Video interview about the book “Social Media and Democracy” (edited by Brian Loader and Dan Mercea)

By Cheryl Jadav, student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster
Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxn4HjbTfYU

If you’re reading this, obviously, you follow social media!

Has politics and political democracy fascinated you? Do you wonder what impacts and what role does social media play, not only in our routinely life but in something as important and broad as politics and democracy?

The interview with Dr. Dan Mercea of City University London highlights the importance of social media in participatory politics. As he suggests, ‘Social Media is an instrument’ that supports democracy.

As Dan Mercea puts in, the book is a ‘fairly dated collection in internet time’. A collection based on a conference held in 2011, this book is for those who are interested in studying the internet and social media, politics and democracy.

Over the last couple of years, we have seen our social networks being flooded by the updates on the political occurrences throughout the globe, be it London or the Occupy Wall Street Moment or the protests on Tahrir Square or in the Ukraine. However, this book on participatory politics will help you understand the non-utopian role of social media in these political situations. One might often believe that social media is the reason behind all the political upheavals seen in recent times.

Democracy is a wide concept and a different perspective can be applied to the various occurrences. For some, casting a vote is democracy. For others, a wider participation of the masses is democracy. Social media aids the wider participation and looks beyond the act of merely casting a vote. As Dan Mercea suggests, social media has enabled more participation from the younger generation. Thus, it could be taken as a game changing act! An act that enables more participation, probably from the masses that might have been possibly left out.

The interview also discusses government surveillance and the power structures that exist and frame social media. A wave of public upheaval has been witnessed by us in places such as Egypt, India, Ukraine and so on. However, what has been the ultimate result? Has the government won or has the mass won?

If your interest lies in understanding social media, be it political or non-political, watch this video for more!

Writing on the wall: Social Media’s first 2000 years. A video about a book by Tom Standage

By Abdullah Anees, student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster

Watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz2l-6yUHbg

At the beginning of our semester we were asked by our teacher Christian Fuchs to write a book review. The book had to be an academic reflection on social media. So I went away and searched for books by authors I could interview face to face.

I came across ‘Writing on the wall’ by Tom Standage, the digital editor of The Economist. In “Writing on the wall”, he argues how the concept of social media initially dates back to the Roman Period one century BC. He took me on an historical journey throughout time and highlighted how concepts of social media played roles throughout history.

From Cicero’s letters to Luther’s pamphlets to the modern day revolutions, Tom Standage discusses how sharing ideas that spread have had influences throughout time. After reading the book I can actually say looking back at history from a social media perspective was very interesting and enjoyable.

Graffiti on the walls of Pompeii or Tom’s comparison of old slates to a modern day iPad set a very engaging theme. However with any book review there are some parts you are left questioning. Questions I knew I would have the opportunity to ask Tom face to face.

Tom clearly outlines his intentions of the book in the introduction. He mentions his focus to be around the rise of social media in Western Europe and America. He admits that he is most comfortable in discussing Western media. However a more suited approach may have been to highlight the historical patterns of both social media in the East and West.

Another view I thought that would have made his work more engaging was if Tom related old social techniques to modern day techniques. One of the questions I asked him was if modern day graffiti could have been linked to graffiti in older societies and how they both were a way of self-expression. Tom explained how modern day graffiti was more of an art form whereas Pompeii graffiti shared slogans and he did not want to mix them together. I can see where Tom is coming from however I believe modern day graffiti be it art or slogans will always be a way for the artist to express themselves.

Once I finished reading the book, I made a final list of questions to ask Tom. This was my second interview I’ve ever conducted on camera and this time I was on my own.

So after a quick crash course on how to setup and use a professional camera and mic, I headed off to The Economist Plaza in central London to meet Tom. In the video included in this post, Tom gave me time to explain any doubts and questions I had, and provided realistic and honest answers.

I would like this opportunity to mention that I thoroughly enjoyed reading ‘Writing on the wall’ by Tom Standage. I would definitely recommend people interested in social media to take time in reading through some of the events that took place in history, which were influenced by media platforms.  I would also like to thank Tom Standage in agreeing to a face-to-face interview and to participate in the production of my video.

