Social Media

 I do think social media has different emergent properties from other forms of communication. Of course, being booted off of it prejudices me against it. But I think a completely different approach might make it constructive. In that way it is the same as everything else; change is not only the only constant; change is the only hope; growth has sufficed til now, but now we are doomed without change. The change I propose for social media is to make it more contextual, and less like call and response. My experience was that any departure from conformity elicited insults. Call and response in real life can be fine, especially when it is spontaneous. I imagine religious call and response is bad, because of pedagogy, or whatever. I think protest call and response is fine in a protest march, since it is just for fun. But call and response in social media isolates users into bubbles, and subjects those that cannot be classified into bubbles to insults. It is the rules of social media that make it toxic. Open source social media imitates the rules of corporate social media, so it is equally toxic. There simply hasn't been time for new rules to be invented by those working on it in their spare time, and those doing it professionally are too busy refining the existing rules to make any new ones. My obsession with an as yet non-mathematical abstraction, forces me to imagine what I suspect would be different rules. Instead of calls for conformist responses by those with lots of followers, how about facet decorations hidden except in specific context. Ideally, context would be the point; taking a decoration out of context would be meaningless, because the new context it was put into would overwhelm the context it was taken from. Whether someone invites discussion in a context, or rejects disagreement in a context, would be as important as the decoration that elicited the discussion or disagreement. It is not possible to lie if the mode of expression is permission or rejection of response. It is only through the rules of communication that people can lie. Written and spoken words can be untrue, because of syntax. Social media calls for response, are even easier to use for disinformation, because the rules of social media are presently geared that way. I think shifting from call and response rules to context rules would decrease disinformation. At any rate, anything would be better than growth of social media without changing its rules, same as anything would be better than growth of the economy without changing what it produces.