Social media: We use it, or it uses us?

To start off this next post, I want to make a point: I'm starting to get more out of guests in the classroom than Solis.  Let me repeat that: people I debated in high school are becoming the experts.  Because social media can bridge a great deal of gaps, but it just can't make local culture obsolete.  I tweeted not too long ago:

http://nyti.ms/ozAUbI the # compresses concepts; ext efficiency; obs linear typology; ret the acoustic; rev into iconography #mcluhan #wsusm

Marshall McLuhan is probably the most brilliant communications theorist I have come across.  In another culture or age, he would either have been burned at the stake or praised as a prophet.  His theory of media ecology took the high-brow work of Innis and Havelock and packaged it for the masses.  His distinction between the linear, typographic worldview (acculturated to and from highly literate societies) against an acoustic, iconographic world (in the absence of some system of typography).  Iconography and speech, like a radio station, broadcast meaning over time, adding context.  Typography, in its higher forms, expects pragmatic layout, but is self-contained and rewind-able.  He also noted a curious form called the Tetrad.  Examine the following:

It's interesting that what does all of these things is the introduction and cultural assimilation of a communications technology.  A new technology (say the wheel) extends an anatomic function (the feet in 360 degrees) enhancing the human's ability (to carry stuff long distances).  The big distinction comes with the phonetic alphabet or other complex linear typographic distinctions.  Once this occurs, new software can change the world.  For instance, once literature became available a split in vernacular occurs between those whom can afford to read and those who can't, but even people from remote and separated tribes who can afford to read begin to have more in common with each other than people whom are living closer.

Other technologies, hardware like radios or satellite broadcasting bring whole nations and even the whole world together.  The downside (or sometimes upshot) is that these technologies obsolesce other media artifacts.  That's just in the physical, tangible world.  In the realm of cultural anthropology, sociolinguistics, and Jungian psychology, retrieval and reversal are key.  These occur as archetypes--the internet as a weapon retrieves the crossbow, for instance.  Both are banned by the highest authorities and both turn untrained persons of even the lowest socioeconomic class into effective soldiers.  Just a personal theory of mine, there.  Reversal is what happens when something is overplayed--for instance, a song on the radio has the meaning when we first hear it and then a different one the millionth time.  The horse, once the most important transportation tool--the tool that literally won the west--is now a recreation; a nostalgia.  Kind of like people that still use MySpace as a tool to see how far they have come.

So I find it similarly interesting that posting such compressions of important information for audiences is bound to chronology.  Something Scroggins and Beauchamp both noted when they presented.  These guys are smart, empowered, and best of all--young.  I'm kind of ready for a new dot.com boom as long as it isn't the same old blood that gets the riches.  And these two definitely keep my hopes high.  They get that if you don't understand the culture of the user (when they get on, what they click, what they avoid, etc.) then you don't understand how to make your social media campaign successful.

But where Scroggins and Beauchamp gave really interesting and contextualized information about social media and getting networks to perform the way a user wants, Solis has increasingly turned to making up words.  The "egosystem," "twitter time," "now web," "statusphere," etc., etc., et... cetera...  These didn't really help.  Depending on where you're at, these might now make sense.  But they are simple word play.  Not worldly experience compressed into a concept.

And that's what I love most about twitter hashtags (those things that start with # and end in characters).  The trend compresses information.  A compressed ball of lead that weighs as much as a couch is ten times easier to carry than the couch, simply because of compression. Will Scroggins (mentioned earlier) talked about Cotweet, a brilliantly designed hashtag compilation application.  This is a perfect example of how the hashtag extends human efficiency of labor in getting a message or conversation out.  But because these messages are occurring in such a small space (10 or so characters) this obsolesces (completely for the first time) the typographic stress on strategic communication.  We are getting so good at getting the idea across quickly and efficiently that my generation is giving up stock literacy for the kind of augmented secondary orality that Walter Ong describes in his works.

If America's identity can be boiled down to a few symbols, why can't mine now that it doesn't take a million-dollar re-branding campaign?

 This retrieves that archetype the hippies and yippies of the sixties were seeking to revive by force: drop out of the book learning, tune in to the that acoustic, tribal drum beat.  My generation, via the hashtag, is reversing into that the iconographic mindset (for better or worse), and though it would be easy to point to the Pepsi Generation's focus on corporate logos, these will never be embraced like the condensation of identity into your own personal hashtag: your @<name> on twitter.  @ictsiege316 is CJ Schoch, the hashtag, for all intents and purposes.  That is my flag for other sailors to see on the information superhighway--the surfers just see something flapping in the breeze.  It's no surprise that literacy is decreasing in terms of actual literature, but people have no problem making it through Icefilms.info for Anons [ie: dummies] so that they can download the latest episode of Sons of Anarchy.  For the record, a little attention to that link will save you a thousand dollars a year, or so.  I could write that argument out, but I have a feeling that the iconogaphic link will fulfill it's role and make my point.

