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What new media delineations or paradigms should replace the old ones?
Movies, TV shows, and newspapers are just a few examples of the traditional media designations that dominated the 20th century. However, the digital revolution (and the internet in particular) has rendered them mostly meaningless now because the analog boundaries that separated them are no longer relevant.
Given the present-day proliferation of platform-agnostic content, what new designations or delineations do you think the world will (or should) adopt in the next century once traditional media is dead?
I really like your points, and I want to add that discord (which seems similar to your descriptions of riot, both which I will say are derivatives of IRC) can been seen as part of this move to decentralised closed communities that tildes is a part of. Increasingly we are seeing that people are valuing the ability to communicate with a smaller subset of a larger group through means that aren’t publically searchable through a search engine.
Someone mentioned the circularity of cultural trends in another thread earlier today, and what you said about the progression of the web reminded me of it. I think the resurgence of decentralization and distributed networks on the internet parallels that cultural circularity at a societal level.
To draw on your last paragraph, that circular progression seems to be related to influxes of online users as more portions of the world become developed and gain the widespread ability to tune into the web. One of the first times it seems to have happened online (in the US, anyway) was with Endless September, but there have been repeats of it in the decades since, across societal delineations.
So I definitely agree with you about the need for online communities to aim for distributed niche models instead of centralized megalopolises. In general, it seems like the more people, interests, or categories you try to shove together under one umbrella, the more likely it is to go to shit – even if you do try to do what Reddit did because you’re ultimately still (badly) herding millions of cats. Ultimately it raises the question about what exactly a social media platform should aim to accomplish, which is where services/products like Tildes, Riot, and Mastodon come into play because their creators are giving traditional social media platforms the finger in the most constructive of ways.
/u/deimos touches upon this idea in the inaugural Tildes blog post, it’s an electrifying reminder that we can either consciously guide the development of the online social structures we use (that in turn shape us), or we can let the darker, passive parts of human nature eventually steamroll over us:
Another thing I wanted to touch upon is the implications of the prevalence of smaller decentralized online communities over centralized monolithic networks, especially when it comes to the relationship between advertising and content-production.
Throughout history one of the main reasons monolithic media communication networks became prevalent was for the purpose of mass advertising. And inextricably tied to rise of those media networks is the origination of mass media production to aggregate attention so that it could be directed.
It’s curious to realize that what we now think of as entertainment originated primarily as (and in many cases continues to be) a vehicle for directing mass attention for financial benefit – curious because in no time the internet has flipped that model on its head.
Now, more people than ever are empowered to entertain and inform for the sake of doing those things, and not for the sake of fulfilling monetary goals. The new model encourages users to financially support the platforms whose values, design, and future they have faith in because those platforms facilitate the type of communication the user values. It also encourages a decentralized and re-imagined form of advertising – not the death of it. A lot of people have a negative bias towards advertising, and for good reason. But I don’t think it’s a human activity that’s ever going to completely go away, and I think it’s worth imagining the ways it could go right instead of only fixating on the ways it’s gone wrong.
Paradigm?
Yes, paradigm.