4. Cybercultures, trusted sources, virals and memes

Posted by Tom | Filed under 04. Cybercultures, trusted sources, virals and memes

We talked in our first sessions about memes and virals, and touched on some of the concepts of trusting sources within the environment of online social media. We also began to look at motivation, and how marcoms needs to adapt to the changing environment. This session will be about online communities, the issues they face, and what ideas and communications spread on the web.

To kick off some thinking around the power of these online communities, here’s some analysis (admittedly from a biased source) of the power of online sharing, and here’s one from a company for whom emailing is their business. One thing that almost all of these studies reflect is that currently both assessed on quality and quantity, email is the strongest/most compelling method to share content.

To what extent do these cultures reflect what happens in the real world?
List examples of cross-polination of ideas between platforms such as web, TV, print, radio, stunts, etc. For instance, where adverts have become more like virals videos as below:

And where videos disseminating socio-political messages have also become more like viral videos (as below). What is the motivation for this shift, and does it work? Is anything sacrificed for those gains?

The reliability/veracity of these online cybercultures as sources presents challenges, and we talked about some of these in Week 3, and ways to mitigate for them, such as the Technorati & Digg model where the quality of the content producer is voted on. It’s impossible to forget the power of the medium however with the terrible news from Haiti being reported first on Twitter. Similar to the socially reinforcing model other platforms use for validating their comments, you could say that the more followers someone has on Twitter should give some indication of their reliability as a source, but it’s unfortunately not quite that simple, given the various sharp practices for getting more followers.

Another recent question thrown up by the platform is the idea of ‘Twitter mob rule‘. For instance when Jan Moir of the Daily Mail wrote the astonishingly backwards article linking Stephen Gately’s homosexual lifestyle to his untimely death, 25,000 people with Twitter at their centre, crashed the Press Complaints Commission’s website in their scramble to try and complain about this blatent homophobia in a mainstream publication (I hesitate to say ‘newspaper’).

Other ‘Twitter Mob’ activity includes the exposing of the ’super-injunction’ Trafigura attempted to use to block The Guardian publishing information about what had happened in Parliament. Yes – that’s an energy and mining firm trying to block the general public hearing what their government says. Probably understandable as it related to their alleged practice of toxic waste dumping in the Ivory Coast, but certainly a shame that the general public don’t retain as many highly paid lawyers as these corporations (Trafigura used Carter Ruck whose legal threats kept reporting of the case out of the public eye until it leaked onto Twitter).

Of course now the likes of Jan Moir can be publicly shamed for their archaic and offensive opinions, and super-injunctions have been exposed to the public as morally highly questionable when they obstruct the public finding out what is happening in their own democracy, a backlash has begun. Hence the phrase ‘Twitter mob’ – panic is apparently spreading among those public figures, companies and writers who make their living through creating hateful homophobic and/or racist lies, or through exploiting populations who previously had no access to a public global voice, and they’re worried. They try to portray it as if a dumbing down, mob rule is taking over freedom of speech, but increasing people’s access to speak publicly is actually the opposite so they’ve yet to invest any meaning into the slightly insulting ‘mob’ term. If this ‘mob’ can challenge the millions spent on lawyers trying to hide the truth about toxic waste being dumped in a place where people are unable to afford to complain, as Sunny Handal said in the Guardian, I’m proud to be part of it.

There are echoes of this idea of trusted sources and the underdog usurping mass media infrastructure by clever use of the internet in the early days of the Zapatistas in Chiapas. Subcomandante Marcos uses this metaphor of a lion to explain:

When we understand that only the lion can defeat the lion we begin to think how to make the lion confront himself.

Effectively this early form of online activism was focused on ‘holding a mirror to the lion‘ so it could see the damage it was causing. Whether intended or not, the real power of these online campaigns lies more in the fact that a huge network of people across the world hear the truth of what was happening in Chiapas, and that somewhat restricts the ability for a government to respond in an authoritarian way. The people of external countries are less likely than politicians to overlook mass murder. The term for this in the ’90s when it began online was ’swarm media’.

Criticism is also levelled at traditional media’s adoption of Twitter as shovelware. There’s an astute blog post looking at the shift in how we use these platforms, from what most people still consider social networks to be good at, lifecasting through to mindcasting and beyond.

We’re now all a part of different cybercultures. What are the pros and cons of this for society, and consequently for marcoms?

Not all news agencies are shying away from these new media however. Peter Horrocks, the new Director of Global News at the BBC is quoted as saying in Ariel their in-house magazine:

This isn’t just a kind of fad from someone who’s an enthusiast of technology. I’m afraid you’re not doing your job if you can’t do those things. It’s not discretionary.

For BBC news editors, Twitter and RSS readers are to become essential tools. Aggregating and curating content with attribution should become part of a BBC journalist’s assignment; and BBC’s journalists have to integrate and listen to feedback for a better understanding of how the audience is relating to the BBC brand.

This campaign from Amnesty in 2008 (I think) is a brilliant way of provoking a social behaviour, then using social media to spread video of it. Excellent!