Welcome to a site that is intended to provide design notes on a free and open social media system. To avoid confusion we emphasise that this web site is not the social media itself and is intended rather as a discussion vehicle. After reading the introduction below we invite you to drill down using the menu. Guests may leave comments i.e. there is no need to register or login to express your opinion on an article. Both this site and the social media site itself are under construction. When both reach a sufficient stage of maturity we will include reciprocal links on both sites.
Introduction.
Social media are driven by the need to communicate and have the potential to widen and stimulate community. These digital platforms are surely a vital stage in our evolution as species and are, we assume, here to stay. However, the current form of these platforms entails heavy storage and transmission of data and are therefore almost exclusively provided by commercial companies that must monetise their operation. As the information exchange is commercialised the process develops some practices that are antithetical to social well being and can indeed be toxic. Information can reproduce exponentially whilst its type and degree of veracity is often unclear to users. It appears there is little incentive for the operating companies to pursue any ethical considerations. Of course the current media can disrupt lives at the individual level but far worse, they are capable of psychologically manipulating the informational foundations of democratic politics. Indeed, the current social media pose a new form of politics as they encourage commercial oligarchies run, ironically, by non-socially regulated individuals and elites. In this way, because of their ubiquity and narrowly defined responsibilities, current social media contain an existential threat. But are there alternatives? One such experimental possibility is described below. It is based on replacing some common criteria about how a social media must operate.
Our system investigates whether an anonymous, secure and free to use social media might be useful and practical. To do this we are constructing a "toy" exemplar. It is very much an experiment. Our system, whose working title is 'virtual fictions' aims to provide complete privacy to an anonymous user and a secure platform to communicate in text with another transient paired anonymous user - this other user can be considered both a confidante and a co-creator, i.e. the pairing is to support both mutual counselling and growth. If both anonymous users wish it, there is a facility to permanently add an agreed final text to the the systems public domain data. As well as conventional textual expression, the system is envisaged to include text driven generative algorithms that can be interpreted by presentation 'engines' (software modules) with which users pairs may experiment - hence allowing the creation and economic storage of art and music. All stored text pieces generate a url that may be linked into by outside sites and the presentation engines may also be downloaded by outside sites if needed to expose a generative piece. By contrast, for security, outgoing links are curated by the system. The system uses AI to detect and remove a range of toxic input including information that might compromise the anonymity of the user. Practical limitations on the development of this screening imply, unfortunately, that our toy system is restricted to the english language at present.
Users communicate by joint editing a cloned version of a selected system node. Then, if they choose to contribute their final piece of conversation to the permanent data structure it will be added as a child node. Users are encouraged and supported, via the content of the pre-existing nodes, to adopt a metaphorical or allegorical style of conversation/writing. Thus, the total data of the system grows as a set of interlinked tree structures. Such a textual structure and its authoring and browsing functionality are as far as we are are aware novel and therefore somewhat challenging to understand, at least in the abstract. However, users will be guided, step by step, on browsing and initiating creative conversations. Constructing the software and designing the logic to support the system requires a bespoke and time consuming approach but the critical unknown is what sort of starter nodes of content would encourage users to undertake a creative conversation and indeed, whether such an approach is viable at all.
As an important extension, we also give consideration to balancing this anonymous online meeting system with a protocol for creating and managing a type of "virtual user" formed of a temporary coming together of individuals in a face-to-face real offline meeting.
In summary, the proposed system experiments with reversing many common design assumptions in what we hope is coherent fashion. Users sacrifice publicly acknowledged ownership of their creation reverting to personal satisfaction (or satisfaction within a virtual user group mentioned above). There is no formal distinction between content contributed by the system developers, other human users and AI. We replace the dichotomies of artist /consumer; therapist /client and community / individual ,with a shifting spectrum of roles.The system can in principle freely provide added value to external sites via links thus, as a side effect, incentivising external creators and clients to also anonymously re-enter our own system to contribute. The system softens the search for criteria of truth against falsity - encouraging awareness of metaphor as a more cautious method to process information. The system puts free use, safety, privacy and social "therapy" as the most important design criteria. It breaks down distinctions between therapy, counselling, art, literature and game media.
(In what follows we refer to the team constructing the social media and this web site as the developers. We refer to the single individual who started the project as the originator.)