Social media is a virtual field of sociality, where social time is converted into digital space. A virtual, digital space where millions of users deposit pieces of their daily activity, opinions, feelings, experiences, voluntarily converting all these into information in the form that each medium accepts. For example, into a photograph, into a like, into a map of the daily route that someone followed, as generated by their mobile’s GPS, into a number of calories consumed by someone else, into 140 characters.
And while there is a diffuse impression and opinions have often been expressed about the liberation of information on the internet or about the equality that social media grant to their users regarding the platform for expression, we will argue that the media of the internet are also, like traditional media, means of emotional and intellectual decadence, but also means of social control. In front of screens again, with a keyboard instead of a remote control.
TV, however, has not been thrown in the trash. It remains in the living room, in the bedroom, as a piece of furniture in the house that has established its value over the years. It plays in the background, maintaining a steady volume of communication sounds. Warmly and soothingly, without expecting anything from you, it confidently plays its program.
What changes with the networked devices that have gained attention, is that everyone can have the feeling that they are in the position of both the sender and the receiver.
“Liberated” information
Think of a square with many stands, where everyone can grab a soapbox whenever they want and voice their personal opinions, their views, and whatever else comes to mind. If this were happening, it might attract the attention of an audience that would occasionally gather to watch, applaud, or boo. Such a situation would clearly reflect the image of consuming a “talent show” style spectacle. However, it’s certain that it couldn’t become a central part of daily activity. On social media, exactly this occurs, with the difference being that opinions, preferences, and personal matters of each individual are recorded in the form of data, and this happens on digital walls rather than physical stands in the real world. The internet creates the feeling of private communication, since it takes place through private devices and in private spaces. The information being shared might not be necessary or might have been better left unpublished. Nevertheless, it seems that – as a rule – socially networked individuals don’t feel such a strong urge to communicate every small detail they post, but rather it’s the fetishism that drives this unrestrained use of media. Just as a photography fetishist isn’t so much interested in a photo’s content as in its metadata: which camera model was used, under what lighting conditions the shot was taken, etc., the fetishism of the medium leads users of online media platforms to consider their very usage as paramount. At the same time, they ignore the significance of the content they expose through these platforms. The construction of a personal digital image and the habitual digital self-exposure to small and large gossips offer in exchange a position of existence in the online world and participation in modern mass communication. From this position, one can broadcast their existence and in return receive information about others’ lives, but more importantly – likes, followers, and all related elements that build a good digital reputation.
Such a personalized world is an excellent field for the above penetration of merchandise into social relations. Nevertheless, within the same field, many claim that, by following specific accounts they choose and participating in online communities, they can communicate about topics that interest them and have access to information that traditional media do not provide.
However, regarding sociability, the issue is how the mass media ultimately become the rival fear of real relationships in the non-virtual world. How do digital machines manage to mediate social relations to such a great extent? Why do virtual relationships, from which the immediacy of genuine relationships has been removed, gain ground? For what reason would someone who speaks to a stranger on the street of a city, without asking forgiveness for interrupting their private time, be considered strange? And why is it more normal to relate to and converse with someone from the other side of the world because they are a fan of the same music star or because you drink the same coffee?
As for access to “true information”, this is rather illusory. Within the enormous quantity and overstimulation of communication, information becomes uncontrollable by each individual recipient. The massive flow of “liberated” information can easily create confusion. While on the part of organizations and institutions that can use their own machines to have overall oversight of traffic, these flows can be controlled and utilized using appropriate means.
In 2010, Eric Schmidt (then Google’s executive chairman) made the following statements:
There were 5 exabytes1 of information that had been created from the dawn of civilization until 2003, but that much information is now produced every 2 days.
The reason for this, he argued, is user-generated content. And finally, to show that he is also driven by humanitarian concerns, he said that companies like his can do anything with this information, but the pressing question is whether they should. Because, as he said, while technology is neutral, he doesn’t believe the world is ready for what’s coming.
I spend most of my time thinking that people are not ready for the technological revolution that will happen to them soon.
Another techno-lord refuted him by claiming that his statements are inaccurate and exaggerated, but he should have more correctly declared:
23 exabytes of information had been recorded and reproduced in 2002. We now record and transfer the equivalent amount of information every 7 days.
