Field notes

Search

Search IconIcon to open search

Social media is the third place

Updated Jan 29 2024

Thinking about public and semipublic posting on social media sites as third places can provide a way of thinking about the responsibility of a platform to its residents: your local bartenders or baristas don’t generally interfere with your conversations, but they do reserve the right to kick people out if they’re disturbing other patrons, and this makes the space better as a whole. Every human society has figured out norms and systems for managing group behavior most of the time, and internet groups are no different. (Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet)

Note how this could affect our thinking on censorship. Instead of top-down control by an authoritarian government or corporation (way too rife for abuse), we could think of weeding out undesirable ideas (i.e. Nazism) as an emergent property when we collectively decide what we value and uphold it from the bottom-up.