The social media tribe

There’s a practice among foraging cultures called “social sharing“: when somebody scores big with the hunting & the gathering, they share all of it with the group.

Nomads don’t have a way to store or transport food, so it would just go to waste if it wasn’t eaten. This reciprocity then covers their asses later when they’re not having any luck and another member of the tribe makes a kill.

Social media communities like the interactive marketing professionals I follow on Twitter also have a formally informal sharing ethos, similarly crucial to network coherence & growth. We take what’s no use if stored—goodwill, news, how-to’s on the latest Facebook changes, inspiring marketing, artwork you can use in blog posts—and feed it to the whole tribe, so that they may be sustained and we will be included when they’ve got rare winter berries.

We have the same reciprocal obligation and the same enculturation of generosity. We get together annually (SXSWi, anyone?) in what are called among foragers bilevel organizations, which dissolve back into small, far flung units before all the local resources are used up (Austin’s beer supply).

It’s nice to be part of a tribe

Why it’s still embarrassing to say ‘tweet’: an ethnosemantic look at online communication

Ethnosemantics: the study of the meaning of words to categorize or classify the world. The variety of words within one category highlight a culture’s priorities. Vocabularies are elaborated to reflect the value a culture places on a category.

Online conversation is becoming our primary means of communication with many members of our social group—coworkers, friends, and families.

The modern act of communication is writing (or more accurately, typing). Our language has evolved to include descriptive verbs for different channels of online writing.

The need for such nuanced vocabulary indicates both:

1. the cultural importance of online communication
   • socially and professionally, (which are almost one and the same, thanks to the necessity of consistent online persona presentation), facility with language becomes a badge of success
2. a deft meta-handling of the constraints of the medium itself
   • text-based exchanges lack body language, volume, tone, speed, and other emotional cues, so must be carefully described with verbs and annotated with emoticons and formatting.

Here are examples of verbs that mean ‘to write online’, and the subtleties indicated by each:

To blog
Example: “I got up early this morning and blogged over hot coffee”.
Destinction: Longform writing expressing opinion. Indicates a degree of commitment to communicating a point of view or expertise. De rigueur for professionals seeking to become consultants or score book deals. Overtones of earnestness (best case scenario) or self aggrandizement (less good case scenario).

To tweet
Example: “I couldn’t resist tweeting about my husband’s award nomination“.
Destinction: Microblog, or “very small blog”. Short, pithy, carefully crafted, well edited due to format constraints. A lingering suggestion of airheadedness, attributable to frivolous-sounding name and simplistic branding. As a result, sometimes shocking when used to discuss serious matters, despite excellence as a format for breaking news.

To Facebook
Example: “Let’s do lunch next week. I’ll Facebook you”.
Destinction: No strings-attached private messaging. Handy, but subject to inexplicable and random privacy screwups. Casual. Indicative of privileged “real friend” status.

To IM
Example: “IM me the link to that video so I can see what’s so damn funny”.
Destinction: Pleasantry-free, brief and thus not annoying. Appreciated for their low interruption factor. For quick questions, link and file exchange. Perfect for professional communication and people who are afraid of Skype. Unwanted side effect: spontaneous work-related questions 24/7.

To Email
Example: “I’ll email you the files and let you figure it out”.
Destinction: The granddaddy of online communication and source of great psychic pain due to quantity. For people of advanced age and business communication. Comes with a dreaded sense of  responsibility to read and respond, likely due to lack of formal policies on length and directness. Appreciated if it appears in bullet points. Means you’re getting assigned a task that’s got too much backstory to just talk about. Mercifully asynchronous.
Subverb: To Forward. In business, buck passing. Coming from Grandma, likely to contain adorable animals.
Subverb: To Reply All. Usually a mistake. Usually excruciatingly embarrassing.

To Text
Example: “Text me”.
Destinction: Personal communication, not unlikely to contain nudity. Signifies priority friends you’d actually give your number to. Short by technical necessity and amount of effort required to type with thumbs. Gave rise to abbreviated language.

Of note is the slight air of embarrassment associated with telling anyone out loud that you’ll communicate with them in one of the above fashions. Face-to-face conversation is the most respectful method of interaction, because time and attention are now our most carefully guarded commodities. We associate online communication with narcissism because it suggests we have priorities, and you are not #1.

