On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 10:24 PM, Mark Andrejevic <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:markbandrejevic@gmail.com">markbandrejevic@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><br>"What kind of information will be prioritized and made available via the "social graph" if this is clearly governed by and subordinate to commercial imperatives? How might a Facebook social graph differ from one that was not crafted according to commercial imperatives? These are the same questions we once asked about how commercial imperatives structures the news and information made available via commercial media outlets. It surely retains its relevance and urgency in the online context, yet we don't seem to ask it as much)."<br>
<br>Mark, these are all excellent questions. A few vaguely coherent thoughts in response...<br><br>- re general critiques of advertising and marketing to children, of the kind that were common a few decades ago but are now almost extinct...yes how much we have changed! My father was a pioneer in educational television but also wrote TV series based on GI Joe and Strawberry Shortcake, both essentially glorified marketing gimmicks, (which he hated but which paid the bills), and for a while I did both as well, so that tension and discourse is something I feel I've known my whole life. And although I used to loathe advertising, and I still cherish any situation without it, I have also spent a lot of time as an entrepreneur and business consultant and I have seen just how useful and in some cases necessary it is. It is one of the most powerful business models we have, for better or worse, often worse, but still, it has its place. And as that place has grown exponentially in the past decades we should at least be clear that protecting kids from marketers is at this point basically non-existent. In large measure due to the fact that marketers were quickest to understand that the web is a social medium defined by relationships, and so they have colonized it very effectively. Much faster than have, for example, educational institutions or governments. (I would argue that this is because neither are defined by relationships but rather by monological literate values that are not compatible with the dialogical web, but that is my bone and I will not pick it here.) I would consider advocating reducing the impact of marketing on kids not by ineffectively regulating it but by building up the relational capabilities of our public sphere online so as to put the commercial sphere into a more reasonable and productive social perspective. Right now facebook is dominant in part because there is such a dearth of leadership and vision in other areas.<br>
<br>- You ask: "What kind of information will be prioritized and made available via the
"social graph" if this is clearly governed by and subordinate to
commercial imperatives?"<div><div><br></div>As regular readers of my comments here know, I believe we can find some answers to questions like this by examining the social dynamics of oral cultures, because they share common dialogical characteristics with digital cultures. So, for example, in oral cultures, interpersonal encounters are essential to commerce, as are personal relationships. Talk and transaction are mutually dependent. It is not the case that one exploits the other but rather that social and commercial interactions coexist, and coexist fruitfully. In our western - read: literate - commercial context, most commercial transactions are anonymous, involving minimal talk and no meaningful interpersonal relationships. The cashier does not really exist as a person but as an instrument of an economic system ruled by paper (cash, inventories, price lists, schedules, etc.) not people. When you buy something at a store you do not genuinely 'meet' the cashier. But when you buy something in any oral culture - at a market in rural Thailand or Morocco or Peru or India - it is exceedingly poor manners to not engage with the seller as an individual. In many cases, it is required. Things don't have prices listed on them. You have to ask. You have to bargain or you are both rude and foolish. You have to chat, taste, joke, look into each other's eyes. You have to get to know one another. And that's if you are a stranger! If you are a local, you are buying something from someone you have purchased from for years, and each transaction is a further installment of a long-standing relationship. Anyway, as I guess you can tell, my point is that we lived for countless generations with this integration of talk and transaction, and we liked it. Now, we live with anonymous transactions, and we like those. But neither is essentially better than the other. If the future involves new kinds of socialized commerce, ones that balance talk and transaction in new ways, we may get to like those too, and we should not assume that just because commerce is no longer anonymous that it will be inherently bad. Of course neither is it inherently good. But it is different from what we know.<br>
<br>Cheers<br>John<br>--<br><a href="http://www.youareyourmedia.com">www.youareyourmedia.com</a><br></div>