Reverse-Engineering Social Media Platforms

The next speaker in the Compromised Data session at AoIR 2015 is Robert Gehl, whose focus is on the effects of corporate social media. There is a conflict between the critiques of proprietary social media spaces and the obvious pleasures of using social media; what do we do about this?

Robert suggests that we make our own, by building alternatives to the standard commercial social media platforms. This proceeds by critical reverse engineering: taking apart existing artefacts to produce new and alternative artefacts that bear a relation to the old while striving towards justice.

There are four points of contact between corporate and alternative social media: first, the reverse engineering is pragmatic in that it retains the key affordances of existing social media spaces and avoids reinventing the format. This is a form of making do with what has already been invented, it reflects canonical reverse-engineering practice.

Second, there is a genealogical approach which incorporates ancillary documentation, previous iterations of the artefact, and historical precedents. It reinstates earlier iterations of current social media platforms by building on what was well-liked about them, for instance.

Third, there are legal dimensions to this, of course – it builds on legal exceptions that allow for a reverse-engineering of existing artefacts under specific circumstances.

Finally, there are normative aspects here, as the aim of this work is always to generate alternatives that improve on the current artefacts.

Why study such alternatives even if they are often very short-lived? Because they offer new views on how to do social media, and because this way we avoid simply reifying success, and focussing only on those platforms that make it.