Alone Together: A Documentary about a book by Sherry Turkle

By Keurkoon Phoomwittaya, student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster

Watch the video here: https://vimeo.com/90989359

In the early days of social interaction on the Internet I tried out different identities with avatars and used pseudonyms in virtual worlds. I learned and shared ideas in online forums that I was interested in such as Hamster Lovers society or the Thai fiction writers community. Nowadays, social media enterprises such as Facebook attract more people to spend their time on the platforms. At any time and on the move we can simulate ourselves to feel as if we were connected together and close with each other. The little mobile devices in our pockets shape and affect how we think about ourselves and relationships with others.

Because of my interest in such topics I became curious to read the book “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other” by Sherry Turkle. I made a documentary based on the issues that her book discuses. I am still optimistic about the abilities that technology poses for us in order to explore new ideas and innovations. But also, we need to know what cause constraints on human relationships.

Researchers have been looking at the potentials as well as problems of technology. In this documentary Sisse Siggaard Jensen, professor of Digital Communication at Roskilde University in Denmark, mentioned that when the computer was first invented people were amazed by its potential as a medium for communication. Later, the World Wide Web helped the world to be open for new ideas. Then, scholars came to study massive multiplayer online role-playing games and social media. Many see positive impacts when something is new. But, as time goes by they also observe problems that affect us. 

In the past, Turkle was optimistic about the potential of the Internet for trying out various identities. But now, with the popular use of social networking sites such as Facebook, she is concerned that the always-on status of our lives has resulted in isolation and individualisation. She says: “These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time” (Turkle 2011: xii). Her point convinced me that we need to know how the designs of different platforms affect our ability to reflect on ourselves and human relationships.

Jensen points out in the documentary that there are new opportunities for people to find possibilities for enjoyment and happiness in virtual worlds such as Second Life, World of Warcraft or EverQuest.  She sees them as spaces for developing resources and understandings with the help of social roles that are different from people’s ordinary lives. In virtual worlds like Second life people are not limited by their skin colour, gender or physical ability. Jensen et al. (2012) suggest that the ways people build virtual communities or experience extraordinary events through thought-provoking art installations hold the potential for creativity and inspirations (Jensen et al.,2012:3). Likewise, Howard Rheingold mentions in his book “Virtual Reality” that symbolic play is a positive act that draws cognition and culture together. “It’s a mental can-opener for liberating new ideas” (Rheingold 1992: 373). He suggests that imitating social roles through symbolic playing is important for everyone Rheingold 1992: 374). The Internet came with the promise that we could find opportunities to try out as well as enjoy making and exploring different virtual social spaces.

In the documentary, Jensen pinpoints that Facebook is a very limited world. The economy of "liking" posed by Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, is a constraint for creativity. While some spaces on the Internet give us resources to play and learn about ourselves in relation to others, our personal information on Facebook became a raw material for private corporations making profits.

If you are wondering why it is important to know more about the ways in which technology affects our lives and how the designs of the online platforms matter, this documentary is for you. The ‘Alone Together’ Documentary (https://vimeo.com/90989359) will take you on a journey, on which you can learn more about the development of empathic skills holding together relationships through play and creativity, the relationship of computers and humans, and how we use technology throughout our lifetime.

References

Jensen,S.S., Philips, L., & Strand D.L. 2012. Virtual worlds as sites for social and cultural innovation. Convergence. 18 (3), 3-10

Rheingold, H. 1992. Virtual Reality. Great Britain: Mandarin Paperbacks.

Turkle, S. 2011. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each other. United States: Basic Books.

The era of the ‘making and doing’ culture: A video about David Gauntlett’s book “Making is connecting”

By Tianzhang Zhao, student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster

Watch the video here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f-tJ3G5uRg

This video I produced is an interview with David Gauntlett and Simon Lindgren talking about the book ‘Making is Connecting’. David Gauntlett is the author of this work. He is a sociologist and media theorist and works for University of Westminster in UK. Simon Lindgren is a sociologist as well, and a social media researcher, who works for Umeå University in Sweden.

The video is about 30 minutes long and is divided into 9 parts:

The first part is about the relationship between making things, individuals’ happiness, and society. In this book, David Gauntlett promotes that making things would reflect and realize individuals’ values, which would bring people happiness and would further influence society as a whole in a positive way. Therefore, this section is focused on the question if ‘making things’ can raise individuals’ happiness and advance a good society.

