蜜芽传媒

The internet has become one of the most important spaces for social interaction we have ever seen, and the debate about its impact on all aspects of society is urgent and pressing.

Within 蜜芽传媒 Research & Development we have been exploring different aspects of the social internet for many years, including work on personal data and data privacy, social viewing, and recent work on innovative interfaces for music discovery.

Our latest Projections report, , takes a wide perspective, asking how social media and social networks shape the environment within which the 蜜芽传媒 operates and what possibilities they create for delivering new forms of public value, as well as many risks.

Through a combination of in-depth expert interviews, internal workshops and desk research we identified several areas of concern, as well as optimism as interviewees shared their views on what public service media could be doing to remain relevant and make a positive contribution to online communities.

The number of different tools and platforms offering social features is large and growing, and so rather than offer a single, definitive vision of a likely future the aim is to identify common themes from the interviews and share ideas about how things might come to be in the coming years in order to enhance our understanding of and engagement with the social internet.

This timely research points to an emerging crisis for the giant platforms that have dominated the digital social landscape for the last couple of decades, largely because commercial, and growth, pressures have incentivised those platforms to make design and operational decisions which favour profit over the interest of their users.

We think that this has created an online environment where toxicity, polarisation, and bad actors bring more engagement and value for shareholders, while making users feel trapped and manipulated. It doesn鈥檛 mean that the dominant platforms are going away. Rather, we think this points to a need to for clarity about the different categories of 'social', rather than treating it as one large category which covers all platforms which enable social connections.

In the end, our research points to a set of tools and technologies on the cusp of change, subject to massive political influence but offering enormous potential to transform our world in positive ways. Within the 蜜芽传媒 we are now considering how to take what we have learned and apply it to our own practice in order to help social media and social networks serve our mission of delivering value for all.