[Air-L] silos

[Sam Srauy]

Well, that’s true, Johnathan. But, I think the argument against silos is the homophily problem. In the US, for example, the redlining issue or racial covenants. Redlining extracted wealth from black communities and move them to white suburbs, and racial covenants were defended on the grounds of preserving a community. Now, I get that Mastodon instances are a far cry from redlining or racial covenants. But, if the whole idea behind openness is to allow communities to intersect — if they so choose— then silos (which I don’t think is silly. Words and actions are not grains, but circulate within a network of power/privilege/knowledge) prevents that from ever happening. Plus, as others are pointing out, Mastodon has its own problems with white supremacy which benefited from the network of communities idea to keep their racism alive. Do we risk reifying that ideology? In other words, if we only form communities (on instances or whatever) are we not maintaining that same ideology? Should we not try to disrupt that? 

Moreover, there’s a data/bandwidth cost. Academic “Bird site” expats are all over different instances. But, as we interact cross instances, we are doing so no the bandwidth and electricity use of our hosts. How do we commune with each other and ameliorate— to the fullest extent that we can— our downstream footprint? I see the concern about silos as being about that, personally.


____
Sam Srauy, PhD
Associate Professor
Digital Media and Production Coordinator
Oakland University
Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations

> On Nov 10, 2022, at 11:03 AM, Jonathan Sterne, Dr. via Air-L <air-l at listserv.aoir.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi Everyone,
> 
> A reminder: the “silo” metaphor is silly.  It implies that silos are bad.  Silos are good.  Otherwise the grain goes everywhere.  I also seem to remember some members of this very organization arguing against the context collapse that large scale social media companies demand as part of their business model.
> 
> Another reminder: this organization is much older than Twitter, and many members were able to find people different from themselves online before Twitter existed.
> 
> Twitter is always looking to expand my interests, for instance, by serving me celebrity news that I do not want.  I don’t judge others for being interested in that, but it’s not like the “openness” of Twitter is the same openness that democratic theorists talk about.  It’s not.  Sometimes the two overlap but not due solely to the size of Twitter.
> 
> That said, of course there are real communities on Twitter, and if I were part of one of those, I would fight to preserve it or mourn its loss if I were leaving.
> 
> But a functional online community precisely partakes of a "siloing” [sic] effect people that are decrying.
> 
> —Jonathan
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