Where are the experts?

So this week, we talked about a really interesting concept. Experts of social media. The point of it was to see how experts could help us use and understand social media better, especially if we want to be popular or have an online business. My reaction though was a bit different. 

As I was reading the articles and watching the videos about these experts, a thought kept coming back to me. These "experts" don't know anything about social media, or if they do, they are behind the times or stating obvious facts that I felt everybody already knew. To me, these weren't experts. I could probably help you just as much as these guys. I came to the conclusion that to be an expert in social media, you don't study and analyze it, all you have to do is use it. Actually participate. You will see how it works, how other people use it, the way the other users think, what they like, want, and talk about. You will see what's successful, not from any data, but from first hand experience, because you will have been a part of it. You will start to be a part of the community that makes those things successful. Some of the most successful and popular people on social media, whether on YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, etc, are just that, people. They aren't businesses or corporations. Sure, some of them make money off of it, but that's not how they started. Their success and popularity are in part, probably a large part, due to the fact that they are one of the people. 

But, my professor also pointed something out to me. I think that way, because I use social media. I don't feel the need to listen to "experts" on social media, because I use it all day every day. He said that I was, in effect, also an expert on social media. But after he said that, he mentioned that there are those who are not familiar with social media, and might need the help of experts. And I understand this and it is very reasonable. But I disagree. To a degree. I believe that that can help those who are unfamiliar with social media, but a much better way to learn is to go and use it yourself. Teach yourself. I don't know why so many people are averse to that concept. If five year-olds can do it, than so can you. At least for social media, we have no need for experts any more. This has very much to do with the idea of crowd sourcing and bottom-up content on the internet. Anyone can make anything, and anyone can learn anything. 

So go out there and immerse yourself in the internet and social media, and in no time, you will be an expert too.  

Digital Illiteracy

So one of the things we talked about this week was how to go viral. I thought it was really interesting, until I realized that I had already known all the things you need to make something go viral, I just didn't really know that I knew.

We went over a few things (mostly geared toward videos), like make it short, make it new, make it have emotional responses, things like that. I had basically known all of those things, I'm on the internet often; I've seen a lot of things that have gone viral, and I've seen a lot of things that haven't. But what I kept coming back to, was the fact that even those things weren't a guarantee for a viral post. I've seen plenty of things that have all those aspects, and still don't go viral. I've even seen post that were almost identical, both had those traits, yet one went viral and the other didn't.

To me it really seems like the internet is fickle. It meant that no matter how hard you try, how many of those viral traits your post has, sometimes it won't go viral just because the internet doesn't care this time. A lot of times things need a push from sites like 4chan or Reddit to make things popular elsewhere. To me, it seems like "going viral" can be pretty subjective at times.

Going along with this idea of what's viral, I read an article today in the New York Times titled "Faking Cultural Literacy". It talks about how, before the internet was a big part of our lives, there was cultural literacy, who was who and what was what for the time. People read newspaper articles, listened to talks, they consumed the media more fully. The article goes on to say that now, because of the amount of information that we go through, it would be impossible for us to read every article and watch every video we see. That's one of the reasons that Twitter and Vine are so popular, they have less data and are fast compared to other forms of media. But in our quest to stay relevant and appear knowledgeable and fashionable, we don't want to skip anything. So our only solution is to skim it all. Read the headlines. Watch the trailer. Read a review or a blog post. But we don't every really consume the media or data passed to us. So we really don't know anything. We're a society of ill-informed "know-it-alls".

So we have basically thrown cultural literacy out the window. And some people would argue that through the same process, we're throwing regular literacy out the window too. In a TED talk called "In praise of slowness", Carl Honore talks about how fast our society is, how detrimental it is to us, and how to slow down and really make the most of life. What he suggests is what I think society needs now more than almost anything else in development of our internet culture.

Digital Good

Where to start? I guess a good place would be how I see the world. I try to be a good person, and I think that most if not all of the people I know are good people. But for a long time I have held this really negative view of the world. That as a collective, the human race is horrible, and we are on a downward spiral morally, socially, spiritually, etc. That we are a lost cause. Collectively, not individually, like I said. I think, on an individual level, most people are good people, but once you group them together the bad is greater than the sum of it's parts, if that makes sense. And when it comes to online interactions...whew, don't get me started. It's way worse online. Thousands of people hack the accounts and profiles of millions of people for personal gain. Racism, sexism, any discrimination really, is the norm in comment sections and discussions. People ignore pleas for help. That's how I've almost always viewed the social interactions on the internet. 

Now, neither of those outlooks is totally true. What I said is true, those things to happen, but I think that they were being misrepresented in my mind. I'm beginning to change my outlook. I'm not completely changed yet, but I've begun to change. 

