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5) Can we tweet things into being?

The technologies we use have their consequences. They’ve meshed themselves with our lives so fully that we aren’t the same without them, and they certainly aren’t the same without us. The process in which they’re are made is not independent from day to day life, human needs are built into the design. The idea that humans can somehow transcend the tools they use, unaffected, has been proven to be an oversimplification. What we control controls us back (Latour, 2007). 

Social media is a powerful force in our lives thanks to the attention that we give it. It only reflects our experiences and realities because we’re there, sharing, liking and commenting, creating value as we do so, with our brains getting actively addicted to the jolts of adrenaline that readily available daily sources of outrage provide (Nakaya, 2014). This is not a new phenomena, and modern technology did not magic it into being, rather, it’s a culmination of the collective choices that we have made, party due to our natures, partly due to our circumstances. However, this reality has never been quite as as urgent and quite as transparent, allowing itself to be easily broken down into data points and spread worldwide. 

Just like the technologies we use have their effects on us as people, the public sphere expanding and democratizing, there’s a process of immersion of the online world with the offline one, with its questionable ethic standards and anonymous feeds, affecting the ways we both report on politics and do politics, an increasing polarization and ambivalence combining in ways that have yet to be explored (Zuboff, 2019).

One of the first major worldwide Twitter trends of 2020 was World War 3. A reaction to the United State’s drone strike, which killed an Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani, this trending topic is the perfect example of the power of social media. The moral panic that arose on not just Twitter, but subsequently traditional media as well, neither helped solve an already tense political situation, nor did it help people understand said situation more fully. What it did do, however, is satisfy the parts of our brains that have gotten used to watching tragedies unfold in real time, coaxing extremely high emotional reactions out in the process. With constant overflow of information and stimuli, it can be hard not to get overwhelmed and checked out, and it’s only pieces of content that are extreme and exaggerated that find ways of piercing the defenses we’ve built up in order to protect ourselves from the endless flow of information, sensensionalized for the very same reasons. 

Livetweeting a world war that isn’t yet happening is just the last example in an endless stream of people trying to feed the addictions that the platforms they use and the corporations that host them have created, a pavlovian response if there ever was one. But the market has a way of adapting towards the trends that create the highest revenues. And, perhaps for the first time, the power to create the biggest conflict might have put into the hands of the many, not the few - because, after all, the biggest conflict would bring the biggest ad revenues.

References:

LATOUR, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Signet Books. ISBN 9788574603902.

NAKAYA, Andrea C. Internet and Social Media Addiction. Missouri: ReferencePoint Press, 2014. Signet Books. ISBN 9781601527615.

ZUBOFF, Shoshana, Robert W. SNYDER a Malcolm MILES. The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. 2nd ed. New York: PublicAffairs, 2018. ISBN 9783593439631.

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4) How can online spaces better serve the perceived common goal of geopolitical stability?

It bears saying that CNN and its counterparts aren’t the centre of the problem of contemporary media, and changing their structures on its own wouldn’t lead to an information revolution any more than cancelling Facebook would. All individual news platforms and all news platforms combined are a part of a system that is measured in capital first (Zuboff, 2019). That itself is, however, neither a conspiracy nor an evil plan to destroy the world order that corporations sometimes get accused of. 

A reach of a newspaper can be broken down into sold copies, online ad impressions, Facebook shares. A success of a human interest story can be calculated based on how many people commented on it, how many people liked it, how many people shared it - that is, how many people were, in fact, interested in it. The easily collected data that online news sites provide didn’t fundamentally and all of a sudden change the kinds of stories we’re interested in, rather, they allowed readers the option of not having to buy the whole package - the newspaper - in order to read the things that matter to them the most. The fact that this has turned into an arms race, where louder headlines and more outrageous stories try to grab the reader’s attention, is not a product of the social media era, either. Sensationalism is as old as mass media, with penny press emerging in the early 19th century - such as the first great hoax of print media, a series of articles published by Benjamin Day’s The New York in 1835 humanoid bats inhabiting the surface of the Moon (Stephens, 2007; McLuhan, 1994). 

Outrageous examples aside, however, as soon as the news turned into a business trying to do more than adhere to the privileged, intellectual elites - a good thing by anyone’s standards, as this lead to the democratization of information and engaging citizens in the public sphere - a market opened up, and the market only has one currency. Simply put, measuring in capital is easier than any other way we have, and it lends itself to most situations quite naturally (Ravi, 2018). Trying to measure in values such how any given corporation challenges the hegemony while maintaining geo-political stability, a task we expect our ‘democracy watchdogs’ (Berger, 2000) to fulfil, is rather harder to calculate and while it might reflect the values of any given individual journalist, it it doesn’t lend itself to a typical business model.

