Humans are Social Media

Core concepts (definitions at the end of the chapter): social media, mutual influence, utopia, dystopia, critical self-reflection , qualitative inquiry, deep work, moral panic, technological determinism, the 5 C's

Welcome to Humans Are Social Media.

This is about you. But for the sake of introduction we'll start with me.

The author: multitasking

​How are we influenced by social media? How is social media influenced by us? The explosion of social media technologies since the early 2000s gives us an opportunity to examine how we do everything - relationships, work, social life, politics, government, and even just plain thinking - through communication media.

On that note... the term media is the plural form of medium. Media is the plural of medium, which is anything through which impressions or force is transmitted to affect things on the other side. (Social just describes the media we are talking about, because they relate to people interacting. The term social media usually refers to digital technologies that help people interact.) So it's technically correct to write "Social media are [awesome, stupid, elemental, detrimental, whatever]." But it's also ok if you write "Social media is [changing the world, turning my friends into zombies, etc]" because the singular form is in common usage. I will use the term "social media" as both plural and singular in this book.

This is the thing about social media: It is grounded in how people talk and behave, not in rules set by any authorities. There are almost no standards at work in social media that can't be changed by users if enough of us start pushing against those standards. We create social media. Tech developers respond to us as they create software apps, also known as software platforms. Then we tweak their apps, using them in ways that developers never planned because these unforeseen uses fit our lifestyles. Or we choose other apps that fit us better. And then those developers respond to us again.

​And yes, social media does influence us too. But it can be surprising how much of what we do online was in practice in our society before social media became "a thing". So we'll look at history and theories in communication, sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science. I'll try to keep the theory clear and easy to understand.

Social media and humans exist in a world of mutual influence. This combination of (1) How we shape social media and (2) How social media shapes our world will be the main substance of this book, and hopefully, of your thoughts while reading this book - and maybe the rest of your life.

I've written this book with Millennials in mind, after years of teaching and collecting responses from Millennials. ​If you are a Millennial, this means that a lot of the content in this book is like social media itself - created and interpreted by your peers. We will explore your experience with social networking sites like Snapchat, Twitch, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, Instagram, Tumblr, Grindr, Tinder, and Her. We will look at discussion forums (on fixing cars, following a favorite band, exploring fashion), blogs, website comments, and maps that let you mark places. We'll look at what we enter in search boxes in Google and other search engines.

If visitors can weigh in or post their input for others to see, it's social media.

You can learn the most about social media if you perform some critical self-reflection (or intense inward examination) of your own use of online social networking technologies. What do you do online, and why? Really? What makes that a good idea? Is it possible it's not a good idea? What about questions of race, and class, and gender?

Finally, I invite you to critically engage with the content covered in this book. Do linked readings/video/audio clips adequately reflect your own experience with social media? Why or why not? To examine social media critically you will need to challenge your own beliefs and practices, as well as social norms, institutions, corporations, and governments.

Finally, I invite you to critically engage with the content covered in this book. Do linked readings/video/audio clips adequately reflect your own experience with social media? Why or why not? To examine social media critically you will need to challenge your own beliefs and practices, as well as social norms, institutions, corporations, and governments.

Chapters and questions in this book

Here are the titles of chapters in this book. They reflect the topics we will cover - though much of what we learn within them will come from you.

• Introduction - Humans and Social Media (an introduction)
• Chapter 1 - Chapter 1: Know thyself, social media (on Identity)
• Chapter 2 - The evolution of social media and the neutral net
• Chapter 3 - Getting in your business (on Privacy)
• Chapter 4 - Algorithms and blues
• Interlude - Picture this: Air Facebook
• Chapter 5 - Performative activism from Zapatistas to Black Lives Matter
• Chapter 6 - Women's movements from Saudi Arabia to the Americas
• Chapter 7 - Spreading salt, brands, and bones (on Marketing and Memes)
• Chapter 8 - Truths, knowledge, and bullshit
• Chapter 9 - Bumbling and grinding online
• Chapter 10 - Conclusion, or Humans are Social Media Superstars

There are questions in each chapter that will help you process what you are learning, express yourselves, AND - if you're in my class - earn class participation credit. Do not skip them! (And do not fudge the word answers by writing in nonsense. It wastes an opportunity for learning for you. And the eye of the Top Hat Instructor sees all.) There are also a few extra sections added more recently - not chapters, but acknowledgments and interludes. Knowledge about social media is always a process with moving parts.

Navigating traffic well requires thinking about social relationships.

