Social Media (Written 2011)

What are social media?

Social media are a rapidly growing set of technologies that are characterized not just by their popularity but also by the fact that they depend on user-generated content. This is what so-called social media have in common. In the popular imagination this is what sets these media – Flickr, MySpace, Youtube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter and the rest – apart from earlier types of internet sites. From those earlier sites, such as Google, one could glean information. But within social media sites the idea is to collaborate, to contribute, to participate in the process. Moreover, these sites depend on portals. Where once we sought data, now data find us. Our actions are anticipated in social media.

After describing social media in terms of their distinctive characteristics, we turn to look at the questions of what is “social” about them and lastly to ask some big questions that may be asked of any media, but relate them specifically to social media. The questions arise from a Christian way of living in the world and thus comprise a constructive contribution to debates about new social media.

Whereas the earlier kinds of internet use involved mainly search engines and email – amazing but now rather commonplace developments – new social media involve users not merely as consumers but producers of their own content, not as professional media creators but as amateurs or, better, non-professionals. Many different kinds of media are available, for working with photos, video, messages, artwork, news, documents and the like but in general all these services are free to the consumer, or the “prosumer” as the new hybrid producer-consumer is sometimes called. They compete, but they also spin off each other or catalyze new developments.

Interestingly, social media are often dependent on a parallel development to computer services, one that was often underestimated in the early enthusiasms about “cyberspace” – mobile telephony. Cell-phones that developed into multi-faceted electronic devices, seen especially in the iPhone (2007) or the Blackberry (1999), also carry social media. So the brief messages characteristic of some social media, such as the tweets of Twitter, work especially well with mobile hand-held devices. Today, the very idea of un-integrated media seems dated, irrelevant, especially to a younger generation.

Social media have come into the public eye, including among many who do not use them, due to their prominence in various political controversies. Their role in elections, such as the 2008 US presidential election that brought (the Blackberry-using) Barack Obama to the While House, and in political unrest, especially in the Arab revolts in 2011, has been much debated. They have also had a notorious role in the publication of classified documents, as in the Wikileaks revelations of 2010. Some see such developments as contributing to transparent democracy in an electronic age, while others see them as reprehensible violations of state secrecy. Interestingly, not much is yet publicly known about the surveillance capacities of social media, but this too has political import.

The social in social media

Social media is a good term for them, for more than one reason. As we have seen, they grew out of the major twentieth century innovations in information and communication technologies, especially the internet. Social media include wikis, for the participatory production of data, folksonomies or, more technically, tagged metadata (such as flickr, del.ico.us.com, Youtube), and mash-ups, which are hybrids where unrelated services are combined. Social media users build profiles, share information, make friends, send messages, share photos and videos. They also work online and engage with business advertising too. Fans, bands and many other groups now use social media. So here is the first, and perhaps obvious reason why they are called “social media.” But another sense of the “social” is this:

All-too-often new technologies are thought of as if they were just “invented” and then, subsequently, had “impacts.” This is very misleading. Much more helpful to consider why they were invented, by whom and to whose benefit? The “social” in social media refers to the ways that content is “user generated.” How they have developed is due partly to where users have taken them, and there is indeed room for initiative and influence here. But the “social” should be taken more broadly, too. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t just come up with Facebook (which he founded). It’s based on already existing media practices and, of course, was invented not just to give users new opportunities but also to make money – indeed to make Zuckerberg the world’s youngest multi-billionaire.

Needless to say the “social” is also unevenly distributed. Access to social media is first to those who can afford it and to those whose education is suited to its use. Facebook, after all, started at Harvard University. It is also a generational set of media that appeals in the first place to those raised in the age of widespread computer use. For someone like me, who was born in the same year as the transistor; obtained a PhD just before silicon chip was invented (in 1978), and my university, Queen’s in Canada, switched over the email communication while I was head of department in 1995, using computers does not “come naturally.”

Yet another sense of the “social” has to do with the so-called social “revolution” associated with the development of new media. What is really surprising is that people persist in letting themselves think about “revolution” as a suitable word that applies. The so-called “microelectronics revolution” was announced to gushing enthusiasm in the late 1970s[1] and more than 40 years later the same word is being used for later generations of innovation. If there are deeper changes happening, it is not due to the size of electronic components or that “new media” are involved. Are social media truly social?

What’s new about social media?

There are some specific departures from previous kinds of media experiences in the world of social media. But it will be for historians some time hence to look back and determine what was truly revolutionary about these or any other changes. There are, for instance, new relationships between producers and consumers, some curious challenges to earlier ways of thinking about “public” and “private” (as private communications become more and more part of the public world) and some leveling of playing fields as previously excluded persons find a voice. These are phenomena to watch and reflect on but they do not yet portend revolution.

