[ICTs-and-Society] facebook and you

[Jan Nolin]

I found this discussion very fruitful to move forward in understanding social media. It seems to me that we, largely, lack appropriate concepts to talk about the phenomenon. But we are progressing with the help of metaphors, cartoons and theoretical discussions that are based on separate disciplinary understandings. As I see it, we have major challenges ahead of us concerning the development of appropriate specialized and general concepts. We need different concepts for:

1. Developing disciplinary understanding.
2. Mutual understanding across disciplines (what we are attempting now)
3. Visualizing and popularizing aspects of exploitation which all but a small group of researchers tend to be blind for.
4. Engaging with the leading discourses on Internet development in the research community, i.e. technologists who claim policy attention and research funding for concepts such as the Internet of things, the ubiquitous Web, ambient intelligence, ambient assistant living, digital living, the Internet of people and things etc.
5. Engaging with the leading discourses on social media in popular accounts and in management, i.e. consultants suggesting concepts such as groundswell, empowerment, SoMoLo, etc.
6. Engaging with the data mining community, in order to introduce a critical understanding of algorithmic work (algorithmic identities, algorithmic ideology etc.)

What I'm suggesting is that we need many specialized concepts for a variety of purposes but also a few exceptionally powerful concepts that work in several different contexts.

/Cheers, Jan

>>> Andrew Feenberg <feenberg at sfu.ca> 2012-04-12 18:46 >>>

That is a wonderful cartoon but as you point out it is not necessarily the best analogy. How about this one? In Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan the immortal aliens traveling from one end of the universe to the other to deliver greetings to their distant counterparts get stuck in the solar system by a breakdown in one of their rockets. They are in no hurry (since they're immortal) and decide to set human history going on the off chance that one day humans will make an object that corresponds to the broken part. From their standpoint human history is mostly irrelevant. It only means a small metal object made by humans by accident to correspond with their needs. From the human standpoint of course human history has a lot of other complex meanings. Neither is "right," both are. This would be the relation between the data miners (aliens all) and the human users.  

Perhaps we should consider some other models of communication infrastructure as metaphors at least. For example, is the Internet a common carrier like the telephone in which a sharp separation between medium and message content is orchestrated by the technology? That would explain how it could be both experienced as a space of free communication by users and a money making proposition by owners of the infrastructure. Another model might be the sidewalk, a space where there is very little social control and no profitable enterprise, but which is essential to the profit making activities of businesses situated along it.

I am not sure where this gets us but I feel that the ways in which money is made on the Internet today are quite strange by the standards of business history. This may be why it is hard to agree on a theory of the political economy of the Internet For a more commonplace model consider the French Minitel system which at its height connected 6 million terminals in homes throughout the country. The X.25 protocol was implemented so that every user's name was known, their time spent on each service was tracked, and they were charged by the minute on their phone bill with the revenue split between the phone company and the service provider. Now that's a business model! 




From: "Sean Cubitt" <sean.cubitt at unimelb.edu.au>
To: "Erik Jentges" <e.jentges at ipmz.uzh.ch>, discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 9:40:55 AM
Subject: Re: [ICTs-and-Society] facebook and you


It is real life that is the zoo – Facebook is the myth that makes us believe we are only zoo animals when we choose to be




From: Erik Jentges <e.jentges at ipmz.uzh.ch>
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2012 18:16:43 +0200
To: <discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net>
Subject: [ICTs-and-Society] facebook and you



Thanks to all for the inspiring discussions. 
Sometimes a picture says more than a thousand words (some might know this):

Pig 1 : Isn’t it great ? We have to pay nothing for the barn.
Pig 2 : Yeah! and even the food is free.
Facebook and You
If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer. You’re the product being sold.



After thinking a bit about this cartoon and the analogy drawn to facebook, some unexplainable sociological intuition rather gives me a hunch that users are not so much the product being sold (to whom?) but that facebook is some sort of a zoo, where all visitors are at the same time the animals on display. Those invited can create their own cages, curating and narrating their identities. This still leaves open who is the manager of the zoo (Zuckerberg and his corporation?) and if the zoo has a viable long term strategy. That remains to be seen.

All the best at the conference, greetings,
Erik 


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. phil. Erik Jentges
IPMZ - Institut für Publizistikwissenschaft und Medienforschung
Universität Zürich
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CH-8050 Zürich
Tel. +41 (0)44 634 46 70 
Fax +41 (0)44 634 49 34
e.jentges at ipmz.uzh.ch
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