Social Media (new series)

A recent blog post by one of my favourite writers, Alexandra Samuel and an article in the New York Times about some research which suggests that teenagers who use the Internet at home are less likely to have good grades at school has motivated me to start a new series on Social Media.

Samuel quotes Matthew Gallion who bemoans the fact that social media are about seeking approval from friends rather than about communicating ideas and emotions. The latter is only possible within the real context of coffee houses and homes. In the New York times article two studies are quoted both of which use relatively small samples to make enormous claims. The researchers brought computers into households with teenagers and discovered that the teenager's school grades went down because of the computer's presence in the household. The second small study found a similar trend in Virginia among poorer households.

Aside from the obvious dangers of taking small studies which inevitably trend in the direction that researchers assume from the start, there is the further and much more serious issue of generalizing to teenagers as a whole. The metaphor that underlies this approach is that the Internet and especially social media are by definition, distractions. But, distractions from what? 

A closer look at the studies mentioned in the Times reveals that little is said about the quality of the educational institutions that the teenagers were attending. The studies abstract the reality of schooling from the home and vice-versa. How about this argument? The schools the teenagers were attending in Romania and Virginia were so bad that they needed the distractions of social media to engage in the interpersonal learning experiences that the schools denied. I am being facetious here, but this constant thematic of social media as destroyers of human capacity and learning, as an interruption to processes that are otherwise not only better, but more substantive belies the fact that social media are a disruptive force and intentionally so.

Matthew Gallion has the same problem in his analysis of the authenticity of the coffee house as a place of communications and interchange. Come on. There is no way of generalizing here. Most "real" conversations happen to be pretty inauthentic to begin with and there is not a special utopian place where conversations break down the conventional barriers that people put up to exchanging real emotions and feelings with each other. 

The problem with these articles and analyses is that the Internet and by extension social media come to represent the opposite of some idealized space that we can no longer access. This is bad social science and a terrible use of anecdotal evidence to make broad claims that have little to do with the realities of modern day communications. 

Communications among people, both interpersonal and social are always fraught with errors, blockages and challenges. There would be little need to communicate if we weren't constantly trying to overcome differences in understanding and perspective. Social media add another potential layer to misunderstanding and understanding — another layer to what we do everyday, which is converse with our family, friends, colleagues and neighbours.

The issues surrounding learning are equally complex. Schools are not necessarily places of learning and are not the ideal environment versus some baser realities in the communities and households we inhabit. As with everything, some schools and some classes in those schools work and others don't. Some aspects of social media work to increase communications among people and others don't.

Distractions are real and always have been. Some teenagers prefer to ride their bicycles instead of studying history. Perhaps it is time to seek new metaphors and models to explain what is happening today. Yes, the Internet disrupts. And yes, all new forms of communications historically have disrupted the social order of their time. 

Ironically, social media might well be the best opportunity we have had in decades to open up learning to many new modalities and to harness the energy of conversation for the public good.  

A Shallow Argument: Nicholas Carr and the Internet

Among its many errors of logic and argument, Nicholas Carr's book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains suggests that the plasticity of the brain — its malleability, means that the generation now heavily involved with, and indebted to the Internet, is having its brains rewired. Aside from the obvious problems in talking about the brain as an electrical system, the supposed plasticity of the human brain is far from being proven although it is in an important area of research in the neurosciences. It is true that the brain is far more capable of adaptation than previously thought, and there is evidence to suggest that learning at all stages of life contributes to a "healthy" brain. However to draw the conclusion, as Carr does, that we are in the midst of a crisis which is redrawing the boundaries of how people think (and most importantly what they do with their thoughts) is alarmist and counter productive.

Carr's panic at what is happening to "us" — distracted multitaskers who no longer read or experience the world with any depth or rigour — perpetuates the century's old hysteria about the effects of new technologies on humans. Stephen Pinker, who actually does research in the neurosciences skewers the simplicity and reductiveness of people like Carr in a recent New York Times article. He says, "Critics of new media sometimes use science itself to press their case, citing research that shows how “experience can change the brain.” But cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk. Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill, the wiring of the brain changes; it’s not as if the information is stored in the pancreas. But the existence of neural plasticity does not mean the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience."

Of even greater interest is Carr's transformation of Darwin's theories of evolution into claims about the speed with which the Internet is altering human biology. This fast forward approach to human evolution has its attractions. After all, humans were not around to witness millions of years of evolution, so it is easy to draw simplistic solutions to explain shifts in human activities and modes of thinking.

Carr's moral panic (taken up and reproduced by hundreds of journalists in newspapers and blogs seemingly desperate for some explanation as to why they are hooked to a medium they haven't thought about with enough depth and historical range) suggests that evolution is like Lego blocks. Once you put a few blocks into place, you have a structure, and once you have a structure, presto! you have evolved!

