Time is precious, so I’ll skip the intro and get straight into the point: the Internet is the new television and people love to feed on other peoples’ disasters. Mix these two ingredients together and you have the vicarious social media users feeding on the world’s disasters in real time while being able to participate in the retransmission of the sad news. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner, television is no match to the new media.
There you have it, that’s the whole article summarized in one small paragraph. You can close this window now and go re-tweet this post. Or, maybe you do have a little bit of time to spend on actually reading an article besides its headline. If that is the case, read on.
We grew up watching TV
The Internet is a big thing now, but most of us grew up without it. Television, on the other hand has been the dominating media throughout our lives and we all had the joy of watching the news live on our TV set. Of course the term “news” is really a vague thing here since today the news on TV is nothing more than opinionated people who are getting paid to criticize politicians (and everybody else) while arguing with each other from within their small “windows” in the TV screen.
Now, since few people really care about politics and the good news either bore people or make them envy each other, TV people managed to keep the people alert (and thus increasing their profit) by portraying all sorts of misery, sickness, disaster and perversion that exists in every corner of our little universe we call Earth. Apparently, people fancy watching how other people were killed, murdered, injured or generally got involved in a nasty situation while they themselves are enjoying the comfort of their sofa and are eating pop corn.
“A hurricane killed a dozen of people“, “A mother murdered her son“, “Earthquake in X place – bodycount still going on“, “Serial killer maniac kills 20” and the list goes on and on and on. Millions upon millions of people sit on their couches every night to watch how the rest of the billions out there are having a hard time staying alive.
Finally, we are not passive TV zombies anymore
Ah, the new era; the Internet, world wide web, social media. The neat thing about social media is that no longer are you a passive receiver of information getting thrown to you via TV, but an active transceiver (transmitter / receiver hybrid) able to form your own network of people around the globe to connect to and participate in the endless flow of information (pointers) brokerage (popularity being its currency) that is taking place on Twitter, Friendfeed etc. Everybody is re-posting everybody else’s links to a gazillion of supposedly interesting blog posts or other media without (hardly) ever reading them. Social media forms the public opinion by counting which articles are getting the most re-tweeting (re-transmission from one user to another).
But the power of social media comes to play when something big is happening at some place of our world, like, for example, the terrorist attacks at Mumbai or the recent Iranian elections incident. Or just when a plane crashes, or an earthquake or wildfire happens. It is only then that social media portrays its value as an awesome tool that allows common people like you and me to post information (text, photo or even video) from the ground zero of every such incident so the world knows first-hand what’s going on in real-time.
Pay attention to they real keywords here: disaster, common people, real time. People are using social media as a tool that connects them to one another so they can transmit information about a disaster in real time. This is nothing less than a live transmission of disastrous news withing the network of users that you are a part of, meaning that you are no longer a passive receiver of the tragic news, but a lively active node in the social graph that gets to re-transmit the bad news to other people.
Yes, lucky social media participant; now you can be the man in the TV breaking news section with the information that the actual number of casualties is 53 and not 51 (according to some other user of course, who got it from another user who read it someplace). You can spend your whole day re-transmitting the information you’re getting from your network to, well, the rest of your network, not only vicariously feedingon the tragedy itself but taking pride in being the newsman in the same time.
It’s awesome.
(Now don’t get me wrong, I do love social media, but not always favor the way people are using them)
Imagine, for a moment, that you can listen to whatever every human being on Earth is saying; that whenever someone opens their mouth to say anything, it reaches your ears. Surely it would be overwhelming since there are so many people talking in the same time, so you’d end up going in a frenzy by this information overload. It wouldn’t be useful at all and you’d wish you were deaf.
Now, imagine the same thing, but this time you’ve got a very cool built-in feature in your brain that’s called “selective hearing“, which is the ability of your brain to selectively tune-in and hear only those people that you wish to do so. This way you could focus on those people whose sayings appear to be important to you in some way, and you could always mute or un-mute people’s voices in your brain at will.
