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In the next post for our series mapping social media, @EthanZ and I I explore why people are increasingly using chat platforms for their interactions online. https://knightcolumbia.org/content/chat-logic-when-you-need-a-living-room-and-not-a-town-square
The bottom line is digital town squares aren't great spaces for a lot of our social life online. We don't hang out with friends and family on a stage in the town square offline, so why should we online?
People have understood this for a while. Nowadays, using digital town squares for "living room" interactions is often a sign of being out of touch—think Grandpa posting embarrassing pictures or having a personal conversation with you on Facebook.
Chat platforms offer privacy, ephemerality, and control which means they function more like living rooms than town squares. That's a great fit for all kinds of small groups. But when you fill a living room with hundreds or thousands of people, you run into some problems.
Whether those problems can be addressed by limiting group sizes and virality is unclear. Will users simply go somewhere else that offers what they want?
Also, we think this shift to chat platforms means that our digital town squares look more like our offline town squares: performative, dominated by elites, and politically contested.
To put it another way, they are becoming more purely broadcast platforms. It's true that digital town squares have displaced traditional gatekeepers, but just because everyone can compete for attention doesn't mean everyone gets it. (TikTok may be an interesting outlier.)
Finally, we cover the history of chat and efforts to build interoperable clients, tying it in to @doctorow's work on "adversarial interoperability". https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability
For background on the series: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/beyond-facebook-logic-help-us-map-alternative-social-media
