Only You Can Prevent Dystopia
I’ll be honest with you: I’m terrified. I spend a lot of my time looking for edifying ways of interacting with technology. In the last year, I’ve told you to meditate, to keep a digital journal, to chat with people on the phone and to never tweet. Still, I enter the new decade with a feeling of overwhelming dread. There’s a good chance the internet will help break the world this year, and I’m not confident we have the tools to stop it.
Unless, that is, we are all really careful.
And so: Here are a few tips for improving the digital world in 2020.
Virality is a red flag. Suspect it.
If I were king of the internet, I would impose an ironclad rule: No one is allowed to share any piece of content without waiting a day to think it over.
... in the 2010s virality got too easy, and then it grew sour, venal and dishonest.
Resist the easy dunk.
In the 2010s, Twitter became the center of the political universe. ... Twitter is a daily toxic nightmare of reflexive egotism and groupthink that will prompt you to question your priorities, not to mention your sanity.
What’s Twitter’s most damaging sin? I say it’s the too-easy mocking joke — what’s known, in the jargon, as the “quote-tweet dunk.”
The imbalance discourages any possibility of meaningful conversation and reduces all of political discourse to empty, shallow quippery.
Find a well-moderated corner of the internet.
What distinguishes the productive online communities from the disturbing ones? Often it’s something simple: content moderation. The best places online are bounded by clear, well-enforced community guidelines for participation. Twitter and Facebook are toxic because there are few rules and few penalties for flouting them. A Reddit community like r/relationships, meanwhile, is a haven of incredible, empathetic discussion because its hosts spend a lot of effort policing the discussion toward productive dialogue.
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/01/opinion/social-media-2020.html