In Defense of Social Media (At Least Some Of It)

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 11

Scott Berkun just posted a great rant titled, Calling Bullshit on Social Media. I suggest everyone read it. Berkun raises good points - and I agree the hype around social media warrants taking a critical look. Despite being in general agreement, there are a few areas I can't abide, starting with this statement:

social media is a stupid term. Is there any anti-social media out there? Of course not. All media, by definition, is social in some way.

Railing against the popular lexicon is always a losing bet. Language is formed by collective agreement and it sticks because it resonates and serves a purpose. The words we use to assign to concepts can reveal quite a lot. Rather than dismissing it, we should try and learn from it. I have written before that I believe the term "social" is a new metaphor for understanding how we will transact business and conduct government. As Lakoff and Johnson so aptly pointed out in Metaphors We Live By, metaphors play a crucial role in shaping our very thought and action. We should take the "social" in social media seriously.

Next Berkun writes:

We have always had social networks. Call them families, tribes, clubs, cliques or even towns, cities and nations. You could call throwing a party or telling stories by a fire “social media tools”. If anything has happened recently it’s not the birth of social networks, it’s the popularity of digital tools for social networks, which is something different. These tools may improve how we relate to each other, but at best it will improve upon something we as a species have always done. Never forget social networks are old. The best tools will come from people who recognize, and learn from, the rich 10,000+ year history of social networks.

Well yes and no. The problem is this. Communication is the foundation of economies, government and business. When you scale up communications you change the world. It is that simple. When you radically accelerate or democratize a means of communication (I would include physical transportation in this category too) it is not a change in class (as Berkun argues) it is a change in kind.

By analogy, the railroad did not invent the wheel nor did it invent locomotion or steam power. In fact the train did not create anything particularly new. What it did was massively accelerate the ability to move people and goods across land. That acceleration changed everything… In the U.S. it standardized time, it nationalized commerce. Around the world it broke the lock of power on maritime cities that used to control commerce… and on and on.

Similarly the Internet, and social technologies in particular, do not create much that is new in the way of content (or even human interaction as Berkun notes) but the medium massively accelerates our ability to create, share, connect and collaborate. That acceleration of our innate capacity and desire to be social is exactly what makes social technologies transformative. Where I agree with Berkun's statement above is that the same rules of social etiquette will apply in this media. That is exactly what stuns so many corporations believing they can migrate essentially antisocial behaviors (hack PR blogs, social media gimmick campaigns etc.) into "social" media.

Lastly Berkun writes,

Be suspicious of technologies claimed to change the world. The problem with the world is rarely the lack of technologies, the problem is us. Look, we have trouble following brain dead simple concepts like The Golden Rule.

Agreed. People can really suck. But "change" is a value neutral term. It doesn't imply good or bad and while it is true that many negative human traits will accompany these technologies, it is hard to overstate the magnitude of the changes that are taking place as a direct result of social media - new ways to communicate, stars (including academics finding an audience) born from YouTube, bloggers redefining journalism and science, open source software dethroning traditional players, the demise of established industries like publishing, music and entertainment, with other industries like telecommunications and manufacturing, retailing queuing up for their turn. We see social technologies organizing spontaneous rallies in California, Moldavia and most recently Iran. That is change. I would also argue that the democratic promise of these tools - the promise that people can connect with each other without an intermediary (I know all of the ways that this may not turn out to be the case - but still...) holds the possibility of distributing power more evenly. If there is one root problem in much of this world - it is the concentration of power wielded by a small minority. We should celebrate any technology that lowers barriers to communication. caveat: Scott Berkun is an O'Reilly Author and in my defense, I owned his book Myths of Innovation long before I joined O'Reilly.

Social Science Moves from Academia to the Corporation

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 4

This is the latest of a series of posts addressing questions regarding social technologies. Previous posts: The Evangelist Fallacy, Captivity of the Commons and The Digital Panopticon. These topics will be opened to live discussion in an upcoming webcast on May 27 with a special guest to be announced.

In order to control a thing you must first classify a thing -- and we are seeing a massive classification of social behavior. While that classification falls under the guise of making life easier (targeted ads, locating a nearby pizza joint using your mobile), history tells us that we should be leery of motives and masters of our social data (see Captivity of the Commons).

Social sciences (behavioral psychology, sociology, organizational development), whose historical lack of data and scientific method left them open to ridicule from the “hard” sciences, finally have enough volume of data and analytics and processing power (see Big Data) to make “social” much more scientific. But this time social science is going to be coming to you not courtesy of Princeton, but courtesy of Google. Not through small studies on willing subjects, but through massive multivariate testing and optimization upon (largely) unknowing test subjects. The corporation, in other words, will hold the keys to social science at a level of precision only dreamed of by the academic and state institutions of yore.

