On Social Media Marginalization
By: Zsolt David
Tags: Platform, Social Media, Philosophy, Marginalization, Sociology

1. Marginalization is a reduction of engagement in social interactions considered normal. Interactions between persons are social where normalcy is embedded. Without an agreement on normalcy, people cannot engage in social interactions.

2. Normalcy is implied. Disagreement leads to negotiations about what is normal through social interactions. This interaction can only start with agreement about normalcy.

3. What is social are based on habits. These habits form constructions, such as language and institutions that define interactions akin to a house that determines ways sound travel. Its walls can be torn down and may fall apart during interaction leading to different interactions.

4. Different interactions remain social if these happen between people. These rely on implied normalcy and establish different social interactions without negotiating what is normal.

5. Negotiation about normalcy starts with an attempt to unveil what is implied. Its aim is to clarify an agreement that serves as foundation for social interaction. Clarifying an agreement can only start with disagreement before negotiation leads to agreement. It often leads to friction as it targets foundational pillars that can cause breakdown of interaction.

6. Friction cannot stem from the dialectic movement of agreement-disagreement because it underpins negotiations. Negotiation is an attempt to clarify that brings disagreement followed by agreement. It is an attempt to induce change that produces change in social interactions while being part of these interactions.

7. Agreement leads to disagreement when clarified. These states in and of themselves cannot be the cause of friction either. States either hide as disagreement masquerading as agreement or show themselves as clarification’s result as agreement. Otherwise, disagreement leads to breakdown of interaction as a result of failing to resolve disagreement.

8. Resolving disagreement that masquerades as agreement hinges on how clarification emerges. This clarification is a similar abstraction to a force that brings down a house’s walls. Wind and gravity may be such forces, as part of the planet’s atmosphere, of nature or however we want to call these constructions. A house is a construction within constructions that defines and shapes the house and its surroundings akin to an institution that defines and shapes interactions and itself.

9. Language defines and shapes persons that are defined and shaped by events. Events’ flow in space is defined by past events that influence present flow, space and events. Time as a construction doesn’t concern us right now, nor do history and relating concepts that reconstruct events with time. Institutions that define and shape the ebb and flow of social interactions is our main interest here.

10. Governance as a construction of interaction between people defines what is social where interactions flow. It forces how language is shaped by teaching it in institutions and what forms it can take according to regulations. These regulations create implications in relational ways that come to define the shape of interactions.

11. Social media is one such institution that relies on regulations and creates regulations. By regulating, implications emerge in response. Implication of intentionality that stems from regulation is but one small facet of implications that stem from institution constructions.

12. Space in these platforms defines how language can flow in terms of form, content and their characteristics, such as text length and other descriptors, that come to define implications. These lay down what constitutes normal social interaction in this space between people. It’s conveyed in text, pictures, sound clips, moving images that carry implications.

13. Marginalization happens when these engagements are affected by reduction. This can happen in quantity, that is in number of interactions one may engage in, and in quality, that is in ways of interactions. If one cannot post videos, their interactions are reduced in quality and quantity because it also reduces implications. Dividing interactions in this way serves no purpose as interactions can always be defined in quantity and quality at once.

14. Let’s get back to the division between the predefined and what gets defined by platforms. Marginalization happens in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, class and so on, between people. Social media platforms provide venue for these marginalizations to take place when they allow for interactions with which such associations can be made. A person’s picture, name, the way they phrase their thoughts can give way for marginalizing associations.

15. Is the potential for association marginalizes? If someone experiences marginalizing behavior in reaction to their face, they may not share a picture of it on social media. If they don’t share a photograph of this kind, it leaves room to associate this omission with marginalization.

16. This discouragement of sharing photos only emerges as marginalization if people are encouraged and do share photos of themselves. If nobody shares photos of themselves, where does that leave marginalization? Does everyone sharing photos imply lack of marginalization?

17. Marginalization emerges in implications in context of constructions. They are invisible, like disagreements masquerading as agreements are. Trying to clarify them is to make them visible. This attempt adds something that wasn’t there that in turn subtracts implications. It creates friction because it reshapes what a construction is and what kind of interactions can take place within them.

18. Social media platforms create social constructions. These make marginalizing dynamics more and less visible by laying down their foundations in concrete. By populating them, walls become lived in, the concrete worn out that changes how people can interact within and around them.

19. Aroundness is predefined by existing constructions that change in reaction to what takes place within. Interactions within and around constructions define and shape constructions. These defining and shaping movements are laden with friction as people see shifting walls fixed and fixed walls shifting that resemble one another.

20. This means that lack of photos carry different implications in different parts of the house, depending on how previous interactions shaped them. Only implications are visible of these previous interactions in painted walls and worn out carpets. One may draw on freshly painted wall, think about what was underneath or take it as a new construction.

21. Marginalization isn’t visible nor invisible in interactions and platforms and persons, only its implications can be traced around to make them visible.

22. This tracing around clarifies marginalization to effects of disagreement. This disagreement prompts negotiation to a direction of agreement about normalcy on the subject of marginalization.

23. This negotiation never settles because an agreement on a subject is a disagreement masquerading as agreement on subject and subjects, agreements and disagreements. Normalcy in this sense is the dialectical movement of agreements and disagreements that hides and reveals in producing agreements and disagreements. It is a series of negotiations.

24. Social media platforms often outline countermeasures to marginalization. It is a clarification of agreement in response to disagreements about implications in form of rules. Are these rules take into account how this house is built or rather rely on the construction of different houses? It must consider how the latter emerges in the former. But since the house is barren after construction, it must rely on implications.

25. Rules on social media platforms are outlines of ideals that hinge on shaky ground to a direction of normalcy. Once people start populating these platforms, agreements and disagreements will induce changes in interactions and constructions they take place in. The house’s ground and walls will solidify in some parts and will remain in shifting motion in others. Shifting motion eludes tracing around and the full grasp of rules that follow it. This fluid movement can only be guided that changes how solidifications occur in platforms.

26. Rules outlining normalcy can never leave idealized state because of the ever-changing nature of interactions it aims to shift and solidify. The less rules solidify, the further interactions shift from the ideal rules describe, while the more rules solidify, the further interactions shift from shifting itself, a movement needed towards the outlined ideal. The rules that allow to get closest to an ideal is when they describe a direction towards which movements can take shapes of solidification in shifting motion.

27. Marginalization is a solidification of implications that remain implications. Social media platforms aim to counter this by outlining ideals while remaining constructions of solidified implications that persist to imply.

28. Ideals pick and choose with a shifting motion what to solidify that in turn solidifies with shifting motion. The latter resembles the former but misses its intentionality that makes any overlap between marginalization and countermeasures formed in ideals incidental.

29. To uphold an ideal, social media platforms reinsert intentionality with changes that induce changes outside of their intent.

30. Navigating marginalization then is a question of visibility for all interested parties. What is solidified and capable of shifting is contrasted with ideals and whether these can undergo negotiations that make implications visible.