The real challenges associated with social media are not dissimilar from the challenges facing everyone touched by the electronic mediation of communication and information. That is, over the past few decades, human beings, long accustomed to analogue media, have been adjusting to a world dominated by digital media. Increasingly, we now speak the language of computers, for better or for worse. The various features of digital information, that it is manipulable, networkable, dense, compressible and impartial, are the reasons why it sells and, ultimately, the reasons why the impacts of computer-powered communication will be felt.[2]

It is easy to be dazzled by the “new” social media, or any other for that matter. But once the noise of spin and advertising has quieted, what are the important things that are still happening? What technologies can “do” is one thing. What we do with them and what they do with us is far more significant. Those qualitative changes, often long-term, are what we should look for. What do social media mean for how we think about meaning, change, power, organization and the ways that we communicate and connect with others? And how might Christians not only recognize the difference between the superficial and the deep, but also face those emerging challenges?

The big questions

When the pundits get excited about what the new gadget will do and the promoters tell us how the gizmo will change our world, questions Christians should ask have to do with how we relate to each other. In a relational universe this is fundamental. No wonder Jesus’ most difficult question is “who is my neighbour?” Whenever we discuss questions of communication and media, this is a vital dimension. Who we are as human beings and how we take responsibility for others is a better starting point than what ports the machine features or even how useful are the privacy settings in some new social media site.

There’s a sense in which we need to ask again the questions asked in the 1960s and 1970s by Marshall McLuhan. He pointed out that the media – and we could add that the same is true of new media – do not just deliver a message, they are the message. That is, the way that communication happens speaks volumes about what sorts of people we have become. Although it is good to remind ourselves that the media are socially shaped, it is also true that they shape us. At the same time, McLuhan also warned that as new media become ubiquitous, we start to take them for granted. And when we don’t notice them, whatever shaping effects they have may be missed.[3]

The big questions about social media have to do with the idea of “connectedness.” As far as Facebook is concerned this is they key (it appears on the opening web page). It seems that “only connect” is enough. Unlike the struggles in E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End, however, where quite different families attempt to find solid points of contact, the desire for connection on Facebook often shrinks to just that. While many find worthwhile and meaningful ways of using social media – frequently for already-existing communities -- all-too-often connection loses any sense of the quality of relationships or of the value of the information being “shared” between users.

Continuing to use Facebook as the example, the simple fact is that one cannot have a thousand friends in the old sense of the word. Friends are people with whom we forge strong ties that last over time. Friends stick with us, whatever, and can be trusted to care about what happens to us. The way it works, Facebook friends are bound to be people who enjoy only weak ties. A thousand friends are made with a mouseclick. But do they care? Will they support you, challenge you, love you? Doubtful. The weak ties may be useful when you need to find someone who might have the sought-after antique or, more seriously, the organ or tissue you need for transplant or even a suitable life partner, but this is just the point; you cannot immediately find what you seek among your real friends.

Of course, there are many “groups” on social media sites but they tend – as Facebook friends – to be merely people who have a similar outlook on the world (in terms of entertainment, sports and clothing preferences) rather than people prepared to recognize and welcome differences and diversity or to question their prejudices. This is of course precisely what the makers and owners of social media sites want. They delight in the self-classification of users into categories dependent on customer preferences. It helps to advertise and sell, to create consumers for their products and services. Other agencies use social media sites for surveillance as well, of course, and the potential – and actuality – of misuse of personal data is considerable.[4]

Since the start of the internet great hopes have been expressed for what were first called “online communities.” Many seriously believed that the internet would offer a new means of making meaningful links between people. Of course, used wisely, it can be a boon to researchers (the first users of the internet), educators, people with specific hobbies or interests, or people with problems, illnesses or disabilities in common. But the idea that cyberspace could be a new location for genuine human interaction unobstructed by old barriers of time and place is very limited, and, research shows, tends to be limited to those who already have significant things in common and who seek a new medium within which to share them.

One researcher, Barry Wellman, has found in that in technologically advanced societies, the internet tends to encourage weak social ties. He uses “networked individualism” as the most accurate way of describing the phenomenon of “online community.” Manuel Castells, the best-known theorist of “network society” suggests something similar and underscores the idea that there are both gains and losses. There is always a danger, of course, of venerating some golden age of community that never existed, and contrasting it with the shriveled experience of “networked individualism.” But equally, while many strong relationships may be maintained in part through online activity, it is also easy to exaggerate the appearance of new forms of online sociability that are in fact rather thin and often self-seeking.

Using social media

Social media are emerging all the time. New developments are bound to make some of what is said here appear dated in a short time. But some things are worth remembering as we engage these new media (see Internet). Sharing photos and videos, journaling online (blogging), offering responses to ongoing events – all these can have worth while, meaningful and God-pleasing aspects. But as Christians engage social media, they will no doubt wish to offer new directions and, sometimes, go against the stream. Trivia obsession, celebrity culture, consumer orientation, possessive individualism – none of these have a place within Christian practice. But there is every reason to celebrate the good, the true and the noble online, for praising true heroism, for seeking the good of the other, and for sharing our lives in a deep sense. The media may limit what can be done, and sometimes non-involvement is a better way, but seeking opportunities at least to make these media truly social is worthwhile.

—David Lyon