As such, I'd really like to end this post with a challenge. I pose this challenge because I'm at a brick-wall with objective reflection on the hypothesis.  Prove the following statement wrong:

We can move ideas in mass communications faster and better with a hashtag or a hyperlink, than any other known alternative.

Social Media: Turbo-Boosted Global Culture

Social media is stimulating, or stimulated by, social processes.  The authorship of social media is so open that it becomes embedded in the cultures of its audience(s) and interwoven into the multi-culti fabric of the global village.  

Don’t believe me?  Well, it may seem a stretch, but rent-to-own the story of the South African zef (or hip hop), Die Antwoord…

South Africa's Die Antwoord

The band recently was the highlight of the (2011) Coachella music festival, one of the most expensive music festivals in the United States, held in Napa Valley, CA.  The band was actually requested to play the festival, due to what could be called the virality of their music videos, which were put on YouTube only when Internet traffic on the band’s website repeatedly shut it down.  Since that time, the music video for the song “Evil Boy” had 4.2 million views by June 20, 2011.

The music, “zef,” means “the ultimate style… our full flex… the South African style,” according to Ninja, one of the vocalists, “It’s like a video-game when you hit the next level, that’s zef.”  The music is a clash of various cultural musical styles (German, British, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaaner, American) and heavily interwoven with pop-culture allusions, symbolism, and metaphors.  The Wikipedia page for the band describes zef as “a South African slang term that describes a unique South African style which is modern and trashy and also includes out-of-date, discarded cultural and style elements.”  It’s basically music made for everyone, and therefore made for social media, as Ninja explains in an interview: “I tapped into my inner-f***ing zef; something happened to us personally… and then we created music based on that experience, we put it into the interwebz [sic]—blaow—faster than the speed of light, that experience was transferred, sorry to sound trippy, but it is… and if you love it, we love it, too, and if you hate it, it’s because you’re not on my level.”  The band’s name is Afrikaans for “the answer.”

Though Ninja and his MC counterpart, Yolandi both attended art school, they bristle at the idea that their project is not a sincere expression of their experience, but rather conceptual art.  On the surface, one could take their offensive and simplistic lyrical content to be a ruse or appeal to the ‘lowest common denominator,’ as my father loved to describe rap and pro-wrestling.  But it is in fact an adaptation to an audience that needs to feel like they’re part of the video, part of the lyrics, part of the song—despite that audience being spread across diverse cultures (as make up not only South Africa, but the global village).  When academics like Jay Rosen point out that:

The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another-- and who today are not in a situation like that at all. (“The people formerly known as the audience”)

 When Rosen criticizes the “fantastic delusions” of media elites (such as Ann Kirschner, vice president for programming and media development for the National Football League) for ridiculous statements, such as, "We already own the eyeballs on the television screen. We want to make sure we own the eyeballs on the computer screen,” he points out that the “historical products of a media system that gave its operators an exaggerated sense of their own power and mastery over others” is being fundamentally altered by social media.  But is Rosen being totally honest when he states, “this makes us all smile”?  As an academic and student of history, Rosen should be aware that academic establishment is wrapped up in its own cultural embrace of and authority over typographic literacy—threatened in the eyes of some (such as Neil Postman) just by television, now considered ‘traditional media.’

Rosen is content to believe that the audience is having an impact on traditional media through social media.  It is not enough for him to proscribe a path for media tycoons.  Rosen explicitly identifies with the thronging masses—a sort of populist academic, if you will.  And this is the case with social networks at war.  Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, the co-author of the Proceedings article “Network-centric warfare: Its origin and future,” was the key proponent of using information technology to create a “revolution in military affairs” (P. Singer, Wired for War, p. 283) by enhancing communications and intelligence sharing between the battlefield and rear-echelon commanders.  Cebrowski, among others, believed the “linking together of every soldier and system into a vast IT network would decentralize operations” but “actual experience with unmanned systems is proving the opposite” (previously cited, p. 359).  As military commanders become the audience of ongoing battles thousands of miles away, they, like Rosen, believe they must have an input.  One example was a general in Qatar giving a special operations platoon commander a uniform violation because he and his soldiers un-tucked their shirts while hiking up a mountain in Pakistan.  

Through the military’s version of social media, generals can check up on their subordinates across the world like a jealous significant other uses Myspace or Facebook to keep tabs on their boy- or girl-friend.  This also raises questions of privacy, addressed from the perspective of social media by Danah Boyd, in her presentation “Networked Privacy.”  Boyd cannot help but notice the individual-centric focus to discussions of privacy online.  She also doesn’t need a weatherman to tell a social storm is brewing, admitting as Brian Solis does in his book, Engage, that as much as the products of social media makes us grin, they can or already do make us grimace.  It may be that our paradigms of privacy are simply outdated. 

