I first encountered the internet in the late 1990s at university. In those days online communication was via email.
In terms of communication the big two for me are Skype and Zoom. When I moved to Portugal in 2008 I started to use Skype to speak to family and friends and since the COVID19 pandemic I have been using Zoom.
In terns of social media platforms, I started using Bebo in 2004or 2005 and in 2007 I joined Facebook.
Facebook is good for sharing family news and photos. It’s a platform I think I should use less of but the fact that I have got so many contacts there, people who are not on other platforms, means that I feel a dependency towards it.
Instagram and Threads are an extention of Facebook. What I put on Facebook appears there too unless I opt out. I haven’t really made the most of Instgram and Threads is really erratic. Either 20 views or 20,000. Political posts seem to be prioritised on Threads.
In terms of other platforms, I have played with TikTok and Twitter (now X) but I don’t use either of these platforms much.
One things that really worries me is that we are becoming dependent on big American Tech companies. Platforms such as Facebook may have started out as a bit of fun, allowing people to connect with friends worldwide but now it is anything but. It is big business and it seeks to control politicial discourse by attempting to silence or at least reduce the visibility of opinions critical of the USA and Israel. X is trying to provoke open-revolt in many countries and regions with Elon Musk in cahoots with the extreme right such as Reform in the UK and the AfD in Germany.
One book I would like to read with regard to all this is Techno-Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis. In the book Yanis argues that capitalism has been replaced by a new system in which Big Tech platforms function like digital feudal lords, extracting “rent” rather than competing in open markets. After the 2008 financial crisis, massive money creation and weak regulation allowed companies like Amazon, Google, Apple, and Meta to build dominant platforms—what Varoufakis calls “cloud capital”—that control access, prices, and behavior through algorithms. Users, workers, and small businesses become dependent tenants rather than free market participants, while democratic governments lose power to these corporations. Varoufakis concludes that this techno-feudal order deepens inequality and undermines democracy, and he calls for the democratic control of digital infrastructure as an alternative.
You can see that Musk is trying to undermine democracy through his X platform through his support of far-right groups. Europe’s inability to build platforms to rival the likes of Facebook and X could lead to problems going forward.
(eugeneward78) A blog 