All digital communication also lends itself to pretending you never got it, while that would be more difficult (but not impossible) in a RL conversation.

Clicking ‘like’ is basically the same as picking and eating someone’s fleas.

Alrighty, here’s a drinking game: let’s try to map the major schools of Cultural Anthropology to social media. Every time we’re able to draw a plausible comparison, we do a shot of MGD and Jägermeister. Please note that I’ve been studying* this subject for 8 days now, and am 100% talking out of my derière.

Historical Particularism
Boas’ view that cultures can’t be compared, must be viewed as products of unique historical conditions, & culture traits understood as articulated to an integrated meaning system.
See: iPhone vs. Blackberry/Android/whatever isn’t an iPhone wars. No phone is intrinsically better than the others, except the iPhone.

Structural Functionalism
Emile Durkheim’s theory that people’s values and behaviours are determined by their role in society.
See: ass kissing on Twitter by those who fall on the wrong side of the followers-to-following ratio.
See: Twitter Charity auction for the honour of having a Kardashian retweet you.
See: the existence of Empire Avenue, the Whuffie Bank, and everywhere else you’re told you can trade on your “influence”.

Interpretive Anthropology
The idea that culture is a symbolic system, and people’s behaviour acts out those meanings, communicating them to each other.
See: The Facebook ‘like’ (content liking, not Page). A pictogram of a thumb, singled out for its connotations of approval, transmits social acceptance and stands in for phatic and grooming behaviours.

Ethnosemantics
The notion that language serves to classify experience into universal categories, denoting cultural meaning.
See: “retweet” (social acceptance), “fail whale” (a frustrating act of god), “pwnage” (loss of social status due to naivete or mental insufficiency)

Cultural Evolution
The classification of cultures on the basis of technologies, especially in regards to vital resource production.
See: 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, 90 million tweets per day (srsly), and 30 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook monthly. Social media content is the new food.

Cultural Ecology
The theory that culture is an adaptation to the local environment.
See: half of Canadians prefer meeting online to meeting in the frigid outdoors.

Processual Approaches
The feeling that people manipulate the dictates of culture to achieve their own ends. Individual people have agency to change culture.
See: Mark Zuckerberg.

Marxism
The idea that culture is controlled by the people who have the means to produce wealth, and that they use this position to maintain their elite status.
See: Steve Jobs.

*Real Anthropologists: I apologize for mangling your discipline. If you note anywhere that I’ve grossly misunderstood the above theoretical frameworks, please educate me in the comments.

I’d feel really good about myself if you’d subscribe to my blog.

Ah, University: where the girls smell like beer and the boys smell like Axe.

It’s officially official, I’m a University student again! I’m studying Cultural Anthropology at the U of M. Entirely internet-based, of course.

Buying textbooks was entirely not internet-based, as I needed them faster than the 2 weeks proposed by ordering online. So with a certain new-erasers-in-Autumn joie de vivre I headed down to campus.

Loud indie rock! Post-adolescent flirting! And MTS, pimping their social networking campaign (sans QR code):

I think I get the conspicuously-absent dirty pigeon now. I think he was a back-up idea the designers were proud of & the much-maligned marketing manager didn’t want to go to waste.

Anyways, I’m studying Cultural Anthropology because now that I work in social media and deal with people, I need to learn their ways.

What can Cultural Anthropology teach us about Social Media (and vice versa)?

I’m very interested in the impact social technologies have on our culture. Network-derived cultural change is transmitting through Canada and the world at the speed of wifi.

Consider:

• Our public behaviour and indeed notion of ‘public’ is changing (think Google’s Eric Schmidt warning us to toe the line because Big Brother is watching),
• New cultural practices are developing to cope with change (think Schmidty also suggesting we may want to just change our names when we’re 18 to Google-erase our embarassing online youth)
• Social norms are being redefined with or without us in the service of marketing products (think Mark Zuckerberg informing us our society doesn’t care about privacy anymore)

I’ve learned something about online communities already

The course instructions request that we not cite Wikipedia, and I came across this project that neatly underscores why—a 12-volume book set comprised of every Wikipedia edit to “the Iraq War” entry over a 4 year span. Talk about “warring” worldviews, in a unique record of and comment on crowdsourced cultural bias.