I’ve been blogging for nearly eight years, so I like to think that I know what this medium is. It allows me to write and share whatever thoughts and opinions I have with whoever cares to read them. Whether I write about ideas, politics, culture, or mundane details from personal life — and whether I am serious, humorous, or sarcastic — that is unpredictable and depends on the whims of a mysterious inner source I cannot define. I don’t know whether to call it an inner muse or an inspiration, and often seems beyond my control. It is not always there, and when it isn’t, I tend to crank out posts mechanically, the same way I force myself to do my pushups because of the self-imposed sense that I “have to.”
Anyway, whether I like it or not, I see myself as a blogger, and I see this site as a blog. Over the years I have seen many attacks on the medium, by people who constantly attempt to characterize and define it, often belittling bloggers as nuts, cranks, haters, or as sick people in need of treatment for Internet addiction.
What worries me right now (and I may be wrong) is that there seems to be a subtle new attempt to derogate and trivialize blogging by sweeping it into the much larger rubric of “social media.” A blog post is a twitter is a Facebook comment, and all are equally silly, and diverting our attention from serious issues! All are therefore under fresh attack as a “tide of cyber-skepticism” sweeps the US:
An intellectual backlash in America is calling for a rejection of some of the values and methods of modern communications. “It is a huge backlash. The different kinds of communication that people are using have become something that scares people,” said Professor William Kist, an education expert at Kent State University, Ohio.
The list of attacks on social media is a long one and comes from all corners of academia and popular culture. A recent bestseller in the US, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, suggested that use of the internet was altering the way we think to make us less capable of digesting large and complex amounts of information, such as books and magazine articles. The book was based on an essay that Carr wrote in the Atlantic magazine. It was just as emphatic and was headlined: Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Another strand of thought in the field of cyber-scepticism is found in The Net Delusion, by Evgeny Morozov. He argues that social media has bred a generation of “slacktivists”. It has made people lazy and enshrined the illusion that clicking a mouse is a form of activism equal to real world donations of money and time.
Other books include The Dumbest Generation by Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein – in which he claims “the intellectual future of the US looks dim”- and We Have Met the Enemy by Daniel Akst, which describes the problems of self-control in the modern world, of which the proliferation of communication tools is a key component.
The backlash has crossed the Atlantic. In Cyburbia, published in Britain last year, James Harkin surveyed the modern technological world and found some dangerous possibilities. While Harkin was no pure cyber-sceptic, he found many reasons to be worried as well as pleased about the new technological era. Elsewhere, hit film The Social Network has been seen as a thinly veiled attack on the social media generation, suggesting that Facebook was created by people who failed to fit in with the real world.
Turkle’s book, however, has sparked the most debate so far. It is a cri de coeur for putting down the BlackBerry, ignoring Facebook and shunning Twitter. “We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, yet we have allowed them to diminish us,” she writes.
While I hardly use Twitter, I do check out Facebook, but it hardly dominates my life. I’m not quite getting how it would “diminish” me, but what worries me is that the attack on Social Media will become a convenient new way to diminish and dismiss blogs.
The logic would work this way:
Social Media is bad for society and is making us less human.
Blogs are part of Social Media.
Blogs are bad for society.
Am I just being paranoid? Or has this blog suddenly been declared to be part of the larger problem of “Social Media”? If so, what should I do? I’d like to just use this medium to say what I think, and I am not trying to make anyone less human or isolate people.
And if having this blog makes me guilty of being a part of the giant conspiracy to isolate people from reality, can anyone tell me why books, movies, television and newspapers should get a pass?
Are some media “better” than others?
Comments
10 responses to “Social is bad, and who is social?”
As near as I can tell, almost all of these people are on the left side of the aisle. Am I wrong?
I think you’re right, although Andrew Keen (long a critic of Social Media including blogs) is supposed to be some sort of conservative.
The distinction seems to be between Social Media and “industrial” or “traditional” media:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
***QUOTE***
People gain information, education, news, etc., by electronic media and print media. Social media are distinct from industrial or traditional media, such as newspapers, television, and film. They are relatively inexpensive and accessible to enable anyone (even private individuals) to publish or access information, compared to industrial media, which generally require significant resources to publish information.
***END QUOTE***
So if the critics of SM are on the left, doesn’t that means the left favors those with “significant resources”?
How egalitarian is that?
or anti-social media
can anyone tell me why books, movies, television and newspapers should get a pass?
They’re approved by our “elite”.
Duh.
You see, bloggers can write whatever they want and people will believe them!
I mean, without bloggers, the global warmmongering religion would have no real enemies and the “deniers” would not have an outlet where they could spew their hatred of Mother Gaia.
Besides, most people are just too dim, if you give them too much information they get confused (bless their hate-filled, little hearts) and vote the wrong way (as we saw in 2000 and 2004).
No, what we need is a benevolent oligarchy of the best and brightest.
“A huge backlash” says some previously unknown academic. We’ll know the “backlash” against cyber media has truly jumped the shark when Time makes it a cover story.
My guess is that this is the latest panicked attempt to marginalize electronic media by the old guard, the same people who have been telling us since Rathergate that only they have the standards of professionalism, training, experience and layers of fact checkers to provide credible information and opinion.
And now, back to our main story: a transgendered couple in Manhattan teach their adoptive Korean child why guns are icky and only racists have them.
can anyone tell me why books, movies, television and newspapers should get a pass?
They are part of the anti-social media?
Besides they already have the correct gate keepers installed. Mostly.
Perhaps it’s because people are treating reporting and scientific studies sceptically, rather than swallowing everything in the media as”truth” that researchers are now trying to explain the reasons no one believes them implicitly anymore?
Perhaps the appallingly inept financial mangers, political operatives, and pundits from all the right schools have created some hesitation in believing them without challenge.
Naturally,it’s because we are mentally ill.
I note that many in the press and academia use “social media” to disseminate information and opinions, so their actions don’t seem congruent with their professions; rather it seems their objection is the dissemination of narratives differing from those dominate in mass media outlets, and in timely fashion.
It’s your Blog. You own it. Write about whatever the hell you wish.
Recently I’ve seen George Monbiot talk about how people with spare rooms need to be forced to take in the homeless. Screw that. Same goes for your website.
If you want to put up pictures of your dog or fish, do it. If you wish to put up long political diatribes, do that.
No one has the right to tell you what to do with your little place in the world be it physical space or cyberspace.
Fuck. Them.
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