Dialogue Description:

Oh, social media. Love it, hate it, avoid it, deconstruct it, but it’s still there and as powerful a tool and as big a distraction as ever. How do we handle it? This month, we want to invite a conversation exploring racism, sexism, and the ways they show up in social media. From debate over “toxic twitter wars” and the trolling and outright hate that can make it terrifying at times to engage with social media, to the call out culture and concerns over “violent solidarity,” let’s gather and see where the night takes us.

If you want some ideas or context, check out these articles:

Dialogue Notes:

These are rough, uncut, unfiltered, and anonymous notes taken at the dialogue. We get that these may not be very readable to those who were not in attendance at the dialogue, and, honestly, sometimes even to those of us who were. We still feel it is important to keep them available as part of our accountability process and for archiving and reference purposes.  Some of these notes have been digested/transformed into blogs.

  • when we tweet at direct actions, exciting to feel connected yet exhausting
  • a lot of social interaction is online
  • not wanting to shut people down
  • what is worth engaging
  • keeping abreast of pop culture and social media in racial justice work
  • connections between online and offline organizing
  • what am I consuming/participating in/feeding?
  • Share less and less of my beliefs on social media, tired of arguments with myfamily
  • Is it life-affirming, how I want to spend my time?
  • News curation and filters
  • Mixed feelings – as much as I want to reject social media, amazing tool, and adependency – I want it to be used for things I believe in because it certainly is

    being used for things I don’t believe in

  • Call out culture online, and the difference between cultivating relationshipsto have difficult conversations
  • Creating superficial level of connection, high level of disposability
  • Tech spaces male dominated, reddit high majority men, can create dangerousgaps, who are creating these spaces and who are they for?
  • Creating systems that people use every day that reflect values of the creators
  • Is tech creating value neutral space?
  • What is good for business – i.e. Trump with CBS
  • How disrupt this?
  • The idea that numbers are neutral, don’t lie, tell whole story – with socialjustice org. metrics, and it’s about how you set up the queries, how interpreting and evaluating it, how see white male frameworks – what are the variables, inherent bias
  • The value is not on human well-being – not factored into these algorithms
  • What is connection to social well-being
  • As movement workers, is the goal to use the data the way you want or toundermine the way data is collected
  • Is the goal to be the hashtag of the day
  • How have reinscribed centers of power, to use these platforms?
  • If you are engaging social media, access, surveillance, data mining, but if don’tengage like not voting
  • Algorithms and non-human dimension of what is viewed, weighed, amplified
  • Anthropologists, historians of future reading tweets
  • Both/and, used to reject social media, yet now living more isolated whichpushed me into social media
  • If we don’t engage, someone else will harness it
  • What do I want to lift up?
  • FCC new subsidy of phones for people on govt assistance
  • Dependence on conflict minerals for electronics
  • One of the more democratic spaces on the web
  • Transferable skills
  • Bay area site where so much is created
  • What would it be like to organize tech employees who are so taken care of bycompanies, how to develop oppositional consciousness?
  • A big internal conversation is how to market in a way that is not exclusive,yet the language is coded in recruitment – how to make tools for them to do

    better and meet them where they are?

  • Is it progress to be the one marketed to? And not wanting to be a product.
  • These companies will exist for a long time – how to shift the culture to createbetter tools
  • Not a straightforward answer
  • Access is tip of iceberg, women and POC who enter can be hostileenvironment, not knowing how to be more truly inclusive, a ton of unconscious bias in interviews, job descriptions, ways to bring people in, not having same salaries, decision-making, hierarchies among developers between South Asian immigrants and white workers
  • Working in tech, regular disruptions of status quo to change the environment
  • Often being only female in a meeting, men would get so angry nearly in fistfights at time while I was told to quite down if my voice got a little animated,