Learning, and liking it

Many years ago, I went to traffic school. It was a six hour class I had to take as a penalty for a driving infraction. Blech! I thought, ready to go in hanging my shoulders and tuning out. But then a friend of mine said, "You know, I went to driving school recently and it's amazing how much I learned, and how differently I look at driving now!" This friend was pretty smart, so I said, ok, I'll go in with an open mind. Instead of sitting there slumped and resentful, I tuned in and I even took a few notes. And I was so happy I did. My teacher was intelligent and really cared about the safety of the roads around us. He reminded us that the other drivers are not our competitors; we're on the same team. The time went by fast. Now I'm a better driver. I haven't had a ticket since.

I kept that open, receptive mind as I went to college, then graduate school. Today I have in a job I love, teaching and learning from you. When we open our minds and listen, the roads ahead are bright and endless.

Is this digital? Is this even new?

Human behavior today can appear utterly transformed by digital technologies. Yet when we look more closely, there are many moments today that echo behaviors of the past, before digital technology played a key role. And there are many societal changes that have a variety of causes, some playing much larger roles than technology. Two examples follow.

Twitter "made" the Arab Spring? Hardly.

Contrary to many claims in the media [link: https://www.wired.com/2016/01/social-media-made-the-arab-spring-but-couldnt-save-it/], Twitter was not responsible for the Arab Spring [link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring]. Twitter was an important tool there, but relationships sustained in face-to-face interaction, and old-fashioned protest in public spaces like Tahrir Square, were the foundations of the Arab Spring. (To learn more, read Paulo Gerbaudo’s 2012 book Tweets and the Streets [link: http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=642730].)

Many teens are always online - but the reasons go deeper than their devices.

Today's North American teenagers choose to spend much more of their time with friends online [link: http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/05/31/teens-social-media-technology-2018/], while past generations socialized more in person. However, there are many factors responsible for this other than today's ubiquity of digital technologies. One factor is that youth are not allowed to go out as much as they once were [link:https://www.apa.org/monitor/mar06/childhood.aspx]. Today’s youth deal with parents who hover more closely and give them less freedom in public spaces than their parents were given themselves, and curfews and other restrictions remind teens they are unwelcome in dwindling public spaces [link:https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/28/curfew-laws-san-diego]. Teens respond to these changes by pursuing social relationships where they can: In their homes, online. (To learn more, read danah boyd’s 2014 book It’s Complicated [link:https://archive.org/details/ItsComplicatedSocialLivesOfNetworkedTeens/page/n0]).To understand the human condition in a digital era, we must first critically consider claims of human transformation by and revolution through digital technologies.

Utopias and Dystopias

It is important to study what social media are actually doing in our world, as opposed to human hopes and fears about them.

The world of social media is sometimes viewed as a utopia - as though entering the golden gates of social media [link: https://www.youtube.com/embed/6zGytq7ckS8] means leaving behind all the troubled communication practices that came before. A utopia is an idealized or perfect imaginary view of society. The utopian view sometimes imagines social media as a miracle disconnected from all prior human communication; other times, social media represents a more evolved social media world, where we have moved beyond all bias. The media theorist Clay Shirky [link: https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history] conjures utopias as he describes social media's effects on how we organize, as though they might connect everyone in the world. He is a great speaker; when I listen to him I feel comforted by the humming machines watching over us, extending our powers with God-like equanimity.

Social media are also seen as the downfall of society [link: https://youtu.be/-HicKjzaOTM] The increasing reliance of our society on social media looks to some like a nightmarish dystopia (an imagined society where everything is terrible). Teens never look up from their phones. Computers make life-or-death decisions, or at least remove humans from making them. Our brains are rewiring to cut out human emotions like compassion as we become robotically trained to pursue likes and connect with people we never see.

It is important to avoid thinking about social media as utopian or a dystopian so that we can learn the ways these media really impact how we communicate and behave. Both utopian and dystopian views of social media are flawed because they examples of technological determinism; that is, they reduce humans to only our interactions with technologies. There is so much more to us! We must note evidence of the way social media changes us - and understand why we respond the way we do. What we do online now is usually related to what we did before social media, and even before computers existed.

What is your story, really?

Market researchers and news media say they know about which media we use and how we use them. Do they?

There are many about your media use. But you may tell a different story than they do.

So is social media ruining our brains? Prominent authors have argued it is [link: https://www.wired.com/2010/05/ff-nicholas-carr/], and many have interpreted neuroscience from entities like the UCLA Brain Mapping Center [link: https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/12/health/social-media-brain/index.html] to support these arguments. But can we really use neuroscience to definitively determine what is happening in our world? This BBC Future article exploring whether social media is rewiring our brains [link: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120424-does-the-internet-rewire-brains] says, well, sort of - because our brains a extraordinary, dynamic organs that constantly update their connections (which incidentally are far more sophisticated than wires.) Neuroscientific findings require some understanding of neuroscience and a critical approach, because neuroscience can be used to add support to any claim, regardless of truth [link: https://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/04/17/psychology-students-are-seduced-by-superfluous-neuroscience/]. We turn to neuroscience when we want to add weight to our observations, but too often that weight comes as the cost of validity and accuracy.

