Yesterday, parliament heard that the major parties will come together and pass a law banning teenagers from social media, after a period of careful thought roughly commensurate with that of a 15-year-old making a Black Friday impulse buy at Shein.com.
Meh, never liked the term.
I never felt it captured the seriousness of the undermining of the public’s access to reliable information, by the ownership of these public sphere’s being captured by profit maximising entities.
The temptation to skew algorithms to profit maximisation instead of best information delivery has proven too great, its why a fundamental shift away from the walled garden concept is required. In my view.
‘Platform decay’ is more serious and more descriptive to boot.
Certainly is better. But i don’t think it needs a ‘technology industry’ specific term.
Old terms like market monopolisation, or corruption of the public sphere.
Or something like those are better, because nothing the tech platforms have done is new, their tactics aren’t different from any other company seeking to dominate their respective product market. The key difference being the speed at which their product travels around the world.
You make a reasonable point. I think there is difference, though, which is the degree to which ‘the customer is the product’ for these platforms, and that’s a key ingredient in Doctorow’s original post:
Sure, advertising is nothing new, but the degree to which these platforms can target content and ads to the individual is qualitatively different to ‘old media’. Emphasis on ‘the customer’, singular, being the product, not ‘the readers/viewers’ as a whole.