The potential of social media is its power to let people self-organize like nothing before. However, there is a lot of skepticism because people are not using it that way, for the most part. They’re just using it for fun and games, many of which don’t even involve others besides possibly annoying them. An example is those Facebook picture tagging memes where you decide which of your friends are most like some picture of a character or thing on a poster full of such characters or things, then tag them. Your friends don’t even have to bless it or be involved in any way, and may be irritated to upset enough to untag themselves, possibly with a note to you! Anti-social media, perhaps?
Something that gets far greater usage than Facebook memes of any sort, though, are Facebook applications. This doesn’t cover all social media by any means, but it’s a pretty good sampling and indicator. The graph below is all the cynics need to state their case.
Facebook Application Purposes
Never mind how much the Just for Fun category completely annihilated the other categories for number of applications, just look at how few other applications categories actually help people self-organize themselves! Now, this graph was from May 2008, by a number crunching firm called Flowing Data and presented on CNET. However, I haven’t sensed any great change in a lot of people’s attitudes to social media as being a tool of real power rather than just fun and games. This despite of President Barack Obama’s campaign putting social media to magnificent use for his supporters to self-organize and leading to a historic real life result. Seems to me the cynics still think that the effort, led by Chris Hughes using the My.BarackObama.com website with other social networking bases, had little influence because it was the people who organized things and talked to each other and got out to vote, etc. (link to Chris Hughes is a highly recommended read if you want to see the true power of social media).
Yes, it was the people who did all the actions, but that’s exactly the problem with a lot of people using social media. They’re not using it using it in more productive ways that result in real life impact. My Facebook 2.0 picture tagging memes where there are real life actions have seen good take-up, but not nearly as much compared the usual ones described early one. It’s the users of social media are the problem, not the technology. The technology enables them to do something. The technology itself won’t do anything on its own. But as President Obama’s campaign proved, people can be taught to do this, and they will if motivated to do so. Their behaviour is what has to be changed.
Ultimately, the cynics on social media may be right that it won’t amount to much. However, I highly doubt that. But if they were right, they would still be wrong because it would be social media’s users that didn’t amount to much. The technology is just fine!
Think about that as you use social media technology in the future!
Twitter is all about false narcissism and acceptance, together in one package. The shallowness that comes with tweeting will be the reason it will be just a fad. As for its real communication value, that will simply be pushed aside by the next decent technological communication a short time a dozen these days. I give it two years’ max (possibly end of 2010 even) before it becomes thought of on the same term as land lines — still useful to many, but just only when the newer alternatives are inaccessible. Quantitatively, that’s a traffic ranking worse than 1,000 where a good online newspaper sits these days.
Seems the world is all a-Twitter these days. The site is mentioned everywhere. Everyone is trying to get on to it and incorporate it into their lives, business, communications plans, etc. It’s #74 on the Alexa.com traffic rankings at the time of this posting after a meteoric rise (click on the link to see Twitter’s ranking and history in playing around with a few options).
But a lot of people still don’t get it! What is the big deal with Twitter?
Well, there’s not really a big deal. It’s a fad that has some relative longevity compared to other recent technological fads, but ultimately, it’s a fad, and here’s why after a quick primer for those not familiar with Twitter, or who might not have thought about the psychology in it.
Twitter is basically free mass text messaging, 140 characters max at a time. You send it to everybody who signed up to “follow” you. There is a “personal” option to text individuals who follow you or who you signed up to follow. You don’t need permission to do either, unlike Facebook’s “Friend Request” where someone has to approve your request. This is the major difference to other most other social networking in existence and a key part why Twitter is successful. You can block people you don’t want following you. However, given the number of strangers lots of people have following them that they don’t care about and just let be, they can’t really prevent someone following them cause that person just creates some strange account and they’ll be able to follow you. Effective screening basically means you have to be relatively anti-social media, and that’s not often done with Twitter. People even sign up to follow others they don’t know just to see what they’re like, based on something or rather that whimmed them to do so. How else would you account for porn starlet Tiffany Mynx deciding to follow me on Twitter one day… even though it didn’t last long as by the time I knew it, she was gone.
The way Twitter allows users to organize themselves gives users two things which comes down to the best of cliques. That’s cliques, like groups of friends snobby to those outside them, not clicks like mouse technology. You have your own clique with those who follow you, and you belong to pretty much any other clique you like, including those of famous people who Twitter. Essentially, Twitter is hundreds of millions of cliques, and you can belong to any, removing the entry barrier cliques are known for as part of their identity. They are only still cliques because each user, including yourself, has one that nobody else can belong to until they sign up to join. Twitter gives you, the common person, both, narcissism and acceptance, all in one!
Imagine that! Narcissism and acceptance, in one thing! Where are you going to get something like that?
Answer? Nowhere. And that’s why Twitter won’t last long. It’s an illusion and people will either find a better solution or come to realize this, and abandon it.
That’s not people as a group per se. That’s people as to each his/her own. It’s about people moving away in any direction they choose, not a group migration to another common destination.
Twitter’s illusion of narcissism comes in the form that your clique isn’t real. They’re all following tons of other people on Twitter and unless you are really someone lots of people should listen to, you’re not all that important to them, either. And if you were, well, you wouldn’t need Twitter… and you won’t need it if the people aren’t there to follow you. Your clique is only real in your mind that your tweets mean something to them, whether all or just one. Even if you realize it’s the latter and it’s true most of the time in your case, it’s still narcissism to have it appear on everyone else’s board. True they did sign up to follow you, but it’s more the concept in the user’s mind rather than the logistics of how it came to be.
