Piracy:illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship.
UNITED NATIONS CONVENTION ON THE LAW OF THE SEA
Die Piratenpartei sollte sich auf ihren Kern – “Piraten” besinnen – oder es wird Zeit, den Namen zu ändern. Sonst ist es ein Etikettenschwindel, so wie das C bei der CDU.
Alles Weitere hat der @dueseberg gesagt: http://wiki.piratenpartei.de/Benutzer:Duesenberg/Ich_bin_entsetzt
When we cruise down the river on a boat, we recognise our own movement in the passing river banks. Ever new sections of the banks appearing in front of us while others which had just passed are left behind makes, what we sense as progress. The wider the river, the less we are able to notice our own movement – until on the open sea we finally lose our frame of reference onto which we would tie progress.
Narrow banks give our movement a distinct direction and clear orientation, wide banks give us leeway.
At this moment we are cruising down a river whose banks are becoming wider steadily. We may indeed still distinguish those but it is more the remembrance of those being still in close sight not long ago, what gives us the feeling of moving forward. Modernity vanishes away. Postmodernism are the last open meadows of the marshes. Let us not lament after those banks of old, that we have passed. Let us look forward to the open sea.
We do not abstract people to sets and let them be represented by a typical specimen. We need no target groups, no gender, no ethnic provenance, to let people speak for themselves individually. Structures of representation – also when still remaining existent as “Volk”, as federation, as political parties – they do not mean anything to us anymore.
Our democracy has become liquid. Suffrage and eligibility become congruent. Everyone as their own advocate and parlamentarian. Everyone speaks with equal voice, however not merely to elect their representatives, but to actively shape politics.
Our Identity can no longer be cast in a rigid form. The arbitrary name that we inherrited is placed next to our true names, that we have given ourselves. Our nicks, handles and avatars are part of our bodily manifestation – like our hair style or clothing.
Sharing is the new owning. Goods are not only there to be possessed, but to be shared, swapped, contributed and to be jointly used. Consumption is not an end in itself. We are millions, billions soon, who connectedly shape the world. We distribute our power and our goods with the novel, handy tools: Wikipedia, Github, Makerbots, Wikis, Pads and countless further community platforms. We show our faculties and are ready to share them. We work because we want to and where we want to. We like working together with others – even not at the same project. What we find relevant, we will pay for. We donate, we get involved with our money or our performance. We do not administrate, we act. What we miss, we found.
The world is all what is the case and not what we agree that it should be. There is no compromise. When we find no consensus on what we hold true, we better stay at odds with each other. The majority’s opinion has no title for truth. At the same time, any knowledge is questionable. No consensus is fixed. Just because our consensus does withstand the persistence and provocations of the trolls, it is sufficiently stable to prevail.
Our knowledge is flowing. All that we know about the world is in continuous flow. We adopt our models to the changing world – and not the world to our models. Like our timeline ever renewing, so the data flows into our knowledge and changes our models of the the world.
We stay busy with merging and routing the various hoses through which our data flows towards us. Sometimes a hose becomes brittle. Before it bursts, we drop it and take its data out of our system.
Code is poetry. Our works of art are called Twitter, Instagram, Youtube or Github. There, everybody is free to make their works public. Each work will be retrieved by those searching for it. Our artists are the developers creating these open spaces, our studios are the co working spaces and hacker spaces, our art dealers and collectors are the venture capitalists financing the work of the creatives and making them big when successful.
Who can still say: “Behold, this is my work”? The times are over where tools and education defined who would be an artist and who would not. High culture is as dead as the Latin of the 13th century. It is still spoken, yet it has lost its relevance. In its lieu the vernacular flourishes. These vernaculars define the culture. Wonderful works will be created from the present-at-hand. Originality means finding the right remix.
The role of the creatives as creators of their work clears away. In Liquid Authorship a work is never completed – the work is in movement, it is nourished by all who create, quote, distribute and advance it. The flowing work has no beginning and no end, it lives on. It is socially added value. Culture is no commodity, but a process.
