Absolute Carmel

The Wagging Tail theory or Zen and the Art of Social Media

Suggested background music for this post:  Ironic/ Alanis Morisette

Read this post in Hebrew

Does web content model follow mass media or the long tail phenomenon? I say neither and both. The web is in constant flux, thus content created in one context is consumed in another. And too often, whatever you wanted to say so badly faded away so fast, while that misfortune discharge becomes written in stone and that stone rolls around and gets consumed by the masses. Ladies and gentleman, I present to you the wagging tail (trademark!) theory of the web.

The true story of social media content is a tragedy: when you share from the heart, let’s face it, your ‘long tail’ is pretty short, and you get used to its familiar warmth, far-off the public eye though right under its nose. You know you’re basically talking to the same ten people and you’re getting used to talk intimately, update some too-much-information statuses and treat every application as ephemeral conversation, more ephemeral than speech even, since it disappears from the news feed even before your three best friends have seen it. Sometimes the sea of information is so noisy and vast and the flow is so fast that it feels more like you’re echoing your thoughts into the web void to be dug by no one.

But right there and than when you get comfy with being a netzien and start speaking your mind freely, the pendulum moves and the tail wags: it’s always a short forgotten tweet about a person no one assumes will ever bump into it, that one video in which you really embarrassed yourself, or the one too personal/outrageous line in that too-long-too-read-anyway post… and the tail wagged! – Forward, retweet, share, link, like, rate, tag, digg – and you’re flooded, penetrated, taken out of context and tossed to the masses, fried on the tribal fire while the social media exposes her mass media teeth and your last sane thought is: why didn’t I think for just one second before sharing broadcasting this???

Social media is a fickle bitch

Social media is a living creature, social media is a fickle bitch, on the web everything moves and flows and changes without rest and you cannot enter the same application twice, heck you can’t even tweet the same tweet twice (try it, I am serious!). Everything changes; everything passes in a diabolic speed, but where to the rivers of Information flow? To a bottomless dark server-pit that unfortunately remains publicly accessible though only Google and selected info mining algorithms can pull it from under the cybernetic ground to stab you in the back with it.

Sometimes this wagging tail makes you feel important: when the PR person of a firm you complained about digs up your blog post and writes an apologetic comment, or when the constantly unavailable costumer service reacts to your whining tweet, but sometimes it’ll make you feel mean or stupid, when the celebrity you gossiped about shows up in your mailbox or the aunt you forgot you had in Australia participates in the YouTube meme mocking you.

But when you really wanna be heard, when you have something beautiful, useful or important to say, no one will hear it, even your long tail is chopped, attention-dried and with no mind-share left for you. And your three best friends will give you that speech again, how reading you DOESN’T equal caring about you as a person. Even when you wear your heart on your tweet, squeezing your best into 140 characters, no one gets to see it, and your beautiful tree falls silently in the woods. And it gets worse: some day, someone else will say something very similar, much later, in a lesser beautiful way, but more people will dig it, and it’ll get popular, might even get its own Wikipedia entry. Randomness is a fickle bitch too.

The economy of attention moves at the speed of thought: when you put all your cards on the table she sniffs and turns her back coldly only to turn back suddenly just when you took your clothes off, dazzling you with her spotlights, flipping contexts and frames on you like flipping a coin. And only social media experts are arrogant enough to think they have recipes for this fickle flip flop.

Since every media is social by nature, I assume “social media” refers to these days of digital folklore, when society IS the media, and the message is carried on the heart muscles of the people, thus each and every one of us depends on the change of heart of each and every one of us: should we spread the virus or break the chain letter? So if there’s a recipe for social media success it must be a very ancient one, for whatever touched people from the dawn of times has never changed, even when hearsay was replaced with tweetsay and word to mouth became word to mouse.

I have much more to say but like every tragedy it’s time for the (social media) choir now. Wagg your tails.

Tags: digital folklore, economy of attention, ephemeral, everything changes, long tail, mass media, oral culture online, sharing culture, social media, tragedy, user generated content, wagging tail theory, web 2.0, zen and the art of social media