Speaker 1: It's Monday, November one. I'm Oscar Ramirez from the Daily
Speaker 1: Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America.
Speaker 1: There's been a lot of scrutiny placed on social media
Speaker 1: recently in light of the Facebook papers, and while social
Speaker 1: media has opened the line of communication for many, maybe
Speaker 1: we weren't meant to talk to each other so much.
Speaker 1: The number of meaningful relationships a person can have is
Speaker 1: far less than the number of people you can accumulate
Speaker 1: in a social network, and that's where the problems can start.
Speaker 1: Both genuine speech and misinformation gets smuddled together very quickly.
Speaker 1: Ian Bogost, contributing writer at The Atlantic and director of
Speaker 1: Film and Media Studies at Washington University, joins us for more.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us in. Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna talk about a very interesting article you wrote
Speaker 1: at The Atlantic talking about social media. So, you know,
Speaker 1: we've been hearing a lot about social media recently. It's
Speaker 1: such a big part of our lives. Really. The Facebook
Speaker 1: papers is hitting the news right now, and kind of
Speaker 1: the effects that they knew on people teens and all that.
Speaker 1: There's just so much right and that's kind of the
Speaker 1: big issue with social media is that there's too much
Speaker 1: And so the article you were working on talks about
Speaker 1: how people really aren't meant to talk to each other
Speaker 1: this much. You know, we come from smaller social circles.
Speaker 1: The more important people in your lives often are much
Speaker 1: smaller in number, and through social media your message could
Speaker 1: be amplified to many, many more people, and it really
Speaker 1: becomes untenable in a way. So Ian, tell us a
Speaker 1: little bit about what you wrote and and why we
Speaker 1: weren't meant to talk to each other so much. The
Speaker 1: idea that we ought to and that we deserve an
Speaker 1: audience with the whole world all the time, maybe multiple
Speaker 1: times per day, and that anything we think or say
Speaker 1: ought to reach as many people as possible. We gotta
Speaker 1: get as many followers as we can. That's that's the
Speaker 1: idea that I'm trying to call into question in this piece.
Speaker 1: And if you look at the social science and even
Speaker 1: the biology of kind of how humans work, there's some
Speaker 1: debate about it, but it is clear that there are limits,
Speaker 1: or at least that most people before the internet interacted
Speaker 1: with a relatively small number of people, especially the most
Speaker 1: interactions they have might have been you know, five or
Speaker 1: ten or fifteen people, your family, your closest friends, and
Speaker 1: your extended circle of colleagues and friends that you really
Speaker 1: engage with on a regular basis typically might be you know,
Speaker 1: a hundred hundred and twenty people, which is you know,
Speaker 1: suggestive at least of the fact that we just were
Speaker 1: never meant to have this many interactions with this many people,
Speaker 1: this frequent, and it's so interesting. You know that number
Speaker 1: of a hundred hundred and twenty. I think British psychologist
Speaker 1: Robin Dunbar had that number at a hundred and fifty.
Speaker 1: In my lifetime, I know I've met that many people,
Speaker 1: But do I truly know that many people. That's a
Speaker 1: hard No. Yeah, somebody that would trust and agree with
Speaker 1: everything they say, that's a hard note. That's really tough.
Speaker 1: And and our most intimate, you know, connected relationships we have.
Speaker 1: This is obviously what psychologists would say, right maybe about
Speaker 1: one about five to fifteen close friends. One of the
Speaker 1: consequences of that is that online people just started trusting
Speaker 1: more and more people that they might not have known
Speaker 1: or maybe shouldn't have trusted. And that is one of
Speaker 1: the things, not the only thing, that's one of the
Speaker 1: things that's allowed misinformation to spread more broadly. It's not
Speaker 1: just that the information out there is bad or that
Speaker 1: there's a lot of it, but people are more receptive
Speaker 1: to it. They're more willing to share it, and they're
Speaker 1: more willing to invest a belief in it than they
Speaker 1: might have been previously. Yeah, you made a note in
Speaker 1: the article two which is pretty interesting, just kind of
Speaker 1: going over how online communication has grown, right from the
Speaker 1: Worldwide Web in the nineties to user generated content to
Speaker 1: the social media that we have. And this was previously
Speaker 1: kind of exclusive to big companies, corporations, somebody that had
Speaker 1: the access to big, giant channels of communication, and now
Speaker 1: this is given to everybody basically exactly, and everyone believes
Speaker 1: that they deserve it too, and it's all free, which
Speaker 1: is important as well. You know, it used to be
Speaker 1: that if you wanted to connect with someone, you'd have
Speaker 1: to you know, maybe print a newsletter or a flyer
Speaker 1: and then mail it out to your community, or even
Speaker 1: if you wanted to make a phone call, that used
Speaker 1: to have a cost to it. Even a text message
Speaker 1: us to do do. So everything has been reduced that the
Speaker 1: friction has been reduced, the cost has been reduced, and
Speaker 1: We've been given this potential audience of millions or billions
Speaker 1: of people and told you ought to have the ability
Speaker 1: to address it. That's what free speech means now. And
Speaker 1: those were the intermediaries before the costs, the barriers, and
Speaker 1: you know, if you're going to publish a book, you
Speaker 1: know that you're publishers all that. Now the new intermediaries
Speaker 1: are the social media companies Google, Facebook, Twitter. Talk about
Speaker 1: that a little bit. There's this myth I think in
Speaker 1: the technology industry that's sometimes called disintermediation, that what the
Speaker 1: Internet does is it removes all of those barriers. You
Speaker 1: no longer have to get a publisher to approve what
Speaker 1: you want to say. You can just post it on
Speaker 1: Facebook or make your own website or blog or whatever
Speaker 1: it might be. But if you think about it for
Speaker 1: even just a minute, you realize it's not that the
Speaker 1: intermediaries such as publishers and broadcasters have been removed. It's
Speaker 1: rather that they've been replaced by the big technology companies.
