It’s that wonderful time of year for one of our favorite lab activities here at iDPI: making the Reimagining the Internet holiday special. This year we decided to go for unmitigated optimism and making promises to ourselves we’ll definitely be keeping. That’s right, everyone here at iDPI made New Year’s resolutions for the Internet.

Join us as we resolve to post, scroll less, scroll more, use Javascript, and do parts of our jobs that we’re already supposed to be doing. And of course, we wish you happy holidays and and even happier New Year, from all of us at iDPI.

A huge thanks to all lab members who participated in this episode, in order: Virginia Partridge, Adam Kohan, Ifat Gazia, Uma Pal, Ethan Zuckerman, Noah Pring, Mike Sugarman, Ryan McGrady, Spencer Lane, Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci, and Kevin Zheng.

Transcript

Mike Sugarman:

Hey everybody, it is time again for the Reimagining the Internet holiday special. This year a new year’s edition. I’m your producer Mike Sugarman. 

Ethan Zuckerman:

And I’m your host, Ethan Zuckerman. 

So Mike, we are almost at 100 episodes of this show. And if I’m counting right, this is the fourth time we’re doing a holiday special of one fashion or another. The last three of them have all sort of focused on the idea that despite the fact that we study the internet, we seem to feel like it’s falling apart and all of us secretly hate it. What are we doing differently this year? 

Mike Sugarman:

Well, I guess maybe that was the question. It’s like does everybody, at least in our lab, secretly hate the internet? So I went around and I asked everybody what’s your new year’s resolution for the internet and I kind of thought everybody would say I’m going to throw my phone into the river. It ends up people don’t hate the internet. They might just hate the current version of the internet but they had some pretty cool ideas about what they can do with their online lives in 2024. 

Ethan Zuckerman:

It’s also possible that UMass is far enough away from the Connecticut River that it’s kind of a unpleasant commute to get there and actually throw your phone into the river. It’s kind of further than most of us can kind of hurl it with one hand. 

Mike Sugarman:

But it’s a nice day trip. It’s a nice thing to do New Year’s Day. Exactly. I think maybe we should be concerned about the environmental impact of encouraging an entire lab of people to do that at the same time. 

Ethan Zuckerman:

It’s a nice day trip. No, no, it’s not even a day trip. It’s like you can go out for lunch, throw your phone in the river and go back to work from there. Yeah, shouldn’t be a problem.

No, I mean, this is the interesting thing about this, is that none of us are doing this work because we think the internet is awful and irredeemable. We would probably find better things to do with our lives. We tend to do this work because there’s corners of the internet that each of us love and would like to see more of. And even at the times where we talk about losing hope as we did last year when we did this, we always come up with things that we’re actually genuinely excited about as far as the future of the internet. 

Mike Sugarman:

You can’t hear the cat walking across this screen. 

Ethan Zuckerman:

No, no, my cat Jasper has just made an appearance walking across my keyboard and trying to interrupt the recording as cats are wont to do. I’m up on the third floor of our house. The dog can’t get up these stairs, but the cat can. 

So Mike, you did the reportage this time around. You’ve been the investigative journalist, you went and interviewed all sorts of different members of our labs, finding things that they really enjoyed and wanted to see more of using the idea of a New Year’s resolution as the frame for this, I will point out that New Year’s resolutions get broken often before the New Year even hits. So who knows how seriously to take these things, but at least it gives us a sense for people’s aspirations and perhaps what they’re actually hopeful when they look at the internet now at the close of 2023. 

Mike Sugarman:

Yeah, and they are hopeful, which I find really refreshing. There’s also a lot of common themes throughout these resolutions. I think the first big one is something that both Virginia and Adam talk about. It’s about something that the internet has been good for at a lot of times in the past and really always has the promise to do. It’s using the internet as a place to gather with people you know, people you don’t know, but people who really feel like your community.

Virginia Partridge:

For a long time, I think everybody just was expected to be on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and you would be there. And I think with Twitter or not, like so many people leaving Twitter for other platforms and being disjoint, like that pressure isn’t as strong. And the other thing is I’ve been reading Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing, which is not actually about how to do nothing. It’s about how to reserve your energy and effort for the communities that are most meaningful for you. And so that’s kind of inspired me to actually go out and figure out what those communities are and put effort and time into them. 

Adam Kohan:

So this year’s my resolution is to join an online community. Generally I use computers to interact with people I already know, who I built a relationship with in person. On the internet I interact with people, or machines, who I don’t really take the time to get to know. They would be total strangers if I met them in person. I want to try it. I want to try something like that. I want to form a small community on the internet with people I know as well as I know the people around me. I do know about people forming groups like that on IRC. I know tons of people who really got into that. I think Discord is the closest thing to that now. 

