Zuckerberg. He’s not the messiah; he’s a very naughty boy!

Ethics of social media, web 2.0 and their potential utilisation by brands.

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The ethics of UGC/web 2.0

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In 2006, TIME magazine proclaimed the year of ‘you’, the year of web 2.0. The year where ‘the many wrested power from the few and help one another for nothing.’

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That sounds very new age and hopeful, but looking back (and considering Gartner’s hype cycle), although things have changed, we didn’t get the ‘community creative utopia’ we were all promised.

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What happened?

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I wouldn’t describe myself as a Marxist, but Andrew McStay’s theory of UGC/web 2.0 as ‘surplus labour’ (Marx, 1867). Today we call ‘surplus labour’ unpaid work. UGC and web 2.0 is the work which creates value on the respective websites, drives traffic and earns revenue. Facebook users, Wikia authors, and YouTube gurus are ‘at work at the wheels of capitalism’ as much the Tesco checkout assistant.

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Q:  UGC is ‘working for the man’, why do people participate in web 2.0 at all. Why do people work for a for-profit company without pay?

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A: People do not know they are working for free, and they enjoy it.

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Where’s the unethical behaviour here then? I don’t believe it is unethical in and of itself  for users to submit UGC as ‘surplus labour’; users are getting a ‘free’ medium to discuss their content, and sites need to cover their running costs, and generate acceptable profit margins (the web is not, in large, a charity). If users don’t have a problem with working for free, who are we to tell them otherwise?

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For me the ethical problem lies with audiences (in general) not knowing that they are effectively working for free. If those audiences knew that it is their work that generates billions of dollars of revenue for web 2.0 sites across the world, they act differently online. Users should be told (in the nicest possible way) that they are being ‘used’.

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Some Marxists will take offense to how UGC creativity is assigned a market value with web 2.0, but I believe this is a bit of a straw man argument; if people value something, and are willing to give time or money to acquire or experience it, it has value whether you like it or not.

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Moving on… to Facebook

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Since my (and my friends) Facebook statuses (and other FB UGC) earn Facebook the majority of its revenue (through advertising), it would be fair to assume that Facebook would pay more respect to their ‘workers

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Despite Facebook’s disregard for privacy, it is still one of the most popular tools used by brands for CSR, and brand-consumer conversations.

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What does it say about the brands when they use a site like Facebook, to promote them being ethical and considerate to consumers? It’s like a vegetarian buying groceries ar a butcher’s; a complete contradiction. How are audiences expected to take CSR seriously, when the medium itself is ‘tainted’?

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Web 2.0, TIME: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html

Gartner hype cycle: http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hype-cycle.jsp

Marx’s ‘surplus labour: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_labour

Andy McStay: http://advertising-communications-culture.blogspot.com/

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Also, Shephard (2009) ‘participation on web not equal’, therefore UGC creation not equal either. Balance of creativity on the net damaged. The net is populated by ‘the loud kid in the class who would always shout out the answer’.

Filed under: Advertising, Branding, Creative, Culture, DCS, Facebook, Marketing, Media, New Media, Opinion, Points of interest, SEO, Social

2 + 2 = 4, not 5.

Activism and digital dissent.

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Digital activism, is just like all other activism in it’s intent and purpose, to enact political or corporate change. It only differs from traditional activism in its accessibility and ‘instaneity’.

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Digital activism allows constant networked global communication, it promotes instant support and mobilisation (demonstrations etc), it also demonstrates traits of Chris Anderson’s ‘long tail’; it allows niche interest groups that would be fractured by geography or lack of awareness to unite for a mutual cause.

Digital activism movements tends to have no public leaders (though, there are always flag bearers and instigators), and therefore acts like a mutual movement in the eyes of the activists themselves, promoting ‘ownership’ and involvement. One lone person cannot enact a fantastic degree of change, but as the clichéd saying goes, ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’.

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Don’t believe me? Look at Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Libya, Iran, Thailand etc. Where were these protests 10 years ago? Social networks and digital may not have caused these uprisings, but they have certainly acted as a conduit, endowing the movements with staying power and legitimacy.

