Selfie licking and the life in the media

Being crazy busy preparing for my first exam on Monday, which hopefully will earn me my first 5 study points, I've not been able to write that much lately, but this morning I'm thinking about the social conventions surrounding social media, where, I've come to the conclusion, being critical of anyone or anything is a taboo.

The unwritten rule of Facebook is that if you don't have anything good to say, don't say it all. Is this like it should be or should we be able to take a little critique, too? One thing is for sure, the arenas of social media full of cute cat videos are a far cry from the idea of these public places being (virtual) stages for advocating democracy and intelligent conversation that Jurgen Habermas was harbouring in his mind. Quite simply: people just don't wanna know.

Instead, people, especially women, post selfies to receive that self-affirmation in the form of positive comments of admiration from their peers over and over again. According to an article from Huffington Post on a study published in an online journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture the peers do, however, prefer a person who portrays herself in a slightly less provocative way rating her "prettier, more likely to be a good friend, and more competent". To put it frankly: people lie.

From the point of view media research and theory, it's interesting note how the "subject" of media has changed over the course of time. Back in the days (1930s) of the sociological starting point of Karl Lazarsfeld and his fellow researchers was to assume that the media audience was at the receiving end of influences from the media content, then along came the Frankfurt School who claimed that we were (unjustly) formed in the media texts to the advantage of the scary Capitalist, but I claim that these days our selves live through the media. So it's not like the lefties say that we're predetermined by ideology or that we're just helpless receivers of intended messages, but that the human life has taken form through the media in that we live in the media nowadays. We can be more of whatever we want to be online than we can outside it. People know what we're doing through Facebook without even being there.

To conclude: Whilst the Habermassian ideal still hasn't realized itself and the narcissistic self is on a digital rampage, we now have two co-existing realities (material/electronic) to manage and that is a mine field of research topics to be discovered!

Should a Disaster Strike...

When human tragedy strikes and somebody ends up committing a horrific act, such as woman crashes a car into a bus killing her children on Sunday in the North East of Finland, the news media always have a field day. Finally something happens and there are plenty of things to write about. This is naturally problematic from the perspective of the individuals whom are concerned with the real and actual events and their privacy. Through bits of available information, like what Ilta-Sanomat (Finland's biggest daily yellow press) has been able to put together on the case, is constructed a narrative of sad, unfortunate events created by a very sad,unfortunate person. And yet, it doesn't help us to understand it any better, so the question to ask is, is it justifiable to publish all this information?

Finland's Council for Mass Media (CMM) in its guidelines for journalists states that "highly delicate matters concerning people's personal lives" should not be shared without their consent, especially concerning minors, but the dirty laundry is often being washed at full speed already, taking this piece related to this horrific intentional car crash from another daily in Finland, Iltalehti, as an example. The CMM guidelines also emphasize the significance as an issue concerning the society as a whole, when determining the rights of privacy. Well, in Finland it typically seems to be important to ask the question "whose fault is this?" To know which part of the social system failed.

Besides the aspects of personal privacy and interpreting societal significance, over time disaster reporting on "iconic traumas", such as the 9/11, take on a life of their own. They become the tales of our times to explain why the world is the way it is. The antagonistic storyline of the struggle between the West and the Middle East has been repeated in countless films and the public anxiety created by potential terrorism has fully been utilized by governing bodies to introduce further measures of control in society.

Management Practices in Finland (2008)

Management Practices in Finland (Johtamisopit Suomessa, 2008) by Helen Seeck doesn't seemingly have much to do with media. However, spotting it on the reading list for my open university courses, I decided to have a look at it because I'm keen to focus on what will be useful to me  in practical working life.

Management Practices in Finland includes thorough coverage on five management paradigms ranging from the historical days of Taylorism and the scientific management  practices to the current day discourse on innovation. In between, there are the alternative views from the humanistic and cultural schools of thought as well as a point of view of the structural analysis approach.

The basic idea behind all of these paradigms is how to best manage an organization as a result of their research into whatever any of them happen to emphasize. The scientific management paid attention to the work tasks and the processes conducting the work was tied to, being clearly a product of its time (mass production). The humanistic school naturally saw well functioning human relations as a key to success, where as the cultural strand emphasized organizational cultures. What's more of today's world are the last two of Seeck's management paradigms; the structural analysis meaning constant evaluation and renewal of the organizational structure and the need for continuous innovation to compete on the market. 

So, so far nothing new. Obviously all of these paradigms have something to offer and all of them are in existence in any given organization and/or company. I would go as far as saying that Seeck's book verges on being boring. Whilst certainly academically convincing, it just functions as a good source for references if you're looking for names and research in any of these topic areas. What's missing, in my opinion, are the real life examples of organizations which have either successfully or unsuccessfully applied these paradigms and the research into what kind of results they have yielded with placing emphasis on specific matters, say human relations exclusively. 

That said, I did enjoy (skip) reading Management Practices in Finland, probably because I haven't read that much management related material before. It provides a thorough overview of the different management trends over the recent decades and in the final chapter on innovation, finally a pragmatic approach is adopted, when Seeck outlines some practical guidance for achieving an innovative working environment that her own research has produced.

