Social Media, Social or Orwellian.

Preliminary thoughts on How not to use facebook or similar social media. (2)

I guess as a first step you have to have a website and/or blog page. In a second step you have to make them known and in a third step you have to enable visitors to subscribe to them, which means whenever there is a new post or contribution, subscribers are being notified. In a fourth step you have to decide what subscribers can do: Read only, read and write, or post more than just comments. Should your subscriber also have a website and/or blog page, he can do the same on his side and you are on the same pin board. You have actually created a space within which you can communicate and share without any interference from outside. (I will not touch here on the problematic of security, safety and privacy in general on the internet. It seems acceptable to me to think and say, that at least facebook or any other similar platform does not have access anymore to your data.)
This does not seem to be rocket science to me, which does not mean, you will not have to struggle a bit and learn the ropes.
Let me finish again with a vignette of a classic situation from infancy. Growing up is permanently confronted with not knowing how to understand and how to do. Very often, growing up needs help, to avoid giving up and falling into despondency. Best help comes from being helped to understand and how to fix things. If the helper offers all the solutions, it cannot be your solution anymore. This kind of helper becomes “big mother or father or brother or sister” without whom you think you cannot sort yourself and your life out. Social media platforms have established themselves as this kind of helpers. They make us end up thinking and feeling there is no alternative and without them we are doomed to perish. Actually, the modern digital revolution in its revolutionary dialectics is not only enslaving us but at the same time providing us with the options and means to stand on our own feet and find our own ways. Facebook and alike is enslaving and at the same time enabling us to voice and share our critical insights. The provide us with the space for their own obituary and the publication of manuals for how to find alternatives and how to create tools for our needs. To quote again Goethe who makes mephistopheles describe himself as ”ein Teil von jener Kraft, die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft.” (“Part of the Power that would Always wish Evil, and always works the Good. ”, much more poetic in German.)

More work to be done and tested. Till soon.