We are amazing. And we are amazing to each other. People donate millions of dollars to charities and fundraisers. They volunteer their time and labor to help others. They are kind. And these things happen online too. I just didn't see it very often on either the internet or the "outernet." But I've started to see just how good people can be. 

I started to see this while I was on the sites Reddit and Imgur (pronounced image-er), who are sister sites. These are mostly for entertainment; Reddit has an educational/news side. I would be browsing through them, looking at cool stuff, when a post about someone who has gone through a hard time, or is asking for help, would pop up. At the very beginning, I would read these posts because I didn't know what they were about. Then I started to ignore them, they were all the same in effect anyway. But as time went on I started to realize what these meant. These were people, who probably didn't know each other in any way except through the website, going out of their way to help these other people through either money, or packages, or services. Once I sat down and actually thought about that, it blew my mind. These people genuinely cared for each other. Of course there were still people who couldn't care less, but the fact that these posts were some of the more popular, it showed that a significant portion of the sites population actually did care. 

Then, in class, we went over a number of websites and online services that aimed at helping people, like Kiva and Kickstarter. We talked about numerous cases of social media campaigns to help people with a number of different types of problems. Thousands of strangers, on a fairly regular basis, sacrifice to help each other out. Many times without any type of reward or benefit. And then I thought about it and I realized that I've always kind of known about it. How people really are good and do come together for good causes. 

I'm starting to change the way I look at the world. It's a good place, over all. 

Stop the world, I wanna get off!

This week in the class something really hit me. We read some talks from religious leaders in our church (being a religious school) that had to do with the internet and social media and how we use them, and there were some quotes that really stood out to me. I'm going to post them and go over why I like them.

A poet described this delusion as an “endless cycle” that brings “knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word,” in which “wisdom” is “lost in knowledge” and “knowledge” is “lost in information."- Elder Oaks

Here he is describing what our time in the internet has turned into. Before the Information Age, before easy access to information, people studied in depth the information they had. When they knew something, they really knew it. People had personal libraries in their homes and offices. But now that we have almost limitless information at our finger tips, but we know nothing. We read something, and then we move on. We learn something but then we don't internalize it, it doesn't change how we look at the world, it's just information for regurgitating. Nobody thinks on what we learn, whether it's online or not, because we have to learn the next thing, there's no time for thinking. I'm guilty of this too, I know too many things to have learned anything. We should cut back on information for information's sake and really make the most of what we already have before moving on to something irrelevant.

I believe many of us are overnourished on entertainment junk food and undernourished on the bread of life.- Elder Oaks

To me, this is pretty self-explanatory. It is very similar to the above quote. We consume ridiculous amounts of information, mostly just entertainment. But that really doesn't do anything for our minds. It doesn't push or stretch our minds, it doesn't challenge us to grow and become smarter. It is the equivalent to sitting on the couch of wasting time eating the potato chips of internet jokes. In the end it kills us. And like I said before, I'm guilty of this too. I spend so much time on the internet, but what am I learning? What good does looking at memes and pictures of cats do for me? I have noticed that lately, over the past few years since high school, I have read very few books, way less than I used to. I haven't been mentally challenged, and my mind has gotten lazy. This is what the internet is doing for most of us. We could use it for so much more, but we figuratively (and literally) sit on our butts doing nothing.

The wise understand and apply the lessons of tree rings and air turbulence. They resist the temptation to get caught up in the frantic rush of everyday life. They follow the advice “There is more to life than increasing its speed.” In short, they focus on the things that matter most... Leonardo da Vinci is quoted as saying that “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”- Elder Uchtdorf

All of these quotes really are saying the same thing, but they are all good regardless. I really like this one because it makes me think of how I am living. I have, and have had for some time now, aspirations to learn so many things: extra academic subjects other than my major, a martial art, yoga, principles of Buddhism, a vocational skill, how to dance, more languages, etc. I want to learn these things, they interest me so much, but what have I done to learn them? Ok, I took a dance class. And I've been slightly more politically aware. But that's it. What have I been doing instead? Wasting time on the internet. And the problem is, is that I don't really want to get off of the internet. I like it. What I would give to, as cliched as it sounds, give up modern life and, say, live in India meditating everyday.

Now, I am talking about myself a lot, but I think that many people are like this, even if they don't know it, even if they don't want to change like I do. But we as a society have been caught up in the Information Age to the point that we can't really get out. And most people don't notice or care. Or both. Hopefully we can figure out the negative effects it is having in our lives and change, just like we did we radioactive materials and cigarettes.

Social Cancer

So one of the things that stuck out to me the most this week that we talked about is how social media, and the internet and connectivity in general, is affecting our lives, how we think.

