151–160 of 239 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing new. That existed before social media and the internet, too. Ban people from certain jobs because the communities they associated with.
(Illegal in many countries post the rise of social democracy, for what it’s worth—the US being a notable exception.)
After spending a number of months on Lemmy as my primary social media, I actually think the fediverse makes one of the biggest issues of social media much worse. There's a very real and dangerous trend towards extremist positions as a result of social media bubbles. I'm sure most people have noticed how large family gatherings have shifted over the last 15 years, and how some family may no longer even be invited as a…
This is exactly what's happening. I never thought I'd make a positive comparison to twitter but twitter threw everyone into one big melting pot. People could block each other but by default they had to listen to a lot of differing opinions before they blocked anyone. In fedi borders are being drawn and they're creating these little bubbles of opinions. So you know that within your border your opinion will never be ch…
Threw everyone using twitter into one big melting pot.
This is a very interesting concept and one I think most comments here are missing. This isn't a question as to why Mastodon (or "Fediverse") has yet to catch on in the wider public. It is more a question as to why scholarly societies are still organized around paid journals. I think the answer to that isn't inertia or greed. I would argue that the tools of federation aren't necessarily suitable to that specific probl…
They aren’t necessarily. In some branches of linguistics, history, and archaeology, for example, the major journals are still published by learned societies or national academies of science, and they are open-access and authors don’t pay to publish. The costs are covered by the massive endowments that the learned societies sit on (some were founded in the 19th century).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The supposed "social media bubble" is a silly myth. The exact opposite is the case: On even the most algorithmically filtered social media platform, you cannot avoid encountering opinions and viewpoints that are dramatically different from what you find in your real-life circles. The real bubbles are your family, your workplace, and your friends. Most of them are the same nationality, roughly the same social class, a…
The difference is that with your real-life social bubble you try to not embarrass yourself, so you only discuss your more moderate views with them. While on the internet if you support some extremistic view, you can just shout it out without much consequence.
Only if you hide behind the shield of anonymity. Which you can't really do in the real world.
The mainstream federated servers of the fediverse largely draw from those same North American or Western European circles. It is very common to see founding members of Mastodon claim that their own subculture’s values and concerns ought to be upheld across the fediverse even as new members sign up, and never diluted. How welcoming can the fediverse therefore be to academics from elsewhere with different concerns and views?
My concern with scholarship on the fediverse would be clash between academic cultures, and potential exclusion. Some fields of the humanities in some parts of the world do not have the absorbing interest in race/sexuality/gender/power that North American and Western European academia does; they look at those developments with bemusement or horror, and frequently complain about how funding gets tied to using Westerner…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't conflate peer review with paid journals, they're very different things. The money received by paid journals doesn't go to the reviewers. The reviewers are mostly professors who have their own funding. I reviewed a paper recently; I certainly didn't get paid for it! Some disciplines are switching to open access journals, meaning that anyone can read the articles for free, and there's no big publisher sucking up…
You are on point: paid journals bring nothing to the table, except that they have somehow established reputations (of varying levels), where people publish their papers. But the journals themselves do very little. It's largely or entirely volunteers who review papers and select the ones that get publish. The journals are completely replaceable. You could also just designate a simple website as the publishing destinat…
After spending a number of months on Lemmy as my primary social media, I actually think the fediverse makes one of the biggest issues of social media much worse. There's a very real and dangerous trend towards extremist positions as a result of social media bubbles. I'm sure most people have noticed how large family gatherings have shifted over the last 15 years, and how some family may no longer even be invited as a…
After spending a number of months on Lemmy as my primary social media, I actually think the fediverse makes one of the biggest issues of social media much worse. There's a very real and dangerous trend towards extremist positions as a result of social media bubbles. I'm sure most people have noticed how large family gatherings have shifted over the last 15 years, and how some family may no longer even be invited as a…
The supposed "social media bubble" is a silly myth. The exact opposite is the case: On even the most algorithmically filtered social media platform, you cannot avoid encountering opinions and viewpoints that are dramatically different from what you find in your real-life circles. The real bubbles are your family, your workplace, and your friends. Most of them are the same nationality, roughly the same social class, a…
This includes things you might have happily accepted you might have just made a mistake on (but I thought I remembered this documentary about Mandela's assassination...) when your real world social circle pushed back, if only it wasn't so easy to find other people that thought the same, and theories of why you are right all along. Usually with a lot of other baggage linked into you being right and everyone else being wrong
Obviously this isn't always a bad thing: people also use the internet to discover that same sex attraction is actually accepted in places outside their community or that their government's position on a border dispute isn't universally accepted in environments where alternative views are legal to express. And it happens offline too (the original 'Mandela Effect' was apparently conceived by a bunch of paranormal enthusiasts in an offline environment). But if the Azeri vet is one of the few people in the world to not think what you're saying is complete nonsense, you'll be much more likely to find him online. Not all taboos are against stuff which is inherently bad to discuss, and not all beliefs universally held within a community are accurate. But a lot of fringe stuff on the internet is fringe for good reason, and even when such views are quiet widely-held "bubbles" suck in people who would never have had the motivation to seek out an offline group for discussing the coming race war or whose fault their lack of confidence in dating really was.
After spending a number of months on Lemmy as my primary social media, I actually think the fediverse makes one of the biggest issues of social media much worse. There's a very real and dangerous trend towards extremist positions as a result of social media bubbles. I'm sure most people have noticed how large family gatherings have shifted over the last 15 years, and how some family may no longer even be invited as a…
The supposed "social media bubble" is a silly myth. The exact opposite is the case: On even the most algorithmically filtered social media platform, you cannot avoid encountering opinions and viewpoints that are dramatically different from what you find in your real-life circles. The real bubbles are your family, your workplace, and your friends. Most of them are the same nationality, roughly the same social class, a…
And the newspaper/channel/site(s) you frequent.