Companies turned social networks into media because they had no idea how to harness the value of socially useful energy concentrated there.
The real horror to turning networks into media is that it happened gradually, and then all of a sudden. Few noticed. Making connections for modest use was okay. Turning everyone into constant content creators/sinks was not.
I was going to build on the conversation generated on LinkedIn on the article in The Atlantic about the age of social media being over when I discovered to my horror that all my connections, content, and company page were gone. All of a sudden, all I got was a stream of ads. Naturally, I checked with others through Twitter. What a wake-up call! And thank heavens I never relied in LinkedIn for my writing. “Never put all your eggs in one basket,” goes the saying. I say, “create your own basket.”
But let’s get back to the network part of online connections. Ian Bogost says, “The shift began 20 years ago or so, when networked computers became sufficiently ubiquitous that people began using them to build and manage relationships.” If you created a profile on LinkedIn, chances are you did it to connect with colleagues, find contacts and companies, and find jobs more easily.
That was the initial value proposition, the benefit. The social network proposed that the value to you was to centralize all your job- and career-related activities. Address books and spreadsheets ar so 1999, they seemed to suggest. “Social networking had its problems—collecting friends instead of, well, being friendly with them, for example—but they were modest compared with what followed.” Because what followed turned us all into mercenaries.
Whether you see yourself as a celebrity or not, the issue is not you, it’s the systemic drive of social networks to turn us all into unpaid journalists, commentators, and storytellers so they could build their media companies.
While social networking became social media around 2009, the shift in narrative had been happening for a couple of years. Twitter was still a social network in 2008, encouraging and engaging certain features of our nature that are essential to our social lives, helping visualize social patterns and regularities, which humans are very good at picking up:
- the adaptive
- the imitative
- the cooperative
People cannot be understood in isolation, and then summed together. Social reality emerges inherently from the collective patterns born of their interactions. As I wrote at the time, Twitter is a map of several social networks that intersect and overlap long enough to give us a glimpse of threads appearing in other quasi conversations.
Stories emerged, but Twitter never embraced the crowdsourced version, though they announced an initiative using the very same name—Twittertales— a few weeks later, which was never executed (to my knowledge). Then in 2010, Twitter turned into the modern TV. A logical progression.
Still a few years later, it turned us into mobs. A growing body of research suggests a striking similarity between collective behavior in nature and human behavior on social media. Renée DiResta says, “coordinated activism, information cascades, harassment mobs bear striking similarity to this kind of so-called ’emergent behavior’ in nature: occasions when organisms like birds or fish or ants act as a cohesive unit, without hierarchical direction from a designated leader.”
But nature is smarter than the algorithm. “For birds, signals along the network are passed from eyes or ears to brains pre-wired at birth with the accumulated wisdom of the millenia. For humans, signals are passed from screen to screen, news feed to news feed, along an artificial superstructure designed by humans but increasingly mediated by at-times-unpredictable algorithms.” The algorithm picks the seven birds. You can only react. And in doing so, you shape the structure. It’s a cycle.
How does the algorithm pick the seven birds? Commercial incentives. Deni Kasrel says, “I remember back in the day when it was possible to have real conversations via Twitter. While even then it was fire hose of content you could still make genuine connections and have meaningful dialogue. Now it’s a tsunami that was all too clearly coming, with unmanageable currents, which as you note, are more driven by algorithms and money than by value and community.”
When money drives everything, everyone becomes a mercenary. the result is that we get inundated with fake meritocracy. It’s hard now to fathom today how LinkedIn used to be where we made business contacts, got referrals, perhaps even deals. The network version used to make job hunting much easier than they had been previously. Now I’m not sure what it makes it. I cannot even remember the last time someone I worked with and knew even reached out to reconnect – without being prompted by the algorithm of a media company. Can you?
Because the almighty algorithm rules. And it rewards ‘performative,’ emotionally-charged content. Much of what I see here these days is ‘virtue signaling,’ posts done more to get likes/attention than to actually generate value for the network (some more obvious than others).
“If change is possible,” says Bogost, “carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments.” Channeling Marshall McLuhan via Neil Postman, it’s become the modern version of “amusing ourselves to death.”
To understand something is to be liberated from it. It’s up to us to decide whether the Twitter meltdown in public and the LinkedIn blips are a warning of things to come. We have agency and don’t need to take the bait. It’s up to us to ‘confront the brutal facts,’ as James Stockdale said. “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose —with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
We’ve had a good run, but the signs of decline are all there: sports elevated to sacred, celebrity chefs, amusement and apathy (cit. Noam Chomsky, Linguistics MIT). Perhaps then it’s never been a better moment to ask again a timeless question to re-orient. “What is value?” Is perhaps the most urgent, yet neglected, question of our time.
In the 4th Century BC Aristotle thought the Value Problem concerned the best or most productive use of a thing. Unlike today, he made no distinction between value in use and value in exchange. Though it is thousands of years old, the Value Problem still matters because it impacts directly the way we live our life, individually and collectively.
“To win the soul of social life,” says Bogost, “we must learn to muzzle it again, across the globe, among billions of people. To speak less, to fewer people and less often—and for them to do the same to you, and everyone else as well. We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad, deep in its very structure.” I agree, and I’ve been much quieter in social media lately for this reason. Is what we are seeing of value?
John Culkin, a contemporary and friend of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, Herbert Simon, professor of computer science and organizational psychology, and Karl Deutsch, then a professor of government at Harvard, and Martin Shubik, then professor of economics at Yale, saw that we were heading for “a technical triumph, and a social disaster” more than a decade before Mark Zuckerberg was even born. “We don’t know enough about how people believe and act together as groups,” says DiResta.
It’s the system, it’s the structure we need to address. And it starts with interdisciplinary ways to look at the question of value within a social context. Reframing value for humans is essential. Which is why I’m launching a podcast (coming soon) to address the question of value. Through conversations, I will explore the question of value in language and narrative, commerce and ethics, the internet and much more with professors, researchers, lawyers, and experts in communication, semiotics, and leadership.
Together, we’ll engage in the question of what is the best use of a thing, which has been largely lost to history.
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[Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay]