Tag: social media

Your own privacy policy

Food for thought about privacy policies from Doc Searls:

There is no reason why websites and services can’t agree to your privacy policy, and your terms of engagement. In legal terms, you should be able to operate as the first party, and to proffer your own terms, to which sites and services can agree (or, as privacy laws now say, consent) as second parties. That this is barely thinkable is a legacy of a time that has sadly not yet left us: one in which only companies can enjoy that kind of scale. Yet it would clearly be a convenience to have privacy as normalized in the online world as it is in the offline one.

Doc is Founder and director of ProjectVRM at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and Co-founder and board member of Customer Commons,

He is a blogger and he is a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto.

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Highlighting content from my September 2021 newsletter

A contrarian social network

Ben Grosser thinks that

platforms embed within us the idea that our own sociality is best evaluated and understood through quantity. They reconfigure our sense of time in ways that can make minutes or hours ago seem old. And their personalized feeds teach our brains that the only content worth watching or reading is that which we can already imagine.

Enter Minus – a social network where users get only 100 posts—for life.

Life lost on the curated projections of other people’s lives?

Worth pondering from James Shelley:

Time spent reading social timelines is time lost. Scrolling through a timeline is time consumed by the curated projections of other people’s lives, which are absorbed wholly and only at the cost of living your own.

Or, to put it another way: time spent on timelines amounts to time spent not living your life.

Spending your time on a timeline is valuable only to the extent you define value in your life by the amount of your life spent reading about the lives of others.

Time spent on a timeline is not time paused, it is life extracted. On average, then, time spent reading timelines is irredeemable and wasted.

If the most immediate value we derive from timelines is that they distract us from ourselves — from the lives we are living, here and now — how much value should ascribe to them?

See also Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

 

On the latest iteration of FB’s “vision”

John Naughton in The Guardian has a few choice words on Mark Zuckerberg’s recent “Memo to All”:

Dearly beloved, our reading this morning is taken from the latest Epistle of St Mark to the schmucks – as members of his 2.3 billion-strong Church of Facebook are known. The purpose of the epistle is to outline a new “vision” that St Mark has for the future of privacy, a subject that is very close to his wallet – which is understandable, given that he has acquired an unconscionable fortune from undermining it.

The rest of the story here.

I read John’s blog assiduously. You might enjoy it too.

 

 

The social media bubble may burst

I’m beginning to wonder about how big of a community can be meaningfully maintained online and how this affects news organizations. For example, many early Twitter adopters such as myself report that their rate of responses, retweets and click-thrus have declined over time.

I suspect this may have less to do with any change in behavior on our parts or that of our followers and more to do with the fact that the Twitter universe is now so large. Already overflowing streams are flooding. The likelihood that even your most interested followers will even see a tweet is ever lower.

In order to develop engaged and loyal communities on social media, news organizations are going to have to work harder and smarter and try to find solutions to Shirky’s “filter failure” problem.

via Nieman Journalism Lab.