The fact that the problems we are facing are neither supernatural, nor happening outside of our control, puppet-mastered by technologies serving a larger than life conspiracies, doesn’t mean that they’re irreversible or impossible to tackle. A system is not, however, overhauled by individuals, and it takes longterm collective decisions to alter it towards a more sustainable path - an issue not unique to the news business, either, and seen in an array of fields from health to social security, areas which should hardly be dictated by profit first and only, either. These collective decisions get made in voting booths, careers choices, in the kinds of investments we make - but also in the conversations we have. Online spaces aren’t the opposite of the so-called real life spaces, they’re an extension of them, more transparent and democratic at their best, murkier and more unreachable at their worst. Either way, they can be utilized to make active choices regarding the type of content we appreciate and share. If we don’t want anger or scandal to be the deciding vote, we must stop choosing to share it in outrage, rather promoting nuance. Our clicks, after all, is what these corporations are after - so, together and individually, we’re in charge of deciding whose lense we view the world through.

References:

STEPHENS, Mitchell. A history of news. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-19-518991-9.

 MCLUHAN, Marshall. Understanding media: the extensions of man. 8. print. New York: New American Library, 1964. Signet Books. ISBN 9788856502800.

 RAVI, Bheemaiah Krishnan. Modern Media, Elections And democracy. SAGE Publications, 2018. Signet Books. ISBN 9386602377.

BERGER, G. (2000): Grave New World? Democratic Journalism Enters the Global Twenty-first Century, Journalism Studies, 1:1, 81-99, Rhodes University, South Africa.

ZUBOFF, Shoshana, Robert W. SNYDER a Malcolm MILES. The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. 2nd ed. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019. ISBN 9783593439631.

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3) What is the role of capitalism in the current state online public discourse?

Everyone’s always talking about algorithms, however, far fewer people actually understand how they work. And that’s not because they’re uneducated or lack the necessary intelligence - the thing that’s left out of the narrative quite often is that algorithms aren’t an open book, rather, they’re the opposite - usually, they’re tightly held industry secrets that we only catch glimpses of (Technology Review). For instance, two years ago, a leak showed that Facebook told its advertisers that the data it’s collected can help them pinpoint teenagers who are feeling worthless and insecure (The Guardian), a grand marketing opportunity if there ever was one. In contrast to Facebook’s approach, a study from 2017 showed that through gathering profile pictures, an algorithm was able to identify a male’s sexual orientation with 83 to 91 percent accuracy through analysing facial features (Kosinski & Wang 2017), providing a stark warning to what AI is capable of. Apart from being secrets to outsides, they’re not easily read by the people who actually design them, either. Usually, there are outcomes that are dictated and that are built into the programme - however, it’s up to the AI itself to keep finding and optimizing ways of getting to those outcomes, with little regard for anything other than the objective of the corporation (Technology Review; Zuboff, 2019).

With Facebook, Twitter and Instagram steadily taking over as the major platforms through which people consume their news (Mitchell & Rosenstiel & Christian, 2018), there’s been an understandable amount of worry for years now, and suggestions that democracy has been hacked resonate through major publications on a regular basis, such as when it came to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Through gathering and analyzing personal data collected from private Facebook accounts, the company was able to skew both the US presidential election and the Brexit vote - and the story is still breaking at the time of writing this essay, with a former manager coming forward and exposing the company from having its influence in more than 68 different countries. It should also be noted that the initial scandal resulted in Mark Zuckerberg being grilled by US senators, revealing the utter unpreparedness of many elected leaders when it comes to catching legislatures up to the ever-evolving world of the internet.

