socialmedia – Mechanical Sympathy

the end of comments in a flattening media-hierarchy

Recently the Toronto Star turned off online comments on their website. I beat them to it by about a year. I was recently asked why I would do that. Don’t I want people to interact with my online content?

I sure do! And if they want to they can share my blog and then comment on it to their heart’s content. What do I possibly get out of running a comments section on a blog? Nothing! If you ask for a login no one bothers to do it, if you allow open, anonymous comments you get buried in advertising and nastiness, the typical by-products of human interaction.

With the advent of pervasive social media the idea of needing a comments section within your online content has had its day. Anyone reading online content has their own social media presence of some sort nowadays. They are more than welcome to leverage that in order to comment on my content. In doing so they share my content. It’s the least they can do if it prompted them to have an opinion on it that they want to share.

We’ve moved from stratified, traditional, paper based media delivery though early adopter online media delivery to a more mature, everyone-has-a-presence-online media delivery system (nicely explained in this essay lambasting education’s inability to free the essay from its millennium of bondage). Embedded comment sections are a hold-over from an earlier internet where online readers tended not to have their own online presence.

Digital technology is forcing an increasingly flat media-scape. Millennials spend almost no time in traditional media. They could barely pay attention to Star Wars in the theatre when I was there last week. I’ve stopped showing videos in class because asking Millennials to watch media simultaneously is alien to them and frustrating for me. In a world where people distrust and often ignore the patronizing nature of traditional media it’s best not to fight the flow.

If you’re determined to hang on to the comment section in your online content you’re swimming against the current. You’re assuming that your content is somehow more established, more authentic, more valuable. You are belittling your visitors’ online presence by making them work in yours. It’s ultimately about you refusing to surrender control of your content in an increasingly democratic communication medium. That idea of control is a holdover from traditional, paper-based media hierarchies, it isn’t surprising that a newspaper struggled with this. You’ve got to let it all go Neo.

If you want insipid examples of human nastiness and stupidity you’ll find them online, especially in anonymous, internal comment sections. I’d long stopped reading The Star’s comment section for this very reason. I also tend to blacklist those brave (often conservative) souls on twitter and other social media who hide behind anonymous or fake user names. They feel very brave and are usually overly aggressive in their anonymity.

What’s funnier are those people who create social media presences based on their real self and then proceed to advertise their ignorance to the world. If someone is going to confuse Twitter with texting there isn’t much we can do for their employment prospects. People who are nasty online tend to get bitten though. It’s a self correcting process and it’s happening less and less because we’re getting better at it.

This flattening media-scape isn’t just hurting traditional media, it’s also snapping at people who don’t realize that their reach has changed. Democratizing media means empowering people who have no experience with publication, and make no mistake, every time you post on social media you’re publishing to the entire planet. People in Timbuktu can read your tweets if they are so inclined.

There will come a point when there have been enough cautionary tales and social experience with self-publication that people will learn best practices and the vast majority will realize just how empowered and potentially dangerous we’ve all become in our flat new world.

In the meantime, if people want to comment on my content they’re welcome to share away, but I’m not providing a comments section because it belittles my reader’s own online presence and dilutes my material with mean and often irrelevant comments.

We’re All Just So Busy

If I hear this one more time I might pop. We’re no busier than we ever were. If we were all so busy we’d have solved world hunger, the impending energy crisis, unemployment, racism, our broken democracies and poverty. If we’re all so terribly busy, what is it that we’re busy with, because it doesn’t appear to be anything important.

Most recently I heard it on CBC radio when someone was talking about an online dating site that allows you to quickly, with little more than a photo and a couple of bio points, select a date and meet them. Not surprisingly, the CBC piece was on the disasters that have come from this. When asked why people do it, the interviewee trotted out, “well, we’re all just so busy now-a-days.” I would suggest that if you are too busy to develop a considered relationship with a possible life partner, then you’re getting what you deserve.

These people aren’t busy, they are distracted.

I see students who spend more than half their walking hours engaged in the (mostly) viewing and (seldom) producing of social media. Much of this is so utterly banal that it defies belief, yet people get so wrapped up in it that they feel trapped. For those who feel the urge to publish their every thought for the world to see, the results are often less than complimentary.

There are those who are leveraging social media in interesting ways, but for the vast majority it is a passive time sink that has conditioned them to do many things poorly and barely ever finish a thought.

