In his band’s debut single, “Losing My Edge,” LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy worries, as the title suggests, that he is is growing old and that “the kids are coming up from behind.”
Murphy’s fear is a universal one. On some level we all want to be cool and we all face insecurity as we get older. We worry that we are out of touch and that we don’t know what’s trendy and relevant. In our face-paced society, we are constantly looking for something newer and cooler. In fields that move at an accelerated pace, such as social media, the effects are amplified. As new platforms appear, old ones disappear overnight.
Social media platforms come and go, but the needs they meet have always existed - social media only re-imagines and reinterprets them. I chose to start this post with the song “Losing My Edge” because Murphy reflects this idea. Even though he feels old around all the young kids, he asserts “But I was there,” as if to say, “I may be older, but we aren’t so different.”
In the spirit of “Losing My Edge,” in a series of posts I will take three concepts associated with social media and explain how these practices have always existed and explain how social media re-imagines them.
When I first started outlining my thoughts, a simple critical analysis seemed daunting, so I decided to mix it up.
I love music blogs (and I even wrote a fashion and music blog all this semester), so I wanted to combine that interest with my analysis of these social phenomena. So instead of strictly relying on traditional scholarly articles, I will use the lyrical content from songs to support and enhance my arguments. I know it may seem like a gimmick, but the more I have experimented with this the more please and surprised I have been by the results. I hope that this creative approach will not only provide unique insight, but also spark some debate. The concepts I chose to look at, much like the music I discuss, are open to interpretation.
Terms such as participatory culture and viral media get thrown around a lot when discussing social media, but considering how quickly online media evolve, few agree on the definitions or dynamics of these type of phenomena. Personally, I find Henry Jenkins’ term “spreadable media” to be most appropriate because it address the active role users play in spreading and creating content. Where as scholars such as Clay Shirkey tend to imply that users lack agency in spreading content, Jenkins recognizes user contributions and puts them at the forefront of his theory.
Before delving into the ways social media enhance our ability to create and spread content, I want to explain how this desire has always existed. While I don’t think a whole lot of people would argue against the assertion that people have always wanted to create and share content, I still want to offer The Knife’s “Pass This On” as an illustration of how this need functioned in a social media-less world.
In this pre-social media context, content spreads through simple, hierarchal patterns. In “Pass This On” the narrator asks somebody to pass on a message through a chain of command. This kind of orderly communication depends on concentrated information being distributed in a systematic way, as Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom outline in their book, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.
Social media releases us from this hierarchy and allows us to quickly disseminate media through a web-like structure. When content gets spread to a huge number of people through social media, we often call it “viral,” but Jenkins rejects and renames this phenomenon. Whereas the term “viral media” implies that people get injected with a hypodermic needle of content, Jenkins’ term “spreadable media” implies action on behalf of users. Though it is somewhat abstract, Dirty Projector’s song “Cannibal Resource” provides a portrait of this concept.
While the song is purposely vague, the lines “I think you’re more than a terrified witness / Behind the arbitrary line” summarize my main point. With spreadable media users both create and consume content, so the line between the two roles constantly blurs, and is, in that sense, arbitrary. The narrator’s assertion that “I think you’re more than a terrified witness” supports this interpretation and rejects the idea that consumers are passively implanted with media and information.
While not quite as explicitly stated, “Cannibal Resource” rejects the idea that information spreads hierarchically with the lines “Look around at everyone / Everyone looks alive and waiting.”
In the following verse, the narrator asks, “Can it ask a question? / Can it sing a melody? / Can it be interpreted? / Or is it more than what the eye can see?” These lines emphasize the agentive role of people in spreading media. Furthermore, they hint at users’ ability to jumble and remix content. Before users’ ability to affect content was limited (e.g. how the narrator in “Pass This On” simply asked for her message to be transmitted). But now, Jenkins asserts in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, users can opt to remix and edit content before retransmitting it.
Beyond transferring and editing content, users have also been empowered with the ability to create entirely new content with unsurpassed ease. Santigold’s “Creator” serves as a prime illustration.
Again, people have always been creating content, but social media exponentially amplifies their ability to spread it beyond their geographic vicinity. Lyrics like “Here all the folks come ask about me / Band wagon, know they used to doubt me / Blind side tend to hit real hard” and “Creepin’ in just like an itch” suggest the sudden, intense way in which users spread media through social media.
Brafman, Ori & Beckstrom, Rod A. (2006). The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. New York, NY: Penguin Books.
Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York, NY: NYU Press.
Jenkins, Henry (2009). If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead. Retrieved November 1, 2011 from http://www.henryjenkins.org/2009/02/if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html
Shirky, Clay (2008). Here Comes Everybody. New York, NY: Penguin Books.
Despite my personal lack of involvement in the social media world, I am continually fascinated with it primarily insomuch as a tool for the presentation of oneself. As David Buckingham argues in Youth Identity, and Social Media, social media tools allow users to create another version of their identity in public. This need to publicly validate one’s identity comes with the cost of having to make choices which will form this identity. This process leads to insecurity about how others will receive this identity. St. Vincent, in her song “The Neighbors,” simply and elegantly articulates these concerns.
