{"id":1740,"date":"2012-03-09T07:35:44","date_gmt":"2012-03-09T07:35:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/?p=1740"},"modified":"2012-03-09T07:35:44","modified_gmt":"2012-03-09T07:35:44","slug":"fetishation_of_social_media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/?p=1740","title":{"rendered":"Fetishation of Social Media"},"content":{"rendered":"

An article on the HuffingtonPost<\/a>, by Arianne Huffington, entitled, “Virality Uber Alles: What the Fetishization of Social Media Is Costing Us All<\/a>.”  Below are some paragraphs that I thought summarized the gist of the article…<\/p>\n

\n

Going viral has gone viral. Social media have become the obsession of
\nthe media. It’s all about social now: What are the latest social tools?
\nHow can a company increase its social reach? Are reporters devoting
\nenough time to social? Less discussed — or not at all — is the value
\nof the thing going viral. Doesn’t matter — as long as it’s social. And
\nviral!<\/p>\n

The media world’s fetishization of social media has reached
\nidol-worshipping proportions. Media conference agendas are filled with
\npanels devoted to social media and how to use social tools to amplify
\ncoverage, but you rarely see one discussing what that coverage should
\nactually be about. As Wadah Khanfar, former Director General of Al
\nJazeera, told our editors when he visited our newsroom last week, “The
\nlack of contextualization and prioritization in the U.S. media makes it
\nharder to know what the most important story is at any given time.”<\/p>\n

Our media culture is locked in the Perpetual Now, constantly chasing
\nephemeral scoops that last only seconds and that most often don’t matter
\nin the first place, even for the brief moment that they’re “exclusive…”<\/p>\n

Michael Calderone about the effect that social media have had on 2012
\ncampaign coverage. “In a media landscape replete with Twitter, Facebook,
\npersonal blogs and myriad other digital, broadcast and print sources,”
\nhe wrote, “nothing is too inconsequential to be made consequential…<\/p>\n

“We are in great haste,” wrote<\/a>
\nThoreau in 1854, “to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to
\nTexas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to
\ncommunicate.” And today, we are in great haste to celebrate something
\ngoing viral, but seem completely unconcerned whether the thing that went
\nviral added one iota of anything good — including even just simple
\namusement — to our lives…. We’re treating virality as a good in and of itself, moving forward for
\nthe sake of moving.<\/i> “Hey,” someone might ask, “where are you going?” “I
\ndon’t know — but as long as I’m moving it doesn’t matter!” Not a very
\neffective way to end up in a better place…<\/p>\n

“But as Twitter’s Rachael Horwitz wrote to me in an email, “Twitter’s algorithm favors novelty over popularity.”<\/p>\n

“Indeed, to further complicate the science of trending topics, a subject
\ncan be too popular to trend: In December of 2010, just after Julian
\nAssange began releasing U.S. diplomatic cables, about 1 percent of all
\ntweets (at the time, that would have been roughly a million tweets a
\nday) were about WikiLeaks, and yet #wikileaks trended so rarely that
\npeople accused<\/a>
\nTwitter of censorship. In fact, the opposite was true: there were too
\nmany tweets about WikiLeaks, and they were so constant that Twitter
\nstarted treating WikiLeaks as the new normal.” <\/p>\n

So, the question remains: as we adopt new and better ways to help people
\ncommunicate, can we keep asking what is really being communicated? And
\nwhat’s the opportunity cost of what is not being communicated while
\nwe’re all locked in the perpetual present chasing whatever is trending?…<\/p>\n

These days every company is hungry to embrace social media and virality,
\neven if they’re not exactly sure what that means, and even if they’re
\nnot prepared to really deal with it once they’ve achieved it.<\/p>\n

Or as Sheryl Sandberg put it<\/a>,
\n“What it means to be social is if you want to talk to me, you have to
\nlisten to me as well.” A lot of brands want to be social, but they don’t
\nwant to listen, because much of what they’re hearing is quite simply
\nnot to their liking, and, just as in relationships in the offline world,
\nengaging with your customers or your readers in a transparent and
\nauthentic way is not all sweetness and light. So simply issuing a
\nstatement saying you’re committed to listening isn’t the same thing as
\nlistening. And as in any human relationship, there is a dark side to
\nintimacy.<\/b><\/p>\n

“The campaigns can sort of distract reporters throughout the day by helping fuel these mini-stories, mini-controversies,” said<\/a> the New York Times’<\/em>
\nJeff Zeleny. Mini-stories. Mini-controversies. Just the sort of
\nTwitter-friendly morsels that many in the media think are best-suited to
\nthe new social media landscape. But that conflates the form with the
\nsubstance, and we miss the desperate need for more than snackable,
\nhere-now-gone-in-15-minutes scoops. So we end up with a system in which
\nthe media are being willingly led by the campaigns away from the issues
\nthat matter and the solutions that will actually make a difference in
\npeople’s lives. <\/i> [emphsis mine]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole article.<\/p>\n

What might this say for the Church and its obsessive, and at times pathological, preoccupation with social media?  Are the same observations written in this article true for us?  I hear from so many sources of younger people that older leadership in charge simply do not and will not listen (see the bold paragraph, above). <\/p>\n

The enduring aspects of the Church in her liturgies, her patterns-of-life, and her foci mitigates against such trendy irrelevancies, yet many of us seem to think that everything must change now, often, and quickly, for its own sake, or we will be become irrelevant. Too often we think that which has endured must be sacrificed for the sake of trendy popularity. We willingly sell our patrimony for a bowl of desperately sought affirmation. <\/p>\n

If you pay attention to what younger people are actually saying (in the aggregate), even if it isn’t what we want to hear, we might learn something that actually helps our situation. What I hear and see in the arrogate, and tell me otherwise form sources other than your own opinion, is that younger people are seeking after time-tested substance that is proven by its ability to endure and survive over time (and over time doesn’t mean over the last 30 years). We are tired of the chaos of constant change devoid of substance.  What is sought are examples of real lives that demonstrate a sense of proven surety built on consequential relationships focused on something other than self. <\/p>\n

Virality doesn’t give such things – the type of things that give meaning to one’s life and a sense of true accomplishment and worth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An article on the HuffingtonPost, by Arianne Huffington, entitled, “Virality Uber Alles: What the Fetishization of Social Media Is Costing Us All.”  Below are some paragraphs that I thought summarized the gist of the article… Going viral has gone viral. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,27,24,26,6,20,10,30,12,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglican","category-christianity","category-generations","category-imagodei","category-politicsculture","category-post-modern","category-quotes","category-research","category-the-episcopal-church","category-thoughts-from-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1740\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}