This myopia feeds data bankers who make a lot of money from the freely given marketing information. It also feeds the industry that creates a treadmill of devices to cater to the process. Lastly, our digital myopia also feeds the egos of all the ‘very busy’ people who see themselves as a vital part of this wonderful new democracy.

At yoga the other week our instructor gave us this: pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. There are things we need to do in life in order to survive and thrive: look after our bodies, look after our minds, look after our dependants, seek and expand our limitations, find a good life. This can be very challenging, but it is dictated by choice. When we make good choices we tend to see a reward. Eat well and feel better, expand your mind and learn something new, look after your family and enjoy a loving, safe environment. Poor choices lead to poor circumstances. In a world where we have more dependable machines and efficient communication, we should enjoy a sense of ease greater than previous generations who had to tune carburetors and ring through telephone exchanges.

Make some good choices. How busy are you really?

Influence Without Affluence

After a Social Media gathering a couple of weeks ago and a rewatch of We Are Legion I’ve been pondering what social expectations we’re developing in our new digital society. Why would I do this? Since our students are immersed in this radical, unprecedented counter culture it might behoove us as educators to have some idea of what cultural norms are coming out of it. Recognizing what is normative online behavior goes some distance toward explaining the seemingly bizarre responses teachers are seeing in class.

If you think the buttoned down 1950s era teacher had trouble understanding the hippy counter culture student of the sixties, you ain’t seen nothing yet. What technology is offering students today is nothing short of an entirely new social medium to inhabit, and what that is doing to early adopters (like teens) is nothing short of a paradigm shift in social behavior.

A number of years ago (2006!) WIRED did a quick piece on GENERATION XBOX, in which they talked about the expectations of gamer culture and how different they are from preceding (non digital) generations. This short list hit the gaming ethos precisely: arrogant, hacking (competitive, results focused regardless of rules), insubordinate… sound like anyone in your classroom? That gaming ethos has done a great deal to influence online presence. The egalitarian nature of the gamer is clearly seen in internet cultures like Anonymous where there is a strong emphasis on your contribution rather than your social standing in the ‘real’ world. What matters is what you say and how well you say it, not how much money your parents had or who you’re the boss of.

You might think this is socialist, but it really isn’t, it can be crushingly cruel and direct and has no patience for bullshit or spin. Everyone isn’t equal, though everyone does have equal access and ability to contribute. This ties organizations, especially politically powerful ones, in knots, especially when they expect the same kind of submission they can force in traditional media in an open digitized space. I suspect it’s hitting a lot of people who are used to the benefits of their social circumstances hard.

If suddenly all of the benefits you had (race, socio-economic status, education, family) are ignored, how do you establish yourself as an alpha? Especially when you’re used to having it handed to you. In the last post I tried to push privacy and ownership of information as far as I logically could considering the near friction-less information we find online.

If you can’t own information because trying to hold it is impossible when it can be copied and spread with no real effort, and privacy is irrelevant because anyone can copy and paste your information, and almost everyone has a media recording device unimaginable 20 years ago and can capture you at any time regardless of whether you want to be seen or not, regardless of whether you yourself are online or not; how do we understand what is ours? Ownership is at the foundation of how we relate to other people in society. With no ability to own material and with information being so slippery we can’t regulate who sees it online, how do we establish social dominance? If we can’t flash the car, the house, our jobs, or even our educations at people and expect benefits, what value do these things have?

The tendency would be to fall back on existing power structures, to try and exercise the same protections that advantage us in society in an online milieu, but this has been shown to fail again and again. Digital information does not work in a personal context the way that social status does. The only thing that makes you special is what you’re doing right now. Your interaction is your credibility online. If you try to game the system and people can find that data, they can make you look the fool. If you are able to maintain an honest and insightful digital footprint, you come as close as you’re ever going to get to being untouchable in the Wild West of the internet.

Someone who puts Ph.D. after their name online is as likely to be made fun of as they are to be respected. If that same person does not advertise their traditional social standing, but produces excellent ideas clearly and accessibly through an understanding of the tools available, then they will gain online currency. If the approach is one of indirect, politically motivated self interest, then the proliferation of digital information makes it very difficult to game the truth, or play people. That email or DM where you instruct other people to do something that you wouldn’t want everyone to know? It’ll end up buried in your back. You can’t stop the signal. If you’ve done it online, it’s obtainable.

I still maintain that radical transparency is what will evolve out of this startling social evolution. Say what you mean and do what you say, be consistent and don’t be afraid. If you make a mistake own it, and if you can’t handle what’s happening don’t advertise it by leaving a permanent record. Lurking is a perfectly reasonable place to back away to online.

