My So-Called Social Media Life

Abstract

This short essay offers a personal reflection on social media and some of the challenges related to corporate ownership and policy issues of privacy and surveillance.

I’m turning into an old fart, a cranky broad, a bit fusty about this thing called social media. I might even secretly pride myself on having an inactive or, at least, a very stale social media presence. I’m so uncool. Yeah, I’m an egghead. Don’t even get me started about the 107 friend requests I’ve ignored on you-know-what. And good lord, the numbers of people that are listed as potential friends . . . scrolls and scrolls and scrolls and scrolls of ’em . . . until I lose track after at least 200 miniature profile pictures, but wait! Wasn’t she my student back in the late 1990s? What class was that, Social Uses of New Media? And hey, clever of that MP to be here—could it be my contribution to their last rather lackluster campaign? OK, neighbors in a few recent cities I’ve lived in, that colleague of the colleague that I met at one of those annual conferences . . . but someone I went to high school with in the era of bellbottom blues, Nixon, and weak weed? And, oh man, look at this lineup of academics! Academics, here, there, and everywhere . . . wow, such polished profile pictures! God, I feel bad all of a sudden . . . not quite depressed . . . a bit panicked, stressed, yeah definitely stressed . . .

OK, so what if I’m a bit fraudulent because I don’t strut the stuff even though I’ve been teaching courses and writing about information and communications technologies (ICTs) writ large for years? Here are some of my thoughts about the questions posed as Social Media + Society kicks off its formative and undoubtedly glorious years!

What is Social Media?

The nomenclature, socio-technical configurations, and social uses/dependencies have evolved from what we used to (and still) call computer-mediated communication (CMC), new media, Web 2.0, and a new dubbing—post-social media, which may encompass the wider panoply of the mobile media infrastructure . . . but wait! What about social media of yonder ages? As Tom Standage (2013) argues, “social media is not new . . . blogs are the new pamphlets, microblogs and online social networks are the new coffee-houses. Media-sharing sites are the new commonplace books” (p. 250). Let us avoid, then, a myopia about the past and consider social media as an ever-evolving socio-technical and political configuration.

What Should Social Media Mean?

To whom? In this journal, I would love to see research by and about the experiences and thoughts from a rich panorama of global citizens who dream, develop, or design social media applications/tools, from those who create innovative social media practices, and from those who resist and subvert certain social media practices.

What Could it Be?

Social media both annoys and scares me. I don’t like the way our personal information is sold to zealous third-party marketers, or potentially given to governments and law officials or others eager to compile a dossier of our activities without our knowledge and consent. I don’t like the huge potential for heightened cyber-surveillance, often couched in the guise of combating terrorism, and I am really dismayed at the behavioral marketing industry, with their obsequious claims that they’re just trying to improve my consumer experience. So I want to read about projects that are imagining and creating alternatives to the current business model.

What Do You Not Want to See it Become?

A place and a space where the underlying political and economic architectures that structure the terms of service impede the security and privacy of our personal information related to data collection, distribution, retention, and control.