Tagged: social media philosophy RSS

  • thePuck 3:11 am on April 30, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: #amazonfail, Chris Brogan, , Gillmor Gang, Jason Calacanis, Leo Laporte, , , Oprah, , Robert Scoble, , social media philosophy, , swine flu,   

    Social Media Misinformation, Disinformation, and Just Plain Stupidity 

    Twitter 6x6 1/1/08
    Image by apenny via Flickr

    OMG we’re all gonna die of swine flu!

    No, actually, we’re not. In fact, very little will happen at all. So why is it being so blown out of proportion? Think about this…more people die every day from…well, everything, than swine flu. Name it. Even the common cold has a higher body count. More people have died of being blown up in space shuttles than Americans have died of swine flu. Just think about that. Space shuttles. How rare is that? Swine flu is even rarer. So why is everyone freaked out?

    I’ll tell you why…because humans are a panicky bunch. Oh, sure, we like to make myths and stories about ourselves being fearless warriors and unstoppable killing machines, but really we are primates who evolved to live in cooperative groups. We did not gain dominance through martial prowess but through our tendency to work in concert and run when outmatched. Those that didn’t run are no longer with us, genetically or actually. When we try to make humans into these mythic creatures, these warriors, it very often breaks them. Post-traumatic stress disorder, emotional disassociation, and periodic depression are common symptoms of broken humans, but of course there are matters of degree; some are not broken but merely bent, and these often make very good soldiers but very poor humans. While this is regrettable, until humans learn a different way to resolve disputes, it is also necessary. Some must give up their humanity so that others may keep their lives.

    But the rest of us are a fearful lot. We repeat unlikely things because they scare us rather than because we know them to be true. We spread fear and inspire chaos. And, even worse, we give license to ourselves and each other to act in idiotic and horrendous ways, all because we were afraid.

    So enough. Quit it. You are spreading panic and making everyone anxious for no reason. Quit tweeting and retweeting the latest stupid update on swine flu. Stop making Google Maps mashups. Stop posting the latest WHO and CDC figures. Stop. Even if there were a real danger, this chicken-little crap would not be helpful. Save it for the zombie holocaust…I am sure Tom from accounting will get a big giggle out of your last tweets of “OMG ZOMBIES WDFFBKW” as he chomps your brains.

    And on that note…celebrities aren’t celebrities here, so quit letting the media lead you by the nose.

    That’s right, I’m talking about Oprah and Ashton and whoever else wants to ply their dirty little trade here. They don’t get it, and most likely never will. Narcissists don’t do well in social media because they give nothing back. Look at the so-called celebrities’ profiles…look at the ratio. Look at how much they interact. Ashton at least seems to make an attempt…most of the “celebrities” seem to think that Twitter is just another place for them to play “look at me!”.

    The real celebrities of our ranks are those who interact, who have ideas, and who actually do things. Robert Scoble, Howard Rheingold, Tara Hunt, Leo Laporte, Chris Brogan, Brian Solis…we all know the names. The people (and many more, some of them I am lucky enough to know personally) are the real celebrities of social media. And I know some of you are groaning about me listing all these A-listers and crowing about “internet fame” like it’s “real” fame, but hear me out: I don’t know what “real” or “unreal” fame is. All fame seems to be an abstraction; we made up the concept and apply it as a social construct. And on the basis of this construct I say that “internet famous” (I am talking about the Jason Calacanis kind of web famous, not the Numa Numa guy kind, in case you are confused) is more “real”, or at least handed out for better reasons and according to values I am more in agreement with, than the fame dished out by Hollywood, TV, and the music industries. I like our kind of fame…it comes because a person is smart, cool, funny…not because an executive someone decided to promote them and turn them into a cash cow. I will take the Gillmor Gang over The View any day.

    And for my final trick, I will also rant about #amazonfail.

    What the hell is wrong with us? Do we so enjoy schadenfreude that we will leap to offense just on suspicion? I was just as guilty in this one…I jumped up on the issue when it first surfaced in the stream and posted, tweeted, and argued as I usually do about anything remotely related to gay rights. And we were wrong. While Amazon dealt with it horribly and I am still unsure as to whether it was a hack (as was claimed on livejournal) or an honest error on their side, we allowed our collective righteous indignation to flow out and attack with no real information.

    Why care?

    Well, I am a bit shocked at how easily we are all directed. We make a huge noise about how we have taken control of the conversation, but we are really just spinning in circles. If some of our pet theories are true and there is a collective intelligence going on in social media, then this intelligence has just woken up, is barely sentient, and reacts like an anxious teenager: eager to embrace every fad, governed and led around by emotional reactions, and unsure of its own place. If we are to take advantage of this new world, then our “smart mob” needs to get a lot smarter.

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    • Evan 11:40 am on May 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I don't think anyone should be surprised the the social web is no smarter than the masses it'd made up of. By the logic above, which I agree makes sense, Web 2.0 should be akin to us rushing through the trees shouting alerts calls to each other (tweets?) and picking knats out of our hair.

      Not that this is a problem. Clearly our Social mind is infantile and can be reduced to some our core emotions: fear, desire for sex, desire for communication, desire for recognition. But there is also this push to grow and mature.

      Even the borg need a queen.

    • Samantha Thomas 2:06 am on May 1, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      The usual remedy for common cold is just lots of water, fruit juice and also vitamin-C tablets.-;.

