Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Saturday, April 25, 2009
The Hyper-Economy
ON ITS FACE, technology and the many benefits distributed from it have powered social progress for centuries. The printing press, light bulb, telephone and telegraph, even the advent of writing itself as a technology have made it possible for humans to become highly complicated, filled with an entrepreneurial spirit unique to our species.
Technologies, especially recent innovations, have deeply impacted long-standing rules governing both micro- and macro-economics. While the purview of an entirely different discipline and not of communication professionals, it is interesting to me how these fundamental changes in economics have also affected ways that humans communicate, conduct business affairs and generate new opportunities for themselves, and the ensuing implications of that change on society at large.
Of particular importance to those of us who study human communication is the introduction, in the last few years, of the concept of relationship monetization. Let me establish what I mean by this – large social networks including Facebook and MySpace have introduced products to the market which enable the user to send virtual gifts and other items to their friends within that network. These are purchased from the social network in question and results in a financial transaction based on the user’s personal network.
What I find interesting about this model is the impact it has on the traditional communications cycle – where we once had a transmitter and receiver, we now also have a business model. No doubt that people have given one another gifts, probably since the beginning of time; but that was never so intricately woven into a person’s private network of friends as it is today. The transmitter-receiver model plays a large role in the Facebook business strategy as the social network becomes an enabler of the communications cycle, online at least, instead of an intermediary.
This has resulted in what I have come to consider the hyper-economy, the trade of one-to-one based on micro-interests and technology enabling consumers to locate others who share those micro-interests. Postman would probably disdain the advent of the hyper-economy; it is impersonal, goes far afield of oral societies and is founded in the fundamentals of technology instead of human contact, and introduces technology as an intermediary to our lives. The hyper-economy only exists in a virtual way, and does not exist for everyone. But it does impact all facets of society and cultures.
I think often about the impact the hyper-economy has already had, and will increasingly have on the fringe of society in the US. For example, I believe it has fundamentally made living conditions for our homeless worse; the technologies that power it have removed the need for simple things, like, pay phones, which has lead to phone companies removing them. What once provided public access to a communication medium has now become a luxury afforded by those who have the means to purchase mobile phones.
When was the last time you saw a pay phone? This website keeps track of pay phone removals, and reported that over the past nine years, fifty percent of payphones have been abandoned or removed. Think about that and you realize what a burden that places on the people served by something so simple as a payphone; what they once could access reasonably inexpensively now requires they seek increasing forms of assistance just to place a call.
The hyper-economy leads to wide disparities between those with access to the technology that enables it, and those without. It allows those of us who are able to afford the tools to access technology and the Internet to be faster, feel smarter, be more informed and leverage the totality of our relationships in new ways. For those without access to these tools, they move further behind, and the hyper-economy increasingly forces them to the fringe. The impact this will have on human communication may not be known for a few decades, but in the meantime we can at least see the impact it has on the economy and social institutions. In my view, that picture is not pleasant for anyone. Can you see a day when we talk about Facebook-to-Facebook communication?
Technologies, especially recent innovations, have deeply impacted long-standing rules governing both micro- and macro-economics. While the purview of an entirely different discipline and not of communication professionals, it is interesting to me how these fundamental changes in economics have also affected ways that humans communicate, conduct business affairs and generate new opportunities for themselves, and the ensuing implications of that change on society at large.
Of particular importance to those of us who study human communication is the introduction, in the last few years, of the concept of relationship monetization. Let me establish what I mean by this – large social networks including Facebook and MySpace have introduced products to the market which enable the user to send virtual gifts and other items to their friends within that network. These are purchased from the social network in question and results in a financial transaction based on the user’s personal network.
What I find interesting about this model is the impact it has on the traditional communications cycle – where we once had a transmitter and receiver, we now also have a business model. No doubt that people have given one another gifts, probably since the beginning of time; but that was never so intricately woven into a person’s private network of friends as it is today. The transmitter-receiver model plays a large role in the Facebook business strategy as the social network becomes an enabler of the communications cycle, online at least, instead of an intermediary.
This has resulted in what I have come to consider the hyper-economy, the trade of one-to-one based on micro-interests and technology enabling consumers to locate others who share those micro-interests. Postman would probably disdain the advent of the hyper-economy; it is impersonal, goes far afield of oral societies and is founded in the fundamentals of technology instead of human contact, and introduces technology as an intermediary to our lives. The hyper-economy only exists in a virtual way, and does not exist for everyone. But it does impact all facets of society and cultures.
