dwoboyle

Gutless, not gone

  • he/they

A person, who, on occasion, will post stuff to the internet.


itch.io page
dwoboyle.itch.io/
Game dev Cohost page
cohost.org/Quixoneira

Keeble
@Keeble

Social media, no matter how well designed, will not save us


Keeble
@Keeble

a lot of this thinking originates from people way overcontextualizing just how much twitter's political impact was long term. the arab spring did not result in long term, enduring change. trump gained popularity because of his atavistic nativism, not his twitter. what minor political gains dsa (for example) have made have not happened because twitter or any social media. its boots on the ground organizing

on the contrary, social media is to organizing what 100 calorie packs are to dieting. they are marketed as a way to diet without really having to put in effort, but what you end up with is sugary carbs in smaller packages


dwoboyle
@dwoboyle

The role of social media and historical leftist zines/newspapers is largely not vehicles for social change by themselves, but as a way to get information out so that folks look into local organizing and local actions. They serve as points of knowledge and radicalization more than anything else.

Useful and necessary but not an end point.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @Keeble's post:

Yeah, organizing that can actually accomplish something in the world happens in meat-space, by physically talking to people. Organizing here referring to getting people to fight.
At the same time one has the feeling that digital tooling should play a role in coordination of action during organizing work, intra-movement discussion and dissemination of information. But public facing "social media" is not the way to do that. A private, invite-only, vetted, heavily moderated web2.0 forum may be much better for that. A place for serious discussions among like minded people, which just isn't what social media are.

I have the impression that people on this platform here are too terminally online and vastly overestimate the importance of what happens e.g. on the public sphere of twitter. That is from the viewpoint of someone living in a central european country, no clue about the US. But in meat-space around me my impression is that very few people actively pay much attention to any of that, by and large regardless of how politicized they are. They also don't post a lot, just in general. This stuff is just not significant, what gets published by news outlets dominates discourse way more.