This blog post was inspired by reading a book that had obvious debts to Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, and realizing that Amber is one development of the subgenre of portal fantasy.

Before I come back to that thought, though, I want to take a trip back to the origins of portal fantasy, and trace the highlights of its development through to the current small revival.

My theory of portal fantasy’s origins – and I think it’s a pretty well-founded theory – is that it comes to us via the influence of George MacDonald on C.S. Lewis, and ultimately has its roots in Celtic myths of the Otherworld.

As anyone who has dipped into Celtic myth will be aware, the Celts who made the myths that have come down to us regarded the stone “barrows” or burial mounds of earlier civilizations as the abodes of the faerie folk, and the entrances to them as entrances to the Otherworld, a world of gods or godlike beings, magic, and peril. Time ran differently there – a feature often seen in portal fantasy; an unwary kidnapped bard or other traveller might spend what seemed a night in the faerie mound and come out to find everyone he knew aged or dead. Rip Van Winkle is a version of this story, though the protagonist is Dutch rather than Celtic.

George MacDonald was thoroughly familiar with these legends (and many others, including the Jewish legend of Lilith, Adam’s first wife), and used the idea of a magically-accessed Otherworld in two of his major works: Phantastes and Lilith. I have always considered Phantastes a dry run for the later Lilith; Phantastes isn’t a bad portal fantasy, in my opinion, but Lilith is a great one, with a powerful theme of redemption. It would make a wonderful graphic novel, though the nudity would be a problem, given that its core natural audience consists mostly of Christians.

Lewis was quite explicit about crediting Macdonald as an influence, and I’m sure he read Lilith. The (legendary) Lilith gets a mention in The Magician’s Nephew, in fact, as an ancestor of Jadis, later the White Queen (one can see Hans Christian Anderson’s Snow Queen quite clearly in her literary ancestry as well; Lewis was nothing if not eclectic in his influences, something Tolkien apparently disliked about Narnia). Unlike Macdonald’s Lilith, Jadis doesn’t get a redemption arc; she is implacably an enemy, and perishes as such.

It was Lewis’s Narnia that really popularized the portal fantasy, just as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings popularized the secondary-world fantasy (though in Tolkien’s legendarium, Middle-Earth is not in fact another world, but an earlier version of ours, like the Hyborean Age of Robert E. Howard). Neither of them invented those subgenres, but they produced works that had such a powerful impact that many later writers either imitated them or took them as a point of departure.

Mostly, they imitated; the list of more-or-less straight knockoffs of Narnia and (even more so) Middle-Earth is too long to attempt to explore here. And mostly, with occasional exceptions, these imitiations didn’t engage with the source material of their source material (the Celtic Otherworld in the case of portal fantasy – though that has been done, notably by Steven Lawhead – and Northern European myths in Tolkien’s case). They turned what readers most enjoyed about those popular books into a set of largely unexamined tropes, much as we’ve seen recently with the rash of magic schools based, usually far too closely, on Hogwarts.

Those tropes include, for portal fantasy, the Chosen One(s) of prophecy, who comes from our familiar world (where he or she or they may be ordinary and little regarded, generally because of youthfulness), to become the only hope of saving the other world. This has inevitable colonial baggage, from a current perspective; it easily falls into the White Saviour trope, and declares pretty strongly that the other people over there can, at best, assist someone from our milieu in solving their problems. The strong presence of this theme may have been part of the cause for portal fantasy’s waning popularity in the last couple of decades, though I think it was more likely just the unaccountable shifts of fashion that subgenres naturally go through. And, indeed, portal fantasy has never completely gone away, though it’s more popular now than it’s been for a while.

Later developments did eventually question and revise and reimagine some of the core portal fantasy tropes. Starting in the late 70s (and finally finishing only recently), Stephen Donaldson’s long series about Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever takes an adult into a portal fantasy, and has him make things immeasurably worse, partly because he doesn’t believe it’s real, but largely because he’s a mess of a human being. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series is explicitly a reaction to what the author hated about Narnia, especially the Christian elements. Foz Meadows’ recent Manifold Worlds series takes place in a portal-fantasy setting largely imagined when she was in her teens, and full of elements that represent wish fulfilment for a queer teenager; this inevitably makes it quite different in emphasis from Lewis and his imitators. Jo Walton’s short story “Relentlessly Mundane” (collected in Starlings) and Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series explore what happens to the children when they come back to our world, having experienced a very different life where they matter a great deal and are not ordinary, and attempt to explain themselves to the parents and other family members they’ve left behind.

