I had been looking for a way into discussing what is defined as ‘social media’ when I encountered this funny post in which the author alludes to its panoptical nature. It provoked a lot of rattling of cell bars in the comments though no one recognised that the problem lies in the definition itself. In this shared reality people ‘go and do stuff on the web’. In the parallel world of marketing these people may or may not be described as ‘participating in social media’. It has been defined as:

"... a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues into dialogues... the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content or consumer-generated media."

Similar to this argument that the web is neither subject nor object we should question our acceptance of the idea that ‘social’ is part of the fabric of the ‘media’ itself rather than an outcome of the discourse it provokes. The definition is based on the presupposition that, in the context described, conversation ("monologues", "dialogues") is part of a power relationship ("democratization") in which currently the discussion is owned ("consumer-generated"). The implication is that this social technology places the means of production in the hands of content creators; the only other form that may exist being that of professional operations ("publishers"). This is a capitalist fantasy of how the social dynamics of the web function. Before the term was used by groups of 'experts', was contributing to forums, newsgroups, using IRC or sending group emails social media? Was participating on Plastic back in the distant days of 2001 social media? How about chatting with friends? Or painting on the wall of a cave? Here’s my alternate definition:

"The monitoring of comment and opinion on the web by power elites for the purposes of reporting and response with the goal of altering the perception surrounding the interests of the organisation concerned."

Why the difference? Well, if you consider what the first definition is trying to describe then nothing has actually changed apart from the fact that what is loosely called ‘conversation’ can now be interrogated through the use of technology as part of a permanent and ever-expanding dossier on people’s opinions. Evidence for justification of this use of social technology is to be found in the language used; definitions are being created by self-appointed gatekeepers to knowledge who understand that this perception management can be geared towards attaining ‘competitive advantage’ for their clients and themselves and that in this context this is being driven by the profit motive. Take this chap, a self-described “evangelist of social media”, and his identification of this issue:

"How do these corporations intend to use these vast records of our behavior... corporations whose main motivation is not in service of 'customer empowerment' but on the traditional goals of manipulating behavior to grow their share of wallet."

Customer empowerment is one and the same as market share in the larger scheme of things. He can’t see beyond this, thinking our defining role in society is as consumers, confused as to which side of the bars he is actually on. This artificial distinction that is called social media by its proponents could more accurately be seen and described as an attempt to form a social technocracy via the co-option of ideas that define a framework that already exists, that people are widely aware of and is determined to be suitable for manipulation, i.e. the web. To further the achieving of this goal it is useful to question the 'nature of the thing', not to develop the 'thing' per se but to give it a discrete integrity that then allows the testing of the boundaries that presently define it, e.g. referencing The Enlightenment is an attempt to give it both a historicity and a validity for the purposes of advancing the overarching agenda.

Update: I am sobbing quietly. Responsibility rests with this post entitled: Social Media is the New Punk. There is a hideous video with sound and everything. I rest my case.

2 original comments:

Terrif post. I think you’re talking along the lines of the extraction of surplus value and the harnessing of mass intellect Marky Marxist.
I recommend that you have a look at the work of Adam Arviddson. Quite a few of his papers online.
He doesn’t write explicitly about social meed, but I think much of his argument about branding is very relevant here.
Comment by Chloe — 1 July, 2009 @ 2:08 pm

Thank you for the comment; it was your fantastic Bruno Latour post that set me thinking about this. I will go and look up Adam Arviddson immediately while I’m still occupied with these ideas.
Comment by Mark — 1 July, 2009 @ 2:15 pm

This is great. I love the fact that this designer has taken a ubiquitous and clunky item and redesigned it to become something svelte and more easily portable. Plugs, with their bulk and three prongs are a pain to pack and transport.

Three-prong folding plug design

(via BoingBoing Gadgets)

At the other end of the scale is this, a winner of an award but really no more than an exercise in futility and graphic design. Unlike the above this project is not a serious attempt to solve a problem through good design as the issue of bike use in the city is more mundane. We already have bikes. We do not need more expensive bikes with transparent solar panels in the wheels. What we do need is more bike lanes, more roads closed to vehicles, more bike racks, bike theft to be taken more seriously by the police, more shared space, vehicle users who respect cyclists right to space, cyclists who respect pedestrians right to space and pedestrians who don't bumble in front of cyclists.

A solution in search of a problem

(via Wired Gadget Lab)

What do you think of my suggestion?

