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.
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
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
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
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
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