Welcome to our first Qwoll podcast “Boundlessly Curious”….
Questions explored
* Has social media in fact compounded tribalism and polarization?
* Can we reliably measure the positive and negative consequences?
* How will generative AI play a role in how we interact with social media?
* What does the future of social media look like?
Summary of the Conversation
Intro to Oliver’s background as a researcher (minutes 1-8) and a discussion around social media, emotions and polarization (8-15)
* Oliver describes how people are mix emotions and rationality and how emotional responses have been exacerbated in the online sphere
* We talk about the origins of the connection power of like minded communities
Social media and the political sphere: the Arab Spring, Brexit and Trump (minutes 16-21)
* You can’t take the genie out of the bottle, analyzing life without social media is like analyzing life without electricity
* Context matters greatly; you can’t very easily say social media caused these things even though it is tempting, but we can say we have more visibility into different perspectives than we’ve had before - certain conversations we’re always happening but many of them we’re offline
Measuring the net effect of social media (minutes 22-30)
* Not so easy, but we can say that there’s been a lot of bad and not a lot of good. Thinking like a scholar or researcher / you have to narrow the scope to answer these questions
* “Social media has been pretty horrible” for teenage girls in Western countries; but maybe, it’s been less negative for elderly people to interact with family and friends; and there’s millions of couples who have met on online dating platforms
Generative AI and disinformation (minutes 31-40)
* So now we might be able to exponentially misinform without a coordinated human effort, that might not be so much worse than it is currently.. but maybe it just becomes more fun?
* You might also have more powerful ideas for identifying misinformation now too though at our disposal
Social platforms like Twitter are making it more difficult to research (minutes 41-45)
* Twitter had previously been allowing researchers free access to data, now under Elon Musk leadership, $42,000 per month is the asking price for .3% of the companies data
* This has relevant implications for our ability to study digital life and that’s not good
Future of social media (minutes 46-50)
* Oliver thinks the trend is for the internet to become ever more personalized and effective at serving our needs, and therefore more addictive…
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