The internet IS the town square. Social clubs are like VIP (or more pedestrian) popular pubs
Also most decently sized European cities have multiple “town squares” each with their own vibe (based on the stores/restaurants that have storefronts there).
Unless I’m not getting the authors drift, I see no problem with the bifurcation as long as town square owners don’t put up unreasonable barriers.
But I don’t think the internet version of this analogy holds up if you were to just erase social networks tomorrow.
Depending on one’s goals, starting your own site on some corner of the internet is akin to opening a store in the middle of nowhere. I can do it, but no one is coming here unless I find the place that people gather and tell them about my new shop in mountains.
The fabric of internet does enable this, but if I want to build a store, I’m going to do it somewhere where people gather, or I’m still going to rely on the places that people already gather to spread the word.
If I’m ambitious, what I really need to do is build a new town so that a square can emerge. But now I’m Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
Analogies between the Internet itself and the town square have always been shaky, and the deeper one goes, the more stark the differences. I’d argue that the internet is closer to the world stage — a place in which anything can happen, but more like the raw environment in which town squares emerge than a town square itself.
A mall is unnecessary to open a store in an existing town, and may even be undesirable depending on the nature of my business. And many towns (thankfully) don’t have malls.
The point was that opening a store is very much reliant on people living nearby, and that the analogy “the Internet is the town square” is not a very good one.
I don’t understand your point though. The Internet is a communication medium, so of course the goal is for other people to interact with your site. But why are platforms necessary for that to happen? People like them, which is fine, but why does it follow that anyone is entitled to access them?
A "gathering place" is not the de facto state of the Internet. Whether it's a "platform", or some as-of-yet undefined structure, the ability to have conversations with a group of folks potentially interested in what I have to say or want to sell depends on there being some gathering mechanism.
My point was that if you remove all major social networks tomorrow, what is left behind is not such an environment [0], and the fact that I can spin up a domain is not a replacement for the utility provided by such networks.
This is not a claim that such networks are only good, or that I like them, and whether or not it's possible to build such a place without just recreating the issues that plague the current platforms is a different question entirely. But the utility is pretty obviously there. The toxicity and misinformation is the obvious problem, but this doesn't imply that there aren't a host of positive outcomes as well.
If we could hypothetically remove them all tomorrow, there are a myriad of use cases that aren't strictly arguing with each other about contentious topics that have no place to go. Municipalities share updates with their communities, National Parks with their visitors, city transit services with their ridership, etc. In years past, this kind of communication would have happened in other ways - physical bulletin boards, printed newspapers, talking to John at the general store, but have all been supplanted by various social media accounts.
Going back to a "pre-social" Internet overnight does not account for these externalities.
I tend to think a pre-social Internet would actually be a better place, but to get there requires new thinking about solving the problems that are currently only handled by social media.
> but why does it follow that anyone is entitled to access them?
I never claimed that it does.
As for the Internet as a “gathering place”, I don’t think I can put it better than I did elsewhere in this thread [1]:
> The Internet (or really the Web) is a common area. You tweet something, I write a blog post and embed your tweet in it, Alice emails my post to her friends, Bob writes a post in response and links back to me, Charlie submits Bob’s post to Hacker News or Reddit, David and Eve discuss in the comments, etc.
Most of them already do. My argument is not that these entities can’t use their own sites, but that doing so is not a sufficient replacement for the utility afforded by social media today. They use social media because it’s the place that people go to get information.
In the physical town analogy, this is like posting your services on the front door of your building. Sure, people who know where you are can now get this information, but they had to know you were there to begin with.
The pre-social world had literal bulletin boards, shipped 3 inch thick phone books to every door, and would rely on the proximity of a new location to attract users who were already in the same area.
What you’re describing is a limbo state where we no longer have the old tools or the new replacements.
> Charlie submits Bob’s post to Hacker News or Reddit
Exactly. And this tends to be where engagement happens. I personally rely pretty heavily on HN as a community of people who are interested in the same things I am. I wouldn’t be aware of 99% of the smaller blogs shared here otherwise.
Ask yourself where we’d be having this discussion if we erased the Internet’s gathering places tomorrow. Unless you think HN should be exempt, which raises a whole new set of objections to the thought experiment.
I don't agree with this. They could use RSS, email, push notifications… we are not lacking in tools to disseminate information.
>> Charlie submits Bob’s post to Hacker News or Reddit
> Exactly. And this tends to be where engagement happens.
Again, I disagree! You're calling out the last step here as somehow distinct from the others, but I think every step of the chain I mentioned is engagement. Sharing a tweet in a blog post or an email is not fundamentally different than doing it with another tweet. The goal is human interaction, not a particular set of features.
Yes, people use social media because it's convenient. But the point of this thought experiment is not "if all social media vanished, we would be totally unaffected" — that's obviously not true. The point is that we would still have our digital gathering place. I'm not saying that we wouldn't lose anything valuable; I'm saying that we wouldn't lose anything fundamental.
This all started with:
> "Even if every single social network vanished tomorrow, we would still have a space where anyone can say whatever they want and instantly distribute it to every corner of the Earth"
I'm glad for the clarification. I think what confuses this is continuing to make claims like:
> Sharing a tweet in a blog post or an email is not fundamentally different than doing it with another tweet. The goal is human interaction, not a particular set of features.
The difference is in the outcome, and can be summed up with one word: reach. And I agree, human interaction is the goal. Features are just things that help humans achieve that goal. But features also modulate what is possible, and how effectively that goal will be reached. Features matter insomuch as they enable outcomes, and not all outcomes are equal across the various ways you could imagine a set of features.
If you believe that publicly sharing a tweet on a platform filled with people who are there to read other tweets - is not different than me sending you a personal email, I don't think there's any way for us to get on the same page.
And I guess I don't understand the point of what you're arguing at this point, because while sure, the Internet continues to exist, it would seem odd to say something like: "Well, the town got blown away by a tornado, but reality still exists, so nothing has really changed".
At this point let's just agree to disagree and move on, since I don't think we're really arguing about the same things.