After the heddy themes of last week: peace, love and harmony - this week's Philosophy and Social Media course took on a slightly more distopian and cynical approach to this new world - at least for the most part. Beginning with the German Philosopher Martin Heidegger, Dr Tim Rayner proposed that - based on Heidegger's theory of "enframing" - the Social Media industry is exploiting "prosumers" as a resource from which to make money.
"Enframing" is the Metaphysical view of reality as a field of resources that can be slotted into production systems. Facebook takes the culture of sharing endemic in the activities of Social Media - and derived from the ideals the 60s counter culture revolution as we learnt last week - and cynically monitises it. Much of the lecture in fact looked at the reality behind what Mark Zuckerberg likes to call "frictionless sharing", how Facebook Connect is in fact a genius strategy to glean as much personal data about your web usership, likes, hobbies and interests under the guise of identity convenience. This data is the by-product of the resource which can then be sold to advertisers. There is nothing radically new about this view; only more drill-down in the science of it. Not surprisingly the class became quite vocal as their suspicions became alarmingly confirmed.
The position is beautifully summed up by this quite from "Prosumers of the world unite":
"Facebook's profit model is built upon an ownership of its user's labour, specifically, the intimate detail of our lives and self-presentations. This is an example a larger trend of “prosumption,” that is, the simultaneous role of being a producer of what one consumes. [Prosumption] generally, and especially on Web 2.0, is the mechanism by which we become unpaid workers, producing valuable information for the benefit of businesses. This is the almost endlessly efficient business model of Web 2.0 capitalism."
Posing the question "How do Facebook make money?" - consensus is that Facebook has its eye on becoming the default guarantor of Identity, thereby beautifully positioning itself to become a payments company.
The narative then moved to the question of reputation. To operate in this new economy, your reputation is based on the idea that - as Dr Rayner put it - you got to give to get back. This is almost the theory of "pay it forward", the idea of reciprical worth. If you do have nothing to contribute then you will derive nothing from it. You get what you put in. I personally think this is the very essence of Social Media. Those who derive no value from Twitter are generally contributing nothing to it.
Social Media connects trustworthy strangers and taps the benefit of that connection - note the way eBay farms the need for strangers to trade in a trusted environemnt where the integrity of the transaction is ensured. Not insured, but ensured.
The concerns of the class then moved from the fear of the cynical exploitation of Facebook to the obligatory regime that had now established itself - if you are not on Facebook you are no one. As if to confirm this, Dr Rayner then focussed on TrustCloud - a new Beta service designed to establish a benchmark standard in Social Trust - kind of like Klout but on Trust instead of Influence.
As always, my mind wandered to what I can take from the learnings in terms of consultancy to clients. This very much supports my feeling that many people are very quickly becoming in danger of being left behind by an economy that defines influence, trust and profile in a new way. You might be CEO of a major organisation, but without a Social profile and without some form of Online credentials will you lose out to younger executives who have these assets in spades? How does a business person fork-lift their use of social media to score well in these new standard services like Klout, LinkedIn and TrustCloud?
While the digital divide usually refers to those bereft of digital devices; pretty soon it could refer to those bereft of digital credibility. Ironically, these could be among the most privileged and wealthy citizens rather than the most disadvantaged.
Anyway, enjoy Dr Rayner's slides - it is a very thought-provoking narative that emerged from its distopian perspective to finally ask: if Social Media rewards the spirit of sharing with a digital standard of currency, how is that a bad thing?