Carr's argument is just a variation on intelligent design. Replace god with the Internet and you have a power so great that humans are not only its victims, they are growing new brains to accommodate its vicissitudes.

Why do balkanized versions of genuinely interesting and important research projects into human adaptability get transformed into this type of discourse? It is probably not sufficient to suggest that every new technology generates panic among those who least understand either its present use or future transformation.

After all, had Carr taken even a minimum peak at the 19th century, he would have noticed that among other assertions, the telephone was described as a killer of conversation and human interaction (an attitude that lasted well into the 1960's). He would also have noticed that the cinema was described as a terrible distraction that among its many effects would probably lead to the death of literature and theatre. Photography was lambasted for its potential to lie and convince the gullible masses that the truth of an event could be found in images.

But, Carr is not the problem here; he is merely symptomatic of an ever growing and worrying trend to ahistoricism among so called public intellectuals. Those who should be the most sensitive to the nuances of change and the shifting relationships among individuals and their communities and the communications technologies they use are now sanctimoniously declaring that the public is being dumbed down. Carr, of course, never spent any time doing an empirical study because it would have taken him years to complete. He accuses internet dwellers of swimming in a sea of illusions without asking any hard questions about how he came to that conclusion.

His lack of attention to history is what he suggests internet users have devolved into, and, in so doing, he imposes on this vast and ever changing community with all of its diversity and multi-national character a superficiality of intent that he himself creates with his own very shallow arguments.

Are Social Media, Social? (Part Seven)

First let me say that I have really appreciated all of the carefully thought out comments sent in by readers. The last two entries including this one directly and indirectly reference your input.

Go to this site to follow the latest local news in your area. Much like Twitter, FWIX lets you follow the local news based on your interests. This is not dissimilar to the aggregate approach taken by many blogs like the Huffington Post and The Daily Beast. The core difference is that news sites select their bloggers, while FWIX relies on entries produced by locals. A site like NowPublic which started in Vancouver but was bought out by a Denver based investment firm, also relies on public participation although there is a good deal more vetting than on other social news sites.

To what degree is the news different on these aggregate sites and what does this say about the use of media? What is the difference between traditional broadcast news and social news? Or, have we all become journalists, writers and commentators on the communities we live in and on the broader political stories that we share?

Part of what makes social media distinct is the *strength* of the ties between people and the stories and messages they exchange. The suggestion that living in a city makes you an expert on local stories depends on many factors not the least of which is what community you belong to, what your work is and where you live. There is no guarantee that being a local confers any greater depth upon a writer or observer. In fact, in some instances the opposite claim can be made. I would suggest that social news broadens the base of potential stories but that the vast majority of what is published is essentially hearsay. In general, with some exceptions, social news sites become a reflection of a small number of users and writers who effectively take on the job for the community of readers.

Digg uses submissions from readers to build a picture of the importance of some topics over others. Numbers count. In 2006 it became apparent that a small number of writers were manipulating the ratings in order to dominate not only the trends of the time, but also to promote their own blogs. An investigation showed that thirty users had taken over.

The internal picture that we have of the Internet makes it appear as if everything we do and say within its confines will have an audience. The network is so large, that news aggregation in particular gives off the impression of connectivity and currency. There is no obvious way of testing these claims other than through a quantitative analysis of visitors and some in-depth studies of usage patterns and learning experiences. Rating a story is not good enough. Feedback is essential to the lifeblood of social news but in reality only a few sites attract the traffic to make them relevant.

This is where Twitter comes in. The brilliance of this short messaging system was all too obvious during the crisis in Iran last year. It has also been very useful in other crisis situations in Africa and Asia. No claims are made to journalistic truth. Twitter entries are newsy without all the baggage of the news attached to them. Recent events in Thailand bore this out, as protesters were able to keep track of their own and the police's movements throughout Bangkok and news agencies used the Twitter entries to explain what was happening.

However, let's delve a bit more deeply into this. The following quote may articulate some of the complications here:

While the standard definition of a social network embodies the notion of all the people with whom one shares a social relationship, in reality people interact with very few of those "listed" as part of their network. One important reason behind this fact is that attention is the scarce resource in the age of the web. Users faced with many daily tasks and large number of social links default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. For example, a recent study of Facebook showed that users only poke and message a small number of people while they have a large number of declared friends. And a casual search through recent calls made through any mobile phone usually reveals that a small percentage
of the contacts stored in the phone are frequently contacted by the user.
(Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu Social Computing Lab, HP Laboratories, arXiv:0812.1045v1 [cs.CY] 4 Dec 2008)

In the same article, the authors talk about how after analyzing thousands of Twitter users they came to the conclusion that even with a large following, the central motivating factor in most tweets is to keep friends and family updated on both personal and public news. Their analysis also showed that the number of friends and family involved in the exchanges were quite small. Once again, the overall size of the network as a whole is making it appear as if more is actually going on than is possible given the daily habits of most users. As it turns out, a tiny number of Twitter personalities and sites gather in most of the usage. As with the news, over time, readers will default to a small number of acceptable sources.