The second part is about creativity. As David Gauntlett says in his book, creativity is “a process which brings together at least one active human mind, and the material or digital world, in the activity of making something which is novel in that context, and is a process which evokes a feeling of joy”. In this section, David Gauntlett illustrates the idea of creativity in detail and where his idea about creativity comes from. Simon Lindgren discusses David Gauntlett’s definition of creativity and explains what creativity is to him.

The third part is about the transition from a ‘sit back and be told’ culture to a ‘making and doing’ culture. This section focuses on how this transition happens and the future of the Internet.

The fourth part is about the relationship between the ‘making and doing’ culture and social media. In this section, David Gauntlett and Simon Lindgren discuss if social media be considered as a ‘product’ emerging from the ‘making and doing’ culture.

The fifth part is about how to motivate people to embrace the ‘making and doing’ culture. In the book, David Gauntlett points out that people today are still used to only ‘watch’, ‘listen’ and ‘share’, but do so much participate in making and doing things. Iin this section of the video, David Gauntlett and Simon Lindgren talk about how one can best motivate people to go from the broadcast mode of media use towards real participation.

The sixth part is about how to describe people who use the Internet and social media. Both David Gauntlett and Simon Lindgren do not want use the word ‘audience’ to describe people who use the Internet and social media. So, what term do two scholars employ? You can find out in the video.

The seventh part is about the ‘creative X’. ‘X’ represents the term that can best be used to describe people who use the Internet and social media. In this section, David Gauntlett and Simon Lindgren talk about what is a ‘creative X’ to them and what kind of behavior could be called ‘creative’.

The eighth part is about free digital labour. In the book, David Gauntlett points out that the social media owners are making money from the ‘creative X’ and squeeze their labour. In this section, David Gauntlett and Simon Lindgren talk about their ideas towards this issue.

The final part is about the users’ awareness of free labour. David Gauntlett and Simon Lindgren talk about whether people online have awareness of the free labour issue or not.

Under constant surveillance: A video about the collected volume “Media, Surveillance and Identity”

By María Belén Conti, student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster.

I have directed a movie about the collected volume “Media, Surveillance and Identity” that has been edited by André Jansson and Miyase Christensen.Watch the video interview here! https://vimeo.com/91504300

As early as 1995, John Thompson was talking of a world of “mediated visibility” in which technology was a double-edged sword, since it allowed the few people in power positions to control the many, but also empowered the many to control those few. Since then, many things have changed, with the Internet growing in importance as well as with the appearance of a new actor: social media.

In these social and networked spaces, private and public communications merge and the invisible turns visible. It is no longer easy to maintain the private sphere private and unintended audiences may reach any message we send. But these unintended audiences that have access to our communications are not only other users but also government agencies and companies, as Edward Snowden’s revelations known as the “NSA affair” and the many forms of targeted advertising can testify.

In other words, we are always potentially under surveillance or monitoring by others, either peers, companies or states. Even though that does not mean that we are all the time under one-on-one monitoring, the potential is there. And most of the times, there is a big power asymmetry, since people sometimes do not even know that they are being watched or, if they do, they feel powerless or out of options.

Even though it can be argued that people can use social and networked media for free in exchange of giving up some personal information, as Miyase Christensen explains in the video, people are in fact paying a very big price for that supposedly free use. Mark Andrejevic argues in this context in the collected volume that data has become “the new oil” or commodity exchanged and commercialized for the “free use” of services.

In other words, even though people may think they are the clients of these social and networked media, they are in fact the product being sold to advertisers in order to make profits. What is more, they are “unpaid workers”, as Allmer, Fuchs, Kreilinger and Sevignani argued in the collected volume, since they are producing all the data being sold to the advertisers, who will then target those same users with specific forms of ads, according to their taste and interests.

But is an alternative to that commercial model possible? In fact, there are some alternative social media such as Diaspora* which intend to protect the data of the users. However, people want to be where most of their peers are, so it is hard to make them migrate to this alternative social media. And in the lack of better solutions, or at least until a better idea comes, education and better legislation to protect users are needed, as both Miyase Christensen and André Jansson, editors of the book Media, Surveillance and Indentity. Social perspectives, point out in my video.

