A Biased History of Social Media

Everybody's raving about this History of Social Media as if it is the greatest thing since creamed cheese, but it's a typically biased, geeky product that -- as I described it on the Muddle -- is proof that history gets written by the victors.

Or maybe not. What's funny is that history is in fact an act that victors engage in to try to prevail -- and they may not. In fact, it's too early to decide "what the history of social media" is because it's just born. The Internet is only about 15 years old -- very young. Sixteen years ago -- even earlier, with Compuserve, Hayes Smartcom, we would send files back and forth on the modem, and attach little messages on the top, where the file name only was supposed to go. That was the first kind of "email". Then, by 1995, we were following about 30 steps to log on to and send messages through Compuserve, and we were still using gophers. We had a boss who was very "scientific" who made us print out and save each and every email message in a big black binder. There didn't yet seem to be an easier way to save them (and there still isn't! Trying to save email is one of the most counterintuitive and stupid things on the web!). We rapidly filled several such binders, and gave up -- it turned out every email wasn't as grave and important as every telegram used to be...

To hear geeks tell is, the "early Internet was filled with porn". We know that it wasn't (and this guy doesn't seem to claim that, either). It was filled with pictures of people's cats, those temple creatures brought to every new home, and those wav files that said things like "Houston, we have a problem!". I used to publish a little newsletter at work filled with random weird Internet sites found by an Internet page randomizer that preceded "I'm feeling lucky" on Google and gave you pages like the one page of one guy in some place like Kyrgyzstan, or a fish shack in Louisiana with blackened catfish on the menu. Weblogs were merely geeky stupid things filling up space obsessively then, with things like "Fixed this bug" or "adjusted this line".

What Stephen Downes (Connectivism U prof) has on his server is a cached page of this "History" because apparently the original guy took it down, no doubt under a barrage of correctives from people as geeky and obsessive as he is.

And I'll join in, from a different perspective. This is one of the most biased things I've seen. It illustrates in spades that extremist geeky hatred of "walled gardens" and proprietary software and of course is Amero-centric, even as it tries desperately to be cool by mentioning that wow, Orkut is really popular in Brazil (without ever telling you why). As usual when people are trying to be fake third-wordly, he leaves out Russia. Where Live Journal, which was dying here, became wildly popular and was even bought out by a Russian. And...why? The author, Trebor Scholz, can't tell us, and I don't know, and his only answer is to attribute it to "captive" status of such services where you can't easily port your friendship network or your content.

And...why did you need to do that again, if you aren't Robert Scoble?

But here's what he left out, in this history of social media, something as obvious as air: AIM. History is often more about what you leave out, not what you put in. AOL's instant messaging service. They always do leave it out! It comes from that visceral geeky hatred of AOL as a "walled garden" but hell, this "walled garden" grew the most popular messaging system on the planet, used by millions of teenagers -- it dwarfs any of the other services. Everybody has an AIM. Or a Yahoo Messenger. And this is simply left out of the History. If it isn't opensource or free or non-walled, in the way this typical nerd demands that it be, it doesn't count. That is, he does include "AIMpages" in a long list, next to Christian Biblical pages, just so we know that they are in the negligible bin that isn't culturally correct.

So naturally he's left out MMORGPs and Virtual Worlds entirely, too. That seems like a huge oversight, because this is where people really socialize in droves. Something like WoW with its 10 million or whatever people on it is an extraordinary socializer. Not to mention Second Life.

Oh, social media doesn't include worlds or games? But wait just a damn minute. Trebor could put in the MUDS and the MOOs so beloved by their founding fathers Richard Bartle et. al. So if they can put in text-based games and worlds, why can't they put in WoW or SL or any of the other dozens of games and worlds out there now, whether There.com or IMVU or Red Light District or Twinity, which now has jobs for the residents!

You type more and talk more on those services than anywhere else. The voice people on SL -- Vivox -- I believe claim more hours of talk than on Skype. That's because people talk as much on that voice thing of SL as they would in real life, they are *socializing* not just having a phone call.

I dunno, what does it take to get these obvious, obvious points across to someone like this, or the other geeks raving about this history as being so fabulous?

