A Revolution or a Tribulation: The Me and the We of Social Media

When I was started reading Revolution 2.0 from Wael Ghonim, little did I realize that the book would inspire me enough to actually start considering Social Media as a political tool. I say this not just because we can use this medium to organize people or to publish real time information to a vast number of people, I have talked about that in my post titled “Now ONE Matters”, BUT because collectively as an online community we can achieve much more than we can do as individuals.

This is critical as the concept of an individual having the disruptive power to take on functions of established institutions, markets as well as the media is disorienting enough for some but the very thought of what entire communities of such empowered netizens can achieve is unthinkable. I think the Arab spring was just a precursor of things to come.

However before getting too enthusiastic, I must put a disclaimer that the trick lies in knowing how to make use of online tools without being overloaded with too much information.  Managing your online presence effectively will be an essential ingredient to personal, political as well as professional success in the twenty-first century. In fact we can use this tool to build our political image which may even enhance our real life image or even correct some of our shortcomings. 

But the question still remains as to what are the key aspects that we can use in our digital presence to empower us rather than being overwhelmed by information overload or being net addicted. In his book Net Smart, Howard Rheingold shows us how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully. Mindful use of digital media means thinking about what we are doing, cultivating an ongoing inner inquiry into how we want to spend our time.

Rheingold outlines five fundamental digital literacies; online skills that will help us do this:

1. Attention,
2. Participation,
3. Collaboration,
4. Critical consumption of information
5. Network smarts

While attention to focus on the tiny relevant portion of the incoming tsunami of information saves time (refer discussion on filter bubble phenomenon later in the article); the quality of participation, empowers the best of the bloggers, netizens, tweeters, and other online community participants. Successful online collaborative enterprises contribute new knowledge to the world in new ways; yet in order to remain credible and well informed we need to be ever critical about what we consume from the internet as facts without checking relevant sources. Lastly he teaches us how networks and network building opens up new opportunities and provides us unprecedented power, never before wielded by individuals in the history of mankind. 

However above all this, the key learning that Rheingold points out is that there is a bigger social issue at work in digital literacy, one that goes beyond personal empowerment. If we combine our individual efforts wisely, it could produce a more thoughtful society: countless small acts like publishing a Web page or sharing a link could add up to a public good that enriches everybody.(source: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/net-smart)

The same idea is further developed in Hyper Connected by Nicholas A Christakis and James H. Fowler who in their thought provoking book establish how we as individuals continue to exhibit real behavior in virtual worlds also. This has implications for all aspects of society, business and well as governance as pretty soon we will enter an era where real world reality will be influenced and even dictated by virtual world reality. Revolutions will be orchestrated, planned and executed on social media and the impact will be felt in the real world. Businesses will be built over the web converting into real dollars in the real world and crimes committed in the virtual world will also get retribution in the real world. Hence it is critical that we understand the main characteristics of the internet that fuel this virtual realism:

1. Our ability to control our own appearance: we can overcome any shortcomings in the real world through our Avatars in the virtual world. We can be tall and fair when in reality we are short and dark. We can be lean and fit while in reality being fat. In short we can live the life of our dreams in the virtual world.
2. YOU can create a whole NEW you – Life does not give a second chance but virtuality does. We can have a second chance! We can carefully build our online profile to actually reshape our image in the real world too.
3. Social networks allow us to have strong as well as weak links in friendship. It allows lost friends to resurface and keep tracks of friends who are far away; friends with whom we would lose touch if not for the internet.
4. Social networks allow us to have massive reach and soon will allow us to have more information about our networks through passive information about our networks thus knowing more about people in our networks and how best we can relate to them for dating, organizing or selling
5. In social networks, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. The network is able to do things that individual members were unable to do. Networks have structures and structures influence the way individuals and networks behave. Recall the Arab Spring?
6. Reality and Wikiality – This is one of the most powerful advantages of being connected. People can create their own information in a collaborative but not necessarily coordinated manner. These open communities allow people to engage in niche interest communities which can be highly enriching and rewarding. This is the classic “Long tail” where millions of communities exist with dedicated members alongside few communities with millions of members
7. In a research done at “Netville”, a wired community that was partially connected, people who were connected were more social and further deepened the real world social interactions than lessen them. They were also more social than people who were not connected and had better networks.  Being connected also allowed them to mobilize faster and share information quickly.
8. Going “Viral” – The key to going viral lies in leveraging “Supernodes” or in layman terms getting interest from those netizens who operate on the Pareto principle and are in turn connected to thousands of followers who can in turn follow the content that has been posted by you.