Why not just rely on our observations to determine what's healthy and what's not in our use of social media? What can we learn about this new world communication by simply sharing our stories and impressions of our behavior with social media in our lives? When we collect these accounts and analyze across them for themes - that is, when we examine social media and ourselves using qualitative inquiry - we may not feel the need for neuroscience to confirm our new knowledge.

A heavy effect on teen brains is not surprising at the 9 hours of use a day the average teen was found to use social media. But what would it mean for social media to ruin a brain? If the answer is lower cognitive function, then no, there is not ample evidence in either social or neural science that social media is ruining our brains. But we are changing as we use it.

One of the effects I worry about for myself is how the web distracts us from deep work, the very human act of sustained thinking and creation. In this interview for the podcast Hidden Brain, computer scientist Cal Newport's study [https://www.npr.org/2017/07/25/539092670/you-2-0-the-value-of-deep-work-in-an-age-of-distraction] rings true for me because of my own experiences. The web allows me to take in a lot of new information from many sources, fast - but with so many streams of information coming in, I have trouble forming a deep sense of all I learn. Knowledge, which I write more about in Chapter 8, is what we should ideally do with information - because computers cannot create knowledge; but humans can. Knowledge requires processing across multiple sources of information to create new ideas. I worry that in this Information Age, human knowledge is endangered; that we know a lot of new data points, but not what it all means when they are carefully considered together.

Changes in how we think and communicate and live can be frightening. But we have to remain measured in our thinking about them, or else moral panics [link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjg-Ln9pLlI&feature=youtu.be] - fears spread among many people about the downfall of society - can result and sweep us up in them. (Link goes to video also embedded just above.) In this class we not panic. But we will analyze changes that have accompanied technology over time, beginning with the Five C's.

The Five C’s

Choice

• Choice means a lot more choices than traditional media offered
• Choice does not mean better choices than before
• What skills does navigating choice require?

Conversation

• People talk to each other – this was rarely possible in traditional media
• One – or many - can talk to many
• Customers talk back to companies
• Conversation is less one sided

Curation

• We all select and present our curated selections
• People tag, bookmark, comment, rate, recommend, and research
• Our connected minds are our consultants, doctors, classifiers, librarians and reviewers

Creation

• In traditional media we rarely created; we consumed
• Consumption is still far more common, but creation is integrated with it
• Creation is cheap

Collaboration

• We create things for one another to use
• We co-create knowledge
• We organize politically

People have always been social, and people have always tried to make their media social. But the social qualities of today's digital media might strike older generations as overwhelming. And as you get older, evolving, converging media are likely to affect you in similar ways.

Social Media

Media is the plural of medium, which is anything through which impressions or force is transmitted to affect things on the other side. Social is an adjective that describes the media we are talking about, because they relate to people interacting. The term social media usually refers to digital technologies that help people interact.

Mutual Influence

how this author describes the relationship between social media and humans as they shape one another, which is the main substance of this book.

Utopia

an idealized or perfect imaginary view of society.

Dystopia

an imagined society where everything is terrible.

Critical Self-Reflection

intense inward examination.

Qualitative Inquiry

a research method in which we collect observations stories, and impressions of human behavior and analyze across them for themes, leading to new knowledge.

Deep Work

Computer scientist Cal Newport's term for the very human act of sustained thinking and creation.

Moral Panic

fear spread among many people about the downfall of society.

Technological Determinism

ideas that reduce humans to only our interactions with technologies.

5 C's

Five qualities that the Centre for Social Media in the School of Communication at American University identifies as making social media especially social: Choice, Conversation, Curation, Creation, and Collaboration.

Did you get all that?

Let's see how closely you've been paying attention.

What social media do you use the most?

Which best describes how you feel social media has affected you?

1. It has totally messed me up
2. It is just part of my life, neither negative or positive
3. It is my savior!
4. It's more complicated than any of the answers above

Media is / are:

1. The intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed to the senses or a force acts on objects at a distance.
2. The plural of medium
3. An awesome new social media app you have to join to take this class
4. All of the above
5. 1 and 2 only

What will we be focusing on about social media, thier users, and influences?

1. Users like us shape social media. Social media does not influence us.
2. Social media influences users. Users do not shape social media.
3. Users shape social media AND social media influences users.
4. All of the above.
5. None of the above.

Which are part of the five C's that make social media social?

1. Commerce, Corporations
2. Conversation, Collaboration
3. Curation, Creation, Choice
4. 1 and 3 only
5. 2 and 3 only

Nice work! And we're all looking forward to complicating all of this with future chapters...right?