Francis Hunger on Tue, 19 Mar 2019 17:28:04 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Christchurch and the Dark Social Web by Luke Munn |
Dear Geert and Luke, although I agree with a large part of Lukes analyse let me put in question the point of machinic agency. Luke writes: "Calibrated correctly, platforms grasp the social, cultural or ideological connections between content, presenting a sequence of ideas that seem natural, even inevitable. These links, as [Rebecca] Lewis argues, make “it easy for audience members to be incrementally exposed to, and come to trust, ever more extremist political positions.”" This kind of description ascribes a lot of power/agency to the technical medium and does in my opinion not fully grasp the agency of individuals who have to actively seek this content (they have to go online, subscribe to certain streams, pick their phones and read messages, click on more extreme content and so on). I mean, "audience members" or individuals have to actively engage with certain political positions. I'm not sure if this kind of argument "the user get's lured into" not even depoliticizes the whole situation as it argues mainly "the user is the victim". It wasn't me – it was the actor-network. The decision for instance to actively engage within let's say the KKK or Blood and Honor and similar groups to me seems similar to the decision of engaging in todays online hate-groups, which may be spread more globally, but nethertheless these are not "algorithms" acting by themselves (what motivation should they have?) but humans who interact with each other trough global communication platforms. Luke further, after describing Pewdiepies influence says: "One of the strengths of the dark social web is that is highly individualized, an environment algorithmically optimized to reflect its inhabitant. … Yet in an operational sense, T.'s environment of platforms, sites and services is exactly the same as ours—it is designed in the same way, with the same architectures and affordances." So I wonder, why does the discussion want to look into the "sociotechnical properties of that environment" instead of looking into the political dimension which forms and enables humans who wish to kill other humans. warm greetings, Francis -- http://databasecultures.irmielin.org # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: