Reflections Of Social Media And Society

With all that has been going on recently, from the ongoing unrest in the Middle East to the riots in London to the dispute of whether the Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority being compared to the fallen Egyptian regime of Mubarak, certain things become apparent. That society can communicate and coordinate faster than the bureaucracies that were designed to govern them is the most apparent. A great amount of attention is being given to the role of social media, be it praise or blame, but social media is just a tool.

In trying to explain what I have been doing over the last 10 years, I have found simple explanations difficult - but for the most part, I've been dealing with technology, social media and practical implications with society not from the popular and well rounded perspectives but from the trenches. From understanding and participating in discussion related to the challenges in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean to even attempting to effect (and affect) solutions to the challenges, I haven't been well known - which is as it should be. The background allows one a lot more flexibility and, despite advice from a former colleague at Linux Journal, I have stayed in the background attempting to understand more, troubleshoot more and do it from an ethical standpoint - something technologists all too often forget in the rush to get to market. Empowering people with technology rather than enslaving them with it and other romantic and idealistic notions are at the core of what I have tried to do and continue to try to do. Social media has become a buzzword for a group of technologies that can be used to those ends.

But social media, in and of itself, is a phrase used to communicate some level of connectedness - and thus it must also implicitly communicate some level of disconnectedness. Technology and society are at the core, and thus I'll break this into: Technology/Social Media as a Tool, Digital Divide and The Future.

Technology/Social Media As A Tool

If social media is just a tool, let us to revisit what the fellow who wrote 'Civil Disobedience' had to say about man and tools:

Man has become the tool of his tools. - Henry David Thoreau

Whether it's a true statement or a false statement does not matter as much as the pause one takes before taking a position for or against it. It's that pause that demonstrates a doubt - and if there is no doubt then we have to ask ourselves why, thus giving us pause. However you spin it, it requires some thought - or should. This is the point that Steve Talbott demonstrated throughout his book, Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines. While the rest of the world - particularly the parts trying to sell everyone else technology - whipped past it like a cyclone on a mission, Talbott talked about the claims of technology and the actual results produced. There was a disconnect. In many claims related to technology, in many fields, there is that disconnect where hype trumps metrics - so when I reviewed the book on a past iteration of KnowProSE.com, I wrote that Talbott was making the point that Thoreau had made so well in the above quote. In a rare moment for someone who reviews books, I got an email from Talbott that basically said, "You got it."

The technologies that are difficult and/or expensive to manage are the business opportunities for folks who can either manage them cost effectively or make them easier and more cost effective to manage. In that way the market has been somewhat democratic in that people vote with their feet. With all of the wonderful things that technology has enabled us to do, we figured out how to communicate with each other more quickly.

Not better, mind you. More quickly.

We've had this want to communicate with each other quickly over the centuries, perhaps even millenia. Consider that the first commercial electrical telegraph existed in a world without the electric light bulb, where telegraphs at night were read by lights that used flames.

That certainly gives an indication of how important society believes communication is, especially given that the light bulb and electric telegraph started development around the same time.

With all of that understood, we have to ask ourselves the following question: Is Social Media our tool or are we it's tool?

Simply saying that it is a tool is not enough - treating it as one is more important. And that requires insistent and uncomfortable introspection at every turn - but it is a necessity for social responsibility. But which society? What responsibility?

The Digital Divide

Once upon a time on an Internet much closer to you than it once was, there was an email list called the Digital Divide Network - a network where many great ideas and thoughts were shared about making technology, if not equally accessible, better accessible. Some came from educational backgrounds, some came from academic backgrounds, some from entrepeneurial and some plain hacks - like myself. Points of view went from the bureaucrats to the visionaries¹who saw a future less bureaucratic. There was a constant pulling and tugging, but at the core of all discussion was the thought that the technologically enabled world was a right that all of mankind had, particularly since so much could be done with it - including communication.

In 2005, I was asked to participate in MobileActive because of something I had been involved with in the past related to mobile technology back when I was still writing for WorldChanging.com. And while there, I was somewhat awed by what some of the folks were doing then with technology toward democratic means. Wonderful, powerful applications of technology were demonstrated and later evolved and used in a certain Presidential campaign. But I also saw the potential for these things to be used for things less idealistic - or, better, less constructively and more destructively idealistic. That I mentioned this at the meeting on more than one occasion - a software developer talking about ethics - probably didn't make me that many friends at the meeting but the friends it did make me last to this day.

The uses of such technologies in riots and even terrorist actions seemed something that we had to plan for, to anticipate, to handle - and yet even as I thought about it then I had no solution. Inadvertently, once again, we humans had opened Pandora's Box - something that has been proven repeatedly to this day. And while there are some that would label me a subversive, I must point out that there are different degrees and different types of subversive. I gravitate toward democracy, toward freedom of speech and so on and so forth. There are other subversives who do not, who I do not understand - but that I know they exist was sufficient to give me pause.

And as it happens, I was one of the people who worked on the MobileActive Toronto Declaration of 2005 - maybe I was put there to keep me from causing trouble elsewhere, maybe not, but the representation within the group chosen to write the Declaration was multinational, multicultural and geeky to the core. Here's what we came up with:

"Mobile phones serves communication. Communication serves humanity. Humanity serves social change. MobileActive: tech4people changing the world."

The message is 160 characters, suitable for a text message.