However, just the very fact that being connected is so powerful and being organized in online communities through social media is completely disruptive is highlighted by various forces that are already trying to wrest the advantage back in the hands of established institutions, large corporations and big media houses.

Efforts to curb net neutrality: A crucial aspect of the internet that makes all of the above possible is its “Open architecture”. This is reflected in the principle of “net neutrality” which makes the internet open, fair and accessible to everyone, equally, from the biggest corporations, powerful institutions to the weakest individual. To understand fully “net neutrality” is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication. The term was coined by Columbia media law professor Tim Wu in 2003 as an extension of the longstanding concept of a common carrier. I personally see net neutrality as an important component of an open Internet, where policies such as equal treatment of data and open web standards allow those on the Internet to easily communicate and conduct business without interference from a third party. A "closed Internet" refers to the opposite situation, in which established corporations or governments favor certain uses. A closed Internet may have restricted access to necessary web standards, artificially degrade some services, or explicitly filter out content. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality )

In the recent past there have been many subtle attempts to curb net neutrality by governments and corporations like by means of either restrictions/ selective permissions by governments and by virtue of premium payments for additional bandwidth by larger co-operations. In my humble opinion, this needs to be fought tooth and nail as if these changes are implemented then governments will be able to interfere in the content that is available on the internet and large corporation will be able to force out the smaller market players including individuals not because of a better product or services but ultimately because of deeper pockets. This is fundamental that the net remains a place where an individual has the power to challenge governments, where entrepreneurs have the opportunity to compete against multinational corporations and a common person is able to tell his\her story without need of a formal media just like Wael Ghonim did in Egypt, Mark Zuckerburg did with Facebook and what 9 year old Martha Payne did when she was unhappy with her school meal (refer:  http://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/jun/16/martha-payne-never-seconds-blog-climbdown )

The Challenge of the Filter Bubble: Another existential threat that is threatening our online experience and our ability to use it effectively is the Filter bubble. Here’s the challenge - as more and more people discover news and content through Facebook-like personalized feeds, the stuff that really matters falls out of the picture. People only get to see what they want to see. In the Darwinian environment of the hyper-relevant news feed, content about issues like homelessness or climate change can’t compete with goofy viral videos, celebrity news, and kittens. The public sphere falls out of view. And that matters, because while we can lose sight of our common problems, they don’t lose sight of us. While search engines like google through their smart algorithms may effectively blindfold us to issues that we do not want to confront but we all know that no problem ever solved itself by closing our eyes.  (Source: http://www.thefilterbubble.com/#sthash.I0q1ykFG.dpuf ). This phenomenon undermines the ability of individuals to become cognizant of pertinent issues and rally around them. Thus in a nut shell, the filter bubble applied by corporation like Google and in some cases countries like China to show selective results, undermines the effectiveness of individuals as well as communities. While personalization is useful but too much filtering of relevant issues is not.

Apart from the major issues facing online communities and individuals, I feel we also need to guard against the following disadvantages:

1. Friends overload: as per a statistic quoted in the book, an average Facebook user had 150 friends while other had thousands. It is not possible for someone to have so many friends and that is a disadvantage of an online social network where if degrees of separation increase then it does not seem real and warm anymore.
2. We can find every person in the world through the six degrees of separation rule: We need to remember that if we can use the internet to find people then others can too, and not always with the right intention hence the right privacy settings are a must for your online profile across sites like Facebook, LinkedIn etc.
3. Your networks display characteristics about you. If your friends are obese chances are you will be obese too. Thus what we put online or the networks we build are a real world reflection of who we are. This can work to your advantage as well as disadvantage.

Thus in summary the Internet makes possible for us to access new social forms that are radical modifications of existing types of social-network interactions and have distinct advantages in four ways:

1. Enormity: a vast increase in the scale of our networks and the numbers of people who might be reached to join them
2. Communality: a broadening of the scale by which we can share information and contribute to collective efforts
3. Specificity: an impressive increase in the particularity of the ties we can form
4. Virtuality: the ability to assume virtual identities

It’s up to us and online communities of Netizens to either make the power of being connected into a revolution or a Tribulation. May the force be with you!