Obviously, the latter would be very useful since it would give you the ability to tune-in to the sayings of different people of varying age, gender, race and culture; some kind of long-distance telepathy that would enable you to connect with dozens, hundreds or even millions of people worldwide who you would never have the chance of meeting up close or getting to listen to what they have to say. And it would be your own choice whether to listen to them, or not.
This is what Twitter is all about
If you can imagine this, then you have successfully grasped the idea of how Twitter works. It’s nothing but a tool that lets you say out loud anything you want. Anything. It’s like some sort of digital “voice” (only in written text) that reaches the farthest corners of Earth (as long as there’s Internet access), and everyone else can selectively tune-in to your digital voice at will. You follow (“tune in to”) the people whose voice is somehow meaningful to you, and let the rest go on talking without their talk reaching your “ears”. It’s dead simple, efficient and powerful.
Now, selective hearing is based on your ability to decide whose digital voice you get to pay attention to, or not; if you don’t think it’s worth listening to whatever some person is saying, you can just un-follow the person and therefore “tune out” of its voice. It’s that simple. No-one said you have to try and pay attention to thousands of people at the same time, it gets incomprehensible and it all breaks down. That’s why you get to choose who to follow and who not to.
But once you do follow somebody, that means that you are acting as a receiver of their “digital voice channel”, and of course you’re not alone; hundreds of even thousands other people may also be receivers to that person’s voice. In the same time you’re acting as a transmitter yourself, since you’re transmitting your own voice to the Twitterverse (Twitter Universe), where other people may opt-in to listen to.
If you don’t like what’s on the radio, just change the channel
When you’re listening to the radio and you don’t like the music its playing, what do you do? Do you call the producer of the show to complain about the bad music and ask them to comply to your taste, or just change the channel? Since Twitter is the equivalent of a medium through which millions of people get to have their own digital “radio” show (only in text, not voice) to express their thoughts and emotions out to the world in general and to no-one in particular, would you ever “call” them to tell them that that they should stop saying what they’re saying because you just happen not to like it?
Of course not. You would just change the channel. Therefore, when you don’t really like what someone is saying out loud to the world, remember that your selective hearing lets you tune out and recover your peace and serenity. Just un-follow them, but never ever tell people what they should say and what they should not, unless freedom of speech is lost and you get to decide what’s worthy of being spelled out and what’s not.
You know that kind of uber-science that applies to making your ridiculously designed, badly developed and utterly irrelevant website climb up the gazillion of steps in Google’s stairway to search heaven? Those “white” or “black” hat wizardry that Internet marketing gurus, SEO wizards and other Gandalf-like creatures are willing to perform (for a slight charge) to boost your company into mythical success?
It’s tagged SEO, for Search Engine Optimization. And it’s dead.
Amidst of a post-web 2.0 era struck by a recession and succumbing to the ultimate power sprouting out of the social media heaven, who needs SEO? There’s no search engine in Twitter, so who cares if your website is not listed in the first search results page? All that matters is to have a few hundreds of thousands of followers. Every person, service, website or even electrical appliance is on Twitter now, so who gives a damn about search engines?
Does SEO help you gain more friends in Facebook? No! Does SEO help you gain more followers in Twitter? No! Search engines are R.I.P., done, dead, kaput and in a state of panic. So forget about all the SEO crap, jump on the social media rescue wagon before the rest of the web plummets into cyber oblivion and let your social presence make you really famous!
Where do we go now?
So it’s the end of the Web as we know it, but what now? How can the social media help you get rich and famous? This is where the new wizardry comes in place: introducing the art of Own Ego Optimization, or OEO for short, the next-gen rituals that are guaranteed to boost you into the highest heights of Twitterland and the rest of the social network universes out there.
Now, out of an untold gesture of generosity, I am about to unfold the well hidden mysteries of OEO, so you can take advantage of this new extraordinary phenomenon for your own benefit without having to spend a penny. Pay attention, and you shall achieve social greatness!
So without further ado, here’s the ultimate spellbook of OEO wizardry:
Orientation: If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years and you’re not on Twitter already, do it now. This is the most important step of your road to success.