While St. Vincent doesn’t discuss the implications of choices made in identity information in social media, she does establish the fundamental concerns all users face. “Oh no! What would your mother say? / Oh no! What would your father do? / Oh no! What would the neighbors think? / Oh no! If they only knew.” The insecurities and uncertainties associated with maintaing a public identity have always existed, but they have even greater relevance in the world of social media. As social media sites, Facebook in particular, push for more and more user transparency, what we chose and chose not to say about ourselves remain major concerns. Even posting strictly utilitarian information on Facebook such as a news story contributes to online identity formation. Therefore every online action must grapple with “what the neighbors would think.”
As we continue to share and post information we build a personal brand. The Velvet Underground and Nico, in their classic “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” illustrate this process.
The lines “And what costume shall the poor girl wear, to all tomorrow’s parties? / A hand-me-down dress from who knows where, to all tomorrow’s parties / And where will she go and what shall she do when midnight comes around?” serve as examples of the types of questions when maintaing an online presence. On Facebook, every musician, TV show, movie, book, and page one “likes” contributes to brand formation.
This process is further complicated by the nature of connections on Facebook. The average user has several-hundred friends, not all of who are necessarily close, offline connections. As such, much of this brand-building is the main source through which other users learn about a person. These types of connections are reminiscent of The WELL, a community in which most people did not know one another face-to-face at all. Instead their online identities were their only identities. Even though data shows that most users use social media tools to reinforce pre-existed offline connections, the importance of online impression management is still vital, especially in cases when users’ connections are strictly online.
While it may seem counterintuitive that the opinions of offline connections are of any importance, our voyeuristic tendencies cause us to be endlessly fascinated with one another. Joy Division’s “Atrocity Exhibition” serves as an excellent musical illustration of these natural tendencies which social media exacerbate.
The chorus, “This is the way, step inside” beckon appeals to the voyeur in all of us. The lines “...doors open wide / Where people had paid to see inside / For entertainment they watch his body twist / Behind his eyes he says, ‘I still exist.’” remind me of the inherently consummatory nature of voyeurism, but go a step further.
The protagonist in the song wants to reaffirm that he “still exists,” implying that the person we are watching is not the real him. This lyric articulates the conflict between between presentation online and reality. Ultimately, an online profile can never be a true representation of the person, no matter how hard we may try to make it so.
Social Media facilitates an entirely new way to create, preserve, and interpret memory. Bloggers document their lives in diary-style posts, Flickr users upload and aggregate photos from events, Facebook users chronicle their lives through statuses, posts and photos, and Twitter users tweet about anything and everything. All of these activities, while on a micro level are quite ordinary, together create a paradigm shift in memory.
In a more primitive, pre-social media world, the desire to preserve still existed. The ways a person could do so, though, were considerably different. As an illustration of this now past age, I offer the song “Coconut” by Fever Ray. The song, while written only a few years ago, offers a quaint illustration of the traditional model of the creation and sharing of memory.
The narrator, who sings about being told stories she “now dream[s] of,” only experiences the memories in her dreams, which is to say on a micro level. The lines “Open atmosphere / Take me anywhere / Take me there,” suggest a physical and mental distance from whatever memories she references.
Where as “Coconut” offers a simple tale about memory, Laurie Anderson’s “The Beginning of Memory” conjures up a wildly different image.
Anderson’s visual of the “deafening” sound of “songbirds everywhere” serves as an illustration of the chaos presented by the vastness of human experiences. Even though the natural desire to share and preserve memory has always existed, the tools to capture and organize memory continue to be re-imagined with social media. Without a doubt the most important mechanism to organize and collect memory is tagging. A fundamental element of Flickr and Twitter, the ability to tag content not only organizes the chaos of millions of users’ content, it also allows others to easily find it. As Anderson puts it in her song, “...before this no one could remember a thing / They were just constantly flying in circles / Constantly flying in huge circles.”
“The Beginning of Memory” specifically mentions another crucial element of social media sites. In the song, the lark protagonist decides to bury her father in the back of her head in order to remember him. In much the same way, sites such as Facebook allow users to collectively memorialize the dead. As Max Kelly explains, putting content online to memorialize a deceased person helps reinforce and preserve current memories. While much more personal than aggregating photos from an event on Twitter, it still serves as a compelling example of social media’s role in changing the way we experience memory.
When many people come together to memorialize somebody, collective perspectives and experiences are created. Intentionally or not, Kate Bush illustrates this pattern of behavior in her song “King Of The Mountain,” which reflects on the enigmatic nature of Elvis.
The second verse, in which Bush sings “And there’s a rumor that you’re on ice / And you will rise again someday. / And there’s a photograph / Where you’re dancing on your grave,” suggests the creation of a collective memory of one person based on the aggregation of individual experiences. Even though in the case of Elvis the experiences appear to be made-up, the idea illustrates the main tenants of collective memory. This memory aggregates into the metaphor of the wind whistling through the house.
Kelly, M. (2009, October 26). Memories of Friends Departed Endure on Facebook. Retrieved December 3, 2011, from http://www.facebook.com/blog.php?post=163091042130
McCarthy, Caroline (2009 October 26). With 'memorialized' profiles, Facebook sees dead people. Retrieved December 3, 2011 from http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10383015-36.html
van Dijck, José (2010). Flickr and the Culture of Connectivity. University of Amsterdam: Memory Studies
