Transcript Slide 1

Social Media and Society
Sustainable Development, CEMUS
Patrick Prax
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Social Media (Facebook, Twitter,
google services, …) and…
1. their definition
2. their business model
1. Who owns media
2. Who funds media
3. their influence on society and power structures
1. Political change, revolution, a free tool bringing democracy
2. The reality: Digital Divide, Huge corporations,
capitalization of the medium
3. The medium is the message
4. their future
5. 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
The Value Chain in Media
Content
Creation
Content
Acquisition
Content
aggregation
Customer
Management
& transactions
Marketing
After Charles Brown, The politics
and economics of media
convergence joined summer school
Beijing 2010
Distribution
Consumption/
Usage
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The Value Chain in Media –
Total Disintermediation
Content
Creation
Content
Acquisition
Content
aggregation
Customer
Management
& transactions
Marketing
After Charles Brown, The politics
and economics of media
convergence joined summer school
Beijing 2010
Distribution
Consumption/
Usage
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The factory in the living room – Sut
Jhally
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
What is it producing?
To whom is it selling the product?
Who does the work?
How do the workers get paid?
When is this work happening?
Are the workers aware of this mechanism?
7. http://vimeo.com/27099108
8. 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
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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…
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.”
21
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=OIw8kGul
mB8
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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 media
1. Get the services you want to use (facebook,
twitter, wordpress, flickr, tumblr, youtube)
working together
2. Getting the first users is the hardest
3. Maintain the sites, provide new content, be
active in the forums
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The services you want to use working
together
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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
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?
• [email protected]
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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
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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 noncommercial media
Cultural Imperialism (3)
• …leading to
– Spread of individualistic
values
– Displacement of public
sphere
– Erosion of local culture
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
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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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Copyright
Digital 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 Cyberspace
1. Myth
2. Cyberspace
2.
3.
4.
5.
Cyberspace and the end of history
The death of distance
The end of politics
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 state
2. Global acceptance of the free market
3. 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.”
87
…
• “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!
89
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”
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