Response to Question 2 of Assignment 01.a (Taylor)
This is a response to question two of Assignment 01.a (Taylor)
The closing paragraph of the Preface from Astra Taylor’s The People’s Platform offers an organizing theme to the detailed analysis she provides later in Chapter one – “Technology alone cannot deliver the cultural transformations we have been waiting for; instead, we need to first understand and then address the underlying social and economic forces that shape it.” (Taylor, 10)
This stood out to me because it loosened the subject matter from the “binary narrative” in which it is generally placed – the role and existence of the internet/social media as savior and revolutionary or the internet/social media as an anti-social neurological threat to humankind. This naïve and idealistic dichotomy typically puts the onus on people to resist the less desirable effects of compulsive social media habits through will power and shame rather than seeking to illuminate in plain language exactly how these internet and social media giants (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, etc,..) strategically exploit these common human frailties in order to utilize the information they collect for monetary gain. All these New York Times best seller non-fiction titles that decry the compulsive behaviors that society en large engages in via the web and social media are too myopic in their scope, as they seek to problematize the individual rather than call out the embedded agendas of the social media conglomerates and the tactics they employ to elicit clicks.
Taylor is also calling out the double speak language used to hail the internet and its tech as ensuring liberation via “Open-ness” – none of these mechanisms of the internet are free of the bias of those who created them. The Internet, its technology, and its interfaces did not emerge from a vacuum. These tools are inflected by the mores and prejudices of the makers behind them, they reflect all the hope and all the limitations that human minds already contain. The internet/social media is shaped by already existing power dynamics and social structures that if left unchecked or not interrogated will continue to contribute to hierarchies of control and power. This is some of what Taylor is getting at so far in these first two sections of her book.
– Sergio
