I have thought and written a great deal about social media in the past few years as I grapple with the reality of the political discussions associated with the Trump presidency. I find it difficult to tease apart the toxicity of issues associated with this administration, the type of related interactions that have surfaced on social media, and my personal beliefs that while all disagreements cannot be resolved, but argumentation can at least offer insights into the reasoning and evidence everyone involved relies on.
My reading has taken me through multiple books on facets of this situation. Here is a podcast episode I think does a nice job of identifying the thinking of others who have tried to explore the same issues. This is an episode from the podcast “Your undivided attention” featuring Eli Parisar whom you might recognize from TED topics and his book “Filter bubble”.
The discussion mentions an organization attempting to examine a better online public space that can be followed through its web site – Civic Signals. One attempt to improve the online public space is based on an examination of previous experiences of city designers who attempt to plan public spaces to improve the total city environment. For example, they consider both the design of the space and the programming of activities available within that space as a way to think through what must be considered.
I don’t agree with everything from this episode. For example, the participants consider the unique properties of political discussion and the challenges and perhaps impossibility of including such issues productively within a broader public setting. I disagree. There are some topics that are at the core of so many issues that they cannot be ignored and to allow many among the public to ignore these topics I don’t see as productive. More concretely, if political discussion does not occur on Facebook which is the space most use, why would you assume it would involve enough people to matter on another platform?