PHILOSOPHYAND SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media is booming!
Facebook Statistics 2012
• Facebook has one billion monthly active users
• There are over one billion Facebook posts per day
• There are 3.2 billion likes/comments per day
• There are 250 million photos uploaded each day
Twitter Statistics 2012
• There are over 470 million Twitter accounts
• Twitter is growing at a rate of 11 accounts per second
• 32 percent of all Internet users are using Twitter

Course description
Social media is driving a ‘gift shift’ through our societies that is impacting on
business, politics, personal and social identity in important ways.
Three phases to the shift:
• Gift shift 1.0: the 80s-90s hacker/open source movement
• Gift shift 2.0: the rise of social media
• Gift shift 3.0: the collaborative consumption/sharing movement

Course materials
Online reading materials will be circulated on Twitter using #philsocial

What is social media?
Kaplan and Haenlein define social media as: Web 2-based user-generated content.
They identify six types of social media:
1. Collaborative projects (e.g. Wikipedia)
2. Blogs and microblogs (e.g. Tumblr, Twitter)
3. Social networking sites (e.g. Facebook)
4. Content communities (e.g. Youtube, TripAdvisor)
5. Virtual game worlds (e.g. World of Warcraft)
6. Virtual social worlds (e.g. Second Life)

What is a prosumer?
• Term ‘prosumer’ was coined by futurologist Alvin Toffler in The Third Wave (1980).
Toffler predicted that consumers would become active to help personally improve or
design the goods and services of the marketplace
• Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams (Wikinomics (2006)) use the term ‘prosumer’ to
encompass product hackers, bedroom DJs and remix artists, SecondLife content
creators, and user-generated media
• Prosumers: producer/consumers of user-generated online content

What is a prosumer?
For hundreds of millions of people, sharing content on social media is a familiar
part of life. Yet little is known about how social media is impacting on us on a
psychological level. We are still learning about how social media impacts on our
sense of personal identity.

The prosumer experience
Peggy Orenstein, ‘I Tweet, Therefore I Am’ (New York Times Online)
1. ‘Each Twitter post seemed a tacit referendum on
who I am, or at least who I believe myself to be’
2. ’I learned to be “on” all the time, whether
standing behind that woman at the supermarket
who sneaked three extra items into the express
check-out lane (you know who you are) or
despairing over human rights abuses against
women in Guatemala’.

Introducing: Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
Philosopher of power and ‘subjectivation’ (processes of self-formation)

Panopticon as ‘machine’ of control
‘[The Panopticon] induce[s] in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent
visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’ (Foucault, DP, 201).
The sense of an implicit tribunal: we shape our behaviour in response.

Social media: a virtual Panopticon

Social media: a virtual Panopticon
Peggy Orenstein, ‘I Tweet, Therefore I Am’ (New York Times Online)
1. ‘Each Twitter post seemed a tacit referendum on
who I am, or at least who I believe myself to be.’
• ’[T]he Panopticon induce[s] in the inmate a state of
conscious and permanent visibility…’

Social media: a virtual Panopticon
• The result? We play to the crowd.
• Creative self-affirmation. The humourist becomes a prankster; the controversialist
an iconoclast; the salesperson a guru; the activist a revolutionary...

Social media: a virtual Panopticon

PHILOSOPHYAND SOCIAL MEDIA

The prosumer experience
Peggy Orenstein, ‘I Tweet, Therefore I Am’ (New York Times Online)
1. ‘Each Twitter post seemed a tacit referendum on
who I am, or at least who I believe myself to be’
2. ’I learned to be “on” all the time, whether
standing behind that woman at the supermarket
who sneaked three extra items into the express
check-out lane (you know who you are) or
despairing over human rights abuses against
women in Guatemala’.

Call of the crowd
• We feel obliged to keep the share cycle going. We hear the call of the crowd.

Call of the crowd
• Prosumers feel obliged to produce product/entertainment for others to
consume. They hear the call of the crowd.

Call of the crowd
• Tribal values: the sense of belonging to an online tribe - a community of people
united by common values and interests

Call of the crowd
• Tribal values: a sense of belonging to an online tribe - a community of people
united by common values and interests

The Potlatch ceremony
The Potlatch – a gift giving ceremony
• A chief or leader would gather their tribe together and present them with a massive
gift of food, blankets, furs, weapons, canoes, and crafts.
• Gifters seek reputational status. The more they give, the greater the prestige

Social media: a virtual Potlatch
• Add your gifts to the common pool
• On social media, we play a reputation
game that hinges on the question:
• ‘Who can give the greatest gifts?’

Social media: a virtual Potlatch
• Gift-giving should be empowering
• If it depletes you, you are doing it wrong

Find your tribe
• Different social media sites attract different crowds: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter…

The prismatic self

The prismatic self
• Social media creates a prismatic self, where segments
of identity are cultivated in distinction from one another
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together (2011)
• Audrey: experiments in self-expression
‘Each day Audrey expresses herself through a group
of virtual personae. There are Facebook and Italian
MySpace profiles; there are avatars in virtual
worlds, some chat rooms, and a handful of online
games. Identity involves negotiating between all of
these and the physical Audrey’ .
Turkle, Alone Together, 194.

The prismatic self
Nomadism: exploration of different identities and experiences
• Sites support aspects of self: Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter…

In sum: the prosumer experience
1. On social media, we post and share in public
• Affirm your authentic potential. Give the best of what you can be. Never forget that
you are engaging in a performance, but take it seriously - it reflects on you.

In sum: the prosumer experience
2. Different sites have different crowds with different expectations of value
• Find the crowd that enables you to be who you are, with whom you can be at your
best. Creatively affirm your authentic person and give it to your tribe.

PHILOSOPHYAND SOCIAL MEDIA