Hoverboard from 'Back to the Future Part II'

It too is based on non-existent technology and also solves the problem of urban mobility in a functional space-saving design. Award please.

Update: We (heart) stuff features the folding plug mentioned above. The designer's name is Min Kyu Choi. He deserves to be very successful.

1 original comment:

Mark, my Mum mentioned this folding plug to me the other day, this is the first time I’ve seen it. Nice design indeed. I saw something similar recently, an American backpacker had a folding, two-pronged European-style plug – that was super-compact.
I’m always bemused by our bulky three-pronged plugs when I return from abroad. When on the road, once you’ve put an adaptor on the end of a charger you end up with a connection to the socket that’s more often than not bigger than the device you want to recharge, much to the bemusement of some foreigners who’ve never seen our three-pronged electric behemoths. However, I confess to a warm, fuzzy feeling when I found them in Hong Kong of all places this year!
Re: cycling – your comments are all valid. One very simple solution, move to Copenhagen where all of the above have come true, it’s cycle paradise, I kid you not ;)
Comment by CharlieO — 24 August, 2009 @ 4:45 pm

Terrible article over on The Guardian about the recent protests in London. Not only is it poorly written it reveals the insulting contempt those in power have for the right to protest. No great surprise as any act of protest is, of course, a challenge to their 'legitimate' authority. So bad is this article I've actually had to pull it apart as there are too many points to easily roll into a neat flowing post.

"Untrained officers must never again be put in the frontline of policing public protests… some inexperienced officers, who were clearly quite scared, used ‘inappropriate force’."

Define 'untrained'. Untrained to do what? Deal with members of the public? Deal with a large crowd? This notion of inexperience is a get-out, pure and simple, to put the blame on an understandable human reaction such as fear to explain what were pre-determined police tactics to suppress dissent.

"Their inquiry also calls for the police to seriously consider whether they can continue with the use of tactics such as kettling and the controlled use of force against those who appear hostile..."

What the hell does "seriously consider" mean? Surely the police should be told that the use of kettling against citizens who are exercising their democratic rights is illegal as is the  meting out of pre-meditated beatings to anyone who is thought to deserve it. Unfortunately this segment is not a direct quote and demonstrates the problems with relying on a journalist's take on what has been said.

"... film footage of those incidents shocked the public and have the potential to undermine trust in the police... the ability of the public... to monitor every single action of the police through... mobile phones and video equipment means they have to take even greater care to ensure that all their actions are justifiable."

Here's the nub of the issue. Up until fairly recently it was common for the media to report on protests by quoting the police as saying one thing and the 'organisers' saying another, e.g. the often wildly differing accounts of the number of individuals involved in a demo. This makes it easy to obscure the truth of what went on under the weight of tit-for-tat claims. Video footage of stony-faced officers dressed in riot gear using the edges of their shields to smack people in the face who can't move due to the crush of the crowd doesn't need a few hundred words of copy from some paid hack to muddy the waters of what actually happened. That said, the ability of the public to watch the watchers shouldn't be the determining factor in ensuring that the police don't abuse their power.

"The MPs repeat their belief that there are no circumstances in which it is acceptable for police officers not to wear their identification numbers and urge those who consciously remove them to face the strongest disciplinary action."

So, how many investigations are in progress regarding such incidents? How many officers have ever been disciplined for removing their numbers? Is it a tactic that a blind-eye is turned towards or are certain officers advised to do so by their superiors? What does "consciously remove" mean anyway; is 'forgetting' to wear your numbers therefore an acceptable excuse? The language used in this article makes it sound suspiciously like this MPs inquiry has precisely no power to get the police to do much of anything.

"He (Commander Bob Broadhurst) said there were 2,500 officers who had only two days of public order training a year and the vast majority of whom had never faced a situation as violent as the G20 protest before."

Are we to simply accept without challenge his assessment that this was a violent situation and that such violence as occurred was not as a result of police tactics such as kettling? Apparently so.

"Denis O'Connor, the chief inspector of constabulary is considering whether to endorse a 'human rights-based' approach to policing advocated by Sir Hugh Orde, the incoming chief of the Association of Chief Police Officers."

This says it all. Yes, I would consider that the police, who are there to serve the public, should base their approach on the ways it is decent and proper to treat reasonable people who are going about their lawful business. The worst of it is that amid the death of one person and the beating of others the actual issue of that day doesn't even warrant a mention. Which is all very convenient for MPs who would rather not debate why it is thousands of people are out on the streets demonstrating.

