In 1997, shortly after Sherry Turkle first published “Life on Screen: Identity in the age of the Internet” and the fascination with information technologies hit mainstream, George Myerson published the booklet “Heidegger, Habermas and the Mobile Phone“. Besides being a nice n’quick introduction to those thinkers in a modern technology context, it contained an analysis of some mobile phones advertisements from those prehistoric times, before phones could surf the web and Americans could text. His striking analysis showed how despite the notion of connecting people (/poke Nokia) the discourse and iconography of those ads were actually soliciting us to connect with/to the technology itself and not with each other through it.
And here we are, 15 years later, inseparable from and immersed in our smart-ass phones in the presence of friends and strangers, aspiring for a more intimate relationship with Siri than with those around us. Only 15 years later and even Sherry Turkle writes an entirely different book, based on interviews with thousands of people, warning us from the erosion and underdevelopment of identity and interpersonal communication, and the redundancy of basic human traits while we’re fascinated with social media and humanoid robotics.
I’m not here to try and speculate what went wrong, Turkle has done it beautifully. But since I’m spending this year in the U.S and exposed to TV commercials for smartphones on a daily basis, I couldn’t help but wonder what are they telling us today about 15 years from now and how compelled are we to go there? (Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love technology. I’m just not sure I love it that way….)
Survival of the flattest
Since this is a blog post and not an academic paper I’ll settle for two typical 4G-LTE smartphone ads currently running on American TV channels.
The above AT&T commercial is part of a series in which there’s a pair of men/women immersed in their smartphones and constantly beating everyone else to the punch, whether in the office or in the sports field. Viewers’ attention is directed towards the speed of those phones as the reason that keeps those guys ahead (and popular), because what happened “so 12 seconds ago” isn’t human history or even nostalgia but plain worthless the moment it isn’t news anymore; its lifespan shorter than bacteria. And he who belittles his history shall end up disparaging himself and his future. I return to this point later.
Meanwhile, back to the ad, if you lift your eyes from your/their phones for a moment and check out the entire mise-en-scene, you’ll see what’s really happening are two losers wasting their lives outside the field. They came to see sports but they are not involved in any of the rich activity and culture of sports, yet the commercial places them in the center of things – the stolen mascot wonders around them and a wounded sports star relies on them – because the center of all things isn’t in the territory anymore, but on the (virtual) map. The “real” game/office and game/office culture is now online, so one must wonder why these guys even bothered to come, instead of “running the show” from their VIP iPad/TV seats at home.
Let’s delve deeper. One cannot bandage a player AND stay on top of all the net traffic at the same time. The female version office commercial made it even less believable that they would find time to throw a farewell party to another worker AND keep on top of other things, within “so 40 seconds ago”. We keep telling ourselves (or THEY keep telling us) that the experience, its documentation, its sharing/dispersion and the reflection on it can happen at the same time (and within 2 seconds) and that this is life now. But THIS isn’t life. That’s not even possible, not even for an AI future quantum computer. However, that explains how our lives’ richness, made of the delicate dialectics between those dimensions, is being flattened and we end up feeling nothing has meaning when we mistake breadth for depth.
Life is a series of multi-dimensional processes that consume time and space. Human beings were always afraid of the passing time and tried to capture it, but this new illusion of staying in one place to stay on top of it is ridiculous at best. If we buy into this commercial’s notion of information as experience, we simply end up spending hours obsessively pressing the refresh button, catching up on information others have experienced and pretending it makes us important to share them as our own, while stuck on the bench with our heads bent, with this incredible speed of consumption as the pulse of our pathetic excuse for a life. As long as we’re competing who reacts first there’s a good chance we’ll forget to act.
Speaking of speed, the commercial pretends that speed is a desired and competitive quality attributed to a mobile device, while any idiot who ever went online knows that nets don’t just push the relevant info to the fittest or fastest. It’s actually human thought or movement speed, literacy, contacts and/or intuition that puts us in the position where a relevant piece of information is timely. Your phone can be a space rocket and you’ll still be eating the dust of a guy who happened to be there or knows someone who sent him a link earlier. The only thing speed is good for is consuming your phone’s battery faster and loading your data earlier by a time unit that passes before you blink. and that’s only if speed even matters.
You already know all of this is happening to make you spend more money for no real added value; I don’t have to tell you that. But what I do want to point out is that THESE are the patterns and images programming your cognition to rely on technology more than you trust yourself and your physical surroundings (the next ad will be more straightforward about that one); that make you feel your experiences are worthless if they cannot be filmed/tweeted/mediated and transformed into this type of social capital, and you’ll be that tree that falls in the woods without anyone to witness it, all alone. Keep sliding your fingers on that luxurious black screen, though, and you’ll scarcely notice your inner loneliness, paranoia or obsession while carrying out life as this mission impossible, never satisfied and compelled to marginalize or forget all that’s really worth living for. Yea, I know most of us manage to tweet all day while living a full(?) life somehow, at least for now, but that’s not what this commercial predicts and some of us aren’t as good in it as others.
