critical approaches to social media vincent maher | strategist | mail & guardian online

my background

Critical what does this mean?

Max Horkheimer 1937 Traditional and Critical Theory

Critique & Transformation Social theory that seeks to change society as a whole, rather than merely explain it

Radical Marxism In direct opposition to the science of logical positivism and authoritarianism

Emancipatory Seeks to improve the quality and structure of life for the oppressed

Ideology An instrument of social production, through which capitalism and its power relations reproduce themselves

False Consciousness The proletariat have been misled…

Hegemony Gramsci used this to explain why people have a false conception of their own values and interests

Fetishism Most primitive phase of religion in which people ascribe magical or divine significance to material objects. For Freud this relation was sexual.

Commodity Fetishism Life is organised through the medium of commodities and the value of commodities is abstracted - use-value and exchange-value is disconnected

As marketers you will know this well

Creating need How do you create a need for something unless you take it away from someone who already has it?

The Talisman In Hermeticism, a talisman is a consecrated material object used to protect and exert some type of power

The Gadget In marketing, a device imbued with a magical power that enhances virility and efficiency

Step back…

Naïve Arrogance It seems like history started in 1993, with the birth of the web

Web 2. 0 It seems like history started at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference in 2004

History is valuable Understanding preceding events and shifts can help us understand the future.

Pre 1. 0 Technology suddenly became central to the process of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution

Technology is fundamentally linked to the path of development in Western society, and is wrapped up in its ideology and an instrument of its power relations

Cultural production What we call “making content”, has a long history

Time and Space was compressed first by the horse, then the railway, then the telephone, then the Internet

Fires in camps Humans based their knowledge and understanding of the world on the personal interactions with people from their own villages, or travellers

Linguistic Diversity This is why each village could have a different accent

Local knowledge, regional myth This is also why magic could always thrive at the edge of the forest

Identity This life, with its relative simplicity, was the anvil against which story-telling forged identity

Regulation? The village elders would regulate what could and couldn’t be said, but the regulation took place after the fact and about the content of the infrigement

Fast Forward Today our identities are formed via a series of interpersonal interactions but increasingly these interactions are mediated

Mediation TV, radio, the Web, email, IM, SMS, MMS, telephone, recording and playback

Regulation Mediated conversations are subject to regulation, on the level of the medium itself and the market regulation of potential media available and their uses

Commercial Messaging As a result of this mediation the very fabric of identity formation is subject to commercial imperatives

Technology is not transparent Most often, technology is presented as a neutral enabler. However, on inspection, this is not the case

The types of technology we have access to are limit[ed][ing]

Google A classic example of an opaque system, couched in the language of technological transparency

Google = Knowledge The front page of Google is the starting point of most research these days

Language Google talk about democracy, accuracy, speed, efficiency, the best results for your query

What are we doing? We enter keywords and get back a list of resources

But what is actually happening? An algorithm calculates the hierachy of resources. It’s just an algorithm, a machine right?

An ideological machine That constructs the structure of relevance based on a system of values

How does PageRank actually work? Google don’t disclose this vital piece of information, on the grounds of protecting commercial secrets

What kind of world do we live in, where the underlying structure of knowledge has legally become a commercial secret??

PageRank Awards age, popularity and various other criteria that reinforce existing power relations

Expert Systems Like driving a car, we accept its output unquestioningly without understanding its inner workings

Expert Systems Google is one of many expert systems that we have come to trust, as a consequence of technological progress

 Danger Gevaar Ingosi

Social Media Something the Mail & Guardian is firmly committed to pursuing, but er… what is it?

Democracy, again With the emergence of sites like Digg, YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace and OhMyNews and things like blogging there is a buzz about how the web democratises content and the media

Destabiliser Actually, what the Web does is it destabilises everything in its wake, not always for the better

Ideology @ wrk But, actually, what they do is they reinforce a lack of diversity of opinion outside the ideological bounds of the conversation

Ideology @ work Digg-like sites are supposed to bring democracy to the editorial process by crowdsourcing it

Ideology @ work Ideas that challenge conventional wisdom [naturalised beliefs of the dominant system] are excluded, whereas those that reinforce it gain popularity

Geeks in a circle According to Habermas, democracy and rational debate require people to to have exposure to alternative points of view

Geeks in a circle What happens is that ideology gets reinforced rather than exposed for what it is, in ever-tightening spirals of audience fragmentation

GWOT and xenophobia This phenomenon cannot be seen in isolation from the US war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the polarisation of society into Judeo-Christian vs Islamic, patriots vs terrorists, us vs immigrants

Nevertheless… The current market is a very exciting one for media, marketers and the newly revived PR industry

Nothing to lose Thinking about the choice we make and the technologies we employ and the uses we encourage in a critical manner can help us to a] do good or b] exploit the system by understanding it better? The correct answer is A and B

What can we say about the future? Whatever we can think about the future is going to be less than impressive in the long term and dissapointing in the short term

What can we say about the future? What will actually happen in the future will seem like sorcery to us today if someone travelled back in time and showed us pictures

What can we say about the future? Nothing is stable, as the life-cycle of technology accelerates and tightens around itself

The problem with a tightly coiled spring is that it can jump out of your hand and go in any direction

Thank you And now for the Amatomu story