I have a book I'll be writing. Will you subscribe to read in full?
It's on recent media history.
I’ll let you take a look at the summary, ok?
Summary
Foreword
Big ideas: from Ericsson to Microsoft; from Facebook to TikTok
The networks of social movements: McLuhan and Foucault
Language at the center: Chomsky, Hjelmslev, Kress and Fairclough
The ideology of cyber: contributions from Pierre Levy
Marketing on a glimpse: comments on Brian Solis
Models of communication: Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr
At odds with tech: WordPress moves swiftly
Micromanagement at scale: the debates around attention-span
Free for all? Moderation and its rocky start
AI will take our jobs: how to prepare for the next decade in tech
Storytelling: the role of artists in a digital economy
Social movements: organizing for equality
Too big to fail: the risk of autocracy and monopolization
Free speech and correlated issues, in light of online discourse
Dating apps and reputation: all the things we hold dear
Video calls and messaging: the best and the worst experiences
Toward a better theory: Zuboff and surveillance capitalism
In defense of a fun internet: the case for memes and nudes
And then, the foreword.
Foreword
The first thing I want people to know about this book is that writing in 2023 is hard. We’re old enough to remember YouTube’s “Pivoting to video” slogan, but it feels like that was many years ago. It wasn’t. Our attention has been reduced and compressed, some people would argue, to the next big thing and a motion that signals you acknowledge this or that -- a cat’s existence or a new way to make pasta, out of spaghetti in a blender. But it’s a mistake to think that there’s a realm of futility, isolated from the serious-business aspect of online transactions (a term not used without research), and another for the political matters, the leadership decisions, governmental power, transparency and secrecy alike. We’ve had to learn about the European Union through the media, when the GDPR was introduced, and then with Brexit; we’ve learned about Canada through media reports that Justin Trudeau had worn blackface and the country’s reserve of maple syrup was more of a source of economic resilience than oil. Of course, humor played its role in making this or any other story a topic of conversation, on and off the web. But with the rise of TikTok, a new video platform that prioritized fast consumption, geopolitical tensions arose, since its parent company was Chinese. These are all known facts, but the premise that video was going to make text irrelevant proved to hit a nerve on many of us, who ranged from attitudes in protection of kids to a defense of capitalism and the First Amendment.
The discussions around freedom of speech took the internet, and soon enough, people were associating the word freedom to anything imaginable, but seemingly forgetting that what matters to put in bills is what makes people’s lives better. And so the debates around video consumption are supposed to be rich and insightful, but that’s far from reality. To understand what the future holds, if we live in a technological state of wellbeing in selected parts of the planet (with digital currencies, food app deliveries, services for hire and positive entertainment as standard), we need to look at the history of media, and then pass on that knowledge to those who haven’t had the chance to experience the changes we have. Generational divides will have a lifespan, and history will not be the same with so many registers of everyone’s activity, at unprecedented scale. Who’s to determine what’s cryptographed or not? Who’s to say if copyrighted, protected media was obtained from which device, to what purpose? These questions arise and then dilute in the midst of issues causing friction in families, communities and institutions like a private company whose name everyone recognizes or the justice system, which everyone at a certain age feels like they can’t miss a comment on. But the freedoms and restrictions of each generation; how it got to a certain point; who were the players in the development of tech policy and widespread use; tendencies of media across decades, suddenly debated as tendencies of media across the timeframe of 2 hours: these are much harder to explain.
Yes, writing a book in 2023 is hard, because nobody reads books anymore. It’s not that bad: the internet has all the knowledge in the world, they say. The people who go against that are essentially against free societies and on the side of controlling powers of authoritarians. But on the other hand, you’d have to look at the data on people’s occupations and priorities according to a census in order to grasp, or begin to investigate, what happens when you’re disconnected. From what? From the pasta made of pasta? From the clowns on TV wearing suits and saying the numbers are better than ever? Who do you believe when information flows so rapidly and commentary spreads like a disease that kills creativity, the most human quality of all? Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben speaks of creativity as a building that is built because it was projected, and mentions the word potentiality. The internet has potential, undeniably (and that’s not an stand-alone affirmation); but we’re entering a stage of openly trusting automation processes to run entire businesses and change, yet again, the landscape we were used to. In 10 years, or maybe less than that, we might be hearing not about what we can do for our content to be promoted to the top of search queries, but what we need to do to instruct a machine on how to make a perfect video that delivers on specific purposes, and the possibility of a planned interaction through systematic training should be a reason to either back off or speed up that train before the rails are even built. Agamben notes, of course, that potentiality is the ability to do, but also not to do -- and we might have to revisit these concepts in terms of how we train professionals in different positions across workplaces.