And, as I realized this morning, Zelazny’s Amber is in the portal fantasy tradition too. It didn’t immediately jump out at me as a portal fantasy, because, in a bold Copernican move, our world is decentred; it’s only one of many “shadows” cast by the true world of Amber, and only as real-seeming as it is because Corwin, a Prince of Amber, has spent so long here. Zelazny takes up the multiversal idea that’s implied in portal fantasy, and occasionally made explicit – for example, in the Wood Between the Worlds in Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew – and puts it at the centre. (My only work of portal fantasy, the short story “Gatekeeper, What Toll?“, was directly inspired by Zelazny, and goes a step further, putting the portal itself, and not the multiverse, in the centre.)

There’s an obvious appeal for children and adults alike in the idea of a different and more wonderful world, where people like you or who you can identify with are more important and significant than you are, and have thrilling adventures. Really, a lot of genre fiction, portal fantasy or not, is working in the same emotional territory, but portal fantasy explicitly offers the chance that we might escape, even if only for a time, from our mundane lives and problems to somewhere more colourful and exciting (though also more dangerous). Some of the questions it helps us to answer are: Who else might I be or become? Can I be a leader, a hero, a worker of wonders? What kind of companions do I need to achieve that? And it takes us somewhere strange and wondrous, which is enjoyable in itself. And then it brings us back home, and sometimes it even asks: what now? What changes in our world because of what we’ve experienced elsewhere? How do I be, in my mundane life, the person I learned to be in the Otherworld?

One way you could look at it is that fantastical literature is itself a portal to other worlds of adventure, in which we can explore other identities and roles for ourselves. And as more perspectives get admitted into the literature of the fantastic, so the places we can explore and the roles we take on only become more varied and interesting.

As an introductory aside: with the demise of Google+, which was my favourite social network, I’ve decided to give up all social media for Lent. So far, it’s going well.

The first thing I noticed was that it felt like someone had died, and I kept wanting to tell them about things I noticed or thought, and couldn’t.

The second thing I noticed was that my mind was a lot quieter when I was meditating. And also when I wasn’t meditating.

Then I had some free-floating irritation for a while. Not sure what that is. Stages of grief? Something completely unrelated? Who knows?

But overall, I’m not missing it. Less pointless drama in my life over things I can’t affect? Yes, please.

Anyway, I’m thinking that after Lent is over I will not be going back to the same kind of social media use I had before (even if I could find a G+ equivalent). Not sure what the future looks like yet – never ask a science fiction writer to actually predict the future, even of things they’ll do themselves – but it may hold more blogging.

Anyway. Recent thoughts about steampunk.

I had an insight yesterday, and revised it this morning.

You remember The Flintstones, the Hanna-Barbera cartoon series ostensibly set in the Stone Age, but which was, in all real essentials, a sitcom about a couple of blue-collar families living next door to each other in the suburbs of a contemporary American city, with a light skin of Stone Age over the top? It’s right there in the theme song: they’re a modern Stone Age family.

My insight yesterday was that a lot of steampunk is like that: ostensibly set in a version of Victorian England, but all the characters and their attitudes and the way the whole thing works are basically contemporary American.

My insight this morning, though, was that The Flintstones was doing it on purpose and consciously, perhaps even as a way of providing some reflective distance from contemporary society (though mostly for the laughs).

The kind of steampunk I’m thinking about does it accidentally, because the authors don’t know much about Victorian England, and don’t care enough to find out. Or just because they’re so unconscious about their own culture that they project its particular details into other times and places, assuming that they’re universal. I’ve seen a tyre swing in the 1870s, folks. A tyre swing!

It’s not just steampunk, by the way. Regency romance does it too. In fact, there’s a certain kind of author who’s just bad at history, the kind of author who will give people born in the 1920s names that were (newly) popular when the author was growing up – whether that’s Samantha and Jason for someone my age, or Courtney and Madison for someone a generation younger. (Both real examples, by the way.)

This bothers me, and I mark the books down for it. It doesn’t bother everyone. It doesn’t bother people who also don’t know much history, for example. But it bothers me. (And it bothers Juliet Marillier, a writer I respect very much.)

A recent article in Vox about the “hopepunk” movement caught my attention, both because I’m interested in positive speculative fiction and because, to my mind, it mischaracterises noblebright – a movement of which I’m a part (and which I had a small role in founding).

