Coming full circle? From the digital agora to the splinternet
Welcome to the twelfth issue of my monthly newsletter
This time, I want to talk about Bluesky, a supposed exodus from X/Twitter and the broader debate about offering a digital agora in a times of geopolitical tensions and growing nationalization of the Internet.
Please enjoy!
After the election Donald Trump as President of the United States of America, many saw Elon Musk and in particular his changes to X, formerly known as Twitter, as a contributing factor. After a first wave of people flocking to Bluesky, a second, much bigger wave, followed the election. Whether this will help to create a "real alternative" remains to be seen but a more fundamental point can be made: are we seeing a return to the early days of the Internet and are we moving away from the lofty goal of a global digital agora?
The Internet has always been plagued by an inherent tension of lofty ideals and visions and more pragmatic technical, social, political, and economic realities. This tension, coupled with a shift away from the globalized and interconnected post cold war world towards a more fragmented and geopolitically contested one, has left us with messy Internet governance and competing visions for the Internet, but that is a subject for the next issue.
One key feature of the Internet as many of its visionaries saw it, was to put away gatekeepers and allow for the free flow of and access to information. In other words, the Internet was about solving the issue of information-scarcity. In line with that thinking, the Internet was seen as a democratizing force from the very beginning and until the Arab Spring when this popular and strong narrative received cracks and more critical examination.
At least if you have access to the Internet, the issue today is not information-scarcity (just look at all the talks, papers, and political activism regarding disinformation). Rather, it seems that we are overwhelmed by all the information available at our fingertips leading inevitably to the emergence of new intermediaries and gatekeepers (see also my previous post). In the early days, this was by search engines once the young Internet grew too big to already know all the relevant addresses as a user. This then continued with social media platforms intermediating and curating content for us and now more and more people are interacting with information through AI in the form of popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
Already in the beginning, in addition to intermediaries like search engines, there was another way of filtering information: communities. From the early bulletin and messaging boards to Internet fora ranging from political interests to niche hobbies, in addition to the "global" Internet people could choose to mostly engage in a smaller circle, according to their rules and interests.
Social Media tried to apply this community idea to the whole world, which is why we see the concept of a digital agora, the global town square as a place for democratic debate straight out of ancient Athens, being attributed to those platforms, in particular X, or rather its predecessor Twitter. While many now claim that since turning into X, the platform can no longer be considered as a digital agora and hope that Bluesky will reclaim that title, it is notable that little thought seems to be given to how such a digital agora should actually work and can make sense at a global scale. Whereas the ancient namesake was following strict rules and processes for access and behavior - many of them not very democratic by today's standards - for the digital agora it is apparently enough to attach "digital" to the established concept to bring it into the digital age.
This lack of conceptualization and thinking about what makes a digital agora work (or whether it can even work) is certainly part of the explanation why we face such a messy governance landscape today, inw which almost everybody agrees that the status quo is untenable, but no one really knows what to do. Leaving the concept of the digital agora in the hands of privately owned for-profit organizations either borders on naive optimism or cynical profiteering masquerading as clever marketing. It is clear, that the logic for running such platforms as a business is not conducive to constructive democratic debate. How such a platform could look like would deserve much more attention (I've previously shared my two cents on the issue back in 2016).
Thinkers like Francesca Bria have repeatedly made the case for social media as "true" digital agoras by being designed as public utilities, argueing also from an European perspective in clear difference to the US model. But so far, these ideas haven't materialized, in contrast to one policy-proposal after the other trying to reestablish state dominance on social media, like most recently the poorly designed Australian proposal to introduce age limitations on social media use.
So, are we seeing the "end of the social network"? The landscape certainly seems to be becoming much more fragmented, with people reacting to the overwhelming amount of posts and interactions and changes in culture on various platforms by retreating to smaller communities or withdrawing alltogether. This has also sparked criticism of isolating in echo chambers or even contributing further to radicalization outside of the public view.
But coming full circle and landing us back in the early days of the Internet, with a contested global digital space and many fragmented communities on various platforms, points to a much more fundamental issue that we have not yet addressed: how we want to govern the age of information abundance.
To finally address this issue, our discourse about social media platforms also needs to step up its game. In a way, bad reporting and understanding of these platforms has elevated them to a role and importance they need not necessarily have. Social media platforms could become what Internet forums used to be. But it is also clear, that social media platforms today are a relevant factor for the information space and their governance demands much more attention and informed debate instead of populist policy proposals or naive corporate speak.
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