Beyond the claims or exaggerations of every high-tech boss, it is a fact that the volume of information produced on the internet per day increases tremendously as the years go by. We can verify this from our daily experience.
If then there is the impression that from the era of absolute control of information by traditional institutional media, we have moved to the era of its “liberation”, we would say that what seems to have been most “liberated” is essentially the information of pieces of life and experience of each broadcaster/user of the network. In the sense of liberating this information as a commodity. To become a participant you can and should be informed too. While, we can hardly deny anymore that there is an underground blackmail for electronic sociality pushed by real world relationships, as the cyber-exhibition of selves becomes more and more a condition. Electronic absence may soon be considered an indication of non-existence, almost death. Access to information, apparently appears expanded compared to the past. But what form does this information take? Amid the inflation of broadcasts, large-scale flows of all kinds of information, inaccessible to non-machines, become disorienting. As you get lost in the chaos of cyber-trash, it doesn’t matter what is truth and what are lies, what is important and what is trivial. The intended and unintended information of daily life, increasingly the mediation of social relations and the ubiquitous presence of mental cyber-machines that constantly return the data they collect as a kind of information, suffice for them to be established as a new model of sovereignty. The message they emit is dominantly true.
But where is all this flood of emissions directed? Who listens to all these opinions and information about online self-presentations? Who really cares?
Is there anyone who truly cares?
Certainly, this massive volume of information is not meant for the trash. There would be no reason for the owning companies to set up such large infrastructures to host all this data if it didn’t serve a purpose. If it were useless, they would keep two or three important ones and throw away the rest. We are therefore at ease! All these emissions are not going to waste; there is some meaning in all of them.
Going back to the case, then, if all personal matters, tastes, and opinions were poured out openly in public, even state security wouldn’t place so many agents with notebooks jotting down everyone’s every detail, just in case the state might pick up some important information. Nor would advertisers sit around collecting people’s preferences for the next advertising campaign. But in the form of large-scale data, things change…
And this is the important point: the collection of such a vast amount of social experience, which exists in standardized informational form and has been broken into many small pieces, making it easily processable and analyzable. All this collected data has been placed by people all over the planet onto the servers of certain companies. What has been given to them is not useless property. It could be seen as a collection of raw material derived from the unowned productivity of free (mostly) time, which couldn’t possibly remain unused.
It is not uncommon for a real-world acquaintance to be followed by an internet search. Online stalking, as it is called, has become a (rather not so guilty) part of relating to others. Getting involved with other people’s posts online is no longer considered an intrusion. Thus, online stalking has evolved into a normal activity for every student, doctor, academic, and has become the subject of student assignments for university, academic and state research. One can use the data collected from such an activity to draw conclusions and publish them. But not to dirty one’s keyboard and, by extension, one’s hands by searching user profiles one by one. Machines will do it, code will do it. That is why it is clean work and socially acceptable. Mass stalking of users of electronic social networks is called social media analytics. And it is indeed a very profitable process, especially if we compare it with the old social study and criticism –as gossip is euphemistically called in villages and closed communities. Mass and global gossiping is a job that every profitable company, every serious state, can and should do, in order to draw useful social conclusions.
Everything you will read here is not secret. It is a narrative based on published texts, research, doctoral theses, academic papers. All these are publicly posted in a world that lives within the inflation of information. A world that has learned to live within it and seems capable of accepting any information. A world that shows no sign of being frightened by anything. Even when information reveals that things are happening that show that our daily electronic habits are not as superficial as we thought until now. Everything will continue as usual. So much so, that we have the impression that even information that could be considered shocking for the connected world (e.g., LinkedIn was hacked, personal data in the cloud are not safe, various revelations or scandals) is accepted and the public ultimately just absorbs it. Even these have become part of the routine of information. And as for the connected public, there is no anxiety that it will abandon its ways. It will be able to sacrifice a lot for the sake of its beloved habits. If mass stalking is ever considered annoying, perhaps a trending topic might emerge under a militant hashtag like #StopAnalyzingOurTweets. And in the end, the conclusion will be: “Come on, it doesn’t matter. Anyway, everyone is connected. This is the modern world.” And virtual life will continue unchanged.
