This weekend I’ll be in Paris for another seesmeetup, an opportunity for French speakers to meet in person after getting to know each other online. They’re good fun.
Seesmeet’up a PARIS le samedi 6?
See some of you there
It’s been a good evening at Podcampuk. The afternoon’s sessions were quite funny and the band was good. I enjoyed filming the band thanks to the diversity of shots I could aim to get.
We had some interesting interviews of which two were with teachers. One was a University level professor whilst the other was a teacher for 7 year old children. The children were podcasting for students in Australia as well as America therefore we see a nicely different use of the medium. This topic never ceases to surprise people.
It’s been a good complete weekend night and whilst I enjoy podcamp UK I do want to have a rest at home. There’s nothing nicer than getting back from a trip and dumping the bag in your bedroom and walking around feeling much lighter.
The Goal of the BBC is to Inform, educate and entertain. The aim of Public Service Broadcasters is to provide people with reliable, accurate information that is not biased, that is neutral, in so far as is possible. Recently with the Far Right getting into positions of power, to control the Radio Television Suisse, the BBC and many other broadcasters and media outlets the need for theory of knowledge, history and Media Studies has become essential.
I would like to throw philosophy into the mix, along with ethics but I think that the three topics in the title will suffice. In theory of knowledge you learn to know what you know, but also to understand what you do not know. You learn about the limits of what you have learned in order to better handle the information that you do understand. It has been years since I studied Theory of Knowledge so I’ll jump on to the next topic. History.
In history you question information. You ask “Who wrote it”, “When did they write it”, “why did they write it?”, “how did they gain from this information”, “Who had to gain from this information” and more. The point is that history is not just the study of the past. It is the study of veracity. It is learning to contextualise the information we get, within the context of that information. To put it plainly, did the loser, or the winner, write this information. In the age of “Social Media” and endless streams of information every point if view has an outlet. Information doesn’t have to be demonstrable for people to believe it, as long as it lines up with their agenda.
The idea that we don’t need to, or shouldn’t study history is wrong for the simple reason that we learn historical facts but we also learn how to identify reliable information from opinion. We also learn to see three or four points of view, before digesting the information and coming to our own conclusions.
The final topic is media studies. When I studied this topic it was a subject that was relevant to media professionals because at the time if you worked in radio, publishing, television of others you need a good grasp of the social context and history of the media, to work effectively.
Today we are in an age where everyone is an author, a publisher, a presenter, and more. We are in an age where everyone has the same reach as everyone else. The gatekeepers are emotion, algorithms, sensationalism and more.
Remember, when people read from newspapers headlines gave the who, what, where. how, why, and when answers in the headline, and people would read the article if it was relevant. Remember that back then we bought the entire paper, daily, or simply picked it up in a pub and read. Clickbait headlines don’t give us any information, and yet future generations are growing up with clickbait titles, rather than informative ones.
Last week Twitter spoke of “legacy” verified accounts, as if they were something to be scorned and avoided. Verified accounts were to ensure that people knew who was authoritative and who was an amateur. Remember Andrew Keen wrote about how the World Wide Web would change our lives, before social media even came on the scene. Musk is an amateur. He thinks he is a media professional but he is just a wealthy amateur with funds. That’s why he’s targeting the memosphere, rather than the broader World Wide Web.
As Instagram went from being a photo sharing app between friends, to a glossy magazine for influencers, as facebook went from being a discussion forum for uni friends, to a place to play zynga games, and when twitter went from being a glorified chatroom to a Right Wing amalgamator so the age of Social Media ended.
Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have become tools to spread disinformation and opinions, rather than social networks. Twitter and Facebook were once tight knit communities of friends talking with friends of friends.
I was triggered to write this blog post because of this article: https://archive.is/hEwOj.
But their concerns were largely drowned out by Twitter and Substack accounts with collective followings in the millions, who cheered the finding. With a better understanding of the Manufacturing of Consent such articles and such groups would have less of a voice on social media. When Andrew Keen wrote his book he worried about bloggers, but as today proves, the problem is not with opinionated individuals, but opinionated corporations and people with the funds to buy websites like Myspace when Keen was writing, and Twitter, as I write this blog post. The danger isn’t individuals. The danger is wealthy corporations and wealthy individuals with specific agendas.
By studying Theory of Knowledge, History and Media Studies people would be equipped with the tools to use social media safely. They see the smoke and mirrors. They are less vulnerable to manipulation.
With the current situation at Twitter I have chosen to take a twitter break. Twitter hasn’t been fun during the last three years, which is part of the reason I went anonymous, private, and then public but anonymous again. It used to be about having conversations with people that I would eventually want to meet in person.
Now that Twitter has shifted political slant and verified account have lost their status there is little to keep me on Twitter. I see it slipping in the wrong direction and I do not want to be part of the network at the moment. I might return in a few weeks or months. For now I think that the best is just to stay away.
I have two mastodon accounts now, on different instances and I am willing to give those networks a chance. I’m on those instances but there is a difference. I am not inclined to invest weeks, months or years on trying to find a community, only for it to be destroyed, once again. Either the owners just grow bored, or the social network is bought, or the users grow bored and leave. After flitting from website from 1996 to today I have lost the drive to invest any time on networks that can be bought by billionaires, with no checks or balances. Why do we provide value to websites that are just sold by greedy people to other greedy people?
I did consider returning to Facebook and Instagram but I don’t think I am inclined to return to these networks. If pandemic policies change and we get to COVID zero then I will have a strong motivation to return to Facebook, for the groups. For now I might take a short break.
I think blogging and web development have a better return on investment than social networks. I will focus on these.
Last night Hill & Knowlton organised a Social Media club event in central London to discuss a number of aspects surrounding blogging, marketing and PR. The Event started with a quick introduction to how certain bloggers have voiced their intense dislike of being pitched to by PR companies whilst others are more relaxed about the whole thing.
A number of conversations took place as sub groups were split to discuss specific topics. The group I was in discussed Pull factors and how to encourage them to come to see your message, how to generate interest and take advantage of the social media and what they’re good at. A few case examples were given and discussed by this group. People from a variety of PR firms joined in the conversation.
Two key things that were talked about in the debrief to the whole group found that no one knows how to deal with the social media and that at this moment in time it is about experimentation to find what is most effective and with whom. Blogging and social media were seen as a hard thing to quantify because conversations don’t have any concrete measurable effects until later. This led on to the point that at this moment in time it’s a challenge to value how you are attempting to raise awareness of what the company would like people to know about.
It was an interesting event and i hope to go many more of this type.
Now that twitter has gone mainstream and fewer people are obsessive about it I’ve been trying to walk the gang plank and arrived on friendfeed. It’s an rss aggregating site, much like facebook where you have none of your friends, but don’t worry. You can populate it with various news rss sources for colour.
That’s not the reason for this blog post. What I wanted to really tell you about is the friendfeed notifier thing. It’s a useful application that shows you the latest item transiting through your home friendfeed feed in real time. As a result you can work on other projects whilst occasionaly seeing what is happening there.