No-one really wants to see you or your friend’s ugly bald head popping in their Twitter client next to your tweets. Instead, use the photo of a hot girl with big cleavage. It works wonders.
Follow as many people as you can. Someone tweeted about politics? Follow them. Or maybe someone tweeted about sports? Follow them. If someone tweets about new techniques to clean decayed elephant teeth cavities, follow them. The rule of thumb is, if it tweets, follow it.
Argue with everyone. Be an a**hole. Let everybody argue with you, debate you, and hate you. Many people have become famous using this spell alone (ha, no I won’t link them here, sorry!). Just remember: there is no bad publicity!
Feel free to act like a web celeb, even if you still haven’t become one. This will make you look like one of those uber-cool online celebrities. Actually it’s pretty easy; all you have to do is tweet about your daily activities, i.e. “bored, going to bed” / “out with @someguy, drinking beers” / “lol, you shuldn’t twerereet when yo’re drun k” etc.
Get all of your friends on Twitter, then tweet about things you do in common, i.e. “out with @supercooldude and @awesomepal drinking beers and designing our next web 4.0 app“
Organize and host conferences, un-conferences and social media seminars. (Caution, this is a really powerful spell!)
It’s pretty obvious but still has to be mentioned for the goofballs: constantly tweet about social media, Twitter and OEO
Re-tweet every 1 out of 5 of your friend’s tweets. It makes them feel special and they get to love you more. As a rule of thumb, if a tweet is not absolutely and utterly pointless, re-tweet it.
Get yourself a Friendfeed account, so you have something to do when the failwhale beast appears on your screen and you spare the suicide.
These are the pretty basic rules. Stick with them, and soon you’ll be a Twitter celebrity! Yes, it’s that easy. Many people have gone this path and so can you! All you have to do is dare to try it.
(If you found this post useful, tweet / digg / stumbleUpon / blog it by any means and go follow me on Twitter!)
I have finally decided to delete my Facebook account. I could write a long post analyzing this decision, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll just quote a short note that I’m going to publish on my Facebook wall.
I have decided to leave Facebook. I never really liked it in the first place. It was fun commenting on your photos and your status messages, learning all those little details about you that I never really cared for and watching you throwing Britney Spears’ to each other.
I won’t miss the myriads of utterly useless groups you’ll continue to become members of, nor the bazillions of ugly applications cluttering your “walls”. And I’m pretty sure Facebook won’t hire a designer before either cold fusion replaces oil or Google hires one.
I am going to delete my account on February the 27th, a day after my birthday. This way you can all wish me happy birthday by writing on my wall and save the phone call or sms! (That is, before Facebook reads this note, gets mad and kicks me out of it before that date!)
I am jumping off the social crap wagon, but you’ll still be able to find me on Twitter (@Karageorgakis). That is, until I delete myself from there too, but I don’t think this will happen pretty soon.
I urge you to re-consider your goals in your everyday time-wasting habits and ponder the question of whether you need to create detailed records of your lives on some (rich by now) twenty-something guy’s servers. I won’t do that anymore.
So take care, have fun and be well. I hope to see you in the real world.
It looks like creating an online identity in the post-web 2.0 era that we’re living in is essential. People go into great lengths to present themselves in the online world, participate in as many social networks they can, flood microblogging services like Twitter and Friendfeed with their thoughts, opinions and emotions, share their photos on photo-sharing sites, upload short video clips of themselves on sites like Seesmic, and the list goes on and on and on.
After great effort, we manage to create a solid social online identity to expose our selves and our lives to the public, updating it with fragments of our personalities and everyday activities. But what happens to our online identity when we die? We are all going to die one day — that’s for sure. Have you ever wondered what is going to happen to your online identity in that case?
All of a sudden, you will stop updating. People may nudge you, poke you, send you direct messages, but they wouldn’t get any replies. E-mails that are reaching your inbox will never receive a reply. Cold silence will come out of your Twitter account and your Facebook friends will wonder what’s keeping you busy. Your blog’s RSS feed won’t show any new activity and all the myriads of social networks you joined during your life will host an account that never updates.