Update: The article referred to above makes it pretty clear that the Police would like to blame  inexperience for their use of violence. This article says that:

"The officer under investigation over the death of Tomlinson was a constable with the force's Territorial Support Group (TSG), the specialist unit used at protests. The officer under investigation for assaulting two women at the protests, including protester Nicola Fisher, was a TSG sergeant."

Ah. So they weren't inexperienced, untrained officers who meted out the worst violence we heard about on the day then? They were in fact members of the Territorial Support Group, which, according to Wikipedia, replaced the Special Patrol Group, members of which allegedly beat an Anti-Nazi League protestor to death in 1979 during a demonstration. Some might say this an unfortunate parallel. I would say that this quote from the aforementioned Wikipedia article sums it up:

"One ex-Metropolitan Police officer suggested that TSG members, 'spend (their) days waiting for action and far too many officers join seeking excitement and physical confrontation'. Some officers are ex-military personnel and these are 'the worst bullies' as 'the laws of the battlefield are not appropriate to the streets of our capital'."

Surely this is one of those cases where actively wanting the job should disqualify you from getting to do it. Much like MPs in fact.

I was going to skip writing about this at it was dull but if nothing else it's worth putting in a supporting link to Chloe's excellent assessment of the phenomenon of Malcom Gladwell. I do not use the word lightly. Anyone who can fill Brighton Dome with paying punters and say absolutely nothing for an hour is a phenomenon. Something is going on here that evokes curiosity; possibly leading to a Gladwell-esque observation about the human condition.  I think that it isn't that he tells anyone anything they don't know, it's that he tells them things they already know but makes a certain kind of person feel cleverer for having been told that they know them; in this case through the medium of a spurious and unengaging story.

That said, Gladwell did try and distract us by saying he was going to tell us about something we didn't know anything about which I thought was a tad presumptuous. Even moreso when he launched into a description of the battle of Chancellorsville in which the Yankees and Confederates faced each other led by General Hooker "... and General Lee" said Matt from the seat next to me. It turns out Matt knows a lot about military history. Gladwell's subsequent asides on the most recent Iraq War based his conclusion on the official reasons for the conflict and his sprinkling of commentary on the financial crisis felt like no more than a nod to keeping up with current events.

I wanted drama, intrigue, a performance! What I got was flat. No fizz. No sparkle. Judging from the queue waiting for the book signing at the end a lot of other people there would disagree. No fuss no muss I guess, except for the fact this kind of pop sociology can lead one to trite conclusions about behaviours that are vastly more complex and do require one to look a little deeper into one's own motivations.  Ultimately his talk lacked depth and was not about provoking new ideas; it was about flattering the audience's credulity and his ego just a little more than that. What we all really need is to have our ideas challenged, critically and frequently, but then I suspect that wouldn't fill so many seats.

Further reading:
Is the Tipping Point Toast?
How your friends' friends can affect your mood
The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell

1 original comment:

Mark, agree strongly “tick”.
Thanks for the link to the register article. Weird Wogan antiques kid and Napoleon Dynamite pictures hilarious.
Comment by Chloe — 27 June, 2009 @ 10:29 am

If reading an 83-page Apple patent application isn't your bag then at least skim this summary: Apple exploring wireless system for quantifying the unquantifiable over on AppleInsider. The "sprawling patent" talks of "sensing systems" that collect data about what happens to objects as they move through space and time. Although the article doesn't use this term Apple are essentially applying for patents on a variety of types of spime, one of those technologies that, like the barcode, will have both a sudden ubiquity and a profound effect on how we view the world of manufactured objects that surrounds us.

If you want to indulge in a little further reading on what's coming next then try When Blobjects Rule the Earth. If your interest is sufficiently piqued follow-up with  Shaping Things; both the speech and the pamphlet are by Bruce Sterling who coined this particular neologism. In fact I believe spimes first appeared, but were not referred to as such, in his 1998 novel Distraction, which is well worth a read.

I start with a clean white Google search page, I have Adblock Plus installed and use Readability to bring the content I find to the fore without any distractions. Add quietube and I'm all set:

"... watch web videos without the comments and crap..."

The excellent Kottke.org has a post on Google's search dominance. When working on projects we need data to support our conclusions and rely on sources such as Hitwise, Comscore, Nielsen, etc. I often have serious doubts about the accuracy of the information supplied. Kottke references Comscore reporting search breaking down like so:

• 64% Google
• 20% Yahoo!
• 08% Microsoft

His own stats come out as follows:

• 94% Google
• 03% Microsoft
• 01% Yahoo!

