Armin Medosch:

“In media theory much has been made of the one-sided and centralised broadcast structure of television and radio. the topology of the broadcast system, centralised, one-to-many, one-way, has been compared unfavourable to the net, which is a many-to-many structure, but also one-to-many and many-to-one, it is, in terms of a topology, a highly distributed or mesh network. So the net has been hailed as finally making good on the promise of participatory media usage. What so called social media do is to re-introduce a centralised structure through the backdoor. While the communication of the users is ‘participatory’ and many-to-many, and so on and so forth, this is organised via a centralised platform, venture capital funded, corporately owned. Thus, while social media bear the promise of making good on the emancipatory power of networked communication, in fact they re-introduce the producer-consumer divide on another layer, that of host/user. they perform a false aufhebung of the broadcast paradigm. Therefore I think the term prosumer is misleading and not very useful. while the users do produce something, there is nothing ‘pro’ as in professional in it.
This leads to a second point. The conflict between labour and capital has played itself out via mechanization and rationalization, scientific management and its refinement, such as the scientific management of office work, the proletarisation of wrongly called ‘white collar work’, the replacement of human labour by machines in both the factory and the office, etc. What this entailed was an extraction of knowledge from the skilled artisan, the craftsman, the high level clerk, the analyst, etc., and its formalisation into an automated process, whereby this abstraction decidedly shifts the balance of power towards management. Now what happened with the transition from Web 1.0 to 2.0 is a very similar process. Remember the static homepage in html? You needed to be able to code a bit, actually for many non-geeks it was probably the first satisfactory coding experience ever. You needed to set the links yourself and check the backlinks. Now a lot of that is being done by automated systems. The linking knowledge of freely acting networked subjects has been turned into a system that suggests who you link with and that established many relationships involuntarily. It is usually more work getting rid of this than to have it done for you. Therefore Web 2.0 in many ways is actually a dumbing down of people, a deskilling similar to what has happened in industry over the past 200 years.

Wanted to stay short and precise, but need to add, social media is a misnomer. What social media would be are systems that are collectively owned and maintained by their users, that are built and developed according to their needs and not according to the needs of advertisers and sinister powers who are syphoning off the knowledge generated about social relationships in secret data mining and social network analysis processes.

So there is a solution, one which I continue to advocate: lets get back to creating our own systems, lets use free and open source software for server infrastructures and lets socialise via a decentralised landscape of smaller and bigger hubs that are independently organised, rather than feeding the machine …”