The intellectual and social media

Here’s a transcript of a lecture given at the Cradle of Humankind to a University of Pretoria-hosted forum on “The intellectual in society.” I was invited to talk by Mark Gevisser, who asked me to do the following in 15 mins:

“What we’d be looking for from you is specific insight on how new media – from websites and blogs to social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook – have the potential for academics to expand their readers and influence, and to reshape the way scholarship -both the research and dissemination of it – works in the world. Most of the participants are social scientists (anthropologists, sociologists, archaeologists etc). Although some technical information would be very helpful to them (how to set up a blog, how to use twitter effectively, etc), I think it would be great if you could blow their minds with the possibilities of new media, and – tall order in 15 minutes – talk philosophically about what new media is doing to the communication of ideas and the role of intellectuals in society. ”

Right. If that’s all, here we go. Here’s the lecture, with my shortened title. People who are social media denizens can skip the bits with numbers, obviously.

“Ask not what social media can do for you – ask what you can do for social media.”

Talking to a bunch of academics of various ages and shapes about Social Media is a bit like lecturing convent schoolgirls on sex. You have to pitch it at the virgin level, but you just know some of them will have already sneaked behind the tool shed and joined Facebook. So those of you who are already denizens of the social media world will know much of what I’m going to talk about, but perhaps you won’t have thought about social media in quite as actively positive a way as I’ll be describing it.

I would preface this talk by enumerating the topics that Mark Gevisser asked me to cover in my 15 minutes, but I’ve calculated that the full list would take 1 minute to read out, or 6.66% of the time allotted to me, which I can ill afford. Coincidentally, that percentage is the number of the beast, which tells you all you need to know about people who make lists.

I have, however, done an analysis of how much time I can spend per topic, and in a feat of what we on Twitter call “quantums”, I am actually going to be straying into negative space if I attempt to cover everything.

So I’ll just give you a taste of what’s possible online or, possibly more importantly, what’s already in the past online. I attend a lot of conferences and presentations, and I’ve noticed a recent shift in South Africa. A very few years ago, people were proselytising about the glorious future that is online, but now there’s a general, tacit inhabiting of the truism that online is not in the future – it’s now.

Speaking of Tacitus, the famed Roman historian, one of the examples I’ll be giving you, of how academics can insert themselves and their professional personae into the online space, will be that of Professor Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, fellow of Newnham College, Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, author of the book “A Don’s Life”, and – more importantly – author of the blog “A Don’s Life”.

But I’ll go into this in detail a little later. I only mention it now because I’m a sucker for verbal segues, probably because I am now entirely a creature of hypertext. If you can’t click on a word and bound off to territories unknown and only marginally related, it’s not language. It’s just grunting.

Ironically, this short talk is actually an inadvertent exemplar for how online works to aid intellectual discourse. When you write a piece online, you don’t have to bother over-explaining too many of your references, you can just link out. In the same way, given time constraints, I’m not going to spend too much time talking about what Twitter, Facebook, and the various – and many – other kinds of social media are. Many of you will use them anyway, and if not, it’s easy enough to Bing them. ‘Bing them….’ it just doesn’t sound right, not like ‘Google it’. And here I could jump into a dissertation on the importance of naming online, but I won’t.

Okay, let me get to the point. Social media own the world right now. Here are some figures that everybody throws out at these presentations:

“By population, Facebook is the third biggest country in the world, after India, with well over half a billion users (and it’s not even a player in China, where QQ and Renren dominate). And 200 million people access Facebook on their mobile phones. Twitter has around 160 million users”.

Some other interesting things (all taken from this great video, which you might want to watch):

“Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users.

“TV took 13 years.

“Internet 4 years.

“iPod 3 years.

“Facebook added 200 million users in less than a year.

“iPod application downloads hit 1 billion in 9 months.

