I learned it on Instagram today: The Chive has officially left Facebook.
Ok, well they haven’t fully left. But they will no longer be posting their articles, videos and other content directly to their Facebook page. Instead, they will be sharing links only in Facebook, and the links will take people back to their webpage. The way God Herself intended.
Have we reached peak Facebook?
A recent article in the Guardian reports that while people over 55 are still flocking to the social network in droves, a key demographic: teens and young adults, are leaving Facebook or even failing to join in the first place. Teens and young adults, according to the Guardian, are “defecting to snapchat”, and while Facebook initially managed to hang on to this group by buying up Instagram, it hasn’t been able to buy snapchat, and copying the popular features of snapchat on Instagram and the Facebook platform have not served to engage younger users.
Continue reading “Chasing Meaningful Interaction: Facebook’s Declining Value”
Civil society is defined by the London School of Economics as:
“Civil Society refers to the arena of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes and values. In theory, its institutional forms are distinct from those of the state, family, and market, though in practice, the boundaries between state, civil society, family and market are often complex, blurred and negotiated. Civil society commonly embraces a diversity of spaces, actors and institutional forms, varying in their degree of formality, autonomy and power. Civil societies are often populated by organizations such as registered charities, development non-governmental organizations, community groups, women’s organizations, faith-based organizations, professional associations, trade unions, self-help groups, social movements, business associations, coalitions and advocacy groups”
I’d like to put the emphasis on “uncoerced collective action” in that definition, because I’d like to talk about how civil society might be challenged or at least threatened in an era where we organize using digital communication technologies.
If I were to rewrite the iconic 1983 Police hit song “I’ll be watching you” for the information age, it might go something like this:
Every pic you take,
Every move you make,
Every post you make,
Every word you say,
They’ll be watching you.
Oh can’t you see,
They’re using more than cookies.
They’re with you on every road,
On every app you download.
You clicked “I agree”,
And now they see what you see,
They’re tracking you,
And all your pictures too,
They’re always watching you.
This post is some thoughts pulled from a talk that I gave this week at Ryerson’s Start Up School. For more great resources for entrepreneurs, and to see the slide presentation that I gave, check out ryersonstartupschool.com
Since the dawn of PR, influencers have been an important tool for those people and organizations who want to reach others with their message. This is not an exaggeration. The practice of public relations was basically invented when Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, hired women to march in the 1929 Easter Sunday Parade smoking cigarettes that they called their “torches of freedom“. Why did Bernays do this? Before this moment, smoking for women was considered taboo, dirty. Bernays effectively linked the act of smoking with the women’s equality movement, and changed public perception for decades to come.
Continue reading “Online Influencers: An Old Idea in a New Medium”
Today, The Verge published an article stating that Twitter has drawn a small line in the sand with respect to the tweeting habits of the 45 president of the United States. Adi Robertson reports that Twitter has suggested that while it is important not to censor or remove important public figures like the president from the platform, it will draw the line at “tweets that reveal a private address or phone number”. Of course, not all people agree with this stand. For example, Sam Harris clearly stated in a recent podcast that he thinks Trump should be banned from Twitter, since the damage he can do via a Tweet is just so great. Twitter’s response though, is one worth considering. When is it appropriate to silence a public figure on a platform like Twitter? And when is it actually in the public interest to support a person’s right to make even crazy or patently false claims on the site?
When the participatory web was new, activists and researchers alike were excited by the potential of this new medium to connect groups without the need for conventional gatekeepers. Because social media allows anyone to post information that anyone (everyone) else can theoretically access, it changed the broadcast model of communication from a one to many (or point to multi-point) to a many to many (or multi-point to multi-point) system. Initially, this change delivered on its promise, facilitating movements like #occupy, #idlenomore, and #blacklivesmatter. More recently, however, even though social media still connects people and facilitates some political organization, it has also revealed its darker side.
In a world of 24/7 cable news, round the clock Amazon Deliveries, and infinite social media notifications, it’s been difficult to not notice how the ways we interact with each other and information is changing each passing day. Chief among these changes of course is the problem of fake news (#fakenews, I guess) or the spread of misinformation in an online environment. Some people blame Facebook and Twitter, who are currently in the news for the role their platforms played in Russian trolling of the 2016 US election. Their involvement notwithstanding, it seems to me that though the platforms had a role to play in the spread of fake news, it was more a passive role in which they took advantage of human frailty, rather than an active one in which their algorithms spread fake news because it’s more exciting content or something. Allow me to explain.
Continue reading “Why Does Fake News Spread on Social Media? Because Of Our Caveman Brains”
This is a follow up to my first post, which details why I think you can be an effective social media advisor, even if you are not personally on Facebook yourself. In this post, I’m going to briefly discuss some of the larger political and economic reasons why I do not engage on Facebook, and why I’m thinking about withdrawing my participation from social media completely, on a personal level that is.
Ahhhhh Facebook! The ubiquitous social network that allows us to freely cyber stalk each other, and live our FOMO best lives in the public eye! A platform that allows us to specify our likes and dislikes, to be collected for all to see! An online bazaar where marketers take all the information we have freely given and use it to sell us more stuff! Facebook how did we ever live without you?
I am a social media researcher, lecturer, and consultant. Invariably whenever I speak with someone about social media, the conversation turns from the theoretical and abstract (best practices for getting your posts noticed; or the effect of social media on democratic participation in society) to the mundane and personal. When this happens, we usually start talking about what social media accounts we use ourselves, or, innocently enough, someone will ask me to connect with them on their social media accounts – first among them, of course, being the eponymous Facebook. When this conversation occurs, I attempt to casually mention that I no longer have a Facebook account, and it is there that my friends, colleagues, students, peers in the industry look at me as if I have suddenly grown a second head.
“Whaaaaaaat? You’re a social media expert (their words, not mine) and you are not on Facebook?”
or
“How can you not be on Facebook? You STUDY social media”