SNS and interpersonal relationships

This week’s readings were very interesting, although I was puzzled by the privacy theme. It seems to me like the theme was more how social media are changing interpersonal communication and thus, relationships. While the Boyd article did discuss privacy issues on Facebook, I thought the major implications were how the newsfeeds were impacting how we view, form, or maintain friendships.

The articles discussed a few major points worth pointing out. The first is that social media seem to be quantifying friendship. Now, as Boyd says, people think of their relationships in terms of quantity. How many “Friends” do I have? How many comments are on my wall? How many “likes” do I get on a status or photo upload? Popularity is now a clearly viewable and measurable construct. I remember high school days well, and I can’t imagine how much this idea must complicate the delicate social system that reigns there.

Also, it almost seems like this system of quantification is extending the popularity contest that is high school to the adult world. As Boyd said “Facebook made what was previously obscure difficult to miss (and even harder to forget)” (p. 16). Now people have to anticipate the reactions of others before they “speak” on social networking sites. Marwick and boyd (2010) discuss how ordinary people are using the strategies of the micro-celebrity to brand themselves on Twitter. People tailor the content of Tweets to appeal to their imagined audiences. It seems as if we are coming to the age when we construct our personalities and our image primarily through social networking sites. Are we nothing more than products to that need marketing strategies to be sold?

Lastly, does social media cheapen friendship? The concept of invasion, as explored by boyd (2008) is the idea that although we can only handle so much social information, Facebook assumes that we can keep track of an endless number of people. The result is that “when data are there, people want to pay attention, even if it doesn’t help them” (p. 16). This works in creating pseudo friendships where people form parasocial relationships with ordinary individuals. Where parasocial relationships used to exist only between ordinary people and celebrities, we are now seeing parasocial relationships existing between the computer nerd and the prom queen from high school days. The computer nerd can come to “know” and be “Friends” with the prom queen, when the prom queen doesn’t know anything about the computer nerd.

The Twitter Revolution

Morozov’s book focuses on his ideas of cyber-utopianism and Internet centrisim. He defines cyber-utopianism, as a “naïve belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication.” Internet centrisim is a “philosophy of action that informs how decisions, including those that deal with democracy promotion, are made and how long-term strategies are created.” This idea encourages Internet-centrists to consider the political environment of the situation involved, instead of just blindly applying the Internet as a tool for democratic change regardless of the context.

Many attempts to free nations from authoritarian rule using the Internet have failed miserably. Morozov attributes this lack of success not to the medium, but to the people using the medium as if it were a mythical magic tool that will free us all from our chains. Instead, Morozov urges us to consider the context first and choose the tools and the strategies second. If we fail to do this, he promises a backlash that could actually have effects against democracy. His book encourages us not to give up on using the Internet as a tool to promote democracy, but to use it more wisely.

Morozov’s The Net Delusion could not come at a better time as the topic is particularly timely with the overthrow of Egypt’s dictator, Hosni Mubarak. His first chapter discusses how the media jumped on the Internet bandwagon during the Iranian protests of 2009, exclaiming a Twitter revolution. He details carefully how this type of media attention couple with en email sent to Twitter by the Obama administration, went a long way to undermine the protestors’ efforts and strengthen authoritarian rule in Iran and all over the world.

Morozov details how authoritarian governments began to monitor Twitter and the content of bloggers when these spaces were previously left alone. In some cases, bloggers were arrested or penalized because of their online revolutionary content. I noticed with the recent Egypt protests that the media seemed to jump on the same new media bandwagon, this time hailing Facebook as the magical tool. Fortuna

When considering the context as Morozov asks us to, it makes sense that Egypt’s revolution would have been a success where Iran’s revolution failed. The Obama administration stayed as quiet as possible through the beginnings of this protest because they considered Mubarak to be an American ally. Even though Mubarak is a dictator, there was no political reason for Obama to want him to be overthrown. In fact, Vice President Joe Biden said that Mubarak was not a dictator and should not have to resign, but should be more "responsive" to the needs of his people. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged Egyptian president to implement democratic reforms, but stopped short of saying he should leave his position. In this case, there was no reason for Egypt to suspect that the U.S. was behind the revolution in order to spread Western ideals and other countries didn’t get suspicious either.

