If you were anywhere near Twitter yesterday afternoon, you would have caught a whiff of the biggest poo storm since that Jessica Leandra dos Santos racism debacle two weeks ago.
The painting that turned SA into a nation of art critics - of the one prominently depicting the president's “manhood” - was defaced under suspicious circumstances. The news broke, as it has been wont to do in recent times, on Twitter. Within minutes, all Twitter feeds were clogged. The content varied: some tweets were adding facts, some were re-tweeting the news itself, most were offering opinions. Eventually, the joke tweets started, and then finally, the bloggers posted links to their own personal rants of indignation. No matter what the form, however, the majority of South African tweets for at least three hours contained a variation of the words “President Zuma's Spear”; the ones that didn't were ignored.
Right now we live in a golden age where we get the best of both worlds - news compiled and packaged for us, and news our social circles choose for us. How long though until our fondness for what we prefer to know about completely takes over from what might be less pleasant or cool to know?
Tallulah Habib, social media activist
It's hardly surprising that we act this way on Twitter. As human beings, we are naturally influenced by each other. The phenomenon was defined within the field of social psychology long before Twitter or the Internet. It's called “informational social influence” and it states that we use the information given to us by others to validate our own judgements and opinions. It stands to reason then that whenever something big and controversial happens, we feel a visceral need to express ourselves on social media. It's just an extension of what we've always done. Whereas, prior to the convenience of tweeting from your desk, you would have gone for a smoke/coffee break to exchange opinions with colleagues, or phoned a friend when you heard some topical titbit, you now have access to a much larger sea of opinions. One that's oh-so-easy to wade into. And just as easy to drown in.
Some other interesting things were happening in SA yesterday, former AWB leader Eugene Terre'Blanche's murder trial ended; Dragon, the first commercial space capsule, was launched towards the International Space Station by a South African-born entrepreneur; huge government misspend by the Gauteng MEC was revealed. None of these news pieces could shoulder in between the outraged, hyperbolic cries about a painting. The rules of majority influence, the same rules that govern what's fashionable to wear and what songs play on radio, kicked in. The spear was “in”, all other topics were out.
One of the great things about social media is social recommendation. Our news gets selected and compiled for us by those who we trust, by those who share our interests. The content we see is tailored more effectively than any news site has managed yet. But at what cost?
Andrew Keene, author of the polemic text “Cult of the Amateur”, states it nicely in an interview with NPR: “Once we undermine the authority and expertise and professionalism of mainstream media, all we have is opinion, chaos, a cacophony of amateurs.”
While Keene is known for his one-sided view of user-generated content, we can't ignore the fact that we have indeed started to see more and more “cacophonies” - Zuma's spear being only the latest example. Remember Kony2012? How about the 7NewWonders? And I've already mentioned Jessica Leandra dos Santos. Does it not seem that the Internet, the technology that has enabled us to broaden our minds, is actually narrowing them? As we turn to social media, blogs and aggregated search results to find out what's happening in the world, are we not simply buying into what the popular, fashionable topic of the day is?
Of course, the old media model - the one whereby an editor, somewhere, made decisions for us - is flawed, too. But at least in the broadsheet newspapers we were given different sections, a product that combined that which we were interested in with topics we may not have been - but may have discovered we were actually interested in quite by accident.
Right now we live in a golden age where we get the best of both worlds - news compiled and packaged for us, and news our social circles choose for us. How long though until our fondness for what we prefer to know about completely takes over from what might be less pleasant or cool to know? From content that goes against our personal beliefs or is less exciting, controversial or naked? How long before the mainstream media, in a desperate bid to maintain profit margins, starts to give us only what we want and nothing else?
We're so worried about great firewalls of countries, but maybe we should be more worried about the walls we're putting up for ourselves.
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