Culture is our cult. Our cult’s symbols are not religious. They are icons we share to unite with each other. The hash-tag for us is the pentagram of the alchemists and cat images is the fish of the early Christians in the catacombs. But who has the right to deny us access to our culture? Who has the right to tell us how we would have to exchange our symbols? It is our cult. We alone have all rights reserved.
We extend our body. Wheels are fast feet to us, clothing is a second skin. Our senses we extend, too: the eyes with telescope and microscope, the nose with the chromatograph, the ears with speakers. And finally our nerves and our brain – by the Net. As our bodies move in space, so our data is moving through the net. The Net spans new dimensions in which we live. Our data is our body in the Internet.
Agnoscit Praesentem. The stars in the sky – they give us hold to steer the ship in the shoreless see.
Santa Clara, Ca. / Bonn, 2012
Joerg Blumtritt, Benedikt Koehler, Sabria David
“Das Proletariat ist diejenige Klasse der Gesellschaft, welche ihren Lebensunterhalt einzig und allein aus dem Verkauf ihrer Arbeit und nicht aus dem Profit irgendeines Kapitals zieht; deren Wohl und Wehe, deren Leben und Tod, deren ganze Existenz von der Nachfrage nach Arbeit, also von dem Wechsel der guten und schlechten Geschäftszeiten, von den Schwankungen einer zügellosen Konkurrenz abhängt.” (Friedrich Engels; MEW 4, S. 363)
Menschen, die nichts besitzen als ihre Arbeitskraft, und die gezungen sind, ihre Arbeitskraft wie eine Ware zu handeln sind, was Marx und Engels als Proletarier bezeichnen. Auf dieser Perspektive und dem Erkennen, wie es um die abhängigen Arbeiter zu Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bestellt war, entwickelte sich die Arbeiterbewegung. Durch die Gewerkschaften und den organisierten Arbeitskampf konnten sich die Arbeiter schließlich aus dieser Abhängigkeit einigermaßen emanzipieren. Heute haben wir die Grundlagen für den Arbeitskampf sogar in unserer Verfassung, wir haben gesetzlich geschützte Betriebsräte, Kündigungsschutz und weitreichenden Arbeitsschutz.
Diesen Fort-Schritt – eine Gruppe von Menschen wird ausgebeutet, wehrt sich und befreit sich schließlich – beschreiben Marx und Engels in ihrer Theorie des historischen Materialismus als Klassenkampf:
Die wirtschaftlichen Bedingungen verändern sich, vor allem durch neue Technologien. Dadurch entstehen immer wieder neue Gruppen von Menschen, die wieder “ohne Kapital” dastehen und ungeschützt ihre Arbeitskraft zu Markte tragen.
Daher bleibt es leider nicht dabei, dass “die Arbeiter” sich befreien und danach automatisch Gerechtigkeit für alle eintritt; wie schon bei Marx/Engels läuft der historische Materialismus dynamisch weiter. Während die fest angestellten Arbeiter ihre Rechte mehr und mehr erfolgreich verteidigen konnten, wurde die Lage für die Tagelöhner, die Ungelernten und vor allem für Migranten oft noch schlimmer. Die klassenbewussten, stolzen Proletarier klassifizierten sie als “Lumpenproletariat” ab.
Keine Stimme ertönt, außer der Stimme der Herrschenden.
(Bertold Brecht, Lob der Dialektik)
Über die Lost Generation der Netzkultur habe ich schon mein Klagelied gesungen. Vor allem diejenigen, die in der digitalen Welt kreativ arbeiten, leben sehr häufig in prekären Situationen. Der Spott über die “Digitale Boheme” trifft die Lage, wenn auch mit zynischen Worten: “Have Laptop – will work.” ist das passende Papp-Schild, mit dem die “Generation Y” für ihre nackte Arbeitskraft wirbt. Und genau die Errungenschaften, die die “alte Klasse” für sich zur wirtschaftlichen Absicherung erstritten hatte – Urheberrecht, GEMA und Verwertungsgesellschaften – sind in ihrer heutigen Form für die Netz-Generation Hürden, die sie nur noch weiter von der digitalen Wertschöpfung ausschließen. Auch die auf abhängige Erwerbsarbeit ausgerichteten Sozialgesetze, Kranken- und Rentenversicherung oder Berufsstandesregeln müssen den – freiwillig oder unfreiwillig – viel ungebundeneren Arbeitern der Netz-Welt oft eher als Besitzstandswahrung “der Angestellten” erscheinen, als dass sie durch diese in ihrer Situation unterstützt würden.