Basically, the Vox article takes what I consider an incidental aspect of noblebright and treats it as essential: the idea of the good ruler. I just listened to an episode of Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz’s ironically titled (and excellent) podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, in which they discussed this article and positive SFF. (Link is to a transcript.) They followed the article’s lead in thinking of noblebright as boiling down to “if Aragorn is king, everything will be OK”.

I’ve always been a little antsy about the “noble” in “noblebright”, to be honest, because actual medieval nobles were rarely good people. The term’s origin is in the Warhammer 40K fandom, where it stands as the opposite of grimdark, and since the noblebright fantasy movement was also a response to grimdark fantasy, my online friend Cecilia, who writes as C.J. Brightley, proposed it as the name.

I had earlier, tongue in cheek, referred to what we both write as “cheerybright”, taking the literal opposite of “grimdark”. Perhaps that’s a better term for something that Anders and Newitz also discussed, properties like the new She-Ra series, that have happy sparkly bits in a world where dark things happen, but are opposed by the power of friendship.

Anyway, the Vox article contrasts hopepunk (perpetual resistance in a world where everyone is imperfect but we have to try to make things better anyway), to noblebright, which it thinks is about the belief that there are good people, and there are bad people, and we need to make sure that the good people are in charge, and then everything will be fine. That’s at best an oversimplification (on my part as well), but it also, I think, misses the point of noblebright. It isn’t primarily about rulers, though it does at least admit the possibility that (morally) good rulers can exist and would be preferable to bad ones. Rather, it’s about the idea that good people, or at least people of good intent, exist, and can make a difference even in a dark world. Which sounds kind of like hopepunk, really.

Anders and Newitz came to the conclusion that noblebright believes in the essential goodness of humanity, and hopepunk does not. Now, this is interesting, because a number (not all) of the core members of the noblebright fantasy movement, including Cecilia and me, are Christians, and tend to hold the essential fallenness of humanity as a key theological idea.

Which reminded me of zebras.

More than 20 years ago now, I and the team I worked with went to a seminar at the Auckland Zoo, held by two consultants who had been brought in to teach us some soft skill or other (I don’t remember exactly what, after all this time). As part of one of their presentations, they included the idea – which didn’t relate at all to whatever their main point was – that people are essentially good. “Do you agree?” they said to us, expecting the answer “yes”.

I didn’t agree, and said so. “So do you think that people are essentially bad?” they said.

I didn’t have a good answer to that at the time, but later on, standing in front of the zebra enclosure, I came up with one. They were saying, “We believe that zebras are essentially black.” When I disagreed, they assumed that I believed that zebras were essentially white. (Yes, I’ve switched those round from the usual associations, because otherwise there might result a complete side-track discussion about whether I was being racist, which would distract from the actual point.)

In fact, zebras are essentially striped.

Now, since noblebright is, in many ways and on many occasions, a reversion to pre-grimdark modes of storytelling, it can easily fall into a divide between good people and bad people, Chosen Ones and Dark Lords, heroes and villains (all of whom, I emphasize, can come from any social class and play any social role; it’s not about rulers). One of the tropes of fantasy is that good and evil tend to be externalized, and that can lead to the problem of the all-good character (with whom the reader identifies) opposing the all-evil character, and the resolution to the problem being the destruction of the evil character (or race, or nation). We’ve all seen where that leads; not only to gas chambers, but also to the idea that deposing Saddam Hussein would automatically and by itself make Iraq a wonderful place.

At its best, and at its heart, I believe noblebright is about flawed, but well-intentioned, characters putting the interests of others above their own interests, and joining with others of like mind in struggling, suffering, and sacrificing for the hope of a better world. And that in turn implies that the world as it is has an essential brokenness and darkness in it, an idea found not only in Christianity but also in Buddhism. (I often paraphrase the first of the Four Noble Truths as “this whole thing is all messed up”.) It’s not a utopian world, though one mode of noblebright can be to show us a better society than our own (still with imperfections) functioning well; a kind of aspirational literature. That’s part of what I attempt in my Gryphon Clerks books.

And speaking of the functioning of society, I think there may be something there to bring out about hopepunk vs noblebright. The idea of perpetual resistance that’s embedded in hopepunk tends to imply not only that society is always going to be in need of revolution and opposition, but that the very idea of society itself is inherently oppressive, and that can never be changed; whereas my experience of noblebright, and my own belief about the real world, is that society functions as well as it does (which is better than many people think) because a lot of ordinary people turn up each day and work to the best of their ability to make things better. I’ve spent much of my career working with engineers and civil servants, which is why I make them the heroes of my books. Without their unspectacular but essential service, we would be living in a much worse world.

