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Social Media and SocietySustainable Development, CEMUS

Patrick Prax

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Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, google services, …) and…

1. their definition2. their business model

1. Who owns media2. Who funds media

3. their influence on society and power structures1. Political change, revolution, a free tool bringing democracy2. The reality: Digital Divide, Huge corporations, capitalization

of the medium3. The medium is the message

4. their future5. the way it can help in making change happen

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Who are you?

• Name

• Educational background

• Project

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Who am I?

• Patrick Prax, PhD Candidate in Media and Communication since 10/09

• The political economy of co-creative game design

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Definitions:

• Media – the storage and transmission channels or tools used to

store and deliver information or data• Social Media– Allow the creation and exchange of user-created

content– Social interaction– Social network– No clear definition

• Digital Media

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Digitalization

“The increasing use of digital storage and transmission in cultural production and circulation and the increasing use of such digital systems, as opposed to analogue ones.”

Hesmondhalgh 2007: 311

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Convergence

con·ver·gence (kn-vûrjns)n.• 1. The act, condition, quality, or fact of converging.• 2. Mathematics The property or manner of approaching a limit,

such as a point, line, function, or value.• 3. The point of converging; a meeting place: a town at the

convergence of two rivers.• 4. Physiology The coordinated turning of the eyes inward to

focus on an object at close range.• 5. Biology The adaptive evolution of superficially similar

structures, such as the wings of birds and insects, in unrelated species subjected to similar environments. Also called convergent evolution.

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Scarcities and Intermediaries (1)• Analogue– Scarcity of frequencies– One-to-many flow of

information– Distinctive industry sector– Linear programming – Mediated consumption

environment– National boundaries

Scarcities and Intermediaries (2)• Digital– Abundance of channels– Many-to-many flow of

information– Convergence of sectors– Non-linear

programming (on demand)

– Disintermediation (later more)

– Global

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The Value Chain in Media

Content

Creation

Content

Acquisition

Content

aggregation

Customer

Management

& transac

tions

Marketing

Distributio

n

Consumptio

n/ Usage

After Charles Brown, The politics and economics of media convergence joined summer school Beijing 2010

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The Value Chain in Media – Total Disintermediation

Content

Creation

Content

Acquisition

Content

aggregation

Customer

Management

& transac

tions

Marketing

Distributio

n

Consumptio

n/ Usage

After Charles Brown, The politics and economics of media convergence joined summer school Beijing 2010

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The factory in the living room – Sut Jhally

1. What is it producing?2. To whom is it selling the product?3. Who does the work?4. How do the workers get paid?5. When is this work happening?6. Are the workers aware of this mechanism?

7. http://vimeo.com/270991088. 17:00, 23:30

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Code

• Lessig page 81-82 and page 120-125 (of the book, not the .pdf)

• Lessig:• What kids of code are there?• Why are they interesting for media?

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Code

• This regulator is what I call “code”—the instructions embedded in the software or hardware that makes cyberspace what it is. This code is the “built environment” of social life in cyberspace. It is its “architecture.”And if in the middle of the nineteenth century the threat to liberty was norms, and at the start of the twentieth it was state power, and during much of the middle twentieth it was the market, then my argument is that we must come to understand how in the twenty-first century it is a different regulator—code—that should be our current concern.

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Code

• In this context, the rule applied to an individual does not find its force from the threat of consequences enforced by the law—fines, jail, or even shame. Instead, the rule is applied to an individual through a kind of physics. A locked door is not a command “do not enter” backed up with the threat of punishment by the state. A locked door is a physical constraint on the liberty of someone to enter some space.

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Propaganda Model, Hermann and Chomsky

Scarcities and Intermediaries (3)

• What about google? Is that an intermediate?

• If you are not on google you do not exist!

• The power of the algorithm, of the architecture, of code…

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The Digital Divide

• The developing world• Women• Black people in the US

• Instead of equalizing it can deepen the inequality

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The Promises of the New

• The Digital Sublime, 2004, Vincent Mosco

• “The nerve of international life, transmitting knowledge of events, removing causes of misunderstanding, and promoting peace and harmony throughout the world”

• “Our whole human existence is being transformed”• “Every home has the potential of becoming an

extension of […] Harvard University.”

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What happened to the radio (or TV for that matter)?

• It had this potential• It got capitalized• The state paid for the networks and

infrastructure and the capitalist business world uses it for advertisement.

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The End of History

• “The information age and what came before it are totally different worlds, with the new era defined by information itself.”

• “The denial of history is central to understanding myth as depoliticized speech because to deny history is to remove from discussion active human agency, the constraints of social structure, and real world politics.”

