twopointouch

Many thanks to comrade Mayfield for his excellent presentation to the collected officers of the Social Media Commissariat … sorry Club, this evening.

To cut his talk short, he’d been thinking about the parallels between the birth of social media and the birth of print itself, as described in Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early modern Europe. The printing press caused a social upheaval and changes in the patterns of people’s thought that would last forever. Revolutions are often thought to be sudden and violent, but as well as that, if they are really revolutionary, they are about long-term, irreversible change.

The printing press, like the explosion of social media, changed access to the means of production and distribution of media forever. It smashed feudalism and church control. It also changed the ways in which people think - new modes of behaviour and activity like silent reading appeared. The emergence of continual partial attention through the likes of Twitter might be a modern analogy.

In a revisionist aberration, Mayfield suggested that marketing had always had a place in print, from its very origins, since early books were very often part advertorial for the author’s goods and services. He suggested in Gutenberg’s time, there were numerous helpful volumes that actually were about promoting the writer - think books along the lines of Tenne Most Efficacious Waies to Dryve Traffick to Ye Blogge. He also cited the division and combined hatred and approval created by this new media, a very familiar theme today when it comes to the media created by you and I and reactions to that from the press and the establishment.

Dialectical materialism and Web 2.0, then. The subsequent conversation revealed a few ways into such an analysis, most of which seem bleak in the short term:

(a) this apparent transferal of the means of production into the hands of the people (e.g. ‘push-button publishing’ for everyone) seems like a revolution. But that apparent liberation is contained within the illusion of freedom granted by a very few corporations. Fox, Google, Microsoft, Facebook. At the next level, our ISPs are owned by even fewer, larger players. Our sense of freedom and ownership in this space is a delusion. The recent Usmanov outage proved how fragile this freedom is. If corporations are the new states, then much of social media might be classified as Ideological State Apparatus to obscure the real relationships between those states and the peasantry.

(b) this is even more the case outside the bourgeois social media intelligentsia (viz. anyone likely to attend SMC). Most people are joining in, if at all, through portals controlled by media giants. Unwitting collaborators, my comrades, not revolutionaries. Maybe not the same media giants as ten years ago. But the same forces, same money behind them. Don’t mistake withdrawal from one account and investment into another for a sea change in how capitalism works.

(c) the myth of transparency. Transparency used as a way to bully lesser powers. Corporations remain psychotic: under US law, they are incapable of acting altruistically. If they do anything about the social media revolution, then it will be because they think it will be the best way to drive profits. Watch them, catch them out, be suspicious.

(d) so what/where is the revolution? Regrettably,there was reactionary talk based upon non-scientific doctrine during the evening that ‘life will out’ and that censorship and control will ultimately be bypassed because that it is the destiny of any new communications medium. Applying the scientific method of Marx and Lenin instead, we might conclude that the ongoing struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie will continue and that the inevitable victory of the working classes will ensue to similar effect. Even the benighted might hit upon the truth sometimes. Print led to education, secularity and the spread of scientific thought, eventually, even though its first thrust came from the opposite direction.

Be watchful comrades. The day is near, but not yet at hand.

Update: somewhat more sensible posts on the event from Alan and Jenny.