Dan Cohen, un des pionniers des humanit\u00e9s digitales et de l’utilisation du blog dans la science historique, vient de publier un billet sur les raisons qui l’am\u00e8ne \u00e0 revenir \u00e0 une utilisation d\u00e9centralis\u00e9e du num\u00e9rique, et donc de son blog, plut\u00f4t que des m\u00e9dias sociaux centralis\u00e9s tels Facebook ou Twitter. Au c\u0153ur de son questionnement, il y a l’utilisation de nos donn\u00e9es personnelles par ces plate-formes. Son billet est d’une \u00e9vidente actualit\u00e9 avec le scandale des donn\u00e9es Facebook utilis\u00e9es par Cambridge Analytica durant les \u00e9lections pr\u00e9sidentielles am\u00e9ricaines de 2016.<\/p>\n
One of the most-read pieces I\u2019ve written here remains my entreaty \u201cProfessors Start Your Blogs<\/a>,\u201d which is now 12 years old but might as well have been written in the Victorian age. It\u2019s quaint. In 2006, many academics viewed blogs through the lens of LiveJournal and other teen-oriented, oversharing diary sites, and it seemed silly to put more serious words into that space. Of course, as I wrote that blog post encouraging blogging for more grown-up reasons, Facebook and Twitter were ramping up, and all of that teen expression would quickly move to social media.<\/p>\n
Then the grown-ups went there, too. It was fun for a while. I met many people through Twitter who became and remain important collaborators and friends.\u00a0But the salad days of \u201cblog to reflect, tweet to connect\u201d are gone. Long gone. Over the last year, especially, it has seemed much more like \u201cblog to write, tweet to fight.\u201d Moreover, the way that our writing and personal data has been used by social media companies has become more obviously problematic<\/a>\u2014not that it wasn\u2019t problematic to begin with.<\/p>\n
Which is why it\u2019s once again a good time to blog, especially on one\u2019s own domain. I\u2019ve had this little domain of mine for 20 years, and have been writing on it for nearly 15 years. But like so many others, the pace of my blogging has slowed down considerably, from one post a week or more in 2005 to one post a month or less in 2017.<\/p>\n
The reasons for this slowdown are many. If I am to cut myself some slack, I\u2019ve taken on increasingly busy professional roles that have given me less time to write at length. I\u2019ve always tried to write substantively on my blog, with posts often going over a thousand words. When I started blogging, I committed to that model of writing here\u2014creating pieces that were more like short essays than informal quick takes.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately this high bar made it more attractive to put quick thoughts on Twitter<\/a>, and amassing a large following there over the last decade (this month marks my ten-year anniversary on Twitter) only made social media more attractive. My story is not uncommon; indeed, it is common, as my RSS reader\u2019s weekly article count will attest.<\/p>\n
* *\u00a0*<\/p>\n
There has been a recent movement to \u201cre-decentralize\u201d the web, returning our activities to sites like this one. I am unsurprisingly sympathetic to this as an idealist, and this post is my commitment to renew that ideal. I plan to write more here from now on. However, I\u2019m also a pragmatist, and I feel the re-decentralizers have underestimated what they are up against, which is partially about technology but mostly about human nature.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve already mentioned the relative ease and short amount of time it takes to express oneself on centralized services. People are chronically stretched, and building and maintaining a site, and writing at greater length than one or two sentences seems like real work. When I started this site, I didn\u2019t have two kids and two dogs and a rather busy administrative job. Overestimating the time regular people have to futz with technology was the downfall of desktop linux, and a key reason many people use Facebook as their main outlet for expression rather a personal site.<\/p>\n
The technology for self-hosting has undoubtedly gotten much better. When I added a blog to dancohen.org,\u00a0I wrote my own blogging software<\/a>, which sounds impressive, but was just some hacked-together PHP and a MySQL database.\u00a0This site now runs smoothly on\u00a0WordPress<\/a>, and there are many great services for hosting a WordPress site, like Reclaim Hosting<\/a>. It\u2019s much easier to set up and maintain these sites, and there are even decent mobile apps from which to post, roughly equivalent to what Twitter and Facebook provide. Platforms like WordPress also come with RSS built in<\/a>, which is one of the critical, open standards that are at the heart of any successful version of the open web in an age of social media. Alas, at this point most people have invested a great deal in their online presence on closed services, and inertia holds them in place.<\/p>\n
It is psychological gravity<\/em>, not technical inertia, however, that is the bigger antagonist of the open web. Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of\u00a0ambient humanity<\/em>\u2014the feeling that \u201cothers are here\u201d\u2014that is often missing when one writes on one\u2019s own site. Facebook has a whole team of Ph.D.s in social psychology finding ways to increase that feeling of ambient humanity and thus increase your usage of their service.<\/p>\n
When I left Facebook eight years ago, it showed me five photos of my friends, some with their newborn babies, and asked if I was really sure<\/em>.\u00a0It is unclear to me if the re-decentralizers are willing to be, or even should be, as ruthless as this. It\u2019s easier to work on interoperable technology than social psychology, and yet it is on the latter battlefield that the war for the open web will likely be won or lost.<\/p>\n
* *\u00a0*<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, thinking globally but acting locally is the little bit that we can personally do. Teaching young people how to set up sites and maintain their own identities<\/a> is one good way to increase and reinforce the open web. And for those of us who are no longer young, writing more under our own banner may model a better way for those who are to come.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Plusieurs des \u00e9l\u00e9ments mis en avant me parlent bien \u00e9videmment tant par rapport \u00e0 ma pratique que des enjeux en mati\u00e8re de la n\u00e9cessaire ma\u00eetrise de nos existences num\u00e9riques. Je citerai :<\/p>\n
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- L’\u00e9volution catastrophique de Twitter \u00ab\u00a0blog to reflect, tweet to connect\u201d au \u201cblog to write, tweet to fight\u00a0\u00bb (et encore il n’y a g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement que le tweet to fight\u2026).<\/li>\n
- Bien \u00e9videmment la question de l’utilisation de nos donn\u00e9es personnelles et du tra\u00e7age de nos mouvements sur la to\u00eele.<\/li>\n
- L’int\u00e9r\u00eat et la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 d’h\u00e9berger son blog et ses donn\u00e9es sur un espace personnel (h\u00e9bergement) comme c’est le cas ici. Cela ne serait pas possible sans ce merveilleux outil qu’est WordPress.<\/li>\n
- L’int\u00e9r\u00eat et l’importance des flux RSS pour \u00eatre connect\u00e9 dans une structure d\u00e9centralis\u00e9e.<\/li>\n
- La question de la nature humaine qui remet sur le devant de la sc\u00e8ne la re-d\u00e9centralisation du web autant voire plus que la question technologique.<\/li>\n
- La question du temps, ou de la diminution du temps disponible, pour r\u00e9diger des billets de blog. Cela n\u00e9cessite une forme d’hygi\u00e8ne de vie auquel j’essaye de m’attacher pour publier le plus r\u00e9guli\u00e8rement possible.<\/li>\n
- L’importance d’outil OpenSource et la question centrale de l’OpenWeb, plus particuli\u00e8rement dans l’\u00e9ducation des jeunes. Et de la culture libre ainsi que celle du remix<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n