Thinking this through, what I say here may not make 100% sense...
The third layer of interpersonal discourse is deeply personal. That sounds fascinating to me. I like that discourse.
Carrying that over to the news... Can the third layer of news be considered to be deeply personal? When I hear the word "propaganda," I think of extremely non-personal communications. So then, can we assume the third layer of news cannot be deeply personal?
If the third layer of interpersonal discourse is deeply personal, why can't the third layer of news be more deeply personal? Is it the nature of the medium itself? You said for interpersonal discourse, the third layer is people talking to one another about serious matters.
The news on the third layer cannot be about the deeply personal because that would require talking to one another. At a certain point, the news becomes more broadcast than interaction. Without that interaction, then the news becomes propaganda. Because it is deeply personal, but it lacks interaction. It's just shouting. So much shouting and no interaction that the facts start to not matter because who cares if something's not right? There's no interaction. No accountability. Then the facts start to fade in favor of the deeply personal viewpoint. Accountability keeps the discourse to have true facts.
Although with Twitter, as you said, it's news on all three layers. Because the nature of Twitter itself is a back-and-forth communications platform. Of course, not always used that way, but it can be back-and-forth. We have all the noise that comes along with it being so open.
What you said about Facebook existing on the first and third layers of interpersonal communication really rings true. You see lots of everyday life photos. And then you'll also see some propaganda sharing. But how much on Facebook do you really see that second layer? Not too much. Fascinating how that happens. Facebook is wide open for any discourse. People could be talking about all the gray layers of meaning. But in reality, it doesn't really happen on Facebook.
Are people afraid to go beyond a certain point in the comment box? A couple years ago, I wrote <a href="https://www.mattmaldre.com/2021/11/11/does-a-tiny-box-yield-tiny-thoughts/">Does a tiny box yield tiny thoughts?</a>. It focused more on the 280-character limit of the tweet box. So, you'd think there would be less third-level discourse on Twitter, and more on Facebook. Facebook's status posts have a limit of 63,206 characters. (I don't know how many in the comment box.) You'd think people would have the open space to type long responses. So why not? Is it a UI thing? The initial size of the Facebook comment is only 40 characters! FORTY! Granted, when you go beyond forty, the box does expand to 154 characters. And then every 56 characters you type, you get another 56 characters.
Anyhow, the point is that the comment box VISUALLY gives you the impression of just a little bit of room to type. Thus, people might be likely to type only a small amount.
To compare, the initial size of the Substack comment box is 358 characters--6.3× the size of Facebook's!
Although most likely, it's just that Facebook is not the place to type out longer-form responses to people. It's the social expectation.
Side-note. It's a bit like how people use Instagram as THE photo-sharing app even though the service sucks regarding features. The search ability is almost non-existent. Try doing a two-word search. You can't! Instagram doesn't offer feeds for users, so forget about trying to view the photos in anything other than the deadly scroll. The ads and suggested posts are annoying. Ok, I can go on and on. But yet, it's the place where people view photos? Why? Because that's the socially acceptable place to do it. Flickr doesn't have any of those problems that Instagram has. Flickr is the superior service. Yet, Flickr is not the place to be. Why? Social norms. Just like Facebook. It has its social norms.
I'm trying to crack why Facebook doesn't have that second layer of personal discourse.
(I tried fixing my hyperlink in the comment, but then Substack deleted half my comment, so I deleted the original comment, and repasted it in as a new comment. So this was my original comment with the funky hyperlink in the middle. I'm glad I first draft longer comments in an outside text program before submitting onto an online form)
If the interpersonal discourse spectrum goes from chit chat to the deeply personal, and the news spectrum goes from rote facts to pure argumentation, then I do think you can argue that it's... if not deeply personal, something adjacent. Because the rote facts have nothing much to do with the interlocutor (the reader), but pure argumentation - whether fair to call it propaganda or not - is ALL about the interlocutor.
As for Facebook lacking the middle layer... you might recall that at first Facebook comments weren't just comments but took the form of a post starting with your name. So it wouldn't be me saying
hey guys who wants pizza
it'd be
Phil Huckelberry wants to know: who wants pizza
and Facebook had post size limits at first as well. And then when they didn't, I would try to write really long things there, and... I'd be the only one. I wouldn't call this design, because I'm not really sure there was a lot of intentionality to a lot of early period Facebook.
I just don't think the Facebook UI, or early algorithms, or early pseudo-intent, lent itself very well to conversations. But earlier social media did. Livejournal was more like that, and of course real-time things like IRC are necessarily more like that.
Facebook actually leaned into it when it made a big deal out of being a news hub, though I don't think that was the point either, I think the whole point there was ad money. When FB started trading in news though I think it did lead to more outright conversation - and I think in the long run FB disliked that. I think it undermined the money generation somehow. Plus it turned out Twitter was a better forum for things like that.
Facebook also had and I guess still has this odd problem: If you DID try to have a conversation that involved 3 or 4 people, 300 other people from your friends list could wade into it, and that could be a mess. You might say, well, isn't Twitter worse? But the weird way threading works sort of makes that different. And of course Twitter is designed to move a lot faster.
Substack up until now has been largely one-directional. Even in comments like this I rarely see very much deep back and forth interaction, even when the newsletter in question has thousands of subscribers. Notes is a potential game changer there, because it introduces the possibility of different levels of interaction between the same people. Jonathan Katz can write a mini-essay, there can be some feedback in comments, but then also there can be Notes, which can be followups, which can lead to more interesting extended dialogue. And from there it can potentially get deeper. Not for everyone all the time, but... maybe.
Thinking this through, what I say here may not make 100% sense...
