Writing on and of social media; how technology constructs and is constructed  Premium

Authors explore the economic cost and socio-political effect Big Tech and other digital intermediaries have on society but also point out that social media has become a necessary tool for engagement and communication

“Everywhere you look, people are hooked on the things!”, shouts Chris Gillhaney in the second episode of the fifth season of Black Mirror. This expression was part of a highly emotional, positively deranged rant by Chris (played by Andrew Scott) after he had just taken an intern of a popular social media platform hostage. As the episode unfolds, we realise that Chris’s rage against social media is a result of despair from when he lost his girlfriend in a car crash as he was checking his phone after he got a notification alert from a social media site.

While the sci-fi anthology in itself is highly acclaimed, this episode had mixed reviews, with critics reviewing it as too simple a message about social media addiction, which takes on the all-too-often moral high ground of ‘social media bad, go touch grass’.

However, Richard Seymour, author of The Twittering Machine would disagree with the critics. Social media addiction is real and we are all high.

The Twittering Machine talks about how social media organises our online presence; how it programmes it. As more and more people login (the network effect), the more data is generated through which large corporations now have a say in what topics are relevant, what style is fashionable, what lingo is acceptable and who our friends are. All of it funded by corporations, of course, who are selling their products in exchange for our data. This model of communication has given rise to “privately owned spaces which function as a new kind of public space”. An arena where one needs constant attention through likes, shares and comments. Seymour elaborates how algorithms surveil our activity on these sites and suggest content we might not have known we liked or had an interest in. It can pick up behavioural patterns, giving voice to our unconscious desires. “We are writing, and as we write, we are being written,” he grimly observes.

However, these platforms have enabled social change. Or have they? While Seymour has a more critical take towards the role of Twitter and Facebook when it comes to social movements, Zeynep Tufekci in Twitter and Tear Gas – The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest gives us an on-ground account of how exactly ‘network’ movements work, their strengths and the challenges. Being a participant and spectator of some of the first tech-driven social movements, she talks about how the internet and subsequently social media was used to navigate and spread protest.

From the Zapatista movement of 1997 to the Arab Spring protests of 2011 and the #BlackLivesMatter, Tufekci elaborates on the constant tension between digitally fuelled movements and the actual real-life impact they sought but most often failed to make. She talks about how social media gave the layperson a chance to not only be politically active and have a voice, it also gave them the opportunity to be leaders. It took politics from politicians and gave it to the people. She talks about the Arab Spring protests in Egypt and how through a twitter hashtag, people would know and assemble for a protest or rally. It organised protests without the actual labour of political organising (campaigning, spreading awareness, having meetings).

However, due to the lack of leadership and fairly spontaneous nature of such protests, it was difficult to sustain momentum and find common ground.