.
Those are some broad strokes. I’ll write more later, but wanted to start.
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