Social media:
Empowered citizens
or Digital dairy cows
Mathias Klang @klang67

I’m a geek.

What we talk about when we talk about
social media

The fundamentalists: Revolution or
breakfast

revolution?

Twitter? Isn’t
that where
everyone talks
about what
they had for
breakfast?

Neo-optimists vs neo-pessimists

Social media…At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in
how people discover, read and share news, information and
content. It's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming
monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is
the democratization of information, transforming people from
content readers into publishers.
(Wikipedia, May 2009)

2006

"Out of this anarchy…
what was governing
the infinite monkeys
now inputting away on
the Internet was the
law of digital
Darwinism, the survival
of the loudest and most
opinionated.”
Andrew Keen: Cult of the amateur
(2007)

“My fear is that these
technologies are
infantilising the brain
into the state of small
children who are
attracted by buzzing
noises and bright
lights, who have a
small attention span
and who live for the
moment.”
Prof. Susan Greenfield

How we got where we are

Digitalization 
Internet 
WWW 
Fixed cost connections 
Storage Costs 
web2.0 
Devices 
Social Media 

Blogger 1999
Google 1999
End of communications monopoly

Normalizing the abnormal

The end of boredom

Silly? Harmful?

Players compete to find the most unusual and original location in which
to play… Rigidity of the body must be maintained to constitute good
That’s Good planking planking.

What we need to know about technology

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is
normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the
way the world works. Anything that’s invented between
when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting
and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in
it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against
the natural order of things.
Douglas Adams

Only technology
(spot the ethical dilemma?)

What we need to know about
social media

if you're not
paying for
something,
you're not the
customer;
you're the
product being
sold

We are digital dairy cows?

Social media is performance lifestyle

My amazing coffee

Understanding the digital dairy farmer

“You have one identity… The days of you having a
different image for your work friends or co-workers
and for the other people you know are probably
coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities
for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity”
Mark Zuckerberg, 2009

Counteracting compartmentalization

MATS MÜGGE
”Jättebra barnskötare - men texten är inte förenlig med vår verksamhet”

Public (?)
privacy

What do the people who control what
we can do, think?

What will they let us think?

A Squirrel Dying In
Your Front Yard May
Be More Relevant To
Your Interests Right
Now Than People
Dying In Africa
Mark Zuckerberg

Wtf? How did this
happen?

Are we stupid?

Ignorant?

Accident?

Facebook made me do it!
Not an excuse – but a reality

Technology, licenses & lack of social
responsibility

Don’t forget the
network effect: Bad
news travels fast

Who will fix it?

What will the law do?

Privacy & the end of big brother

The problem
with autonomy

Regulation by proxy: a paranoid approach?

What are
organizations doing?

Creating policies, ignoring reality
“personlig inte privat”

The futures of social technology

personalization

Walled gardens
life as a digital dairy cow

New dependencies (tics, not addiction)

So…, closing thoughts…

Don’t forget the squirrels

Policy is
not enough

In a network: silence is
acquiescence

Think before
you update.

THANKS!

Mathias Klang
klang@ituniv.se or @klang67
www.digital-rights.net
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Surveillance
Sousveillance
autoveillance