Of course, I’m a middle-aged, educated straight white man, which could help to explain my tendency to consider the current system as “imperfect, needing reform, but better than what you’d have if you tore it all down”; people with less hegemony might differ on that point, and I understand why, even if I don’t agree.

The other thing I think about a lot in this context is agency. I often make a (somewhat simplistic) contrast between genre fiction, in which protagonists take (eventually) effective action against opposition in order to bring about an outcome they desire, with “literary” fiction, in which characters often decline through helplessness to hopelessness. Anders and Newitz, in their podcast episode, also contrasted “optimism” and “hope”, defining optimism as the idea that things would turn out OK basically on their own, while hope is more “if we work together and do everything we can, it might be better”.

Though I describe myself as a techno-optimist, I certainly don’t believe that things will turn out fine by themselves; my SF stories, when I write SF, tend to be about futures in which we need to fight to hold on to human values in a world transformed by technology, not always for the better. I believe technology can help us build a better world, but only if building a better world is what we’re setting out to do, and only if we think through carefully what a better world would look like.

All of these thoughts could open up in all kinds of directions; it probably needs a book. I haven’t mentioned solarpunk, for example, which is a form of positive science fiction that somehow often manages to show us a world I consider dystopian and struggles to tell interesting stories that aren’t choked by exposition. I haven’t discussed dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, and whether they can be, or even are essentially, hopeful (a question Anders raised that didn’t receive a lot of discussion on the podcast). But I think the important point here is that how you write positive SFF will depend a lot on what you believe about humanity, society, technology, and “the good”, and it’s a good idea to be clear in your own mind about what those beliefs are, and check that you’re not just repeating tropes that tell quite a different story. To be as fair as possible to the person quoted in Vox speaking about noblebright, perhaps we have occasionally done that while setting out to do something else.

In my previous post, I sketched out a way of potentially reducing the current issues with the structure of social media, by taking it back in the direction of the internet’s open roots and reducing the control exerted by large, unaccountable, for-profit corporations.

I can’t actually implement that. I could maybe do the technical side, at a stretch, but creating the critical mass of adopters that would be essential for it to succeed, against the resistance of powerful incumbents, is far beyond my ability or the ability of anyone I know.

So what can you or I do to improve social media if we can’t do much about its structure? What influence do we have?

Well, we have some influence, however small, over the content of social media. Specifically, we decide what we share, how we comment, and what we react to. And since shares, comments, and reactions are the three ways in which a social media post gains traction and influence, this isn’t an insignificant power, if we choose to use it wisely.

In this post, then, I want to suggest some principles that we can follow to improve the quality of social media in our immediate zone of influence.

Posting and Reacting

Let’s start with posting and its little brother, reacting. (On Facebook, your reactions are broadcast to your network, so it’s similar to sharing the post; on Google+, your network only sees your reactions if you haven’t turned that setting off, and most people have done so. Among other things, this means that I feel more free on G+ to “like” things that not everyone in my network will agree with, without worrying about what they’ll think.)

On social media, few people create content, and much of the original content they do create is about themselves, not about issues. (Which is fine; one of the reasons I’m connected to people on social media is that I care about what’s happening in their daily lives.) A larger number of people curate content, sharing articles or “memes” either from websites they frequent or from other social media users in their networks. Usually, we share things that we feel strongly about, and that we agree with; and the easiest strong emotions to arouse with a piece of content are outrage (at the actions or opinions of people who are “not our people”) or self-righteous smugness (at the actions or opinions of people who are “our people”). If you can find one of “your people” hitting out at one of “their people” it’s a two-for-one.

A lot of sharing on social media, in fact, is aimed at proclaiming our membership in a particular group. By proclaiming faithful group membership through the things we share, we can get affirmation from the other members of the group (in the form of further shares, reactions, and comments) and feel less alone in a hostile world.

The natural effect, though, is to amplify outrage, smugness, and division. I hope we can agree that smugness and division are inherently bad things to amplify, and that outrage is only worth amplifying in two circumstances: if it’s outrage about something that’s actually happening or has actually happened, and if our outrage leads to effective action for change.

Those two criteria are not often met, though.

“Fake news” is a term that’s had a lot of use over the past couple of years. It’s sometimes used as a mere slur against coverage that’s unsympathetic to the speaker’s “side,” but there are more objective definitions of “fake news”. It ranges from outright falsehoods presented as news (sometimes under the cover of “satire”), through conspiracy theories that impose a false narrative on real events; extreme spin and distortion; the omission of context or nuance to the point of reversing the significance of a fact; and biased opinion presented as facts.

