In my essay for Cyborgology, I explore the use of social media to express sympathy. I critique the media phenomenon known as disaster porn and apply it to the the logic of social sharing on Facebook and Twitter.
…documented sharing incentivizes Facebook and Twitter users to traffic in disaster porn. This is the depiction of destruction or tragedy in ways that do not enlighten, but merely sensationalize, pervert, exploit. The ego-stroking affirmations of social networks—the likes and RTs—the ones that push us to share new music and comment on engagement photos, seem perverse when dealing with gory misfortune. From this unsavory perspective, many of the declarations whizzing around Boston look like sympathy but smell like attention-seeking.
…As with older forms of news media, this risks entering into a perverse agenda-setting of the moral. To accept an attention-grabbing rubric to determine cultural significance is to bolster the same kind of news norms that we recognize to be malevolent. These include a preoccupation with the global north, xenophobic privileging of moneyed American interests, highlighting pornographic disaster over chronic, pervasive crime, a disregard for victims who are not white, downplaying environmental degradation with no immediate, visible harm.
Chris Matyszczyk writes on CNET, “In order to peddle a new product that he hopes will take over your Android phone, Mark Zuckerberg seems to feel forced to share details about himself. After all, the more human he appears, the more you can trust him, right?”
“These ads take into account people’s browsing behavior outside Facebook, as captured through cookies, with the aim of offering up messages about products they’ve already shown interest in,” writes Jennifer Van Grove of CNET.
Personalized advertising based on one’s Web browsing isn’t new, but this marks the first time Facebook has allowed advertisers to market their products directly on News Feed. (Prior to Tuesday, advertisers were only permitted to display these ads on the rightsize column of the site.)
As Van Grove notes, these types of ads are extremely valuable to merchants; they know that the products they’re pushing are the same ones you’ve been browsing and they can determine, with precision, whether you follow the link and make the purchase.
The tricky part for Facebook though, is not further alienating its users. Van Grove, and the analyst she quotes, use words like “creepy” and “jarring” to describe the feeling that consumers might have as they come upon their ad-augmented News Feed.
“The tension between experience for its own sake and experience we pursue just to put on Facebook is reaching its breaking point. That breaking point is called Snapchat.” This begins a sophisticated and accessible essay in The New Inquiry by the sociologist Nathan Jurgenson. Fascinated by photographs and the act of consuming images, Jurgenson discusses how the culture of photography has changed under the ever-presence of social media.
For those who live with status updates, check-ins, likes, retweets, and ubiquitous photography, such an understanding is near inescapable. Social media have invited users to adopt a sort of documentary vision, through which the present is always apprehended as a potential past. This is most triumphantly exemplified by Instagram’s faux-vintage filters.
As documentarians and photographers train their eyes to see the profound in the mundane, or to capture movement and emotion in a still image, professional habits become inescapable ticks. Documentary vision is to gaze at the world always with a picture frame in mind, as if every face, tree, shadow or dinner plate is a potential photograph. If you follow Jurgenson’s description, social media has now burdened us all with documentary vision. The real world is just material for Facebook.
Riffing off his earlier piece on Instragram and the faux-vintage photo (No, just because that filter makes me and my friends look like we are from the 1940s doesn’t make the frame important or worthy of memory), Jurgenson argues that the abundance of our Facebook galleries have lessened the value of the photograph. All the rehearsed posing and desperate retouching coupled with the limitless capacity of smartphone snapping and storing makes our digital museums less memorable, not more. In a culture where everything is seen as a potential, sharable post, smiling for the camera can be exhausting. (Pretend like you are having fun! Cheeeeeeese!)
This is why Snapchat, the app that lets you send temporary photographs, represents a refreshing change up.
Temporary photography is in part a response to social-media users’ feeling saddled with the distraction of documentary vision. It rejects the burden of creating durable proof that you are here and you did that. And because temporary photographs are not made to be collected or archived, they are elusive…By leaving the present where you found it, temporary photographs feel more like life and less like its collection.
