Earlier this year, Google announced plans to shutter Google+, its failed social network. While this decision won’t affect many of us, some folks consider Google+ home. A post on Medium by Steven T. Wright highlights the plight of these communities that will go away when Google+ shuts down in April of 2019. Can they find a new place to meet?

The story profiles developer John Lewis, who built a group on Google+ with the purpose of trying to find a replacement information environment for these folks. Some are finding their trust in large companies as stewards of their information environments has eroded as a result of the way Google (mis)managed G+:

“Some are going to platforms similar to Facebook like MeWe, some are going to open-source sites like different Diaspora pods,” he says. “I think people are a bit wary of the big companies, after seeing what the rest of Google did to Google+. With their divided attention, Facebook was able to take all of their cool features and cannibalize them. I think we want something that will last for a while, that won’t be shut down by some exec.”

People invest real time and energy in these places. While on one level they are “products” to be “managed,” they’re also infrastructure where people build out important parts of their lives.

The Death of Google+ Is Tearing Its Die Hard Communities Apart

Marc Pritchard, Procter & Gamble’s long-serving Chief Brand Officer, on how P&G helped create the modern digital media ecosystem:

when we first worked with them they were platforms for communication with people. They had no advertising business. We essentially worked with Facebook to figure out how to place media, how to do reach and frequency, within Facebook.

YouTube came along, and we thought this could be interesting. Not sure where it’s going to go, [but we] ended up monetizing it. What’s interesting about that is that [the founders of Facebook and YouTube] didn’t build these platforms for advertising. Some of the challenges that they’ve had recently, I think, have been because they were built for another purpose. Whereas other media companies, the TV and the radio, they started off and they built advertising in.

I’m not sure that the advertising business model is inherent to either TV or radio, but overall Mr. Pritchard is correct: digital information environments such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube weren’t designed primarily to persuade. The advertising-based business model they’ve latched on to (in part driven by demand from clients such as P&G) has created incentives that have harmed society as a whole.

That said, P&G recognizes that it has great power as one of the world’s leading advertisers, and has been taking steps to wield that power responsibly:

10 years ago [P&G] went down a purpose path. When I first started my job we had purpose-inspired, benefit-driven brands. What was interesting about that though, is that it was too disconnected from our business. Over the course of the last few years what we’ve done is we’ve gone back in at it, we’ve really become a citizenship platform. We’re building social responsibility into the business. It includes gender equality, community impact and environmental sustainability based on a foundation of ethics and responsibility.

Laudable! But what happens if/when tough choices are called for? If it came to it, would the company be willing to sacrifice growth and profit for sustainability?

The Biggest Voice In Advertising Finds Its Purpose

Digital information environments are still a relatively new thing for our species. We’re still looking for ways of understanding what these things are and how they affect us. Inevitably, we talk about them through the lenses of what’s come before—the things we’re familiar with. If (like me) your background is in architecture, you may think of them as types of places. But of course, that’s not the only way to think about them.

In an essay in Medium, Michael Philip Moskowitz and Hans Ringertz draw the analogy with food. They identify five pillars (diet, exercise, sleep hygiene, vocation, and interpersonal relationships) that are important for good mental health, which they identify as the leading cause of disability worldwide. To this they add a possible sixth:

What we, the authors of this essay, have come to believe through our separate paths of enquiry over the past decade is that a possible sixth pillar of health has emerged in the era of smartphone addiction and ubiquitous computing. We call this element “digital nutrition,” and in our view, healthy digital habits urgently warrant adoption.

What is digital nutrition?

We define digital nutrition as two distinct but complementary behaviors. The first is the healthful consumption of digital assets, or any positive, purposeful content designed to alleviate emotional distress or maximize human potential, health, and happiness. The second behavior is smarter decision-making, aided by greater transparency around the composition and behavioral consequences of specific types of digital content.

The way I’m reading it: you are what you eat—and also what you read online. Your digital media diet may be making you sick.

It’s an interesting analogy, but not one that I’m fully on board with. Information (what the authors call “digital assets”) is very different from food. We can identify what foods that nurture or harm us, but even with our advanced science this knowledge is still imperfect. (Think of the continually shifting opinions about the benefits of foods like red wine and coffee.) Still, it’s possible to envision nutritional science getting more accurate over time. How would the equivalent work for information, digital or otherwise? Information is too contextually dependent—too personal—for us to define universal guidelines of what constitutes a good digital diet at anything but the highest levels.

To the point: the authors anticipate the emergence of a “new labeling system for digital content — one that goes further than today’s film and TV ratings and more closely resembles nutritional information on food packaging.” This seems like dangerous ground. Who would do the labeling? To what ends?

It’s Time to Embrace Digital Nutrition