5 ms·
Social media are tools, and a tool is as good/bad as the use we make of it, we should never forget.
by maffeis 10y ago
Social media are tools, and a tool is as good/bad as the use we make of it, we should never forget.
- soufron 10y agoNope, tools also have a meaning by themselves.
- maffeis 10y agoWe come to understand the meaning of tools only by the use other people make of them. Of course tools come with a priori, socially charged meanings, yet they are the results of the way we have historically used or interacted with them. There's no such a thing as intrinsic meaning, in this world.
- mk89 10y agoWhat's the meaning of a knife, then?
- hutzlibu 10y agoTo cut. But with a butter knife you won't really cut humans. But there are combat knives for that... and yes, you can also use the latter for butter, but not so good.
- jacalata 10y agoTo be pedantic, a butter knife is really for spreading, not cutting.
- sannysanoff 10y agothere are people obsessed with knives as such (collecting them, playing with them, carrying them all the time, imagining they save the world/themselves with knife). Knives have their power over them. And that's just knives, not even intellectual toys like products of multi-billion industry we're talking about.
- rhizome 10y agoRight, but that's not "meaning in themselves," it's "meaning in context."
- rdiddly 10y agoI get your point, I think - a knife's "nature" if it has one, depends on its use. But a knife is an example of a simple tool with many purposes. What about a complicated, specialized tool built for only one or two purposes? Worse yet, what about a complicated tool serving multiple people's divergent and conflicting purposes?
- mk89 10y agoLike a swiss knife? :) Oh I see your point, and I also dislike certain tools that, despite their possible wide set of functionalities, still don't convince me. Facebook is definitely one of them. However, my question was more generic because social media themselves are not bad. HN is also a social media, after all. Of course, when you give all your data to someone, well, you take some risks. I just don't like the idea that one tool is "just" bad. Facebook, more specifically, offers many features, and some of these are really interesting to me, less to somebody else, yet there are other "things" which don't convince me too much.
- pjlegato 10y agoA tool -- a knife, say -- is merely a chunk of inert metal. It has no inherent meaning whatsoever. It is meaningful only insofar as it is placed into a social context. Any meaning is in the observers' minds, not in the tool itself.
- reddytowns 10y agoSocial media is a honeypot meant to trick people into giving up their information. Each piece on it's own may seem unimportant, but like in a game of Go, you won't see the full impact until it's too late.
- maffeis 10y agoAgreed. But I think it's safe to say that by using social media we implicitly accept the constant tension between using the tools and becoming a tool ourselves.
- thaw13579 10y agoIf that's the case, I have to wonder who "we" is for social media--advertisers, people communicating through it, share holders, or some combination thereof?
- maffeis 10y agoI'd say the latter one: we are all in this together, one way or another.
- a3_nm 10y agoSocial media are owned and run by someone else, so they are not agnostic tools the way a hammer is.
- userbinator 10y agoI almost implicitly read that as "users of social media are tools", which while a bit harsh, might actually have some truth to it...