The spanner in the networks
While Twitter continues its widely reported implosion, the company often takes the spotlight from the processes and happenings that constitute its and any platform’s central value. Value is the key in this case, as fiasco after fiasco has not been sufficient to give other platforms a go – and there are really very many to choose from. Complaints about the challenges of Mastodon or the confronting interface of Reddit overlook the extent to which users had to overcome Twitter’s own early issues, but these complaints implicate the way we have organised our information systems around the platform. That implication is this: our need for Twitter (as well as other social networks) is derived as much or more from the centrality we have given it as from anything that Twitter itself does or offers.
Other services will greatly struggle to take over because the services, benefits, or even moral and ethical frameworks are not what is important to users; it is the platform’s centrality to users’ routine social practices. This highlights the relevance of Manuel Castells’ Network Society, which he recently revisited with a much more cynical eye to accommodate ongoing processes of technological and societal change. He found that global networks, including social media networks such as those at Twitter, have become a more entrenched site in the struggles of self-identification, negotiations of power, and social structuring, even as the rosy lens of liberating self-communication fades firmly into the sunset. The loss of this optimistic horizon casts a considerable pall over the Network Society we see transpiring on Twitter. Social organisations, like the state or massive multinational corporations (like Twitter) have not diminished in their significance but rather learned to leverage the centrality of the network to empower themselves.
Ameliorating the risk of self-reinforcing social power and dominance stemming from these leveraged networks is a daunting task because it requires sacrificing the immediate benefits. As it stands, scholars are asked for the Twitter text they want to accompany their academic publication, governments flag major decisions by tweet, and information workers decry the pain that comes with losing followers in a move. In each of these cases, the issue is not how great Twitter does what it does; governments aren’t excited about a service that Twitter offers and those wincing Twitter leaders aren’t crying out for the loss of easy login systems. It’s just easy and predictable access to a group of people – even if that access is less easy and less predictable than before. As we further allow transgression after transgression by a platform endorsed by the Taliban as a bastion of free speech, we might need to start asking questions about the society we are so desperate to sustain through this network, as well as how willing we are to empower its biggest beneficiaries.
Tim Koskie, CMT researcher
This article is featured in our newsletter of 14 July 2023. Read our newsletter in full.
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