We are focusing on David Weinbergers idea of the three orders of order. The first is the order of physical things, like organizing plates, cups, and silverware in cupboards and drawers. The second order of order is systems of cataloging, such as the Dewy Decimal System, organizing information based on certain traits that they hold. The third order of order is the miscellaneous. Instead of separating information into different groups or sections, everything is just in a web, or pool together. Information is now identified by any quality or trait that it holds, and we decide how to search for it, or how it is organized, much like tags on a photo.

The third order of order is how the internet and social media is organized, just everything thrown together and we search for it based on whatever we remember about it, or categorize it anyway, and as many times, as we want. What this is doing is making it extremely efficient to find information. We don't need to be experts in the subject to find what we're looking for, and we don't need to even know exactly what we're looking for. We'll be able to find it, because everything is connected to everything. This has made it easy for anyone to search for anything. Instead of having to memorize or learn everything we want to know, we can just search for it. This is, in essence, moving our memory from the internal to the external. This can be extremely useful. But because we do not understand it completely yet, just like the properties of radioactive materials were not understood and overused in the 50's, we are overusing and abusing it. Instead of making neural connections in our brains by learning, memorizing, retaining, and applying information, we are moving those neural connections online. Thereby removing any cognitive benefit we had to learning to it. Now, I haven't studied this in depth, this is just basically speculation, or a hypothesis of mine at this point, but I do believe it. We are taking the challenge away, and by doing that, we cannot exercise our minds. "Use it or lose it" in practice.

It would be beneficial to us, I think (this is all just personal thought anyway), is to be raised, and trained formally in school even, by moving through the orders. We grow up as children learning the first order of order naturally when we interact with the world. We learn the second order of order in school, but that is even becoming less common with the introduction of technology in many classrooms. It is my opinion that education, both in the home and at school, should remain in the second order of order until much later in development, up till the later teen years, as they finish high school. Then they would be able to move on to being fully exposed and immersed in the third order of order.

Also we, as educated adults, should change a little bit when it comes to how much we depend on the third order of order. We spend so much time plugged in to the internet, our devices, and social media. This could be detrimental as a mass addiction to cigarettes, but this would be a social cancer. We should really take time to unplug. We should augment our lives with the internet and everything that uses it, but our lives shouldn't be consumed with it, shouldn't be it, the internet. We will find, I personally think, that if we continue at this rate, that we will see similar side affects as if we were all addicted to cigarettes, or if we were still using radioactive paint to make our watches glow in the dark. We have to calm down. We have to walk away sometimes. It will consume us, if it already hasn't. And I'm guilty of this too, I have to change as much as the next guy. It's a problem society as a whole is facing, and I don't think anyone really knows what to do to fix it yet.

Here we go...

So here we are. My first post. Now, I’ve been using social media for a while now: Facebook, Steam, Reddit, Imgur, Pintrest. I’m fairly familiar with social media. But in this class and over the course of the semester, I think I’m going to be doing things a bit different. Like I said, I’m familiar with social media, but I’ve always been a “lurker”, someone who just views the content, rather than contributes to it. That’s what’s interesting about this for me now. 

I’ve started a blog, and a Twitter account, two things that even a couple weeks ago I would never see myself doing. And so far, it’s going well. I’m going to have to learn how to actually be social on these social media sites, like we were talking about, without interaction between people, it’s just media. I think part of the reason I never engaged like everyone else did, was because I understood the rules of these sites, rules of the internet you could say. Rules for what’s popular, what gets ignored, and what get criticized. I guess I just never thought that anything I had to say or contribute would ever qualify to be popular. But, who knows? Maybe by the end of this I’ll be shooting off tweets and uploading posts to reddit and they’ll get retweets and upvotes galore. We’ll see.

On a less personal note, there was something we talked about that I’ve been thinking about. We watched a video about the inception of the telephone and national and then international phone lines. And then we watched a video about the beginning of the internet and then the web. And I started to think about how, sure, the web is about 20 something years old now. But, in a historical perspective, just becoming widespread, it’s just now become as pervasive as telephones, over the course of the last few years. And sure, as individuals, we may know how to use the internet, we’re familiar with it, but I feel that as a society, we still don’t really get it. We’re still testing it out, seeing how it works. Our society is changing, it’s going online, and we’re still figuring out how to do that. Society changed with the printing press, and then the telephone (just to name a couple), and now it’s changing with the internet. And I have no idea where it’s going. I don’t know if anyone can really know. Do we have the imagination to think of where this could go? We have access, fast, easy access, to the internet virtually everywhere we are. Where will it go next, what will it look like? I’m excited for it. But a little bit scared too.