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.