Ich glaube, dass die Piratenpartei die Aufgabe hat, für dieses neue, “digitale Proletariat” die Rolle einzunehmen, welche die Sozialdemokraten für die “klassischen” Arbeiter und Angestellten spielt. Ich bin überzeugt, dass die Interessensgegensätze der alten mit den neuen Proletariern es auf jeden Fall rechtfertigen, dass es mehrere Parteien bleiben. Die Piraten machen die SPD wie auch die Grünen nicht überflüssig – im Gegenteil: sie haben die Chance, komplementär zu den bestehenden sozial-orientierten politischen Parteien, einen weiteren Aspekt sozialen Engagements hinzuzufügen. Viele Positionen und Meinungen in der Piratenpartei werden dann helfen, diesen Gruppen von Menschen eine politische Stimme zu geben, die ansonsten ungehört blieben.
Wer seine Lage erkannt hat, wie soll der aufzuhalten sein?
(Bertold Brecht, Lob der Dialektik)
ὁ ἔχων ὦτα ἀκουέτω.
Kunstbegriff der Liquid Culture ist wieder das 'Je ne sais quoi' #ricorso #allegorie
— Joerg Blumtritt (@jbenno) August 3, 2012
“All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation. You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death.”
Gertrude Stein
Viele junge Amerikaner waren schon vor dem Kriegseintritt der USA nach Europa, in den ersten Weltkrieg gezogen, meist als Sanitäter für das Rote Kreuz oder andere NGOs, wie man heute sagen würde. Zusammen mit vielen jungen Europäern erlebten sie, wie die “Alte Welt” zusammenbrach und – wie es zunächst schien – allerorten endlich die Moderne sich mit Macht ihre Bahn brach – sei es durch den Umsturz der Monarchien wie in Deutschland, sei es durch kommunistische Revolution in Russland oder durch die Apotheose der Maschinen im italienischen Futurismus.
Voll Idealismus kehrten sie zurück, aber die erhoffte Revolution blieb aus. Überall wurden der Aufstand des Neuen niedergeschlagen – in München die Räterepublik grausam beseitigt, in Russland versank die Revolution im Bürgerkrieg und bald in unmenschlicher Diktatur, in Italien wurde aus dem Futurismus bald Faschismus. Und in den USA waren die ersten Nachkriegsjahre ebenfalls von heftiger Reaktion gekennzeichnet – Alkohol-Prohibition, Justizmorde und soziale Ungerechtigkeit, die scheinbar unverrückbar festzustehen schien. Wer in diese Zeit eintauchen möchte, dem seien die Werke von F. Scott Fitzgerald, G. Stein, J. Dos Passos, T. S. Eliot oder E. M. Remarque empfohlen.
Eine junge Generation wächst heran und erlebt, dass die Welt radikal anders sein kann; sie entwickeln ihre eigene Ethik – einen Kodex, wie die Menschheit glücklicher und gerechter leben können sollte, und für einen Moment scheint es ihnen, als ob es keine Utopie ist, sondern Wirklichkeit werden kann. Und dann fordert das alte System mit Macht die Loyalität ein; ein Kampf beginnt, an dem sie sich aufarbeiten und schließlich scheitern; erst die folgenden Generationen werden den Wandel tatsächlich erleben, die erste Generation aber ist verloren, aufgerieben.