Social media analytics: the engines behind networked devices…
There is a large market of programming platforms and tools that enable data collection, analysis application, and conclusion extraction, primarily targeting companies. These tools use the raw material of social network content contributed by their users to apply methods for sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining), detecting correlations and trends within specific communities, observing consumer habits, categorizing users, detecting unconventional behaviors and events, or predicting social movements and reactions. However, beyond companies, there is also governmental interest in user-generated content, with significant investments being made in building machines to analyze it. In service of these purposes, departments of information and social sciences in academic and research institutions are set up, usually under governmental funding. The goal in every case is to study social trends, detect potential crises, and explore the possibilities of social control and surveillance. Below, we have gathered some examples concerning analyses of social network user activity. These examples are minimal compared to the plethora of activities in this field, as the area of real-time large-scale data (big data) analysis is flourishing and represents one of the new territories for capitalist exploitation. Also, while it is understood that in the US development in this sector is racing ahead, Europe and particularly Greece are not falling behind at all in terms of such endeavors. Therefore, we have quite close examples to provide.
The Visibrain Focus platform applies real-time twitter analytics. It is aimed at companies and organizations that draw conclusions from online social movement, providing analysis packages that start from 400 euros per month for 50,000 tweets up to 2000 euros per month for 1 million tweets. In this company’s client list, the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, the French Ministry of Education, and the French High Committee for Civil Defense appear (a think tank for research and analysis of global security issues and new solutions for a “resilient society”). Among these are technology companies, telecommunications, marketing, pharmaceutical, banking, automotive industries, consulting firms, etc.
At the Greek National Centre for Research & Technological Development2 operates the Multimedia Knowledge & Social Media Analytics laboratory, which develops applications for monitoring and analyzing social networks and conducts research within European projects. On the laboratory’s page, the directions of the research activity it develops are described. We present here some of these directions to give an idea of how those behind networking devices refer to the subject, collecting and analyzing data:
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Social media monitoring and data mining
Combining multimedia content analysis and web mining techniques for knowledge discovery and improved information retrieval by exploiting social networking media (Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc.). Specific mining problems being investigated range from topic detection and topic structure description to location and event detection in large user photo collections. Applications include real-time social media monitoring and indexing to facilitate targeted social search and opinion search.
Collective Intelligence
Scalable and distributed approaches for exploiting the hidden knowledge in user-contributed content, through crowdsourcing of available data and creating an optimized “Intelligence” layer, also called Collective Intelligence, which transforms the large-scale and poorly structured content of the web and social media into substantive topics, entities, measurements, social connections, and events.
Large-scale multimedia indexing and search
Developing scalable methods for applying content-based image search in large image collections.
Web analysis of social interactions
Analyzing relationships and network interactions among social media users to understand latent structures and functions, collective behaviors, and user profiles. Methods include detecting and characterizing communities on evolving networks (e.g., retweet and reply streams on Twitter) and integrating methods for user classification.
Reality mining for e-Governance
We study methods for extracting different aspects of city functionality based on data contributed by mobile citizens. Our goal is to turn citizens into live sensors of their neighborhoods and establish bidirectional communication and collaboration with local authorities.
Context-aware behavioral interpretation in healthcare
…Extracting behavioral patterns for recognizing personalized activity and for adaptive healthcare services.
Computer Vision for Event Recognition, Monitoring, Surveillance, Security
(Near) real-time approaches for monitoring and recognizing novel events in surveillance video and crowd video. Spatiotemporal event localization and anomaly detection.
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Greek universities participating in collaborations for implementing European projects of a similar nature develop corresponding activities. One such project coordinated by ICE-HT is SocialSensor, which was funded by the European Union with 9,639,593 euros, of which ICE-HT received 1,341,526 euros3. We reproduce the description of the SocialSensor project from the Institute of Computer and Communication Technologies page of ICE-HT:
Social networking applications have now become a modern reality that concerns an ever-increasing part of the population, businesses and public organizations. For example, the short messages exchanged on Twitter played a major role in recent developments in Arab countries, Flickr and YouTube constitute rich photographic and video collections based exclusively on user contributions, and indicatively on Facebook 30 billion posts (links, photo albums, status updates) appear every month. It is now evident that whatever happens in the real world is recorded in real time by users of social networks who create content, comment on it and discuss it among themselves. It is also important that social networks and applications beyond networking, entertainment and information applications can also be used as a source of rich information that can be useful for a plethora of other applications.