God in the machine-flesh
Don’t forget to breath. Shall we take a look at that second ad now?
Verizon are rooting for the same speed rhetoric but at least they present a more realistic situation in which people compete on an auctioned item online (although, again, the quality of your connection and the quantity of your obsession will win you more in that department). The interesting part of this commercial is the elephant in the room alligator in the swamp. Alligators are mythic ancient powerful creatures preceding dinosaurs, barely changed during the process of evolution, and even in the Jewish bible the “big alligators” are mentioned as already there shortly after God turned on the first light. In older Sumerian myths, the alligator is related to the snake and portrayed as God’s old nemesis.
The Verizon alligator represents nature, evolution and mythology all together, as surpassed by the human-technology alliance that takes the place of God in this battle. The entire relationship between humanity and technology was based on the attempt to conquer/tame/control nature but somewhere along the way, technology went from being the means to being an end, to being THE end (of us?). Neo-utopian theories (for example, singularity) are currently mashing up good old technological determinism with cutting edge evolutionary biology, striving for “Matrix 4 – the heavenly version”, in which humans and machines merge into a super being. But this super being isn’t struggling with nature anymore– it IS nature, according to this discourse – it is the next step in evolution.
To cut a long story short, we now play God/Pygmalion/Frankenstein, that created a functional tool, a Golem, and when it threatened to swallow us and alienate us from both nature and human nature, we animated it and whispered on its ear that we’re in this together as a new kind of being, a natural being. And it is all so exiting that we don’t even have the time or ability to notice the things left behind anymore, things fundamentally missing from our own evolution as humans and society, things that are not solved (and sometimes even made worse) by technology. It’s kinda ironic that those who re-frame men’s invention of and involvement in technological development through almost mystical discourses of salvation, are some of the same people that whine about others who invented a God to worship, act out on its name and expect him to solve all our problems.
Now remix techno-utopia, mimetics and atheism and you’ve got the perfect recipe for denial of any sense of self, soul or human spirit, which puts us in the same line with technologies – we could be like them and they no longer have trouble to become like us (it’s just a question of technology!). And this justifies giving up on any attempt of moral/social/economical/political change, because technology will soon make it all redundant. Is it really a coincidence that these ads are running in times when Occupy movements are rising around the world, promoting themselves through those same technologies, or is it a latent message for them to worry about YouTubing their drumming sessions on faster phones and entertain us until the “God in the machine” appears, literally this time? What saddens me is that so many of those people who identify and walk with social justice moments truly believe those new technologies will “naturally” take their side.
Deselecting natural selection
I’ve got much more to say about the ideas invoked by this ad but they’ll be left for a future post. In conclusion, in Verizon’s ad, speed is the evolutionary advantage technology brings as dowry to our merger, thus we’ve outsmarted the alligators and made a sweet deal with our “successors” – they upgrade us instead of destroy or enslave us like dystopian science fiction predicted. But it’s all just a pig in a poke and the alligator is CGI. It takes only a small natural disaster to disable our energy production ability, restore our humility, and remind us that the 3D movie we live in is still playing on a planet earth near you, after all.
Let’s suppose neo-utopists are right for a minute. Philosopher Ken Wilber reminds us that in evolution, transcendence includes rather than excludes earlier life forms. If I may infer from that another nuance I’d say it requires maturation and timing is everything. Atoms do not start clustering into cells until they figure out “atomness” or else all evolution would have happened simultaneously, so 27 seconds ago.
Look at the world around you. Do you really think we got the project of humanity figured out or are we digging our own grave and considering the en(super)powerment of a Darth Vedar along? Even if this is to be our fate (which i believe it isn’t), I dread the consequences of a premature transcendence attempt in which we as humans discard, in the name of evolution, our responsibility and agency as “the invisible hand” in this process of (un)natural selection. So don’t you natural-select me into thinking I don’t have a choice because as long as I’m not a machine, thank God, there’s always a choice there.
(… And they wonder why I’m in no hurry to bring a child into this world, where both Pinocchio and the real child aspire to become an iPad app of an interactive comic of Justin Beiber, or in the best case scenario, dedicate their lives to building such an app.)
