Human practice determines the meaning of the tools utilized. I want eventually to get back to shag's account of Facebook: she gave a beautiful description of how party-line telephone systems worked in small town and rural America up to the war, and in some places longer. Same advantages and same defects.
Carrol
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Wojtek S Sent: Friday, February 11, 2011 5:04 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] The role of social media in the Egyptian uprising
Re: "I think that 'social' refers to the participatory nature of certain 'media'"
[WS:] Participatory?
When I was in grad school I remember reading a journal article by some Israeli scholar arguing that media as they existed back then 9i.e. mostly television) were by nature "social" because the meaning of the message was socially mediated, by which he meant that people would discuss the message and collectively decide its worthiness. It is not coincidental that the person was Israeli, because I think that this argument would be quite questionable here as people tend to watch tv alone, albeit they do talk about entertainment.
But in any case, by these standards, whether the media are social depends pretty much on the social context in which they exist. The same TV might be "social" in Israel (or Eastern Europe as I remember it) but rather anti-social here, where tv watching tends to be more solitary. Pushing it even further, internet based media would be even more anti-social, because human interaction is minimal - the only interaction is between internet characters, most of whom will never meet in person. And unlike "social" tv watching, in which people who collectively participate in a media even also interact on different social levels, as neighbors, family members, or co-workers, the internet based interaction even if it involves "actual" people rather than made-up characters, is carried in a social vacuum - that is, the participants are unlikely to interact in any other social context.
So this leaves question to what degree internet media are social or anti-social. We think we interact with people but this is not how we would interact with actual persons in face to face situations. And the meaning of what we say or receive is seldom collectively negotiated - in most cases a person have hardly time to think in some depth about a "tweet" let alone discuss it with others.
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