Actually part of what got me interested in this is the federated networks. I realized that the federated networks make this friendlier and also make me feel more comfortable with it because there’s less of that feeling that it’s tied to some monetization strategy. That’s what was good about IRC too, because I used to do IRC a decent amount when I was in my teens. That was the most I ever did stuff like this, and I actually joined this, that’s like a medium-sized community. But with the federated universe, it feels more like IRC, but more with the technology, with the newer technology and the newer interfaces. So yeah, she might start there. And that’s a good place to start. 

Mike Sugarman:

And then a couple people in our lab, like Ifat and Uma actually took this one step further, not just thinking about how we can make the internet a nice place to get together with our communities, but how we can really put work into making the internet a safe and productive place for all communities who might want to take part.

Ifat Gazia:

When we talk about internet, we only look into the future of the internet. Internet this, internet should be able to do this, internet should be able to do that. But we never go back into the beginning of the internet to really understand how this could be like a great tool for communities that are misrepresented and underrepresented on the internet. So I think that’s some kind of a conversation that we always miss and nobody wants to go back and put focus on that. And we just keep thinking, okay, so what’s this internet going to do for us tomorrow in the future, in next month, in next year? 

But we really don’t want to understand like what it did in the past, how it has been working and if we talk about really surfacing minority voices, dissident voices on the internet, we really have to go back to the beginning and understand like how did this erasure of certain communities happens from the internet in the first place? Unless we don’t understand that, I don’t think internet could be like a great tool for everyone. I mean, of course, it’s amazing, the world is somewhere else with this kind of technology. But it does not include, it’s not inclusive. It excludes a lot of communities, a lot of discourse from around the world from communities that are really vital and they have to be a part of this internet sphere, you know, this digital sphere, digital public sphere that the internet is creating. 

But many communities are conveniently left out of it and nobody wants to go back to the beginning of the internet to see how this could be rectified, how this could be fixed so that we can carry everyone along us and not like picking and dropping, okay? I’m just going to take the ones that are strong enough to like run in the race and I’m just going to leave the ones who were not a part of this race in the beginning and then of course, they are lagging behind.

Uma Pal:

My resolution for New Year’s for the Internet is that it needs to be overpopulated with healthy online communities. Right now, it’s heavily underpopulated. In order for groups like women and children to be more protected in cyberspace, this must be the goal. This would also help civic online discourse and in creating safe spaces for any other groups that are disenfranchised, especially with the 2024 election season coming up, this needs to be a priority for the Internet in that.

Mike Sugarman:

So Ethan, those are two members of the lab with honestly really serious ideas about the value of the internet in society. What’s your resolution for the internet this year? 

Ethan Zuckerman:

So, Mike, obviously I’ve been online long enough that I’m always looking towards the past. But the truth is, I’m starting to wonder whether some of the best aspects of the internet are in the future rather than going backwards. I spent a lot of time waxing lyrical about the height of blogs and blogging. The truth is, what you got were a lot of overconfident white techie dudes opining about everything under the sun. 

What I’m starting to see these days is the voices of people who are genuinely experts and knowledgeable about different subjects, writing online, and the chance to really dig into what they’re thinking. So, I’ll just list a couple of them off. I read Molly White very carefully. She writes about crypto, she’s behind the Web3 is Going Just Great. But she’s got a newsletter these days on Substack talking about basically criminality in the crypto industry. And I don’t necessarily read every word of it, but I always read the headlines and it gives me a real sense for how that field is going. There’s an author, Heather Cox Richardson, who has a wonderful sub-stack called Letters from an American, which basically looks at contemporary politics instead of puts it in a historical context. I’m also reading Casey Newton and Platformer. 

These are all newsletters and they’re very much like my favorite blogs used to be. But instead of being written from, you know, here are my opinions and here’s how I’m feeling about the world. They’re really written from a position of expertise. 

And so I think I have kind of a pair of resolutions for 2024. One is that I want to write more. I want to get back to blogging and not so much here’s how I’m feeling. But here are places where I do have some expertise. I do get out in the world to see and experience some interesting stuff and I want to share that with people. But I also want to start finding experts on topics that I am interested in that I really care about and I want to be reading more closely, particularly around climate science and around urban development, which are two topics that I’m fascinated by right now. 