Posted 2 months, 2 weeks ago at 3:37 am. Add a comment
A ten years old kid doesn’t know what slander is. When he offends another kid or speaks hatefully of his teacher on Facebook, he is in the context of spontaneous speech since online writing is speech for him. He doesn’t expect this speech to be framed as a formal written publication that he’s held legally responsible for, because, as far as he is concerned, there is little difference between saying those things aloud at school or on Facebook.
A new Israeli law that extends slander liability to online user generated content may be the first time since biblical times that slander will apply to daily speech contexts, only because the legal system adopts an all-embracing view of the internet as public media. The prohibition of slander appears numerous times in the bible and leprosy is presented as the punishment for those who gossip about others rather than mind their own business. Judaism as well as other spiritual traditions encourages the practice of aware speech and purity of the word so that we speak about our own experience rather than make assumptions about others.
“Applying slander to netspeak will not reduce
negative language and critique – it will only transfer it
from the literal to the homiletic level of interpretation.
We will witness an increase in ironic writing and
critique through visual memes.”
Applying slander to netspeak will be forcing us into this practice (and despite being forced into it the result might actually benefit web discourse…). However, much before Israeli netziens become saints, the new slander law will probably enhance another online discursive phenomenon. Online messages often feature irony, humor, sarcasm and parody and are often presented multimodaly. These new literacies that require a high degree of sophistication lift the bar for online participation and often require rich inter-textual knowledge (especially in the case of memes). Therefore, I think that applying slander to netspeak will not reduce the use of negative language and the frequency of critique – it will only transfer it from the literal to the homiletic level of interpretation. We will probably witness an increase in ironic writing and critique through visual memes as a way to stay above the radar of slander laws. These new literacies already proved useful discursive resources in designing messages that stand out and successfully attract our overloaded short attention span. They shall prove useful once more in bypassing current attempts to limit online freedom of speech.
A few weeks ago I gave a talk on emerging genres of online violence that were less familiar before web 2.0 and lack of awareness to their impact may make us victims or aggressors online. One such example is the power to publish and distribute information, traditionally held by rulers or journalists, that has overwhelming impact on the individual and should be used carefully. Nowadays, every ten years old can say something online that may reach the distribution scale of a national broadcast and be captured and replicated before he has the chance to take it back; Yet no one offers this kid the fu**ing manual to use such a power without getting someone killed with the wrong words. And now they mean to sue him for slander over it.
The connection between the new slander law and my talk is McLuhan’s argument that we perceive new media through the frames of old media until its actual novelty manifests itself and forces us to change. We’ve been treating the internet as another public media and its content as text, but web applications are also spaces we (virtually) inhabit and avatars that represent us online. Thus, hurting our avatar may be hurting us in ways we can feel, although they might not make clear sense nor cause direct physical damage. These avatars and spaces might require their own legal protection and rights. Meanwhile, these simultaneous metaphorical layers suggest we are not as close as we think to understanding what the web really is, how it works for us and how to approach what happens to us on it. Or maybe in it, or through it. Even the prepositions are biased.
Posted 5 months, 4 weeks ago at 3:18 am. 1 comment
Last February I went to Vienna for an extraordinary weekend: I attended the classic high society kaffeesieder ball in a palace, and the proletarian/satiric weightlifters ball in a pub. The result is not something i can describe in words, you’ll have to see for yourselves:
What do Zombies, Vampires and Communication Technologies have in common? Mainly that we, humans, are fascinated with them. Both Zombies and Vampires came out of ancient graves in folklore horror tales, and now are popular cultural icons. It’s puzzling that no one has made a connection between them, though, because they represent opposing ideas: the Zombie is a living dead, a body-in-decay without its heart and soul and no flow of emotions pumping through, while the Vampire is a dead being, whose soul’s been replaced with an extremely alive, overtly passionate and voluptuous entity.
The Zombie kills without a reason, since causality and purpose are irrelevant to zombies. This inability to reason with it or understand its motives is what makes the zombie a monster in our eyes, pure evil. The Vampire, however, drinks blood to survive and bites to reproduce. We can relate to these basic instincts, thus vampires have gradually turned from freaky monsters to sexy tormented super heroes in our cultural texts.
But why do we like seeing so many Zombies and Vampires on our screens? The zombie represents humanity’s greatest fear: living a life without meaning, reduced to a series of automated practices that form our routine. The Zombie embodies our fear of dying from within, loosing presence and slipping away from ourselves, while seemingly still functioning.
In the modern world of hyper media, zombification is a serious threat that resonates with the industrial era distopian fear of eroding humanity in the face of efficient automation. Our communication technologies only seem friendlier today, but one could argue they reduce our empathy nonetheless, satisfying our instant gratifications with automated solutions that close every gap, never truly challenging us to grow.
