Category: Feudal Intenet

The Internet as Ecosystem

This is a work in progress – comments are welcome (and moderated so will not appear immediately, and spam not at all)

A healthy ecosystem consists of a large number of species (types of organism) interacting in balance. Depending on the environment different species will be more prevalent, but there is normally a balance – and a range. In a area we might think of a natural grassland (for example) there will be a range of grasses, and also other vegetation, as well as insects, small mammals, birds etc.

Rewilding

Just as a natural ecosystem can be made healthier by, for example re-introducing beavers to manage water flows, it may be that strategically introducing diversity into the software environment can be made to improve it.

For example carefully controlling the complexity of required web pages required for citizens to function would allow people use less complex browsers – needing fewer resources on their computer or other device.

Commercial Social Media – a public health issue.

This is a work in progress, published early, but on topic comments are welcome. Comments are moderated, and spam will not appear.

The history of Commercial Social Media has some similarities to the history of Tobacco – we are now at the stage where we are discussing whether this habit (phone addiction) is good for children, in the same way as one of the public health responses to cigarettes was to try to prevent their use by children.

Everybody does it – all my data is out there anyway

At one time smoking was common in every enclosed space, a person could not go to a bar or restaurant, get on a bus, work in an office, without being exposed to second hand smoke – so why not join the crowd, rather than being a weird non-smoker.

It is good for your health

In its earliest days tobacco was promoted as a medicinal herb, and cigarettes were part of the rations soldiers received during the First World War.

Staying in touch with others does have great mental health advantages, the problem comes when that is moderated through a third party which is deliberately designing the systems people are using to make them addictive.

It is a Free public service

In it’s early days Commercial Social Media spent large amounts of venture capital to give users the ability to create and share content with relatively little intrusive advertising, and much of that content was high quality and valuable. This gave and incentive for users to keep returning, and algorithms made content people viewed the most the highest priority – even if some of this content was misogynist or reinforced existing biases. Now that people are ‘hooked’ the quantity of advertising has increased. This could be compared to ‘The Old Dope Pedlar‘ by Tom Lehrer. ‘Doing well by doing good.‘.