Twitter and Purpose

People seem to be of many minds when it comes to the 'purpose' of social media. I say purpose in quotes because I don't mean the purpose of social media companies, I mean the purpose of the platforms themselves. Like all companies, Twitter and Facebook and all the rest exist primarily to make money, that purpose is about as clear as it gets. But the purpose of the platform Twitter is a lot more murky. Is it a recreational activity? A place to promote goods and services? A networking tool? Different people have different ideas of what it's truly meant to be and when those ideas conflict, things don't always go smoothly.

The concept of professionalism on social media is both loved and reviled. People are mocked for being too formal, but also mocked for being too casual in certain circumstances. I get it, it's jarring to see a respected professional say the fuck-word on Twitter and it's weird when some random person runs their account like they're holding court. Fundamentally it's a conflict of purpose. If you think social media is for fun self expression, you won't like it when someone refuses to open up in the slightest. If you think it's for promoting yourself in a professional way, you won't like very unprofessional behavior. There are social media platforms like LinkedIn that make their purpose very clear, but platforms like Twitter take a more Swiss army knife approach. Twitter is for whatever you want to use it for, which means that very different people are always going to come into conflict with each other.

The Importance of Social Media to Society During the Pandemic

     We all can recognize the importance that social media has in our lives and the role that it plays. When we look back on the last year of our lives, I think that we can all agree that social media was somewhat of a positive factor in many peoples lives. At the end of the day, social media was created to keep people connected that can't always be physically near. 

    Humans bond over shared experiences, and quarantining during a pandemic is definitely an experience people across the world had to suffer through. Social media acted as some peoples main communication between friends and family members both near and far.  Facebook introduced the "care" button during the pandemic, a new reaction showing a smiley face hugging a heart. While this may seem trivial, to many an emoji hugging a heart was a way to send an emotion and an action that was for many impossible to convey otherwise. When talking about the new emoji, Facebook product manager Misbah Uraizee explains, "Love already works really well. But we also tried to find a reaction that can work for use cases where it's not purely about love, like when someone wants to show an emotion like sympathy, support, or care. Something beyond Love.” Social media is also a great place to share content. Many were able to get lost in the TikTok trends and stay entertained that way, others were able to find a relatable comic and share it with family and friends. 

Across the Web and Down the Street

So much has been said about social media and the Internet's ability to bring people together across incredible distance -- we can wish a friend happy birthday in Belize, fire off an email to a colleague in London and then take a turn in a game of Words With Friends with your sister in California, all from the comfort of your New York home. But what happens when your social network is centered around being around the corner and down the street? NextDoor is a social networking site centered around neighborhoods, allowing communities to connect and communicate online instead of through the time-honored method of stapling a flier to a telephone pole. As you might expect, people use it in a variety of ways -- advertising their local plowing or dog-walking businesses, selling unwanted items, sharing photos of lost pets and found mementos, complaining about the person who doesn't clean up after their dog, and asking for local recommendations. During the pandemic, however, use of the site ramped up, both for better and for worse. CNN ran an article on March 18th, 2020 by Samantha Murphy Kelly, right as the United States was locking down, about how rapidly usage on the site was changing in light of the pandemic. Some users saw the site as an opportunity to make a quick buck or trade high-demand goods for their own needs. Hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and cleaning supplies like Lysol wipes were difficult to obtain (and though we may not have realized this on March 18th, but would be nearly impossible to get for weeks and even months after this article's publication.) Selling these sought-after goods to your neighbors is an ethically dicey situation, particularly when combined with rocketing prices for the most in-demand items, but many newfound entrepreneurs used the site to profit from pandemic fears and shortages.

On the reverse of this, however, were people using the site to help out their fellow neighbors. Unlike Facebook, in which your social circle may live all over the world and are often people you already know, such as friends and family, NextDoor consists of people in your neighborhood who you may not know at all (or only know as "the person down the street who really needs to get their truck's muffler fixed.") Some people, seeing the unrest and fear swirling through their streets as the country began to understand the seriousness of what we were dealing with, used NextDoor as a way to check in on their neighbors and their community. Some reached out with offers to grocery shop, pick up medicine or run important errands for elderly people, immunocompromised people, those who were quarantined from exposure or a positive test result.

