Thursday February 20, 2025; 9:21 AM EST
- Over on Bluesky, in a brief thread thread raising the question of whether social media would be better without replies, Joel Martinez asks, "Isn’t a conversation comprised of replies to a counterparty though?#
- Perhaps the logic behind that sentence, in that context, goes something like this:#
- Social media aspires to be a conversation. Conversations require replies. Therefore, social media requires replies.#
- But an exchange of replies isn't a good enough understanding of conversation. When a police officer pulls someone over, an exchange of replies follows, but that's not what most of us mean by the word conversation. When an abuser harasses a spouse in the now-unsafe space of their shared living room, that's not a conversation. When hard and threatening questioning goes on in a cell somewhere out of the presence of lawyers or, indeed, out of reach of the protections of law, that's not a conversation.#
- So conversation must be something else other than a mere exchange of replies. No wonder people's blood pressure rises when they read many kinds of comments on social media. No wonder early in that Bluesky thread Dave Winer attempted to dislodge the idea of conversation from our idea of social media.#
- Have people ever had good conversations on social media? Maybe so. I seem to recall people occasionally behaving themselves and doing what they might do in their living room among guests and friends. Somebody in effect sets an object, a topic, out for view on the coffee table, and people chime in with what they know about it. They try to ask good questions and make suggestions about how our understanding of the thing on the table might open up before our eyes as possessing traits new to us, powers and uses new to us, that sort of discovery. The people in the room collaborate for a while because they enjoy conversation and know sometimes it can really pay off.#
- They know that sometimes at the end of a conversation new ideas have made their presence known, or at least our thinking has been nudged forward a bit.#
- That doesn't remind me of Twitter, and it doesn't remind me much of the too-narrow definition: exchange of replies.#
- For myself, I'll put on hold the idea that social media could be restructured as a meaningful conversation. I'm not sure it can happen, but I can accept it as an open question. I'm pessimistic, though.#
- However, I'm somewhat more optimistic that we could have web tools and personal/group web practices that offer other virtues. And to some degree these things may already exist.#
- End of Part 1.#