After class today, post a comment of at least 250 words summarizing your reading and the lecture on Anil Dash’s “The Lost Infrastructure of Social Media.” Feel free to reflect on the social media that you have used or are aware of and how it has changed over time. Remember to note what “Whig history” is and how it relates to digital technologies including social media.
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Anil Dash’s “The Lost Infrastructure of Social Media”
In the article, The Lost infrastructure of Social Media, Anil Dash takes readers through a summary of the history of trends for the blogosphere, and of tools that have been and are currently available. In the article, he highlights how the transition to a new world of many social media channels has created gaps and opportunities in the market. Social media has had a massive effect on how we consume content. The ability to share content with our friends and peers has opened up a social aspect to content consumption and regularly leads us to view content that we usually wouldn’t be interested in. Content shared by our friends takes on social authority, one of the most powerful endorsements possible. As social networks became popular and powerful, the old dispersed blogosphere disintegrated, and those early services became centralized, leaving the power in hands of a few private companies. Publishers and independent voices became more susceptible to control points of a few social networks and search engines. The center capability of writing articles on the web remains fairly developed and strong, and this has been infused with renewed energy by the release of writing tools such as Medium. Dash recalls one point when one could search most of the blogs in the world and achieve a reasonable complete and up-to-date set of results. Dash highlights Technorati as pioneer service by attempting to crawl all blogs on the internet each time they update. The current internet can see relative complete searches results for hashtags or terms with Twitter or some closed networks. But the closing of Google Blog search in 2011 marked the end of blog search as a distinct product, separate from the general web or news search. The rise of social media and networking has made it faster and easier to access information around the world, and by having smaller, bite-sized chunks of information makes it easier for people to digest and communicate to one another. Whether through a simple tweet, post on Instagram or a status update on Facebook, we can instantly be made aware of aware of different issues around the world than we ever were before. Dash cautions that this is nothing new. People will innovative ways to publish on the internet as long as there is internet. He further assets that as far as ideas, they come and go, sometimes they may even disappear because they are no longer relevant. Other times ideas disappear because of the market impact or of a dominant player in the market.
In the article, “The Lost infrastructure of Social Media” by Anil Dash, Dash discusses how early platforms of blogging have been forgotten but incarnations of those features in those platforms can still be valuable today. As social networks grew the old blogosphere fell apart and a few private companies took over. The core features of early blogging was able on any site and helped popularize social media. But now many of these open features are no longer in existence as new bigger companies have taken over. Let’s take for example Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook. These are three large social media platforms that have taken over the internet. Any small company before them as been wiped out. Any small company which had the same idea as them has been wiped out because of them. The blogosphere which Dash brings up had features like, publishing, search, comments, responses, likes and favorites, updates, identity, friend lists, and the same things that websites like Tumblr have now. As social media became popular blogosphere was out run by other blogging sites like Tumblr. All these new forms of technology are recycled, there is no definite new idea when it comes to the internet. Most things are revamped ideas that were already created by someone else, who unfortunately either didn’t market it correctly or different get the right recognition for it. These idea that were good ideas the first time around and will remain good ideas in whatever way they are remade for our modern society. Dash just hopes that those who are building tools today will see what’s come before and use it as inspiration to help give voice to people on the web in a way that’s less corporate controlled.
In his article, “The Lost infrastructure of Social Media” Anil Dash focuses on how older forms of technologies are shown in newer forms of technologies. He notes that as social networks became more and more popular the old decentralized blogosphere fell apart. This means that the services that these blogospheres provided, were combined, giving all the power to only a select few private companies that took over. Early era blogging has provided many features and aspects that is incorporated into social media today. Blogging has helped social media become so popular today, that there are hundreds of thousands of users on each social media platform. There are many aspects of social media today that we just assume we’re always there as a part of the program. However things such as likes/favorites, comments and searches were not always part of certain platforms. Liking, favoriting and starring certain things is probably the main activity on social media. However as it may seem to be common sense to have these actions now, it has only been added in, within the last decade. The same goes for commenting. When blogging was first being used, there was no tool that could be used to comment. Third party apps were created for commenting services. Eventually commenting features were included in these large domains, however it caused more harm than good, because it enables verbal abuse and cyberbullying. Twitter may seem incomplete today without the hashtag. The hashtag allows you to search for items within the twitter domain. Before there was no way to do any type of blog search. Older forms of technology is being incorporated into the new technology that’s available today, allowing technology to keep evolving.
