I have long divorced myself from the consumption of film, games and music; so when it’s understood that without the presentation of an emotional experience the appeal of these three things would effectively be neutralized, I’m fine with that.
My observations are less targeted at software as an art form. I think it’s more about how it’s being marketed and what the effectiveness of a software’s marketing suggests about its targeted audience.
I would be more interested in Bonfire if they had a plain web page that just said for example, “Bonfire is a social networking service that can communicate with the ActivityPub protocol and does X, Y, Z and we are working on W. We named it Bonfire because bonfires are like quaint parties but with a raging flame in the middle of it.”
To summarize, maybe I prefer certain software that advertises itself plainly by its merits than…I guess more “psycho-social” sort of attributes?
That said, I don't see the point of divorcing media-like software (by which I mean at least video games and social media, like Bonfire, and possibly other types of software) from its emotional content. Just as the entire point of a movie or a record is basically only its emotional content, the entire point of using social media software is the emotional content of the interactions with others, right? And, if the emotion is the point of the software, why is it out of bounds to advertise it with that slant? Movie trailers and novel jackets are entirely emotional in their language. Are those somehow bad or immoral?
Or are you simply saying that emotional marketing of software isn't to your personal taste?
Perhaps it’s out of bounds because it’s unrealistic. A social network is neither film nor novel. Maybe the issue is that we are talking about how software appeals emotionally to real people where they will engage in real communications with real consequences with the emotional appeal of movie trailers, video games and novels.
Ironically the tone that the advertisement of Bonfire for example reminds me of is reminiscent of those fake ads from games like Fallout 3 or Bioshock. They’re almost employing the exact sort of rhetoric that people who try to make a world a better place before shoving everyone down tubes beneath the ocean and sticking needles in their arm use.
Is it fair when a social network like Gab or Truth Social behaves the same way?
Or is software with contrived emotional slants only acceptable when it appeals to your own personal views?
Movies and social interactions carry emotions. Social media can (should?) carry social interactions, but why should social media itself be the source of emotions? Can it not be neutral in emotions and 'just' carry social interactions with emotions?
The closest thing we have to a neutral "common carrier" in social media -- if we stretch the definition of social media -- is probably email, but even the choices made there over its decades-long rollout have emotional consequences. Furthermore, the emotional content of checking my inbox on my phone in the waiting room at the tire shop is different than blasting through it with mutt on my Ubuntu desktop, and is different again when I log into my webmail quick on my parents' elderly Dell desktop.
IMO if we try to pretend that there is a clear separation between the medium and the message, then in using these apps we open ourselves up to an even deeper level of emotional manipulation than using them with that truth in mind.
True. Being neutral is a nice goal, but unachievable. Every choice has a color, some dull, some bright, but colored nonetheless.