This recent New York Times article highlights just how much social science, psychology, and personal data converge when a credit card company wants its debts repaid (via Andy Oram’s Radar post).

Should we be concerned about this shift from academia to the corporation?

I hold the current structure of government and corporations in equal regard in terms of how well they adhere to Google’s maxim, “Don’t be Evil.” So in some regard, I shouldn’t really be troubled that social science has moved from academia (which has often been a handmaiden of government) to the corporation (which really just wants to understand what moves you to click that “buy” button, or bump up your average order size by $10, etc.). Except…

Except if you believe that consumer culture is wreaking havoc upon the systems that support life and that the application of social science on behalf of the corporation is intended to simply turbo charge the status quo...

We find ourselves in 2009 facing deep, structural challenges -- peak oil, environmental degradation, climate change, and financial meltdown.

That's why the notion of social science in service of accelerating the existing system troubles me. Tim has spoken about the need to “Work on Stuff that Matters.” How might we apply social science toward "stuff that matters" instead of toward "buying more stuff that doesn't matter?"

The Digital Panopticon

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 16

This post is part three of a series raising questions about the mass adoption of social technologies. Here are links to part one and two. These posts will be opened to live discussion in an upcoming webcast on May 27. (special guest to be announced shortly)

In 1785 utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed architectural plans for the Panopticon, a prison Bentham described as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example." Its method was a circular grid of surveillance; the jailors housed in a central tower being provided a 360-degree view of the imprisoned. Prisoners would not be able to tell when a jailor was actually watching or not. The premise ran that under the possibility of total surveillance (you could be being observed at any moment of the waking day) the prisoners would self-regulate their behavior to conform to prison norms. The perverse genius of the Panopticon was that even the jailor existed within this grid of surveillance; he could be viewed at any time (without knowing) by a still higher authority within the central tower - so the circle was complete, the surveillance - and thus conformance to authority - total.

In 1811 the King refused to authorize the sale of land for the purpose and Bentham was left frustrated in his vision to build the Panopticon. But the concept endured - not just as a literal architecture for controlling physical subjects (there are many Panopticons that now bear Bentham’s stamp) - but as a metaphor for understanding the function of power in modern times. French philosopher Michel Foucault dedicated a whole section of his book Discipline and Punish to the significance of the Panopticon. His take was essentially this: The same mechanism at work in the Panopticon - making subjects totally visible to authority - leads to those subjects internalizing the norms of power. In Foucault’s words “…the major effect of the Panopticon; to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary” In short, under the possibility of total surveillance the inmate becomes self regulating.

The social technologies we see in use today are fundamentally panoptical - the architecture of participation is inherently an architecture of surveillance.

In the age of social networks we find ourselves coming under a vast grid of surveillance - of permanent visibility. The routine self-reporting of what we are doing, reading, thinking via status updates makes our every action and location visible to the crowd. This visibility has a normative effect on behavior (in other words we conform our behavior and/or our speech about that behavior when we know we are being observed).

In many cases we are opting into automated reporting structures (Google Lattitude, Loopt etc.) that detail our location at any given point in time. We are doing this in exchange for small conveniences (finding local sushi more quickly, gaining “ambient intimacy”) without ever considering the bargain that we are striking. In short, we are creating the ultimate Panopticon - with our data centrally housed in the cloud (see previous post on the Captivity of the Commons) - our every movement, and up-to-the-minute status is a matter of public record. In the same way that networked communications move us from a one to many broadcast model to a many to many - so we are seeing the move to a many-to-many surveillance model. A global community of voyeurs ceaselessly confessing to "What are you doing? (Twitter) or "What's on your mind? (Facebook)

Captivity of the Commons focused on the risks corporate ownership of personal data. This post is concerned with how, as individuals, we have grown comfortable giving our information away; how our sense of privacy is changing under the small conveniences that disclosure brings. How our identity changes as an effect of constant self-disclosure. Many previous comments have rightly noted that privacy is often cultural -- if you don't expect it - there is no such thing as an infringement. Yet it is important to reckon with the changes we see occurring around us and argue what kind of a culture we wish to create (or contribute to).

Jacques Ellul’s book, Propaganda, had a thesis that was at once startling and obvious: Propaganda’s end goal is not to change your mind at any one point in time - but to create a changeable mind. Thus when invoked at the necessary time - humans could be manipulated into action. In the U.S. this language was expressed by catchphrases like, “communism in our backyard,” “enemies of freedom” or the current manufactured hysteria about Obama as a “socialist”.

Similarly the significance of status updates and location based services may not lie in the individual disclosure but in the significance of a culture that has become accustomed to constant disclosure.