Even for users who limited their interactions strictly to online-only, the pandemic brought about a big increase in a behavior long-present in both online and in-person social behavior: the spread of misinformation. While conversations about how misinformation spreads through online communities and social networks are not new, well-known platforms with global audiences, such as Twitter and Facebook, often have at least some form of method for identifying and annotating or removing such misinformation to prevent its spread. Additionally, these user pools may contain people knowledgeable in the fields of the alleged information who may choose to dispute or discredit these posts in their comment sections or by posting to their connections in an attempt to mitigate the harm of the misinformation. On NextDoor, however, the communities tend to be smaller, as they are made up of people in a neighborhood. While a post on Facebook about a supposed COVID cure might go viral and have a nationally known and trusted medical professional respond to debunk it, that is a lot less likely on NextDoor -- unless you live down the street from a celebrity doctor.

NextDoor may make the internet feel a lot more local, but the COVID pandemic has highlighted some of the holes in the plan. This site can bring people together and encourage neighbors to help each other, but it also is a place where scams, schemes and misinformation can spread.

Social media and the People

 In this age of technological advancement, it shouldn’t be surprising that people are using social media to “connect” with others. When I set up my Instagram account (against my will), I immediately received a message from someone whom I haven’t seen since middle school, which came as a shock to me. It wasn’t that I was shocked that somebody from my past found me on social media--I was just surprised that she found me so quickly.

The ability to find people with a mere search bar is one of the most fascinating things about social media, as well as the most dangerous. It’s all well and good if you’re looking up someone you used to be friends with, or if you’re just looking for that casual friendship that comes from liking and boosting certain posts; it’s quite another thing when the searcher is somebody who has less than benevolent intentions. That’s not even getting into the friend requests from people you either don’t know or don’t like, or the people make social media their own personal battlefield. In my opinion, social media is a tool that you have to be careful with, which is a definition that varies from person to person.

DM For Cheap Promo: Native Advertising Disguising Itself As Reviews

If you currently use Twitter, you might have clicked on a viral tweet or two, scrolled down, and saw the author of the original tweet post something about a green tea face peel or something along those lines. There are a few things for sale that typically pop up in these scenarios, such as a stuffed squid you can turn inside out to make look happy or sad, or a galaxy lamp. There is always a link to buy them. For awhile I didn’t understand why I was seeing these. For a while I thought they were just really popular products that consumers felt strongly about. I was wrong. It is, of course, a “new” type of advertising. The people whose tweets go viral are being paid to advertise these products.

 

It isn’t really surprising. As the digital landscape changes, advertising needs to change to keep up. It’s well known that on Instagram, companies will hire social media influencers to sell various products, whether explicitly in an ad or by having the product in posts. On YouTube, companies will sponsor videos for popular creators. The same sort of advertising would have to crop up on Twitter eventually. The biggest difference, to my understanding, is that in the other cases with Instagram and YouTube, the company and the influencer have more of a professional relationship. There are often contracts involved. But with the Twitter case, it’s usually a one-off deal. You go viral once and a company contacts you, asks you to plug their product below your viral tweet for some quick cash, and that’s it. Sometimes people will even announce they’re willing to sell space under their viral tweet by saying something along the lines of “DM for cheap promo.” Reading that once is actually what tipped me off to the fact that the product tweets were advertising. It’s not frowned upon to do this. In today’s “hustle” culture, people are encouraged to take whatever deals they can for extra money. Making a quick buck off a good joke or witty observation is fine.

 

If the Instagram and YouTube promotion deals are official, with contracts, then the Twitter users making promotions like this are like freelancers. They aren’t officially tied to the companies or anything, but they still do a bit of work for them in exchange for money. It’s all part of how advertising is adapting. Native advertising needs to look more and more like word-of-mouth advertising. People are more likely to purchase something or try a service if they’ve seen or heard good reviews than if they just see the advertisement. By camouflaging these advertisements as endorsements and reviews, the companies are using social capital they wouldn’t have otherwise. However, it can’t pass for this forever. People will realize, probably faster than I did, that since the same few products keep popping up in the same ways, that it’s native advertising. To my knowledge, the companies using this advertising technique aren’t big companies. It’s not like Nike or Apple are doing this. It’s companies that need as many people to see their products for as cheap as possible.

