Hello Universe, and welcome back to my blog. It's been a while, so dust off your propensity for ignoring the ramblings of an adolescent gay and brace yourself for some Opinions.
I have started my fourth semester at University, and I have been reading a lot more than usual the past week. Approximately a bajillion percent increase over the entirety of December, in fact. I fell off the bandwagon hard last year (the first since the creation of my Goodreads account that I failed my annual book goal.) Specifically, I've been reading late nineteenth century literature, which has contained a piercing critique of the Western University. Its mostly fair, and targeted at the incredibly narrow definition of success present in higher education, along with the accusation that university is so incredibly isolated and insular that it cannot meaningful connect with people. With the rise of the internet, however, some very high quality social and artistic critique has fled the university in a different way. Instead of standing in ready and equally inaccessible defiance, blog posts, tweets, and the "Share" button have democratized higher level thought and art by simply making it (almost) free. If you seek it, you no longer need to enroll in a university that costs thousands of dollars annually, or subscribe to an expensive journal. Many forms of knowledge are available with a quick google search, and a well curated social media presence can present a dynamic and highly discoverable intellectual landscape.
The question now becomes how to best engage with this critique, now and in the future. In this blog post, I will attempt to address possible methods of categorization and preservation in what I am increasingly convinced actually is the cyberpunk future. If you are looking for test subjects for your super strong robotic limbs or laser eyes, please contact me.
The first question is how to engage with social media critique in the now. For this to be relevant, you must (1) engage in pop culture of some form. This can be video games, television, social media itself (see below), books, music, journalism, or a myriad of smaller and more niche interests. You must then (2) discover and attach yourself to people who engage in the same culture as you. Sometimes this can come from outside sources - following the author of a particularly interesting oped, or discovering a podcast hosted by someone you know from another podcast which in turn introduces you to a new cohost who is on another podcast who recommends a book... you get the picture. This is one of the most social aspects of "social" media is that so called "content creators" (artists, writers, critics, pundits, etc.) tend to be linked by social and professional connections and will recommend new things to their audience. After securing a baseline community you can (3) disseminate the thoughts of both yourself and others to the community, through the use of composition and sharing, and (4) expand and cater your personal experience through pursuing more specific content (mechanically, removing some from your feed, and following the creators of particularly engaging shared content). This approach is time consuming, but rewarding, for the adequately equipped, economically independent, and high school or better educated audience. Those without those advantages are essentially cut off from these conversations. Despite having a lower upfront cost to engage with than a university, social media demands that you seek specifically the content you need as opposed to informing you of what will be relevant to you through some sort of set curriculum, and has very few opportunities for engaging with those without a basic set of advantages. Those without a computing device with a reliable internet connection, a certain level of privacy and autonomy, and the rhetorical ability to engage with arguments in a respectful and constructive way will struggle to access any of the benefits from social media, while others will simply never know such criticism is present on the platform.
         The Internet has also created new forms of content to critique. The presence of memes in the mass culture dates back to well before the internet, but the democratizing power of social media, and before it forums, promises that iteration is rapid and diverse, with those of many walks of life congregating on a single format, remixing and adapting it until it inevitably fades or, in rare cases, enters the popular lexicon as a new unit of culture. This transformation is almost undocumentable, and is representative of the challenge of collecting and analyzing social media as a whole.
Also pressing to those who would use social media as an outlet for intellectual exploration and expression is the process of archiving works. Who among us has not failed to share an interesting tidbit we read somewhere, or bookmark a good article, only to have it lost to the sands of time? The incredible speed and frequency of creation in a social media environment prohibits the human memory from committing every odd fact that is encountered. We form opinions on the accounts we observe and follow, and yet how often do we have a concrete idea of the events that led to that formulation? Who even is this person whom you have no memory of following? Someone with an interesting one off tweet? Maybe someone who has changed their name and icon, possibly several times? It is impractical for every person to hold a record of their social media, as it is too dynamic. This leaves those who are originating the content to be the bearers of documentation. There are more tools for this, such as timehop, and on the twitter platform tools such as storify help present threads legibly, or the official Twitter product "moments" which can be used by creators or end users. The question still remains, though, what is worth documenting. What will stand the test of time and be relevant a year from now, a decade from now, possibly generations to come? What posts will seem important only to be viewed a waste of hard drive space later on? The choice of what to document becomes equally important as to how to document. There should be no doubt, however, that documentation must be done. Social media is a platform run by corporations, and anything viewed as unprofitable will be inevitably discarded. Posts that are a decade old may be viewed as nostalgic, but as time goes on, will platforms like Facebook and Tumblr really need to maintain posts with zero interactions after almost 20 years? Will these well known platforms now even exist in the future? What if an update to the service makes it impossible to access archives due to broken links?
There are a few solutions to these problems. The first is to take up the responsibility as a creator to document, archive, and preserve all of your work, whether it be in a local digital archive or on paper. The curation is up to the originator, and maybe it will make a good book, but this is ultimately time consuming and can detract significantly from one of the primary values of social media, its ease of use and accessibility. The second solution falls in a similar line, but from the user point of view, it may be valuable to support the durable goods of critics and artists you value, both in order to sustain them but also to  permanently capture some of their thoughts and ideas. It is much easier, after all, to reference an autobiography or book of essays than a tweet circa 2012. The third is less practical, but as a society, we might pressure our institutions to attempt to document these things. If you recall I opened this essay with a brief discussion on the relative democratizing power social media can have on education. While I truly believe this, I also believe that our traditional educational structures, i.e. colleges and universities, are in a position to document, catalog, categorize, curate, and analyze social media interactions. This could include, but not be limited to, academic ethnographies, literary analysis compilations of Amazon reviews, television (which is at the moment truly worthy of academic study) reactions in real time and in the weeks following being recorded, psychological evaluations of the most popular accounts at any given time, and otherwise. There is already significant work into how the presence of the internet is changing our culture, but it is time academia recognize social media not only as a component and purveyor of culture, but an active creator, analyzer, and critic to culture itself.
For further reading on this subject I highly recommend the book SPREADABLE MEDIA by Jenkins, Ford, and Green, for a helpful view into the nature of Social Media. Otherwise, I encourage you to seek out new connections online. In troubled times like this, a lot of insight is to be gained by simply following the retweet trail to the source and seeing if maybe that weird person with a stop watch icon is actually the smartest person you've ever read. Or something.