When it comes to how organizations and companies use social media, it does not come as a surprise to learn that it is utilized to communicate with external parties. However, the article “Enterprise Social Media: Definition, History, and Prospects for the Study of Social Technologies in Organizations” states that social media is often used in organizations as a way of internal communication--that is, to communicate with employees and co-workers. When I initially read the article, I was surprised to see that many people saw social media as an opportune way to communicate with employees and co-workers. This was not because I thought it was impossible to use social media in that way, but because I thought that it was a terrible idea to do so. Growing up, I have always listened to lectures from teachers and professors about how dangerous social media is when it comes to finding a career; people have to be careful to not post content that might jeopardize their job positions, which is difficult when it seems like everything and everyone is on social media right now. 

Companies allowing employees to communicate via social media appears to be a bit of a double-edge sword. For example, social media allows correspondences to be made public and remains logged into the system even after it is completed (Leonardi, Huysman, and Steinfield, 2013). While this can be used as a way to “keep track” of employees and make sure that nothing suspicious or illegal is occuring, it can also be seen as an infringement on a person’s privacy. Where a person falls on this argument likely depends on how strongly they feel about having other people read what they have written, as well as their own usage of social media. 

Works Cited

Leonardi, P. M., Huysman, M., & Steinfield, C. (2013). Enterprise social media: Definition, history, and prospects for the study of social technologies in organizations. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(1), 1-19.

Parasocial Relationships

If you’ve spent time online in the past few years, you’ve probably heard the term “parasocial relationship.” You may have even had a few and not known it. A parasocial relationship is a one-sided relationship between a person who devotes their time to a person (or people, or groups of people) who doesn’t even know they exist. Often it takes the form of adoring fans following a celebrity’s career and personal life. In recent years, many people have latched onto internet celebrities, such as YouTube stars or Twitch streamers, but famous musicians, movie stars, and athletes are still a go-to when discussing parasocial relationships. Think about how much you’ve learned about various movie stars throughout the years from reading tabloids, watching gossip TV shows, or just casually browsing Twitter. There’s nothing wrong with taking interest in a person or their work.

               The problem is when it becomes obsessive. A classic example is “teenage girls being in love with boybands.” You don’t have to have ever listened to One Direction to have heard stories of their fans violating their privacy or harassing their significant others. (Note: while “fangirls” may be a well-known example, this behavior is nowhere near exclusive to girls or teenagers. Anyone, of any age or gender, can have a parasocial relationship and get obsessive. Nor is it a behavior that any age or gender automatically has.) When people follow a celebrity’s career so closely for so long, they start to believe they actually know the person. They may assume that through knowing so many things about the person, they have a genuine connection, despite the object of their affection not knowing they even exist. Further, how someone portrays themselves to the media is not actually indicative of who they are as a person. It’s a persona. People naturally modify their behavior to the situations they are in. Just because you’ve listened to someone’s album a hundred times and watched every interview of them on YouTube doesn’t mean you know who they are in person.

               As previously stated, an interest in someone’s career can turn obsessive. This includes stalking, harassing, and even threatening the person at the other end, or the people close to them. It can turn dangerous. People with parasocial relationships may also harass or threaten people for not liking the same person or see them as a “threat” if they appear to be in competition with the other side of the relationship. Think about how intense sports rivalries can get. It’s not unheard of nowadays for celebrities to have their fans dogpile (mass online harassment of a specified target) people saying negative things about them. Things can get particularly hairy with famous online content creators, who many view as more accessible than traditional celebrities due to the online nature. Sometimes, content creators or celebrities will intentionally portray themselves as open and accessible to foster parasocial relationships with their fans. They encourage their fans to view their relationship as a two-way street to maintain a sense of fan loyalty.

               Of course, this isn’t every relationship a person has to a celebrity they like. Often times people are just interested, to varying degrees, in someone’s entertainment career but never gets obsessive over it. It can be innocuous, like knowing which celebrities you share a birthday with (I share mine with the late Stan Lee) or going out of your way to see a movie because you like the lead. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just remember that you do not know the person on the other end.