Now, it’s one thing to accuse Facebook or Twitter of undermining democracy. However, the platforms who connect people to their news aren’t the only problem: rather, they’re itself an extension of a larger one. The news has always suffered from the tension between its public service branch and its business branch, and if the internet is good at one thing, it’s highlighting dormant systematic problems that’ve been keeping humanity awake for centuries. And with ad revenues falling, the market getting more competitive and everyone with an internet access having the power to inform, all while print media continues to shrink, traditional media continues to place more and more of its future into their websites - and while being shared on Facebook is important, only certain kind of content gets the biggest reach, and it’s hardly calm and nuanced (Kreiss & McGregor, 2019). Thus, the content that gets made is often already pre-tailored for the online market, with its limited attention span and an addiction to chaos. So despite the fact that media outlets such as the CNN can hardly be accused of being pro-Trump, the 2016 era saw them streaming his campaign rallies and speeches for hours without commentary, allowing him the platform and legitimacy that he needed. And now, CNN gets to do what it does - helping create the crisis its positioning itself to be in the business of solving, one click at a time, a little richer than before.

References:

KNIGHT, Will. The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI. Technology Review [online]. 2017 [q. 2020-01-07]. Available at: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604087/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/

 WANG, Yilun a Michal KOSINSKI. Deep neural networks can detect sexual orientation from faces. American Psychological Association [online]. 2017 [q. 2020-01-07]. Available at: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/sites/gsb/files/publication-pdf/wang_kosinski.pdf

Facebook told advertisers it can identify teens feeling 'insecure' and 'worthless'. The Guardian [online]. 2017 [q. 2020-01-07]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/01/facebook-advertising-data-insecure-teens

 MITCHELL, Amy, Tom ROSENSTIEL a Leah CHRISTIAN. What Facebook and Twitter Mean for News. Journalism.org [online]. 2012 [q. 2020-01-07]. Available: https://www.journalism.org/2012/03/19/what-facebook-and-twitter-mean-for-news/

 KREISS, D., MCGREGOR, S. C. (2019). The “Arbiters of What Our Voters See”: Facebook and Google’s Struggle with Policy, Process, and Enforcement around Political Advertising. Political Communication

ZUBOFF, Shoshana, Robert W. SNYDER a Malcolm MILES. The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. 2nd ed. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019. ISBN 9783593439631.

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2) What is the relationship between the business models of old and new media?

The news cycle is an ever-evolving phenomena. When mass media was gaining prominence, it took weeks or even months for news to make its way into the collective consciousness. However, with the emergence of new technologies, particularly cable television, the news cycle has speeded up considerably. Therefore, even back in the early 2000s, a technological dark age by today’s standards, there was talk of the 24-hour news cycle, with news that were endlessly breaking, and newsrooms adhering to the fast rhythm of the modern consumer (David & Gitlin, 2001; Zuboff, 2019).

The perceived crisis that contemporary media finds itself in is often described as a symptom of the Trump and Brexit eras, with their pocketed internet, information diets consisting of soundbites and headlines, and deeply polarized Twitter feeds. However, no crisis is born out of a single man’s abuse of power, no matter what country he’s found himself leading.

There is a 2004 episode of the now-cancelled CNN programme Crossfire, hosted by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and Bill Clinton’s former strategist Paul Begala, where much of the problems that might feel brand new unveiled themselves in a now-iconic moment. The format of the show relied on pitting two opposing voices pitted against each other in order to argue about any news topic currently trending, the louder the better. Jon Stewart, then the host of The Daily Show, accepted the invitation and went on to accuse the Crossfire hosts of hurting America - helping politicians and corporations rather than fulfilling their journalistic duties to the people and the common good. “You’re part of their strategies,” Stewart tells them, describing an increasingly polarized add-first media environment that relies on scandal and punditry in order to draw in viewers in a market that’s more competitive than ever before (CNN, 2004; Jenkins, 2008. This happened two years before the first little bird Tweeted its outrage and two years before Facebook opened up to the public, inviting us to poke at the hegemony while serving its best interest. 

The technology of our times has a way of holding up a mirror to the problems facing us. There is no doubt that there was never a larger, more complexly vast mirror than social media. We’re facing the viral spreading of both the best and the worst of humanity, with movements such as MeToo and BLM getting more visibility than ever before, but also with the alt-right finding platforms to gather and recruit (Mendes, 2019; Neiwert, 2017, Zuboff, 2019). Hiding from the so-called reality has become an industry unto itself, symbolized by endless streams of binge-worthy entertainment, a new height of escapism. 

The most popular, far-reaching posts on social media are not ones of calm, collected discussion. Twitter, the most political of all social media, build its brand on summation, leading the ever-more complex world away from context, getting our brains addicted to thrilling outrage akin to watching a terror attack in real time, adrenalin streaming through our veins and add revenue streaming towards the corporations hosting it (Chen & Zeng, 2018; Nakaya, 2014). The consumers of the free platforms are products sold to advertisers, our attention as currency (Beattie, 2019). And the fact that the lense these corporations provide for us to see the world through is rather askew is not a barrier to their profit, rather, it’s a vantage point. Feeling scared, outraged or even deeply excited, after all, keeps us scrolling (Beattie, 2019, Chen & Zeng, 2018). 