A December, 2008 PEW study showed that eleven percent of Americans who are online use Twitter. The mental image we have is of something far larger going on and guess where that has come from? Broadcast media, in other words, television, and the twenty or so most visited news sites on the web which are also the most traditional.

More on this in my next posting. Follow me on Twitter @ronburnett

Part Eight 

5 Innovative Websites That Could Reshape the News (mashable.com)

• Fwix Socializes Hyperlocal News (readwriteweb.com)
• How Mobile Technology is Affecting Local News Coverage (mashable.com)
• 3 New Ways To Discover Popular Online Content (makeuseof.com)

Are social media, social?

Warning: This is a long article and not necessarily suitable to a glance. (See below on glances.)

I have been thinking a great deal about social media these days not only because of their importance, but also because of their ubiquity. There are some fundamental contradictions at work here that need more discussion. Let's take Twitter. Some people have thousands of followers. What exactly are they following? And more crucially, what does the word follow mean in this context?

Twitter is an endless flow of news and links between friends and strangers. It allows and sometimes encourages exchanges that have varying degrees of value. Twitter is also a tool for people who don't know each other to learn about shared interests. These are valuable aspects of this tightly wrought medium that tend towards the interactivity of human conversation.

On the other hand, Twitter like many Blogs is really a broadcast medium. Sure, followers can respond. And sometimes, comments on blog entries suggest that a "reading" has taken place. But, individual exchanges in both mediums tend to be short, anecdotal and piecemeal.

The general argument around the value of social media is that at least people can respond to the circulation of conversations and that larger and larger circles of people can form to generate varied and often complex interactions. But, responses of the nature and shortness that characterize Twitter are more like fragments — reactions that in their totality may say important things about what we are thinking, but within the immediate context of their publication are at best, broken sentences that are declarative without the consequences that often arise during interpersonal discussions. So, on Twitter we can make claims or state what we feel with few of the direct results that might occur if we had to face our ‘followers’ in person.

Blogs and web sites live and die because they can trace and often declare the number of ‘hits’ they receive. What exactly is a hit? Hit is actually an interesting word since its original meaning was to come upon something and to meet with…. In the 21st century, hits are about visits and the more visits you have the more likely you have an important web presence. Dig into Google Analytics and you will notice that they actually count the amount of time ‘hitters” spend on sites. The average across many sites is no more than a few seconds. Does this mean that a hit is really a glance? And what are the implications of glancing at this and that over the period of a day or a month? A glance is by definition short (like Twitter) and quickly forgotten. You don’t spend a long time glancing at someone.

Let’s look at the term Twitter a bit more closely. It is a noun that means “tremulous excitement.” But, its real origins are related to gossiping. And, gossiping is very much about voyeurism. There is also a pejorative sense to Twitter, chattering, chattering on and on about the same thing. So, we are atwitter with excitement about social media because they seem to extend our capacity to gossip about nearly everything which may explain why Justin Bieber has been at the top of discussions within the twitterverse. I am Canadian and so is he. Enough said.

Back to follow for a moment. To follow also means to pursue. I will for example twitter about this blog entry in an effort to increase the readership for this article. In a sense, I want you the reader, to pursue your interest in social media with enough energy to actually read this piece! To follow also means to align oneself, to be a follower. You may as a result wish to pursue me @ronburnett.

But the real intent of the word follow is to create a following. And the real intent of talking about hits is to increase the number of followers. All in all, this is about convincing people that you have something important and valuable to say which means that social media is also about advertising and marketing. This explains why businesses are justifiably interested in using social media and why governments are entering the blogosphere and the twitterverse in such great numbers.

Here is the irony. After a while, the sheer quantity of Twitters means that the circle of glances has to narrow. Trends become more important than the actual content. Quantity rules just like Google, where the greater the number of hits, the more likely you will have a site that advertisers want to use. Remember, advertisers assume that a glance will have the impact they need to make you notice that their products exist. It is worth noting that glancing is also derived from the word slippery.

As the circle of glances narrows, the interactions take on a fairly predictable tone with content that is for the most part, newsy and narcissistic. I am not trying to be negative here. Twitter me and find out.

Part Two

An Early Report on the Internet

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation broadcast this report by Bill Cameron at a time when the Internet was a genuinely new phenomenon.

First Report On The Internet - CBC Prime Time News