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A long-form piece in the Guardian about the use of social media to document our existence and provide proof of our experiences, sometimes to the detriment of the actual experience.
The cry of the title was born out of the earlier days of the Internet, and possibly the culture of the imageboards - "Pics or it didn't happen" - is in response to a different caption - "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." In previous media forms that wrote and reported nonfiction, there were filters and gatekeepers and persons whose job it was to ensure that things said were not libelous and were factually accurate. While they occasionally failed (which is what retractions and corrections are for), it was generally accepted that things that came through those channels are accurate and happened. With the advent of the Internet, any entity with sufficient design skills can produce any thing they want and pass it off as true, because it looks sufficiently official and talks about Big Important Names and Organizations and possibly users Statistics to back them up. Enough hoaxes, misrepresentations, and robots writing things means going online now requires a hardened sense of skepticism. It should have been a golden opportunity for information professionals to educate is on how to evaluate what we see and find those places that provide honest information.
That didn't happen, and still isn't happening, even in the schools where that sort of thing should be taught. Instead, what we got was a half-baked skepticism - text is inherently untrustworthy, so further evidence must be supplied. Pics or it didn't happen.
Except, if you continue on in those same corners of the Internet, you will find that once people have access to the rooms that professionals use to retouch, enhance, superimpose, and create effects with, they will use it to create things that never happened, and then allow other people to think it's real, because the fact that the "proof" of its existence is right there for the seeing. Pics, even if it didn't happen. The art of forgery is alive and well and living on the Internet in a hundred thousand tutorials and informative documents.
Which is a long way of looping back to the first point of the article, that the things we post on social media are inane, banal, trivial, and boring. But, as establishing ourselves as not robots, agents, or corporate shills working off profile documents on how to appear like real people on the Internet, posting about what we had for lunch, or about our latest relationship dramatics, or pictures of pets and children are reasonably effective at proving that we are essentially human.
The article follows a parallel line to this, as it warms to the idea of deconstructing the practice of social media as we do it now, by declaring that it's not the content of the content that's important, but whether there's content at all and how quickly it arrives. Since our feeds all constantly scroll downward as new material arrives, the only way to stay afloat us to do something that momentarily puts us at the top of the list again.
Information professionals have long known that if your page is to be the one selected by someone doing a search, it is an absolute necessity for your page to be on the first page of search results. You could have the most accurate, informative, beautiful page on the Internet, but if you are on page 2, only the most dedicated of searchers will actually find it. Thus is born that most black-hearted of enterprises, search engine optimization. Which basically boils down to telling an algorithm, however sophisticated it may be, that your page is the most correct, most informative page on the internet, and therefore the best result to have for someone's search query, so push your page to the top of the results page.
The other part of search results is something that probably has a more scientific name than "the spam threshold", but there it is. Somewhere, after a few pages, the results all start looking like other things, because they're copies of something higher-ranked, or they have gibberish of key words, including yours, while advertising warez, pr0n, or other such things as the actual content of the page. Once you've hit the spam threshold, most people abandon the search, figuring there's no new information to be had. It's quite possible there is, but it's not likely.
People, of course, are not algorithms. We count our optimizations in the form of followers and subscribers. And one of the best ways to get followers and subscribers is to have a steady stream of activity. It helps to be witty or poignant, of course, but it might be more important to be frequent.
The other side of this idea is what the article goes to next - that if everyone is posting things, there's the danger that you're going to miss out on the one important post on the middle of the deluge. If all interactions and posts are substantive, then the scroll shouldn't move too far before you get caught up. That said, even with my tiny monkeysphere, if I go away for a few days, I will reach the limit of being able to go backward, with all of your excellent posts lost unless I examine your pages individually. In a faster-moving medium, it would almost be certain that something would get lost or I would spend forever in the infinite scroll trying desperately to catch up. The treadmill is particularly vicious here - must be able to simultaneously stay at the top of the scroll while reading through it and making comments.
This push-pull then reinforces the idea that we are measured by our responses as much as our posts. A prolific poster with no comments or kudos is seen as a failure, someone shouting to an empty room. Someone who isn't posting things as they think of them potentially runs into "Simpsons did it" and someone else getting all the credit. So somehow we have to find the formula that has us posting high-quality material regularly that makes sure to gather lots of likes and kudos, too. No wonder famous people and corporations designate people as their handlers of the social media - it's at least a full-time job. How do the rest of us plebians manage it when we're already working jobs?