So I think one of the possibilities is that as terrible as the social internet feels like it might be at some points, the internet continues to connect more and more and more people and many of those people are really bright, really creative. And the fact that we can hear directly from them is a wonderful thing. 

Mike Sugarman:

Yeah, so Ethan, you are really touching on something that I think was maybe the major running theme in these resolutions this year, which is that people are really trying to figure out how to use the internet in a way that feels valuable to their lives. Like it really contributes something meaningful. I think Noah was actually the person that put this best. 

Noah Pring:

Yeah, so my New Year’s resolution for the internet is I want to be more intentional in how I use it. So, you know, like most people of my generation, I’m chronically addicted to TikTok and Instagram and all that type of stuff. So I’m just endlessly scrolling at the end of the night and the day, you know, anytime I can. So, but I, you know, have seen these trends on TikTok where people recommend, you know, critical essays that they’re reading or books that they’re reading. 

And, you know, I want to be able to, you know, put my phone down and maybe go read an essay or maybe, you know, go outside and just not feel like I have to be looking at something or have that I’m missing out on something if that makes sense. So, you know, just trying to acknowledge and understand how and when I’m using my phone and how to not use my phone is my goal.

Ethan Zuckerman:

So Mike, what about you? As we’re heading towards the end of 2023 and you’re thinking about an internet resolution for 2024, what comes to your mind? 

Mike Sugarman:

I’ve always been really excited by the internet as like a creative place. And that’s a place where there are a lot of creative people. That’s a place where you have access to a lot of creative things and music and art and culture and all of that. But also a place where like I could be creative. 

You know, I looked at my Instagram feed recently and I was like, man, I used to have a lot of fun posting weird stuff with funny captions on Instagram. And my friends would see it and that was really fulfilling. 

So I think my resolution in 2024 is find a way to be creative on the internet again. Honestly, because it’s just a way to have a little bit more fun in my day to day life. Maybe I’ll start blogging again. I kind of have this dream of like adding a page to my website that’s like a generative music and generative visuals, a JavaScript thing. 

But honestly, one of my biggest creative goals for the internet in 2024 is just to get Freq up and running. And that is a creative project for me since I’m in charge of designing it. But I also am seeing it as something that can foster some creativity around music online kind of more generally.

So the version of Freq that’s probably going to show up first is basically going to be one where you can make these big collections of albums. And I kind of look at it as, you know, when you like make a playlist for a friend or when you get on the radio to DJ for whoever’s like listening in your local area. I actually think that’s one of the most exciting, creative things we can do, you know, take the music we love and demonstrate to people how we hear it, how we think about it, what we think is similar to it. You know, just kind of showing other people how to enjoy things in the way that we enjoy things. I think that’s an incredibly interesting creative endeavor that we all do all the time. And I think that’s the exact sort of thing that I would love to see more of on the internet, honestly.

Ethan Zuckerman:

Mike in fairness, you did publish a book in 2023. And as I understand, you got another album coming out soon. So it’s not exactly like you’ve been sleeping on these things. But I do understand what you mean. There is this feeling at some points when you look at the internet and you realize the creative things that people are doing. You find yourself sort of thinking, can I be doing the same? 

I’m going to hate myself if I don’t mention Cala The Tunnel Girl. Last year, the place that I was finding creativity online was TikTok. And this year, the person that I’m obsessed with is a 37 year old woman who is digging a giant tunnel under her suburban home somewhere in New England. And she’s something like 30 feet down and 20 feet long at this point. And my favorite thing about this is she does it all in pearls. So maybe that’s the answer. Maybe we just need to put this all online while we’re in pearls. 

Mike Sugarman:

Okay, so admittedly they’re not about to start wearing pearls and digging holes in their basements, I imagine. But that does actually fit pretty well with what Ryan and Spencer were thinking about. Really this question of how do I present myself online?

Ryan McGrady:

My New Year’s resolution is to social media again. It’s very exciting, I know. So part of what I find so difficult about it is an extension of what I have always struggled with in social media, which is, I don’t know, it sounds gross to call it this, but something like branding. 

Like what is my account? Is it an academic account that talks about media studies and social media? Is it a New York City resident who is tweeting about the latest politics or the goings on around New York City? Is it somebody who is really interested in Wikipedia? Is it a bird photographer? And my Twitter account wound up being about 90% that towards the end, where I would go on just when I saw a cool bird, took a picture, share the picture. A lot of my followers wound up being, and people I follow, wound up being people associated with birds. And it just kind of, that just happened. Figuring that out has been an impediment to me getting back on social media. I know I’m not going back to Facebook. I know I’m not going back to X at this point. 