Als die Sache mit dem Netz so richtig los ging, dachte ich: wir haben es geschafft; jetzt wird alles sich sogleich verändern; es kracht schon im Oberbau, bald kracht es auch im Unterbau … Fünfzehn Jahre Später sehe ich, wie so viele, die mit mir glaubten, ihnen seine Flügel gewachsen, die Federn gestutzt bekommen. Ob in der Politik, den Medien, ob in Kunst und Musik oder den Universitäten – wir haben alle, so scheint es, das Beharrungsvermögen der alten Machtstrukturen unterschätzt. “All right we are two nations.” beschreibt Dos Passos diesen Bruch durch die Gesellschaft, den wir heute “Digital Divide” nennen.
“Zynismus ist Herz mit negativem Vorzeichen.”
Erich-Maria Remarque
“Unsere Leser sind noch nicht so weit.”, “Der Kunde versteht das nicht.”, “Die Mehrzahl unserer Wähler sind doch Senioren!” – um mich herum sehe ich einen meiner Freunde nach dem anderen scheitern, manche offen und mit lauter Klage, andere still resignierend, in innerer Emigration.
Vielleicht bin ich jetzt zu pessimistisch, aber das Ende von Julia Seeligers Blog Allerseelen auf faz.net ist für mich ein Menetekel.
“From the very nature of progress, all ages must be transitional.”
Gertrude Stein
Wie vor hundert Jahren wird es “dem Esteblishment” nichts helfen, einen Untergang des Abendlandes verhindern zu wollen; zu weit ist die ökonomische Basis der Gesellschaft schon heute durch die Veränderungen der Netz-Welt geprägt. Was mich aber traurig macht, ist mit anzusehen, wie die ganze Avantgarde dieser Revolution zerrieben wird. (Dagegen zu arbeiten, ist für mich einer der Gründe gewesen, in die Piratenpartei einzutreten.)
Ich frage mich: Ist es “Schicksal”, dass wir genauso verloren gehen, wie die Lost Generation vor hundert Jahren? Können wir das nicht besser?
Der erste Schritt wäre, uns klarer über die Wirtschaftsmodelle der neuen Welt zu werden – nicht nur im IT-Bereich, wo, ausgehend von Silicon Valley, sich bereits ein frisches und unserer Zeit angemessenes Ökosystem entwickelt hat. Wie geht es aber weiter mit Kultur, Medien, Kommunikation? Was wird aus der Bildung? Hier denke ich, gibt es noch viel zu tun, bis wir auch wirtschaftlich in der digitalen Zeit angekommen sind. Die Gefahr ist groß, dass im Vakuum, das in der Auflösung der alten Wirtschaftsstrukturen ensteht, einige Unternehmen alles an sich reißen, was plötzlich scheinbar frei herumliegt. Die Ausbeutung öffentlicher Güter durch Google, Facebook oder Amazon wäre die Folge, wenn wir nicht selbst unsere Alternative Ordnung aufgestellt haben, bevor die alte Ordnung völlig kraftlos geworden ist.
Eines aber ist mir völlig klar – nicht erst, seit die FAZ ihr “Experiment” mit der @zeitrafferin beendet hat: die alten Strukturen bieten uns kein Obdach; der Preis, den wir dort für “Schutz” bezahlen müssen, ist zu hoch. Wenn wir uns nicht selbst helfen – und zwar jetzt, augenblicklich – werden wir eine verlorene Generation werden, und es ist mir wenig tröstlich, mir vorzustellen, dass man später auch über uns sagen wird: immerhin haben sie gute Bücher geschrieben.
Es rettet uns kein höh’res Wesen
kein Gott, kein Kaiser, noch Tribun
Uns aus dem Elend zu erlösen
können wir nur selber tun!
Declaration of Liquid Culture
Die dititale Kluft
Das Ende der Geschichte – für kreativ Berufe
Die Moderne ist unsere Antike
Non-Commodity-Production
[Download als PDF]
[English Translation]
Wenn wir in einem Boot auf dem Fluss fahren, erkennen wir unsere eigene Bewegung am vorbeiziehenden Ufer. Dass immer wieder neue Uferabschnitte vor uns auftauchen, während wir andere, an denen wir gerade vorübergefahren sind, hinter uns lassen, empfinden wir als Fortschritt. Je breiter der Fluss, desto weniger können wir unsere eigene Bewegung bemerken – bis wir auf dem freien Meer unser Bezugssystem, an dem wir Fortschritt festmachen, ganz verloren haben.