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• “I’m someone who believes that because progress will come no matter what, we need to make the best of it.” – Bill Gates

• “Liberal Democracy may constitute the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the final form of human government and, as such, may constitute the end of history”-Fukujama(1992)

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The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism - Bell (1973)

• The economizing mode in which “accepts individuals as its unit of analysis and treat whole societies as the sum total of individual wants expressed in the marketplace.”

• The market has become the arbiter of all economic and social relations, even of a moral nature.

• In fact, we are led in this work to the inescapable conclusion that one ideology, capitalism, admittedly riddled with contradictions, has indeed won out at the expense of […] anything that gets in the way, including a moral sensibility or any sense of limits.

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Cyberspace

• “For Gingrich and his PFF( The Progress and Freedom Foundation) colleagues, the Internet is not just a corrective to democracy; it is democracy.”

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The internet is democracy, or is it?

• Put this in conversation with – Jhally (who is the customer?), – Chomsky (advertisement and ownership as filter)

and – Lessig (code)

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The Business Model: Social Medium

• Provide a free platform for communication• Have their users provide all the content• Become unavoidable • Then sell targeted advertising and trade with

information about your users

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Copyright David Bradfort

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Their Business Model

• Provide a free platform for communication• Have their users provide all the content• Become unavoidable • Then sell targeted advertising and trade with

information about your users

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• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIw8kGulmB8

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Political Change

• The “Twitter Revolutions” of the “Arab Spring”?• Media as a tool for free speech, democracy,

freedom…• Or what?

• The role is often overestimated. The media itself is neutral at best and can be used by both sides.

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Unavoidable?

• Try to live without facebook for a while. Or without any kind of google service!

• So if you need to use it, shouldn’t it be regulated? Or even public?

• Corporate interests governing code governing social interaction

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The power of the algorithm? Or just what happens with hypertext?

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The History of Media Development …

• …and how it disappointed every single step of the way

• The internet/digital media as well?• We will see… as soon as it retreats into the

wood works– Electricity– Radio waves– Digital media

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The conclusion Moscow draws

“Concepts lead to questions. As a mythic brand, globalization leads only to only response: Amen.”

“The redeeming power of the market has proven to be a dangerous illusion. In times of crisis, neoliberalism has no solution to offer. Fundamental truth that were pushed to the side return to the fore. Without taxation, there can be no state. Without a public sphere, democracy and civil society, there can be no legitimacy. And without legitimacy, no security.”

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The future… Either this…

• Hopefully open source

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Or this…

• Fully commercialized social interaction and private life

• Paying with facebook currency online• All information about us collected centrally• We are totally transparent, ready to be abused

by companies and states alike, and we gave away all this information for free (moreless)

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Liquid Life, Deuze

• An attempt for a link between political economy and individual identity

• The notion of Precarity• Knowledge work with digital media• How does this article relate to your own

private/professional life and this project?

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The way it can make change happen?

• Well, that is up to you. • But here might be some practical advice.

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Some basic ideas for starting out

Publicity for a project with social media1. Get the services you want to use (facebook,

twitter, wordpress, flickr, tumblr, youtube) working together

2. Getting the first users is the hardest3. Maintain the sites, provide new content, be

active in the forums

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The services you want to use working together

Getting the first users is the hardest

“Diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated through media over time among members of a social system”

-Everett Rogers

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Maintain growth

• Maintain the sites, provide new content, be active in the forums… THIS IS NOT TRIVIAL

• Most restaurants go out of business because they do not last long enough to finally make money but…

• Most sites get made and abandoned

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Questions?

• Patrick.prax@im.uu.se

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• Business model of corporate broadcasters• Filters over news production, probaganda• Precarious work• Code

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• The additional voluntary reading will be:• “Manufacturing Consent” by Hermann and

Chomsky, First Chapter• Conclusion of “The Digital Sublime” by Vincent

Moscow• Gill, full article• What will this give to you?

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Sherry Turkle, 2004, How Computers change the way we think

• Privacy

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Sherry Turkle, 2004, How Computers change the way we think

• Powerpoint instead of powerful ideas

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Sherry Turkle, 2004, How Computers change the way we think

• Simulations and their discontent

Media Globalization Effects

• Media Globalization promotes:– Opportunities for shared information– Borderless communication– Global commerce– And thus…

Media Globalization Effects• …promotes• Liberal democratic ideas and

empowered citizens world wide• People can explore different

points of view through different channels – Less susceptible to propaganda– Spread freedom– Peace and prosperity

Global Media Corporations (1)

“We’re gonna take the news and put it on the satellite and then we’re gonna beam it down into Russia, and we’re gonna bring world peace, and we’re gonna get rich in the process! Thank you very much! Good luck!”

