E.B. White used to write a column called Running to the Country (or it might have been One Man’s Meat, or maybe that was one issue). White’s been described as getting frustrated by “silly questions” sent by readers (“silly questions” is my description, not his). If they asked for additional details about some experience he’d written about, he almost certainly wouldn’t answer. He wrote “there are 10,000 of you, but only one of me.” (At least he supposedly did; I can’t find the citation.)
In the non-virtual world, where we can be face-to-face and one-on-one, what seems like a “silly question” is often really just a way to start a conversation. In the physical world, of course, there is just one of me and one of you, and we both might have the time and attention to chat. One of the persistent illusions of the online world of blogs, newsletters, and twitter clones is that you can feel like you’ve contacted someone in much the same way as a physical encounter. But it’s very different. And the clues we were able to use in the past to remind ourselves of the differences aren’t there — holding a copy of a paper magazine used to be one of those clues that even if a writer’s clarity and honesty speaks to you, the writer is not speaking directly to you. Of course, as White apparently found, even the clues of paper and ink were not always enough of a reminder of the real situation.
A good writer’s work can speak to you in a very direct and immediate way. That’s one of the ways writing is judged. It’s on us, the readers, to understand the context; that we are an audience, not in a multitude of individual conversations. The online world is still very young, and I think we haven’t yet internalized our situation or our responsibilities as an audience. There are 10,000 of us (often a lot more), but it just doesn’t seem like it. So we don’t act like an audience. We’re not involved in authentic two-way conversation. That’s an illusion.
Falling for the illusion is not entirely our fault. Particularly with systems like twitter clones, the whole thing is designed to fool you. A popular system that came before twitter clones, after all, is texting. You can use your mobile phone to call a person, and you can also use it to text a person. Using a twitter clone, whether it’s twitter (“X”), Blue Sky, Mastodon, or any other one, there are a lot of contextual clues that feel like texting a person. These are lies, but intentional. The twitter clones were designed that way. To fool us.
You could fairly describe all the graphics and interactions designed into software as “intended to fool us.” There aren’t really any little folders somewhere in your computer, and when you create a document it doesn’t really look like a tiny piece of paper. The designs used to fool us are mostly fooling us out of an intention to help. To make something pretty abstract and complicated (like the actual way your information is stored in your computer) simple and easy. But there is also a variant of user interface designs called dark patterns. These are intended not to help, but to get you to act in a way you probably wouldn’t if you understood the whole context. You can find dark patterns in software systems that make it nearly impossible to cancel a subscription, or find yourself having purchased something when your intention was not to purchase it. There’s more information about dark patterns at Wikipedia and at https://www.deceptive.design/.
The thing about dark patterns is that they’re usually intentional. The whole point is to scam you in some way, usually to get some money out of you. I don’t think the twitter clones were designed with bad intentions, though. I’m sure it seemed, at the time, like a beneficial, helpful sort of thing. Let’s make it so people can communicate with lots of others the same way they communicate with individual contacts. Even now it sounds reasonable. But I think years of experience with twitter-like designs (and here I’m including Facebook-like designs too) shows that these, too, should be considered dark patterns. Or maybe “dark systems” is a better term.
So what could be done about these bigger, more pervasive dark systems? The bigger, more pervasive solutions might involve alternative design patterns that are full of in-your-face reminders about the real context. Some kind of regulation might help, although it would be very, very difficult to come up with regulation that addresses the issues. But there’s a more real-world solution that’s a lot more personal, like an actual interaction with an actual person. There’s a personal cost, although not in money. The personal solution is to minimize or eliminate your own contact with the twitter clones and Facebook clones. That’s what I’m trying, and it works for me.