In the days of “Metropolis” and Chaplin’s “Modern Times”, technology was a freaky monster, but in our days of iPhones and Kindles, we adore these gadgets like pets, and often treat them like one of our body’s organs. Our carbon bodies are significantly slower, limited machines. They need to go through processes, they need to digest, and they can run out of energy and require our care and slow refill. So we’re disappointed of them, we think of them less than the wonderful digital machines with their robotic perfection, and we channel our minds into digital spaces, to feel fast, vast and flexible, forever young.
Curiously enough, this is also the case with Vampires. My friend Odelia writes her master thesis on the shift in our perception of vampires: from wanting to kill it to begging it to go to bed with us (e.g Twilight or True Blood). The modern vampire is a super human, it he has a stronger livido, enhanced senses, and he is everything we would have been if we had the guts, writes Odelia.
To me, our love for both vampires and smart gadgets, reveals our fear that being human is just not enough, it’s weak and flawed and needs to be upgraded and enhanced through some technology, whether it is a bite, a mega byte, a beer or a drug. Thus, we often invite such vampires to suck our blood, which is merely a metaphor for our energy.
Vampires can also take the form of people that their presence is consuming, that practically feed of our life force, and are up when we are down. And sometimes we let ourselves become vampires, become possessed, obsessed, power drunk, cruelly indifferent and cold hearted… telling ourselves this is survival, this is about being strong, it’s the way to beat the system and become the best, but it is actually a heart catheterization, a humanity-bypass. Both in the Jewish Talmud and the myth of Dracula, the vampire is in fact a demon, which represents all that drives us off our paths, all that isn’t our spark-of-God human soul.
The big secret is that humanity is perfect and powerful. Our weakness is our strength. This carbon body is a unique medium, our soul’s temple, haven and heaven; a one of a kind manifestation resource that the entire universe is after. Thus, the forces that tempt us to underestimate or transcend it – that plant in us the idea that virtual is as good as (and sometimes even better than) real – are conducting the greatest conspiracy of our times. If I were to translate it into our favorite metaphors this could be the screenplay of the next science fiction blockbuster of our decade.
Picture this: humanity is under the most deadly attack it has ever known, near extinction, but nobody notices or even suspects it, because nothing dramatic is happening on the outside – we are being attacked from within, on an unexpected frontier poorly equipped to spot intruders. The tragedy is that we experience it as madness, indifference and evil, and we interpret it as part of ourselves, an inherent flaw in human nature, that’s enhanced to the point it’s becoming normal….
But this is the mother of all wars, led by a coalition of zombies and vampires, operating quietly and gradually through communication technologies, using them to spread despair and draw our attention (soul) out of our bodies, tempt us to channel it through virtual spaces. Making us feel uncomfortable with ourselves, destroy ourselves with constant “improvements” that never really feel good, or neglect ourselves through technologies of becoming someone else…. so we’re slowly emptied out, our life’s purpose forgotten, and we’re becoming kinda zombies: our souls are caught in the net while our precious bodies, these diamonds that the entire universe but us knows their real worth, are being taken over by the vamps. Thus, we wake up every day and we don’t even know that we manifest THEIR dreams.
Till one child discovers the secret weapon to save humanity, like Harry Potter saved us from Voldemort. And it is the same weapon no less: love, meaning, something worth living for. This is no Hollywood kitsch, it’s the strongest energy in the universe and it’s what humans live for and feed of. It’s practically God. Doing what you love and loving what you do, in all its forms like enthusiasm, compassion, empathy or laughter. One can de-zombify oneself and stop the organs from falling off, by falling in love and stumbling upon something meaningful, by struggling to make meaning of the little things in life. Things become full, beautiful again, when looking at them openly, particularly, fondly….
As for vampires, one of the most common ways to kill it is sunlight. Love and happiness are exactly that, an inner sunlight that’s so strong, it simply melts the forces of darkness, decay and obstruction. Even feeling our pains and sorrows feels beautiful and grounds us to what’s so real and wonderful about us. That simple irrational flow often reduced to chemistry and traditionally treated with suspicion by philosophers of reason, is our best protection.
Our life’s task is to perform ourselves freshly, in real time present tense, day after day, minimizing repetition and automation. Caring, sharing, creating, being involved…this is God’s work.
Posted 1 year, 6 months ago at 10:52 pm. 3 comments
“El Ranchio!” shouts the bus driver. A flock of peddlers cling to the windowpanes like locust to the crops, offering water bottles, rapidly melting ice cream scones and mango slices. The thought of being on their side of the window in a minute sends a shiver down my spine. I’m the only passenger dropping herself into this chaos. I’m trying to move with confidence, throwing my backpack on the floor and sitting on it pretending to read a book and evade my presence, but the attention focused on me sabotages my concentration.