“More interesting for educators, is that the US Dept of Education study that revealed that online students out-performed those receiving face-to-face instruction. [I'm not sure if this is a stat that makes much sense, to be honest. It's like saying that students with desks outperform those without. But I offer it for what it's worth.]

“Some US universities have stopped distributing e-mail account [ because young people think e-mail is as out of date as fax machines. Well, they would think that if they'd heard of fax machines.]”

Normally, if I was talking to publishers, or marketers, I’d focus on South African statistics, because in their cases they generally want to take advantage of the local market. But as an academic and/or an intellectual – and I assume there’s a difference sometimes – your market is the world, which is another of the great attributes of new media – it can insert you into your sphere of interest, and allow your sphere of interest to surround you, rather than condemning you to intersect.

But given that we are South Africans, and it’s our localised world we’re looking to benefit, here are some South African stats.

Facebook is the second most popular website for South Africans, with almost 3 million South African users of Facebook a month.

Twitter is the 8th most popular website, with around 2 million visitors a month, and about 100,000 of them actively tweeting.

YouTube is the 5th most popular, with over 2 million users a month. And by the way, YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world.

South African mobile chat network Mxit has around 20 million users a month.

But the truest measure of the importance of social media is this: social media has now overtaken pornography as the number one activity on the web.

Me at Facebook HQ in Palo Alto, pretending to be faceless.

These are just some quick stats to emphasise the importance of social media, and social networks, in terms of reaching people, and since I last checked these stats a couple of weeks ago, they’re probably way higher by now. But the true worth of social media, for me, lies in its disruptive potential. All over Africa, bloggers and ‘social media practitioners’ (we need a catchy name for this, by the way) are using the power of the internet to fight despots, dictators, corrupt politicians, evil regimes and cellphone companies. Which sounds a little grandiose, I admit. But they’re also using it to bring knowledge and information to places where those essentials for civic action are sorely repressed. I’ll put up a list of examples of this on my blog, as time precludes my giving that here.

But the true worth of any disruptive technology, or revolutionary idea, can be judged by the extent to which governments and repressive societies try to clamp down on them. Here’s an extract from one of the laugh-a-minute press releases from the ANC Youth League, or ANCYL-biters as I like to call them. This one was sent out by Floyd Shivambu only last week, on the 3rd of November. I quote:

“ANC YOUTH LEAGUE CONCERNED BY CRETATION OF FAKE TWITTER ACCOUNTS IN THE NAME OF ANC YOUTH LEAGUE PRESIDENT JULIUS MALEMA:

“03 November 2010

“The ANC Youth League is concerned by the continuous creation of fake Twitter accounts in the name of ANC Youth League President Julius Malema. There are computer hackers who have created twitter accounts in the name of the President and recurrently posting misleading messages.

“The ANC YL has in more than one occasion reported these impersonators and hackers, yet no action has been taken against them by the twitter administrators. We will now approach the relevant authorities to report these hackers and call for the closer of twitter if its administrators are not able to administer reports for violation of basic human rights and integrity.

“Those who are hacking systems and impersonating the ANC YL leadership should immediately stop doing so because the laws of this country will come very hard on them.”

A wall at Twitter. Soon to be torn down by the ANCYL

The relevance of this email lies not in the spark of hope it must raise in anyone who was losing faith in the education system in South Africa, but in the almost bewildering lack of knowledge, shown by our esteemed representative of the youth of South Africa, of technologies that are almost universally embraced by the youth of South Africa.  (For example, the idea that you need to ‘hack’ Twitter to create an @juliusmalema account.)

And this is why intellectuals and educators need to learn to use social media. In one of those ‘quantums’ things I spoke about earlier, you have the chance to know your enemy even before he knows himself. The internet is our next battleground, and we need to get ready. And I’m not only, or even primarily, talking about the battle for – and forgive the shorthand – the healthy survival of democracy and constitutional rights in South Africa. The most important struggle is the battle to make sure our citizens have access to education and information.