Twitter’s illusion of acceptance is based on false hope, not the kind that springs eternal, aka the type President Barack Obama is talking about. People let you into their clique, and you get to all these “personal messages” from them to the clique. It’s like being in the clique of that girl or boy whose clique you once wanted to be in and hearing them tell everybody something, except it’s via text and you don’t even hear their beautiful voice. Not yet, at least. Twitter might make it to voice one day if they can get it on fast enough before they die out. You are in that clique for the same reasons you wanted to be in those old cliques, so you can tell others about it, feel like you’re in their world and maybe even have some communication with that boy or girl, with other things being beyond that first hope.
Ashton Kutcher as he has on his Twitter profile as of the evening of Apr 16 (987,795 followers, 73 followed)
In Twitter, though, the first is nothing to brag about. If it mattered that much to me that you followed Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter feed, I could do the same. Ashton is trying to get 1 million followers before CNN does, by the way, current at 987,795 followers. Yeah. He really cares about you! That shallowness is the perfect example why Twitter will pass as a fad. Being in his world will just expose you to all those things you never dreamed about him in your vision of what he’s like. Finally, the chances you’ll get a tweet in response to yours… if he’s even following you, is a far longer shot than you’ll ever had with talking to that girl or boy once upon a time. He’s following all of 73 people, by the way. Um, can you say narcissism? Can you feel the love? But credit due, he’s at least honest as he can’t follow 987,795 people.
Note to Twitter, you could make it even more popular you’d let people become even more shallow so Ashton can follow all those people in return, but prioritize things so he only gets tweets from those 73 without any of his followers ever knowing. They can then brag Ashton’s following them in return to them following Ashton!
As for why people follow those with massive cliques, they hold out hope someone like Ashton might send them something one day, in a lottery mentality as I call it. However, with time, they will lose interest. It isn’t hard to get bored with something so impersonal as tweeting. Other tweets and something real in life is all it takes. Then the followers will go to someone else, and so on and on. But that might be it. It won’t take long before the game grows old.
Ultimately, you might just keep Twitter for a convenient communication means with your real life friends and family, but there are better ways of doing that, even. All this social media will grow tiresome to your fingers and suddenly, something like a phone call, or video call by then, might just seem very pleasant and refreshing. Everything you do with Twitter will be more possible and convenient with some other technology, even the ones today like a cell phone, and like many of the birds today, Twitter will become an endangered species. Quantitatively, that’ll be outside of the top 1000 websites so like a good (not great) online American “newspaper” source these days. Sadly, I can give Twitter a longer grace period than many of the birds out there today, but I’m going to go conservative and say 2 years max.
That’ll be April 2011, but officially, I’ll go for December 31, 2010.
Enjoy your life, Twitter! And try not to die bitter!
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Why do you think Twitter’s so big and how long it might be hot?
This post is about my view on religion justified as a reason to fight wars, with robots facilitating the process to depersonify killing that is now easier than before with the revolution going on in robotics used in war. It is based on the video below from the 2009 Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference of military analyst P.W. Singer, in his talk about the revolution quietly going on in war of using robots to fight them. By quiet, I don’t mean anything like top secret, but to the degree that’s going on and some of the details you really don’t hear about. The revolution is hugely eye-opening and, more importantly, morally challenging since it really depersonifies war the way guns have depersonified murder and war where it’s become so easy to kill. With robots, we don’t even have to be on the same continent to do the same. It’s all like a video game.
Military Analyst and Wired for War author, P.W. Singer
One point P.W. Singer brings up in his talk is how this is perceived in the Arab world, that Americans are cowards to fight with robots instead of people. Trust me. If they had access to these robots, they would, too. It’d be a lot more efficient, economical and easy than trying to convince potential recruits of the 70 virgins waiting for them in the afterlife if they become terrorist bombers. Besides, how long could 70 virgins occupy one’s interest for eternity, anyway? It’s hypocrisy to take the stance Americans are cowards for not fighting man to man. They should be appreciative there’s some compassion in modern society, despite the lack of compassion that seems to exist in war. In the good old days, if you had the weaponry to wipe out the enemy, you’d put them all down, or at least down to their knees, mercilessly so they would know there were consequences to petty acts of war like terrorist bombings. You know, they’d take on the kill one of us and we’ll kill 10 of you policy. No exceptions.
The scary thing about P.W. Singer’s talk, though, is that all this robotic technology could easily belong to the enemy. Considering all the manufacturing going on outside the US. Think about all the software writing done outside the US. Don’t forget that US science and engineering graduates becoming smaller and smaller compared to other countries. Then there’s the ease of duplication from learning by capturing one of these things. Put it all together and I think you can see how it would not take long before the enemy can play at the same level, or slightly less but in greater numbers. That was the old Soviet Union’s war technology approach with how many of their war machines looking like US ones, only not as good. They didn’t lose the Cold War on that strategy though, but economics. And don’t forget, this time around, there are no humans to die with loss of inferior machines but that bundles of them could outdo the fewer better ones.
P.W. Singer ends his talk with a great question of who is really wired for war, humans or robots? I think the answer to that question is easy, though hard for a lot of humans to admit. However, my additional take on it is if in depersonifying the killing for wars, and having to morally debate how responsible for it all, if we would not fall back on the most convenient excuse for killing we have ever had, which is in the name of religion.
In the past and present, we have used religion to remove responsibility from ourselves for killing in wars, but we still had to do it ourselves.
In the future, we will be able to use religion to justify our killing, and claim our innocence as the robots do the killing.
Both will make it more convenient to kill, which will only lead to more killing.