- Ted Turner, Founder of CNN

Global Media Corporations (2)

• Ranging across different media – books, newspapers, magazines, broadcast TV, cable and satellite, film, music and internet

• Promoting and influencing politics • Working with local governments (e.g. Chinese)

to suppress press freedom• “War on journalism” though monopole-like

powers

Cultural Imperialism (1)

“the sum of processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured and forced , and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominant centre of the system”

- Schiller, 1976

Cultural Imperialism (2)

• Global media corporations influence national policy towards deregulation and privatization, reduced funding of public service and non-commercial media

Cultural Imperialism (3)• …leading to– Spread of individualistic

values– Displacement of public

sphere– Erosion of local culture

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Nation States

• Imagined Communities • Global migration and TV satellites have

resulted in big, new, globally scattered diasporic (from “dispersion” ) cultures linked in transnational public spheres

Media and Globalization (2)

• Traditionally media seen as enhancing the national state (creation of imagined community, public space)

• Global broadcasting media uncoupling the state and the culture

• Centralization of cultural production• Broadcasting media globalizing in form as

well as in content.

Cultural Imperialism (4)

• Soft Power

– “achieve desired outcomes through attraction”– “ability to set the agenda in ways that shape the

preferences of others”- Nye, Assistant Secretary of

Defense under Clinton

Critique on Cultural Imperialism

• Inadequate treatment of local conditions• There are new patterns of media flow,

Spanish, Indian, Chinese and Arabic productions – Al-Jazeera, Satellites

• Promotes a regressive national media and culture politic

Cultural Imperialism (5)

• McLuhan asks: What abut the medium?!?

• Effect of the American model of television as a medium– Entertainment content to– Attract audiences to– Sell them to advertisers

– Did you ever think of this before? Where was the watchdog?

Copyright

• Way to control information and entertainment• Totally violated in this presentation• Important factor in international trade

agreements • Digital rights management• SOPA, PIPA, ect.

The Media’s Influence

• Media Content

• Media Effects

• Social Results

The Media’s Influence

• Media Content

• Media Effects

• Social Results

The Media’s Influence

• Characteristics of the Medium

• Effects

• Social Results

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CopyrightDigital Rights Management

• What should Copyright do?• Why would we frame it as “copyright” in the

first place?• Alternative “Urheberrecht”, like the right of

the creator

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The Digital Sublime, 2004, Vincent Mosco

1. Myth and Cyberspace1. Myth2. Cyberspace

2. Cyberspace and the end of history3. The death of distance4. The end of politics5. When old Myth were new

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Multiple Factors

• “economic, political and social forces are as important in determining where we are headed as is an understanding of the technology”

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Myth

• It does not matter if it is right or wrong.• What matters is if it is dead or if it is alive.• Why does it exist?• What does it tell us about people?• “Myth transforms the messy complexities of

history and gives them the pristine gloss of nature.” Barthes (1972)

• “not an explanation, but a statement of fact.”

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Assumption: We have…

1. The perfect state2. Global acceptance of the free market3. Triumph of empirical science

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The Promises of the New

• “The nerve of international life, transmitting knowledge of events, removing causes of misunderstanding, and promoting peace and harmony throughout the world”

• “Our whole human existence is being transformed”

• “Wars are to cease; the kingdom of peace will be set up.”

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…

• “Every home has the potential of becoming an extension of […] Harvard University.”

• “--- will usher in an a new era of friendly intercourse between nations of the earth.”

• “Freedom to escape the reality which is a lie to achieve the reality which is truth.”

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Radio

• Grass-root culture pushed aside• Commercial use– Ads

• Political propaganda• Military• No commons left!

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TV

• The factory in the living room• Large government subsidies harvested to

finance infrastructure for commercial activity• “short term commercial considerations will

dictate the form of the network” Smith (1972)

• Seems familiar?

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• “Television is no instrument of imperialism. It belongs to the people as does radio. It comes at a time in history when the world needs to have an eye kept on it for the welfare of civilization.” – Dunlap (1942)

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What happened to the radio (or TV for that matter)?

• It had this potential• It got capitalized• The state paid for the networks and

infrastructure and the capitalist business world uses it for advertisement.

• People listen to music and watch MTV cribs• Consumerist culture

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“In the political and economic sphere, history appears to be progressive and directional, and, by the end of the twentieth century, has culminated in liberal democracy as the only viable alternative for technologically advanced societies.” – Fukujama (1999:282)

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The promises of the Internet

1. “A new sense of community”2. “Widespread popular empowerment”3. “Without the filters and censors set up by

watchful governments and profit-conscious businesses”

4. “Educational Innovation”