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Ok, that’s all well and good, but what’s the downside?

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I honestly think that the main reason for the popularity of digital activism (Facebook groups/trends), as opposed to other forms of activism, is the rise of what I call ‘Me too’ culture, a culture that revolves around shared experiences ‘hey I joined that group too!’, or ‘I don’t want to look selfish by not changing my profile picture for charity’.

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Does ‘me too’ culture promote insincerity in activism? Or does it let people feel like they have become a part of something, a piece of history. Also, like many things digital, participation is governed by the convenience to the user of that participation; if all it takes for a user to ‘enact change’ is to change their profile picture, change their status, ‘like’ a group, or write your email on a petition then many will gladly take part. These are not true activists.

Kavada (2010:108), argues that it is not only necessary for movements to be seen as mutual, leaderless, movements for audiences to be truly engaged with the movement (eg, proactive, communicative), but they must also feel like they are part of the decision making process (not very common in many forms of digital activism). A lack of power in the decision making process can lead to a lack of ownership and commitment to the relevant cause.

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What this means for advertising?

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If your brand does a ‘bad thing’, you can bet your ad spend someone will find out about it. You can also count on people drumming up support and awareness to your actions. If it serious enough, you may end up on the front page of the Guardian, or even worse, the Daily Mail. Some awareness campaigns create movements, this is ‘muchos mal’ if you are at the receiving end of the discontent, expensive to repair.

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Kavada: Joyce, M., ed., 2010. Digital Activism Decoded. New York: International Debate Association.  Available at: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/digiact10all.pdf

AP: Social Networking’s role in Middle East protests. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XgtxAg-TSk.

Chris Anderson’s http://www.longtail.com/

Egypt: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12289475

Tunisia: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12180738

Syria: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/bodies-in-the-streets-as-syrian-tanks-storm-protest-town/story-e6frf7lf-1226044764669

Libya: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8344034/Libya-civil-war-breaks-out-as-Gaddafi-mounts-rearguard-fight.html

Iran: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/02/201121412571299951.html Naughty Mahmoud

Thailand: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7584005.stm

Would you like to know more? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932011_Middle_East_and_North_Africa_protests

Filed under: Advertising, Culture, DCS, Facebook, Flickr, Marketing, Media, New Media, Opinion, Points of interest, Social

I know what you did last summer, and last night.

Online privacy in the UK/Airstrip One.

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Havard law man Charles Fried, defined privacy in volume 77 of the  Yale law journal (1968) as “control over knowledge about oneself”, or controlling access to your personal information. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the internet, this privacy is nowhere to be seen. The ease of access to your information, and the demand for ‘free’ online content has, in part, caused us to lose huge chunks of our online (and offline) privacy.

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Websites all across the net need a source of revenue to meet web design, management and hosting costs, and this revenue has to come from somewhere. If you are not going to pay for it, value will be stolen from you, often without your consent.

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Public awareness of the issues surrounding privacy, and the misuse of public information, have been bought up by literary works such as Orwell’s ’1984′ and Kafka’s ‘Zer process’, which have highlighted the importance of privacy in ‘modern’ times. Fried (19680 argues that privacy is a fundamental part of liberty, if we don’t have privacy online, how can we have true liberty.

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The scary thing is that most of us do not know that we are being ‘watched’, by business and digital miscreant alike.

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The main enemies of online privacy include:

Browser cookies: often just make the web more convenient to use, like storing site settings and usernames, but can be used to track site history and browsing habits.

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Flash cookies/LSO/super cookie: This reclusive menace is similar to browser cookies in what they do (convenience and tracking), but different in that most people are unaware of their existence, and are more difficult for the average user to remove.

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Google (http://www.theonion.com/articles/google-responds-to-privacy-concerns-with-unsettlin,16891/): basically one of the worst anti-privacy offenders in the world, including snooping on people’s homes, recording unsecured wireless connections and trespassing on private housing peabody estates to take pictures of the front of houses for local youths to eye up for theft. Thanks Google.