Vlogging: Video interview about Dhiraj Murthy’s book “Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter Age”

By Barrie Schooling, student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster

Watch the video interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3u4CyVStk4

Google ‘Twitter book review’ and you’ll get reviews of 1,000 page tomes reduced to 140 characters, for example “The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Beautiful and thought provoking novel of love, obsession, lust and oppression". This sort of activity, indeed every sort of activity on Twitter from the profound to the banal are the subject of a book called ‘Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter Age’ by Dhiraj Murthy.

Having recently written a review of the book I arranged to interview Dhiraj in his Goldsmiths lab and chat to him a bit more about his work and to ask questions that might help to me critically review his work.

In ‘Twitter. Social communication in the Twitter age’ Dhiraj Murthy discusses the platform as it gives ‘ordinary’ people a medium to publish ‘user-generated “news/updates”, Twitter is a ‘social media’ where the ‘social’ is derived from the content being created by users rather than a ‘traditional’ media outlet.

Traditional media content is determined by the producer whereas the process is more democratic in Twitter. Murthy identifies ‘whoever is considered to be an expert or simply worthy of being listened to is potentially determined by consumers rather than producers’. Users can choose what information they wish to receive through the accounts they follow – ‘they can choose from a variety of sources: traditional media, individual commentators, friends, leaders in an occupational field’.

Murthy explores the notion of the ‘global village’ and other’s who see Twitter as the realisation of the global village, for example ‘fashion enthusiasts can interact with fashionistas in London and Paris, regardless of where they live’.

On one hand Twitter ‘can be thought of as a megaphone that makes public the voices/conversations of any individual or entity’ but yet if the voices ‘reflect influence already present in traditional media’ then it isn’t truly a democratizing technology merely a different medium for the same messages. Murthy presents an ‘event society’ but given that these ‘trending topics’ or ‘events’ can often be a mixture of a major news story alongside a celebrity story he questions what constitutes an event? A major political rebellion is undoubtedly an ‘event’ but is what your colleague had for breakfast?

Murthy observes many changes to traditional journalism, from Twitter adding to journalists’ ‘source mix’ to historically impartial journalists giving personal viewpoints via Twitter to the idea of ‘crowdsourcing’ and he gives examples like users looking through the great volume of MP’s expenses for discrepancies.

The ‘citizen journalist’ is presented through coverage of the Mumbai bombings in 2008 and the US Airways flight that downed in the Hudson River in 2009, both of which were first reported via Twitter. Although the ‘citizen journalist’ has in the aforementioned cases been the first to report on the story Murthy presents a case for the traditional news media still being the main reference point for verification of the story.

Throughout the book Murthy is careful not to over- or under-credit Twitter’s importance to the subject at hand, be it in saving lives following a disaster. This chapter on Activism uses statistics to debunk a number of myths about the role of Twitter in Arab Spring uprisings and the so-called ‘Twitter Revolution’.

Whilst not entirely convinced about ‘revolutions’ happening as a direct result of Twitter activity Murthy does constantly note social changes arising as a result of its usage and the chapter ‘Twitter and Health’ provides one such example. Throughout the chapter we are given examples of changes (and limitations) in people’s medical advice and opinion being shared via Twitter, to new support groups forming via Twitter or to the use of hashtags to filter the usually like-minded into the similarly-diagnosed.

I’d like to thank Dhiraj for allowing me to interview him and I hope you enjoy listening to his opinions on the subject.

The contribution of social media to human resource management

Zhao, Tianzhang is a student in the Social Media MA at the University of Westminster.

Social media helped to generate energy and mobilize a community of support in the U.S. presidential election in 2008, which helped Barack Obama to achieve popularity (Jue, et al., 2010). According to Jue and his colleagues (2010), this fervor of political influence would be of particular value to any community activist, no matter their political beliefs or organizational affiliation.

If this were true what would this mean for organisational management? Most organisations seek to engage employees, clients, customers, suppliers and partners in an effort to achieve brand loyalty to their products and services. However, in today’s world political and business leaders cope with increasingly difficult circumstances in achieving these objectives (Jue, et al., 2010).