Ethics and governance in the newsfeed: the New Yorker's "Inside the Making of Facebook's Supreme Court"

It would be difficult to deny the influence and affect that Facebook has on our digital world. With roughly 2.8 billion active users as of the fourth quarter of 2020 (Statista), Facebook allows users the opportunity to connect with and befriend each other, buy and sell goods and services, meet other people with likeminded interests or hobbies, advertise their business, discuss news and world events, share cat pictures, use video, audio and text chats, and more with people from all over the world. Long before Facebook was posting those level of quarterly numbers, however, came the concern of how would the website handle content that was posted that violated their terms of service agreements or even national or international law. (The latter additionally evolved to a more nuanced question -- if posted content violated the law in one country but was acceptable in another, how should that type of content be moderated on the site?) Content could be flagged by algorithms for containing certain objectional content; users could flag material they spot for review; site moderators could comb through, looking for questionable content. Complicated cases or viral content could be escalated up the chain of command, even up to Mark Zuckerberg, who was noted in the New Yorker piece as having said that he ends up dedicating a large portion of his time evaluating high-profile posts that have come under review for content and trying to decide whether or not they should be removed from the site. After Professor Noah Feldman suggested a "Supreme Court" type "quasi-legal" body be added to Facebook to grapple with the more thorny or high-profile concerns around free speech, Zuckerberg suggested that he present it to Facebook's corporate board. Though they had concerns, Zuckerberg defended and ultimately unilaterally ruled to bring the Oversight Board into existence.

With a body of members pulled from many high-profile places -- a former Prime Minister, a Nobel Peace prize winner, professors, White House officials, activists, journalists, and more -- they began to attend trainings and build bonds within the team. Only a few weeks after the board's establishment, however, the Black Lives Matter protests began sweeping across the country, and along with it came numerous controversial posts, including those from the now former president Donald Trump. The board was not even evaluating cases yet, but they debated a particularly controversial post from Mr. Trump that had been removed by Twitter but not by Facebook. In October of 2020, they began evaluating cases from a small percentage of the user base as a way to test out the program. Barely three months later, a deluge of politically-electrified posts running the gamut of the spectrum exploded surrounding the events of the January 6th, 2021 United States Capitol attack. Facebook elected to suspend Mr. Trump's account indefinitely, followed quickly by his permanent ban from fellow social media giant Twitter. A few weeks later, after the inaguration of current president Joe Biden, Facebook opted to submit Mr. Trump's case to the board for their review. According to Politico, Mr. Trump has submitted an appeal, and the case is currently open to the community for comment, with the board opting to extend the comment period due to high interest in the case. They are set to rule on the case in April of this year (Politico).

I find Facebook's Oversight Board to be a very interesting concept. As Kate Klonick from the New Yorker noted, there has not been anything quite like this in recent times -- at least, that I have encountered. Given the notable influence Facebook has as a social platform and tech giant, I think that the idea of separating the ethical, legal and sometimes philosophical challenges from the business and tech side of things makes some sense. Having a dedicated team of people with the knowledge to debate and deliberate on potentially objectionable or inappropriate user content, and having their powers, responsibilities and duties separated from the interests and responsibilities of the business of Facebook allows the decisions to be at least somewhat disentangled from shareholder obligations, business interests and a CEO who does have unilateral power to do things like create an oversight board despite his corporate board's misgivings. This high-profile early case may be this brand-new oversight board's undoing, or it may be just the thing to establish it as a serious tribunal of minds deliberating some of the newest ethics and free speech examples of our time.

Klonick, K. (12 February, 2021). "Inside the Making of Facebook's Supreme Court". The New Yorker.

The Existential Agony of Brand Twitter

It seems a little cynical to think about social media marketing when the purported goal of social media is to be a platform for free expression of individuals. Obviously it's a lot more complicated than that, but Facebook is supposed to be a place to laugh at your old college classmates, right? But in reality, social media makes money. It makes money for the platforms themselves, for a few individual users, and most of all, for advertisers. And I feel like there's a lot of pushback against this idea and honestly, a lot of it is warranted.

This is what brings us to Brand Twitter. If anybody isn't familiar with weird online things, I'll explain. Corporations have been using social media for years, but recently there's been an explosion in corporate social media accounts, especially on Twitter, that present the brand as a very humanized individual. This of course describes the Wendy's Twitter account, which will tell you to fuck off if you insult their burgers, but also includes brands like Sunny D, Burger King, Denny's, etc. Most people just ignore these accounts or occasionally laugh at them (because let's be honest, the Wendy's girl saying the fuck-word is funny), but there's also a pretty big backlash against Brand Twitter and I can understand why.