Enge Ufer geben unserer Bewegung eine eindeutige Richtung und eine klare Orientierung, weite Ufer geben uns Bewegungsfreiheit.
In diesem Moment fahren wir auf einem Fluss, dessen Ufer immer weiter werden. Wir können sie zwar noch erkennen, aber es ist eher die Erinnerung daran, dass wir sie vor kurzem noch nahe vor Augen hatten, die uns das Gefühl von Bewegung nach vorne vermittelt. Die Moderne verschwindet. Die Postmoderne sind die letzten, offenen Marschwiesen. Jammern wir nicht alten Ufern nach, die vorbeigezogen sind. Freuen wir uns auf die offene See.
Wir fassen Menschen nicht zu Mengen zusammen, um sie dann durch ein typisches Exemplar repräsentieren zu lassen. Wir brauchen keine Zielgruppen mehr, kein Gender, keine ethnische Herkunft, um Menschen als einzelne für sich sprechen zu lassen. Strukturen der Repräsentation – auch wenn sie als “Volk”, als “Staatenbund”, als “Parteien” weiter bestehen – bedeuten uns nichts mehr.
Unsere Demokratie ist flüssig geworden. Aktives und passives Wahlrecht werden deckungsgleich. Jeder tritt für sich selbst ein und auf. Jeder spricht mit gleicher Stimme, aber das nicht nur, um seine Vertreter zu wählen, sondern um direkt mitzugestalten.
Unsere Identität lässt sich nicht mehr in eine starre Form pressen. Der willkürliche Name, den wir geerbt haben, steht neben unseren wahren Namen, die wir uns selbst geben. Unsere Nicknames, Handles und Avatare sind Teil unserer körperlichen Manifestation – wie unsere Frisur oder Kleidung.
Teilen ist das neue Haben. Güter sind nicht nur zum Besitzen da, sondern zum Teilen, Tauschen, Weiterschenken und gemeinsam Nutzen. Konsum ist kein Selbstzweck. Wir sind Millionen, bald Milliarden, die vernetzt die Welt gestalten. Wir verteilen unsere Kraft und unsere Güter mit den neuen Werkzeugen, die wir in Händen haben: Wikipedia, Github, Makerbots, Wikis, Pads und unzählige weitere Gemeinschafts-Plattformen. Wir zeigen unsere Fähigkeiten und sind bereit, sie zu teilen. Wir arbeiten, weil wir es wollen und wo wir es wollen. Wir arbeiten gerne mit anderen zusammen – auch wenn nicht immer am selben Projekt. Was uns wichtig ist, bezahlen wir. Wir spenden, wir beteiligen uns mit Geld oder mit unserer Arbeitsleistung. Wir verwalten nicht, wir handeln. Was uns fehlt, das gründen wir.
Die Welt ist, was der Fall ist und nicht, worauf wir uns verständigen, dass sie zu sein hat. Es gibt keinen Kompromiss. Wenn wir keinen Konsens finden, was wir für wahr halten, dann bleiben wir besser uneins. Die Meinung der Mehrheit hat keinen Anspruch auf Wahrheit. Gleichzeitig steht alles Wissen in Frage. Kein Konsens ist festgeschrieben. Nur wenn unser Konsens das Beharren und Provozieren der Trolle übersteht, ist er stabil genug, die wirklichen Herausforderungen zu bestehen.
Unser Wissen fließt. Alles, was wir über die Welt wissen, ist im stetigen Fluss. Wir passen unsere Modelle der sich verändernden Welt an – und nicht die Welt unseren Modellen. Wie sich unsere Timeline ständig erneuert, so fließen neue Daten in unser Wissen und verändern unsere Modelle von der Welt.