What to do? Well, social media is a useful platform for leaders to construct and share their strategic goals in a relatively efficient and accessible way. To gain and sustain competitive advantage, leaders need to rely on the engagement and commitment of those they work with, namely their employees and partners. They also could depend on social media platforms to accelerate and enhance employee innovation, engagement, and performance (Jue, et al., 2010); The elements of human resource management in an organization. In other words, social media

As Jue and his colleagues (2010: 2) claimed, “those who are actively using social media in their organizations can be confident that they have new ways to improve their business performance, create long-term capability, and ultimately sustain their success”.

Based on Jue and his colleagues’ work (2010: 74-75), social media would be a great help at work, which would be reflected in the following ways:

1.  Incorporated into a company’s corporate culture and critical to its strategy.
2. cost effective.
3. scales more effectively to meet a global audience’s training needs.
4. engages employees in sharing knowledge and expertise.

For example, we can look at the NHS. In practice, NHS states that social media helps them enhance their human resource efficiency. In their 2013 report on their employers, it was pointed out that firstly, social media offers a great platform for both organizations and individuals to listen and have conversations with people they want to influence and talk to. Secondly, social media provides an online platform for HR managers to highlight the working behavior guidance and HR policies. Thirdly, the next generation of NHS employees would rely on getting information from the internet and mobile devices, therefore, how NHS embraces these social media users for the benefits of employees and patients would be significant in developing a sustainable NHS. Finally, if NHS could trust their employees with the patients’ lives, why can employees not be trusted on social media?

To sum up, the relationship between social media and human resource management has an unexpected change in this dynamic environment. For social media researchers, it should be emphasized that the unexpected function of social media would always emerge along with the changing environment in specific industries or working areas. For HR managers and leaders, it is time to be aware of the importance of social media’s impact at work, and think about how to take the advantage of using social media effectively to develop the organization and promote business performance.

References

CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development). (2013). The role of HR in corporate responsibility. Available: http://www.cipd.co.uk/binaries/6100%20SOP%20Corporate%20Responsibility%20(WEB).pdf. Last accessed 1st Dec 2013.

Jue, A.L., Marr, J.A. & Kassotakis, M.E. (2010). SOCIAL MEDIA AT WORK: How Networking Tools Propel Organizational Performance. United States of America: Jossey-Bass.

NHS. (2013). HR and social media in the NHS. Available: http://www.nhsemployers.org/Aboutus/Publications/Pages/HR-social-media-NHS.aspx. Last accessed 1st Dec 2013.

Social Media – Giving sport stars a voice?

Abdullah Anees is a student in the Social Media MA at the University of Westminster.

Two things I am very fond of are social media and sports, and what better way to relate the two in modern day then a reflective blog on how one influences the other.

As we all know, social media platforms have allowed people to voice their opinions with others worldwide. The difference in a message being shared from any individual to the larger audience has developed at a furious pace since the development of Web 2.0. We now see people, such as athletic celebrities, who we were once accustomed to only seeing on the TV, now becoming vocal on social media platforms. It seems stars are taking their views more public rather than leaving that up to their publicists.

Twitter, Facebook and various other social media platforms have allowed athletes to more readily reach out to their fans to establish a common connection. This common connection is the will to express their opinions and views; they now have a stage to show they have another side to them apart from sports. TV and Newspapers did not really give them a stage to express views on certain issues; and many times they were miss-represented without having a way to reply.

If newspapers and television pick and choose information from these athletes then surely social media allows us to eliminate the press and obtain information directly from these stars? Social media has given people access to direct sources of information in every possible field.

Social media has given the space for these public stars needed to protect their image in times where a candid photograph or a quote could be exploited and taken out of context.

Does a social medium really give them freedom of speech?

Many sport stars have gone on to twitter to express their views on certain events and have received mixed reactions from the online community. This has resulted in them retracting statements made online by deleting posts and tweets. Being in the ‘public eye’ they are expected to behave in an appropriate manner, questioning their actual freedom of opinions.

Being role models of many young children globally, their views and behaviours are constantly monitored on social platforms and you get the feeling the press is ready to pounce on any slip up these stars make. The press will always build stories around sports stars expressing their views and opinions socially.