In listening to the different rhetorics that are floating about, I can't help but be fascinated by the individual-centric frame of privacy discourse in a networked era.  Critics of contemporary American capitalism might argue that this is because neoliberalism dominates both politics and economics, prioritizing the individual over institutions like governments or corporations.  Analysts of tech culture like Alice Marwick might argue that Web2.0 is seeped in neoliberalism as well as a libertarian ethos that focuses entirely on the individual. And legal scholars might point out that you can't think about "harm" without focusing on the individual.  Afterall, when we're talking about the politics of privacy, it's hard to avoid discussions of individual harm. (Danah Boyd, “Networked Privacy”). 

Boyd describes “privacy” (the concept) as a loose conglomeration of control and agency, over one’s social situation.  She even notes how teens operate on the assumption that their offline interactions are “private-by default, public through effort.  Online, the opposite holds true.  What this means is that achieving privacy requires fundamentally different strategies online than offline” (Danah Boyd, “Networked Privacy”).  Boyd refers to these new strategies as the opposite of the institutional controls on privacy found in the physical realm.  In the digital plane, the “networked social practice” of privacy is more important than any one website’s privacy settings:

Some manipulated privacy settings to try to keep people out, but many more started looking for social solutions.  One of the first things that teens started doing en masse mirrored a practice that any parent would recognize: they started encoding their meaning.  Rather than trying to restrict access to content, they started to restrict access to meaning.  Any parent will tell you that kids have an amazing ability to talk behind their backs right in front of them.  Siblings develop coded signals to try to hide information from parents.  And tweens gossip in the backseat of parents' cars, using referents to refer to things that the parents know nothing about.  The same thing happens online.  Teens use pronouns to refer to people and events that only those "in the know" know the reference.  Others use song lyrics to fly below the radar, engaging in an act of social steganography.  None of this is new, but it takes on a new scale when it takes place in Facebook.  (Danah Boyd, “Networked Privacy”). 

This ultimately leads Boyd to the conclusion that contemporary models of privacy are “too obsessed with individual harm” and fail to recognize the harm to a collective that can be caused by a violation of privacy.  In other words, “policy makers and privacy advocates” need to evolve as fast as teenagers in how they look at new technology.  Li’s open leadership shows how such a paradigm shift could occur organically (a good preliminary dovetail with the lessons of not only Solis’s Engage but also Singer’s Wired for War, two books that will repeatedly find their way into this blog).  Li also demonstrates how embracing a public-by-default medium, even when flooded with negative commentary, can inflect upon the audience and even cause the content on social media to do a 180-degree turn to the positive.   

Her key example was the Red Cross (an admittedly well funded and networked organization) after Hurricaine Katrina.  Instead of looking at the individuals criticizing the Red Cross online as enemies of the organization, Wendy Harman, the organization’s first social media manager (and Li’s poster-child for her concept of “open leadership”), was able to lead her superiors to believe that they should be kept closer than friends or enemies, as they represent thousands of people who are engaged and committed enough to leave a comment.  Harman was able to help the organization catalyze a more contemporary view of social media, and in so doing, co-opt the criticisms as plans for improving the Red Cross’ services.  Harman even created a national Facebook page, blog, Flickr and Twitter accounts, and more.

Then the calls started coming in from local Red Cross chapters hoping to jumpstart their own social media efforts… So she wrote a handbook that laid out guidelines, procedures, and best practices on how Red Cross chapters could and should use social media, and she put it online for anyone to see.  With the equivalent of an operating manual in hand, Red Cross chapters quickly started creating blogs and their own Facebook pages, and even setting up Twitter accounts.  More important, the large base of Red Crossers… became part of the Red Cross’s outreach.  (Charlene Li, Open Leadership)

The ultimate starting point for social media, as these sources have lead me to believe, is starting a conversation.  Social media might make a profit, but its content is not ‘for profit.’  So rather than expecting a social media campaign to generate sales or a buzz on morning talk shows, organizations should expect feedback.  And that information is more valuable than gold in an information-based economy, where knowing your clients is often more important than knowing last year’s product line.  Solis makes a point of clearly introducing this in his intro to Engage, noting that the goal of an organization’s use of social media cannot be to control, or dominate, what is being said, but rather, must be to ‘constructively engage’ both supporters and critics, to generate that information.  ‘Constructive Engagement’—a term borrowed from political science to describe international diplomacy with hostile states as an alternative to diplomatic isolation— is a much more telling example of the point Rosen makes about the media-audience balance of power becoming far more egalitarian).

So when Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa, refers to artists Die Antwoord as “the national disgrace of South Africa,” he may be missing the point.  Even if the hip-hop/rave hybrid band is not the cultural ambassador Zuma wants, it is the cultural mix-mash that South Africa deserves.  Simple, but rich with humanity (allusions to video games speak odes to the band’s awareness of their global audience).  Though it might seem like harping on a good artist, it’s actually a metaphor for good use of social media.  Just take your experience, plug it into the “interwebz,” and blaow!  You’re on that next level.  Were you aware?