A pair of data scientists trained a fake news detector, and discovered in the process that it’s actually easier to train a real news detector. They called it Fakebox. What it detects is whether a sample article is “written with little [sic] to no biased words, strong adjectives, opinion, or colorful language”. In other words, it looks for an objective, factual tone–the kind of article that doesn’t tend to compel people to share it on social media.

So, if you don’t have the technical resources to set up a Fakebox server, how might you decide whether to share something or not?

Well, firstly, is it substantial? Does it present or consider more than one viewpoint? Does it explore the topic in depth? This test basically rules out the “memes” which many people on social media share as readily as I click “Like” on a cat photo. I don’t mind (up to a point) the inspirational-quote ones or the jokes; I’m talking here specifically about the ones which lay out something that sounds like a fact, or a series of bullet points that sound like facts, but don’t provide any way of checking the claims for context or accuracy.

It’s essentially impossible to convey a significant amount of truth in an image with just a few words, and when these memes are fact-checked, they tend to range from outright falsehoods, through inaccuracies, to aspects of the truth presented without enough context to really understand them in a useful way. I haven’t done a study, but my intuition is that they skew towards the “outright falsehood” end, often by what they omit, but sometimes by what they claim. Whenever I see a new one do the rounds, I wait for the fact-check, and it almost without exception confirms my suspicion that they’re, at best, misleading. I never share them, even the ones that match up with my existing beliefs, and I urge you to consider adopting the same policy.

Secondly, before sharing something, check its tone. Does it amplify helpless outrage? Or does it amplify hope? Outrage is compelling, and in sharing it with your friends, who will agree with it and reinforce that you’re not alone, you feel slightly less helpless; but if all you’re doing is spreading the helpless outrage, it’s not a net gain.

Thirdly, does what you’re sharing give a helpful way forward or suggest action you can take? I listened to a fascinating podcast a while ago about some research done on China’s social media platforms. Surprisingly, the researchers found that people were not censored for expressing outrage against, or even insulting, government officials or government policy. What got them censored was calling for action. The Chinese government has apparently concluded that expressing outrage is no threat to them, as long as nobody does anything.

This suggests that amplifying a sense of helpless outrage on social media will only help to preserve the situation, and the system, you find intolerable.

Before you share, ask yourself: Would the Chinese government bother to censor this?

Fourth, does what you’re sharing draw us together by our common humanity, or focus on what divides us? Does it locate all the problems outside your group, reinforcing a sense of them and us? This is a question for liberals as well as for conservatives; liberals are far from immune to the temptation to excuse their own people for what they condemn in the “other”.

I have a lot more respect for articles that are criticism coming from inside the house. There is, of course, a place for criticism of groups you don’t belong to; part of the reason you don’t belong to them is that they stand for something you disagree with. But an article that implicitly (or even explicitly) places all the evil somewhere else is inevitably covering over a blind spot.

That doesn’t mean you can’t share it. But it does imply a duty for you to uncover that blind spot and comment on it, critiquing the failings and omissions of your own people according to the principles you claim to hold. If you’re actually acting out of principle, and not simply based on group membership, you should be able to do this at least some of the time.

In general, though, I suggest that you focus on and amplify what you love and what you hope, not on what you hate and what you fear. Terrible things are happening, but wonderful things are also happening, and they get a lot less exposure even though they’re more common. If you feel you need to talk about things going wrong (which is an important topic, as long as it’s not the only topic), do so by talking about people who are doing something about them.

If you can’t find anybody who’s doing anything, maybe you should do something.

Commenting

Let’s talk about commenting now. “Don’t read the comments” is generally good advice for websites (and excellent advice for YouTube); comments on social media, depending on who’s in your network and who you allow to comment, can be more positive and helpful, but they can also rapidly degenerate into insults and point-scoring. This is especially the case on controversial topics, the kind of thing that is based on amplified outrage–which is another good reason not to amplify outrage.

One of my basic principles for social media comments is: don’t interact with posters who can’t pass the Turing test. The Turing test is the famous social conversation test which sets out to distinguish a person from a machine. There are a lot of “bots” around on social media, posting stereotyped comments based on keywords in order to draw attention to their business or cause, or amplify some particular form of outrage. Some of these are software-based, and some of them are implemented in the form of a human being typing on a keyboard. If you can’t tell which one it is, don’t talk to them.

