Telegram and substack are great, but they’re ultimately (mostly) asocial. They’re a whole bunch of folks, each in his or her own separate building, preaching. Isolated fiefdoms aren’t what move us together toward societal progress. Societies need social networks.
I wonder if a true meaningful deliberation is possible between strangers on a widespread scale with social media, period. We can sometimes manage it between smaller groups of people with some degree of shared norms, at least epistemic norms and some minimum baseline of social norms and some degree of competence at disagreeing constructively. But it is unfortunately very clear that those conditions are not present in current digital spaces, regardless of whether those seem "tyrannical" or not to people who have had bad experiences with them.
Those conditions may well also not have been possible face to face, especially once we grew larger than the ancient Polis, and even that seems like a borderline case. We just didn't realize how far we were from the deliberative ideal until we started looking closely at what was really happening because the "polarization" and so on became so dramatic.
Reputation is not to me a solution to the problem of social media not being social in the more fully human sense because reputation is so easily manipulated and we have no solution to that problem other than some sort of agreed upon reliable certification process or some sort of agreed upon fair deliberative process. And we are lacking either of those, at least in any broadly agreed on form.
I wonder if a true meaningful deliberation is possible between strangers on a widespread scale with social media, period. We can sometimes manage it between smaller groups of people with some degree of shared norms, at least epistemic norms and some minimum baseline of social norms and some degree of competence at disagreeing constructively. But it is unfortunately very clear that those conditions are not present in current digital spaces, regardless of whether those seem "tyrannical" or not to people who have had bad experiences with them.
Those conditions may well also not have been possible face to face, especially once we grew larger than the ancient Polis, and even that seems like a borderline case. We just didn't realize how far we were from the deliberative ideal until we started looking closely at what was really happening because the "polarization" and so on became so dramatic.
Reputation is not to me a solution to the problem of social media not being social in the more fully human sense because reputation is so easily manipulated and we have no solution to that problem other than some sort of agreed upon reliable certification process or some sort of agreed upon fair deliberative process. And we are lacking either of those, at least in any broadly agreed on form.
Best to you Mark.