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silveradeptA 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.
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no subject
Date: 2015-03-28 12:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-28 05:06 pm (UTC)Which seems to me to be a fairly miserable sort of existence, but being fairly young and thus having spent my entire adult life in that environment, it's hard to escape. I have escaped it somewhat materially by not having facebook or a smartphone (although I used to have both of them and use them for exactly the purposes described in the article), but somehow the idea still lingers in m mind, and obviously judging by that article in almost everyone else's, that other humans are quantum gods who determine whether or not my experiences exist.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-29 12:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-29 03:49 am (UTC)Maybe that explains it.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-29 06:32 am (UTC)But thanks for this. It's reminding me that I really don't HAVE to do it all. I can post when I want, or not, or just comment, and the people I know and who really want to talk to me will do it in some way or another even if I'm not The Most Prolific, Interesting Woman In The World.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-29 09:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-29 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-30 05:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-30 08:53 am (UTC)This is not the first time I've seen online writing mentioned as performance (it was called "performance art", specifically; this was said about one blogger I followed on and off until he died) and I never got those words out of my head. At first I was offended, both for him and for myself as a reader, since if the blogger this was said about was a performer, then I was following "an act" with (ostensibly) no heart in it, all being done for show. The fact that this blogger was an avid fan of a true performance blogger and mentioned him a lot did not help my overall confusion around this topic.
In the long run I came to decide what was said about him was not strictly true - this blogger was a trained stage actor so of course he could perform - even in writing! - which was probably what some of his readers were picking up on, but his heart was more in it than I think a lot of people gave him credit for. But despite wanting to trust what I saw because I'd been seeing it for years before this comment was made, the phrase threw me off for a long time as it made me doubt not just his motives for writing, but my own taste in writers/online personalities, and doubting myself was probably the worst part of that whole scenario. (I mean, Owen on Gawker back in the day? Dear, wonderful, fucked-up Owen? He is probably one my favorite writers of all time, but he was nothing but performance art all the way. Doubting why I liked his writing still kills me, but once I came to doubt my taste in writers, I came to doubt my taste in Owen, too. Part of the draw of Owen was how much of a verbal show-off he was - no one could hold a candle to the guy, except maybe this other one.)
There are two sides to everything and performing by blogging and/or posting to social media is no exception. On the positive side, a good writer can make their performances worthwhile and not just a selfish waste of everyone's time. On the negative side...you and I have discussed one example of that so extensively that I think you know both who and what I mean. It can become like a vortex that sucks you in and never lets you out again. The person posting in that fashion is thriving on putting on a performance strictly for social gain and self-gratification at the expense of many things, including the truth, and building lie upon lie as a way to tell a story and gain friends who stay loyal in light of all the destruction that's so compellingly yet inaccurately described. This is social media at its most sinister and destructive.
Maybe I should be glad for the experience just to learn (first-hand, with myself as the most immediate and recurring victim of that posting cycle) that things are not always as they seem - especially online, where it's so easy to twist the truth around people who can't know what the truth really is, sometimes by simply adding or dropping a single word or sentence or event from the timeline which changes the meaning of everything else that's said. In light of watching that happen I've learned not to be as trusting as I might be otherwise. And in the long run, that probably won't hurt me as much as taking anyone's online postings at face value probably would.
The part about search engines and how people use them (and what they value as far as search results go, and why) is endlessly fascinating and 100% spot-on. This more than anything is what I've been writing about for years (nine years and change, to be exact) and is a topic I never grow tired of. I think the only major twist I'd add to what you said, which is otherwise still accurate today and going back nine+ years and then some, is that search engine search is probably being abandoned lately in favor of more in-house solutions (for instance, by searching blogs, Facebook, Buzzfeed, Twitter, and Pinterest directly). And I'd love to read and write more on that topic.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-30 01:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-30 05:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-30 05:33 pm (UTC)And yeah, DFW made quite a few startlingly accurate and insightful predictions about digital culture, such as "selfie anxiety" in Infinite Jest.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-31 08:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-31 08:11 pm (UTC)I agree on in-house searching, but I suspect that people get from place to place where they do those searches through engines. It's a first stop and a linking point.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-28 03:15 pm (UTC)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.
Indeed so. I wound up abandoning Twitter last year, for just that reason - it was proving to be so time-consuming merely keeping up with everyone, as I deplored the notion of merely skipping over everything posted overnight. I'm certainly not opposed to the notion of returning, but I haven't yet worked out any good means of obviating the original issue. Not to worry - LJ's flow is more measured, and at a pace I can reasonably keep up with, occasionally to the point where I'll even peruse my Friends of Friends list. =:)
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.
Which is why I prefer LJ, on balance. ^_^ I can spend days working on an entry, adding references to a particular article's main point, dropping something if it seems superfluous or has fallen out of timeliness, and working out how best to make the embedded images flow within the text.
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.
Plus even the occasional interloper. ^_^ Indeed, it is gratifying to have that.. well, validation, I suppose, that one's writing, photography, music, or other efforts have proven at least stimulating enough to spark some form of response or appreciation. Even a simple "fave" on Flickr or 500px brings me a smile.
It's a performance, because my internal picture of myself is much different than the person others are imagining in my writing.
How often are one's internal and external visions all that closely related, I wonder. =:/
no subject
Date: 2015-03-28 10:05 pm (UTC)I have mostly abandoned Twitter because of the same kind of problem of being unable to keep up with everyone, despite having less followers on Twitter. I much prefer the ability to think on long form and to spend time crafting what I want to say.
That said, interlopers are always nice. They help us realize that there's more than one picture of us out in the world, and that those other pictures might be ones to try on for a bit to feel better over, or in anticipation of a more permanent shift.