I want
to start this blog out with a little personal experience that definitely
reinforces the importance of Brian Solis’s “Conversation Prism,” a categorized
taxonomy of social media. I have been
active in the #Occupy movement in Wichita and to get my city better
connected with New York, Washington DC, and elsewhere, I saw fit to sign up for
a list-serv. I was among 4,000 people to
do so. The email that I responded to was
an open call for people to reply all with their particular organizing interest,
to connect people with their issues. My
response was “maybe this would be better on a good old fashioned bulletin
board.” Yes, full disclosure, my email
was lost in the ensuing data melee that saw around 100 emails come through my
inbox in just 5 hours. For a second there, so was my browser (see below). I was a part of
the most inefficient use of Social Media that I can think of.
That
said, my reply, use a board (bbBoards are so nostalgic) needs contextualization
to not seem archaic. Messageboards, much
like the original iterations of the internet, break up information into
qualitative categories, storing responses in threads. The software is probably one of the oldest on
the net, besides TCP/IP. But the reason for suggesting this lies in
the fact that it is still one of the most pragmatic systems on the net,
provided moderators do their jobs and the back end software/hardware these boards
run on are kept in good condition. Sites
like TehParadox use the message-board
structure to facilitate massive amounts of data without having centralized
control over the site’s content. Moderators
follow guidelines and keep others in line with a demerit system to ensure the
content (links to music, movies, and games that have been hacked for free
access—but just as many links to news or interesting websites) stays high
quality. This is exactly what a movement
like #Occupy needs.
Sadly,
only proprietary or branded social media exists on Solis’s conversation
prism. The real innovation in and around
social media will not be within one of these existing proprietary mediums. This is just the first reason I take issue
with the conversation prism. The second,
I referenced in a tweet while reading not too long ago: #engage
p.162-164 #convoprism framework lacks various basic
notions of validity. #wsusm (October 9, 2011). This problem is simple, “the prevailing
framework for cataloging social properties” which Solis “condensed and
simplified” is a list of non-exclusive qualities, which provide no
discriminate, construct, or even face-validity. If this was a biologic taxonomical model, it
would leave scientists whom adopted it wondering, “Well, this bird is a great
deal like a reptile, but also similar to a turtle—where does it fit in, again?” All taxonomic models must walk this line,
from prehistoric ethnobiology
to the binomial structure used originally by Charles Linnaeus. But as my ethnobiology professor, Dr. Eugene
Hunn, once pointed out: there are lumpers and splitters amongst all groups of
people. Too much lumping leads to
confusion, too much splitting leads to an inefficient taxonomy. The latter is at work in the conversation
prism.
Tor, for instance, is a revolutionary social media tool that
allows social activists and human rights campaigners complete control of their
content, even when extreme political pressure is brought to bear on the user
(this is accomplished through 254-bit encryption that the CIA has never
reported cracking). So is this a form of
“micromedia” or a “mobile device” entry?
The drone, for instance, is a constant form of social media in the lives
of those whom live in militarized zones.
Some have even called them Barak
Obama’s key foreign policy tool.
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