It could be that visitors to Kottke.org fit a certain profile, perhaps not the kind of person who defaults to a portal when they open their browser. With this in mind I took a look at the analytics for a few sites I have access to, including blogs and commercial operations. The results came out as follows:

• 91% Google
• 04% Yahoo!
• 04% Microsoft

I'd be very interested to see figures from other people as this makes it look like Comscore's data is wildly off. I wonder what the explanation could be? From my perspective Google have search completely stitched up and no-one is in much of position to challenge their dominance. The figures show that recent articles about Wolfram Alpha or bing are either written by people with no understanding of search or who are simply keen on attention-grabbing headlines over substance and inquiry.

Update: TorrentFreak illustrates the point I make above in this post: Nielsen Hugely Underestimates BitTorrent Traffic. The inaccuracy of the data from these measurement companies is highlighted by a recent news story from The Age that quotes Nielsen data for visits by Australians to BitTorrent search engines. Apparently mininova provided their statistics so their data could be checked out. Nielsen data turned out to be wildly inacurate with traffic to mininova alone being 600% higher than Nielsen reported to a number of BitTorrent search engines. In conclusion:

Data from measurement companies isn't worth much beyond a vague guide to broad trends

I can't actually find Nielsen saying anything about this directly but my question to them if this is true would be: "Why should we trust any other conclusions you produce if your data is apparently so unreliable?".

Update: I'm honour-bound to point out these results from Hitwise that show Google taking a 90%+ share of search.

Update: please see the comment below from Mark Higginson (not me, another one!) who is Director of Analytics at Nielsen in Australia. He points out that the figures they supplied were not a measure of visits as the TorrentFreak article stated but instead measured 'unique audience', a metric I'm not familiar with. This goes someway to clearing up this confusion but also shows how easy it is to make assumptions about what is being claimed from audience figures that may be being calculated in completely different ways. I really appreciate Mark taking the time to comment on this post and clarify this matter.

4 original comments:

The difference between those figures could be explained by the simple fact that Hitwise, Comscore, Neilsen etc is based on page views yeah? Where as your data and Kottke.org’s data is based on referrals. MSN is the default home page for people with internet explorer. A lot of people can’t be bothered, or don’t know how, to change their home page. So that means every time they open up IE, the MSN home page comes up. They may not use it for search, in fact they may even search for Google in Yahoo or msn/live/bing.
Additionally, people may use Yahoo or Bing, but may not find what they’re looking for and resort to Google.
Numbers are only ever a snapshot of a particular viewpoint, so they could potentially explain the discrepancy.
Comment by Scott — 5 June, 2009 @ 10:03 am

That’s a very good point because don’t Comscore et. al. collect data from a small sample of individuals with an app installed on their computers? I wonder if this means a ‘view’ is being confused with ‘use of’ as you point out?
Comment by Mark — 5 June, 2009 @ 10:07 am

Hi Mark,
Mark Higginson in Australia here. Long time between meetings. :-)
I was the one who supplied the figures to The Age in my role as Director of Analytics here at Nielsen Online Australia and part of the issue with the article mentioned was the journalist using the term “visits”. The numbers we supplied were actually Unique Audience, not visits, not even Unique Browsers – and comes from a panel methodology.
So whilst TorrentFreak didn’t know it, the comment in their article “This may sound like a lot of traffic, but since Nielsen reports the number of visits and not the unique visitors we expected it to be much higher” was incorrect. The comparison to the figures that Mininova report isn’t apples with apples – plus Mininova aren’t able to report on Unique Audience – the best they would be able to do is Unique Browsers, which with cookie deletion etc can be widely overestimated as an indication to actual user numbers.
Comment by Mark Higginson (the other one - in Australia — 30 July, 2009 @ 7:19 am

Hi Mark,
Many thanks for the comment and apologies for the delayed response, I’ve had a busy, busy August getting married.
I think what this shows is the confusion around the different measures we employ. I’d favour ‘daily unique visitors’ as a metric I can compare across sites that gives me a good idea of how popular they are in terms of a sustained readership, kind of equivalent to print ABC figures.
What does ‘unique audience’ measure and does anyone else use this? If this is a Nielsen only metric doesn’t this make these kind of comparisons impossible outside Nielsen’s own system of measurement? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
All the best,
Mark.
Comment by Mark — 25 August, 2009 @ 5:22 pm