References:

GILES, Robert H., Robert W. SNYDER a Malcolm MILES. What's next?. 2nd ed. New Brunswick, USA: Transaction Publishers, c2000. ISBN 07-658-0709-2.

JENKINS, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. New York: NYU Press, 2008. ISBN 9780814743072.

MENDES, Kaitlynn, Jessica RINGROSE a Jessalynn KELLER. Digital feminist activism: girls and women fight back against rape culture. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-019-0697-846.

NAKAYA, Andrea C. Internet and Social Media Addiction. Missouri: ReferencePoint Press, 2014. Signet Books. ISBN 9781601527615.

NEIWERT, David. Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump. London: Verso, 2017. ISBN 1786634236.

NEIWERT, David. Social evolution, political psychology, and the media in democracy. New York, NY: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2019. ISBN 978-303-0028-008.

ZENG, M. Oz, ZENG, P.., & CHEN, G. M. (2018). Twitter versus Facebook: Comparing incivility, impoliteness, and deliberative attributes. New media & society, 20(9), 3400-3419.

ZUBOFF, Shoshana, Robert W. SNYDER a Malcolm MILES. The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. 2nd ed. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019. ISBN 9783593439631.

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1) Are communication technologies inherently political?

Technologies have been shaping our media since the dawn of time, but it wasn’t until Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press around the year 1440 when it became clear that together, they can very much drive the human narrative. Gutenberg’s most famous use of the press was political in itself was the 42-lines Bible, in line with the oncoming trend of spreading The Word, an act itself fraught with both liberation and imprisonment (Eisenstein, 2005; Edwards, 1994). 

Half a century later, Europe was swimming in millions of volumes, proving that the human need for information and the market’s desire to commodify said need had worked together long before our Twitter feeds. The sudden presence of what was once a luxury item drove the demand for a more engaged citizen, privileged as he still was at the time. What came after, catapulted by Martin Luther’s 1517 Ninety-five Theses and culminating in the Reformation, was perhaps the first true media revolution on record. The Reformation then in turn lead to the kind of uncontrollable, speedy progress that can only result in a crash: which it did, in the form of the 30 Years’ War, one of the deadliest conflicts in human history (Edwards, 1995; McGrath, 2003).

Having presented these snippets of history, some of which feel like an echo of today’s times and some of which might sound like a warning, it could easily be concluded that humans are merely slaves to the object they find themselves inventing, a statement far too simplistic to withstand any analysis. In fact, there are likely only shades of grey when it comes to trying to determine the origin of change. However, the far more interesting point that arises from examining the present and past alike is not who’s in charge of the narrative, but rather what we continue to choose to do with the tools at our disposal, whether they are the printing press or social media.

The vast and complex realities of who we are, whether or not we are ready for it, being transferred into 1s and 0s, but the individual people of today have no more of a choice when it comes to the existence of the technologies that make it possible than they did when Gutenberg created his printing press. Our large-scale realities are inevitable and unavoidable. However, that does not mean that individuals are not given choices once they actually come into contact with said technologies. The printing press was, after all, used to challenge the hegemony much like our feeds are used nowadays, just in a slower, less immediately visible way.

If there ever were clear borders between the political and the personal, they have long since disappeared (Harutyunyan, Hörschelmann, Miles, 2009). Our platforms for expressing and building our innermost selves have merged with the platforms through which we experience and engage with our political realities, creating walls of content that both separate us and trap us in our inescapable togetherness. But being human has long been understood to be a political act in itself, and the technologies we create have an everlasting way of holding up a mirror to our humanity.

References:

EISENSTEIN, Elizabeth L. The printing revolution in early modern Europe. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 05-218-4543-2.

EDWARDS, Mark U. Printing, propaganda, and Martin Luther. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1994. ISBN 05-200-8462-4.

MCGRATH, Alister E., Kathrin HORSCHELMANN a Malcolm MILES. The intellectual origins of the European Reformation. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. ISBN 978-063-1229-407.

HARUTYUNYAN, Angela, Kathrin HORSCHELMANN a Malcolm MILES. Public Spheres After Socialism. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. ISBN 9781841502120.