Dunbar's Number

One of the most interesting ideas in this unit's lectures was Dunbar's number, a concept I've seen floated before using other words. If you don't remember what I'm talking about, it's the idea that people can only maintain about 150 meaningful relationships at a time. Where I've seen it before was in an old article from the humor website Cracked, where the author proposed the concept independent of any academic knowledge and dubbed it the monkeysphere, since it's a holdover from early human evolution. It's really cool to see that this idea, which I found very insightful, actually has some scientific basis.

The humor article in question wasn't about social media exactly, it was more about the problem of online harassment. Back then it was mostly an issue in the comment sections of articles, but constant social media usage has really pushed it to the forefront in recent years. I don't mean that in the 'cancel culture' way you hear from politicians. People talking back to those in power is a perfectly normal political process. I mean harassment of ordinary people who don't have power. The original article I read introduced the 'monkeysphere' aka Dunbar's number to explain why so many people feel comfortable being awful to strangers online. In short, their brains are out of room for new people and make it hard to see some random online stranger as a full human.

I have a lot of experience with online harassment, mostly in fandom contexts, and definitely true that the people who participate in it don't see their targets as human beings. There's a very strong level of dehumanization required to do some of the awful stuff I've seen and most of them have no trouble expressing it in explicit terms. They will say the words "you're not human" and show all signs that they fully believe it. So while Dunbar's number only applies to meaningful relationships rather than larger questions of worldview, I think there's probably a logical extension of the theory that deals with seeing the humanity of others as well. It could be a larger number than 150 or something more complicated that includes stuff like in-group out-group dynamics, but I agree that the human brain most likely has a hard limit to the number of people it can understand at once. At some point, we just stop thinking of others as fully human. Most of the time that's really not too important, but it can definitely get dangerous.

Social Media Highlights: Letterboxd

When you think of a social networking site, you might think of Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Perhaps you think of earlier incarnations of the websites that digitally connect us, such as Myspace or Friendster. But as the social web has developed and connected so many of us to each other, many social networking sites beyond the most popular and generalist ones have popped up, including ones centered around a common interest -- such as watching movies.

Letterboxd (letterboxd.com) is a social networking sites for movie aficionados. The free membership allows you to track, rate, and review movies you have seen, make lists of movies for yourself or other people to browse, follow other people for their reviews and activity, 'like' lists and reviews, and keep a diary of your film-watching. Upgrading to a pro membership (currently $19 USD per year) most notably allows you to have no third-party ads and access to additional statistics about your film watching and site activity, as well as filtering films by what streaming services they are on and getting notified when films you want to watch become available on said streaming services. Additionally, some minor but useful actions also become available to you such as pinning reviews on your account, filtering your activity feed by type of post, duplicating lists, and changing your username, which are nice extras. There is one additional account level type, the patron account ($49 USD per year); this allows you primarily to visibly support the website via your name's inclusion on the patron website, some fun cosmetic upgrades such as being able to add a background to your account, and early access to beta features on the site. While this final account type would likely mostly appeal to power users and does not offer the practical upgrade of features that the pro account upgrade does, the perks do offer a fun way to support the site and flex on your fellow movie buffs a little bit.

It should be said that I am not truly a movie buff in the way that most of Letterboxd's users seem to be. However, even as a casual movie fan, this website offers interesting content. While browsing the site for this review, I found myself very drawn to the user-created Lists section. These lists seem to run the gamut from informative to humorous to extremely niche and back again. As a sample, the top three lists on the highlighted display of lists that are "Popular this week" are:

• Guide to Film Movements (History of Art Cinema)
• All films Scorsese mentions in his "Il Maestro" essay
• Movies Jared Leto should be nominated for

The last one is an empty list and at time of this posting, has garnered over 2700 likes and 100 comments, dwarfing the responses to the other two lists for the week.

One other thing that I found both notable and delightful about Letterboxd is that you do not actually have to have an account to browse the content users have posted. So if you are not a huge movie buff but your brother-in-law keeps raving about how good a certain flick is, or if you are a public librarian suddenly finding themselves needing to bolster your library's collection of horror films when your tastes tend more towards the Rom-Com section, Letterboxd would allow you to browse reviews for specific titles and see how fans of a genre categorize and review both the titles you have heard of and the ones you know nothing about. Tech-savvy movie buff patrons might also appreciate the website suggestion for tracking their personal watch lists and finding new films as well. Overall, I think that Letterboxd is a neat site that integrates useful social networking site features into a site that can bring film fans together.