22 July

I’ve posted before about how social media is confused with social networking, which came before it. The two main differences that turned social networking into socially toxic imitative rivalry, were: 1) the creation of the ‘feed’, and 2) the capacity to comment on posts from people outside your usual network of online connections. Social media is a social technology, not an information technology. The problem isn’t misinformation or disinformation. It’s that it destroyed the actual social networks, and allowed strangers to interact without any moderating social connection. Under cover of bullshit ideas that this is ‘democracy’ and ‘free speech’. I’ve devised some diagrams that are like conceptual compressions about this shift, which I’ll share here over time.