Am I My Phone?

Big Kitty is Watching You. (1984 reference!)

The article “You Are Your Phone”, found in the Explorations and Provocations folder on MyLearningSpace, exemplifies Slack’s notion of the Cyborg. Slack, who borrows from McLuhan’s notion of media as an extension of man, argues that no longer is technology a mere extension of ourselves, but rather technology and man embody one entity; the concept of cyborg. I know this has already been discussed in other posts, especially in connection to the short film Noah, however, this article calls for more attention to this concept. While this article exemplifies this cyborg notion successfully, it also illustrates the exploitative nature of social media and technologies. One key quotation sums up this reality adequately:

“If the mere tracking of phone use reveals how we spend our days, our diurnal routines, imagine what would be revealed by a deeper analysis, one that examined the apps we use, the people we connect with, the things we look at and listen to, what we say and what we write and what we like, where we go, what we search for, the photos we take. It’s all there, public self and private self. There’s no shame in admitting the fact: You are your phone” (Carr, 2015).

Here, the author validates what users of current technologies and social media have recently become aware of, we are our technologies. What we may search for, what we like and dislike, where we may want to go on vacation... Everything about ourselves is known to the technologies that most people have become reliant on. As the article notes, most of our phone usage is unconscious. Not only that, but even if some users do not fully understand the implications of going online or using their mobile phones, I would argue that disconnecting completely is the only way to avoid exploitation. Each time we choose to go online and on our phones, media companies alike are tracking our every move, from our online behaviour to our physical presence in order to better understand us and advertise to our very wants, needs, and desires. We are our phones. We are our online social media profiles and our Google searches. As unfortunate and contentious this may be, our readings thus far in the course largely support this reality.

What else is left though? If this is our current web 2.0 reality, what is our future with technology going to look like? Will the information gathered from our usage on the internet and social media platforms continue to exploit us of our content and personal information? When will it be enough? I guess time will only tell.

Youtube as Participatory Community (?)

I first saw this video during one of my undergraduate courses (Sociology of the Media) a few years ago, and thought that it might be interesting to revisit in the context of our course. Though the video is close to an hour long, I'd encourage you all to watch it if you happen to find yourselves with some spare time - I enjoyed watching it just as much the second time as I did the first!

The video is of a presentation by Michael Wesch, a professor at Kansas State University on the history of Youtube and why he finds so much value in it as a cultural object of study. He begins with the story of Numa Numa, and the video produced by Gary Brolsma of himself dancing into his webcam to the song in February of 2005. In April of 2005, Youtube was born, and with it came thousands of videos of people in their homes dancing to Numa Numa in the style of Gary. According to Wesch, "Gary is like the first guy on the dance floor of this global mixer" (4:40). He shows that a quick search of Numa Numa on Youtube produced 58,000 results (This video is quite dated however, so I did a search of my own on Youtube tonight and found that now that number is closer to 1.2 million). Wesch is quick to point out that these people are not dancing to mock Gary, but rather to celebrate new types of community and global connections, transcending space and time, which hadn't been previously known (5:00). Perhaps then, Gary Brolsma's Numa Numa video is an important moment in our world of global connections, as one of the early examples of participatory online communities and remix culture. (Interestingly, some of Wesch's discussion on remixing on Youtube is centered on the many, many versions of Charlie Bit Me, which is a fun tie-in to our discussion last class).

In chapter 3 of Fuchs' book, he provides a list of Jenkins' definitions of participatory culture, being that there are relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing content with others, members who believe their contributions matter, and members who feel some degree of social connection with one another (76, although I am using an e-book of Fuchs and the page numbers differentiate from the hard copy). Based on these definitions, Youtube could be an example of a community which encourages participatory culture among its members. Because Jenkins' definition ignores participatory democracy, which can call issues of ownership and profit into question, there are likely some downsides to the Youtube community which Wesch misses entirely.

Another platform which may be interesting to discuss would be Joseph Gordon-Levitt's HitRecord, which he calls both a social media site as well as a production company. The site encourages users to upload content to the network with the intention of others remixing and building upon their original work, but pays users for any content which generates profit for the company. In this regard, HitRecord encourages more of a participatory democracy than that of the Youtube community, and may be a site to watch for interesting new internet collaboration.

Social/Media/Theory Presentation Schedule

Presentation Schedule

CS 640 Social/Media/Theory

Week of January 12:

HAYLEY

*Jennifer Slack and Greg Wise. “Articulation and Assemblage” (MLS)

*Jeremy Packer & Stephen B. Crofts Wiley, “Strategies for Materializing Communication (MLS)

JILLIAN

*Leah Lievrouw, “Materiality and Media in Communication Technology Studies” (MLS)

*Jennifer Slack, “Beyond Transmission, Modes and Media” (MLS)

WILL

*Mark Hansen, “Media Theory”

*Manuel Castells “Power in the Network Society” (MLS)

Week of January 19

SANTIAGO

Fuchs, Social Media: A Critical Introduction, 1-89

*Adam Arviddson and Elanor Colleoni, “Value in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet”(MLS)

INEEN

*Eran Fischer, “Class struggles in the Digital Frontier: Audience Labour Theory and Social Media Users” (MLS)