I think often about the impact the hyper-economy has already had, and will increasingly have on the fringe of society in the US. For example, I believe it has fundamentally made living conditions for our homeless worse; the technologies that power it have removed the need for simple things, like, pay phones, which has lead to phone companies removing them. What once provided public access to a communication medium has now become a luxury afforded by those who have the means to purchase mobile phones.
When was the last time you saw a pay phone? This website keeps track of pay phone removals, and reported that over the past nine years, fifty percent of payphones have been abandoned or removed. Think about that and you realize what a burden that places on the people served by something so simple as a payphone; what they once could access reasonably inexpensively now requires they seek increasing forms of assistance just to place a call.
The hyper-economy leads to wide disparities between those with access to the technology that enables it, and those without. It allows those of us who are able to afford the tools to access technology and the Internet to be faster, feel smarter, be more informed and leverage the totality of our relationships in new ways. For those without access to these tools, they move further behind, and the hyper-economy increasingly forces them to the fringe. The impact this will have on human communication may not be known for a few decades, but in the meantime we can at least see the impact it has on the economy and social institutions. In my view, that picture is not pleasant for anyone. Can you see a day when we talk about Facebook-to-Facebook communication?
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Objectivity & Rhetoric
If we look at the infrastructure of modern society’s decision-making, some obvious patterns emerge. As humans we seek to understand and digest information to make good decisions for ourselves and our communities; this has traditionally been made possible by objective news coverage that presents all sides of an issue and enables us to make productive, healthy decisions. However, market forces are straining that delicate web of information and providing a gap in knowledge that is being replaced by person-to-person communication.
We have to consider how we got to where we are now. Historically, society has been based on the tenets of critical rhetoric – even before the written word, critical public discourse has been at the center of democracy and society. Primarily oral societies, according to Walter Ong, consider “words that have magical potency” to describe their thoughts and ideas. This combination of intense critical thinking and use of powerful words led to profound public discourse and distribution of ideas. An oral society requires a deeply involved, high degree of individual critical thinking to be a valued contributor.
The advent of the written word enabled the recording of that discourse paper, elevating one period’s thought to history and providing historical context for all to read, consider and analyze. This removed the barrier of human memory by simply providing a recording device – Ong describe it as a simple technology. The invention of the printing press then made the widespread distribution of these materials possible, removing the obstacle of human intervention entirely by automating, to a degree, the publishing of thoughts, opinions and ideas.
When newspapers came on the scene, they began to fulfill the role of day-to-day archivists of information – they gathered information into objective, opinion-free digests of the news of the day. This provided to individuals a compendium of thought, removing the context of Ong’s “magical potency” by reducing the information to mere fact in written form. This formed a public trust between newspapers and their readers, and thus began a centuries long tradition of journalism.
Along our path in the last century, we have lost control of this public trust by introducing private enterprise and in turn, profits. The delicate public trust established with foundation of journalism relies upon it remaining an untouchable by influence. By turning the press into a business, this undermines its ability to be objective because it draws into question the fundamental service of the organization – does it serve the public, as established, or the shareholders? Can a news organization serve both independent of the other?
The consequence of introducing a mediator, in this case the news industry, to the framework of public discourse is that I believe it has lead a de-evolution in critical thinking. We have become increasingly reliant upon our information sources for analysis rather than facts due to busier lives and unprecedented numbers of responsibilities plaguing our modern lives. This puts a much higher importance on the objectivity of those news sources.
The introduction of computers and the Internet to the mix has only served to exacerbate the challenges of modern public discourse. Increased access to information has made it difficult for news organizations to keep up and stay relevant and has challenged their business models to the point of extinction for many. For many consumers of information, the Internet has replaced and filled the gap; nevertheless, not everyone has ready access to the Internet or the ability to read the news online. Further, because of the challenges placed on the news business, news organizations have been forced to trim staff. This creates severe resource constraints, makes it necessary to rely upon third-parties for more information (which may or may not be trusted sources), and decreases the objective output of a newsroom.
This leaves a gap for the public. We are now facing, with a high probability, a future without newspapers. For the newspapers that do survive, at least under the current business model, demands for output will be so high that it will be very difficult to produce truly objective, unbiased news stories to inform public discourse. As a society we will be forced to turn to online sources, far removed from the ethics and tenets of oral traditions, for news and information.
Finale Video from Rocky Mountain News, Denver
Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.
The challenge for the public will be to return to a place of being highly involved in critical analysis of the facts – as represented online – to make informed, valid decision for ourselves and our communities. In doing so, computers and the Internet may just require a return to our roots in oral tradition.