Ununterbrochen sind wir damit beschäftigt, die unterschiedlichen Schläuche, durch die unsere Daten zu uns fließen, zusammenzuführen, die Ströme zu vermischen und weiterzuleiten. Manchmal wird ein Schlauch brüchig. Bevor er platzt, lassen wir ihn fallen und nehmen seine Daten aus unserem System.
Code is poetry. Unsere Kunstwerke heißen Twitter, Instagram, Youtube oder Github. Dort ist jeder frei, seine Werke öffentlich zu machen. Jedes Werk wird von denen gefunden werden, die danach suchen. Unsere Künstler sind die Entwickler, die durch ihre kreative Arbeit diese Freiräume schaffen, unsere Ateliers sind die Coworking- und Hackerspaces, unsere Galeristen und Sammler sind die Venture Capitalists, die den Kreativen die Arbeit finanzieren und sie bei Erfolg groß machen.
Wer mag noch von sich behaupten: “Siehe, dies ist mein Werk”? Die Zeit ist vorbei, in der Werkzeug und Bildung definierte, wer ein Künstler ist und wer nicht. Die Hochkultur ist so tot wie das Latein des 13. Jahrhunderts. Man spricht es noch, aber es hat seine Bedeutung verloren. Stattdessen blühen die Volkssprachen. Diese Volkssprachen definieren die Kultur. Wunderbare Werke werden aus dem Vorhandenen geschaffen. Originalität bedeutet, den richtigen Remix finden.
Die Rolle des Kreativen als Schöpfer seines Werkes löst sich auf. In Liquid Authorship ist ein Werk nie abgeschlossen – das Werk ist in Bewegung, es wird genährt von allen, die es schaffen, aufgreifen, verbreiten und weiterentwickeln. Das fließende Werk hat keinen Anfang und kein Ende, es lebt weiter. Es ist eine gesellschaftliche Wertschöpfung. Kultur ist keine Ware, sondern ein Prozess.
Kultur ist unser Kult. Die Symbole unseres Kultes sind nicht religiös. Es sind die Zeichen, die wir teilen, um uns miteinander zu verbinden. Der Hash-Tag ist uns das Pentagramm der Alchimisten und Katzenbilder sind uns der Fisch der frühen Christen in den Katakomben. Aber wer hat das Recht, uns den Zugang zu unserer Kultur zu verbieten? Wer hat das Recht, uns zu sagen, wie wir unsere Symbole zu tauschen haben? Es ist unser Kult. Nur wir selbst haben alles Recht daran.
Wir erweitern unseren Körper. Räder sind uns schnelle Füße, Kleidung ist eine zweite Haut. Auch unsere Sinne erweitern wir: die Augen mit Teleskop und Mikroskop, die Nase mit Chromatographen, die Ohren mit Lautsprechern. Und schließlich unsere Nerven und unser Gehirn – durch das Netz. Wie unsere Körper sich im Raum bewegen, so auch unsere Daten im Netz. Das Netz spannt uns neue Dimensionen auf, in denen wir leben. Unsere Daten sind unser Leib im Internet.
Agnoscit Praesentem. Die Sterne am Himmel – sie geben uns Halt, das Schiff auf der uferlosen See zu steuern.
Santa Clara, Ca. / Bonn, 2012
Jörg Blumtritt, Benedikt Köhler, Sabria David
The timeline, this is what we call the stream of our friends’ posts that we get presented when we use social networks like Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus, has become an important way to stay in touch with our bunch. But it is also a means to share information, news or entertainment by posting links to content, that we think would be interesting for our kind.
It is often said that our timeline is in fact a filter. We see only what our community of selected friends would post. If someone starts posting things, we would not want to see, we would “unfollow” or “uncircle” him or her sooner or later – depending on our mood and on the strength of our relationship and the “netiquette”, the rules of courtesy in social mediathat everyone has to obey to remain accepted member. Advertising in particular seems to be content, that would only very rarely pass through this filter, if at all. Like in our “meatspace” communities, we would avoid people pushing unwarranted business towards us. Thus, the timeline might be the toughest Spam-filter there is.
