revisiting an old observation ("the more things change...")

Revisiting this old post from 2020, "How to Engineer Civil Unrest..." –– apropos, mainly, of today's wonky audience reporting.

#MakeItMakeSense

It occurs to me that sometimes our "last best hope" is Meta's general ineptitude with data handling.

If you're thinking that this is an odd perspective for somebody who spends a non-insignificant portion of their time in social media management to take ...

I submit to you that social media is (or, better, are) here. The major platforms currently in operation seem unlikely to go away any time soon (and I am not sure that we would, at this moment, particularly want them to; I'm not sure that if they disappeared instantly things would in fact get "better" in any appreciable way, without our taking first all the steps that we could, actually, be taking already –– in other words, social media play an enormous role in how we perpetuate our problems, but I'm not convinced that social media explain why we perpetuate our problems).

HOW we use those platforms is not static, nor predetermined.

Much of my dissertation was focused on the concept of user manipulation(s) of a given platform's combination of affordances and constraints, and I think that's useful again here.

My friend Jim (I quoted him in the diss) has been fond of saying:

"Art is play within constraints."

So is politics.

So is digital discourse.