And here's the hilarious part -- instead of recording the evolution of various popular games and pastimes on Facebook, Trebor obsessives about privacy and the ability to data harvest. But wait...didn't he just whine five minutes before that, that the data isn't exportable from Orkut (or FB for that matter)? So which is it, dude? Silos or trampled gardens?

More bias witnessed in his one-sided coverage of the blogosphere -- Huffington, who he describes (because everybody else does) as a "former right-winger" is a left-wing blog which he culturally and politically approves of. So none of the high-traffic right-wing blogs are mentioned at all.

And here's where the heavy, heavy bias really shines through -- Trebor's dissing of YouTube as not being a "proper social media" site because...the files aren't technically "shared", i.e. physically pushed on the tubes from one person to another, but only able to be linked to from another blog, where it can be embedded. Imagine, the horror of it all, unable to physically "own" the copy of the media actually on your grubby little hard drive, but only be able to view it, or blog about it and comment on it.

It's as if the comments don't count to people like this. YouTube has millions and millions of users. It's very much at the center of the social media storm. And yet, for this fussbudget and extremist, it "doesn't count". He even drags in Comrade Lessig to frown on it:

"The term media sharing is not completely accurate in the case of YouTube as the site does not facilitate the sharing of actual media files. It allows the embedding of media files hosted on Youtube in blogs. Contrary to YouTube, Blip.tv does share the media file itself. Lawrence Lessig referred to YouTube as fake sharing site whereas he highlights Blip.tv as a true sharing site. Dina Kaplan, co-founder of blip.tv, is one of the many but little visible women in this field. "

Sigh. What a load of crap. Blip is more authentic than YouTube? That's ridiculous. One could argue that by forcing link backs, and embedding in blogs, YouTube is encouraging more socializing and more sharing of the *content* which is of course what MATTERS, even if the physical electrons only "fake shared". Lessig should know what "fake sharing" is. It's like Creative Commons, where you get credits and link-backs for your content, but you can't *sell it* and have someone *own it* by *paying you*.

Note that Trebor, ever eager to be politically correct, cites one of the few women in the business. BTW, he forgot to mention Seesmic, which is even more special for the Metarati than blip.

Here's another very biased and tendentious statement from this "history" writer:

"The Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006 (DOPA) is a bill, which was brought before the United States House of Representatives on May 9, 2006. The bill, if enacted, will require schools and libraries that receive E-rate funding to prohibit access to social networking websites. DOPA would thereby limit access to a wide range of educational material on these websites (especially for minority and rural youth)."

It's a sad fact that predators *do* make use of sites like MySpace. And the idea that there is "a wide range of educational material" on MySpace is, well, risable. It's a social networking site. Just because it's free and social, doesn't mean that it is educational -- not everything has to be rescued for the geeknet by being declared "socially useful" as "learning".

In fact, schools I know block these sites not only because of predators or bullying, but because they are time sucks and waste the school's resources -- kids shouldn't be tarting up their MySpace pages during school but learning something more valuable than describing how they hurled at a beer party or showing some girl's tits, all the accompaniment of emo music.

And imagine this: a history of social media, that has Twitter not in some separate epoch, some sort of new paradigm (it's a global AIM for adults), but merely at the end of the same long boring paragraph in which AIMpages were tucked in next to Bible pages, and merely described in a half sentence as "microblogging" when it isn't really blogging you do on Twitter; what you do is *chat* -- oh, the makers started out with this hokey "What are you doing?" stuff at the beginning, like an FB status update, but people just walked around that, because obviously, if they are sitting at their computer, or punching at their cell phone to work Twitter, they aren't doing anything but those things, so the correct thing to say about it is they are "thinking and chatting". Even @scobleizer shut down Twitter when his wife was actually giving birth to his son.

Now let's come to a very glaring error this Trebor has made: leaving out Second Life entirely, even thought he puts in Kaneva. That's just sheer spite and pigheadedness. I don't know why Web 2.0 social media gurus (like Shirky) hate SL so much. It's my operating theory that they hate it because it unseats their guru power -- many people can access SL and do creative things with it without any need of geeks -- even with its learning curve, SL puts you into creativity pretty quickly. It also represents "mass culture" that people like these geeks *hate*.

And here comes a bit more of geek story-telling:

"In 1992 Marc Andreessen (b. 1971), a local 6’4” undergraduate student at the University of Illinois, working on minimum wage at night, used the protocols for the WWW from CERN to create a more "human interface for the World Wide Web." Together with other students, Andreessen created the Mosaic browser, which was launched in 1993."

