This is a presentation I gave at Technomadic Marketing in Cape Town on 18 July, outlining the social theory underpinning the Mail & Guardian Online strategy for social media.

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

2. my background

3. Critical what does this mean?

4. Max Horkheimer 1937 Traditional and Critical Theory

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

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

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

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

9. False Consciousness The proletariat have been misled…

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

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

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

13. As marketers you will know this well

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

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

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

17. Step back…

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

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

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

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

22. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

29. 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

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

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

32. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

47.  Danger Gevaar Ingosi

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

49. 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

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

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

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

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

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

55. 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

56. 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

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

58. 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

59. 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

60. 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

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

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

63. Thank you And now for the Amatomu story