Social media is rapidly changing the way people communicate and share ideas. Rather than a static book or website that people merely read and absorb, they now have the power, in multiple ways, to talk, tweet, post, blog, or do a quite a number of other things in response. These powers used to be exclusive to the professional until recent achievements in our constant expansion of communication took hold. Academic disciplines in the form of classification by means of the Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress Classification System have fallen wayside to folksonomies much to the dismay of those in academia. The question remains however: Does the strengthening role of amateurs in social media have a negative impact on our community? In most ways, it does not. The rise of the amateur in the digital media realm does lead to a necessary devaluation of the professional not unlike the ideas of Karl Marx. The hierarchy is flattening to a Grassroots driven web community where money is decreasing as a factor and bullshit is being exposed.
The rise of the amateur is creating a grass-roots approach in which the community drives the movement of media. It is a non-traditional power structure, an upheaval against the status quo of only professional creation. Amateurs can participate immediately by merely logging into a number of social networking sites and sharing anything they would like to. Simplicity in many uploading processes has been achieved on websites like Facebook and YouTube. Not only the data itself but the metadata (data about data) is being produced by amateurs as well in the forms of comments and reviews. Designers and manufacturers can look at the responses and cater to the requests that they see or directly enable a participatory design scheme in which all stakeholders are actively involved to ensure that the product satisfies. On websites like Alltop that gather the most popular news stories from every website and organizes them on one page it is fellow readers, not editors, that are deeming what is most important and interesting. People cycle information through the web in this way at an incredible rate of speed that professionals could never keep up with. The new internet is giving people from almost any demographic to post online, since computers with internet access are now available at almost all local libraries. We are being exposed to people who may not have had the opportunity to go to college and become a professional. Anyone has been given the capacity to change the world.
The professionals are scared, and for good reason. Charles Murray, a seasoned and well-known author, recently complained on the American Enterprise Institute blog that his contribution to the co-op page of the New York Times only earned him $75. Media platforms are beginning to recognize that there are many people who would be happy to produce articles, movies, and photographs and post them all over the internet for free. Many productions make up in character what they lose in professional editing techniques, such as the Bed Intruder song on YouTube. Experiments such as these are less restricted because millions of dollars in production costs are not lost when there is a fluke. Millions of videos are posted and while only some catch fire, that ratio is just fine. No longer do amateurs pay for the privilege of enjoying professional content. The content is the currency. This does mean that many parties involved are losing money from these sources but there are ways to cash in. A huge part of the new social media is the tracking of what people want and selling them just that. Social networking creates friends, which in turn creates more business partners and customers for companies. Websites to aid with this are also being created, like Spreadfast. Spreadfast is web-based software that tracks people’s views and interactions on companies pages or blog. This helps companies recognize what the most successful methods are for attracting more attention to their companies. Professional time and commitment still makes content more valuable and there is definitely still a place for it today. I’m not going to stop attending mind-blowing action films containing Batman realistically scaling buildings to sit at home and watch YouTube videos, and I speak on behalf of many more than myself.
The new social media is doing the reputable deed of exposing consumers to bullshit, as well as showing the truth about the way people are these days. Especially since the availability of thousands of reviews for an infinite amount of products, TV shows, movies, and music, advertising by the companies themselves isn’t the only way we can obtain information about what we are going to buy anymore, which is great. There wouldn’t be enough professional reviews to keep up with the mass amounts of products being traded and a variety of opinions from different types of people who use each product wouldn’t be available. People are helping each other out by advising them against buying say, a faulty camera or boring book. In the case of folksonomies, the original creators of the media are the categorizers too. There are user added tags and keywords that people can use to search images. The Dewey Decimal System wouldn’t categorize anything under “dubstep,” because it is a relatively new music genre, but taggers on a music sit would. New names such as this are being created every day. Therefore, tags are a true reflection of society and language. As people continue to tag media, they will become more accurate as people become familiar with the most popular tagging systems. It is argued that astroturfing is a problem with the new internet, but people have always had the ability to be dishonest about their motives. The mass amount of “real” people online are sure to outnumber the astroturfers. As with any media we have gotten in the past, people need to remember to check sources and such before seriously retaining an idea that they read or see anywhere. Transparency has increased since the introduction of social media because companies can be ousted easily by anyone on the internet. I read comments on an article just the other day that it was a scam. Had there been no comment boxes, I’d never have known. Therefore, social media actually decreases the bullshit factor in our day to day lives.
Social Media is a revolution that has created infinite connections of people on the web. People on the opposite sides of the world can come together to make or spread an idea, which is undoubtedly awesome. However, social media can be dangerous when it comes to politics. If someone posted a YouTube video of our president making deals with terrorists, it would become very popular and cause a great deal of uproar. It is much easier to make people hate by giving them something they are ready to believe, than to make them think. When it comes to topics like politics, perhaps only professionals should have the right to talk because many political groups do have the manpower to spread faulty ideas. Besides that, I fully support social media. Even the ambiguities of tags in folksonomies that some librarians may complain about really only bring people to the unexpected. I love “stumbling” (www.stumbleupon.com) and finding something completely unrelated to what I was looking for and being pleasantly surprised. Social Media brings people back to having a part in what they see, rather than just sitting on a couch and taking it in. This new system supports Karl Marx’s ideas because it is moving from the fragments of media and information given only by professionals to the complete and real picture of how people in society are talking and operating. The hierarchy of who can say what has been flattened. Marx also believed that creating rules for a system after it has been created can cause some serious problems. Producers of technology should consider that before they keep pushing these social media boundaries.