It was 1997. The government of Guatemala has just signed a peace agreement with the guerrilla rebels and the rumor was that many of the newly unemployed armed fighters in the north of the country have taken up robbery. It was a bad timing to be lured off the beaten track and follow Alex to Coban; that city that offered absolutely nothing besides him, and then again he didn’t end up offering much either. So here I was, alone for the first time, waiting for the daily bus to Petén, to Tikal.
As I’m working on playing cool and concentrated in my book, I’m missing another bus that stops right beside my backpack. The sound of the driver peeing on his wheel in my vicinity is the only thing that makes me jump off the backpack and move it seconds away from being splashed. The peddlers die laughing and I join them. Ironically, I start feeling safer here. Every time a bus leaves, the junction becomes very quiet. The peddlers retreat to the tin pavilions to hide from the sun, and loose interest in me. It’s time to find out when’s the bus to Petén. “Excuse me, when’s the bus to Petén?” I ask in Spanish.
I think I really noticed her only after the question was already asked: very old, very skinny, her face’s wrinkled and her spine’s curved, her black and gray hair is gathered behind her back and her clothes are worn out. “In about an hour” she answers, “I’ll tell you when it’s here”. She turned away but I couldn’t. I kept following her with my eyes. She had a big pot covered with a cloth on a collapsible wooden tripod. She was too old and too weak to push her way between the peddlers onto the buses but she was very quick to lift up that tripod and rush towards descending passengers or private cars that occasionally stopped at the nearby gas station.
She would gently drop the pot near the potential costumer and lift up the cloth exposing the hot brown chicken legs. If the costumer nodded, she would quickly wrap it up with a hot tortia hidden in the cloth and offer it to him respectfully, with two hands, chin down and a slight bow. She treated every portion as if she was diapering a baby and all of this for less than 50 cents.
Her movements fascinated me. I think I witnessed the practical meaning of pure honor and humbleness for the first time and I felt big tears welling up in my eyes. Although it’s been 12 years since, I tear immediately up to this very day, as her image comes up in my mind. Even now at the moment of writing, and every time I re-read for editing. This person strikes a very deep trans-personal chord in me, and I remember missing home and feeling deep gratitude for the life that I have.
I was flooded with those feelings that people experience in the presence of Gurus and after deep meditations. Was she even a real person or a fallen angel, a portal channeling the misery and beauty of the world’s poverty? “Hey, Peténera!” she calls me suddenly; “there’s your bus”. Between all the hard works burdening her wrinkled curved body she was able to keep my request in mind too.
Six years later I arrived in Guatemala again, and the bus from Antigua to Panachchel dropped a few passengers at El Ranchio junction. The noisy peddlers did their routine but my eyes wondered beyond them, hopelessly looking for the world’s grandma with the chicken pot tripod. Six years of physical labor in this blazing sun must have killed her already. And no one else was selling chicken tortia. Maybe she had no offspring or maybe she was irreplaceable. I mean, the function is always replaceable- everyone could sell chicken- but one’s imprint on the souls of people they meet while doing that function is unique.
Twelve years have passed since the first and only day I saw her, and I see her image so clearly and that’s the only thing I need to think of in order to cry on demand. It makes no sense but so does life. And she ended her life without knowing her ripple effect; not knowing what she meant for a strange person in a strange country that engraved her on its heart as a symbol for honor and humbleness; not knowing she was and will always be someone’s portal to that tree of life, that something deep and unclear in the root of the world.
That is how I imagine sometimes the Goddess, the feminine part of God. In the Jewish tradition we call her Shehina and the story tells she is being exiled to earth where she suffers with the people until they’re ready to become her and heal that consciousness to reunite with God. So while in exile, she might as well be selling chicken tortia at El Ranchio junction. But since she is the Goddess, her every move is meaningful and fully present, revealing that grace that awakens one’s ability to see the world for what it truly is for just a moment, to connect to its texture and experience the suffering and the beauty wrapped together like a chicken in a tortia, only to emerge as pure gratitude in one’s heart.
p.s this story has nothing and everything to do with thanks giving. For those who celebrate it, feel free to share this story on your holiday.
Posted 2 years, 6 months ago at 12:42 am. Add a comment
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 andyou’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.
Posted 2 years, 6 months ago at 11:00 am. 1 comment
Over 50 years of mass communication research and we still don’t know how media effects work. We can map an effect; we can see the numbers going up and down, we know media influences public opinion somehow but how? It’s not as simple as brainless imitation of media behavior, so what is it than?
While pondering that, Elihu Katz was looking at models of personal influence as a different issue. He suggested we all have opinion leaders among our acquaintances that mitigate media messages for us and we trust their opinion and often shape ours accordingly. He called it the two steps flow hypothesis.