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BT Webwise: BT will soon be rolling out their new ‘service’, which uses ISP based deep packet processing, to record every bit of up and downstream data to analyse your (well, BT customer’s) browsing habits and interests. This information will be sold to advertisers to provide you with more personalised adverts. Interestingly, there is no true opt-out. Scarily I’m with BT, not only am I being ripped off, but soon to have my every online action recorded, analysed and categorized. Lovely jubbly.

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Social networks/Facebook: An interesting one, apologists would claim that social networking sites only make public what you allow, but Facebook have changed privacy permissions in the past. Also, Google and Facebook, make most of your information accessible by all by default. This would not normally be a problem but, even though I said in my last blog post that people are not stupid, most people are –digitally- stupid, and make assumptions about the service they are using, sometimes with incredibly embarrassing results. Then there are the countless Facebook apps just squirming for the chance to access you and your friend’s private information.

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Spyware: Given that many online users don’t really understand the risks of spyware and browser exploits, it is unsurprising how common spyware is on PC’s around the globe. Spyware is essentially a virus, but is different from viruses in that they very rarely make themselves known to the PC user, do no physical damage but steal information like keystrokes, bank account details etc, and are not detectable by most of the popular anti-virus programs.

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It has got to the point where, if the information is online, or on your PC, then it is publicly accessible by all.

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What does this mean to advertisers? The more the industry ‘takes the mickey’, the more public distrust and anger will be towards businesses. As privacy becomes more of a concern, users will be more difficult to engage with digitally. I believe that if privacy was better respected online, people would ‘lurk’ less and engage (2-way) more with online content.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_privacy

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/19/facebook_privacy_sucks/

http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/articles/lso/ Straight from the horses mouth#

http://www.google.com/privacy/faq.html

https://www.privacyinternational.org/

http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/index.php

Filed under: Advertising, Branding, DCS, Facebook, Flickr, Marketing, Media, New Media, Points of interest, SEO, Social

TALK TO ME, DO YOU LIKE LADDERS?

The digital divide in the UK; a 3 (not 2)tier system.

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This is a system where 10 million people just cannot be reached digitally. That’s one in six people. It’s a system where it seems every other under 30 stashes a smartphone in their pocket or handbag. And, of course, there is the majority with the ‘old school’ DNS connections at home.

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What does it mean to society to have a growing group of consumers that are ‘switched on’ 24/7, and another group of consumers that can’t be reached digitally at all?

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With the ‘virtual pint’ generation, the 4 million over 65’s who ‘don’t see the point in the internet’ generation and everything in-between. Sounds like a class system to me; at least a class system that is not based upon levels on education, but rather perspectives on emerging (well, maturing) digital communications technologies.

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Is this a problem, or a happy accident?

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[Geordie accent] “YOU decide.”

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So how is it a problem?

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For society, the digital divide means a whole class of people who will be left behind. In a world where digital communication is the main arena for our current culture and communication, and where even mundane activities like shopping and accessing government services become a chore without a connection to the web. It is also a system where those that a more connected are more likely to be more successful in the workplace; whether it is keeping up to date on the latest industry breakthroughs through blog posts, keeping up better social/work networks via Facebook or LinkedIn, or applying to the 7 million jobs posted online each year: connected people have an advantage.

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So how is it a benefit?

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If you are a media planner that thinks in demographics as opposed to psychographics, the digital divide has made your life so much easier. The facts are black and white. You just can’t reach over 60’s with digital (though that is slowly changing), so use ‘old media’ vehicles, and it is really worthwhile, as well as a whole lot easier, to ‘talk to’ or target under 30’s, so to get your ROI nice and juicy you need to focus on social and digital for the under 30’s demographic.

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WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?

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Independent: decoding Britain’s digital divide

Guardian: ML Fox and the digital divide

Exploring the digital divide: Stump et al 2008

Filed under: Advertising, DCS, Facebook, Marketing, Media, New Media, Opinion, Social, Theory