[…] In the project, techniques will be developed for the analysis, integration and fast search of user-generated content, in order to extract useful information for different applications. Innovative solutions […] will compose a software platform that searches and analyzes the content of the social web, combines it with professional content and presents it in real time […]
From the SocialSensor project, 130 publications emerged, and 2 spin-off companies. The tools developed are used by numerous companies, government organizations, and academic institutions. Research in this field appears to continue in subsequent projects, such as REVEAL: REVEALing hidden concepts in Social Media4, with a total budget of 6,925,004 euros, in which, apart from CERTH, other Greek institutions such as Democritus and Athens Technology Center S.A. also participate. Within the European funding framework Horizon H2020, CERTH participates in the TRILLION project: TRusted, CItizen – LEA coILaboratIon over sOcial Networks5, which begins in September 2015:
The idea of community policing promotes the implementation of communication channels between citizens and law enforcement authorities. By regularly assisting in finding relevant information, risk detection is accelerated, prevention is improved, and a dynamic is created that mobilizes continuous collaboration between citizens and authorities.[…] The operational environment of TRILLION is not limited to crisis periods, but extends before them in the process of early risk detection and avoidance.
On the commission’s page for the trillion project, it states:
… The proposed research should take into account the virtual dimension of “community policing” (for example, the interaction between citizens and police officers through social networking websites) and analyze the underlying social, cultural, legal, and ethical dimensions.
Something chilling in the story is the realization – once again – of where taxes and public revenues go in European states, which we workers mainly pay. Isn’t it a very pleasant combination? First, we provide our own experience in the form of data to internet machines, and then our own money is used again, which we have paid through direct and indirect taxation, to analyze our own experience. To make investments in projects that develop tools aimed at monitoring, controlling, and mass managing citizens.
… analyzing what does not belong to them.
Let these minimal examples be enough to convince us about the high levels of “interest” in collecting and analyzing the content contributed by users of social networking engines. Regarding the potential uses of the developing tools, we will refer to a publication made within the framework of SocialSencor, where the uprising of Turkish youth in the summer of 2013 was used as an example. A social explosion that began with the defense of Gezi Park, at the edge of Taksim Square, from its destruction. We translate some parts of the publication, in which the operation and usefulness of analysis tools for large-scale events, such as a social uprising, are presented.
[…] The described software supports configurable, targeted crawling and indexing of multimedia social content combined with real-time analysis and summarization. We will evaluate the software in a large-scale study around the #OccupyGezi events. […]
We started the crawling exercise on June 4 and continued until July 17. The crawling was conducted around a set of selected keywords and a small number of selected accounts on Facebook and YouTube. […]
A total of 16,785,785 information items (including retweets) were collected and 319,095 multimedia content items during the period from July 1 to July 17.
The image presents the map view of events with different zoom levels (based on the subset of images with geographic tags). From the image, it is evident that although the events were particularly intense in Istanbul (specifically in Gezi Park), there was notable activity in other major cities of Turkey and even in major cities of Europe and America.
[…] The evaluation of the crawler in the context of the #OccupyGezi events proves that it is an effective tool for collecting diverse content from social networks and navigating and searching through it in multiple ways.
As another “example” for analysis, the Arab Spring is often used, which the Western world claims that social media played a central role. Many studies have been conducted in recent years by academic and state institutions to study the use of online media in the social revolutions of the Arab world. Many Westerners characterized the Arab Spring as a Twitter or Facebook revolution. An article on the University of Washington’s website titled “New study quantifies social media use in the Arab Spring” begins as follows:
In the 21st century, revolution may not be televised – but it might be transmitted via tweets, blogs, text messages and organized through Facebook, as recent experience shows.
