There was a time when not many companies were active on social media. There were just people posting about cats and statements from places like positivelifetips.com: "You can always make money. You can't always make memories" - anaemic, trite and that is one of the better ones. Companies and people quickly got good at telling you all the great things they were doing.
Trying to be greener I once bought the green cleaning ebook from one of the most well-known, green mummy blogs in the US offering natural health remedies and green tips for the home. The site doesn't feel commercial, not at first, and yet it is so perfect, so aspirational, so good. Since I don't fancy an American-style lawsuit I'll keep the name undisclosed. Important warnings regarding the method for this cleaning recipe were omitted. I ended up in A&E with chemical burns to my eye. I went to their Facebook page to say what had happened and was met, puzzlingly, with a dead silence, not just from the mom herself, her sidekick or site administrator but from the thousands of followers. All I could think was that perhaps Americans don't like bad stories in public about the things they support. Perhaps they were responding with a polite silence. Even so, this site has 200,000 'likes' and there wasn't one peep. It was a mystery. I decided to look on it as a "learning experience" to steer clear of these types of blogs and left it behind.
Some months later I was in the park when I was introduced to someone who ran the council's social media page. She happened to mention that as a Facebook administrator she could mute comments from the public she didn't want others to see. If someone said something she thought was negative, or not "on brand", she would mute it, the poster would think their comment had been seen but in fact it would be hidden to everyone else. It is a trick, a dupe, a sleight of hand of which the site's audience remained oblivious. I suspected that is what had happened on the green mummy site.
Meanwhile, I noticed that when you commented on corporate social media sites you would get a response not from a person with a name, as you still would (usually) if you wrote a letter or an email but a response from the organisational voice: "McDonald's" say, not "John at McDonald's". Even weirder, while the Voice would - naturally - be "on brand" it could also sound informal, even fun, just like a real person. In the beginning, it was a bit like when Innocent Smoothies came out with the jokes and quirky small print on their packaging - it felt new, friendly, a brand you might trust your kids with. It was just a non-traditional, succesful marketing gimmick that was later picked up by many others. Organisational social media with its branded but human voice and all that relentless positivity felt a bit the same. If you looked too long or too closely it started to feel a bit like "The Truman Show". Critiquing so-called positivity is a tough gig though. Few noticed, more couldn't care less. Now it wasn't just marketeers airbrushing adverts for their clients, companies, individuals, everyone was spinning and cropping and setting up an angle. The whole world was starting to feel airbrushed and nobody seemed to care.
A year or so later I joined a group of active travel enthusiasts who wanted a membership of like-minded people to be the public voice to the council to improve things like the infrastructure for walking and cycling and to help promote these as good things. When their social media presence was set up, in an effort to generate interest, somebody became the social media voice. Interesting articles about active travel from around the web started to appear on their page and the voice would ask: what did we all think about this? The group was new and there wasn't much response. I had things I wanted to say, but not about other people's articles. I wanted to say what was on my mind but about our local situation, black spots for instance, well known to the public, ideas we had for improving things. I wanted the people, the users, to drive change but the group was bent on supporting the council taking that lead. I had already been slapped down by a man in the council for too much initiative and stepping on his turf. The council were involving the public, not meaningfully it seemed to me, but just to say they had - and not for the first time. But no-one was going to want anyone to mention that.
I found that when I or anyone else posted on the social media page of this new community group it was relegated with everyone else's remarks to the "Community" section where nobody really goes. It wasn't on the main page with the Voice's articles. Despite there being a warning that all content needed to be child suitable, the community posts to this area that practically nobody saw were moderated. The control was heavy. So, for all its laudable aims and good intentions, it wasn't easy to post what you wanted to say, easily in a place where people would see it and contribute. It didn't really feel like a true community group where everyone's voices could be heard, equally. It was more a platform for the Voice, choosing the topics to which you could add comments which might or might not be muted - who was to know? Everyone from the Marine Conservation Society to your local cafe does it now but if a community group is calling itself as such they should be walking that walk.
Around the same time, the popular historiographical idea that history is written by the victors, started to roll around in my mind. That year I had started reading Ryan Holiday's Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator which was a similar story, only writ large, on a global scale. The control of the media, of the story was the same though just more complex and fuelled by money not good intentions. Cumulatively, gradually, these things fermented. Eventually, I was reminded that s/he who controls the narrative, no matter what the platform or the context, controls not just the view of the past, but how things are right now. Social media is particularly insidious because everything has this positive spin, so you tend not to notice any agenda. More importantly the person, group or institution who controls the narrative controls not just perception but, often, the consequences of that perception.
*
"What do you think of this?" asks, politely,
the community page,
the interest group.
the council
on social media or surveys:
"This", obscuring things
a community might have raised.
"This", showing where lies
the real control of that scalene:
Where they urge you to:
'contribute',
'share',
and (impotently),
'shape'.
No comments:
Post a Comment