How will your online friends know what happened to you if none of your friends or family members are using those services as well? Will people ever wonder what may have happened to me if all of a sudden I stop posting updates on Twitter? Are they going to search for me in other social networks, or leave a comment on my blog, or e-mail me asking why I’ve stopped participating? No person in my physical environment is using Twitter, so no-one’s going to post news about my death.
Will people care after all? Is there any “friend” or “follower” that is going to care that I’ve ceased to post and to exist? And if they got to find out, how would they react? Would they mourn, sob, laugh, re-tweet the news of my death or just un-follow me since no more updates would ever be coming from my account?
Finally, what is going to happen with the information that I’ve submitted to all these sites and services? Will my Facebook account or my Flickr photos still be there, years after I die? Would my family be able to browse my photos, my social networking timeline, my videos and my e-mails and all the myriads of tiny fragments I’ve submitted to the Internet (e.g. comments on other people’s posts)? Would it make them feel better if the data was still there, or would they merely be unable to delete my accounts (since they don’t know the passwords)?
I can’t help but ponder all these questions. I don’t know what’s best to be done. Entrepreneurs could build on this idea, and create a “social memorial” or “web graveyard” for the lost souls of online identities of departed persons. They could even create a service that monitors all online activity of every person and declare them as “missing” if they don’t update in any online service for some time (i.e. a year), or declare them as “dead” after more time passes. They could even crawl the web for every piece of information regarding that person, gather it and create an entry in their Social Memorial so people will remember them.
They could even give the option for their family and friends to pay in order to promote their loved one’s profile to the top of the list, so they could gain more new “mourners”. There may be a grader for these deceased online identities, measuring the value of each one and creating lists about who was the most social one. Such a service may exists even now, as I’m writing this. If there is, please leave a comment and let me know, and if there’s not, I’m damn sure there’s going to be one in the future. This is the social era, everything can be used (and abused) in the name of profit!
For the ambitious entrepreneurs that may be reading this, here’s one more idea: give people the ability to sign up for such a service while they’re living, so they can link it to all their social networks and other sources of personal information. The service would monitor all these sources and upon a prolonged lack of activity, it would create a memorial for them. There you go, I give you this idea for free — it’s too morbid for me to monetize on.
Update [20 May 2009]: Looks like somebody decided to monetize on the premise. I was damn sure this would happen.
I haven’t been a hardcore gamer in my life, except for manically trying to finish the Monkey Island series when I was younger and perhaps the short burst I had with Grand Theft Auto, but I don’t usually play games. I did, however, indulge into trying out World of Warcraft (WoW) which led to some serious time-wasting that could almost be classified as an addiction.
Having played WoW for almost a year before quitting and indulging into social media lately, I can’t help but witness the similarities between the two (of course this applies to almost all MMORPGs, but I’m referring to WoW since it’s the only one I’ve ever used).
A whole new world
World of Warcraft is actually the MMORPG version of the game Warcraft, and Blizzard (the company that created it) did a very nice job in creating a massive and diverse universe for its players. The world is quite big, spanning continents with dozens of areas, each being special in its own way. It’s not so trivial to explore all the different lands in the game since the world is just too big.
Social media, on the other hand, don’t have the equivalent of space – there is no such thing as a “world”. However, explorations are not at all absent, since there are many different “areas” that users can explore. For example, Facebook sports applications as well as groups, and even browsing all of them could possibly take years. There’s something new to explore, and there are even applications (games) on Facebook that are plain versions of MMORPG’s (e.g. Mob Wars).
A parallel universe
Even though scientists have yet to decide upon a commonly accepted universal theory about the nature of our universe, it’s pretty safe to say that we (at least physically) appear to be living in the same universe with each other. However, our players in WoW are living in their own universe. It doesn’t really matter if that universe exists only inside Blizzard’s servers, it’s still a valid universe with its own space-time and its own laws. It is a parallel universe to ours, albeit in a Matrix-like fashion (maintained by computers).
