The Interwebz. ISA or Collection of Ideologies?

After leaving class on Tuesday, I was struck by how much Althusser, Adorno, and Horkheimer’s ideas fit in perfectly with ideas I learned this January in New York about the effects of media on the American public.

Here’s an interesting thought. While President Obama was meeting with President Hu, China had a seventy percent increase of Facebook membership, the site Check Facebook noted. One in ten people on earth frequent Facebook. That means that while President Obama can reach hopefully all 310,958,000 American citizens if he makes a press release via television, internet, news, and radio. That’s 4.5% of the world’s population. Mark Zuckerburg, the man behind Facebook’s curtain, can reach 10% of the worlds population in a millisecond. Even more so, he has access to 1 in 10 people’s information, friends, likes, dislikes, and GPA location. It has its own currency, its own interpretation of United States law, and it is changing the world. However, that is only one site in an ocean of digital property, social networking, and cyber text.

One of the places we visited was Columbia, where we met with Dr. Sreenivasan We learned the history of Columbia’s Journalism school, about New York, and then delved into the world of social networking. Dr. Sreenivasan noted “the ability to synthesize and communicate information to a wide audience will employ you for the rest of your life.” The first blog we learned about was Tehran Bureau, where the writer capitalized a unique blog market and went onto to receive a large sum of money. It was a testament to the fact that technology keeps getting better, faster, and cheaper. Technology helps, but it is important to remain skeptical. Dr. Sreenivasan said, “we should all be early testers [of technology] and late adapters.”

Technology has shifted our idea of authority. As Louis Althusser noted, we are all affected by “ideological state apparatus” (1348). Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter allowed people to turn to their friends instead of pillars of advice. We no longer look to Robert and Ebert to choose movies; instead we check our Twitter or RSS feeds. This seems to go against Adorno, and Horkheimer’s ideas, but in other ways it slips right into the machine. This inclusion in relevancy has made users part of the story. Dr. Sreenivasan noted, “crisis are the same today as yesteryear.” However, before the story was reported and printed, there was a wall of isolation between reader and text. Now, we expect to be part of the story, to comment, to drive up search engine hits, to click “like” on statuses or stories we react to.

With this narrative in place, Dr. Sreenivasan then went on to share a number of websites that offer a valuable contribution to the networking discussion. Mashable was started out of a basement in Scotland. It now is one of the largest social networking news, commentary, and research sites. It collects news and business articles and press releases as well as more entertaining and extracurricular focused articles. The material helps recreational and business-minded users alike. Paid Content is a little different. It focuses on economic study of social media, but instead of the news layout of Mashable, it is designed like both a blog and a twitter feed. What both of these sites have in common is the fulfillment of niche. Dr. Sreenivasan suggested that for cyber success, the first step is to specialize in an area, followed by delivering that content in an accessible digital form.

All of this assumes the value in social networking and digital presence. However, if that is debated, there are at least four values that are difficult to discount. The first benefit is the ability to post and access new ideas, trends, and news. The second is an extreme expansion in audiences. Social media allows for not only a growth in a single large audience, but also a growth in the number of different audiences. Thirdly, social media grants attention. It gives eyeballs and high traffic to topics previously censored or ignored. Finally, social media and networking allows for personal branding. Facebook, Flikr, and so many other sites are turning individuals into ideas and assumptions. As Dr. Sreenivasan reminded us, “you are your Google results.”

Google results sound a lot like Althusser’s idea that you are not a person, but a collection of ideologies. In fact, social networking sounds a lot like a collection of ideologies.

Another branch of digital media I learned about was the more artistic side of social media sites included Klout, Viddyjam, and the YouTube Lean back. Klout is the most general of the three; it is a site that measures influence on the internet. Now while they include all types of individuals and organizations, it seemed to be mostly driven by entertainment people and artists. However, their research and measurements could be hugely valuable to businesses and other organizations for monitoring their own influence as well as their competitors. Viddyjam on the other hand was similar to the popular and well known, internet radio site Pandora. It creates custom music video playlists while also allowing users to select already prepared stations. Reflecting on both Viddyjam and Pandora against what we learned on January 20th at PEW at the future of radio, I am interested to see the impact of internet radio in cars. XM options have been pricey and at times restricted to one affluent audience. Yet internet access on phones and laptops as well as things like Blue Ray players has been available and utilized by a much wider audience. Internet radio stations right now compete against each other while also fighting different mediums. Should they be all audio, or is video vital to their progression? Viddyjam seems to directly compete with YouTube’s Leanback. Leanback however is slimmer, simpler, but also takes longer to personalize.

The final site Dr. Sreenivasan left us with was Poynter. He encouraged us all to seek out people in our lives and on the web to point to great things. For him, this media blog was his own pointer.
After this I met with my friend Ashley Harris who currently is a music agent for Sony Music. A large part of her job is social networking. She told us that even with vast knowledge of LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Foursquare, and a number of other sites, she still was not up to date with social media. She suggested we look at Pipl and Bit.ly. Pipl is a scary version of the White Pages. With only a last name it delivers a large number of personal details on the searched person. It reminded me of the Zaba search engine, only a little scarier. Bit.ly was far more interesting. It is a service that records web traffic. It can be used with most search engines, social networking sites, and home pages. I was amazed.

However the most interesting thing I left with was the article “Cyberspace when You’re Dead.” The article questions in detail the murky waters of the ownership and purpose of Internet identity and possessions after someone has passed away. Again, the leaning is towards physical property, and the inclination from the legal world is to categorize internet presence under estate laws. However LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo are all considering not allowing a transfer of authority but instead creating a new mode, “memorial status” that would auto-set account settings and preferences to allow friends and family to continue to post but to block hackers and spammers from interacting with the account. The matter is currently in court and under discussion.

I’m sure this post has most of you thinking TLDR, but if you got to this point, what do you think? Is social networked an ISA? Is it simply a resume of our collected identities? With so much forced (and sold) personalization (but also generification) and lack of privacy, are we headed towards 1984 with a dash of Brave New World?


(p.s. All those sites used to be links. Sorry for the internet derp.)