Aral Balkan talks about how to design tools and find ways around the big social media platforms. He calls for the design and implementation of Small Tech. I fully agree. Technology to provide us with agency needs to be not just small, but smaller than us, i.e. within the scope of control of the group of people deploying a technology or method.
My original fascination with social media, back in the ’00s when it was blogs and wikis mostly, was precisely because it was smaller than us, it pushed publication and sharing in the hands of all of us, allowing distributed conversations. The concentration of our interaction in the big tech platforms made social media ‘bigger than us’ again. We don’t decide what FB shows us, breaking out of your own bubble (vital in healthy networks) becomes harder because sharing is based on pre-existing ‘friendships’ and discoverability has been removed. The erosion has been slow, but very visible. Networked Agency, to me, is only possible with small tech, and small methods. It’s why I find most ‘digital transformation’ efforts disappointing, and feel we need to focus much more on human digital networks, on distributed digital transformation. Based on federated small tech, networks of small tech instances. Where our tools are useful on their own, and more useful in concert with others.
Aral’s posting (and blog in general) is worth a read, and as he is a coder and designer, he acts on those notions too.
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