Thoughts on the Social Media Revolution, part 3
A friend of mine posted in response to a previous post: Some of my friends have gone so far as to get rid of their cell phones. They wanted to go back to a land line with an answering machine, only to find this was simply too expensive and complex to manage anymore. They just use Skype now. If you want to get ahold of them, and they're not home, you leave a message and they'll call you back. Weird, huh?
A couple of weeks ago, I called a guy back, and his phone just rang. At first, I thought it was him ignoring call waiting, but I eventually came to realize that he didn't own an answering machine. If you want to talk to him, you call him while he's home. Unsurprisingly, he wasn't particularly young.
Aye, but those are examples of isolated reactions to the event, and furthermore, they're from people who remember what life was like before the advent of cellular phones (to say nothing of mobile web devices), which only supports my point that the SMR is probably in its nascent stages. We all see it coming, but in my opinion, we're all just disagreeing on how deeply social media has penetrated into our culture. Already, it's gotten to the point where two people across the globe can feel that they're part of the same group and feel close to each other, despite never having met each other physically...or never meeting physically, ever.
All disagreements aside, however, this isn't a fad: the social media won't go away, it'll just keep advancing and find more ways to create and maintain virtual communities. It won't be identified as a past event until it either becomes so invasive that we can't imagine our lives without it, or until most of us who can remember what live was like with landlines are dead and buried. The Amish aside, it's going to be like trying to remember what life was like before television.
Sometimes, I feel like Baudrillard when I think about this stuff because the phrase "no longer" rings in my head like a tolling bell. Sometimes the "no longer" signifies something awesome-good, and other times, awesome-bad.
-
BTW, 32, I'm going over your comments again about the importance of the Internet. I still concede that the Internet is one of the, if not the, most significant collaborative efforts in human history. If any anarchist wants to point towards great successes for his beliefs, all he was to do is read up on the history of the Internet. If you want a model to prove that anarchism works, cooperation is possible without an outside coercive force, that it's possible to make people work together without any form of leadership, and people will easily take social capital over monetary gain, the Internet is your answer. Like that line of code that allows you to type in domain names instead of IP addresses? I don't think anyone owns the rights to that: it's just there, and people take it for granted. Sure, there are regulating authorities, but there isn't any centralized authority patrolling the Web with any ability to punish wrongdoers...y'know, other than ensuring that stuff done wrong won't work, but I'm digressing.
Corporations ruined all the fun anyway. While they might not control what is actually on the Internet, they sure as hell can control your access to what you can see, which is going to be a problem, since the current stage of SMR isn't driven by any lofty notions of free exchange of information or communal projects, but by a desire for profit. That being said, I still think the SMR is going to be big, but because it's mostly a result of people buying into a lifestyle that's being aggressively marketed towards them, it'll be big like The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden: you gain something, but in many ways, you're going to be completely divorced from the past in ways that can't be imagined until after the fact.
Where was I...?
If you would, consider the Internet a virtual place, a warehouse of knowledge, then SMR as the series of communities within it - the global village analogy is, and always has been, a line of marketing BS because people tend to congregate in smaller groups, even when clumped up in a single room together - and the significance of SMR becomes clear. The Internet is significant because it changed the way we perceived the world (as well as spatial and temporal relationships) and exchanged information, but SMR stands a fairly good chance of changing how we see ourselves.
Or to be simplify shit, the Internet is the tool, and SMR is how we're learning to live with it. It's not like we said, "Oh, neat, we have download porn and bitch about movies all day on chat boards" and that was it; no, the Internet changed the way we think because we made it important, and SMR is an evolution of that change.
However, I think we might both be falling under Amara's Law when it comes to Computer-Assisted Social Media (a more technical term for SMR). But I'm thinking of Reed, Metcalfe, and Sarnoff's laws, as well as a little bit of Moore: the technology we have now will be half of what we're going to see in a year's time, so I may be giving it too much credit, and I think you're not giving it enough.
I think. I think. I could be wrong. It's late, so maybe my logic's a bit twisted, because I'm fairly certain there's something wrong with this post.