In the article, “The lost Infrastructure of Social Media” by Anil Dash he tells us how old forms of technology have an identity still. Here we see the new technology, but what is in the new technology is the old technology that is just updated. One example of new technology is the old blogosphere which eventually went away after private companies emerged and changed everything. Social media now is somewhat like blogging, but a lot more advanced compared to back then. Social media itself has taken over the way we do things. Social media itself has opened up the way we consume content. Being able to share any type of digital information to one another is a huge change and that was what blogs were, but now as social media emerges we have more options. As social media emerged the entire blogging universe completely fell apart people realized that the new technology was just more capable and had more ability to attract things like jobs, content, and other things. The news gets delivered faster now at days where we are able to get things like tweets, trending news, Facebook status update, or an Instagram post the way we get our information is completely different. The publishing itself is a lot different from a blog. Dash explains how people will find a new way to publish the internet because everyone has the internet access. Therefore he believes things will come and go until they no longer have an relevance to us as the consumers.
In the article “The Lost Infrastructure of Social Media” Anil Dash peels back the trends that have enriched or derailed the progress resulting from technology. Coined by long-time computer programmer Jaron Lainer, the term virtual reality denotes the rise of new types of social media dominate online discourse, in that way companies responsible for this have changed what is called API or Application Programming Interface. APIs are a way for users to build a program, a website, some kind of front end that interfaces with someone else’s technology. Take for instance Google Maps, an online service that on websites is embedded with special features to assist navigation. The idea is that it makes available an API, a set of rules from which access connects with a third party’s technology via browser (this being Google). Double-edged these APIs are both a blessing and curse for those involved. In one respect APIs carry a sense of generosity that one in possession of advanced technology is “giving away” the privilege to use it in exchange for adhering to established rules with the prospect of incorporating it with their technology. On the other hand, a curse ensues on the off chance a company retracts their policies (change their minds) and you created something that is dependent on their API, any plea of reconsideration it out of the question. In today’s market, technologies are the brainchild of a legal entity, hence decisions on how said property is used to left to those in ownership of it. This has become more apparent in our current social media landscape, because over the last decade SIM companies that wanted to grow very quickly opened their APIs so that anybody could use them and users had power over how to incorporate this technology into their own and the promise of that was a proliferation of different social media. The idea is that with everyone sharing, collaborating in the long run it benefitted everyone but then when we began to see the rise of consolidation of social media, a few key players (Facebook, Twitter, Google) started locking down their companies. As a result other companies that built their APIs on top of Facebook and Twitter, they had to “reinvent their wheel” or start up from scratch.
In this article “The Lost Infrastructure of Social Media” by Anil Dash talks about the overtaking of the blogosphere by companies with power and money. He talks about the contrast and comparisons of old and new technologies. Blogging sites were used as a gateway to promote social media and now they are very few sites left in existence. As the popularity of social media grows the need for older software disappears. Dash talks about searching using blogs but that came to end in 2011 with Google Blogs. Dash believes that social media is leading to new “widespread abuse.” In the old days comments were left in order to allow a website grow and prosper but now people have taken advantage. For example, YouTube has a leave a comment section but along with good comments there are abusive and hurtful comments. He explains that big name publishers are investing in the bad rather than the healthy. A fairly recent addition to most social media platforms are the “like” or “heart” tap to let someone that you acknowledged or taken interested of something that someone has posted. One thing about the new internet is that all the ideas that the have been reused. The old social media have been reinvented and used as the building blocks for new social media. Social Media has lost itself for what it’s truly about. It’s suppose to be a safe place for people to express their thoughts and share it with others. Now it’s become a place full of advertisements and an exploitation of our personal information.