Category: media

Pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell’s recent essay in The New Yorker, “Twitter, Facebook, and Social Activism,” is wrong in the way that a lot of his broad-strokes claims miss the finer points. He teases with toss away lines like: “Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all?” His focus is on social media’s ability to connect to strangers. But what about its ability to connect us to each other? What if it can strengthen communities, not pull them apart? My argument that it does hold this potential also runs counter to Robert Putnam’s claim: “My hunch is that meeting in an electronic forum is not the equivalent of meeting in a bowling alley–or even in a saloon.”

My current research is on how place-based communities (or just ‘communities’ in the traditional sense of the word) use social media to shape media narratives and mobilize resources in moments of crisis. It’s still a few stages from publication, but I’ll be excited to prove Gladwell wrong. The more we know about how social media works well in some communities, and not in others, the better we can address inequalities that spill over from the virtual world to the real one.

Update (1/27/11): Tweeters and commentators are directly calling out Gladwell’s thesis:

@monaeltahawy I wonder how Gladwell will feel after #jan25  #egypt and #tunisia, particularly since these were total grassroots

RT @Firas_Atraqchi da ghabi wala eih? totally disagree with Gladwell – his is an ethnocentric approach, Iran is NOT the whole MENA ..

In #Egypt 4 somethng overinflated, useless  we say “Soak it in water&drink it” = Malcolm Gladwell, social media, #Jan25 http://nyr.kr/dBIqZC

Some1 tell Malcolm Gladwell to eat this: #Twitter, #Facebook, and social activism http://nyr.kr/dBIqZC #Jan25 #Egypt

@sandmonkey: This is becoming the region first telecommunication civil war. Our internet & smart phones are weapons they won’t allow us to have. #jan25

(Thanks to PI for the tips.)

You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service. You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone.

Update #1 (2/1/10): The New York Observer reports a little schadenfreude on New York’s Newsday‘s $4 million firewall to have subscribers pay for content. After three months, there were exactly 35 people who were willing to pay for online content. According to reports from reporters, the website is ‘an abomination’ and they are still sore about changes in the media landscape affecting their paper: “People are still mad about losing our national correspondents, our foreign bureaus and the prestige of working for a great newspaper. The last thing we had was a living wage, being one of the few papers where you’re paid well. And to have that last thing yanked from you? It’s made people so mad.”

And then there is Greg Kot’s new book, Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music. The Nation‘s J. Gabriel Boylan writes:

Unlike the introduction of the compact disc, which was developed by major labels and music retailers, as well as Phillips and Sony, the current tumult was unplanned and unforeseen. Digital technology has put far more power in the hands of ordinary consumers to wrest music from its gatekeepers. But crashing the gates has caused the music economy to dip down between cheap and free; people are storing more music on their hard drives than they’re likely to listen to in the next decade, yet major labels, music retailers and even jukebox manufacturers are spiraling toward obsolescence. Offbeat and invaluable aspects of the mass music experience are slipping away as well, from the cranky exclusivity of the niche record shop to the tastemaking role of college radio to the music press itself.

Update #2 (8/7/10): The New York Times has a nice piece on the work of copyright enforcers.

For the end of the semester I like to talk about Deviance and Drugs. It’s a good way to end on a high note. I have some shtick proposing that heroin should be legalized and how I’m an addict myself, of caffeine. But in discussing it with Ben we came upon the ‘uses’ of drugs, which would be a nice connection with Herb Gans’ ‘The Uses of Poverty.’ Ben pointed me to Doug Rushkoff’s book, Cyberia, wherein he illustrates how the computing innovations of the 90s were largely fueled by  MDMA. In an article, ‘E: Prescription For Cultural Renaissance,’ he describes a three-stage process of 1.) breaking down inhibitions, 2.) developing an empathy towards others’ emotional needs, and 3.) nurturing a sense of communal, non-verbal communication. As Ben explained, the thinking behind this is that the drug does different things, manifests itself in different subcultures and, for Rushkoff, as the “fledgling Silicon Alley firms became dependent on Grateful Deadheads and other psychedelics users as programmers, cyberculture became known as a ‘cyberdelic’ movement.” The entire second part of Cyberia, Drugs: The Substances of Designer Reality, is available here. Despite making note of Howard Rheingold’s fashion sense, I have never thought of this before.

Coffee as a substance is not without its historical moment as well. Peter Stallybrass, in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, notes that coffee served as a powerful component matched with the rise of capitalism. Perhaps ‘Spirit’ isn’t the right word. He quotes an 18th Century James Howell:

’tis found already that this coffee-drink hath caused a greater sobriety among the nations… Whereas formerly apprentices and clerks, with others, used to take the morning draught with Ale, Beer, or Wine, which by the dizziness they cause the brain made many unfit for business, they use now to play the good fellow in this wakeful and civil drink. (1986: 97).

This is an old story in the terms of internet history (two years ago), but I almost forgot it when teaching Media & Technology and I wanted to post it here so I would remember it next time. The video ‘Crank Dat’ (along with the dance in the video) because a huge hit, with everyone from MIT grad students to Pari and Harvin‘s ‘Crank Dat Curry Sauce’ doing their own interpretations of the song and dance. It was so successful that when Soulja Boy was signed to a major label the new video portrayed a clueless African American Record Executive having the phenomenon explained to him by two little kids. As a sidenote, the MIT grad student who played a small part in the internet phenomenon received a letter from some lawyer with a ‘cease and desist’ order (view his response here). That, I imagine, would signal the end of the ‘internet sensation’ portion of the song’s shelf life!

Speaking of copyright, here‘s a nice video by law professor Michael Geist about the super secret copyright treaty in the works at present.