Modern Media's Communication Crises

    

    It's rarely pleasant but always interesting and informative to see what happens to social circles when communication hubs change.

I restarted this blog in part to ensure there was some sort of nominally independent, vaguely stable location where I could be found or contacted, as well as ensure I had a place to write without overmuch bother. Not that I really cared about being bothered before. Moderating my Twitch stream is an exercise in real-time manners management, so comments I can take my time to respond to are easy.

But that's not what I consider a concern. It's that the vast majority of the Internet's everyday interpersonal communication has been slowly, deliberately guided into very narrow channels, and funneled through a shrinking number of websites and services. Nominally for user convenience, but underneath it's mostly for data mining and ad placement. These things happen slowly, and companies tend to willingly do it at a loss for a long while- because they can afford to. Eventually the public stagnates sufficiently to become a captive audience, at which point comes inferior service, ad farms, and price gouging. Case in point: the car services and bnb-makers. The notion of "XYZ-as-a-(expensive subscription) service" for something that used to be a product is another major worry. I need look no further than the OS on this machine to see the problem with that- fundamental components like a word processor now require logins? Authorizations? It's a terribly unethical attempt to gouge the consumer, and that's on every PC around the world! 

Now the bird is circling the train, but Discord still exists, the mammoth is slowly growing, and Jack's second try seems to have gained an unfortunate amount of momentum. They're all rather fragmented though, and don't seem to be able to offer as much of the streamlined contact and information transfer that's been de rigeur all through these Years Of Plague. Worse yet, so much of modern life is internet-adjacent, what happens when a major online nexus withers and dies? The potential loss of past archives would be immeasurable... and would make for obvious easy ransom demands from the ethically bankrupt tech sector- whoops, tautology!

The idea of reestablishing a social media presence is nothing new, but there's also a lot of potential social baggage involved. Will you remember everyone? Can you contact them? Will you contact them? The machinations can become very complicated very quickly, even for those not 'aggressively online'.

Perhaps someday I won't be the one that reaches out first to reconnect.

Would much really change, I wonder?

Unsafe and Unnecessary Information

 

With the massive expansion in internet availability around the world, the potential for easy access to information has never been higher. 

Unfortunately, the world is full of people who don't care about accuracy, only marketability, and the modern internet centers around that fundamental design flaw (and the accompanying character flaws responsible).

Accurate information tends to be static. It's sometimes utilitarian, even boring. It comes from verifiable professionals, often with accompanying references. 

That's not how the internet works right now, which is a terrible problem. Such a measured, deliberate approach not only fights with the current rapid-fire "content creation" meta, but also with the visibility and accessibility algorithms behind the websites themselves.

Under the hood, the modern internet is sabotaging itself for the sake of short term offscreen profits, maximizing its ability to farm search information, then harvest and sell potentially useful data to other corporations and governments that are willing and able to pay. It's like a futures market- so all parties know it's nonsense but they play along anyway!

When it comes to most things food-related online, aids like the Jump To Recipe browser plugin are almost mandatory, since brief documents with lower word count (as opposed to, say, short videos) get reduced priority in search engines, rendering them less effectively found. What would otherwise be a quick and easy lookup feels like it's been hamstrung from both sides, padded out to the point of aggravation with longform anecdotes and ersatz prose just to reach a level of search priority it was obliged to from the start. 

To a person in a hurry looking for a weeknight dinner notion, it feels like a profound betrayal to find a 'recipe' webpage that then requires navigating past a handful of ads, sponsorships, and an often unreadably obtuse wall of vaguely related text to find a 'recipe' that might turn out to be a poorly formatted mess ill-suited for the purpose. There is little worse than wasted time.

The internet was developed to speed up information sharing, after all. 

Anyone else still remember the old term "The Information Superhighway"?

Doesn't exist any more. Now useful things are buried in piles of catchy but forgettable junk. We've got lasting horrors like NyQuil Chicken, or the uniquely Chicagoan Malört Sausage. Does anyone remember the memetic horror Tide Pod Pizza? Things like that are/were popular. Imagine the horrors you might have missed!

I keep my personal online presence to a relative minimum. I've talked about it before, even. The more of something there is, the less likely any of it is going to be adequately organized, curated, and useful to those who might seek it out.

Just because it can exist doesn't mean it should, and just because it exists doesn't mean it deserves to be seen. Reckless promotion of unverified information kills people. Hasn't that been obvious enough these past few years?

Unfortunate that this morning showed clearly how sufficiently large companies are willing to cover for one another at the macro level when it comes to misinformation. The sorts of problems these situations create can't be solved with just money. When it looks okay for the big guy, the little one imitates, and the whole environment suffers.

But I suppose if given enough money, one can buy sufficient peace and quiet for the rest of one's days... minus occasional grumblings from a vestigial conscience.