As we all know, social media provide great new platforms for people to show the world their skills and talents, to engage in civil discourse and debate, to connect with their friends and families, and to achieve widespread notoriety and fame. I could even tell you this from personal experience. I love being able to share articles and think-pieces that I've read in the news, see funny videos, and keep up with whatever is happening in my friends' lives. Social media are, in fact, fun.
But I also think it's extremely important that we look at the larger macro-level factors that social media play into our society and economy. Social media companies are major corporations. Just like governments, corporations are highly powerful social institutions which have a great deal of influence over our lives. Corporations can dictate a lot of the ways in which we think, feel, and act throughout our lives on a constant basis. Further, through public relations, a corporation can frame issues and concepts in society for us in ways that benefit them directly. Indeed, through framing, agenda setting, and priming, corporations can decide the ways in which we perceive reality.
Why does this matter? The reason we tend to associate social media with freedom, self-expression, personal connection, and innovation is because social media companies have framed them in that way. Moreover, if social media are free of monetary charge to us to use for whatever reason we want, why do social media companies feel the need to brand and market to us?
Well, that's the thing. Social media aren't free of charge to us. Social media don't directly rely on our money, they rely on our identities. Facebook and Twitter harvest unfathomable amounts of private information about our lives on a regular basis. They then use this information to sell to marketing companies and advertisers so they can then find newer, more effective ways to sell to us.
When you sign up for a social media site, you allow that site to have almost total access to all the information about your personal life. You not only surrender control over your identity, you allow a corporation to watch over everything you ever do, anything you ever say, and anyone you ever speak to. You allow them to then give this information to other major corporations so they can learn how to more effectively get money out of you. In short, social media allow corporations to profit off your very existence, and there's almost nothing you can hide from them.
What can an individual do to prevent this? Not much. All of us are required to use social media in order to be maintain our membership within society. Yet in order to use social media, we have to sign away all of our rights to basic privacy so that a major corporation can watch over us and then sell our information to other corporations, who in turn use it to profit off us.
Let's break this down using the allegory of the third place. Imagine that you've just spent a long day at work where you're down low on the office food chain. At work, the environment isn't completely socially safe, and you can't be comfortable to act and speak the way in which you'd prefer. But at the pub, you're among friends in a safe, neutral environment. You're given a chance to build up your social capital and truly participate in your social circle and community.
The pub may be owned privately, but the space itself is a free public environment where you can interact with your peers. Maybe you spend some money to get a drink or some food, but the space itself is free for you personally to use safely and, more importantly, privately.
But now, these "third places" are becoming increasingly digitized. And as fascinated as we are by the technological achievement this indicates, we have to realize the problems this causes. Facebook and Twitter are becoming the new pubs. Unlike the old pubs, they are not free, safe spaces by any stretch of the imagination. Pubs, parks, bowling alleys, etc. are spaces within which there is no charge to exist. But on Facebook and Twitter, you are required to allow the owners of the space to trespass on every single conversation, interaction, comment, or photo you create. You surrender all safety and freedom you have in the space from the get-go, and you allow major corporations to peer directly into your own life. There is now way to escape this, because social media have become increasingly the main way in which we build social capital and participate within society.
The problem isn't with social media. The problem is that social media are privately-owned spaces in which you're forced to surrender your personal freedom and your right to personal privacy.
Now, I'm not necessarily arguing against private enterprise or profit-seeking. I don't intend to get into a larger debate about structural institutions here. However, I think we need to look more closely at social media right now, and we need to think about all the ways in which it's deemed an instrument of freedom, creativity, and innovation. Perhaps we need to shift our thinking a little bit.
For more on this topic, I strongly suggest the following research which was cited in my paper:
Social Media Is Not Self-Expression by Rob Horning. I recommend this one in particular. It's more of a narrative piece than a research paper, and it makes some fascinating observations about identity construction and self-expression. It discusses how social media make it easier for companies to create identities for people to conform to, which in turn makes profits easier to reap. It also commands us even more to surrender our data and privacy online.
The Political Economy of Privacy on Facebook by Christian Fuchs
Primitive Digital Accumulation: Privacy, Social Networks, and Biopolitical Exploitation by Brian A. Brown (You may need to be logged into your AU Library account to access this one.)
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