A Menace to Society

What exactly do we mean by "social" in the context of social media? At the simplest level, it suggests communication between people that is not necessarily goal-oriented. In other words, it's not about communicating a specific message, in the manner of a phone-call or text, so much as being sociable: chatting, musing, ranting. But it also implies a broader field of participation: a public rather than private conversation. This in turn means that we see it as a reflection of society, albeit a fragmented and incoherent one. But despite this, we're reluctant to acknowledge that it reflects actual social relations, despite power being front and centre (likes, blocking, pile-ons etc). We might ruefully acknowledge our role as digital peons, providing the content that will be exploited by others, but this is a misleading analogy because none of us are forced to work the digital fields and what we receive in terms of utility is vastly greater than our individual contribution of toil. What we shy away from are the structural assumptions inherent to social media about authority and the degree to which we are complicit in establishing and defending its hierarchy of regard. 

Vulgar technological determinism would have you believe that social media has changed society, and may even have gone so far as to "rewire our brains" (a direct descendant of the belief that travelling in steam trains at 30 mph would physically alter the human body), but in reality it has simply made more obvious what was already there. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer put it in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, "the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest". Consequently, any new technology will reflect existing social relations, even as it reforms historical dispositions of power. Old media firms are replaced by new media firms, but capitalism remains. This is so obvious that it is rarely stated, but it's actually an example of hegemony. If you imagine that capitalism is simply human nature ("hardwired" in our brains), you won't question whether it is historically-contingent and therefore may have temporal limits. A technology that undermined or bypassed capitalism then becomes inconceivable. 

This allows supporters of capitalism to criticise the technology, even to the extent of characterising it as a menace to society (making us stupid, eroding democracy etc), without questioning the fundamental social relations that have given rise to it and which it embeds. As Adorno and Horkheimer put it, talking about the culture industry of the 1940s, "It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself". Lacking any social explanation, this coercion can then be attributed to personal motives, such as greed or partisanship. We're all familiar with the liberal charge-sheet: Facebook manipulates the credulous for financial gain; political bad-guys use social media to foment hate and convince people to vote against their best interests; Twitter empowers mobs and encourages bullying. What tends to be missing from this analysis is any recognition that social media reflects pre-existing conditions: that Facebook is fundamentally no different to General Motors or that Twitter has no more obligation to society than any capitalist business. 

Old media companies are keen that new media companies should be considered publishers not simply because this will require them to accept responsibilities that will help "level the playing field" commercially, but because the distinction reinforces the claim of old media that it faithfully fulfils those responsibilities itself. The counter-claim of social media firms that they are merely platforms is actually a claim that they are genuinely neutral, because disinterested, which casts the old media's commitment to even-handedness and "speaking truth to power" in a less than flattering light. The social media firms' gradual adoption of their duties as gatekeepers is presented by liberal opinion as not simply the rectification of a market imperfection but as a progressive contribution to society. This contribution takes the form of mitigating social ills that have been "thrown up" or "unleashed" by the technology, as if those behaviours and attitudes characterised as ills either didn't exist hitherto or were simply latent.

This tendency to blame the tool inevitably leads to both an over-inflation of the technology's capability and an exaggeration of its harms. We saw a classic case of this during the week when the Information Commissioner's Office published the results of its long-awaited investigation into Cambridge Analytica. Despite the extensive and often breathless reporting on the company and its dealings over the last four years, this passed almost without notice because the ICO unsurprisingly concluded that there really wasn't anything to see here. Cambridge Analytica's actual "crime" was to have over-sold the common technology that enabled its services. The suggestion that the Russians swung the EU referendum and the 2016 US Presidential election was always absurd, yet it was pursued seriously by mainstream journalists (to the point where it became indistinguishable from conspiracy theory in some cases) essentially because they were unwilling to admit that the business model of commercial data analytics is 90% bullshit.

This makes for an interesting contrast with the coincidental tale of Public Health England's Excel spreadsheet, which revealed the messy reality of much technology in practice. After various banking fiascos in recent years, it shouldn't have come as a surprise that mission-critical systems sometimes rely on outdated software, often lashed-up and poorly understood by its minders. This is partly a result of the "If it ain't broke" mentality, but it also suggests a reluctance to risk updating something that works because quite how and why it works isn't fully understood due to poor documentation, inadequate testing and plate-spinning in an organisation where executive priorities are volatile. After decades of outsourcing and austerity, it also shouldn't come as a surprise to learn that the state lacked a modern, thoroughly-tested system for managing a pandemic, despite this being near the top of the list of civil threats. For all its fetishisation of technology (that world-beating app), or perhaps because of it, it is clear that the government is poor at systems-thinking.

The PHE incident also highlighted the extent to which process integrity can be compromised by the needs of executive oversight. From an architectural perspective, not only should centralised test data have been stored in a database, but the dispatching of cases to tracers and the generation of statistics for reporting (for which Excel is a perfectly appropriate tool) should have been handled by discrete systems. The political dimension to this single point of failure is the way the system embedded a Whitehall-centric reporting hierarchy. Though Serco and other third party service providers were blameless in this case, outsourcing is predicated on the ability of the executive to read the "dashboard", not only to ensure service delivery but to assess contract performance. In other words, the system's vulnerabilities arose from the power relations of the participants. 

Social media isn't an epochal change in human culture - it pales in comparison to the invention of moveable type or telephony - and big data isn't the new oil. Though our digital exhaust is evidence of our psychological need for esteem and our innate sociability, it isn't a vector for mind control. Our engagement remains shallow and self-aware rather than addictive. Likewise, we are not reducing our cognitive diversity through filter bubbles and, far from being at the mercy of arch-manipulators like Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey, we continue to find ways to repurpose the technology to meet our actual needs. Social media has brought our commitment to the competition for social esteem into the realm of the market, but that commitment obviously long predates the technology and its commoditisation in popular culture has been a commonplace since the invention of the teenager. The near-ubiquity of social media simply reflects the way that competition has thoroughly colonised society since the 1950s.