We have to consider how we got to where we are now. Historically, society has been based on the tenets of critical rhetoric – even before the written word, critical public discourse has been at the center of democracy and society. Primarily oral societies, according to Walter Ong, consider “words that have magical potency” to describe their thoughts and ideas. This combination of intense critical thinking and use of powerful words led to profound public discourse and distribution of ideas. An oral society requires a deeply involved, high degree of individual critical thinking to be a valued contributor.
The advent of the written word enabled the recording of that discourse paper, elevating one period’s thought to history and providing historical context for all to read, consider and analyze. This removed the barrier of human memory by simply providing a recording device – Ong describe it as a simple technology. The invention of the printing press then made the widespread distribution of these materials possible, removing the obstacle of human intervention entirely by automating, to a degree, the publishing of thoughts, opinions and ideas.
When newspapers came on the scene, they began to fulfill the role of day-to-day archivists of information – they gathered information into objective, opinion-free digests of the news of the day. This provided to individuals a compendium of thought, removing the context of Ong’s “magical potency” by reducing the information to mere fact in written form. This formed a public trust between newspapers and their readers, and thus began a centuries long tradition of journalism.
Along our path in the last century, we have lost control of this public trust by introducing private enterprise and in turn, profits. The delicate public trust established with foundation of journalism relies upon it remaining an untouchable by influence. By turning the press into a business, this undermines its ability to be objective because it draws into question the fundamental service of the organization – does it serve the public, as established, or the shareholders? Can a news organization serve both independent of the other?
The consequence of introducing a mediator, in this case the news industry, to the framework of public discourse is that I believe it has lead a de-evolution in critical thinking. We have become increasingly reliant upon our information sources for analysis rather than facts due to busier lives and unprecedented numbers of responsibilities plaguing our modern lives. This puts a much higher importance on the objectivity of those news sources.
The introduction of computers and the Internet to the mix has only served to exacerbate the challenges of modern public discourse. Increased access to information has made it difficult for news organizations to keep up and stay relevant and has challenged their business models to the point of extinction for many. For many consumers of information, the Internet has replaced and filled the gap; nevertheless, not everyone has ready access to the Internet or the ability to read the news online. Further, because of the challenges placed on the news business, news organizations have been forced to trim staff. This creates severe resource constraints, makes it necessary to rely upon third-parties for more information (which may or may not be trusted sources), and decreases the objective output of a newsroom.
This leaves a gap for the public. We are now facing, with a high probability, a future without newspapers. For the newspapers that do survive, at least under the current business model, demands for output will be so high that it will be very difficult to produce truly objective, unbiased news stories to inform public discourse. As a society we will be forced to turn to online sources, far removed from the ethics and tenets of oral traditions, for news and information.
Finale Video from Rocky Mountain News, Denver
Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.
The challenge for the public will be to return to a place of being highly involved in critical analysis of the facts – as represented online – to make informed, valid decision for ourselves and our communities. In doing so, computers and the Internet may just require a return to our roots in oral tradition.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
The Dangers of Anonymity
No doubt computers have changed the shape and trajectory of personal relationships, and I would not make any argument to the contrary. For example, I recently heard a social media consultant speak at a conference and she was extolling the vastness of her online network – proudly proclaiming she has more than 50,000 followers on Twitter, 9000 friends on Facebook, a network of 16,000 on LinkedIn, and so on. This clearly would have not been possible twenty years ago; technology did not allow it, nor did the limits of the human memory. Technology has evolved to make it possible; whether she believes that she really knows her 200,000 or more friends is another matter, but this vastness sets up some unique problems to the medium of computer mediated communication.
First is the problem of identity construction. The possibilities raised by such an enormous network of people are potentially overshadowed by the personality of the person who owns it. There is the potential for vast advances in knowledge in a subject matter, global efforts to combat ethical atrocities, broad collective awareness of a problem. Lacking here are symbolic markers common to our lives – clothing, hair styles (Thurlow, Lengel & Tomic, 2004). We do not necessarily know anything about the person behind the network; some social media tools have made an effort to combat that by making it possible to upload photos, icons or avatars of yourself to give some context. But these little cues are not replacements for the instincts we have developed since childhood.
In constructing their online identities, people may misinterpret their real self, either through disillusionment or by choice. The Johari Window put forth by Luft & Ingram (as cited in Thurlow et. al., 2004, p. 103) is helpful but lacks the key insights relevant to computer mediated communication. Their four quadrants are one-dimensional and do not consider one of the key aspects unique to the Internet – that it enables people to be someone else entirely. Thus, the Johari Window might look different for a person’s online and offline personas.