-
That being said, if I don't get a certain phone call or e-mail this week, I've got to hit the temp service. I really don't want to work in a restaurant: that's what I came to Georgia to escape.
A couple of weeks ago, I called a guy back, and his phone just rang. At first, I thought it was him ignoring call waiting, but I eventually came to realize that he didn't own an answering machine. If you want to talk to him, you call him while he's home. Unsurprisingly, he wasn't particularly young.
Aye, but those are examples of isolated reactions to the event, and furthermore, they're from people who remember what life was like before the advent of cellular phones (to say nothing of mobile web devices), which only supports my point that the SMR is probably in its nascent stages. We all see it coming, but in my opinion, we're all just disagreeing on how deeply social media has penetrated into our culture. Already, it's gotten to the point where two people across the globe can feel that they're part of the same group and feel close to each other, despite never having met each other physically...or never meeting physically, ever.
All disagreements aside, however, this isn't a fad: the social media won't go away, it'll just keep advancing and find more ways to create and maintain virtual communities. It won't be identified as a past event until it either becomes so invasive that we can't imagine our lives without it, or until most of us who can remember what live was like with landlines are dead and buried. The Amish aside, it's going to be like trying to remember what life was like before television.
Sometimes, I feel like Baudrillard when I think about this stuff because the phrase "no longer" rings in my head like a tolling bell. Sometimes the "no longer" signifies something awesome-good, and other times, awesome-bad.
-
BTW, 32, I'm going over your comments again about the importance of the Internet. I still concede that the Internet is one of the, if not the, most significant collaborative efforts in human history. If any anarchist wants to point towards great successes for his beliefs, all he was to do is read up on the history of the Internet. If you want a model to prove that anarchism works, cooperation is possible without an outside coercive force, that it's possible to make people work together without any form of leadership, and people will easily take social capital over monetary gain, the Internet is your answer. Like that line of code that allows you to type in domain names instead of IP addresses? I don't think anyone owns the rights to that: it's just there, and people take it for granted. Sure, there are regulating authorities, but there isn't any centralized authority patrolling the Web with any ability to punish wrongdoers...y'know, other than ensuring that stuff done wrong won't work, but I'm digressing.
Corporations ruined all the fun anyway. While they might not control what is actually on the Internet, they sure as hell can control your access to what you can see, which is going to be a problem, since the current stage of SMR isn't driven by any lofty notions of free exchange of information or communal projects, but by a desire for profit. That being said, I still think the SMR is going to be big, but because it's mostly a result of people buying into a lifestyle that's being aggressively marketed towards them, it'll be big like The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden: you gain something, but in many ways, you're going to be completely divorced from the past in ways that can't be imagined until after the fact.
Where was I...?
If you would, consider the Internet a virtual place, a warehouse of knowledge, then SMR as the series of communities within it - the global village analogy is, and always has been, a line of marketing BS because people tend to congregate in smaller groups, even when clumped up in a single room together - and the significance of SMR becomes clear. The Internet is significant because it changed the way we perceived the world (as well as spatial and temporal relationships) and exchanged information, but SMR stands a fairly good chance of changing how we see ourselves.
Or to be simplify shit, the Internet is the tool, and SMR is how we're learning to live with it. It's not like we said, "Oh, neat, we have download porn and bitch about movies all day on chat boards" and that was it; no, the Internet changed the way we think because we made it important, and SMR is an evolution of that change.
However, I think we might both be falling under Amara's Law when it comes to Computer-Assisted Social Media (a more technical term for SMR). But I'm thinking of Reed, Metcalfe, and Sarnoff's laws, as well as a little bit of Moore: the technology we have now will be half of what we're going to see in a year's time, so I may be giving it too much credit, and I think you're not giving it enough.
I think. I think. I could be wrong. It's late, so maybe my logic's a bit twisted, because I'm fairly certain there's something wrong with this post.
-
That being said, if I don't get a certain phone call or e-mail this week, I've got to hit the temp service. I really don't want to work in a restaurant: that's what I came to Georgia to escape.