That strikes me as very believable, if there’s anything to the many rumors of Canadian politeness.
As I imagine you know, in the U.S. (and since we’re now back on topic), the supposedly forgotten ones are ordinary white men, the ones who, from their privileged position, take calls for equality as calls for oppression of themselves. Trump tapped deeply into that particular vein of delusion.
This form of Victim-card Playing was highlighted (in a way that would be hilarious if the whole thing wasn’t another sick and scary example of “I’m a victim, too!”) when Political-TV Hairstyle Sean Hannity bought a cheesy painting to give to Trump, in the hopes that it’ll hang in the White House.
Oh dont get me wrong weve got racist bigots too. And with slowdown of the tarsands and the oil industry in general theres a lot of working people suddenly out of work who feel very forgotten right now and if we’re not careful we’ll see the kind of backlash that brought in Trump.
I actually have been working on a business idea based on a new model of social media construction. I really don’t think the horribleness is built in to the web. I think that it’s built into the way the web doesn’t address issues of safety and need for privacy into the social media fabric. That’s why people create these safe spaces where they can discuss, say, at BoingBoing tech issues with other likeminded folk and not have to deal with caveman types who think that tech is sooo scary. I think it’s possible to create spaces where those issues are in the forefront and there is support to create a more friendly environment.
but currently it is definitely a lot of the issue, the way our social media software causes discussions to become little echo chambers instead of open forums for real discussion.
Where I find so-called social media lacking is that there isn’t much formally social about it. Users creating and sharing content is good, but what would make it social is relationships, and existing services offer no way to do that - apart from a nebulous pre-made construct such as “friend” which means different things to different people. So I think what has been missing is user-created relationship types. Such as: users a, j, q, and t have formed a “company”, users b, c, and n have formed a “marriage”, users e, h, m and v have formed an “agricultural planning group”. And so on. It helps people to have some formal structure to their interactions and facilitate actual group activity. Since bad actors are usually talkers and not participants, they wouldn’t last long.
All of the “Web 2.0” social media I have seen have only been slicker, more proprietary versions of discussions and pictures like people have been doing on IRC or Usenet for years, which was why I never bothered with MySpace, Facebook, or the like.
ETA: It seems that they do allow for arbitrary categories, which I think is neat. That’s a start. But there is no way to define a charter or keep records. Or define basic rule sets, such as “membership in group popo =/= group kkk, breitbart, trumpland, etc”
