Pondering both a personal existential crisis alongside a global public policy challenge that politicians need to find answers to – and quickly.
I compared my social media use to that of just over a decade ago and noticed how much more the interactions between my online and offline worlds were compared with today. One of the most fun things from that time were our pub lunches at a pub not far from London King’s Cross. What was lovely was that although many of us were meeting for the first time face-to-face, the conversations we had were as if we had known each other for years.
This was a time when social media firms were not chasing the advertising currencies in the ruthless manner that they are doing so today – much to the detriment of the user experience when you consider the term ‘social media’ in its more meaningful sense – focusing on the ‘social’ rather than the ‘media’. I came to the conclusion that the media should be facilitating the social bit, not the social bit being the cash cow for big media corporations. The fact that we’ve ended up with the latter reflects a failures of our political and public policy institutions as much as anything else.
The immediate fallout from the new restrictions on Twitter.
In a nutshell, it has cut me off from my outside world. You could say I had become over-dependent on that single platform in the face of my now very limited mobility. It became my primary means of communicating with people over and above other platforms and methods. It was also my heavily curated form of staying up to date with public policy in the areas I am interested in – selecting individuals with specialist knowledge in areas that fall below the mainstream media’s radar. How is anyone supposed to keep track when after less than a minute scrolling you reach the nominal ‘limit’ of what you can read? (I bet that’s gone down well with the firm’s advertisers!)
So I’m now faced with an existential crisis – as I assume more than a few other people do too. In particular those who have various mobility impairments and health conditions that restrict their mobility – and like me have become very reliant on a single social media platform.
From one view point the company concerned doesn’t owe me a living or an obligation to provide such a service. The market is the market. From another point of view, such is the social ecosystem that has grown up around that and other platforms, and such is their importance to the functioning of societies that to put such restrictions on in such a manner inevitably becomes a public interest issue. By that I mean if a critical group of industries, or a critical mass of people are negatively affected by that issue to the detriment of society, then it is in the public’s interest for state actors to get involved. It’s not the same as what is ‘of interest to the public’ – insert name of celebrity splashed upon the front pages.
“Too big to fail”
Where have we heard that phrase before? (The banking crisis). Are we about to find out that there are other things in private ownership that provide essential functions in 21stC society that are too big to fail and need propping up somehow, or government / regulatory intervention to uphold the public interest and public’s wellbeing? The EU vs multinational corporations provide some of the most interesting case studies on this.
What happened with Twitter wasn’t entirely unexpected – we were warned a few weeks ago
Read the article by David Tuffley in The Conversation here, from 15 June 2023. Just over two weeks later, the restrictions came in and the recriminations began. The article is also a crash course in a piece of global communications infrastructure that barely existed a generation ago. i.e. My generation were not taught about this at school. Over the weekend I’ve had a series of offline conversations at the Cambridge Playlaws events about the things my generation was not taught at school that would have been really useful.
Essentially it’s a spat between one firm and another over the costs of essential services the former relies upon the latter to provide – at a price. The former thinks its too expensive and is trying to reduce them (esp after a very expensive takeover – which almost always results in ‘cost cutting’ pressures). The former did not pay/renew, the latter cut the service, and all hell broke loose.
So now I have to find something else to do with my life other than doom-scrolling.
Which in one sense isn’t a bad thing – it has forced an issue that I’ve felt for some time was a long time in coming. At the same time it feels like I’m now cut off from informal conversations online with everyone who I have been in regular contact with in recent times. With existing mobility restrictions anyway, somehow it feels like my world is that massive bit smaller as a result of the last few days.
“Something must be done!!!”
When you start unpicking the issues , the concept of the public digital commonwealth emerges. There are a number of papers and articles on this so I’ll list a few here:
- IPPR – The Digital Commonwealth (2018)
- IIASA in Vienna (UN) “Digital commons as a global public good. Internet as a free space, and methods for combating the spread of disinformation and misinformation.” (2023)
- EuroDIG “Digital commons as a global public good” (2023)
- European Public Digital Infrastructure Fund White Paper (2022)
There are many, many more but I’m all brainfogged up from trying to figure out where to go from here. One way or another, I hope the immediate restrictions will be resolved quickly. But the bigger questions will be with us for a lot longer.
We are long overdue a massive public conversation about these things. But as Brexit showed, our political institutions are unable to create the conditions necessary for that informed public conversation. Those institutions need to change, and I cannot see that change coming from within the political establishment. Where it will come from, I don’t know. But it needs to happen.
If you are interested in the longer term future of Cambridge, and on what happens at the local democracy meetings where decisions are made, feel free to:
- Follow me on Twitter
- Like my Facebook page
- Consider a small donation to help fund my continued research and reporting on local democracy in and around Cambridge.
The Cambridge Town Owl 