If you are talking to a person, though, talk to them like a person, not a member of a group whose members are interchangeable. My wife had an experience recently of commenting on an acquaintance’s post, which was a classic amplifier of outrage against a group of which she happened to be a member. Another poster who I know is an actual person jumped in and ranted at her based on a stereotype of who she was, bearing little connection with reality. It didn’t result in a fruitful discussion.

An exchange of insults achieves nothing. Instead, look for common concerns and common humanity with people who differ from you. Consider the recent story of a well-known comedian who engaged with a man who coarsely insulted her on Twitter. She looked beneath his insult for the person and found someone in pain, and they ended up having a productive exchange; in fact, she helped him with the life situation that was part of what was behind his bad behaviour.

If you must have a discussion with someone you disagree with on social media (and I don’t advise it, in general), look for things you agree on, and appeal to shared values. Show how those shared values lead you to the conclusion you’ve reached. If you can’t find shared values, there’s not much point in discussing.

I’ll add: Don’t argue to win. Have some humility, and be prepared to learn and admit when you’re wrong. I’ve found that as a rule in life, whenever I go off on a rant, I almost always find I’m mistaken about something in the situation; sometimes about everything.

Summary

In summary, helpless outrage over misinformation; self-righteousness; and affirming group identity at all costs are not a good basis for basically anything. But they’re what social media tends to encourage.

We can help to change that if we approach our social media usage more consciously.

So here’s my social media pledge:

• I will seek out and share the truth, not just what confirms my prejudices.
  • I will only share information that’s substantial and fact-based.
  • I will not share “memes” that sound like facts, but don’t provide enough context to evaluate their truth.
• I will amplify what I love and what I hope for, not what I hate and fear.
• I will look for ways I can take action to change things for the better.
• I won’t engage with bots, or with people I can’t distinguish from bots, and I won’t act like a bot myself.
• I will look for shared values and common humanity in the people I encounter.
• I will approach discussions with humility, kindness, and a willingness to change my mind.

Join me, won’t you?

I’m going to talk about a topic which isn’t usually what I blog about, here or anywhere. It’s on my mind, though, and I think it’s extremely important, even more so after reading this article in the Washington Monthly on the major issues with how Facebook operates and how that allowe bad actors to influence events such as the Brexit vote and the US election – to their (perceived, short-term) benefit and the rest of the world’s detriment.

I’m doing this in two parts. The first is about what I think could be a fix to at least some of the issues mentioned in the article. That’s not something I could implement myself (or rather, it’s not something I could implement myself and make functional enough and, crucially, widely adopted enough for it to replace the current social media model); so I’m also planning a Part 2, on what I am trying to do, and what you can also do, on an individual level to mitigate the current problems with social media and make it ever-so-slightly less awful. I’m putting this out there, though, in case anyone who can make it happen wants to pick it up and run with it.

As a background, my day job is as a business analyst for a large corporation, and I’ve spent 20 years designing technology solutions for real-world problems. I’m not the best-qualified person in the world to suggest how to fix social media, but I’m also not completely without a clue. Here are my thoughts.

Opening Social Media

Most of the current problems with social media, as identified by the Washington Monthly article, occur because it’s not controlled primarily by the users, but by largely unaccountable and almost unregulated corporations.

The heart of my proposal is to change this, and the means isn’t (essentially) new. I propose a social media landscape built forward from the technology we had around the turn of the century: blogs and RSS.

The idea of the “blogosphere” was that people had a conversation by posting their thoughts and their responses to others’ thoughts. But blog platforms never really facilitated that as well as they could have. Social media platforms make it much easier, because they’re centred on the social network rather than on the content. However, the key thing about blogging that’s different from social media, and better, is that you can own the content and host it on a site that you control – though you can also use free platforms that will host it for you if you prefer. This blog post, for example, is coming to you from my own site; I own the domain name and pay for the hosting, so I can pick it up and take it somewhere else if I want to.

RSS and its various successors are technologies by which you can subscribe to the entries on someone’s blog (or similar) and see them turn up in a “feed reader”. Google used to have a good one, but discontinued it, probably because in the age of social media fewer people were following blogs. I migrated to Feedly, but I don’t keep up with the feeds much anymore either; I mostly just use it to make sure I don’t miss any episodes of webcomics I follow. This is partly because it’s not in a single stream, though I can put it into one if I really want to, combining multiple feeds under a topic that I define. Still, it doesn’t produce a social-media-like experience.

There was an attempt, years ago, to create a platform that aggregated your various feeds from all the different sites you contributed to into one place where people could subscribe to them all. I don’t even remember what it was called; the implementation wasn’t compelling, and not enough people adopted it. But the idea of a unified feed that would show anyone who cares your Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Goodreads, etc. all in one place is a good one. Google+, Twitter and Facebook facilitate this, in fact, by enabling you to autopost from other platforms.

