a criticial approach to social media
DESCRIPTION
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.TRANSCRIPT
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critical approaches to social mediavincent maher | strategist | mail & guardian online
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my background
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Criticalwhat does this mean?
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Max Horkheimer 1937Traditional and Critical Theory
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Critique & TransformationSocial theory that seeks to change society as a whole, rather than merely explain it
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Radical MarxismIn direct opposition to the science of logical positivism and authoritarianism
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EmancipatorySeeks to improve the quality and structure of life for the oppressed
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IdeologyAn instrument of social production, through which capitalism and its power relations reproduce themselves
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False ConsciousnessThe proletariat have been misled…
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Hegemony Gramsci used this to explain why people have a false conception of their own values and interests
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Fetishism Most primitive phase of religion in which people ascribe magical or divine significance to material objects. For Freud this relation was sexual.
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Commodity Fetishism Life is organised through the medium of commodities and the value of commodities is abstracted - use-value and exchange-value is disconnected
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As marketers you will know this
well
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Creating needHow do you create a need for something unless you take it away from someone who already has it?
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The TalismanIn Hermeticism, a talisman is a consecrated material object used to protect and exert some type of power
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The GadgetIn marketing, a device imbued with a magical power that enhances virility and efficiency
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Step back…
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Naïve ArroganceIt seems like history started in 1993, with the birth of the web
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Web 2.0It seems like history started at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference in 2004
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History is valuableUnderstanding preceding events and shifts can help us understand the future.
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Pre 1.0 Technology suddenly became central to the process of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution
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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
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Cultural production What we call “making content”, has a long history
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Time and Space
was compressed first by the horse, then the railway, then the telephone, then the Internet
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Fires in camps Humans based their knowledge and understanding of the world on the personal interactions with people from their own villages, or travellers
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Linguistic Diversity This is why each village could have a different accent
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Local knowledge, regional myth This is also why magic could always thrive at the edge of the forest
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Identity This life, with its relative simplicity, was the anvil against which story-telling forged identity
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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
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Fast ForwardToday our identities are formed via a series of interpersonal interactions but increasingly these interactions are mediated
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MediationTV, radio, the Web, email, IM, SMS, MMS, telephone, recording and playback
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RegulationMediated conversations are subject to regulation, on the level of the medium itself and the market regulation of potential media available and their uses
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Commercial MessagingAs a result of this mediation the very fabric of identity formation is subject to commercial imperatives
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Technology is not transparentMost often, technology is presented as a neutral enabler. However, on inspection, this is not the case
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The types of technology we have access to are limit[ed][ing]
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GoogleA classic example of an opaque system, couched in the language of technological transparency
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Google = KnowledgeThe front page of Google is the starting point of most research these days
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Language Google talk about democracy, accuracy, speed, efficiency, the best results for your query
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What are we doing?We enter keywords and get back a list of resources
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But what is actually happening?An algorithm calculates the hierachy of resources. It’s just an algorithm, a machine right?
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An ideological machineThat constructs the structure of relevance based on a system of values
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How does PageRank actually work?Google don’t disclose this vital piece of information, on the grounds of protecting commercial secrets
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What kind of world do we live in, where the underlying structure of knowledge has legally become a commercial secret??
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PageRankAwards age, popularity and various other criteria that reinforce existing power relations
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Expert SystemsLike driving a car, we accept its output unquestioningly without understanding its inner workings
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Expert SystemsGoogle is one of many expert systems that we have come to trust, as a consequence of technological progress
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Danger Gevaar Ingosi
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Social MediaSomething the Mail & Guardian is firmly committed to pursuing, but er… what is it?
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Democracy, againWith 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
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DestabiliserActually, what the Web does is it destabilises everything in its wake, not always for the better
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Ideology @ wrkBut, actually, what they do is they reinforce a lack of diversity of opinion outside the ideological bounds of the conversation
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Ideology @ workDigg-like sites are supposed to bring democracy to the editorial process by crowdsourcing it
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Ideology @ workIdeas that challenge conventional wisdom [naturalised beliefs of the dominant system] are excluded, whereas those that reinforce it gain popularity
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Geeks in a circleAccording to Habermas, democracy and rational debate require people to to have exposure to alternative points of view
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Geeks in a circleWhat happens is that ideology gets reinforced rather than exposed for what it is, in ever-tightening spirals of audience fragmentation
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GWOT and xenophobiaThis 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
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Nevertheless…The current market is a very exciting one for media, marketers and the newly revived PR industry
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Nothing to loseThinking 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?
Th
e co
rrect a
nsw
er is A
an
d B
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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
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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
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What can we say about the future?Nothing is stable, as the life-cycle of technology accelerates and tightens around itself
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The problem with a tightly coiled springis that it can jump out of your hand and go in any direction
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Thank youAnd now for the Amatomu story