Jurgenson goes on to say that temporary photography like Snapchat can actually help bolster the position of traditional photography. Amid the barf-stream of endless “Mimosa Brunch!!!” pics and “Were you in a frat?” bro photos, Snapchat is private and thus a more meaningful affair. It’s deliberately about nowness, not “Can’t wait to post this.” Snapchat’s fleeting impermanence reminds us why we take pictures in the first place.
“The ephemerality sharpens viewers’ focus: Once received, a Snapchat count-down is a kind of time-bomb that demands an urgency of vision, a challenge to exhaust the meaning from the image before the clock runs out. Unlike a paper photo that fades slowly over the years, the temporary photo disappears suddenly. Given only a peek, you look hard.”
Last week Facebook unveiled it’s newest product, or what Mark Zuckerberg called Facebook’s newest pillar: Graph Search.
Using natural language, users will be able to search within Facebook for things like: “friends who live in Seattle,” or “friends who listen to Kanye.” It’s very similar to how we use Google. The upshot, of course, is that Facebook is filled with all kinds of personal data that is not accessible to Google’s indexing and the wider internet.
Using our “social graph,” Facebook’s nerd language for the online networks we’ve woven together, Zuckerberg and company will offer a personalized search. Rather than use complex algorithms informed by people’s online behavior (like Google), Facebook will run it’s custom query using our friends and jobs, the things we’ve “liked” and the places we’ve been.
While many tech observers see “social,” “local,” or “personalized,” as the future of search engines, there are reasons to avoid the quick embrace. For starters, Google works pretty damn well. Secondly, if I’m looking to a trustworthy friend to recommend a restaurant or a mechanic, wouldn’t I just text that person?
Another issue mentioned by many reporters is that most people don’t use Facebook or Foursquare the way power users do. So while, in theory, a personalized social search may be more valuable to me it’s also a lot more limited in scope. How many of your friends actually rate their music and movies and then post online? (Usually it’s just that crazy handful of people who blow up your news feed.)
Facebook’s promo vid makes this kind of information culling look like an enriching experience. While I’m very skeptical, I’ll wait for the roll out before I become a full on naysayer.
Even as social media collect an increasing amount of data about our personal preferences, quantifying taste is exceedingly difficult.
The tech journalist Stephen Baker, writing in the NYTimes, frames the recent paradigm shift in advertising like this: Where clever humanists, “Mad Men” advertisers like Don Draper draw from the liberal arts to predict and guide our shopping behavior, search technology like Google has recently enabled a more quantitative approach.
Baker writes:
In the last decade however, those numbers people have rocketed to the top. They build and operate the search engines. They’re flexing their quantitative muscles at agencies and starting new ones. And the rise of social networks, which stream a global gabfest into their servers, catapults these quants ever higher. Their most powerful pitches aren’t ideas but rather algorithms. This sends many of today’s Don Drapers into early retirement.
While this narrative may lead one to believe that advertising on social media is the next frontier, Baker provides evidence suggesting otherwise.
Corporate advertisers are devoting only a modest 14 percent of their online budgets to social networks. According to comScore, a firm that tracks online activity, e-commerce soared 16 percent from last year, to nearly $39 billion this holiday season. But advertising from social networks appeared to play only a supporting role. I.B.M. researchers found that on the pivotal opening day of the season, Black Friday, a scant 0.68 percent of online purchases came directly from Facebook. The number from Twitter was undetectable.
Interestingly, Baker goes on to suggest that perhaps social media’s ineffective marketing is merely a function of firms measuring the wrong things.
Baker points out that while Facebook and Twitter may not lead to direct sales, their likes and retweets are potentially valuable, in nudging our inclinations. He writes, “The impact of new technologies is invariably misjudged because we measure the future with yardsticks from the past.”
In July of this year the CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings posted this on his facebook: “Netflix monthly viewing exceeded 1 billion hours for the first time ever in June.”
Steven Davidoff of the New York Times examines the two critical aspects of this case: 1) Is facebook a public space where investors and analysts know to receive information? And 2) Did the post contain material information?
Struggling to keep pace with our modes of information consumption, regulators reveal their outdated framework.
