From Harvard Gazette
How to make social media, online life less of ‘dumpster fire’
By Samantha Laine Perfas
Popular social media platforms were once a place to connect with old and new friends, post life updates, and share photos of your kids. But they have become fraught with misinformation, an algorithm-delivered onslaught of content aimed at fueling discord, all in service to business models that prioritize drawing eyeballs, said experts on digital life at a discussion last Thursday on how to improve discourse and spaces online.
But that’s not how they started.
“I think it’s important to remember why people were originally going to a lot of these services, these online environments. They were looking for connection and were looking for community,” said danah boyd, founder of research nonprofit Data & Society. “It was self-identified geeks, freaks, and queers — which I identify as all three — that were very, very happily finding their people in these online environments, and they were investing in those relationships.”
boyd, who is also a distinguished visiting professor at Georgetown University, was part of a keynote panel at an afternoon-long series of discussions, titled “Beyond Discourse Dumpster Fires.” boyd’s panel was moderated by Berkman Klein Center Faculty Director Jonathan Zittrain, the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School...
danah boyd received her Ph.D. from the UC Berkeley School of Information and is the founder of the Data & Society Research Institute. She is also a researcher at Microsoft and a visiting professor at New York University.
