I’m not sure how you feel, but after a quarter century of being chronically online I’m tired of the internet. Most days it’s a lot of drivel, toxicity, and negative emotion. Sometimes I put my phone down after scrolling my feeds and I feel icky.
Maybe I am an old man screaming at clouds, reminiscing about the early days of the internet when we believed in “sharing economies”, the power of social networks (before social media of course), when we saw message boards, blogs, and micro-blogging as democratizing forces, timelines meant to help you keep in touch with your friends as opposed to endless algorithmically-driven feeds; honestly I could go on.
In my “shakes fist at today’s internet” despair, I stumbled upon a post on IG from Sigla Research Center that advocated for the potential of online spaces. It gave me hope, providing a way forward for online engagement.
I got to sit down with Ferdinand Sanchez II, the Head of Public Engagement at Sigla and a researcher on disinformation and deliberative democracy. He explained that, “Sigla is a third space for various sectors like academics, activists, civil society organizations, and even the public,” where the goal is to “reflect on our current socio-political realities and work collectively toward a flourishing and healthy public sphere...”
These things also contribute to real people posting less. Your post gets no traction because it doesn’t feed the algorithm. And if it does get traction, you run the risk of drawing the ire of the crowd, who could hate on anyone for anything at this point. Ferdz acknowledges that he hears this a lot, that there is a “palpable anxiety when it comes to posting online” because of anticipated reactions from other people. So why risk posting and engaging if you might get mobbed? So what happens is that people are posting less, and if they do post, they are mostly talking within their own silos or echo chambers.
As Sanchez explains, “...now we're more polarized communities or societies where just one word would trigger a lot of things, right?” But he believes the challenge is to "pause and reflect and engage,” and to avoid “dehumanizing others or trying to disregard others just because they hold a different viewpoint than us.”
He explains, "I guess that's how the internet reflects our everyday society…all the expectations, the cultural norms are bounced into these…spaces…And it's because of the way it is framed or structured,...The platforms or the algorithms incentivize” emotional and vitriolic things.
If it’s so toxic there, if everything makes us feel so awful, then why hang around? Sanchez reminds me that the internet isn’t some monolithic thing, “It’s still man-made” so it can be reclaimed.
In the syllabus that Sigla has created, which focuses on disinformation, their last lesson is on the ongoing potential of online spaces. For example, he points to LGBTQ+ communities who have used platforms to connect in ways that conservative societies offline would not allow.
The main way we make the internet better is understanding our agency. I was ready to quit because I felt I had no power. But Fedz tells me, “We can reclaim, we need to recognize what’s working and criticize what’s not working.” He says one thing that we can see working is user moderation in spaces like Reddit.
He says we need to reimagine technology, “not for profit, not for human exploitation, but in ways that are centered on our needs.” He invites us to imagine a rebuilt internet where “each and every one of us has a voice and everyone has a stake.” We both end with the idea that a good internet culture doesn't polarize, but serves as a space where societies can flourish.