The third layer of interpersonal discourse is deeply personal. That sounds fascinating to me. I like that discourse.
Carrying that over to the news... Can the third layer of news be considered to be deeply personal? When I hear the word "propaganda," I think of extremely non-personal communications. So then, can we assume the third layer of news cannot be deeply personal?
If the third layer of interpersonal discourse is deeply personal, why can't the third layer of news be more deeply personal? Is it the nature of the medium itself? You said for interpersonal discourse, the third layer is people talking to one another about serious matters.
The news on the third layer cannot be about the deeply personal because that would require talking to one another. At a certain point, the news becomes more broadcast than interaction. Without that interaction, then the news becomes propaganda. Because it is deeply personal, but it lacks interaction. It's just shouting. So much shouting and no interaction that the facts start to not matter because who cares if something's not right? There's no interaction. No accountability. Then the facts start to fade in favor of the deeply personal viewpoint. Accountability keeps the discourse to have true facts.
Although with Twitter, as you said, it's news on all three layers. Because the nature of Twitter itself is a back-and-forth communications platform. Of course, not always used that way, but it can be back-and-forth. We have all the noise that comes along with it being so open.
What you said about Facebook existing on the first and third layers of interpersonal communication really rings true. You see lots of everyday life photos. And then you'll also see some propaganda sharing. But how much on Facebook do you really see that second layer? Not too much. Fascinating how that happens. Facebook is wide open for any discourse. People could be talking about all the gray layers of meaning. But in reality, it doesn't really happen on Facebook.
Are people afraid to go beyond a certain point in the comment box? A couple years ago, I wrote <a href="https://www.mattmaldre.com/2021/11/11/does-a-tiny-box-yield-tiny-thoughts/">Does a tiny box yield tiny thoughts?</a>. It focused more on the 280-character limit of the tweet box. So, you'd think there would be less third-level discourse on Twitter, and more on Facebook. Facebook's status posts have a limit of 63,206 characters. (I don't know how many in the comment box.) You'd think people would have the open space to type long responses. So why not? Is it a UI thing? The initial size of the Facebook comment is only 40 characters! FORTY! Granted, when you go beyond forty, the box does expand to 154 characters. And then every 56 characters you type, you get another 56 characters.
Anyhow, the point is that the comment box VISUALLY gives you the impression of just a little bit of room to type. Thus, people might be likely to type only a small amount.
To compare, the initial size of the Substack comment box is 358 characters--6.3× the size of Facebook's!
Although most likely, it's just that Facebook is not the place to type out longer-form responses to people. It's the social expectation.
Side-note. It's a bit like how people use Instagram as THE photo-sharing app even though the service sucks regarding features. The search ability is almost non-existent. Try doing a two-word search. You can't! Instagram doesn't offer feeds for users, so forget about trying to view the photos in anything other than the deadly scroll. The ads and suggested posts are annoying. Ok, I can go on and on. But yet, it's the place where people view photos? Why? Because that's the socially acceptable place to do it. Flickr doesn't have any of those problems that Instagram has. Flickr is the superior service. Yet, Flickr is not the place to be. Why? Social norms. Just like Facebook. It has its social norms.
I'm trying to crack why Facebook doesn't have that second layer of personal discourse.
(I tried fixing my hyperlink in the comment, but then Substack deleted half my comment, so I deleted the original comment, and repasted it in as a new comment. So this was my original comment with the funky hyperlink in the middle. I'm glad I first draft longer comments in an outside text program before submitting onto an online form)
Thinking about it now:
If the interpersonal discourse spectrum goes from chit chat to the deeply personal, and the news spectrum goes from rote facts to pure argumentation, then I do think you can argue that it's... if not deeply personal, something adjacent. Because the rote facts have nothing much to do with the interlocutor (the reader), but pure argumentation - whether fair to call it propaganda or not - is ALL about the interlocutor.
As for Facebook lacking the middle layer... you might recall that at first Facebook comments weren't just comments but took the form of a post starting with your name. So it wouldn't be me saying
hey guys who wants pizza
it'd be
Phil Huckelberry wants to know: who wants pizza
and Facebook had post size limits at first as well. And then when they didn't, I would try to write really long things there, and... I'd be the only one. I wouldn't call this design, because I'm not really sure there was a lot of intentionality to a lot of early period Facebook.
I just don't think the Facebook UI, or early algorithms, or early pseudo-intent, lent itself very well to conversations. But earlier social media did. Livejournal was more like that, and of course real-time things like IRC are necessarily more like that.
Facebook actually leaned into it when it made a big deal out of being a news hub, though I don't think that was the point either, I think the whole point there was ad money. When FB started trading in news though I think it did lead to more outright conversation - and I think in the long run FB disliked that. I think it undermined the money generation somehow. Plus it turned out Twitter was a better forum for things like that.
Facebook also had and I guess still has this odd problem: If you DID try to have a conversation that involved 3 or 4 people, 300 other people from your friends list could wade into it, and that could be a mess. You might say, well, isn't Twitter worse? But the weird way threading works sort of makes that different. And of course Twitter is designed to move a lot faster.
Substack up until now has been largely one-directional. Even in comments like this I rarely see very much deep back and forth interaction, even when the newsletter in question has thousands of subscribers. Notes is a potential game changer there, because it introduces the possibility of different levels of interaction between the same people. Jonathan Katz can write a mini-essay, there can be some feedback in comments, but then also there can be Notes, which can be followups, which can lead to more interesting extended dialogue. And from there it can potentially get deeper. Not for everyone all the time, but... maybe.
That was a lot
too much, they say, too much
Ha