And now we’ve got a third component in this equation: the web, a space in-between mass media and interpersonal communication and now we’re wondering how bloggers or other web agencies make influence happen. Half the literature on bloggers compares them to journalists assuming their influence model is mass media like. The other half tries to frame bloggers in terms of collective action or even social movements suggesting that their influence might resemble personal influence models.
Those social networks early media research tried to map are alive on today’s web. But the meaning of opinion leaders has changed. They no longer have to be real life contacts. The real life component in the perception of acquaintance and trust may no longer be relevant. In a time when boundaries between mass media and inter personal communication blur, your personal connections might be colonized too by commercialism and be interest driven, while an idealist blogger you follow might earn your trust. It is the genuine passion and reflective transparency that makes an opinion leader whether he is a journalist, a blogger or a childhood friend.
I came to think of the need to redefine opinion leaders in the age of the web during my ethnography of the political campaigns in the Israeli blogosphere. Here’s a paper I gave about it at AoIR 10 a few weeks ago:
Blogger’s influence was evident and could be separated from mass media due to pushing different agendas, but the process of influence in the making was yet to be analyzed through defining blogging practices. Do they do it like journalists or like activists? The answer was a little bit of both. But maybe both aren’t that different. Maybe the cognitive process of influence is one, maybe mass media stories always influenced us in the same way personal influence worked, but this could be spotted only after getting used to celebrity and fandom culture.
Maybe we feel personally close to mass media figures, we perceive their passion as genuine, and we trust their recommendation like we’d trust a friend’s. Maybe that’s why we let journalists and actors become our politicians too. Opinion leaders cannot mean people we actually know anymore because the meaning of actually knowing has changed and dissolved into a subjective perception of itself.
To be continued (in terms of research)….
Posted 2 years, 6 months ago at 1:26 pm. 3 comments
Today, for the international day fo peace I want to share a personal selfish thought with you. If you’re not Israeli you can either sympathize with me or hate me for it (and if it really touches you, it should be able to feel a little bit of both).
Pumpkin spiced latte
It’s a Starbuck’s original. I’m having it almost every day for the past two weeks. It became part of my routine here and drinking it feels so foreign, exotic. It’s nice to get used to something that you won’t be able to have when you’re back home. In a globalized world where you get the same things everywhere; in the Internet era when you can be on facebook, twitter and skype with your friends and family, and experience the events back home – I hold on to those little differences that weave the sense of actually being in another place.
I’m in Hawaii, carrying out a routine of paradise on earth, and yet I miss home so much. I get to be in a fantasy setting and I find myself longing to just hang out with my dog again in that ugly square near my house in Tel Aviv. The Americans I meet feel lucky to be Americans. They always assume all of us Middle Eastern would rather be Americans too and be away from all of this war crap. I don’t blame them, they got long immigration queues that give them that idea, but I find it hard to explain to them why I can’t really make myself at home anywhere but in my home. Why I love visiting their country and all other countries, but no matter how many years I’ll drink it, that tasty pumpkin spiced latte will never “taste like home” for me.
Home is where ______ is
What’s that got to do with peace day? I’m getting there. You see, I happen to live in a place of dispute. My ancestors claim it was their promised land and wave their bibles, while some of my neighbors and web friends claim their ancestors were on that land too and hold keys to the old houses they fled from during our independence war. How would an American feel if a Native American will knock on his door one day and claim his ancestors actually owned this land before there were U.S property laws and he should just evacuate himself to Canada or something? (At least until the Canadian Eskimos will realize they can pull the same trick…)
The Native American (or in my case, Palestinian) may have a point there, but would you leave the house you were born in, the only place that you will ever call home, because the guy has a point? Furthermore, will that guy really feel like home in your house? I’ve talked to this Palestinian guy online and he told me his family is originally from the Israeli city of Safed and he dreams of coming back home.
Since he was born in Gaza and never saw safed, I was compelled to ask him: Are you sure it’ll feel like home to you? Safed is a myth to you as the vague Promised Land was to my biblical ancestors. I’ve been to Safed a month ago, it’s a very poor city living of its peculiar mystical tourism. Honestly, after you’ve seen the city I bet you wouldn’t wanna live there. A home is not just a construction or merely a location, it’s what was cultivated on it and in it and with it, and it’s the culture and the community that emerged in that space and has already merged with it. “And that, my friend” I told him, “isn’t yours. It can’t be yours. It’s foreign to you, and you’ll feel it”.