Another angle I want to mention is the commercial aspect of sport stars being on social media. If a top flight footballer tweets a picture of his branded boots is that a message from his sponsors? Do they really have total control over their tweets? Even in the case of false advertisements from companies who deny they get sponsored athletes to promote to their audience their brand it still has to be questioned.

There are some sports stars that I would love to see on social platforms; however there are numerous reasons why they keep away. Their inability to cope with the ‘digital public eye’ and what they might feel are restrictions of speech being a public figure would be my first opinion.

Would you like to reflect on your research, pose ethical or logistical research questions to the network, or blog about developments in the field of new social media? See your name in print by emailing nsmnss@natcen.ac.uk 

Blurring the limits between personal and professional life

María Belén Conti is a student in the Social Media MA at the University of Westminster.

As a journalist, I usually find myself in a difficult situation when it comes to social media: would it affect my job opportunities if I openly express my opinion of certain topics online as my friends do? Should I always be professional because if anything personal is filtered I will lose my credibility (major asset for a journalist)?

Some may say that the best solution is to have two different profiles, one for personal and other professional proposes (EFE, 2011; Restrepo, 2012). But again, the personal profile is there and the chance of information, opinions or photos filtering to audiences we don’t want to reach is still high.

“You have one identity...The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly... Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity”, said Mark Zuckerberg (quoted in Meikle and Young, 2012, p.129). But is that really the case?

As Erving Goffman (1959) points out in his book The presentation of self in everyday life, we are always performing different roles to different audiences: “When an individual appears in front of others, he knowingly and unwillingly projects a definition of situation, of which a conception of himself is an important part” (p.234-235).

In other words, we won’t show the same persona in our work, in front of our family or with our friends. And that doesn’t make us lose our integrity, even if Zuckerberg doesn’t agree. Those different audiences have different expectations of us, and therefore we will highlight those aspects that better fit the “front” we want to show in each performance.

But, what happens when social and networked media mix those audiences? What if they get access to the back stage that we want to keep private? After all, as Goffman points out, usually we relax when we know we are not being watched. However, with the increased visibility online, those chances are reduced. As Meikle and Young (2012) explain, “convergent media make the invisible visible” (p.129). So that brings me back to the beginning of this post: how does that affect our lives? Are the limits between professional and personal life blurred?

To address this issue, the concept of Foucault’s Panopticon is useful. It implies that the permanent visibility make us modify our behaviour, being more cautious than what we would be if not being watched (Thompson, 1995; Meikle and Young, 2012). I find it interesting that a study among long-distance students (Bregman and Haythornthwaite, 2003) -whose assignments include regular blogposts - confirm that we pay more attention to what we say and how we say it when we know we are being observed and that our contributions may be searched later:

“Every opinion, however well expressed, every joke, turn of phrase, and typographical error remains preserved, leaving a written legacy of an individual’s persona and style” (p.124-125).

The same can be said about photos, videos and opinions we publish online. If something is on the Internet, you cannot be sure it won’t be filtered. Even if we have good management of our privacy settings, our friends may comment or share that post and they may have different privacy settings than ours. So if we don’t want to risk something becoming publically available perhaps we better not publish it anywhere on the Internet.

References:

Bregman, A. and Haythornthwaite, C.(2003). Radicals of presentation: visibility, relation, and co-presence in persistent conversation. New Media & Society, 5 (1), 117-140. [online] Available from: Sage Publications. < http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.90.6651&rep=rep1&type=pdf> [Accessed 30 November 2013]

EFE News Agency. (2011). Guía para empleados de EFE en redes sociales (Guide for EFE’s employees in social media). [online] Available from: <http://www.efe.com/FicherosDocumentosEFE/Gu%C3%ADaEFE-Redes.pdf> [Accessed 1 December 2013]

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life, Harmondsworth: Penguin

Meikle, G. and Young, S. (2012). Media convergence: networked and digital media in everyday life, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Restrepo, H (2012). Borrador manual de estilo en redes sociales (Draft style guidelines for social media). [online] Available from: <http://es.scribd.com/doc/113601191/Borrador-Manual-de-Estilo-en-Redes-Sociales-Hernan-Restrepo> [Accessed 30 November 2013]

Thompson, J. (1995). The media and modernity: a social theory of the media, Cambridge: Polity Press

Reflections on the influence of social media on privacy

Akin Olaniyan is a student in the Social Media MA at the University of Westminster. 