I have a Blue Sky account. I have a Threads account. I have a Mastodon account. I have Instagram account. Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, these are tools and their companies and their collections of people. And it becomes difficult to separate those things in order to just focus on the tool element and see it as something that can be many things. And it’s almost ironic that here we are, we’re a lab that studies social media. And some of us, I’ll just say me, are just so clueless as how to use social media. Not from a like, it’s too technical perspective. But just how do I, how do I extract meaning from this? Like, and my New Year’s resolution is to figure out how to use them properly.

Spencer Lane:

I was actually thinking of making my New Year’s resolution blogging. I have a blog site that I made, and I put a “here’s who I am” post up, and then set a goal of basically reading books and papers and that kind of thing, and then writing about them, and then posting that. And I’ve got a few things along those lines, kind of in the pipeline, but I haven’t really buckled down yet and started actually getting them out. 

I feel like one of the complaints that people have about modern social media is it’s so removed from context, right? You see a single post on the platform formerly known as Twitter, and they literally call it a micro blogging platform. It’s short. There’s not much context. There’s not much in way of citations or anything like that. I feel like one of the things that used to be cool about the old internet was blogs and blog roles, and a lot of communication online was done through that long form format. Similarly, the old web forum, I feel like, was almost a better mode of communication. You have things organized by topic with a pretty clear flow through chronologically, unlike something in Reddit where yeah, it’s organized by topic, and you’ve got a post at the top within the comments section. I don’t like that format where it’s—I’m going to respond to this, and it’s going to nest underneath. 

Something with the web forum, you end up, in my opinion, getting better discussion because it’s one continuous discussion as opposed to a whole bunch of miniature threads. You end up getting more back and forth. You end up getting a higher quality discussion. I feel like people end up thinking a little bit more about what they write in long form things rather than short form micro blogs or comments on Reddit or things along those lines. 

Mike Sugarman:

So what Spencer is saying is I think something a few people are saying, which is folks here at the lab want to actually start doing this stuff that they want to see more of on the internet. They kind of want to help build the better way of doing things by doing those things. And then there are a couple people in our lab who actually are interested in building things. We’re going to hear from Kevin and Chand who are both working on some really incredible software projects here at the lab.

Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci:

Yeah, my new year’s resolution is for us to release GOBO, which is an app that we’re building that is social media aggregator and cross-poster. So my resolution is to release GOBO to the public. Right now we’re in a private beta, but next year we’d like to open it up to everybody who wants to use it. And when that is available, they’ll be able to head to gobo.social and start using the app there. 

Kevin Zheng:

My New Year’s resolution is to make more things. I think right now I’m feeling, I went to a bunch of holiday markets last weekend in Northampton. I was just really inspired by all of the things that people are making. I’ve learned that Western Mass has a particular history of printmaking. There’s a really strong history of printmaking. Ethan’s pointed out that western mass has a strong history of toolmaking. I think not to reduce history and make it seem better than it actually was. 

But I think right now our current approach to using the internet through platforms makes it hard to make things that reflect how we want to be online. I feel like an Instagram post doesn’t necessarily, or can’t, I don’t think an Instagram post can capture everything that we could possibly want to present online. 

So I hope to make websites, build Tube Stats, our YouTube data dashboard, and really try to present new ideas in new ways instead of using what already exists. 

Ethan Zuckerman:

So, Mike, one of the things that I love about this, and I think you’ve sort of set this up as a ritual, what that’s recording this episode every year, is that it’s a, it’s a very important thing. And I think that’s what I love about this year, is that it’s a really nice time capsule of where everyone’s at, what everyone is finding fascinating. But I really like this as a way of putting out to the rest of the world what it is that we’re hoping to do in the coming year. So I hope this will actually hold me to my practice of finding some new people to listen to and putting some expertise out in the world. And I hope that in the next few years, I’ll be able to do that. 

Mike Sugarman:

I’ll raise you one. Maybe in 2024 we should try to do more things we feel good about and fewer things we feel bad about, at least when we have the choice. And that goes for the things that we do on the internet too. 

I want to thank everybody who took part in this episode this year—all of our wonderful lab members here at the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst. 

In order, you heard from Virginia Partridge, Adam Kohan, Ifat Gazia, Uma Pal, Noah Pring, Ryan McGrady, Spencer Lane, Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci, Kevin Zheng, and of course, your host, Ethan Zuckerman, and me, your producer, Mike Sugarman. Thanks for joining us for yet another holiday special, and we hope you like what we have coming in 2024.