The secret formula of home
Many people ask me how come I continue to live and love Israel, why won’t I use immigration as a form of resistance to my government’s actions. Heck, I even threatened to do so myself, many times. But obviously I can’t. I mean, of course I CAN, technically, I’m a friendly educated person with a global consciousness that can take root practically everywhere. You can remove me quite easily from Israeli territory but you can’t remove my roots – the Israeli culture and identity – it is with the same roots that I go to a foreign land and although it will rarely be noted on the surface, my roots may never really fit in perfectly in the new soil.
Even if I wander as far as the north pole, I’ll always be asked where I’m originally from, I’ll always be held responsible to something by someone, I’ll always feel guilty about something, I’ll always care about everything that happens back home. *sigh*, yea, home will always be “there” even if whatever I had there didn’t exist anymore.
It’s not politically correct but it’s true so I’ll just go ahead and say it: as much as I am peace seeking and sympathetic to Palestinian suffering, and aware of the injustice that keeps me safe in my home, I am still grateful my home is unchanged, that the circumstances that make it my home are maintained. Living in Israel you normally meet Palestinians who speak of an independent country in Gaza and the West Bank and that seems just fine and far away, but when abroad or online you meet many other Palestinians that speak of the entire land as Palestine, that want to return to Jaffa and Safed and hey, wasn’t Tel Aviv actually “Sheikh Munis” once?…
I fear that the concept of home, like love or identity, is a complex caotic fractal, a secret formula, that if I change one component I’ll lose it entirely. Tel Aviv just won’t be Tel Aviv under Palestinian rule, with a flock of new Palestinian residents or when its people and cafes and beaches are moved, as is, to Uganda. The geography and ecology create symbiosis with the community and the culture: it just doesn’t grow the same way in a different environment, in different circumstances.
There’s no clear right or wrong, both sides have rightful claims. Palestinian grandmothers should be allowed to return to the homes they fled from and at the same time Israeli children should be allowed to live in the homes they were born in. It doesn’t matter that it’s a small territory barely spotted on the world map while vast fertile lands wait to be inhabited someplace else. This is the fu**ing home for both of us and that’s that, i guess. Go figure. May we find a more peaceful and creative way to share it in a way that maintains those secret ingredients that make it a home for all of us.
The people of Israel live, homeless
As I was wrapping up this post a miraculous thing happened. I overheard the Israeli hymn, the tikva (that means “hope”), coming from downstairs across the street on waikiki beach, played by a homeless violinist. I left the computer and went down with a video camera. By the time I crossed the street he was already playing the popular “Jerusalem of gold” and I managed to capture him with the finale of the patriotic chant “am Israel chai” (which means “the people of Israel live” and is often sung by religious people in hard times, to cheer us up and remind us of the liveliness of our people and what we accomplished after all that we have been through).
The mixed nationalities tourist audience cheered without even realizing what they listened to. During the break he took after “hava nagila”, the homeless violinist told me he wasn’t even Jewish, he just knows many popular violin tunes from different cultures and he was playing there for hours before i heard him.
Tears came to my eyes as I realized this was just a message from the universe, from God to me, a manifestation of the ability of my culture to follow me everywhere, even in the most unexpected places like Waikiki beach, and always strike a chord (pun intended this time) weather I like it to matter for me or not.
The people of Israel indeed live and they live practically everywhere in the world, but only few lucky (?) ones can come to terms with calling another place home. I am continuously amazed to meet Israeli people living in the U.S and Europe for many years, seeing success and wealth there and yet giving it all up, settling for much less, only to return home again, to Israel.
Before you have any dialog with us, I think you should understand this about us. It doesn’t justify occupation, it doesn’t justify anything. I suppose even the most serious left wing activist feels this dissonance as he or she still live here and not just write an angry blog from their NYC residence… it’s just how thing are and that’s what I wanted to talk about today. Happy peace day to everyone. I still blog for trust!
What is home to YOU? Is it a distant cultural memory or the actual smells of your mom’s cooking, the flower bushes outside your house, the angry salesman in the local grocery store….?
Posted 2 years, 8 months ago at 4:16 pm. 8 comments
I’m in Hawaii right now, on the other side of the world lagging 12 hrs behind the Middle East. I wake up with the beautiful blue-green Pacific Ocean outside my window watching surfer-newbies take a shot at the waves as tropical birds stop by my porch checking out their food options.
On the street everyone smiles, many girls wear flowers on their necks or behind their ears, vendors open oysters and embed the pearls into jewelry in front of my eyes, and within 10 minutes walk towards the beautiful green mountains, one enters tropical jungle kingdom with fantastic waterfalls straight from the iconography of LOST.
If there’s heaven on earth it must be here: great weather all year, colorful tropical vibe and the best of American consumerism’s abundance. But instead of simply enjoying that, all I can think of is why can’t we have that too? Why are we condemned to fight for territory? why people in our area are so angry and obsessed? Why can’t we focus on joy and happiness as a top priority as well?