However, those who rose up in the Arab world did not wait for Facebook to decide to do so, nor Twitter to learn that they would face weapons and tanks. If these media were used – mainly for opening up to the outside world and publicizing what was happening there – it does not mean that they used them to organize or that without them they could not. To citizens of the Western world, the use of social media made more sense than the thing itself that was happening. Not the uprising itself, but the way in which it is supposed to have happened: via social media. The message was identified with the medium and the message lost its meaning. Reproducing the view that this is all – that is, that social uprising takes place in the 21st century on the servers of one or more companies – is a mental projection of reality, but not reality itself. The perception that is cultivated serves the application of power techniques. The perception that there are independent means of communication, which are social media, is not ours. Those who develop mechanisms for reproducing social control (and do not hide it) are those who most promote such ideologies. And they are the ones who want to convince us that writing on a company’s website is alternative, is independent, is revolutionary. We do not argue that it was wrong to use social media, phones, emails, blogs by those who took to the streets in Arab countries in the midst of social revolution. What we are saying is that so much noise from people who are in the camp of power techniques becomes annoying. The next time we hear that a social uprising takes place through social media, we should certainly be more suspicious of the side that supports such a claim. Could it be the same people who use cybermachines to analyze social movements? If we believe that things happen this way, so much the better for the other side. And if the Arab Spring or other social explosions and their relationship with social media have already been analyzed hundreds of times, after the fact, the goal – as can be seen from projects like SocialSensor – is ultimately real-time analysis, so that the next repetition of such events will be more easily manageable by organizations that have the appropriate machines and the appropriate means.
The mental mechanisms in front of socially networked screens
We should observe that within the framework of the fetishistic cyber-exhibition – which we discussed earlier – the vote is the first to become an object of posting on electronic walls. While pollsters declare that more and more people are unwilling to reveal their vote to them or hang up the phone in their faces, the electronic wall, as if by magic, provides all the answers.
Despite the development of social media analysis tools and all the related intentions6 in most cases the inherent mental function of social networks suffices for the mass psychosocial management of citizens. Especially when it comes to issues that fall within the sphere of routine, everyday and harmless activities, the function of social media is analogous to that of traditional media, but in a more modern way that fits the era when information and informatization are racing. No extra machines are needed.
A recent, characteristic example was the legendary Greek referendum of 2015 and the use of twitter by electronic voters under the topic #greferendum. Twitter during Tsipras’s referendum was used as a weapon for the modern Greek revolution against the bad European lenders.
A social media monitoring and analysis company named Talkwalker (in the context of advertising the services it provides) published a study of the two trends for the referendum based on data it extracted from Twitter. For analysts and those who serve such studies, they can confirm the certainty with which the virtual crowd moves based on the rules of the spectacle. We, with regret, observe the tragic virtual reflection of the social emotional and intellectual collapse.
According to the study, the #no had a strong lead in Greece and globally already from the announcement of the referendum. However, the #yes overtook the #no in Greek Twitter accounts only after capital controls were imposed. But after Tsipras’s speech on television, after the prime minister looked the people in the eyes (..!!), citizens calmed down and the #no took the lead again. In the text published by the marketing department of the company Talkwalker, the following is written:
Tsipras and Varoufakis, through their social media activity, appear to be leading the debate, generating more discussion and noise than Juncker and Lagarde. Alexis Tsipras is eight times more socially active than Jean Claude Juncker and generates three times more social engagement. Varoufakis’s tweet: “Democracy deserves a push on European issues, we simply delivered it, let the people decide, funny how radical this idea sounds” was retweeted by other accounts more than 10,500 times and marked as favorite more than 6,800 times. Tsipras’s tweet: “The dignity of the Greek people in the face of blackmail and injustice sends a message of hope and pride throughout Europe” was retweeted more than 4,800 times and marked as favorite 3,200 times. Overall, during that period Tsipras posts 37 tweets using the #NO hashtag, which lead to 18,000 retweets, thus boosting the campaign for #no.
The latest and most seasoned in this high-level political contest and upgraded quality comes Juncker, with his own tweet (which did not even remain in history for us to reproduce) having been retweeted only 2,240 times and favorited 1,390 times.