In fact, most of us tuned in at the point that these students, leaving their fussy university behind because they didn't want to enable a student project to go commercial, made Netscape. Yes! Netscape! That's what we used.

"Together with other students, Andreessen created the Mosaic browser, which was launched in 1993. The browser made the Web accessible to the non-technical person. This was the single, most significant milestone in the popularization of the Web. In 1993, the WWW experienced a 350 percent growth rate, mainly in United States."

Although Trebor can't bring himself to admit it, then Netscape was overtaken by Internet Explorer, which of course is "evil" in his book. Here he writes:

"In 1995 one fifth of all Internet traffic is caused by WWW, taking over ftp’s leading role. Microsoft woke up to the Internet that year with Bill gates talking about the "title wave of the Internet." Coming in late, Microsoft decided to "give away" its Internet Explorer (IE) for "free," which led to anti-trust law suits for anti-competitive behavior. But "free," already then was not cost free as users had to have Windows, Microsoft's platform, to run IE."

Uh...you need to have a computer to run anything, dude, even free opensource stuff. So not even Linux is free, if you're going to really look at it -- nor is Internet service.

One of the hypier thirdwordist sections of the essay tries to elevate social media to a tool of revolution that is "transforming the world":

"In 1997, David Garcia and Geert Lovink defined Tactical Media as "what happens when the cheap ‘do it yourself’ media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to the internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider culture." By 2002 Tactical Media Labs had been started in Amsterdam, Sydney, Cluj, Barcelona, Delhi, New York, Singapore, Birmingham, Nova Scotia, Berlin, Chicago, Portsmouth, Sao Paulo, Moscow, Dubrovnik, and Zanzibar. In 2004 the Mídia Tática group in Sao Paolo (Tatiana Wells and Ricardo Rosas) established several AutoLabs in this context trying to help the urban poor to use the new resources of the Internet for their own ends."

The problem is...it doesn't work. These groups don't achieve anything. Dead bodies keep being dumped in Mexico. Dead journalists keep showing up in Moscow. Fifty percent of the children in New York City don't graduate from high school. The revolution didn't happen. It destroyed, and the machine moved on. Imagine, these hectorers trying to harness a free thing like social media and assign it a social role, so that it only exists in a purely utilitarian role of helping aggrieved groups "get theirs". Sigh.

Remember DMOZ? A geeky predecessor of Wikipedia, of sorts. Did you know it was bought first by Netscape, then sold to AOL? I didn't know that! So naturally, that got this geek author's knickers in a twist. I don't know what-all AOL did to over-moderate the geeky DMOZ editors, but something happened. And where is it now? And why did this happen? And if information wants to be free, how can it be sold? And why does it have to be sold...and always ends up being sold, every time?

More copyleftism, as is to be expected with this author:

"The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Napster in December 1999, which was followed by the heavy metal band Metallica filing a lawsuit against the company in 2000. During the last months of Napster’s operation in 2001, several other file-sharing programs emerged including Kazaa and Gnutella, which allowed users to continue to share music files. Napster was important as it established expectations-- information wants to be free."

Oh, boo-hiss, the evil RIAA once again! Except...how are musicians going to be paid? Who will manage them, whether booking tours or advertising? The idea that musicians themselves will all be able to erase those functions and market directly through Internet sites is naive and short-sighted. No doubt there are a lot of wives and girlfriends and groupies doing all the grunt work of maintaining those websites and packing up and mailing all those CDs...And why can't we characterize this "file-sharing" not as "information wanting to be free" but as "people wanting to steal when it's easy to steal?"

More bias on the section about "citizen media," as not a word is said about CNN's project "i-Report" and only the biased extreme leftist "Indymedia" is fanned.

BTW, here's something useful you can learn from this essay: a whopping 55 percent of all Internet traffic is due to Bittorrent, software made by a drop-out named Bram. And you continue to talk about net neutrality?!

And here's the hate of middle America, religious people, civic groups of the class type:

"round the same time political scientist Robert D. Putnam publishes Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, describing the decline of social capital in the United States. In the US, he describes the decline in civic participation, religious participation (churches), civic participation, altruism, reciprocity, workplace participation (union membership declines), informal connections, and political participation (voting, running for office). While Putnam's definition of social capital is problematic and his examples are old-fashioned, he does notice the mentioned decline of social capital but simultaneously describes a rapid growth of small niche communities and self-help groups."