I used to blame our religious differences for it, but my Muslim friends say religion is used as political means in a much more basic struggle for money and power. So few people play this game and yet they manage to keep entire populations apart, breeding hate and stereotyping each other through misguided media.
Today, 11.9.09, a day that is remembered as an international trauma, we choose to start melting these stereotypes through the impartial medium of blogs and align with the light, the love and the hope. Thus, we start with the basis needed for all of that to breed, for the bridges to rebuild: we start with trust.
It’s no secret that our administrations don’t trust each other and as people we barely trust our administrations, so can we trust each other, as people? What needs to happen in order for YOU to restore your trust in the other side which you might perceive as an enemy but actually you don’t know too much about? What needs to happen in order for us to be willing to take a chance on that?
One thing I realized about Israelis lately is that we desperately need to be safe, always in the comfort zone. And so it’s really hard for us as to bare the risks of openness for peace: we feel we’ve done that before and all we got was hurt and terror, so we freaked out, closed up and built a wall on our land and in our hearts.
However, the same way we don’t close our hearts after a love gone sour and we’re willing to be hurt again in order to feel love again, we need to keep that gate open for peace even if it’ll be abused by some on the way. I know, I’m afraid too. But to think peace will sneak up on us peacefully on our terms only is a bit childish, isn’t’ it?
I mean, do we have any other choice but open our hearts in trust even when it’s hard and scary, especially when it’s hard and scary and pray love gets the upper hand?
What do YOU need in order to open up to trust again? Bloggers from the EuroMed area will blog for trust today as part of the “restore trust, rebuild bridges” campaign. Please join us: add “I blog for trust” to your posts, spread the word or record a video response to our clip.
I would also like to recommend a new blog that attempts to build such a bridge to warm up the cold waters of the Israeli-Egyptian peace. Meet Mr. Foul and Mrs. Falafel. I strongly recommend following them as it seems it’ll be both informative and funny.
Many religious people await the mythic war between the light and darkness without being aware that the war is already being fought and they’re in fact aligning with darkness. It is the war between the people who love only the ones who are similar to them, and the people who love and embrace diversity. The war between people who think there’s only one truth and they’re holding its key and the people who see the complexity of many truths in different contexts and for different people. The war between those focused on exclusion and separatism and the ones focused on inclusion and connectivity.
Last week, an anonymous killer still running loose, started shooting at a community center for gay teen in Tel Aviv. Two teenagers were killed and 15 were wounded. The liberal city of Tel Aviv in the democratic country of Israel was shocked such a hate crime is possible, but some said that they always knew Tel Aviv to be a liberal bubble, inside a country that 46% of its people think being gay is a form of perversion and its formal religion explicitly bans gay relationship, comparing them to animal sex and condemning the parties to death.
These are not the words of God. There are enough God-wannabes spreading disarray through messages “channeled” by different people, only nowadays we take them less seriously than our BC ancestors. God, the spirit and consciousness of all living things, cannot be a fundamentalist, cannot afford to exclude some of its parts. It’s not so divine and barely even makes sense: if God wanted everyone to follow the same rule he/she/it wouldn’t have made everyone so damn different.
God doesn’t live between the pages of a book and doesn’t speak only to the ones who grow beards. god is in the world, it is in the details, in the small things, in everything. So God must love colorfulness, God must love diversity because unity is made of diversity and a ray of light breaks into the colors of the rainbow. This is the true face of God. Indeed, we’re all made of both light and darkness, like the Yin & Yang symbol suggests, but are we aligning ourselves with the light, containing our darkness, or aligning with the dark, swallowing and oppressing our light?
Some of my best friends are gay and I always thought sexual orientation was a private thing and either than that one could hold various opinions on different issues, but I understand now that being a gay activist and having a gay identity is necessarily taking a liberal stand, it must also mean being feminist and respecting minorities etc. We identify with complex identities in order to create bridges: while our national identity might be rivalry, our sexual identity might create something more important in common for us.
I stand with the gay community in Israel these days because it moves me to see them forge a strong political identity due to recent events, showing everyone their true size and true colors, and I’m so proud of them. God has made them a bit different so they could appreciate the beauty in our differences and help fight for the freedom of love, thus I count on this community as a partner for the vision of a new world.
I took this footage (with English subtitles) at last night’s memory, pride and tolerance rally held in Rabin Square a week after the brutal shooting:
Posted 2 years, 9 months ago at 11:39 am. 2 comments
Currently a visiting scholar at Indiana University. Hopefully this year I will update this blog more, especially with new research insights coming up real soon. Meanwhile you can follow me on Twitter at @carmelva.
