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{
  "uri": "at://did:plc:mdjhvva6vlrswsj26cftjttd/com.whtwnd.blog.entry/3ljsh34u2ow2e",
  "cid": "bafyreidbmayrofko2bllphwon42ozovu7ecdfse2gaqc3z4via4ltapjle",
  "value": {
    "$type": "com.whtwnd.blog.entry",
    "theme": "github-light",
    "title": "FR #106 email intro",
    "content": "My weekly newsletter ([signup here!](https://fediversereport.com/)) gets you all the articles I've written that week, as well as additional writing/analysis not found in any of my articles. If you're interested, this is what I published this week:\n\n\n---\n\nA major reason why I care so much about social networks and building alternatives is because I view social networks as collective sense-making tools. Networks like Twitter not only allow information to spread rapidly, much more importantly, they are used to have us collectively make sense of all this information, process it, and let it shape our worldview. This is fundamentally why it is so disastrous that tech billionaires control most social networks: they control the tools that we use to shape our collective understanding of the world.\n\n \n\nHenry Farrell wrote an excellent blog about this a few months ago, about how \"we're getting the social media crises wrong\". Farrell writes: \"The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings.\" \n\n \n\nI highly recommend Farrell's article, and it has shaped how I view social networks as well. Farrell focuses on the negatives, the idea that the social media crisis results hurts our collective understanding. Misinformation is harmful because it malforms our idea of how other people think about the world.\n\n \n\nBut I think we can go a step further here: Farrell's point is that (mis)information on social networks shapes our collective (mis)understandings. What I'm interested in: Is there a difference between social networks for this phenomenon? On a given subject, can a difference be determined between a social network's collective understanding on that subject? And how do these ideas spread between networks, and with which speed?\n\n \n\nThese questions have been on my mind for a while, but I've started to see the rapid changes in the world as a good way to get a rough indication of this effect. The destruction that Trump and Musk are causing rapidly changes the order of the world, and many core assumptions do not hold anymore. This makes it that people will have to update their worldviews to adapt to the new state of the world. \n\n \n\nWe are now in a situation where it is possible to know that people will have to change their worldview. Trump and Musk's destruction make it simply untenable to ignore the new reality we live in. But changing a worldview is always difficult, especially for long-held beliefs like \"America is a trust-worthy ally\", so this effect will not happen instantly. \n\n \n\nThis creates a situation that I've not experienced before on social media: if you're paying attention, you can get a good idea of some facts about how the world has changed, but the collective understanding has not yet caught up. Paying attention to how quickly this new fact becomes 'collective understanding' gives a sense of the speed at which information travel in a social network. Furthermore, it also gives us the possibility to check if there are differences between the social networks. Does TikTok come to a different collective understanding than X, Bluesky different than Instagram?\n\n \n\nI'm not tuned in enough with TikTok and X to get a good sense of to see in which direction their collective understanding of a rapidly changing world is going. For Bluesky and Mastodon I find these to be very different networks. On Bluesky the process of collective sense-making is visible in real-time, while it seems to be quite absent on Mastodon. How this will further develop, and what role Bluesky takes in collective sense-making on a societal level remains to be seen, but it is something I'm closely watching.",
    "createdAt": "2025-03-07T16:41:27.954Z",
    "visibility": "public"
  }
}