Speaker 1: And now you've got to get your stuff into the
Speaker 1: hands or eyes of other people through a service like
Speaker 1: Facebook or Twitter, or you've got to make it rise
Speaker 1: to the top of a Google search. In order that
Speaker 1: people can see it in the first place. And those companies,
Speaker 1: those kinds of companies make their money through engagement, by
Speaker 1: by monetizing data and attention, and for that reason, it's
Speaker 1: in their interest to have you interact with other people
Speaker 1: and other ideas and other units of content as frequently
Speaker 1: as possible. Talk to me a little bit about mega scale,
Speaker 1: and you know, you were talking about those incentives, right
Speaker 1: these and metrics to encourage the engagement, the likes and
Speaker 1: share accounts and all that, the number of your followers,
Speaker 1: all that, But talk to me about mega scale and
Speaker 1: how that just becomes this unwieldy thing. Mega scale is
Speaker 1: the term that my Atlantic colleague Adrian the France coined
Speaker 1: to name this assumption that big technology companies have that
Speaker 1: they have to grow as large as possible, as fast
Speaker 1: as possible, and they have not just a big user base,
Speaker 1: but a kind of unprecedented one. If you think about
Speaker 1: the fact that they Pacebook has billions of users, a
Speaker 1: couple of billion users. Previously in human history, that is
Speaker 1: just unprecedented that a company, or that anyone or even
Speaker 1: a government would have direct access to control the information
Speaker 1: that that many people see and to influence their behavior. Now,
Speaker 1: one of the things that happened around megascale that idea
Speaker 1: of the largest possible business is it became a tacit
Speaker 1: precept of the technology industry, so that if you want
Speaker 1: to go and get funding or start a company, you
Speaker 1: must grow as big as possible and as fast as possible.
Speaker 1: And that value made its way into the hands and
Speaker 1: hearts of ordinary people too. So everybody from a politician
Speaker 1: to you know, your your neighbor or the the influencer
Speaker 1: down the block. They believe that their celebrities, right, and
Speaker 1: not just celebrities, but they have the potential to reach
Speaker 1: anyone on the earth immediately and all the time. So
Speaker 1: Megascale is first a kind of business model for the
Speaker 1: modern technology business, and then an ethos, a way of
Speaker 1: thinking about and interacting with the world that kind of
Speaker 1: comes on the heels of that business model. And that's
Speaker 1: where you know, a lot of this really gets problematic
Speaker 1: right there. You know, the good messages, the bad messages,
Speaker 1: it all kind of just gets muddled together as just
Speaker 1: one big number. And it doesn't matter if it's good
Speaker 1: or bad or excuse one way or the other. Just
Speaker 1: the amount of it is kind of what everybody's looking for.
Speaker 1: So what do we do then to help with this?
Speaker 1: And I know, you know, to be clear, you're not saying,
Speaker 1: you know, communication is bad all that, and I think
Speaker 1: you've made your point to that. It's just you know,
Speaker 1: so much of it, right, So what do we do?
Speaker 1: Do we how do we limit social media? A lot
Speaker 1: of people have talked about regulatory intervention, but even some
Speaker 1: of those things are just really difficult to implement and
Speaker 1: to enforce. They are difficult. And you know, as these
Speaker 1: Facebook paper stories start to come out and we see
Speaker 1: more and more calls to regulate or to legislate Facebook
Speaker 1: and other social media companies, one of the things that
Speaker 1: sometimes comes up, and if you just break up these
Speaker 1: companies into small and it's too big, you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's a monopoly, is you break them up into smaller companies.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't really help when you when you give
Speaker 1: it a real thought, because those smaller companies would still
Speaker 1: have the same structure, the same sort of mega scale
Speaker 1: at their hearts, serving billions of people and letting them
Speaker 1: talk to one another constantly. So one of the things
Speaker 1: that I started to think about is, well, what are
Speaker 1: the other ways that you can introduce limitations or constraints
Speaker 1: on behavior. It's not just whether a company like Facebook
Speaker 1: ought to have a billion users or whatever, but what
Speaker 1: each of those individuals are allowed to do or constrained
Speaker 1: to do, and how maybe we might scale it down
Speaker 1: or down scale it into a more kind of human
Speaker 1: sized experience. A way of trying to get back to
Speaker 1: that time when you know, you you talk to a
Speaker 1: smaller number of people less frequently, you made the most
Speaker 1: of the opportunities you had for communication, and because it
Speaker 1: had friction and cost to it, both financial cost and
Speaker 1: kind of opportunity cost, it was more considered, if you will.
