I found this on sphinn and I wanted to respond to a few points. Its about applying a method of discussing the effects of media change on society by Marshal McLuhan called a Tetrad.
What is enhanced? – The idea of an authority for the collective. When we have lots of people speaking it is the voice of authority and experience that commands attention.
I think there is a subtle difference between what you are saying (the power wielded by authority figures is enhanced) and what is actually happening (the value of attention in garnering authority is enhanced). As social media matures online, its seems as if we’ll see the same number of media “authority” holders as in old media.
What is made obsolete? – The power of the individual is lost. The average social media user becomes redundant. Of course, s/he can still work their way up to being a power user in time, but the average user is left with little or no power and is forced to rely on top users in order to be �heard�.
Compared with other types of media the average social media participant has much more power (and authority?) than they’ve ever had before. What is obsolete is the necessity of power to get authority. It used to be that you had to be in control of a large and expensive distribution system wide enough to gain media authority. These days the distribution is large supply and cheap, what you need to do is get attention, which is scarce due to fragmentation.
What is retrieved that had been made obsolete earlier? – Brings back the idea of the shaman or tribe leader.
The traits necessary for individual memes to survive in forms of media with scarce attention and fast paced social dynamics, like urban legends, Homeric poems, gossip, and indeed oral culture in general translate directly to modern forms of social media.
What is reversed when pushed to extremes? – Back to �master and servant� methods of information retrieval. When pushed to its extremes more users will go back to using search engines. The social media power user is in itself a reversal of search engines – from lots of information sources to trusted sources.
In search you query, in social media you discover. You wouldn’t go looking for a pizza place on digg, just as you’d be more likely to go to digg when bored (or at least I would). The tetrad here is actually what would the subject reverse to turn into if it was pushed to the limit of its potential. If attention grew immeasurably scarce due to fragmentation, I don’t agree that search would replace the discovery function for the average user, they would simply be using smaller, more targeted niche aggregation sites of which there would be millions and the power wielded by a power user on any site would be meaningless.
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Great post. It seems that we’re on the same wavelength on a number of issues.
It will be interesting to see if the meta-search engines like Google will be able to provide the same level of quality and relevance across these various, fragmented niche sites. I don’t think they will be able to, and I even wonder if any of this stuff will be “aggregate-able” in the long term.
It’s amazing how prescient McLuhan was at times.
In a conversation I’m having on Twitter, its become apparent that the bigger the audience on a social news site, the better the “filtering”, and people often leave social news sites due to lack of users.
So perhaps fragmentation beyond usability is not the path we’re on?
Sorry Dan, I have to disagree with you here. It is becoming very fragmented and power does reside with a few, the rest are the colective.
Power users are really powerful, even more powerful than CEO’s of corporations!
People do listen to us, and we do influence communities.
But how does one become a power user and what will that power user use his or her power for?
Igor, I probably agree with you too, but would you agree that fragmentation leads to loss of power for the “few” if only by a reduction in the scarcity of power users?
Hi Dan,
I am doing research comparing McLuhan’s Tetrad to Claude Levi-Strauss’s Canonical Formula. You can find my discussion at http://robertkblechman.blogspot.com/2008/01/four-play-mcluhans-tetrad-and-lvi.html
Bob Blechman
Dan, power of knowledge is more dangerous than money and bombs. I rather have power in the hands of a few than power be abused by many.
But when the few abusing the power the many unite to check the power.
Same like all revolutions!
Has anyone done a tetrad of the scientific method?
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