    • Logan Robinson 12:04 pm on August 12, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      you can actually shorten the symptoms of common cold by taking lots of vitamin-c*’~

  • thePuck 7:45 am on April 5, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , signifier, , social media philosophy, ,   

    “Do you see what I mean?” How a drunk-driving tweetstorm cast doubt on the solidity of the ‘signifier’ 

    Communication code scheme
    Image via Wikipedia

    Recently, I butted in on a tweetstream. A woman boasted about how she’d been worried about her drunk friend, and that she’d driven close behind her to make sure she got home safely. My retort was that if she was so concerned for her friend’s safety, why was the friend driving drunk? Why weren’t her car keys confiscated, with her ensconced safely in a cab?

    Needless to say, things got heated. She was tweeting in the USA after a long hard night out drinking with her buddy. I was tweeting across numerous timezones fresh eyed, sitting in the morning sun in South Africa.

    I softened my tone.

    Let me rephrase that. In MY opinion, I softened my tone.

    From where I was standing, I felt like I was offering the peace olive.

    That’s not what she took out of my communication. All she could hear was the supercilious, snide, judgemental haranguing of some creep on the southern tip of a continent she couldn’t even stab at on a map.

    I’ve since blocked her Twitter account. I have no interest in following the thoughts of a partygoing condoner of drunk driving.

    But heck… What if we could have aligned our meanings? What if we could have shared access to our inner thoughts? We both tried. But with varying levels of skill and intent.

    A fundamental in communication is verification that one’s message has indeed been delivered intact.

    Because signifiers — the ‘carriers of signs’, the ‘deliverers of meaning’ — are slippery beasts, they shift, and are differently understood from person to person.

    The trouble is that we tend to take our signifiers for granted. We don’t really think for a moment that the signifiers we use — our very words — might run the risk of being misunderstood. We are, after all, communicators, no? And signifiers are, after all, the pack mules of communication.

    When I say the word ‘Love’, for instance, it is a signifier that carries a vast payload. So vast that it’s unlikely you’ll understand it the same way I do. I might be issuing it as a declarative verb. I might be INSTRUCTING you to go out and love!

    You might have ‘heard’ a noun, a wishy washy, ‘Ah, love is such a joy.’ Or a vicious, ‘Love is disgusting, and causes pain and misery.’

    As the sender of a message, I trust and pray that the message I THINK I’m sending is the same one you’re receiving.

    There’s a fair amount of hard work we can do to try and encode our intent into a message. We can provide context. We can use logical thought progressions. We can ground our speech in practical, real-world examples. We can seek verification from those who receive our message.

    But ultimately, no matter how skillfully we encode our messages, the slippery nature of signifiers always eludes us. Put simply… It is impossible for you and me to calibrate our understanding so that what I grasp in the privacy of my own head matches what YOU grasp. You may SAY you get my meaning. I may even AGREE that your summary of my meaning is indeed what I intended. But the signifiers we use are too slippery for certainty.

    This puts pressure on our social media communications. As an avid Twitterer (or Tweeter, or twit, or whatever signifier you’d like to assign to the concept), I’m well aware of the power of the shifting signifier to cause great misunderstanding and anger.

    Here’s the rub. In social media, we’re confined to conveying loads of info in very small channels. Twitter gives us 140 characters to convey our message. So we use ‘lowest common denominator’ words as our signifiers. We simplify our language to fit all of our meaning in. Which means that we lose richness. We dumb down. And even so, our basic words have so much slippage that we’re misunderstood.

    I’ll try and summarize this post as a tweet:

    ‘@royblumenthal: D’ya understand what I think I said? And if so, could you lemme know what you think I said? Significant? And don’t drink’n'drive!’

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    • Michael Hafner 8:04 am on September 18, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      hey that a great post; I´ve written a lot about the meaninglessness of the signifier, but unfortunately most of it in german.
      the challenge with social media and understanding is not only speed and limited space, but in my eyes also the moving and changig contexts:
      if you read my book, I have a fairly good idea about what you are doing
      if you are reading my weppage, I loose a little bit of control – I don’t know where you start, how you come there, what device you use
      if you read my rss feed – I have no idea of how, when, where and what you are actually doing
      and here, it´s actually the worst and most unsecure case: I THINK I have an idea about what you said, and I THINK that what I post here should make some meaning – but shouldn’I actually get back and have a closer look on what you actually wrote? shouldn’t I try to find out more on who you are, to make sure I get your background and know in whcih context you are talking?
      On the other hand – why should I? Your existence, to me, are just a few lines of text, there will probably never be any closer encounter. So why shouldn’t I just take this, do what ever I want, understand it however I think, and not care about your “real” intentions at all?

  • thePuck 7:17 am on April 5, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: @royblumenthal, artist, director, National Speakers Association of Southern Africa, , , Roy Blumenthal, , social media philosophy, Society and Culture, South Africa, visual facilitator, writer   

    Please Welcome Roy Blumenthal to the Social Media Philosophy Project! 

    Image of Roy Blumenthal from Twitter

    Artist

    Roy Blumenthal works as an artist and visual facilitator in South Africa. He provides imagery to express the ideas of people and organizations.

    His Flicker gallery:

    These images become part of presentations. A few examples:

    YouTube Preview Image

    YouTube Preview Image

    YouTube Preview Image

    And a glowing recommendation with images by Roy:

    YouTube Preview Image

    National Speaker, Writer, and Director

    When he’s not making ideas visual for his clients, Roy is a Professional Member of the National Speakers Association of Southern Africa and freelance writer and director in local theater.

    YouTube Preview Image

    Make Him Feel Welcome!

    His first post will be up shortly, and it’s a doozy on the question of implicit definitions and signifiers in language.

    Follow Roy Blumenthal on Twitter!

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    • Brianna Lee 5:52 am on May 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Flicker is really great when sharing photos over friends and families. I love the resize feature of Flickr.~.,

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