Dave The Web Guy
The War Between Mainstream and Social Media
10/05/2021
I was a little incensed by the topic of a 60 Minutes episode which featured a "Facebook whistleblower" who breathlessly reports that Facebook promotes divisive policies to make money.
It's not that I think Facebook is being falsely accused of dividing people or harming the psyche of low self-esteem people; it's that CBS and all the other networks and profit-media organizations do exactly the same thing.
It's so damn hypocritical.
It's not only hypocritical, it's telling. I have this belief in a war of sorts between classical "mainstream" media and social media platforms, with the former engaged in a life-and-death attack on the latter for control.
Social media as a general concept demonstrates that we don't need a few concentrated outlets feeding us news with a few "authoritative faces and voices". In terrifying realization of this, that's why the mainstream media is eager to underscore the lack of integrity in, and overstate the danger of, social media - even to said hypocritical levels.
The CBSs of the world won't be happy until nobody trusts social media (or by another perspective, people freely talking to each other), and, in fact, come to fear it. The old media must retain its power.
The kicker here as that I personally don't respect either institution's platforms because they are both fighting for dominant control over our minds.
I say this of mainstream media for the reason I just outlined above, but in the case of social media platforms I say this because they maliciously eclipse the power of the core web, the original and pure form of "social media", where people can really post anything they want. Social media platforms draw people away from this power and wind up resetting "digital freedom" in their monetizing operational image.
This should be a world by now of a million independent blogs on the world wide web, but instead, we have a few big tech social media platforms with "feeds".
Set up a blog? You'd be lucky today to find anyone born after 1995 who even knows the difference between the web and Facebook, let alone knows how to use Microsoft Notepad and an FTP client to post an image to the world.
I have no love lost for Trump supporters, but at least they got kicked in the teeth by social media enough that they became "woke" to this danger. At long last, a large and meaningful (if not deranged) segment of the population was reminded of the social media company dominance that has way too much control over their expressions.
People: Learn to host a blog on the actual World Wide Web (like the blog you're looking at now). It's vulnerable to de-platforming, yes, but you retain that "last mile" freedom such that a stronger case is required as is a more complex initiation.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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