This phenomenon of a highly sophisticated algorithmic as well as social prediction engine has been named “The filter bubble” by Eli Pariser. Bubble in this case has a thoroughly ambivalent meaning: a bubble that surrounds us, in which we are somehow even trapped, because we do no longer see the reality outside the bubble clearly but only blurred; the second meaning of course is that of a soap bubble that will bounce sooner or later like any other hype of the online business. And there is concern that this bubble could not only diminish the quality of serendipity inherent in heterogeneous networks such as the Internet, but also the probability of advertisers reaching new audiences.
The rise of social media comes with a decline of mass media regarding relevance and time spent. Although it is undisputed that the 30”-TV-Ad is still the most effective means of advertising, and is likely to remain this way for a long time, some audiences are to be reached less and less intensely over classic communication channels.Advertising is perhaps only more sensitive to this development than other forms of publicity. However it becomes less and less probable to reach out for everyone we would like to address, be it for advertising, political announcements or any other kind of publication. This will certainly not overthrow everything that has been proven advertising and communication knowledge, but it will add a novel dimension to the rising complexity of communications planning that we should take into consideration.
Social media platforms provide multiple technological means to make this filter-process even more seamless, effective and invisible for their users. By organizing our contacts into groups, lists or circles, users are encouraged to (re)create hierarchies of relevance (“inner circle”, “extended circle”, “nuisance circle”, “Spam”). At the same time, the content posted by someone from the “buddies” circle might get a totally different credibility and attention than content by someone in “business partners” or “opinion leaders”.
A third layer – after timeline itself and the circles – between the user and “outside reality” is created by Google and other search engines that use the selections made by the users in their social media profiles (timeline, circles) as input for their algorithms to provide the most relevant results for our queries. These technologies take content posted by our friends to predict what would be relevant for us. Hence we can no longer expect to be shown any kind of objective search ranking, instead we will get our very own list of results that might be completely different from that of our colleagues or neighbours: since we have other Facebook or Twitter friends, we will get other stuff into our timeline. Google translates this into what it thinks we would find relevant. This will heavily take effect into Search Engine Optimization. How should SEOs in the future be able to guarantee that “You get a top-10 search rank”? For SEO, it will thus also become important, to see the website URLs we want to promote, be recommended as often as possible by being posted or twittered.
Also targeting display ads can be improved that way. This is of course a good thing at first, since campaigns will perform more efficiently and the user experiences more ads he might find relevant. But the inventory to address a broad audience, maximizing reach, as it is mandatory for building brand awareness, becomes more fragmented at the same time.
Thus social media work as a filter, induced by the user but at the same time sieves what the user gets recommended by search engines or display advertising. Very few platforms allow the users to access and edit the predicted preferences of these algorithms; Google e.g. does offer this to the users on http://www.google.com/ads/preferences. This might become more common after the EU Privacy Directive that became effective May this year will have become implemented in national legislation soon.
Finally, also the media consumptions of the classic channels is affected by the filter bubble. Studies have shown, that nothing does influence a reader’s or viewer’s choice of programme or press issue more heavily, than the recommendation they get through their timeline which becomes therefore also a screen that might preselect what someone would watch or read. And not only media consumptions – also our brand preferences start to be effected by the posts of our community, that we had individually composed to form our circles, friends, our timeline.
As a side effect, the meaning of brands in people’s lives changes. With mass media advertising, the most valuable brands would have been those, that create prestige, aspiration for their buyers. Conspicuous consumptions is based on mass communication. It requires that others easily recognise what brands we buy. When the process of building brand preferences gets somehow atomized as we do experience when enclosed within our filter bubble, we tend no longer to get aspired for brands we buy for others might no longer notice the specialness of our brand-choices at all. And at the same time, it becomes increasingly more important to show affiliation to one’s community, to get acceptance, be welcomed as a member. Brands that contribute something of value to a community, something that not only the buyer but in some way the whole community would benefit from, get the clear advantage of being likely to show up in their buyers’ posts, telling their friends, “look, I care about all of you”. Umair Haque, writer for the Harvard Business Review, coined the term ‘meaningful brands’ in opposition to ‘aspirational brands’. This topic will be unfolded in a broader perspective in the article [Title of the article and page reference – ] by Daniel Bischoff and Dennis Grzenia.