    telling blonde jokes in between meetings

  • Emotional compensation
  • When it comes to tense conversations in person, all kinds of physiologicalresponses in the moment, on FB can think about response, re-read and edit, re-read and edit, useful tool to make sure I am hearing what they are saying, cool out my defensiveness
  • When heated up can be hard to cool down at the time
  • Total dismissal, can be hard not to respond in same way
  • Not attacking person, yet bring up what you believe in
  • And then there are the trolls, inflammatory, hateful, energy-sucking
  • Not wanting to engage with trolling
  • Article about how social media has brought back the stocks, mob mentality,public shaming
  • Should we push out past the choir?
  • Is it a useful tool if only sharing thoughts with like-minded folks?
  • Will post comments on our blog if not hateful, yet will post problematic oneswith a response
  • These platforms are not accountable
  • If a publishing company published an extremely racist text, would be calledto account – where does responsibility lie?
  • Mediating our relationships and facilitating
  • Thinking of social media as an institution, like public schools – how deal withbullying?
  • If creating social space, how shape interaction
  • Colorblindness and the “new racism”, “perspectivelessness” is a maledominated perspective, who has right and wrong answers, to say something is “without perspective” means that it is the perspective of power
  • That there can be threats of rape in response to your ideas, these companies have so much responsibility
  • Rape culture online
  • What is it to shut down and distinction with censorship?
  • Platforms for organizing hate, not just words
  • A lot of white terrorism linked to internet
  • From psychology standpoint, safety in anonymity
  • When children put on masks can increase violence in their play
  • Strategies to depersonalize
  • Internet allows people to say and do things beyond what they wouldnormally when identified
  • Milgram blind obedience to authority experiment
  • Power of the situation to overwhelm individual conscience
  • Technology has diminished personal tolerance for discomfort – easier to textthan confront in person, weakens muscle of engagement
  • When a kid wanted to call and bully me as a kid had to talk to my folks first
  • Abolition had view that there could be a world without slavery
  • Social media companies are built on profit how can be revolutionary
  • A world without Twitter
  • What other skills do we have not needing social media to mediate
  • A world beyond capitalism
  • Debates in prison abolition, what propositions reinforce punitive modelwhile easing situation for some
  • Benefits of connected with folks geographically far away
  • Global economy, if take out people trying to make as much money as top –would be different tool
  • Is the internet the commons?
  • Sometimes the posts that we do can be violent even if intention good – allytheater, performing good, cred through posting as ally but through doing that
  • “violent solidarity”, spreading posts with images of violence so seen as beingthe one posting, tagging people
  • also these can be images that are censored in mainstream media
  • how we learn about atrocities
  • as domestic violence trainer, I would avoid details to avoid re-traumatizing,let people know they could share or not
  • intention is important and how to be aware of unconscious bias, of potentialimpacts
  • something dangerous about the way that different posts come through feedso fast, to view and respond fast, how are we sitting with what we see/read?

    What sells is ephemera

  • What does it mean to slow down?
  • A couple of white boys made something on snapchat that went viral, gotlifetime supply of shoes, damn daniel
  • en fliq creator did not make profit
  • How internet impacts attention and cooptation of Buddhist mindfulnessmeditation of problem of not being able to focus in sustained way
  • Speed of information
  • When is it turned off?
  • Challenging my assumptions about tech and social media, what are joys andhow is it perpetrating what I do not want to participate in?
  • Jared diamond, when hearing, about a certain tribe dependent on woodencanoes, what were they thinking when they cut down the last tree?
  • How robotic we have become in not feeling?
  • Goal to turn my phone off more
  • Be like the fox – make more tracks than needed, and in different directions
  • At meditation class, theme was pausing, mediating what consuming
  • Environmental impacts
  • Had a nightmare of thousands of people on treadmills powering internet
  • fb use has gone though roof because recovering from surgery – but now wantto make sure I’m not so lonely that fb feels how I am connected to people
  • disability justice – a number of folks this is key arena of connection
  • being more somatically connected as I am bombarded, flight or flight state allthe time
  • live at pace that feels sane and healthy
  • so much cultural pressure to be constantly on
  • community connectedness offline
  • what feels authentic and meaningful, pulled all over the place?
  • How holding ourselves accountable with what we curate? Curating apersona?