The answer appears to be that you just throw everything at the wall and see if anything sticks. The need to document everything to prove existence will quickly produce what's what and what's chaff for your particular feed.
Which goes to the major part of the article - once you have an idea of what the people want, the next step is to package it appropriately. With the technology we have available, a picture can be given the appropriate filter, have a caption attached and be sent out to the world within a five minute span. Or a video, or audio recording. (Much to the consternation of local and other police departments caught in the act of doing something other than serving and protecting.) So not only are we documenting ourselves in real time, we're able to apply production values, editing, and presentation to the things we're doing before they get posted. We're not only just thinking about what to show, we're thinking about how to frame it, what effects to apply to the shot once it's taken, and what captioning we're going to put on it. The kinds of things that professionals take days, weeks, or longer to put together are being decided in seconds, executed in seconds, and sent out to be viewed for a few seconds before the process starts again.
So now we have created and packaged an identity for ourselves, myself included (although I tend to stick to text rather than multimedia), and are presenting it to others, seeking their approval and commentary and hoping that one is interesting enough, waiting for the ding that indicates that a new notification is here.
You can probably see the snake eating its tail at this point - a post, looking for comments, about an article pointing out how posting with the intent of looking for comments is an empty pursuit, but a very popular one, and that we do this because we want to be part of the network that we have. Which is pretty much what I'm shooting for here - to participate in a network of interesting people by making a post and hoping for comments. It's a performance, because my internal picture of myself is much different than the person others are imagining in my writing. I'm hoping to put my best foot forward and be witty or erudite or something else that's interesting with each post, and gather comments that say as much. I know that my identity is supposed to not be bound up in such other-focused things, but there's the part where as a performer, you want to both have an audience and have an appreciative audience. So it would be a lie to say that it's all completely about what I think is interesting, or just about what I'm thinking. But it's a lie that most people partake of, and I'd like to believe that I'm not doing it primarily for other people to notice and comment on. If I were, I think of be in a different profession. And possibly a different House.
The cry of the title was born out of the earlier days of the Internet, and possibly the culture of the imageboards - "Pics or it didn't happen" - is in response to a different caption - "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." In previous media forms that wrote and reported nonfiction, there were filters and gatekeepers and persons whose job it was to ensure that things said were not libelous and were factually accurate. While they occasionally failed (which is what retractions and corrections are for), it was generally accepted that things that came through those channels are accurate and happened. With the advent of the Internet, any entity with sufficient design skills can produce any thing they want and pass it off as true, because it looks sufficiently official and talks about Big Important Names and Organizations and possibly users Statistics to back them up. Enough hoaxes, misrepresentations, and robots writing things means going online now requires a hardened sense of skepticism. It should have been a golden opportunity for information professionals to educate is on how to evaluate what we see and find those places that provide honest information.
That didn't happen, and still isn't happening, even in the schools where that sort of thing should be taught. Instead, what we got was a half-baked skepticism - text is inherently untrustworthy, so further evidence must be supplied. Pics or it didn't happen.
Except, if you continue on in those same corners of the Internet, you will find that once people have access to the rooms that professionals use to retouch, enhance, superimpose, and create effects with, they will use it to create things that never happened, and then allow other people to think it's real, because the fact that the "proof" of its existence is right there for the seeing. Pics, even if it didn't happen. The art of forgery is alive and well and living on the Internet in a hundred thousand tutorials and informative documents.
Which is a long way of looping back to the first point of the article, that the things we post on social media are inane, banal, trivial, and boring. But, as establishing ourselves as not robots, agents, or corporate shills working off profile documents on how to appear like real people on the Internet, posting about what we had for lunch, or about our latest relationship dramatics, or pictures of pets and children are reasonably effective at proving that we are essentially human.
The article follows a parallel line to this, as it warms to the idea of deconstructing the practice of social media as we do it now, by declaring that it's not the content of the content that's important, but whether there's content at all and how quickly it arrives. Since our feeds all constantly scroll downward as new material arrives, the only way to stay afloat us to do something that momentarily puts us at the top of the list again.