Twitter offered everyone the comfort of expressing their opinion without restraint. Since this public figure said it, since Varoufakis said it and Tsipras and my friends also said it, I will say it too! And when there is such a massive movement of tweets, there is an explosion in cyberspace and the system cannot withstand so many barriers that accumulate and so much free expression of public opinion, not mediated by channels. And then the foundations of capitalism can no longer withstand it and are forced to take a step back. Thus, during the referendum, the revolutionary expression on twitter overturned all the anti-worker measures of the memorandum and increased the basic wage. In the end, it was almost as if the referendum itself was not even needed to achieve all this. We realized that this free medium helps people to struggle so simply, as easily as everyone finds and communicates under the “panhuman value” of national unity!
Social networks gave the connected world the joy of feeling that its information was obtained independently of the channels, of the Presenter and the Tremi who promoted the “yes” against the people. The Greek speaker’s psyche was freely expressed: “we will show them the old Germans #no!” Thus, after the great shipwreck of the agreement (#greekment in twitter’s language) that would introduce the new memorandum, the unique happened: the internet was shaken by the explosion of a new hashtag that directly declared it was a coup: #ThisIsACoup. The hashtag was created by a physics professor in Barcelona who wrote on July 12:
The Eurogroup’s proposal is a coup against the Greek people #ThisIsACoup #Grexit
…and it entered the global top of Twitter, reaching as far as television channels and major newspapers.
Therefore, from July 2nd when there was an uproar with “#NO, we’ll show her, Mrs. Merkel”, when Schäuble himself had been alarmed by what was written, we reached July 12th when #ThisIsACoup shook the planet. Someone wrote in an online comment on a television show’s page: “For about 2 hours now it’s number one in the world. At this moment the Germans are experiencing global outrage”. So there you have it! And thus the networked mass managed to fall victim to psychological manipulation by itself. This is something that omnipotent television cannot achieve in such an artistic way. The transition from we’ll-show-them to look-what-they’re-doing-to-us is nothing unprecedented for Greek petty bourgeois and their ideological fixations. However, as this dynamic is validated by a medium that appears as an alternative, self-confirmation and reinforcement of generalized petty bourgeois attitudes emerges. We say this while being unaware of exactly which mechanisms may have been at work behind the scenes7 but it appears that social networks prove sufficient for the role of mass psychological manipulation of the networked. In the new media paradigm, they fill the gap in psychological manipulation of television audiences.
Much noiseless fuss (in the form of information) and much intellectual poverty. This is the way online mental machines have of throwing the “participants” into the vortex of the simplicity of the electronic crowd. In a virtually tangible way: tweets, retweets, uploads, likes… This is different from the way traditional media are said to subject the public to passivity. The involvement of social network users makes them more fervent defenders of the information they receive and transmit through their personalized electronic universe, because they feel it is their own information or that of their social circle; because they feel that by turning off the TV they are doing something different. However, previously, every piece of information, before being published, has been adapted to the ways and framework of the new medium. Involvement in the processes of informing does not essentially change the content, not only because social relations do not change mentally, but also because there is in between a mental machine that sets its own terms as it mediates communication. Which does not change social relations, but—as a medium—accelerates, reproduces, and reinforces already existing social ideologies.
We do not doubt that the capabilities of our class today are far greater than they were in the past, making it impossible to sustain television “news” any longer. Thus, new media machines attempt to address this dynamic by transferring old mediation mechanisms and extending their own. Analysis tools exist to confirm and reinforce existing social relationships, to validate whatever moves within the framework of dominant ideology, or to identify deviations from established social patterns.
The actions, thoughts and denials of modern workers and laborers cannot be assimilated like the dominant ideology, but they can be studied and controlled as social “anomalies”. The mobilization from the side of sovereignty of mechanisms for recording, collecting and analyzing social experience aims at identifying, controlling, suppressing and manipulating contemporary denials.
If the bureaucrats of the masters try to exploit every possible opportunity to invade our lives and steal them in the form of information, we would not be the ones to protest against the abolition of our “privacy” in its civil sense. But instead of surrendering our daily experience for analysis by the technicians of power, we will refuse to dissect it and convert it into data form. Against the cybermachines we must be ready and willing to defend the autonomy of our order.
Shelley Dee
cyborg #04 – 10/2015