The proliferation of new media platforms has not slowed. During Web 1.0 social media giants like Facebook and YouTube (2005) and Twitter drew millions and billions of users… and for the most part have retained them. Every few years new challengers emerge (WhatsApp 2009, SnapChat 2011, TikTok 2016), but rather than replace the previous platforms, they typically just layer over. Social media users make their videos on TikTok and then cross-share them to SnapChat or Facebook.
Most of these platforms are designed to put the company in the drivers’ seat and the revenue stream is related to paid advertising and clicks. As such the algorithms are secretive. Users don’t know how or why some content shows up in their news feed more than others.
For communities like churches hoping to strengthen social connections, Web 1.0 presents some major problems. Yes, everybody is on Facebook, but no everyone doesn’t see what gets posted by the church, or their fellow parishioners, or sometimes even by their blood relatives. And, mixed into the media ecology is the reality these companies, beholden as they are to advertising revenue and the need to keep everyone engaged in the social media space, are manipulative and divisive and prioritize heated debate and other kinds of inflammatory debate over the kinds of content a local community might actually wish to center.
Web 2.0
However, there are emerging examples of Web 2.0 communities can consider. Basically, Web 2.0 emphasizes user-generated content, participatory culture, and local, end-user control of the design of the platform.
One very popular example is Discord (or if you haven’t heard of Discord, maybe you’ve heard of Slack). Both are channel-based messaging tools designed for teams. In a Discord server, a community (whether it’s a work team or an entire congregation or a group of campers who meet at camp) create a server and join it. Participation in the server is limited to those who officially join it. Once in, members of the server can post in the various channels and respond to one another. In Discord, there are also “rooms” for voice and video chat. And servers can import apps facilitating easy interoperability between the server and outside apps (like Google, for example).
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