H2

text type: article

Assignments

Outline the changes in relationships and communication brought about by social media as well as the associated risks.

20%

Analyse the means and strategies Bogost employs to convince the readers to reduce their social media usage and to create awareness of the dangers social media pose for society.

40%

Choose one of the following tasks:

3.1

You have read Bogost’s article and are convinced that the author’s idea “Wouldn't it just be better if fewer people posted less stuff, less frequently, and if smaller audiences saw it?” is an unrealistic approach to tackle the problem. You decide to write a letter to the editor in which you explain what kind of knowledge and skills people need to use social media responsibly and what society can do to support responsible and safe usage.

Write the letter to the editor. Use the quotation as a starting point and include your background knowledge.

3.2

“Technology and social media have brought power back to the people.”

Comment on this statement.

40%

“People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much”

by Ian Bogost

[...] Your social life has a biological limit: 150. That’s the number – Dunbar’s number,

proposed by the British psychologist Robin Dunbar three decades ago – of people with

whom you can have meaningful relationships. [...]

We can reasonably expect to develop up to 150 productive bonds, but we have our most

intimate, and therefore most connected, relationships with only about five to 15 closest

friends. We can maintain much larger networks, but only by compromising the quality

or sincerity of those connections; most people operate in much smaller social circles.

Some critics have questioned Dunbar’s conclusion, calling it deterministic and even

magical. Still, the general idea is intuitive, and it has stuck. And yet, the dominant

container for modern social life – the social network – does anything but respect

Dunbar’s premise. Online life is all about maximizing the quantity of connections without

much concern for their quality. On the internet, a meaningful relationship is one that

might offer diversion or utility, not one in which you divulge secrets and offer support.

A lot is wrong with the internet, but much of it boils down to this one problem: We are

all constantly talking to one another. Take that in every sense. Before online tools, we

talked less frequently, and with fewer people. The average person had a handful of

conversations a day, and the biggest group she spoke in front of was maybe a wedding

reception or a company meeting, a few hundred people at most. Maybe her statement

would be recorded, but there were few mechanisms for it to be amplified and spread

around the world, far beyond its original context.

Online media gives the everyperson access to channels of communication previously

reserved for Big Business. [...] Finally, people could publish writing, images, videos, and

other material without first getting the endorsement of publishers or broadcasters.

Ideas spread freely beyond borders.

And we also received a toxic dump of garbage. The ease with which connections can be

made – along with the way that, on social media, close friends look the same as

acquaintances or even strangers – means any post can successfully appeal to people’s

worst fears, transforming ordinary folks into radicals. That’s what YouTube did to the

Christchurch shooter, what conspiracy theorists preceding QAnon did to the

Pizzagaters, what Trumpists did to the Capitol rioters. And, closer to the ground, it’s

how random Facebook messages scam your mother, how ill-thought tweets ruin lives,

how social media has made life in general brittle and unforgiving.

It's long past time to question a fundamental premise of online life: What if people

shouldn’t be able to say so much, and to so many, so often? [...]

The capacity to reach an audience some of the time became contorted into the right to

reach every audience all of the time. The rhetoric about social media started to assume

an absolute liberty always to be heard; any effort to constrain or limit users’ ability to

spread ideas devolved into nothing less than censorship. But there is no reason to

believe that everyone should have immediate and constant access to everyone else in

the world at all times.

My colleague Adrienne LaFrance has named the fundamental assumption, and danger,

of social media megascale: “not just a very large user base, but a tremendous one,

unprecedented in size.” Technology platforms such as Facebook assume that they

deserve a user base measured in the billions of people – and then excuse their misdeeds

by noting that effectively controlling such an unthinkably large population is impossible.

But technology users, including Donald Trump and your neighbors, also assume that

they can and should taste the spoils of megascale. The more posts, the more followers,

the more likes, the more reach, the better. This is how bad information spreads,

degrading engagement into calamity the more attention it accrues. This isn’t a side

effect of social media’s misuse, but the expected outcome of its use. As the media

scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan puts it, the problem with Facebook is Facebook.

So far, controlling that tidal wave of content has been seen as a task to be carried out

after the fact. Companies such as Facebook employ (or outsource) an army of content

moderators, whose job involves flagging objectionable material for suppression. That

job is so terrible that it amounts to mental and emotional trauma. And even then, the

whole affair is just whack-a-mole, stamping out one offending instance only for it to

reappear elsewhere, perhaps moments later. Determined to solve computing’s

problems with more computing, social-media companies are also trying to use

automated methods to squelch or limit posts, but too many people post too many

variations, and AI isn’t sufficiently discerning for the techniques to work effectively. [...].

Wouldn’t it just be better if fewer people posted less stuff, less frequently, and if smaller

audiences saw it?

People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much