We Are the Media: The Ongoing Disruption of Social Space Via Social Media

by Miguel Del Fresno
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED)

Speed and Complexity

The history of mankind is unthinkable without technology. In the Internet age, where real time dominates over geography, web 2.0 and the rise of social media communication is another example of the exceptional ability of people to collectively communicate meaning and ideas. We tend to believe in the uniqueness of each era and its relationship with technology because the social changes resulting from innovation have always triggered changes in society. These changes not only support the conditions for technology to be created, but also change how people engage in interpersonal relationships (consider the telegraph to the telephone to the smart devices).  One of the substantive features of how technology is collectively experienced is the speed at which technology pushes communication, at the same time as it is concentrated in shorter time spans.

These uninterrupted technological spans have been presented as a gradual extension of our senses, leading some early thinkers to note, "we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned" (McLuhan, 1964).¹ This means that new media and technologies are transforming not only the “how” of communication, but the “meaning” of what is being communicated.  This process of reorganization and expansion has broadened the collective interpersonal communication system, which has had an effect on the reconfiguration of social reality itself. The internet and its evolution is the most disruptive contemporary social-technological phenomenon on interpersonal collective communication in history.

Social media allows the rise of an evolution of a new and complex influence communication ecosystem in contrasts sharply with traditional, primarily vertical, mass media communication, which is becoming more limited in its ability to synchronize general perceptions. The Internet allows for mass social media communication that also simultaneously provides for the emergence of micro-media. Anyone with a simple technological tool (a mobile phone) and Internet access can be a real time broadcaster competing for reach and notoriety with the professional media. The old saying in journalism was that you could have the biggest scoop in the world, but if you don't have a way to get it out, it remained the biggest secret in the world. Now that notion is dead. Today everyone has a personal technology device to get out the big secret anytime, anywhere. Everyone can be a journalist.

Additionally each of us in micro-media space can simultaneously be active and passive receivers, transmitters, and diffusers of information, rumors or symbolic meaning. These micro-media communications can be self-generated as well as passed along from others; they include material from the mass and micro media. As result the communication ecosystem can simultaneously contain without any trace of contradiction noise and signal, truth and lies, virtue and vice, news and rumors, the original and duplicate, voyeurism and exhibitionism—all within the same bold universe of inclusiveness.

We, the New Media 

It is in this new micromedia space—the Twitterverse, the infinite YouTube playloop, the rabbit hole that is Facebook—that the movement from “other” as media to “we” as media is coming about. For a long time the unidirectional communication media professionals controlled by elites pursued the symbolic and informational control of societies or large parts of that society. Mass media messages were the only game in town and they owned both the message and the means of communicating that message. Micro-media has the dual property of being both part of the medium as well as part of the message. Within a mass self-communication system, micromedia are able to extend messages from and to others (peers or professional media) through a multidirectional communication system. This system reflects individual (one to one) or social (one to many and many to many) interactions without the imposition of any agenda from the larger professional media.

The new influence ecosystem arising from the emergence of micromedia is modeled below. It illustrates how the professional media have been forced to cohabitate with micromedia. The traditional, vertical influence system, with its ability to synchronize perceptions on a massive scale, has been significantly disrupted by social media and mass self-communication. Micromedia now plays a significant part in the battle of social perceptions, influencing beliefs and diffusing opinion. 

In the influence ecosystem, the changes in collective interpersonal relationships, due to caused by the emergence of Internet and social media haves created a hybrid communication sphere. Professional media and social media are combined in a unique system, with offline and online contexts existing in the same social continuum. There are no social, methodological or ontological utility to maintaining a differentiation distinction between the two in the new hybrid social continuum this new space. The research place is not the research object, because where things happen is less important than what is happening—especially when we are looking for understanding at the intersection between society and technology as well as between human behavior and technological change.

This hybrid, all-media space forms a labyrinth linking people who share information, news, perceptions, beliefs, and rumors in a real-time, immense, networked communication system. The result is that everything—people, information, events, and places—are connected, creating a vast aggregate social network. In our work we drew on social network theory to provide a useful conceptual framework and robust set of methods for both understanding, analyzing, and representing the pattern of social networks interactions that surround individuals in the #commoncore Twitter's opinion climate.

Making the Invisible Visible

As we have shown in this project the expanded social context of the Internet and social media through Twitter gives rise to social networks on any number of topics and social behaviors. Unlike the mass media, which is a professional communication tool, social media is a collective and interpersonal communication mechanism, which has created an unprecedented unique social continuum, where offline and online social interactions are individually and collectively, local and globally experienced in real time. 

Given the mind-boggling amount of data streaming through this network, it has been difficult to chart the complex relational structures that emerge online in networks like #commoncore, because the robust size of the data makes climates of opinion on organizations, media, individuals, companies, institutions, and lobbies difficult to comprehend. Such can be best typically be represented and studied through computer programs and visualizations of information. Through an innovative set of methods in this project we captured, mapped, and analyzed Twitter's interactions as social networks in a depth and scale that has recently just become possible for the average citizen. This work make the invisible forces of interaction visible and accessible to a wider audience.

The relational data captured from social media offers many new opportunities to understand communication practices in the social media space. In other words, new types of communication networks and new media like Twitter vastly increase our ability to understand complex social and communication problems and the rise of a new kind of influencers. 

From our point of view as researchers, one of the most valuable aspects of Twitter is its evolving nature as a sort of central nervous system of the Internet, playing the roles in practice as a media of intersection of every social and professional media. Like in any social space, some people will be disproportionately influential in the system—they can be thought of as opinion leaders.

Social Media Influencers

Opinion leaders tend to be identified as nodes for the diffusion of new ideas or behaviors based on the premise that once they have been properly identified, they may act as change agents. It is also possible to identify key nodes in networks to prevent the diffusion of errors or misbehaviors. The real existence of influence inequality can be explained not as a result of who we are, but rather to whom we are interconnected. 

Social media influencers (SMIs) are the independent players who shape audience attitudes through the use of social media channels, both in competition and coexistence with professional media. Being able to accurately identify SMIs is critical no matter what is being transmitted in a social system. SMIs can be identified by their high-ranking position in a network as the most important, or central, nodes.

Our social network analysis of the #commoncore presents a social media network analysis on Twitter of activity surrounding the Common Core and reveals the existence of different typologies of SMIs elites (we called them transmitters, transceivers, and transcenders) interacting in a highly complex information ecosystem of ideas. By analyzing Common Core opinion climate, we identified ways that social media is reactivating in a powerful way the link between citizens, social debates, and politics.

The Common Core debate on #commoncore is an exemplar of the ongoing disruption of social media, and how the traditional exclusivity of mass media is quickly becoming outmoded, outdated, and outstripped by the rise of social media. The mass media creation and distribution of meaning, perceptions, and beliefs reflecting the agenda of the elites is being challenged and refuted by the fast-moving thumbs and fingers of all walks of life, the “we” enabled with our ubiquitous devices, multiple points of contact, and the “viralization” of news, ideas, or opinions. At the same time this new breed of social interaction offers the opportunity to reactivate the link between society and politics, creating a potentially democratizing collective tool.

Reference

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.