culture

The Social Self As A Business

by

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

To mark this post historically, this was posted the day Tumblr decided to cut out some adult content (it’s hard to tell exactly what they meant, it got weird)  This was quickly followed by an algorithm that clearly was terrible not doing it’s job, and leaving people to discuss leaving.  When you can’t exactly spell out a vision for what you want to do, that vision seems to be “stop some nudity”, and your system is bad, yeah people are going to leave.

This doesn’t entirely surprise me, an old hand at watching internet companies shoot themselves in the food.  I’ve seen sites and services appear and vanish, sometimes quite sadly.  This has led me to an important but unpleasant truth.

You have to run your social media presence like a business.

What do I mean by this?  Simple

  1. Social media is vital to our lives (for some of us more than others)
  2. Social media companies rise, fall, and change.
  3. To reach your social media goals, you have to consider your vision, make a plan, and have expenses – just like a business.

For me, a writer, this is more vital – but also as my writing is a hobby, it’s almost more effort.  I mean it’s hard to disentangle my audience, my fellow authors, and my sarcastic video game posts.

But it still comes down to this – business decisions affect social media, social media is connected to our lives, so we have to run that part of it like a business.

No, I don’t like it.

I don’t like knowing something may vanish the next week because of a merger.  I don’t like seeing people leave a site due to some weird policy change.  I dislike wondering who’s harvesting my data.  It’s tiring and it’s exhausting, and annoying, not to mention a bit dehumanizing.

But this is where we are now, when business decisions affect where you post recipes and if you repeat an Overwatch meme about Hanzo’s shirts.

Maybe in time we can build more humanized platforms.  Maybe we can get others to evolve.  But until them your social media life has to be run like a business, especially if you have any large groups, complex plans, side businesses, media presence, etc.

If it helps, what I do is actually review my social plans once a month – who’s planned what, do I want to host an event, etc.  I’ve had to work my social media reviews into that, along with my marketing reviews for my books.  It helps, but it’s annoying.

And again, I don’t like it either.

Steven Savage

Fandom At A Different Level

by

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

After my post on the dangers of “Gray Goo” Media, serdar had his own detailed response. His response is worth reading – he also has some alternate ideas to my wishes worth considering – and he then notes it’s important to explore why and how we like things over specifics. He then proposes a most interesting exercise.

Sometimes I imagine we can cultivate this by way of exercises. Get together a slew of people who have divergent and vibrant interests, sit in a circle, start with one person, and have that person talk about some specific aspect of a specific thing that gets their attention. (“The reason I like Emma: A Victorian Romance is the attention to detail.”) Then the next person picks up from that thread. (“Something I like that has attention to detail… but here’s what else I like about it, the fact that it is a deeply humane story.”) And on to the next person. (“The thing I like that has a humane element…”)

This idea intrigues me enough that I’m thinking of using it under various circumstances, and suggesting it to other groups like a local book club, cons, etc. I also find it illustrates an important point about sharing media.

A lot of what we like about media can get very specific. I relate to this character, I like this specific story element. The become, intentional or not, exclusionary. If someone does not take to a given element or character, people have trouble connecting to you – indeed, a passionately stated enthusiasm can seem to be exclusionary. We don’t want to offend someone saying “not for me.”

Instead this method is about the commonality of how we relate, not what we relate to specifically. We discover our shared interests not in media specifically, but what we are interested in and how we share that. A group of people can each be passionate about good worldbuilding, and discuss how they love it, while completely not being interested in everyone else’s choices.

This may not save the world, but it gives us a lot to think about. Maybe it’s a method that can lead we passionate people to help others bridge gaps and find common grounds, which we could certainly use more of.

Steven Savage

Media Gray Goo

by

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

Every now and then (OK, weekly), something Very Dumb happens involving a piece of mass culture media. People meltdown because of some casting. Someone gets fired because of saying something controversial like “hey, don’t be a douche.” Some new thing comes out that really just builds on something else, and we vaguely care.

How much of our minds get occupied by stuff like Marvel, DC, Star Wars, Doctor Who, Star Trek, and the like? How much of our culture involves these works? How many people hang on every new book, idea, episode, etc. Geek that I am, I’m starting to wonder if this has gone very, very bad.

Let’s imagine how a healthy body works. Yes, it’s a unified whole, but also it’s got specific parts and is filled with checks, from antibodies to the ability to vomit bad food to neurons holding back other neurons from doing something terrible. A body is a single thing composed of parts that are both linked and independent in some ways (but not separate from the body).

A body that was one giant unified mass is basically an amoeba or The Blob.

Now let’s ask about a healthy culture. Shouldn’t it be the same way? There are dominant cultural elements, and many subcultures, specialized knowledge, and generalized knowledge. There will be conflict, but often in service of a larger whole – subcultures generating widespread ideas, widespread ideas passing their time and going to memory, etc.

A culture that is one giant unified mass is a gray goo of nothing, large but nothing to hold on to, nothing relevant to the individual.

I’m thinking our mass culture is becoming a mass of gray goo. Sure some of it may be great gray goo, but overall it seems to be samey even when good. I’m glad we can re-invent things (Like Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor, who I loved), but why do we have to keep doing the same thing?

Worse, doing the same thing keeps giving power to the same group of people and companies (usually Disney these days). We’re letting people own vast chunks of our culture, and the inevitable battles between “do it good and interesting” and “give me the gray goo I expect” are exhausting. Besides, we know in the end that the big companies are going to play it safe – and safe isn’t always the best thing for the culture.

(Think of it as being like your brain overruling your body’s warning signals to keep drinking and eating cheeseburgers.)

This is probably why some big companies like Netflix and Amazon caught on and are working on churning out different stuff. It’s perhaps why we see authentically good media as well because some people got that there needs to be more. I can critique the hell out of them for many reasons, but I can acknowledge smart plays against gray culture goo.

So now I want to imagine a different media culture.

Imagine a media culture with few to no dominant media properties. Imagine things actually ending for a change, and excellent media being rerun or reread instead of being extended. Imagine not having cultural space taken up by gray goo, but more, smaller things.

Imagine if you do get into something that is a long-term media commitment, that it’s a more intimate experience. That TV series going on for a decade and its spinoffs don’t have to be forced into our consciousness. Imagine fandom as more interlinked preferences than A Big Thing.

Imagine more originality or at least new versions of the same old thing.

This is going to sit with me awhile. It makes me think about my own tastes, about what matters, and about what I’m writing.

Steven Savage