Who’s to claim that the Internet isn’t a parallel universe as well? We all know we can go “online”, but where is that online space? Your online identity exists not in the real world (there you have your “actual” identity) but in the Internet world. You can log in anytime to this world and interact with it. You “peek” into this universe every time you launch your favorite Twitter browser, so you can interact with other “online” versions of actual people (or even robots – bots). You enter it every time you’re on Facebook, and in a more direct way when you log into the 3D virtual world of Second Life.
Be it newsgroups, Twitter, Facebook, Second Life, WoW or even the web, the Internet is a parallel universe created and maintained by humans with the aid of machines. Each one of us has their own (possibly multiple) identity in each of such worlds.
Levelling
One of the most important aspects of WoW is that of levelling. You start at level 1 as a young and poor guy (or gal) with practically no knowledge of surviving in the world. You soon begin to learn how to combat, so to protect your life from predators as well as how to make money out of the items you get by looting their corpses, so you can buy new clothes, weapons etc. Every time you gain enough experience, you “level” (used as a verb) and become more powerful; your health, strength and other stats are increased and you can buy arms and clothes of higher quality.
Levelling makes the world really addictive mainly for two reasons: first, players always want to gain “one more level”, so they never stop playing; second, because they’re in a constant direct/indirect competition with all the other players, so they need to level up and become better than them. This is so true in WoW, that having a character of the highest possible level brings much joy to players and makes them feel rather superior to their lower level peers.
People are always in direct or indirect competition to each other in our society and it’s always enjoyable to feel “better” than others or “superior” to them. Social media was built on this premise, which is the key to their success: people want to show-off and become “better” than others, even if it’s only for their online presence (they may still suck in the real world). Showing off is perhaps the most important reason people are using social media for.
But since the media itself is an arena where players from every corner of the planet can compete in becoming the coolest person in the universe, the idea of levelling is not absent. Not only does a person’s status increase by the mere number of followers in Twitter, or friends in Facebook, but there are dedicated services like Grader that calculate a score in the range of 1-100 that’s based on how important your online “character” is. Even top user lists are compiled, where people compete to climb up and beat their peeps, in either ethical or “unethical” ways.
Socializing
We all know that prolonged use of computers is supposed to make people less social in real life, but at least the Internet helps people socialize in the online life. WoW is quite fun to play mainly because you get to play along with other players who are not bots but actual persons. You can form a team and beat hard enemies, fight other (real) players of the opposing faction, form “guilds”, chat, and even flirt with them. There have been cases where people met in the game and then got married in the real world (but unfortunately I don’t have reference for this one). The bottom line is that fun comes when interaction with other humans is in play.
Of course, the same applies to social media. You get to chat with your friends or with people you don’t know, become friends with them, flirt with them, get on a date or even marry someone you met online. Although, as in WoW, you never really know the gender or looks of another person as it’s pretty easy to present yourself as something that you’re not.
Time-wasting
One of the main reasons people are condemning WoW players is their severe time-wasting, since they may be playing for many hours every day. But aren’t there Facebook users who spend hours in front of their computers, “socializing” with their friends and spending great amounts of time (and even money) on useless and almost pathetic “applications”? Both activities are huge time-wasters, but it’s still a matter of taste if one fancies spending their time killing virtual beasts, or throwing Britney Spears’ to their buddies and feeding their virtual pets!
Social media are MMORPGs
Examining all the differences, we could say that social media are indeed a form of massively multiplayer online role-playing games. They are used massively by multiple “players” all over the world who go online to create their own “characters” and engage in a role-playing “game”. In both of them, you get to interact with people who you don’t know, compete against them, show how “cool” you are, try to become better and more important than others and gain popularity. There are many new things to do and unknown territories to explore.
Participating in either MMORPGs or social media steals much of your time. Both are worlds of their own, in parallel to ours. They’re both another way for a person to participate in a “non-real” environment where they can show-off as much as their heart desire. Aren’t they all nothing more but different facets of the new multi-dimensional universe we have created, named “The Internet”?