Making sense of the obvious tension between online visibility and privacy is never going to be a straightforward thing for me. Having worked as a reporter and a corporate communication specialist for more than two decades, I have some sense of dealing with public scrutiny of my work. Until now, social media was just for me another platform. If you know newspapers, I used to think, you shouldn’t have problems functioning in the new environment that digital convergence has created.

Or so I thought.

Just weeks after arriving for the Social Media MA at Westminster University, I have come to agree with danah boyd that being visible through social media can both complicate and enrich our lives (boyd, 2012). Social media networking sites like Facebook and Twitter offer new ways of engagement that have collapsed the walls of privacy, sometimes with terrible consequences. Henry Jenkins captures this well when he says, ‘when people take media into their own hands, the results can be wonderfully creative; they can also be bad news for all involved.’ For me, herein lies the irony; the thought that we would be willing to trade off a slice of our privacy for a chance to make ourselves ‘visible.’

The culture of sharing that is one of the tenets of the convergent media environment may be fraught with minefields, but Castells’ point, that, ‘In our society, the protocols of communication are not based on a sharing of culture but on the culture of sharing’ (Castells, 2009) is useful here. The new environment has given us ‘power’ to determine what we create, remix, share, anytime we want and with those we choose.

True, in the social media environment, ‘the media are no longer what just what we watch, listen to or read – the media are now what we do’ (Meikle and Young, 2012). Oh! How we enjoy the newfound freedom, to do away with the middleman and reach out in our network. Never mind that I performed a similar role in a newspaper. Maybe it sounds out of place to ask whether social media serves a critical need. The status updates, the likes and the sometimes, meaningless chatter all serve a need. They bind us together. “Our playful conventions and in-jokes may create insider symbols that help groups to cohere’ as Baym (2010) notes very well.

Notwithstanding, it looks to me like Rosen’s description of the people formerly known as the audience is rather too ‘romantic’. For one, corporate media may no longer ‘own the eyeballs’ as he states but in this process of becoming more active, we lose something important as well. Given what I have leant in just a few weeks, boyd’s argument that, ‘when people assume you share everything, they don’t ask about what you don’t share’ (boyd, 2012), for me, sounds frightening even in the era of ‘Big Brother’. We all have a way of ignoring ‘Big Brother’ until we’re caught in uncompromising positions.

My mind went to Boyd’s position the story of the UK university students whose Facebook profiles were swiped by ratemash.com and published without permission, in the latest example of third party misuse of online data. The all pervasive power of both Facebook and Twitter, to be able to remove whatever exists of the thin line between the private and the public has got me taking a second look at my accounts on social media platforms.

My goal? Cut out all but the most important of my engagements online. Every text, every image and ever engagement is an opportunity to say something and connect. As Baym (2010) says, “…as people appropriate the possibilities of textual media to convey social cues, create immediacy, entertain, and show off for one another, they build for themselves, build interpersonal relationships, and create social concepts….” 

I realize as I do this though, that there’s a chance that I may miss out in other ways but the thought that my profile and other data can be taken, remixed and shared sounds worrying.

Maybe I’m old fashioned but I strongly think there’s a creepy feeling to having a text, say, an unflattering selfie made available on the scale that convergent media makes possible. But having seen the reaction of some of the students whose profiles were swiped by ratemash.com, I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t be embarrassed unless they were in showbiz.

References:

boyd, d. (2012): Participating in the always-on lifestyle. In: Mandiberg, M (ed.) The social media reader. New York/London: New York University Press, Pp 71-76

Jenkins, H. (2008): Convergence culture: Where old media and new media collide. New York/London: New York University Press

Castells, M. (2009): Communication power. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Meikle, G. and Young, S. (2012): Media convergence: Networked Digital media in everyday life. London: Palgrave

Baym, K. N. (2010): Personal connections in the digital age. Cambridge: Polity

Rosen, Jay: The people formerly known as the audience. In: Mandiberg, M (ed.) The social media reader. New York/London: New York University Press, pp. 13-16