> I think after several posts I'm finally getting to what I think is core
> here. "The Media" (social or otherwise) do not exist; they exist only as
> embedded in social relations, and have no existence in abstraction from
> that
> context. They aren't even relations (mediations), they are tools as I said
> before. But since, even or especially in abstraction, they have not
> independent existence, there is nothing to understand.
In other words, the Medium Plays No Part in the Message. But new media make new audiences and/or new communicators possible, and/or change the rhythm of communication. Surely messages are partly shaped by the intended audience and partly by the rhythm (i.e., how fast exchanges take place)?
Mike Beggs
-------------
I don't know what this thread is about, but that doesn't stop me from having an opinion...
The title is wrong headed, the role of social media...is the role of a technological means of communication in a revolutionary potential that becomes actual, or concrete. Every revolution has some means of communication with technological accoutrements. The most material factors are the scope of time and space, the geography of communication systems. Given enough time any technology will spread through out the human community's spatial distribution. Stone age cultures for example.
So what are the concrete factors involved with the cell phone, facebook and twitter, plus the internet and home/work computer systems? They are the same, time and space. I think the key difference in social media is the ability of the ruling structures to control the time/space distribution. The means of control and the dialectic of imposing limits war against such a spread.
What makes social media relevant is its extreme shortening of time and great expansion of space and the difficulty of imposing controls. But these problems have nothing to do with the underlying human conditions of struggle, that is the content. Without the rising human awarness of those conditions and their crushing weight, twitter and facebook would be nothing but the social emptiness of teenage american highschool discourse, the chattering emptiness of any high school lunch area gossip. Since I am no stranger to that, my question is simple.
Does Justin Biber have a dick?
Twitter and facebook were specifically designed to answer such question by a consensus that as the numbers mount, the cash rolls in. Magic. Capital has figured out a way to tap another market with unlimited potential profit, mobilizing teenage gossip, which is to say teen sex drives of the collective social imaginary.
Now who knew such a technology could be mobilized far beyond its original design? That's the fantastic metamorphosis of all technology within the human imaginary realm. The first printed books were bibles and social political tracts. But when did the first pornography arrive? That would be about the same time, which if you can read Durer, was simultaneous---if you can imagine Durer's eroticism---a difficult but not impossible task. And the kinko nature of his most famous prints of Adam and Eve, The Knight, the devil, and death.
I have no idea why this is so, but revolution and sex (desire, eroticism, hope, children, gender...) are never far apart...amd meditations on death always follow---as do the images of dawn and life and promise.
What does gossip, and social media have to do with revolution? I think it is the concrete potential to register the instantaneous state of revolutionary concieousness changing by the moment in the heart beat of time. This is always possible in direct conversation, direct crowd awareness of itself as a collective identity---but now it can be expressed and made a vastly larger collective concieousness in a much smaller unit of time over a much greater distribution of space. (It is also in contrast, in the most limited time-space distribution of the acts of love, of touch of lovers far from any other social context where such moments exist.) Revolution and love never seem far removed from each other.
I think I will stop, as I head into my second martinis.
Today I had a great day. I watched a revolution. I got a dream job offer, and went to UCB Whurster Hall panel discussion on Egypt with a good panel from the Middle Eastern Studies department. Then we left for drinks at the Durant Hotel bar and talked at near the intensity of Tahrir...theorizing revolution with people who knew and had known these moments in a much smaller way for themselves. That is to say friends who shared the components of their experience, theories and concieousness with each other.
CG
ps. the Berkeley night is screaming chants and yells from cars in solidarity with Tahrir in drunken fury.