no face, no voice, no problem

accessibility

see a11y for digital accessibility

audience and purpose

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digital community building

Notes

I’ve witnessed and been a part of a variety of digital communities but have no sociological framework to see how and why some work better than others
There are increasingly now paid roles in digital community building, moderation, support, etc
so there must be a developing ‘best practice’ etc
Incredibly subjectively, neocities feels like how tumblr used to feel (in early to mid 2010s)
I’ve seen people describe TikTok like early YouTube
wikipedia, wikihow, open source
open and closed discords, discord for tech
streaming communities
tiktok niches
comments

influencers, tastemakers and curators

The need has arisen again for internet curation, as in the early days with sites of relevance or interest, it becomes necessary to ‘curate’ your own feeds, train your algorithms, or follow ‘content creators’ who you trust to produce what you’re after. This way, we are back to the cults of personality. Internet representatives who are influencing on your behalf.
with mass-saturation of ‘content’ we now become hoarders and scavengers of good material, with ad-hoc libraries and archives of varying niche and varying quality held by all sorts of people
the personal and the professional, competing personas, liability of mis/disinformation

putting content in context

There are increasing efforts to deal with misinformation and disinformation on the internet but this is part of a larger issue with the hugely saturated sphere of internet content that often lacks context and deprioritises clarity and understanding. How do we properly balance safety and autonomy, (satire and truth, mystery and clarity) and most importantly who gets to determine this? More recently there have been some projects addressing provenance in the sort of ways I’ve been hoping for. Here are some more considerations on context.

notes pre- public release of chatgpt

“Educating people about how to assess risk is obviously a worthwhile exercise. However, lecturing them about what they should and should not fear does little to improve matters” - How Fear Works (Frank Furedi)(but i didn’t agree with enough of this book to bother finishing)
How to balance children’s rights, child safety, child autonomy
Demystify the internet without ‘shielding’ kids from stuff, limited/mediated access from a third-party
Maybe a sidebar of explanations, context, guidelines, and someone to talk to who is actually trained to chat with kids for education, triaging queries etc
‘informed consent’ model of content warnings rather than ‘safe search’ style or ‘trigger’-only warnings
Some AI models providing age-stratified provision for children - how up to date are ‘reading levels’? Is age still used for this — i looked this up where is it
Is there anything that actually ethically and accurately screens for ages? I doubt it. But also proven issues with self declared ages. But if no direct interaction between kids of those ages, maybe self declaration is fine?
Unknown/unofficial/anon/disconnected authors? ethics? right to be forgotten, right to be uncontactable, right to disown or defocus certain past works and frame your past in your own way. Link to the advice for citing trans academics
identifying and indicating intent, direct interest, personal opinion, third-party viewpoints, many are subjective links to expertise
Some intentions of content
- To entertain, perform
- To garner attention regardless of impact, to bait, to troll
- To educate, inform, share knowledge, organise
- To misinform, incite hatred
- To persuade, convert, sell, convince
- To sell based on false promises, unsourced claims
- To constructively criticise, discuss, clarify, correct, add on, boost others’ content
- To praise and congratulate
- To share, reflect, foster community, ask advice, be vulnerable
- To inflame, incense, criticise with call to action, boycott
- To support bigots and incite hatred, to target the vulnerable
Categorisation generation, content taxonomy, granularity, scope
fact checking AI is v questionable
Content provenance, authors, publishers, natural language descriptions of trust, trust mechanisms
Browser extensions or standalone browsers that value provenance more in visual hierarchy, ‘reader mode’. May have additional security features, translations, summaries?
Open hardware implementation (or linux browser for kindle-like devices) of content-viewing device- like an e-ink e-reader but also with readable internet content
Generating plenary questions from literature on e-readers
AI generated summaries/fact-checking/provenance on video content through transcripts, ethics
clearer forms of self-directed tone indication/intent declaration in micro-content to assist with social misunderstandings?

— TV tropes, know your meme, urban dictionary where it isn’t just hyperlocal, clickbait headline summarisers etc, combined and expanded to other public deceptions, jokes, common patterns, social phenomena etc for various cultures. General language AI can explain phrases or jokes I don’t have the context for but community-comment-twitter style is better. ethical considerations but maybe use to general demystifying of social patterns

notes post- public release of chatgpt

since then, many developments on individual platforms as well as large increase in uptake of AI models since ChatGPT came into public use, making this idea more mainstream, providing better examples
providing provenance to articles way easier than interactive sites and micro-content
on making sources very clear to allow informed consumption
time relevant comments - eg some stuff I comment about a game update is only relevant if you see it within eg first week of update being out
finally some projects are focusing on proper provenance!
but also many v questionable ai projects on this
which context is relevant when
many of my thoughts here have been altered by further understanding on trust in provenance - as trust is relational, context is required for recommendations etc
intersubjective methods are the best we can do. context-dependent context. views.

Resources

eg https://thetrustproject.org/

the internet as public space

regulation on how content is consumed, sometimes requests sometimes demands
setting boundaries for your own pages and profiles
- taking lead on how you are treated and how you’d like to interact with the world
- but personal pages on public platforms aren’t actually personal, they’re a shopfront
- often unenforceable boundaries, left to other parties to respect or not, just like in offline world
- muting, blocking, or leaving platforms as direct mechanisms for disapproval
- mechanisms to report to authorities, just like in offline world
- who does and who should be holding any authority over these matters
‘community guidelines’ in eg forums and discords that are legitimately community-informed and community-managed vs corporate ‘community guidelines’ that have frequent backlash by the users eg Instagram nipple policy
who is the comments section for?
the right to be an enigma, public art and its consequences
the right to ignorance of possible response, pre-caveats and disclaimers, fear of mis-speech preventing sharing anything - both on and offline
the importance of making mistakes, and dealing with them well
public forums for backlash, the ease of storing evidence of wrongdoing
public safety, safeguarding, what we owe to each other, online exploitation and consent
- ‘if you don’t like us maybe don’t follow us or don’t comment’ ‘no, you don’t get to say that. You’re a public figure.’
online culture as representative of offline culture to more or lesser extents
how comments sections on some forums can be more strictly controlled for integrity of useful educational eg coding, stack overflow, ‘this doesn’t answer the question’ sort of thing
upvoting, downvoting, distributed mechanisms for approval
QA forums, currency systems of social (or sometimes monetary) value, bulk answering without adding real value to discussion
what about as physical space? the internet as physical infrastructure

sharing online

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communicating across boundaries

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alternative communication

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human diversity

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