So here’s what I imagine as a compelling alternative to the current monolithic social media platforms which are in control of the content you produce, the content you consume, and your social network. It combines those older ideas, and brings them up to date.

1. A new, open standard for “feeds” that can take content in text or multimedia forms, posted on any of an arbitrarily large number of platforms that conform to the standard; tag it in various ways that the user controls; and combine it in a way people can subscribe to.

The crucial thing about this is that the content remains on whatever site you posted it on. You absolutely can still post on Twitter or Facebook or Google+, but you can also post on your own hosted site, or Goodreads, or a completely new site that someone invents tomorrow, and (through a small snippet of code that anyone can include on their platform) have a checkbox or whatever that says “add to my feed”. And anyone who subscribes to that feed can see it, because they’re subscribing to the whole feed, not an algorithmically curated version of the feed controlled by an unaccountable platform. Nor do they need to be using Facebook to see your Facebook posts.

Anyone can create an app that allows people to post to their feed, and anyone can create an app that allows people to view the items in the feeds they’re subscribed to. If Google+ changes their app in a way that annoys you, you don’t have to stick with it to see content from Google+ users. You’re in control of both your content and your user experience.

A crucial upgrade to the old feed system to make it more social-media-like would be the ability to post comments on the content straight from the feed reader app, in a similarly open and interoperable way to the posting of the content to begin with.

Of course, you will want to curate and filter the feeds you subscribe to. I’ll get to that in a minute. First, how would you choose to subscribe to someone’s feed? That’s the next part of the solution:

2. An open social graph (which is what the connections between people in a social network get called by people who discuss these things).

It should be straightforward and trivial to provide, on whatever site you happen to be posting on, a subscription button that will allow people to link into your feed and select what parts of it they want to see – more on that below. When they do so, they should be presented, in whatever app they’re using, with the option of categorising their connection to you: family, social, education (teacher, student, fellow student), employment (colleague, former colleague, employer, union), geographical (neighbour, old roommate, local organization), interest (religious group, fandom), and so forth. This is in their app and under their control; it isn’t owned by a corporation or exposed publicly.

“Free” apps might have as part of their terms and conditions that they can make use of what they know about your connections for advertising – ideally revealing that they are doing so as they do so. Also, there are obvious advantages to my app and your app exchanging this information; if you and I went to school together, I’m likely to want to know about the people you’re connected to who also went to school with us, and connect with them as well. But that doesn’t require that the information be publicly accessible, or owned by a corporation. It can just travel between our apps in a private message.

Those two elements by themselves would be adequate to get the system going. To make it compelling, though, might require a little more.

3. An open topic system.

One thing that Google+ has over the other social networks is that you can self-categorize your content into “collections”, and people can decide whether or not to see it based on that. If you post about robots and your dog, and I’m only interested in the robots and your sister is only interested in the dog, we can arrange it so that we only see the posts we’re interested in.

There are limitations to the “collections” system, though. A post can only be in one collection; it’s alternative to, not integrated with, “circles” (the way G+ provides to group people you’re connected with); and the collection titles are chosen by the user and not related to any standardised list of topics. So I have a collection called “Every Day is Caturday”, my friend Daniel has one called “Look at My Cats”, and my friend Jen has one called “Because the Internet Doesn’t Have Enough Cat Photos”. All three are on the same topic: pictures of our respective cats.

A picture of my cat.

I’m envisaging a topic hierarchy, with some level of automation based on the keywords you use in a post, what a picture is of, and where you’re posting, so a review of a fantasy novel on Goodreads would automatically get topic-tagged as Arts and Entertainment > Fiction > Fantasy Fiction and Arts and Entertainment > Fiction > Novels. Yes, multiple tags should be possible. Also, it would be good to be able to direct posts on a particular topic primarily or exclusively to a group of your connections, so that my political posts don’t enrage my wife’s family, for example. (How to implement making posts fully private, rather than just hiding them by default, is a problem I haven’t figured out yet.)

Though not essential to an open social media system, I think a more robust topic system would help to get people who are interested in the same things together; to allow people to curate which posts they see – manually or with automated help from whatever app they use; and even, perhaps, to counter the “filter bubble”. For example, your app could tell you not only what people you’re connected to are talking about in a topic you’re interested in, but also what people you’re not connected to are talking about.