The longer declaration of Intent for MobileActive:

From 22-24 September 2005, organizations and activists from across the world working on the use of mobile/cellular technology for activism met in Toronto to better understand the strengths and limits of the medium and to disseminate lessons learned, as well as strategically to increase activists' ability to organize constituencies with this new technology.

Mobile phones and SMS have become one of the coolest gadgets on the planet and can be used in new ways to connect the people of the earth.

We affirm that:

• Communications technology is a right derived from the inalienable right of freedom of expression;

• Without "The People" mobile technology means nothing. Thus, the technology shall be used as a people-centred tool to maximize social good, justice and equality;

• Technology can and shall be viewed as a public good requiring worldwide democratic access; including open standards for hardware and software;

• Mobile technology offers the opportunity for reflecting an inclusive, democratic and compassionate voice for social justice. Put in the hands of the people and social movements, mobile phones and SMS can produce positive results for the common good;

• Mobile technology be maximized as a tool to break down barriers of language, gender, race, class, and sexual orientation;

• Socially and ecologically responsible production and retirement of mobile phones is a must, as well as the ability to recharge them with renewable energy;

• The use of mobile technology be maximized in networking, mobilization, education and training to the end of creating a just world and in the fight against oppression.

• Finally, we acknowledge that the growth of mobile/cellular technology is not universal and thus reflects existing global political, social and economic inequalities.  We work towards making it available to everybody for the world's people to advance their welfare.

The trouble with such declarations and intents is the implicit relativity. 'Social good'. We couldn't find a better way to express it other than modifying it with 'justice and equality'². And as the world passed by, no one took notice which really shouldn't be a surprise since the World Summit on Information Society (which I electronically participated in) was effectively paid the same amount of attention: "Yeah, that's nice, but we don't want to worry about that. We want to innovate and shake the world up!"

The innovation has happened, the world shaken - and here we are as a society wondering at the agitation and disruption of social media in our society - some good, some bad - and the world tries to regain its footing even as the aftershocks keep causing their own societal quakes. We knew it was coming - and those of us who are paying attention know that there is still a Digital Divide, and that the social media shocks being created are not yet being made with the majority of people connected. Certainly, more people are connected - but we're not at 100%. Arguably, we're nowhere near it - so when we discuss the democratic use of technology, we're discussing the democratic use of technology by those who have it.

Guess what? Not everyone has that connectedness. Society remains larger than those members of society with social media access. The Digital Divide, as much as it may have been eroded, exists. Social media is not necessarily democratic because not everyone has the communicative technologies. That implicit flaw in social media discussion is generally ignored because it is an inconvenient truth for those advocating social media toward profit-oriented ends (just as the value of heavy social media users is implicitly oversold).

The Digital Divide remains, the governments and their related bureaucracies in the world are slow to react and their reactions - which will be very difficult to change - are reactions to what could be considered to be a democratic minority. In social media discussion, we like to talk about the participation and discussion value - but we implicitly omit the silence.

Le silence seul est le souverain mépris. [Silence is the sovereign contempt.] - — Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

Until the silence is better addressed, social media may be well doing a disservice to its own future. It seems peculiar to have to note that when social media itself provides the feedback mechanisms that broadcast - traditional - media has prior lacked, but it is possible that because social media doesn't have that trouble that everyone who uses it feels as though everyone else has it. But not everyone does.

The Future

Despite my experiences around the world and my participation in social media, social networking and technology ranging from the Honeywell 316 to smartphones, I can't predict the future. No one can. That won't stop anyone else so I won't hold back on my comments about the future of social media and society³.

In the broad strokes, the world is going to get messier. While social media participation continues to approach the idealistic 100% penetration of the global population, we have algorithmic trading in our economies that are effectively allowing fewer people to affect the economy in meaningful ways - at least until someone open sources such an algorithm and everyone brings Wall Street to a grinding halt (it could happen, it might even happen). We have bureaucracies that were built to resist change being challenged by the societies that they are supposed to serve to... change. We have increasing amounts of the disenfranchised communicating through social media, reacting and acting more quickly than the bureaucracies can tolerate - and the first instinct of the bureaucracies is to remove social media. We've seen it from Egypt to San Francisco and many areas in between - and where we haven't seen it deserves mention as well. But that's the treatment of a symptom.

As we have become able to communicate more quickly with one another we haven't learned how to communicate better. We haven't been able to get past our own geographically imposed cultural and linguistic stereotypes that have made us isolated - and we also are finding that the control of wealth is almost always at odds with the thought of democracy; those that have less always want more and those that have more don't want to lose what they have. Meanwhile, marketers and salespeople use social media to tell us what 'we really need' but yet what so many cannot afford.

Meanwhile, a small group of people can impact an entire globe - as the continued fallout of September 11th demonstrates.

It seems like a recipe for disaster.

The future is quite obviously include more social upheaval - idealistically towards something closer to homogeneity on many fronts - and social media is and will remain an asset and detriment to whatever we, as a species, negotiate our future to be. Our society has suffered itself for millenia and, likely, will continue to. There is no feasability in considering that we won't survive; if we don't the discussion is not relevant.

Thus we will survive. The real question is: how?

I suppose the only thing left to do now is to post a Youtube video of a band that didn't take its own words as seriously as they should have.

¹ Everyone considers themselves a visionary. What truly defines a visionary is time proving his or her validity.

² Indeed, in retrospect we could remove 'social good' from it altogether.

³ I just managed to toss in an appropriate disclaimer.