Hi, I’m Josue Valles, the Content Marketing Strategist of Social Quant. I’m putting together an expert roundup on Social Media Marketing and wanted to reach out to you. The question is: If you could only do 3 things with social media this year, what these 3 things would be? The point is to show readers what they should focus on this year to get more results.

Geert Lovink: Thanks a lot for asking, I am honored. First of all I would turn Facebook and Google an into a public utility. I am inspired by the slogan “the internet is our social network.” It is not enough to train ourselves and limit usage in order to manage the addictive sides of social media. Such neo-liberal suggestions merely see the problem at the level of individual users. Instead, we should look at alternative architectures and talk about ownership. Search engines should be paid for and maintained by ISPs. And we own our own data. They cannot be stolen behind own backs. The second thing would be to dismantle all data centers and redesign the internet as a distributed, federated network. Peer-to-peer cooperatives are already working on such solutions, worldwide. It is time to scale down the internet. The essence of social media is not updating or news but networking and organization. These tools are there for collaboration in networks. We need to take out the ‘media’ aspect in social media and turn them in social networking sites. The third thing would be to liberate social networks from the one dimensional aspect of the profiles and the related template culture. Facebook is the most dull and unimaginative site aka app ever designed. From an aesthetic point of view it is a crime against human creativity. Part of such liberation of conformity and boredom will have to be the destruction of the repressive ID policy. Crypto might be a good short-term solution to protect ourselves against state and corporate intrusions but the best way would be to get rid of identity all together.