I also think this is fair comment, but it also kindof misses a bigger point: and that is that the experience of media in our lives before social media kindof conditioned us all to separate ourselves into the categories of performer and audience, with the publisher in the middle with the power: and media has always laid the power in the hands of content publishers vs content consumers.
I loved early social networks pre-Facebook (newsgroups, messageboards, LiveJournal) as power was not yet consolidated in the larger publishers. The clever publishers always saw this potential to consolidate power and control media consumers more than ever before. Which has happened, as we’ve been trained for so long to be passive consumers.
The most important element of Burning Man culture for me was the focus on participation: no spectators. The media world wants the opposite and always has.
Message boards etc. still exist but I generally have thought of them as distinct from “social media”. The distinguishing characteristic is algorithmic feeds. Also, Lemmy is mostly link aggregation, which is much less of a thing on message boards. Lemmy is even more like that than Reddit was, despite the implementations being similar.
I also think this is fair comment, but it also kindof misses a bigger point: and that is that the experience of media in our lives before social media kindof conditioned us all to separate ourselves into the categories of performer and audience, with the publisher in the middle with the power: and media has always laid the power in the hands of content publishers vs content consumers.
I loved early social networks pre-Facebook (newsgroups, messageboards, LiveJournal) as power was not yet consolidated in the larger publishers. The clever publishers always saw this potential to consolidate power and control media consumers more than ever before. Which has happened, as we’ve been trained for so long to be passive consumers.
The most important element of Burning Man culture for me was the focus on participation: no spectators. The media world wants the opposite and always has.
Message boards etc. still exist but I generally have thought of them as distinct from “social media”. The distinguishing characteristic is algorithmic feeds. Also, Lemmy is mostly link aggregation, which is much less of a thing on message boards. Lemmy is even more like that than Reddit was, despite the implementations being similar.