Still, Mubarak attempted to block the Internet by restricting access to many sites and considerably slowing down the network. While Twitter was unavailable, more savvy users still found a way to get around the block by using proxy servers. A quote from Philip N. Howard, director of the Project on Information Technology and Political Islam at the University of Washington explains this. “Most of the folks who are tweeting are kind of the digital elite who can set up proxy servers and Twitter clients and get their message out,” he says. “It only takes a few thousand of those folks to feed the rest of us news about what’s going on.” Essentially then, while technology failed the revolution in the context of an authoritarian government, it was still technology that revived it again. As this technology gets more and more advanced, and people get savvier using it, will it be harder for dictators to control? It seems like such was the case in Egypt.

Branding

Wilken and Sinclair’s 2009 article opened my eyes to the both exciting and formidable possibility that cell providers could quite possibly become the new equivalent to the broadcast networks in the near future. Already since their article was published, the mobile phone industry has taken huge leaps and bounds. 3G is a widespread technology and is quickly becoming a thing of the past as 4G enters the picture. Smartphones have developed beyond our wildest imaginations. The “zero-one-two-three” approach that Wilken and Sinclair discuss. Advertisers predict that mobile advertising messages and campaigns will take off when the situation is that there are “zero manuals, one point of entry to the service, no more than a two-second response time and content that is no more than three clicks away” (p. 438).

Certainly we are at the point where this technology exists and is becoming more and more widespread. Still there are many who lack access to smartphones (1 in 5 adult Americans own a smartphone, according to a report by Forrester Research), but the use of text messaging is on the rise, especially in teens. A survey conducted by Pew reveals that nearly 90% of all teens in America now send and receive text messages. So the scenario presented by Wilkens and Sinclair certainly has the potential to be reality. If it does come to fruition that cell service providers become the new broadcast networks, what are the pros and cons that we need to consider?

The positive aspects involved here is that this is a total game changer in many ways. Certainly it offers many perks to advertisers and public relations practitioners as described in Kelleher’s article in that this technology will allow organizations to build relationships with consumers. Also, advertisers will be able to provide individualized content and to take advantage of the GPS technology that is built in to most smartphones to provide advertising at the point of purchase. One benefit for the consumer and/or citizen is that it is becoming easier and easier to access information that one might be interested in almost anywhere at any time with just the touch of a button. A person can use this technology to stand in the mall and research the pros and cons of a specific product right there. Certainly, there are positive implications for this technology that allows for such high individualization.

Yet, there may be negative implications as well. For example, one problem that I see is in the privacy aspects that lie in behavioral targeting. While individuals do seem to enjoy personalization (Sundar & Marathe, 2010), the spying and tracking by corporations that goes into personalized content is a bit scary. Also, if advertising companies will begin to make thousands of different versions of an ad to target individuals more efficiently, who will and how will they decide who gets to see what ad? If advertising companies target specific groups, there could be a chance that the differences between these groups are accentuated which could have grave consequences if the differences lie in socioeconomic status.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I am worried about the amount of power that cell providers could hold if they do become the new broadcast networks. We already grapple with issues of press responsibility because the majority of media products come from a few, giant corporations who are 100% concerned with turning a profit. If the cell companies continue to attempt to retain exclusive control over their customers, they could end up wielding more power than the networks ever thought about having. It’s scary to think that a handful of companies (ATT, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile) could control not only the media content that we consume and the advertisements that are directed our way, but they would also have a stronghold on how we manage our personal relationships as well. Current technology certainly allows for these companies to have a scary amount of information and control over us. As more and more people depend on smartphones for all of their information and entertainment needs, the idea of a Big Brother effect only gets stronger.

References:

Forrester, accessed at: http://forrester.com/rb/Research/state_of_consumers_and_technology_benchmark_2010,/q/id/57526/t/2

Pew, accessed at: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Cell-Phones-and-American-Adults.aspx