The second problem is the personalities of those who comprise a person’s network. If we consider the limitations of the Johari Window as it applies to a single person’s online and offline identities, consider the extrapolations to an entire online network – in the example of the young woman I heard speak at a conference, she could be dealing with hundreds of thousands of personalities. People who may reside heavily in the closed quadrant may be tapped as passive in their public persona, but may in fact be very aggressive online. The characteristics of a person’s social network online, thus, may not be reflective of either that person’s genuine personality, nor the genuine personalities of those with whom they connect online.
A good example of the challenges this raises comes from my experience working at Google. While on the communications team there I dealt frequently with their social networking application, Orkut. Orkut was – and still is to this day – wildly popular in Brazil. A major public relations disaster unfolded when a group of young students in Brazil took an online scuffle offline to the real world. The escalating dialogue over a soccer game final score – very innocuous in its beginning tone – resulted in an offline scuffle that led to several murders. This was not a situation where gang members were hanging out on Orkut, nor known criminals; these were young high school students who let their online rage transfer to the real world. This is a critical shortcoming in computer mediated communication; without those symbolic markers and social cues, conversations can quickly escalate into hateful dialogue even if the people involved were not predisposed to such actions.
Third, there is an issue of language, and this can quickly fuel the fire of angry online community members, where things get taken out of context simply due to language barriers. I witnessed this many times at Google, and noted even in my own interactions with journalists for whom English was not a primary language that I could easily take questions or comments out of context and get angry.
All of this raises the question of computer mediated communication being inherently more angry or hostile than face-to-face communication. I do not believe that Internet-based communication is inherently more hateful than other forms. But I do believe that certain conditions in computer mediated communication renders the form more volatile and less stable than face-to-face interactions, which leads to broad generalizations about its dangers.
References
Thurlow, C., Lengel, L., and Tomic, A. (2004). London: Sage Publications.
First is the problem of identity construction. The possibilities raised by such an enormous network of people are potentially overshadowed by the personality of the person who owns it. There is the potential for vast advances in knowledge in a subject matter, global efforts to combat ethical atrocities, broad collective awareness of a problem. Lacking here are symbolic markers common to our lives – clothing, hair styles (Thurlow, Lengel & Tomic, 2004). We do not necessarily know anything about the person behind the network; some social media tools have made an effort to combat that by making it possible to upload photos, icons or avatars of yourself to give some context. But these little cues are not replacements for the instincts we have developed since childhood.
In constructing their online identities, people may misinterpret their real self, either through disillusionment or by choice. The Johari Window put forth by Luft & Ingram (as cited in Thurlow et. al., 2004, p. 103) is helpful but lacks the key insights relevant to computer mediated communication. Their four quadrants are one-dimensional and do not consider one of the key aspects unique to the Internet – that it enables people to be someone else entirely. Thus, the Johari Window might look different for a person’s online and offline personas.
The second problem is the personalities of those who comprise a person’s network. If we consider the limitations of the Johari Window as it applies to a single person’s online and offline identities, consider the extrapolations to an entire online network – in the example of the young woman I heard speak at a conference, she could be dealing with hundreds of thousands of personalities. People who may reside heavily in the closed quadrant may be tapped as passive in their public persona, but may in fact be very aggressive online. The characteristics of a person’s social network online, thus, may not be reflective of either that person’s genuine personality, nor the genuine personalities of those with whom they connect online.
A good example of the challenges this raises comes from my experience working at Google. While on the communications team there I dealt frequently with their social networking application, Orkut. Orkut was – and still is to this day – wildly popular in Brazil. A major public relations disaster unfolded when a group of young students in Brazil took an online scuffle offline to the real world. The escalating dialogue over a soccer game final score – very innocuous in its beginning tone – resulted in an offline scuffle that led to several murders. This was not a situation where gang members were hanging out on Orkut, nor known criminals; these were young high school students who let their online rage transfer to the real world. This is a critical shortcoming in computer mediated communication; without those symbolic markers and social cues, conversations can quickly escalate into hateful dialogue even if the people involved were not predisposed to such actions.
Third, there is an issue of language, and this can quickly fuel the fire of angry online community members, where things get taken out of context simply due to language barriers. I witnessed this many times at Google, and noted even in my own interactions with journalists for whom English was not a primary language that I could easily take questions or comments out of context and get angry.
All of this raises the question of computer mediated communication being inherently more angry or hostile than face-to-face communication. I do not believe that Internet-based communication is inherently more hateful than other forms. But I do believe that certain conditions in computer mediated communication renders the form more volatile and less stable than face-to-face interactions, which leads to broad generalizations about its dangers.
References
Thurlow, C., Lengel, L., and Tomic, A. (2004). London: Sage Publications.
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