But in a parody of Kahlil Gibran via John F. Kennedy – you shouldn’t be asking what social media can do for you, but asking what you can do for social media. The internet needs intellectuals. To put it extraordinarily crudely – and right about now a Keynote slide would really come in handy – the internet is great for providing a democratic platform for people to express their opinions, but this has its flaws.

The problem with this democracy of opinion on the net is that we are overwhelmingly confronted by many people each with single opinions. For true educational and ideological shifts to happen, we need single people with multiple opinions, and indeed with self-contesting, complicatedly shifting opinions. The internet is great for content, but not so hot on context. We need social media practitioners who can present a more complex, less certain view of the world, which is an elaborate way of saying we need thinkers.

Social media is, primarily and most importantly, a means of communication. But let me quote that great philosopher of HTML, Jacques Derrida, from the opening paragraph of Limited Inc.

“Is it certain that to the word communication corresponds a concept that is unique, univocal, rigorously controllable, and transmittable: in a word, communicable? Thus, in accordance with a strange figure of discourse, one must first of all ask oneself whether or not the word or signifier ‘communication’ communicates a determinate content, an identifiable meaning, or a describable value. However, even to articulate and to propose this question I have had to anticipate the meaning of the word communication. I have been constrained to predetermine communication as a vehicle, a means of transport or transitional medium of a meaning, and moreover of a unified meaning. If communication possessed several meanings and if this plurality should prove to be irreducible, it would not be justifiable to define communication a priori as the transmission of a meaning, even supposing that we could agree on what each of these words (transmission, meaning, etc.) involved.”

Too much to unpack now, but for me the important point is this: language, communication, social interaction, meaning, data, information – these are all things profoundly affected by the medium that is the internet, but the very structure of that internet works to predetermine how you define all those things online. A practical example – There’s a reason why people like the ANC Youth League and the Chinese government are made profoundly uneasy by social media. Twitter has, in its very code, a democratic DNA that, for good or bad, must inevitably work to further an American idea of democracy. Without people interrogating and contesting that prescribed meaning, we risk losing control of the language we are increasingly forced to use.

But this is all a bit rabble-rousing. To get more practical: there are thousands of examples of how social media has been used by academics to help with their work, and how academic disciplines have been profoundly altered by the way the world has changed with the advent of social media. I’ve randomly chosen one as an example. Well, that’s a lie – I actually chose this one because it came with videos, podcasts, multiple-links and cool graphics. But Mark Gevisser has condemned me to giving a lecture without a projector, screen and sound system, which is a bit like asking Simphiwe Tshabalala to play soccer without a ball and field.

So I’m reduced to playing you a podcast audio interview with Professor Mary Beard, which you can find on YouTube.

http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/extracts/its_a_dons_life.mp3

With the help of the devil, I’ve made a list of the takeaways from the Mary Beard Podcast. What a blog – and all social media – can achieve:

1. Dispel preconceptions about academia

2. Rapid response time

3. Own your means of communication.

4. Interactive

5. Create an intelligent online audience, esp. comments.

6. Feed your ego.

7. It’s a pleasure

8. It’s not a dumbing down – it’s a clevering up. Links to abstruse topics.

9. Fabulous research tool.

10. There always have to be Ten Tips in lists online, I don’t know why.

Right, out of time. To sum up in 140 characters, which is all you’d be allowed on Twitter -

Social media is essential tool 4 disseminating info, 4 social and intellectual change, and 4 research and publishing. And it’s de facto.

Thank you.

1. 

   Ndiana matthew says:

   November 11, 2010 at 8:53 pm

   Brilliantly written article from the sights of a tweeper per excellence!
2. 

   Ryan Brussow says:

   November 24, 2010 at 9:07 am

   Brilliant article Chris! I’ll be sure to share this.
3. 

   Chris says:

   November 24, 2010 at 10:03 am

   Thanks, Ryan.