Page Against The (Culture) Machine

A central theme to this study is that I will look at the possibility of whether pluralistic models of the media, specifically crowdfunded journalism, could have an impact (potentially a powerful one) on the current organisational structure of ownership and control in that industry.

In order to do investigate this i'm getting pretty close to asking the question: 'Can social media actually change anything?' There are certainly quite a few people who think not. Internet critic Evgeny Morozov has consistently criticised the internet's ability to destroy everything about our lives from how we care form the elderly to how we have ruined the process of giving money to charity. He has raised huge concerns though around how internet firms are part of the new hegemonic structure and we are now placing our faith, and our data, in huge global institutions more than ever. For him the internet is not offering a pluralist utopia but a dystopia of epic proportions.

Malcolm Gladwell doesn't like the internet either, or at least not social media.  He thinks doing things in the real world is best.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/oct/03/malcolm-gladwell-twitter-doesnt-work

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell

It's a fair enough point he makes in these articles; that real life activism and actual protest is best, and that twitter and facebook etc don't actually help contribute to this. They don't give you 'discipline and strategy' as Gladwell puts it. Although i would almost definitely argue with the latter point as makers of this real team protest mapping software that helps protestors evade the movements of the police almost certainly are using social media to create a strategic difference.
(https://www.recordedfuture.com/map-turkish-protests/)

He goes on though:
As the historian Robert Darnton has written, “The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.” But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.

Gladwell explains how social media essentially only encourages a mass trivial participation without any real engagement and despite thousands of case studies that show apparent engagement from an online crowd he dismisses them as always being for causes that hardly need any effort on behalf of the audience anyway. getting 1 thousand people to sign an online petition is not the same as mobilising 1000 revolutionary fighters to storm the palace. Which is true its not the same. obviously.

 “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.

In 2011, Morozov wrote a similar article in the guardian entitled: 'Facebook and Twitter are just places revolutionaries go' (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/07/facebook-twitter-revolutionaries-cyber-utopians). Which was essentially saying the same sort of things and ran to the defences of Gladwell. The two of them are probably friends. But not in the facebook sort of meaningless way. The real 'friends in real life' way.

"And yet Gladwell was probably right: today, the role of the telegraph in the 1917 Bolshevik revolution – just like the role of the tape-recorder in the 1979 Iranian revolution and of the fax machine in the 1989 revolutions – is of interest to a handful of academics and virtually no one else. The fetishism of technology is at its strongest immediately after a revolution but tends to subside shortly afterward."


It's a good argument that they make but their obvious cynicism towards the internet does seem to blind them from the fact that I'm not sure anybody actually thinks that facebook and twitter did single handedly create any revolutions. Surely we thought all along that they were just really cool, interesting, unique, useful communications technologies that could and did enable people to find avenues of resistance that didn't exist before. In interviews with people who fought the fights in Egypt, and the middle east during the Arab spring people actually used twitter and social media in new and creative ways. There was a huge amount and a huge upsurge in usage during that time. Sure social media doesn't create a revolutionary but it can surely help them come together and fight a stronger fight?

Crowdfunding is an example of this pretence of involvement as Gladwell and Morozov might suggest. That news readers may contribute the odd £2 here and there but are they actually involved in a strikingly new way that threatens the established order of news readership and therefore help bring about a new way forward for the fourth estate that can bring about a more democratic awareness of information for the masses? For an answer to the we may need to look at the very nature of power itself...