If we come back to the early stages of telecommunications, for the sake of clarity and relative proximity, we might look at companies that made history and still operate in high stakes today. But there’s much to look at. It’s not just a question of distribution, but also ideology. It’s the demand question, and language as responsible for effecting the transactions we needed, but not without being looked at in a more careful lens. From the form and content to the substance; from the universal grammar theories to the social motivations of discourse; from the virtual representation and its essential givens to the concrete accumulation of means to make capital, which don’t always match; from the new to the newest, and compulsive behavior as a driving force of apparent productivity in the hands of an invisible, unassigned position of management: this book aims to explore the nuances of social media but also in the language that made it what it is, without looking at code development or infrastructure, but addressing these topics to situate readers.
Events in the development of the narratives of technology will be explained briefly, in the attempt to make it as informative and accessible as possible, without losing space to the people who want to scream their thoughts into a microphone in your majorly silent neighborhood. Social movements, moderation and surveillance are split into separate chapters, but we know it isn’t quite like that. The need for storytelling and the protections for journalists across the world will be taken into account, but firstly considering that storytelling has a broad definition, from the old best sellers, blockbusters or the current streaming champions to the smaller but still unique narratives of daily life in a situation that raises public interest and tests both audiences and the ones reporting; on the other hand, the stories published on how success is measured will be looked at in critical analysis, considering narratives of power and influence which normally dominate the corporate world, but should, in my view, be closer to the public knowledge area, in a push for accountability and a good use of trillions in a given currency. Finally, we’ll look at the web in its inner workings, meaning what it represents to the user, but also what companies tell us we can or can’t do, and why. In this debate, we’ll extend our views to questions of legislation, but also considering the existential, the philosophical, the psychological and the social, in order to have a necessary responsible debate around what it is that motivates people to talk about freedom in a space they seem to claim for themselves, but with loopholes that source the content back to the big companies running the show. What stays with us? What definitely doesn’t, and what are the silver linings?
In this effort, my choices of themes reflect what I’ve observed as a former university researcher for discourse analysis, and along the way, there may be some elements of storytelling. Anonymity is a guiding principle in this work, but it won’t always be the case. The first thing I ever did in front of a computer was to draw on Microsoft Paint, on my uncle’s big computer, around the year 2000 and maybe before that. The universe of video games doesn’t inspire a lot of my thoughts, but video calling definitely does. We project who we want to be in virtual spaces, and we’re able to play with it. It was precisely the concept of parody that made me start my academic work, and then moving onto humor, only to find out I wanted to be in a higher role in the field of education. As I write this, I hope reading about recent events and a few distant ones will clarify what’s at stake, to whom, and how to change dynamics, if necessary, in order to have an equitable space for everyone to enjoy and a society that doesn’t ignore its social problems or believes the pre-internet life skills are worthless: when you buy new clothes, you might be doing something like changing your email address; when you wash the dishes, you might be clearing the cookies; when you talk to your parents, you might wanna check who’s following you. The question is who’s going to be with you when you do all these things, and as we watch relationships erode, implode and collide, I believe it’s possible to benefit from the internet as a place where many can relate to many, but not necessarily board the Titanic.
***
I hope you won’t mind to pay 5 dollars for reading the next posts. This work take a lot of energy and focus, as well as decades of research and a highly competitive mindset to be able to address topics that everyone wants to debate, but not all of them are willing to face the backlash.
I am. So I’m asking for your contribution.
Stay tuned.
— ivo