Further on curation, I can imagine an approach which bubbles the most engaging posts to the top, but also shows you that there are other posts from this user, or other posts on this topic, that are below some “interest threshold” that you’ve set. If you’re feeling like looking at lots of cat photos today, and you’re not so much in a dog mood, your app could cater to that.

Another potential fitering approach would be by sentiment. Sentiment analysis on social media is already well developed, based both on the words used in the post and on people’s reactions to them. Corporations use it to get alerted when people are unhappy with their products or services. What if you could set your app to show you mainly hopeful posts, and to suppress anxious or negative posts? True, you could end up living in a delusional world of happy rainbows and ignoring real, urgent problems, but there are ways around that as well (if a negative post gets a lot of engagement, show it even to people who don’t want to see many negative posts).

Right now, with the apps through which we access social media being controlled by the same corporations that control the content, what I’ve just outlined isn’t an option. We’re stuck with what their algorithms show us. But if the system was open, and anyone could write an app for consuming content that anyone could write an app for creating… Well, I think that would be a better world.

While we’re waiting for that better world, though, there are things we can do individually to make social media less broken. More of that in my next post.

My wife has a long-term disability, one which, while it doesn’t confine her to a wheelchair permanently, does affect her mobility. She and I watch the TV shows NCIS and Bones together, and we’ve been discussing the representation of disability in the two shows. I’ll avoid spoilerific specifics, but in each show there is now a character who has been caught in a bomb blast and is confined to a wheelchair. The two sets of writers handle this circumstance quite differently.

The NCIS writers chose a minor character who only appears occasionally. When she appears, she’s in a wheelchair now – and that’s about it. There was some very brief dialogue about how it was difficult for her to adjust, a hint that maybe her boyfriend, who’s also a character, found it difficult – but no arc, no real story about how this changes her life and his life and their life together.
The charitable way of interpreting this approach is that the writers want to normalise disability, to present a disabled character as just a character who happens to have a disability and otherwise goes on with her life. Given the many opportunities these same writers have missed with the Ellie Bishop character, though (which is a whole different rant), I’m not inclined to be that charitable; and I’ll discuss later in this piece why, even under that interpretation, it’s still a problem.

The Bones writers chose a character from the core cast, who’s in every episode. This puts the whole issue more front and centre. Also, what they’ve done is represent the experience of having a disability, having a life partner with a disability, having a friend and colleague with a disability: the frustration with the things you can’t do any more; wanting to carry on with your work so you can feel useful, and hold on to all the things you can still do and haven’t lost; the unjustified optimism; the false hope which is dashed; the anger; pushing away those who care for you when you can’t deal with the emotions; not wanting to be pitied, yet feeling self-pity; the fear; the bad coping; the lost possibilities; the weight of the reality that it isn’t going to get better, that this is your life now; and also the experience of not knowing how to help your lover or friend, and frustration with their process and their emotions.

To me, the difference between these two shows is the difference between being visible and being seen. Disability in NCIS is visible: there’s a visibly disabled character (occasionally). But it’s a little bit like the sexy lamp test: If your female character was replaced with a sexy lamp, would it make any discernable difference to the plot? If that character was not disabled, had made a full physical and emotional recovery, or had never been in the bomb blast at all, would the plot of any episode of the show have to change even slightly? It would not.

Case in point: a recent episode in which the disabled character’s boyfriend is looking at an apartment with a view to their moving in. There is a clearly visible step at the entrance to the apartment, one which you could not get down in a wheelchair. Nothing is said about this.

In contrast, disability in Bones is seen. A disabled person – my wife – looks at it and says, “That’s what it’s like. That’s how it is.” She feels represented, in other words, not just tokenised.

It’s early days in the Bones arc, but I expect good things. I expect the writers to continue to unfold what it’s like to be, or be close to, a person with a disability: the ups and downs, the personal growth, the things that always stay frustrating, the way you find value in your life anyway, the adjustments that everyone has to make.

There are two parts to diversity and representation. There’s the part that affirms that these people who are different in some way are also still people, that reminds us of our common humanity and our common human experience, and that’s important. But there’s also the part that says, “These fellow humans of ours have a different experience of being human that comes from who they are, and that different experience is also interesting and worthy of being seen.”

I’m committed to writing diverse characters in my fiction, not as some sort of quota, but because different experiences of being human are part of what fantasy and science fiction are about. I don’t do it enough, and when I do it, I’m sure I get it wrong sometimes; but I want to keep doing it, in the hope that people will recognise themselves and feel seen, and in the hope that other people will see not only their common humanity but also the value and importance of their difference.