*Mark Andrejevic, “Personal Data: Blind Spot of the “Affective Law of Value” (MLS)

Week of January 26           

SAMI

Fuchs, Social Media: A Critical Introduction, 95-178

ERIKA

*Kylie Jarrett, “Who Says Facebook Friends are Not Your Real Friends?: Alienation and Exploitation in Digital Media” (MLS)

*Andrew Herman, “Production, Consumption and Labor in the Social Media Mode of Communication and Production” (MLS)

Week of February 2

MARIA

Gehl, Reverse Engineering Social Media 1-92

KARLY

*Tarleton Gillespie “The Politics of Platforms” (MLS)

*Jussi Parikka, “Cultural Techniques of Cognitive Capitalism: Metaprogramming and the Labour of Code” (MLS)

Week of February 9

SANTIAGO

Gehl, Reverse Engineering Social Media, 92-140

AMARA

*Peter Nagy and Gina Neff, “Imagined Affordance: Reconstructing a Keyword for Communication Theory” (MLS)

*Joshua McVeigh-Shultz and Nancy K. Baym, “Thinking of You: Vernacular Affordance in the Context of the Relationship App, Couple” (MLS)

Week of February 23

JO-DEE

Mosco, To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World, 1-122

WILL

*Jodi Dean, “Communicative Capitalism and Class Struggle” (MLS)

*Ted Striphas, “Algorithmic Culture” (MLS)

*Melissa Gregg, “Inside the Data Spectacle” (MLS)

Week of March 1

SAMI

Mosco, To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World, 123-226

JACQUELINE

*danah boyd and Kate Crawford, “Critical Questions for Big Data” (MLS)

*Andre Brock, “Deeper Data: A Response to boyd and Crawford” (MLS)

*Nick Couldry and Alison Powell, “Big Data from the Bottom Up” (MLS)

Week of March 8

JILLIAN

Frith, Smartphones as Locative Media, 1-79

KARLY

*Jason Farman, “The Materiality of Locative Media” (MLS)

*Stephen Crofts-Wiley, Tabita Becerra, and Daniel Sutko, “ Subject, Networks, Assemblages: a Materialist Approach to the Production of Social Space” (MLS)

ERIKA

* Andrew Herman and Vincent Manzerolle, “The Rise, Fall and Future of BlackBerry™ Capitalism” (MLS)

Week of March 15

KATIE

Frith, Smartphones as Locative Media, 81-146

JO-DEE

*J. Macgregor Wise, “A Hole in the Hand: Assemblages of Attention and Mobile Screens”(MLS)

*Jodi Dean, “Apps and Drive” (MLS)

MARIA

*Gerard Goggin, “Mobile Web 2.0: New Imaginaries of Mobile Internet” (MLS)

*Aaron Hess, “The Selfie Assemblage” (MLS)

Week of March 22

INEEN

Massanari, Participatory Culture, Community, and Play: Learning from Reddit, 1-94

Week of March 29

HAYLEY

Massanari Participatory Culture, Community, and Play: Learning from Reddit, 95-170

AMARA          

Gehl, Reverse Engineering Social Media, 141-166

Week of April 5

JACQUELINE

Papacharissi, Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, Politics

KATIE

Fuchs, Social Media: A Critical Introduction, 179-208, 235-266

Alterative Social Media Structures: Tsu

Source: Tsu

Alterative Social Media Structures: Tsu

For this blog post I wanted to delve a little further into Fuch’s critique of social media structures and platforms as being hyper exploitative of their users (in the sense that users are seldom paid for their revenue generating labour on the platforms). In-class discussion surrounding this issue seemed to indicate that we are quite far from a consensus on whether or not these platforms offer a fair trade for unpaid labour. To hopefully add to this discussion I would like to present the social media platform Tsu. Tsu is an alternative social media structure that aims to pay users for their content. It largely appears to be trying to compete with Facebook by offering similar services to users while giving them a large share of revenue that they generate (90% of advertising and 50% of content driven revenue).

The space constraints of these posts limits the level of analysis that can be offered here but at first glance Tsu seems to be attempting to address the issue of exploitation without appropriate monetary compensation. While it seems that such a social media structure is a step in the right direction there may still be issues with privacy rights regarding personal information, ownership, access to information, and user agency. Further research is needed to determine whether or not such issues are addressed by the platform (although a restructuring of the company so that users have a voice within its operation in the social democratic manner that Fuchs describes in chapter 3 might help).

What I am hoping to point out by introducing Tsu is that an alternative social media structure is not just possible but already exists. Such alternative structures may even be profitable (and thus viable) within our current socio-economic structure (as some may argue that alternative media structures are not viable within neo-liberalism). We do not need to settle or advocate for current social media structures without considering alternatives. I would urge readers to seriously consider whether or not we wish to express to the world, through compliance with existing social media structures, that unpaid exploitation is acceptable within our social system (as servitude is a slippery and dangerous slope).

Works Cited

N.A.. Facebook. Facebook 2016. Accessed 21 January 2016 <www.facebook.com>.

Fuchs, Christian. Social Media: A Critical Introduction. London: SAGE Publications Inc., 2014.

N.A.. Tsu. Tsu LLC 2016. Accessed 21 January 2016 <http://www.tsu.co/>.