Power, Corruption, and Social Media

I came across this blog post from the UK’s Guardian about astroturfing.  And no, it has nothing to do with fake lawns or stadium football. Astroturfing refers to the creation of multiple artificially generated profiles used to control public opinion often at the expense of drowning out comments from real users.  This, of course, made me think back to Michael’s presentation that posed an interesting question of “Who is really at the keyboard?”

This technique is becoming more prolific, and the software is more sophisticated. Just think about the implications. The ability to manipulate mass public opinion is the ultimate weapon. It seems that even the U.S. military has been leveraging social media, and not in a way that would seem to be consistent with a country that touts itself as the promoter for free speech.  Another article from the Guardian, Revealed: US Spy Operation Manipulates Social Media, discusses the military’s plan to use astroturfing to make fake online personas to influence internet opinion and spread pro-American propaganda, primarily in the Middle East.

There have been other known instances of tobacco companies using astroturf groups to fight regulation, and even fake grassroots campaigns that appear to have mass public support. This just validates the importance of developing a critical awareness in our students about new media. When I think of the powerful and sophisticated systems and software that large corporations and governments can employ, the potential is a little scary. One of the big draws in social media comes from the power of numbers–we’ve seen how social media can incite uprisings and revolution–but what does it mean when those voices can so easily be co-opted by powerful organizations?  As someone who regularly uses social media sites like Yelp for restaurant and business recommendations, it makes me wonder whose truth I am buying into…

Roger Ebert Tweets in a New Era

After reading all of the “down on technology” posts Kory has been responding to, I thought I’d share one of my favorite bloggers and a great recent article of his: Roger Ebert’s blog entry Tweet! Tweet! Tweet!

I’ve recently become somewhat obsessed with Roger Ebert, and especially his blog. After losing his voice because of an invasive surgery, Ebert developed an extensive online persona. Ebert is a man who has been involved in the print industry for more than half a century (his first review was printed in 1958), and still, he is one of new media’s biggest fans. Despite the slow demise of print newspapers, he declares today, where movie critics are movie lovers who blog because they love film, the Golden Age of Movie Criticism. He believes the accessibility of blogs has made it possible for great writers who don’t want a career in journalism, or may not have the connections to succeed in the print world, to contribute to the previously exclusive world of film criticism.

But more about Tweets: remember all that class discussion and readings about how new media can give voice to students who feel like they don’t have one? Ebert embodies this.

Twitter for me performs the function of a running conversation. For someone who cannot speak, it allows a way to unload my zingers and one-liners. One of the problems with written notes and computer voices is that, by their nature, their timing doesn’t work. I used to have good timing. Now in real life a conversation will be whizzing along and a line will pop into my head and by the time I write it down and get someone to read it, the moment and the context will have disappeared. Often everything will grind to a halt while I remind people what I was referring to.

For him, new media, and twitter specifically, have given him a voice after (literally) losing his to cancer. New media has given him a way to bypass his physical limitations and continue to communicate with the world in the speed he wants. And because of it, he has developed a larger, youthful audience, which was celebrated when he was awarded the Person of the Year Webby Award.

Although Ebert isn’t explicitly talking about composition or pedagogy, I find his observations about new media to be applicable to our class discussions. Mostly, I recommend him because it’s so refreshing to read a man who defies the stereotypes; he’s older and employed by print media, and yet, he maintains to be one of technology’s biggest cheerleaders.

Twitter Literacy – Howard Rheingold

I found this article by Howard Rheingold very helpful for navigating the world of tweets… He argues for the importance of new kinds of media literacies and says that “the difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it – on knowing how to look at it.” Ultimately,

“Whatever you call this blend of craft and community, one of the most important challenges posed by the real-time, ubiquitous, wireless, always-on, often alienating interwebs are the skills required for the use of media to be productive and to foster authentic interpersonal connection, rather than waste of time and attention on phony, banal, alienated pseudo-communication. Know-how is where the difference lies.”

Read Rheingold’s article here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/detail?entry_id=39948#ixzz0kx2bMXjy