Documents the ACLU released today show police are using a 1986 law intended to tell police what phone numbers were dialed for far more invasive surveillance: monitoring of whom specific social-network users communicate with, what Internet addresses they’re connecting from, and perhaps even “likes” and “+1″‘s.
Entrepreneur/blogger/geek-genius, Dalton Caldwell has raised $700,000 towards App.net, a company to challenge ad based social networks. Where Facebook and Twitter must cater their services to the advertisers who fuel their business model, Caldwell wants to build a community with only users in mind.
Like Github, an adored software service that charges for premium options, App.net will ask you to hand over some cash. The upshot is that the service/platform/community will never have to answer to advertisers. No banner ads, no privacy concerns, no promoted tweets from Mitt Romney.
In Hollywood lexicon a meet cute is the serendipitous crash between strangers. Usually a man and a woman, the chance encounter ignites the plot and the ensuing laughter and romance. Jack stumbled upon a wilting Rose moments before she leapt off the (then intact) Titanic. Harry initially met Sally in need of a ride to New York City. And Sean Parker spawned his longtime business partnership with Shawn Fanning discussing computer security in a chat room.
The universe has an affinity for coincidence. So why not cull this cosmic co-mingling through technology? By matching strangers based on similarities and interests, companies like Mr. Parker’s Airtime hope to harness serendipity.
Equal parts Skype and Zuckerberg, with a hint of eHarmony, Airtime hopes to expand and explode the social graph. Where social networks remain remarkably confined to coworkers, classmates and college buddies, people discovery offers a way of interrupting routine by using the gravity of shared interest rather than geographic contingency.
Airtime introduces us to “Talk to Someone.” This novel feature pairs up fresh faces using criteria like interests, location, and acquaintances. To protect against the wrong kind of people (think Chatroulette) and to ensure a healthy amount of privacy (you probably shouldn’t be using this), users remain anonymous to each other until an “+Add” request is sent and an acceptance made.
But isn’t “expanding the social graph” just a clumsy way of saying meeting new people? Aren’t people discovery apps, the ones that tell you if like-minded users are nearby, just a creepy kind of ice-breaker? (Text message: “Hey! My ambient GPS mobile technology is telling me that you are also at this conference, let’s bust open our social graphs together…what’s your name?”)
To paraphrase the Easter egg at the beginning of Fight Club: couldn’t all this be replaced by walking up to a person and starting a conversation?
For the timid and the less extroverted, perhaps this kind of unplugged boldness is frighteningly difficult. But to sell an Apple-esque chatting service as a ticket to whimsical friendship seems misguided. The random delight of misadventure, the kind of accidental spark that we crave in monotonous modernity is precisely the kind of thing people discovery is not. In the process of gaining the digital grip, we simultaneously lose our human touch.
Still, Airtime, Highlight, Foursquare, and the Facebook-acquired Glancee, shouldn’t be seen as digital shields against rejection. That would be too harsh. The concept of social discovery—the exposure to things that fascinate—works quite well. When the discovery aspect turns on cultural and commercial products, as in Pandora, Netflix, StumbleUpon, and Twitter, users are willing to take risks, step outside ready-made preferences and cultivate an authentic taste.
But when the thing that is discovered is not a thing at all, but a human relationship, something like happenstance isn’t fostered. Rather, it is a contrived politeness like the paralyzing inauthenticity of a bad first date.
Marketed as if a bubbly Alexia Tsostis or a BFF Justin Timberlake is just waiting for you to sign on, reality reminds us to expect a sea of woozy, disembodied, unflattering faces. As the editors of the literary magazine, N+1 point out, it is impossible to maintain eye contact using video chat.
In the provocative and much talked about documentary, Catfish, the nether realm of the internet persona is explored. The Facebook meet cute swiftly spirals downward, resembling a strange, perverse nightmare. More than one character realizes that to look at a person’s pixelated flesh is far from gazing into their eyes.
While people discovery may satisfy some urge to connect, the kind of serendipity they promise will rarely be found behind a screen.