Information professionals have long known that if your page is to be the one selected by someone doing a search, it is an absolute necessity for your page to be on the first page of search results. You could have the most accurate, informative, beautiful page on the Internet, but if you are on page 2, only the most dedicated of searchers will actually find it. Thus is born that most black-hearted of enterprises, search engine optimization. Which basically boils down to telling an algorithm, however sophisticated it may be, that your page is the most correct, most informative page on the internet, and therefore the best result to have for someone's search query, so push your page to the top of the results page.
The other part of search results is something that probably has a more scientific name than "the spam threshold", but there it is. Somewhere, after a few pages, the results all start looking like other things, because they're copies of something higher-ranked, or they have gibberish of key words, including yours, while advertising warez, pr0n, or other such things as the actual content of the page. Once you've hit the spam threshold, most people abandon the search, figuring there's no new information to be had. It's quite possible there is, but it's not likely.
People, of course, are not algorithms. We count our optimizations in the form of followers and subscribers. And one of the best ways to get followers and subscribers is to have a steady stream of activity. It helps to be witty or poignant, of course, but it might be more important to be frequent.
The other side of this idea is what the article goes to next - that if everyone is posting things, there's the danger that you're going to miss out on the one important post on the middle of the deluge. If all interactions and posts are substantive, then the scroll shouldn't move too far before you get caught up. That said, even with my tiny monkeysphere, if I go away for a few days, I will reach the limit of being able to go backward, with all of your excellent posts lost unless I examine your pages individually. In a faster-moving medium, it would almost be certain that something would get lost or I would spend forever in the infinite scroll trying desperately to catch up. The treadmill is particularly vicious here - must be able to simultaneously stay at the top of the scroll while reading through it and making comments.
This push-pull then reinforces the idea that we are measured by our responses as much as our posts. A prolific poster with no comments or kudos is seen as a failure, someone shouting to an empty room. Someone who isn't posting things as they think of them potentially runs into "Simpsons did it" and someone else getting all the credit. So somehow we have to find the formula that has us posting high-quality material regularly that makes sure to gather lots of likes and kudos, too. No wonder famous people and corporations designate people as their handlers of the social media - it's at least a full-time job. How do the rest of us plebians manage it when we're already working jobs?
The answer appears to be that you just throw everything at the wall and see if anything sticks. The need to document everything to prove existence will quickly produce what's what and what's chaff for your particular feed.
Which goes to the major part of the article - once you have an idea of what the people want, the next step is to package it appropriately. With the technology we have available, a picture can be given the appropriate filter, have a caption attached and be sent out to the world within a five minute span. Or a video, or audio recording. (Much to the consternation of local and other police departments caught in the act of doing something other than serving and protecting.) So not only are we documenting ourselves in real time, we're able to apply production values, editing, and presentation to the things we're doing before they get posted. We're not only just thinking about what to show, we're thinking about how to frame it, what effects to apply to the shot once it's taken, and what captioning we're going to put on it. The kinds of things that professionals take days, weeks, or longer to put together are being decided in seconds, executed in seconds, and sent out to be viewed for a few seconds before the process starts again.
So now we have created and packaged an identity for ourselves, myself included (although I tend to stick to text rather than multimedia), and are presenting it to others, seeking their approval and commentary and hoping that one is interesting enough, waiting for the ding that indicates that a new notification is here.
You can probably see the snake eating its tail at this point - a post, looking for comments, about an article pointing out how posting with the intent of looking for comments is an empty pursuit, but a very popular one, and that we do this because we want to be part of the network that we have. Which is pretty much what I'm shooting for here - to participate in a network of interesting people by making a post and hoping for comments. It's a performance, because my internal picture of myself is much different than the person others are imagining in my writing. I'm hoping to put my best foot forward and be witty or erudite or something else that's interesting with each post, and gather comments that say as much. I know that my identity is supposed to not be bound up in such other-focused things, but there's the part where as a performer, you want to both have an audience and have an appreciative audience. So it would be a lie to say that it's all completely about what I think is interesting, or just about what I'm thinking. But it's a lie that most people partake of, and I'd like to believe that I'm not doing it primarily for other people to notice and comment on. If I were, I think of be in a different profession. And possibly a different House.
