Trusting the Ratio
The fury of the meme wars can seem really bad. Like society is ripping apart at the seams. The online is real life and real life is increasingly weird.
My late colleague Jim Gilliam wrote a book about how the internet was god because it connects us all together. He also explained his belief there was a benefit in the scaled post-Facebook nonviolent online conflict because it quickly exposes a regional or global moral consensus and propels society forward.
I’m more of a Buddhist and Jim’s first assertion doesn’t fit the totality of my experience with human interconnectedness. The second part, though, is very interesting.
THE RATIO is comments / amplification + positive emojis
On an open platform, there are two kinds of community consensus that develop.
One, considering that you have some curation and filtering in terms of how you build your own little consensus group, is accepting feedback from folks within your own community. (That this community is self chosen is key to this moral framework.) Did I say that it might be cool to let the Bezos/Bloomberg digital scabs step back to the workers side and almost get ratioed by the more activist members of my consensus group Yes. But I was not ratioed and at that point I take the feedback to heart and continue on my way.
The second ratio is the one that everyone talks about. It’s less important to the self, but much bigger for the community and society. This is a public shaming or even a nonviolent wrecking. In Japan, when the internet swarms on you, they are in your apartment hallways — but the overflowing class war in the United States has remained largely peaceful (I advocate nonviolently crushing the billionaire class and its lackeys) and much of that is because culture signals through social media are widely respected by the punditry and the political class.
When I think and write about open social media, I’m thinking about platforms where real users interact openly.
What if I bomb a public opinion so hard or make a joke so cringe that it’s not just my community that gives me feedback, but a big wide world of other people I’ve never interacted with? This seems to me to be what Jim was thinking about.
Nonviolent ideological conflict through Twitter seems pretty damn good to me considering what this country has been through.
So, this second kind of ratio is culturally significant. Your own peer group may keep telling you that you’re ok, but if I or some millionaire-serving-billionaires stooge lose the world, we all learn a lesson.
A note on harm prevention: Troll attacks on Twitter really suck at a personal level for everyone involved. They just aren’t fun on the nervous system. If you are having problems or feeling like you are not being productive or representing your values, take a break. Go outside.
Meet up with or talk to a friend.
Try not to write things you’d want to delete later. Punch up, publicly, and respect the ratio.
I also strongly recommend these notification filters on Twitter:
