This post was inspired by something that has been bothering me about the exodus from Twitter: the moral pressure to leave that is being exerted on those who – for now – out of necessity still remain there.
While, of course, I see the danger of autocratic plutocrats controlling our global communication infrastructure, and yes, we should move toward publicly owned social media platforms, we face a practical dilemma. Ideally, we’d instantly switch to a smooth, decentralized, user-friendly Fediverse-like infrastructure that prevents dictatorial control while maintaining effective global reach for mass emancipatory movements. Sadly, we don’t live in that ideal world. In reality, Twitter (which I refuse to call X, as Twitter is the community, while X is the hijacked technical platform) remains a powerful global network for climate action, Gaza advocacy, COVID research, and many other similar, often fragile social movements.… Read more...
Conversations in Context: A Twitter Case for Social Media Systems Design
On September 1, I gave the invited talk for the 5th AIS SIGPrag International Pragmatic Web Conference Track of the I-SEMANTICS 2010 conference in Graz, Austria. Here are the abstract of and link to the paper, as well as the presentation.
Abstract
Conversations are the lifeblood of collaborative communities. Social media like microblogging tool Twitter have great potential for supporting these conversations. However, just studying the role of these media from a tool perspective is not sufficient. To fully unlock their power, they need to examined from a sociotechnical perspective. We introduce a socio-technical context framework which can be used to analyze the role of systems of tools supporting goal-oriented conversations. Central to this framework is the communicative workflow loop, which is grounded in the Language/Action Perspective.… Read more...