What is "problematic" or "old-fashioned" about Putnam's definition? That it might involve a church basement, the sort of thing that geek Trebor has a visceral hatred of? What would he recognize as acceptable? A Trekkies convention or a bondage party?

Next the early annals of creator-fascism, the epitome of which we can see in Second Life:

"Also in 2002, the American economist and urban studies theorist Richard Florida published the controversial The Rise of the Creative Class. He writes:

“This young man had spiked multi-colored hair, full-body tattoos, and multiple piercings in his ears. An obvious slacker, I thought, probably in a band. 'So what is your story?' I asked. 'Hey man, I just signed on with these guys.' ... This young man and his lifestyle proclivities represent a profound new force in the economy and life of America. He is a member of what I call the creative class: a fast growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce on whose efforts corporate profits and economic growth increasingly depend. Members of the creative class do a wide variety of work in a wide variety of industries--from technology to entertainment, journalism to finance, high-end manufacturing to the arts. They do not consciously think of themselves as a class. Yet they share a common ethos that values creativity, individuality, difference, and merit.”

No mention of how large, how resourced, how persistent this class is -- yet it is a class. A class that may have to be overthrown for the real revolution in social media to occur.

Interestingly, this social media study contains a paragraph on the ill-fated Omidyar network, which ran for about 3 years, even under the administration of the former Haney Linden, and then closed. Why? It would be good to understand why. I was a member for a year, and I found it awful. Why? Because it didn't do what it said it would do, actually "empower". By putting in one of those awful rating systems, it encouraged people to game the system by starting up threads to try to catch the attention of Pierre or his wife Pam, or try to gain karma points in other ways. As you tapped away on it, you were also very much aware that instead of doing all those world-changing and world-saving activities which you were doing either as paid staff or volunteer giving precious time, you were...chatting. On a place where no one would let you be critical of the service or indeed anything about the whole goofy non-profit world. One of the things I didn't like about this service is that while it required a registration and a log-on, it didn't keep your information private within that service. It was Googleable, and that meant that my RL information was snatched and ridiculed on Second Citizen -- and Haney simply didn't care about this problem, because he was one of those extremist Linden types that hate robot.txt and want information to be free. Had the network been more like Facebook, it would have perhaps encouraged more actually networking in a safe space. I have no idea what the real knock on it was, as surely they closed it for other reasons than those I'm citing.

In an interesting piece of reporting, Trebor tells us this:

"In 2004 it has been reported that the top 100 users of the referral site Digg control 56 percent of Digg's front page content and that a niche group of just twenty individuals had submitted 25percent of the front page content."

The old "power law" (the "content law") at work -- and at work giving the lie to the whole entire fake premise of social media as a great democratizer or great vehicle of social change. Social media is socialist. Social media is even Bolshevik. It enables the top users to control content even more than in the explicitly controlled mainstream media. In fact, it puts control of a significant percentage in a tiny number of hands, far fewer than in any MSM situation, where letters to the editor and call-in radio shows enable more public participation. This should make people worry. Instead, Trebor merely skips on to tell us about evil DRM.

I was interested to learn about this book by a Ms. Terranova (no relation to the egghead site) who has written a thesis about how not only information wants to be free, labour is and should be free and capitalism makes this possible (moving to a new stage, as it were). But, at a whopping $85 for the book even used, I had to give it a pass.

Comments

[Daman Tenk]

One small thing, regarding your whining about the RIAA.

If it's for the artists you're speaking, the RIAA is the last person you want on your back.

The way the RIAA is AGAINST Artist Rights is exactly the very reason the Recording Artists' Coalition was created in the first place. THEY are the ones you want to support if you care about the artists. Not the RIAA.

[Jago Constantine]

With regard to Robert Putnam's book on declining social capital, I have doubts that social media can take the place of "church basements"

[Prokofy Neva]

I refuse to accept any automatic, tribal, conformist, knee-jerk interpretation of the RIAA. I have yet to hear anyone tell me in unbiased, persuasive tones why I'm "supposed" to think this organization is "evil". If it truly were the evil thing geeks portray it as, every single rock band would be against it. But they aren't. Management of bands costs money, and takes professionals. In and of itself, a management body that demands rights and protects rights of its investment, which is considerable, doesn't at all seem inherently evil to me whatsoever; it seems good.

