2/ Communities create, explore, and enforce shared norms. But, on social media, the enforcement mechanism is pathological. At best, the structure of interactions between endlessly overlapping and entangled communities minimizes the power enforcement. Everything gets muddled.
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3/ More realistically, incorporeal communities -- or, aggregated allegiances, really -- dedicate a wildly excessive amount of time and attention trying to fortify the community boundaries obliterated by the medium.
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4/ It's wildly excessive because the medium *does* connect everyone -- but only with respect to attention. Within a community, norms guide agendas. On social media, different communities compete over contextless attention as a resource, trying to enforce their latent agendas.
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5/ Consequently, the feed and trending algorithms stoke a constant sense of insecurity. The competition for attention reduces everything to defining a multiplicity of community boundaries simultaneously, at the expense of intra-community social interactions.
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6/ The mixture of inter-group to intra-group interactions is awful. At the limit, the medium approaches a combat arena that endlessly fragments communities, pulverizes connections, and crystalizes stereotypic animosity.
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7/ Advertiser-friendly homogeneity and the commodification of attention creates really high market capitalizations because the catastrophic and self-perpetuating social damage is fully externalized.
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See also:
@Aelkus's take on dysfunctional fandoms and politics, which I think is related. https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1026843256271851524 …This Tweet is unavailable.Show this thread
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