Speaker 1: And so you know, if you think about this, we're
Speaker 1: constantly constraining ourselves on at all the time. Like you know,
Speaker 1: Twitter says you can only post this many characters. You know,
Speaker 1: this is the way that that an image is supposed
Speaker 1: to look on Instagram, or it's it's square in shape
Speaker 1: at least it used to be, or the way at
Speaker 1: a Snapchat post can time out and disappear. Those are
Speaker 1: examples of arbitrary artificial constraint that we accept because we
Speaker 1: understand it and we're willing to embrace it. And so
Speaker 1: while it's a long road from point A to point B.
Speaker 1: I think that refocusing our attention to technology services so
Speaker 1: that they embrace and design some of that artificial constraint
Speaker 1: and make it more natural. That's that's one way of
Speaker 1: thinking about how we might solve some of these problems,
Speaker 1: in addition to some of the regulatory conversations that are
Speaker 1: that are on the horizon. One of the examples you
Speaker 1: mentioned too that not many people might want to go
Speaker 1: for is what if you can only post a Facebook
Speaker 1: once a day, a week, or a month even you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, just to limit all of that.
Speaker 1: You know, one of the examples that you listed to
Speaker 1: in all of this is Google Plus maybe a better
Speaker 1: way to kind of organize the social structures. And I
Speaker 1: personally never liked Google Plus, but maybe this is all
Speaker 1: to your point, right. You know, it didn't work. It
Speaker 1: didn't work that way because you couldn't get the mass
Speaker 1: the main followers. But organizing things in those circles circles
Speaker 1: of importance, right, your family, your coworkers and then all
Speaker 1: the other people that you might have come in contact with,
Speaker 1: you know, could have been maybe a better model, like
Speaker 1: you said, but you know what happens with what we
Speaker 1: have already. People don't want to lose their megaphones. People
Speaker 1: don't want to lose what we already have, and that's
Speaker 1: another hurdle to all of this. It's very, very hard
Speaker 1: to go back. And you know, you could look back
Speaker 1: on the design of these services, whether it's Facebook or
Speaker 1: Google Plus, and say, oh, if we'd known then what
Speaker 1: we knew now, maybe we would have acted differently, maybe
Speaker 1: we would have introduced some guardrails, and that made or
Speaker 1: might not be the case. But knowing that we can't
Speaker 1: literally go back in time, we can still clean up
Speaker 1: the way that these systems work. And there may be
Speaker 1: some combination of factors, some of them regulatory or legislative,
Speaker 1: if we can manage to make that happen, and some
Speaker 1: of them, you know, driven by the marketplace, by people's
Speaker 1: desires and their willingness to change their behavior. And people
Speaker 1: don't necessarily know what they're willing to do either. But
Speaker 1: where we acclimate to these new services relatively easily. You know,
Speaker 1: back when Vine, the short video service that the Twitter
Speaker 1: owned and shut down after a little while, back when
Speaker 1: that existed, it was six second video clips, right, And
Speaker 1: if I told you, you know, and even in the
Speaker 1: era of ten minute YouTube videos, you're gonna love six
Speaker 1: second videos. It would have been like that doesn't make
Speaker 1: any sense at all, But they were delightful. So some
Speaker 1: of this has to do with what exists in you know,
Speaker 1: the competitive nature of the marketplace is supposed to give
Speaker 1: us more options, not just in the sense of more
Speaker 1: places to get the same idea or the same experience,
Speaker 1: but different experiences. And while Google Plus may not have
Speaker 1: been a fantastic and it certainly wasn't a successful social network,
Speaker 1: it did offer a different way of organizing our relationships
Speaker 1: that was more in line with the idea that they're
Speaker 1: naturally limited to some extent, that the way that we
Speaker 1: talked to our family is different than the way that
Speaker 1: we talk to our colleagues, and that there's a finite
Speaker 1: bar of each Yeah. I mean, it's just an interesting notion.
Speaker 1: And we've seen social media get so what in wieldy now,
Speaker 1: and we're trying to go back and put the genie
Speaker 1: in the bottle and it's so hard to do. I
Speaker 1: suggest everybody go and read Ian's article on this. There's
Speaker 1: so much stuff in there, very well thought out. Ian Bogos,
Speaker 1: contributing writer at the Atlantic and Director of Film and
Speaker 1: Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Thank you
Speaker 1: very much for joining us. Thank you. I'm Oscar Ramirez
Speaker 1: and this has been reopening America. Don't forget that. For
Speaker 1: today's big news stories, you can check me out on
Speaker 1: the Daily Dive podcast every Monday Friday. So follow us
Speaker 1: on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast