About that “social” media
- Image via Wikipedia
The last couple of days, I’ve been thinking a lot about “social media.” I’m not an expert, I grant you. But I do see where the lines are blurring, and that is something that culminated in my responses to Pat Thornton earlier today on Twitter.
What is “social media?”
To hear some people talk, it’s closer to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter than it is to blogs and podcasts and YouTube.
But I’m going to argue that “social media” encompasses all those things. It is FaceBook. It is Twitter. It is MySpace. It is YouTube. It is blogs. It is even – gasp – comments!
Because social media isn’t about the platform, rather it’s the ability of people to interact with the content, to provide feedback, to provide their own views on whatever content is supplied. Some media are more social than others. I’d argue that newspapers – for instance – are gradually moving toward a greater social media presence through the use of blogs and comments. But it’s a slow movement. Some are more attuned than others.
Twitter sounds like a good example of “social media,” since people can respond to one another and follow one another, but, honestly, that’s been happening since the beginning of the blog explosion in 2001. “Social Media” is really just another term for “Web 2.0.”
Now, the real crux of the issue is whether people “respond” to “social media” and change their practices based on the feedback of their userbase (for a great discussion of this, listen to this episode of On the Media).
If I really wanted to dissect “social media,” I’d come up with an operational definition that excluded some of the simplistic means of “socializing” media (like comments) and go through every media outlet and score them on their “social media” ability. It’s a good idea, and one I’m throwing out for free to anyone who might like to apply for a grant. I’ve got a dissertation to finish.
The point being, “social media” is amorphous. You can’t nail jello to the wall. Let’s quantify the phenomenon with better data before talking about who’s doing what. I would welcome the details.
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Social Media and history: another frame to consider
- Image via CrunchBase
It seems a common trait when “new” means of communication arise for there to be a bit of the “tsk tsk” from folks who don’t seem to “get it.” It can happen with a medium, or with a message (think rock ‘n’ roll and blogging).
Lately, it’s happening with Twitter, in particular, and “social media” in general.
The latest examples to fall into this vein of luddism are from Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mail, Jenny McCarthy of the Telegraph UK, and Robert G. Picard of The Media Business.
I encourage you to read those three pieces and the points made in them. Then come back.
Now, I’m not going to get into how many times I’ve heard these points raised about every different new platform for expression that comes along (recalling the professor who described blogging as “the mental equivalent of masturbation”). And I’m not going to debate whether telling everyone about your “banal” existence actually achieves any worthwhile ends. There are certainly problems with social media.
But I do want to say that all this “narcissism” is a good thing from a historical perspective.
Bear with me for a little biographical backstory: While attending South Carolina for my Ph.D. courses, I was able to take a course in journalism history that was very informative, and led to a conference paper that I was actually quite pleased with. (see the Academic Resources section of this site for a PDF version).
But one thing I learned from journalism history is that there are an awful lot of “holes” in the historical record. Source documents are remarkably limited. Secondary sources like news reports are remarkably limited. What brought this home to me was listening to Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina talk about protests where he was arrested and not a single word appeared in the local newspaper.
Then there are lives that are lived outside the glare of cameras and media attention. Ordinary people who exist as unemployment statistics, or productivity statistics. If you were to do research on these people, you’d likely find some gov’t documents, maybe, as McCartney noted, “a few photographs,” but precious little else.
The beauty of social media from a historical perspective is that there is a greater chance that the lives of individual real people can be saved for the historical record. A fuller picture of the people who surround us will be available for future historians, for future generations. That doesn’t mean it will all have equal value. But it could be available. I wish more of my great-grandfather’s life was available for me to know about, to learn from.
One thing social media allows that past media platforms don’t is the ability to put more of “yourself” into the medium. TV doesn’t allow that. How many historical nuggets did we lose to people watching “Must See TV” instead of living their lives?
Of people listening to crap top-40 radio instead of creating their own music?
Now let’s turn that around: What if you had access to your great-great-grandparents’ Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, Flickr photos, and YouTube mashups? Not to mention their iTunes playlists? Could you get a better idea of who they were than looking at a few faded posed pictures, maybe an old diary, and some government records?
That can’t be a bad thing.
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Failed banks by state visualization
Playing around with IBM’s Many Eyes online data visualization site, inspired by the Planet Money crew at NPR, I came up with this visualization showing the number of failed banks by state:
Illinois has four. California and Georgia lead the nation. The data came from the FDIC’s list of failed banks, which I put in a spreadsheet and then manually counted them by state after sorting the columns. I also removed any bank failures prior to 2007, since there was a gap between 2007 and 2004.
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Obama’s 2nd Press Conference – Semantic Network Analysis
As I did with one previous performance by President Barack Obama, I’m uploading a real semantic network analysis of the president’s press conference from tonight. This was done using the transcript and the Leximancer semantic network analysis software. I took out the questions and Obama calling names.
The circles represent themes. The larger the circle and the more centrally located, the more central was the theme. Themes that are closer to each other were more closely associated in the answers than other themes.
Semantic Network Analysis of Obama's Second Prime-time press conference. Click for larger image.
Here are the top concepts by mention:
issues 37
think 31
people 30
budget 27
leadership 26
economy 23
simply 18
years 17
health 14
care 14
percent 12
talking 12
growth 12
steps 12
costs 12
American 12
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