Embed Notice

It's unfortunate that the term "social engineering" has a previous meaning as a slang term among computer programmers for a kind of attack on a system that leverages human frailty as opposed to faults in the software, because this – the design of social media platforms – is truly *social engineering*.

From where I sit, with a foot in both the technological and the social sciences, it seems really clear to me that there is no general sense that there is such a field as the engineering of online society. Not their underlying technologies, but the use of technological deployment to instantiate social spaces, that bring about certain social realities.

This is not a thing that is taken seriously. To the contrary, it's treated quite lightly.

🧵