I suspect that many of our students lurk online because they are trying to parse the wild west that they see out there. They don’t want to make fools of themselves, but they are also wrestling with what they know happens in the real world (you can get away with lying, deceit and social/political games quite easily in a world where information is ownable – especially if you’re the beneficiary of racial, social or cultural advantage). Online the powers aren’t powers and the socially weak can suddenly become something else if they have the voice and the will to do it.

Being hacked may not be a bad thing if it keeps everyone honest. The threat of hacking is what prevents many of the ‘real’ world powers from abusing the internet (that and it has insinuated itself into business and society to such a degree that pulling the plug would be a disaster). Marx may not have taken down capitalism, but online society offers the kind of radical egalitarianism that wraps monopolistic capitalists in knots.

The other thing about this radically flat mediascape is that hierarchies that force group think tend to fail. Rather than being threatened into following the crowd, you are free to disappear online. You aren’t beholden to social context in the same way you are in the real world. This means you can do things online you’d never do in ‘real’ life. Like the guy who screams obscenities and gives the finger to others while driving who would never do the same thing while walking down the sidewalk; the person online is removed and empowered in an interesting way by the machines that isolate them from their social context.

I’ve enjoyed watching the dismantling of these assumptions in a number of large organizations. I’ve been frustrated by others that claim democracy while really wanting to enforce an existing hierarchy. Online society is the most radically democratic ideal we’ve ever created. Access is cheaper and more available than citizenship in the first world (arguably the previous means of access to political control). As we miniaturize and mobilize computing and billions more people come online and realize that they are not powerless in their societies (and that they belong to a larger, more pervasive and more powerful online society), the world will change, and the ones who will suffer are those that have benefited from history the most.

Notifications Off

While away in the States recently I turned off notifications in the various apps on my phone to save on data, and then turned off notifications entirely when I got home, I found I was enjoying the silence.

In that silence I started thinking about operant conditioning and just how wired to our personal devices we’ve become. Digital distraction is a cultural phenomenon with people wringing their hands over rising vehicle accident rates and people falling into open manhole covers. We tend to forget that looking at a screen when we should be doing something else is a choice. We’d rather play the victim than accept that kind of responsibility.

The dreaded notification is at the core of this idea of being victimized by digital distraction. There is a simple fix though: turn them off. Your social media is all still waiting there for you, the only thing you’re missing is immediacy, but that urge to respond quickly points to a deluded sense of self importance; despite what you think, most people aren’t pouring over their social media waiting for you to post something.

I didn’t get data while I was away, I figured I’d get by with wifi when I could find it. This quieted the noise even more, making me wonder why I’d want a device constantly demanding my attention in the first place.

The lack of data made me very conscious of the urge to post as events are happening. You see this all the time at sports events. A game winning goal gets scored and instead of cheering people are taking bad photos and spending time putting them online. It happens in concerts too. People spend bucket loads of money and time getting to these events only to view them through a smartphone screen, or ignore it entirely while they create social media posts.

You get this urge when you’re in the middle of something fantastic to want to share it immediately like a live news broadcast, but your social media audience isn’t watching a show, they come and go. Audiences on social media aren’t like audiences on broadcast media, they are never all in the same place at the same time. That sense of urgency is you misunderstanding how social media is different from broadcast media. Sure, take a picture, but if you don’t post it in the next 30 seconds your ratings aren’t going to drop. Your production team isn’t going to be out of a job.

Social media is inherently addictive. It is designed to provide an
unconditioned stimulus response. It doesn’t take long to tie the
notification to that initial, unconditioned response.

Our approach to smartphone use needs to evolve. Having a general purpose, networked computer in your pocket shouldn’t mean you’re on the social media hook 24/7. A good first step is to try and view your social media use from a more accurate perspective, don’t get sucked into a false sense of immediacy with it. Enjoy being where you are, maybe snap a picture to share later when you’ve got a quiet moment. Whatever you do don’t miss what you’re doing because you’re viewing it through a smartphone screen, or ignoring it while you’re making social media updates about it. In spite of what you might think, you’re not a media personality, even if you do have 1000 friends on Facebook.

A good first step is to turn off notifications. It’ll all still be there waiting for you, but you won’t be a Pavlovian experiment in distraction when you interact with it. This will probably upset mobile service providers who are making a mint from over-priced travel packages designed to keep you ‘connected’. You’ll probably also find your interactions take on a more nuanced and thoughtful appearance; something else it would be nice to see more of on social media.