It feels like a violation, like these brands are lying to people and pretending to be something they're not. And I mean, that's kind of what they're doing. They're not just regular social media users, they're huge companies. Wendy's is not really feuding with Burger King in any organic way, it's a smart marketing ploy to make consumer think about the brands more and maybe even buy more burgers in support of their favorite. A lot of the internet's charm is that it's just regular people doing regular people things. It's entertaining when two people get into an online fight because there's real stakes and real emotions behind it. Wendy's and Burger King may have the surface-level appearance of a feud going, but it's hollow inside. It doesn't satisfy our weird voyeuristic desire to watch two strangers destroy each other in public and it feels like a betrayal.

Does this type of marketing strategy work? I haven't seen the numbers, but I imagine they're pretty positive. Wendy's Twitter has been going 'viral' (if you can even call this artificial type of content viral) for years. But it's always going to rub some people the wrong way because it feels inherently dishonest.

Here's a relevant video on the topic. Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C26Zu8zNvqM&ab_channel=JarvisJohnson

There's more to the hashtag

     When the average person thinks of a "hashtag" and how it is used, their first thought would probably be in reference to twitter or instagram. The use of a hashtag is placing the pound symbol (#) in front of a word, and that post or tweet will be associated with every other post or tweet that share that #hashtag. 

    Social media has tricked us all into indexing and assigning keywords to our posts! Kinda kidding, but interesting concept is it not? Let's say I am a photographer, and when I share my work on my instagram page, I also tag it with the following: #photographer #nature #mountains. Now if I am a regular user who just wants to see some cool pictures of the mountains while I am stuck in my 800 square foot apartment in Brooklyn, all I can do is open up my Instagram app and search through the hashtag. I can come across your image that you posted. 

    What if library patrons could "tag" books in the catalog? I know most ILS/OPAC have ways of searching through subjects, authors, title and more; but sometimes both patrons do not know how to correctly search and MARC records are not as well done as they can be. Imagine a patron checks out a book, reads it, and can add tags so that maybe a patron who wants to read a specific type of story, or even character types that they enjoy reading about. It may be an impossible late night idea, but I think it could be an interesting project for both staff and patrons alike. 

Social Media Basics

Last semester I took a course on web development for information professionals. During that course, I learned a ton about how the internet works and way more HTML than I expected. However, I find myself still learning new things in this first week. It's surprising how much there is to learn about the internet, something we all use on a daily basis. For example, I wasn't entirely familiar with the differences between Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. Sure, I'd heard the terms before and they were briefly touched on in that previous class, but now I feel like I have a much stronger understanding of what they actually mean.

Our current existence in Web 2.X makes a lot of sense as a concept. I'm 23 and I've basically grown up online like many other people my age. The internet has changed a lot since the mid-2000s, shifting from a place where information could simply be accessed to something way more focused on individual content production. When I was a kid, most people simply used the internet to play games or read about topics that interested them. Social media was in its infancy, primarily focused on connecting people who had lost touch offline or allowing for a relatively small personal space that really only existed for pre-existing friends to view. However, now almost every social media user feels a push to create content and gain attention online that previously would have been near impossible. People are almost expected to become bloggers, youtubers, or other active participants in social media from a very young age. This has created all sorts of problems, but also allowed artists of all kinds to amass significant followings and fund their careers. It would be impossible without the change from Web 1.0, which turned the internet into something much more focused on user-generated content and interactivity.

The majority of entertainment that I consume these days is a direct product of this Web 2.X format. I watch a lot of (perhaps too many) Youtube videos and read social media posts by many different users. I've been involved in online fandom for years, reading fanfiction and looking at fanart published on open sharing sites like Archive of Our Own and Tumblr (rip). I still read conventionally published books and watch mainstream movies, but far less frequently than purely online content. I even write my own fanfiction sometimes and post on Twitter regularly. I can see why this format really took off; it allows anyone to gain fame and provides an opportunity for creatives to share their work without many limits.

While I've gained a much greater understanding of Web 2.X, I'm still not sure what Web 3.0 means. Collaboration between people and machines? What would that look like? Is it referring to things like the Youtube algorithm, which takes user watch history and produces new results? I've always been wary of things like that because I fundamentally don't trust robots and don't like that they know what I've watched. That information is private and not for mechanical eyes. I will be the first against the wall in the robot uprising and I accept my fate.