Are musicians rights to "trump all"? I simply don't see that they need to. Management pumps lots of money into selling, organizing, distributing for artists. It's not a trivial role. It's not a role that "social media" can replace, whatsoever, as I pointed out: back of "social media" is just...people. Amateurs, in some cases.

I simply find most of the hysteria around RIAA to be *unpersuasive*. That doesn't mean that I am somehow for exploiting artists and having evil managers clean up. Gosh, think of the evil managers out there, like that guy who sucked up all of the N'Sync boys' money, etc. Sure, there are stories of exploitation. But inherently, a group of managers banding together to protect their rights, and sue *for their private property* against *thieves* doesn't appear evil to me. You can rant and rave all you like about it, but it's not persuasive, as you are ignoring the very real problem of *theft* which harms musicians most of all, and which prompts the RIAA activities in the first place.

[Clubside Granville]

It would take far too long to point out all the errors (lies?) in the referenced article, but let's start with the title: "A History of the Social Web". What does that imply? That the history would start with the World Wide Web, a protocol of the Internet. But what do we get instead? Decades of marginally accurate information about computers, huge gaps in networking (the Bulletin Board System revolution that came with personal computer modem acceptance) history and even an at-best abridged if not outright mistaken tale of the Web's invention (no reference to SGML?).

Social sites were there from the first day CGI was available (nearly synchronous with the first Web server) with guest books, forums and other traditional "connective" apps ported from the BBS scene (and CompuServe, AOL and college networks). There doesn't even seem to be a definition of what the Social Web is to the author leaving the article as a whole a meandering mess.

Two last things before I irritate myself further: the IBM PC did not ship with a mouse and Web 2.0 refers to a technology not a use, it means moving away from the stateless relationship between client and server to a more desktop-like responsiveness through AJAX and related technologies.

Where is this article headed to? If it's a school paper, an F better be in the wings, if for publication, may at least one knowledgeable editor arrive on the scene before this dreck hits the printed page.

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes, you're absolutely right, I had forgotten about that BBS period. Of course, because that was with "walled gardens" that are universally loathed by these Web 2.0 geeks, they just erase them out of history.

I remember there were computers without a mouse, you just typed all those DOS commands. Hmm, were those Apples? No, they were early PCs. They had a really clunky turning of the pages.

[Matt]

The internet is a lot older than 15 years old. The web is only about 15 years old, but the web is a subset of the internet (if the dominant part of it these days). Second Life uses the internet, for instance, without being part of the Web beyond a few points of integration here and there.

I remember when the web first came out actually. Lots of virtual world devs at the time were irritated that now we had to bother with a "website" rather than just focusing on the world itself. (Here is where someone chimes in about how the boundary between the two will disappear, etc etc. Maybe.)

[Prokofy Neva]

Are you enjoying that feeling of superiority that geeks get when they "set someone straight," Matt?

I know all that. But for all practical purposes, the "Internet" is really what started about 15 years ago. All the truly geeky ARPAnet thisnthatnet stuff before the web, before you had actual pictures and clickable addresses, was not "the Internet" for most people. The Web may be "a subset" of the Internet technically, but it really is coterminous for most people -- for common, non-geek use.

In fact, I can remember that we used the Web *without* the picture capacity because we were on dial-up modems with a capacity of 55 or something, whatever that slow speed was. So we shut off the pictures, which it let you do back then, rendering all pictures as coloured diamonds. "We are not children, we don't need pictures," a staff person told me.

No, the boundary won't disappear, and what you say about irritation back then for those pioneer VW devs is interesting, if they perceived websites as "in the way". They *are* in the way. They're in the way *now*, as the Lindens struggle to dumb down the world and make it "like the web". Nobody needs this.

[williamgeorge]

Now I agree that everyone is welcome to believe what they want, but to not let an honest discussion develop seems deceiving to me. Whether you believe in the hype or not isn’t the point, rather the inability to have an honest discussion about something on an old-media platform in a public space.
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williamgeorge
http://www.drivenwide.com