The Lego War

Coming across an alternative news platform the VICE News, which provides socially aware information under the headings of Environment, War & Conflict and so on for the "connected generation", I took notice of an interesting piece on how Lego has ended its partnership with Shell due to consumer pressure that stems from the opposition to Shell's oil drilling activities in the Arctic Region.

Besides the fact that this is a clear example of consumer impact and how it has been achieved via spreading content via social media, the most compelling thing about it is that the Youtube video "Everything is NOT Awesome" Greenpeace made is not of true real life material. It's a cleverly targeted animation made with Legos of events yet to come, which is successful in not only delivering the message but with also delivering the end result; an actual change in corporate relations for the benefit of the environment.

What's great about the Greenpeace animation, too, is that it's not based on something that has already happened, which I think people find empowering. I remember seeing the horrendous images of the so-called BP oil disaster in 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico, which is referred to by Wikipedia as the world's largest marine oil spill accident so far, and whilst they made me feel sick to my stomach I ended up doing nothing, because after all, there was nothing to be done at that point. It was just easier to shut the browser done and move onto topics a lot more pleasant. What Greenpeace achieved with their Lego animation is "shareable" online content which has led to something that makes a difference.

The Like Economy

Having set myself on a somewhat solid ground in terms of present day theoretical framework with the little help from Manuel Castells (see my previous post), I was delighted to find a practical guide to the world social media and e-commerce on a trip to my local library. “The Like Economy” (Tykkäämistalous, 2012) was written by two Finnish guys Petteri Kankkunen and Pär Österlund with the entrepreneurial take on the current media landscape in mind.

The basic gist of their message is what Google's Country Manager for Finland Anni Ronkainen also says in Kymen Sanomat which is that companies must develop their e-commerce and mobile services, because that is where the business is and will be. Traditional places of consumption, like Stockmann, on the other hand, are gasping for oxygen like fish on dry ground.

Business on the web through social media channels is, in short, based on sharing. Whether that be sharing of a Groupon deal, sharing of product information or sharing of a poor review of service. That is a double ended sword in that whilst the social media enable simultaneous and cheap interaction with a large customer base, it can also ruin everything should vicious stories of bad experiences start running wild on the web.

Social capital is what Kankkunen and Österlund call the social networks of people through which there is endless potential to reach new prospects and equally the power of showing what our friends or like-minded people have purchased, thus convincing us that our money will be well spent. After all, we know these people and are likely to trust what they say.

Conducting successful e-commerce, however, requires so much more than simple transactions of trading. Presence in the social media means providing interesting content related to one's product or services free of charge. It means following up on what people say about you and getting back to them. Yes, even to the nasty ones. It means being omnipresent at all times.

Whilst the book authors offer many a tip on advocating commerce via social media channels and the book serves as a great starting point for anyone thinking about doing that, by now, some two years after the publishing of “The Like Economy”, everyone knows the stuff in principle. What remains difficult is the clever content production. Being creative is not easy.

Manuel Castells: Communication Power (2009)

What a better way to return to media studies after close enough to ten years than to read Manuel Castells' Communication Power (2009) in which he provides us with an overview of, what he has dubbed as, the Network Society. The Network Society is that of a techno-Marxist functioning principle, where the all-familiar divide between oppressors and the oppressed from the Marxist tradition exists in the form of inclusion/exclusion in the electric spider web that now surrounds us virtually at all corners of the world and to which we're connected through our mobile devices. As a curiosity to this, the World Bank declared on its website in 2012 that 75% of the earth inhabitants have access to a mobile phone.  What would be even more interesting to know or to calculate is the rate at which this coverage is growing on an annual basis.

Fortunately Castell's take on the labour market is more from today's world than the Marxist era's industrial time miseries. That take is more positive for those who participate in the production as self-programmable agents since they're the ones who effectively determine what is valuable, what is to be desired by us, to the rest of us. OK true, we live in a relative value economy, where commodities are exchanged for value and indeed those commodities need to be manufactured by some people. Those in generic labour do that, but they're reduced to hapless gaming chips to be spat on by global corporations whenever the advancements of digitalization has erased their work tasks excluding them from the System. Well, partially at least.

I guess you could say then that the new ruling class doesn't just own (in the sense of owning, say, a shoe factory in Britain in the Victorian times), it designs (and then it goes out to buy things and owns them). The designer of things create that relativism in the value and therefore express power over the rest of us. This power is in existence through, what Castells calls, the Network Enterprise which I see iconic companies of our times like Google and Facebook to be, as they actively direct our minds and construct the world to us.

Another bone that Castells' throws us relates to the issue of influence over audiences. According to Castells, audiences interactively partake in the production of meaning. Thus, in the digital age, the oppressor is schizophrenically also the oppressed, as we all are, first and foremost, the consumers of commodities regardless of our status in employment. The world view on offer here is nice, I like it. Simple enough to recognize and complicated enough to apply to our multi-layered realities of existence. And though we've not escaped the cruelties of the free market that Marx couldn't have even dreamt of, we can still have an impact to what meaning we give to things. Castells says that “meaning determines action so communicating meaning becomes the source of social power” and convinces me to believe there's room for improving the world through that.