Social Media Parlour Games
I decided to take a pause with the Eclectic Digest newsletter the past few weeks to reflect on the outbreak of war in Ukraine and to reckon with the global uncertainty.
Learn how you can lend your support to help Ukraine here. And if you’d like to learn more about the history of the region, here’s a booklist.
As we watch world events unfold in real time online, this week’s digest includes a collection of articles exploring the philosophical, personal, historical and societal impacts of social media.
The Myth of the ‘First TikTok War’
Kaitlyn Tiffany | The Atlantic | March 10, 2022 | No paywall
“The history of war is also a history of media, and popular memory associates specific wars with different media formats. Vietnam was the first television war. The first war in Iraq, in 1991, was the first cable-news war, or the first CNN war. Twelve years later, the American invasion of Iraq was ‘supposed to be CNN’s war’ again, but instead became the Fox News war. It was also called ‘the YouTube war,’ in which, as one journalism professor put it, soldiers made ‘personal and at times shockingly brutal’ homemade videos of gunfights, suicide bombings, and other violence, many set to rap or metal music…But every new media format is said to be more immediate, more immersive, and more moving than the one that came before—a fact, or supposition, that commonly intersects with the labeling of wars according to their preeminent broadcast channels.” (1,885 words)
What TikTok videos have in common with Victorian parlour games
Kim Beil | Ryan Tacata | Psyche | February 28, 2022 | No paywall
“The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga argued in the late 1930s that we transmit culture through play. Not through the professionalised forms of theatre or sport that represent themselves self-consciously as cultural icons, but through simple fun and games. For Huizinga, play ‘promotes the formation of social groupings’ that last long after the end of the game, whether it’s a card game, amateur sports or children’s make-believe. When we forward a zany video to our contacts or imitate dance moves found online, we bind virtual social ties to our real-world friends.
In his book Homo Ludens (1938), Huizinga describes play as a ‘magic circle’ that creates a lasting ‘feeling of being ‘apart together’ in an exceptional situation, of sharing something important, of mutually withdrawing from the rest of the world and rejecting the usual norms…’ What better way to describe the urgency with which we turned to internet videos since March 2020?”
The great conundrum of the sustainability influencer
Whitney Bauck | Grist | March 2, 2022 | No paywall
Social Media + Fashion + Influencers + Greenwashing + Consumerism
“Corporate spending on influencer marketing expanded by a whopping 42 percent in 2021 and is estimated to hit $15 billion in 2022. Combine that with reports that fashion executives consider sustainability one of their ‘biggest opportunities for growth,’ and it’s not hard to see why the category has proliferated.
What influencers do is regurgitate and reshare information. So at some point, messages can get diluted and attention can be pulled away from people or places where it’s really important,” says Neumann. “We can’t equate consumption-focused content creation with activism or journalism.” (2,075 words)
Chris Bail on Breaking the Social Media Prism
Chris Bail | Princeton | April 14, 2021 | No paywall
An interview with Chris Bail, a data science professor and director of the Polarization Lab at Duke University, and author of Breaking the Social Media Prism.
“Even before social media, we social scientists discovered that people are very bad at learning what other people think about them. I invoke the metaphor of the prism to describe how social media has set this process into hyperdrive.
The social media prism fuels social outcasts who seek status by providing them with a sense of belonging. One chapter of my book takes the reader inside the lives of political extremists or ‘trolls’ through a combination of in-depth interviews, survey data, and experiments…I concluded that most political extremists are drawn to social media because it provides them with a sense of status—however artificial and meaningless to the rest of us—that they cannot obtain in other social contexts.
The most powerful aspect of the social media prism is not simply that it fuels extremism, but also that it mutes moderates…But when moderates become less vocal on social media, an even bigger problem can emerge: extremists can become misunderstood as moderates. In other words, most people who are exposed to someone from the other side on social media are interacting with someone who has extreme views, but they may *think* this person is in fact a typical member of the other side. The result is what social scientists call ‘false polarization.’” (1,317 words)
Listen to Chris Bail on the Ideas Podcast here.
Order Bail’s Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing here.
Note: If you purchase a book via links mentioned in this newsletter, I may receive a small commission while supporting independent bookstores.
🎧 For listening: Svyatoslav ‘Slava’ Vakarchuk
From the Yale Goodfellow Program website:
“Svyatoslav ‘Slava’ Vakarchuk is a social activist and lead vocalist for Okean Elzy, the most successful rock band in Ukraine. As an activist, Slava supported the Orange Revolution and is founder of the non-profit “Lyudi Maybutnyogo” (People of the Future).
In 2003, Slava became an Honorary Ambassador of Culture in Ukraine. In 2005 he was named a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Development Programme and became a member of the Parliamentary Committee on Freedom of Expression and Information. In September 2008, he renounced his seat in the Verkhovna Rada party due to a corrupt political climate. In parliamentary elections in 2007, he appeared as an independent candidate on the Our Ukraine–People's Self-Defense Bloc's list. The Ukrainian magazine Korrespondent ranks him as one of the 100 most influential people of Ukraine.”
Read more about Svyatoslav Vakarchuk here.
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