A Social Media Platform for Bibliophiles!

     I think that we all can agree that social media is an integral part of society. Many of us start and end our days using some form of social media to stay in touch with friends and family, near and far. It is a great way to stay in touch, share personal photos, and updates with your friends. 

    What if I told you that there was a social media platform for book lovers?! Yes, dreams really do come true. A few years ago I discovered Goodreads, and reading has never been the same. Goodreads is a great tool to a reader, I originally started using it to track books that I wanted to read. Once I realized other reader friends were using the app, it transformed into a more social tool. Goodreads allows the user to share books that they are reading and their progress; track what they have read, what they want to read; and also get personalized book recommendations based off of your own personal ratings and books read. Adding friends allows you to see what books they are reading and you can like and comment on their progress and "shelve" onto their own lists.

    My goal is to try and incorporate the use of this application to use into my library community where I work. We have used Beanstack, a software program purchased to use for reading challenges within the library which allowed for some social interaction between library patrons to leave reviews on books read and comment within. Patrons provided feedback that they really enjoyed the social aspect of reading and seeing how many books they could stack up during a period of time. Goodreads allows the reader to set yearly goals, which could provide a similar feeling of reading accomplishment but with the added social aspect and eliminating the moderator of library staff. 

    If anyone has used Goodreads or creates an account, add me!  I'd love to see what you're reading😊 

Facebook's tangle with the FTC

Back in December 2020, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) shared a press release stating that they were suing Facebook for violating antitrust legislation and monopolizing the social media playing field. Facebook, which acquired the rival platforms Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp messaging service in 2014 as well as instituted "anticompetitive conditions" for software developers, has used its corporate largesse to eliminate competitors via corporate buyout (FTC). With approximately 2.8 billion active users as of the fourth quarter of 2020 (via Statista), Facebook certainly has a large market share for their numerous services, including their social media webpage side (with profiles, comments, fan pages, business pages, et cetera), their peer-to-peer e-commerce site Facebook Marketplace, and their messaging application, Facebook Messenger (which allows for private and group conversations as well as video and audio chatting.) The range of services they offer could definitely entice someone to log on and spend a significant amount of time on the site (and viewing ads) -- the convenience of wishing your elementary school best friend happy birthday, sending a funny picture of your cat to your sister, putting up an ad to sell your old couch and checking out the menu of the new coffee shop that just opened down the street all in the same session is appealing to users. However, Facebook's reported 2019 profit of over $70 billion makes it difficult to argue that potential competition has little chance of being even a blip on Facebook's radar in terms of sharing customer bases and potential ad revenue. (FTC)

Sometimes people may fall into the trap of thinking of social media platforms as merely a tool -- like a wrench, they allow a user to complete a task or make a task easier. However, they are not just a neutral object, but the product of people and of companies -- people with goals and opinions, and companies that are out to make a profit and thrive. While it takes time and resources to compile evidence and build a case, it is very interesting that it is six years past the WhatsApp acquisition and eight years past the Instagram acquisition that there was finally legal movement to slow the spread of Facebook's influence. While Facebook's user base was still massive in the years of the Instagram and Whatsapp acquisitions -- 1.056 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012 and 1.393 billion in the fourth quarter of 2014, respectively -- perhaps it is not as simple as sheer number of users that spurred the Federal Trade Commission into action (Statistica). The FTC's release notes that Facebook also tried to control the landscape through anticompetitive and strict allowance of use of their application programming interfaces, or APIs, with third party applications. APIs can allow for very fluid and interconnected use of different applications, such as allowing someone to quickly make a profile on a website using their already-signed-in Facebook profile, or allowing a website access to your Facebook profile to post specific content on your behalf on your Facebook wall, such as sharing news articles or quiz results. According to the FTC, however, Facebook would only permit use of certain desireable API functions by a third party web service if that service did not create any functionalities that would compete with Facebook's stronghold on the market, and would not allow them to use these APIs if they supported, advertised or allowed users to use services from competing social media companies on their platform -- essentially telling these third party sites that if they wanted to work with Facebook, they were going to do it only on Facebook's terms, and without allowing any other social media services in on the action. This paints a different picture than just a company that has been wildly successful by providing a much desired service. While it remains to be seen what, if any, action will be taken against Facebook to break up their monopoly on the social media landscape, it will be very interesting to see how the business side of social media changes with opportunity for new ideas and services visible on the horizon.