In the intro of his Phd (Defending my Bastard Culture!) researcher Mirko Tobias Schäfer writes about two TIME-magazine covers depicting the man/woman/group/… of the year.

The first one is the well known cover from 2007. A computer screen is depicted and in fact mirrors the reader looking at the front cover. The text on the bottom of the page says it all… “Yes, You. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world”. Though this image has been widely used (and thus maybe loses a bit of its importance) it still is relevant as it refers to the so-called participatory culture (popularized under the term Web2.0).

The second one dates from 1983. Time Magazine did not elect a Person of the Year, but choose the computer as the Machine of the Year. The man in front of the computer is almost blanked out and sits alienated in front of the screen not even touching the keyboard.

Schäfer sees as a reason for this emancipatory evolution from a ‘machine in control’ to the ‘user in control’ the development of the computer as a work medium to a life-medium (work, leisure, friendship, family,…) and the great amount of content which ordinary users can publish online.

These are not ’shocking’ conclusions, but the way they get depicted by these TIME-covers, covering almost 25 years, is beautifull & illustrative.

In a previous post I tried to debunk the term ’social media’. I’ve claimed -in contrast to the Wikipedia-definition- social media has got nothing to do with technology or the internet.

As Dorien asked for more clarification I will focus on the telegraph as an example of social media.

The Hurrays (& Boo’s) each medium faces

“we are one!” said the nations, and hand met hand, in a thrill electric from land to land. (The Victory, 1872)

The Atlantic Telegraph – that instantaneous highway of thought between the Old and New worlds.  (Scientific American, 1858)

These quotes remind me of the quotes you heard at the beginning of the popularization of the internet or when after an O’Reilly-conference the term web2.0 was coined. Typical terms for that time were “information superhighway” (see above, that instantaneous highway of thought) or the co

ncept of “global village” connecting distant places beyond the borders of space and time.

The ‘code language’

We all know chat language or SMS langauge. It is an abbreviated form of the English

language to speed up the process of communication.

Most known examples are probably LOL for ‘laughing out loud’ or thx for ‘thanks’.

With the telegraph they also used these code language for fast and easy social contact:

I I stands for ‘I am ready’. An operator would use SFD (’Stop For Dinner’) when he would take a break for dinner and one would use GM to wish the fellow-operators a Good Morning.

Human relationships

When the internet started to become mainstream we saw stories poppin up in popular press about

people meeting and eventually getting married via the internet. It was perceived as a miraculuous never-seen-before event that love emerged via your 56k-modem.

In his work “The Victorian Internet” Tom Standage refers to numerous stories of love over the wires. Most of them comes down to operators who in the after-hours started chatting (or playing board games like checkers) via the telegraph and eventually fell in love.
So, the only thing I wanted to tell in this and the previous post is that it’s not the internet or any other medium which is making us social, but it is the people using it (to have fast and easy communication, to find friendshiop and maybe even find love). All the buzz surrounding so-called web social media is not new and has been here before…

Source: The Victorian Internet

I have something - almost obsessive - with books. When I was little, I weekly paid the library a  visit and came home with ten books (the absolute maximum), crawled under the big dinning table and started reading. And after bedtime, I secretly continued reading with a flash light hidden underneath the covers. Working for a publisher and getting paid to read books, was for a long time the job of my dreams. And still , I can’t pass a book store without going inside and buying a book. Contrary to my youth, I no longer go to the library. Instead I buy every book that I want to read. Why? I’m not sure … probably because it’s a very personal good: you laugh with it, cry with it, fall a sleep with it …. And the idea that “your” book has been in the hands of thousands of library visitors …!

So enough about my book-thoughts.

A few weeks ago I discovered Blurb, an online publisher of books. And since my mother’s birthday is coming up, the idea of making here an own personalised book was born! So, I decided that would be a very nice present (I will like it probably more than she does)!I started immediately by downloading the software … and I must say: it’s very easy. You first have to decide the size of your book and if you want one in colour or in black or white. After that you have the choice of using some starting points (lay out examples)  or starting from scratch!

I decided to use a starting point, namely the photo book. After that it is just dragging the pictures to the right place and inserting some text. And even with those easy actions, you receive help. For example when the resolution of your picture isn’t high enough, the programme tells you this!

From my point of view, the most difficult and time-consuming activity was collecting the right pictures! A process that still takes place.

To be continued…..

Clubbyclub is initiative from the Netherlands and can considered as a personal social network site. It is a closed website for existing groups of friends. A secured place where you don’t need to worry about the whole world looking over your shoulder when posting a new message or photo.

Clubbyclub is in fact a reaction on the popular, big social networks. Often one accepts friends that aren’t really friends (the well-know problem of social desirability bias) one wants to share embarrasing photos, personal messages or invitiations for parties with. The emphasis here lies on existing friends and not on meeting new people of reconnecting with old friends.

Source: Frankwatching.com, Clubbyclub.com

Apparently it’s sometimes necessary to sum up some rules concerning how to behave on social media sites. Although one might think that they are very different from the good manners we all have in real life … it’s not really the case.

On her blog, Tamar Weinberg, published a social media etiquette handbook. Apparently, there do exist people that act completely different on a social media site, than they would do in face-to-face relationships. In order to reeducate those, Tamar Weinberg created the handbook, with some specific actions for specific social media sites. For example, when talking about Facebook, one of the she talks about is adding users as friends without introduction. Maybe it’s helpfull telling people who you are … just like you do in real-life?

Some basic rules to survive in a social media universe can be found here

Source: Tamar Weinberg at Techipedia: The Ultimate Social Media Etiquette Handbook.

In my classes my students & I try to debunk & deconstruct the so called web2.0-terminology. The first item we dealt with was social media.

When searching on Google you get about 100 million search results. The first result which pops up is -not surprisingly- a link to Wikipedia which states that social media are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings.
I do think this definition -which is the one most commonly used- is lacking a bit of nuance as it stresses the ‘new media’ element too much. I much rather prefer the term (and definition) Sociable Media Judith Donath was using back in 2004 aka Web2.0-prehistory: Sociable media are media that enhance communication and the formation of social ties among people. She then refers to letter writing as one of the most commonly known and ‘old’ sociable media as it empowers you to be social via a medium.

In her opinion communication technologies are not developed to stimulate being social. As an example you could take the predecessor of todays internet, ARPA-net, which was indeed intended as a military & university network. Still, Donath continues, as we live and thrive on social interaction, all communication technology will eventually be used to be ’social’. The SMS-protocol was in fact intended for system warnings or techno-communication, not for a widespread and highly succesfull means of communication among ‘ordinary’ mobile phone users.

As a conclusion Donath remarks that it’s not about the type of technology you’re using, it’s about the features (rhythm, format, bandwidth, permanence and identification) that affect how the technology can be used.

Maybe a nice ancdote to conclude. When searching for definitions and critique on the term maybe the most interesting and down-to-earth remark I got was the one at the AOIR-list. I’ve asked them to give me a definition of ’social media’ and the first and only answer I got was Which media are asocial? .
True.

Source: Sociable Media

Update: I’ve written a second post on this topic.