So far we have been mostly looking on what does get filtered out. But what kind of content is there, that people accept in their timeline? Since most users follow not only people that they would have already known in their life outside social media but make new acquaintances, there has to be something that gets through the sieve. With the ‘meaningful brands’ we have got a first hint, of how advertising within the filter-bubble might still work. Apart from that, and in addition to the obvious, the personal statements, the thoughts, impressions and emotions people tell their followers, there is a specific form of information that gets propagated from one personal circle to the next, that is repeatedly shared, retweeted, liked or whatever form of handing along a certain platform provides. You know what I am talking about: LOL-cats, manga cartoons, freak show images, and often pictures without any apparent specialness – food, someone showing his beerglas against the skies, fowl, to name just a few. For images like this, the term ‘meme’ became fashionable.
‘Meme’ is an artificial word. It was created in behavioural biology to describe the way, traditions and culture get passed from one generation to the next and get part of the adaption of a group of humans to a changing environment – comparable with the genetics and natural selection of the fittest in the standard model of evolution. The meme is hence meant to be the cultural equivalent of the gene. When social media communication became common, it was soon realised, that some cultural snippets would get passed from one user to his friends and from his friends to their friends and so on. Mostly these would be images or videos, sometimes funny Powerpoint-Presentations or single phrases of text, marked with some kind of tag like #tahrirsq, #occupywallstreet or #londonriots. My last examples show, that the scope of memetic communication goes far beyond entertainment. In deed, it is often said, the whole uprising in Northern Africa that was quickly spread, was not at least a phenomenon of self organisation alongside memetic tags.
There are different types of memes, depending on their way of propagation. Some get spread very rapidly, globally and evenly. Others are shared only in their own community – which needs not to have been defined otherwise; these images just tend to stop at some invisible boarder. Some images seam to virtually infect one community and then, after some time, jump over to the next, creating bubble-like structures in the social web, while others fade away proportionally to the distance of their point of origin.
Just before joining MediaCom, Benedikt and I had started researching, to find the answers to the question if any given image had the power to become memetic. Even more interesting: to become able to brief creative people how to shape an image for a certain memetic task. So we set sails for hacking the meme code, like the Genome Project would have gone for the genetics. We started analysing images for which we would track their history of being shared on a very large scale. We collected some 10 million images in a database, together with the necessary meta data like who posted it, how many friends/followers would the have, how quickly would the image get re-shared, which language was the text that went with the image’s post, and so on. The second step is a continuous survey where people tell us which of a choice of two images they would more likely share with their friends online. All the data – the image itself, the meta data and the judgement of the participants of our survey, we put together to build statistic models to predict the success of any given picture. So we learned not only if an image would be memetic but also what it was to provide it with this quality. The detailed results will soon be published.
A chasm runs through our society (if we would stay with this 19th century term anyway). The Digital Divide is usually attributed to the problems of “digital illiteracy”, the fact that a portion of the world’s population is kept outside the Internet by poverty or stubbornness.
In truth, however, and I am convinced about that, the fault of the digital divide is cutting on a much more elementary level though our so called occidental culture. And I take this reactionist term as fully adequate, as Oswald Spengler would have done, because we are talking about nothing less then the complete upheaval of the order that we took for granted at least during the last 200 years. Why would I write such lofty stuff? Because it fits!
Fifteen years ago, I had read a witty article in Wired: : Net-Heads vs. Bell-Heads. Bell-Heads is derived from the Bell Telephone Company, the world’s first telco and direct predecessor of AT&T. Over a hundred years, the Bell-Heads had been the architects of the global (tele-)communication. From the Bell Labs in New Jersey many of the most important inventions of the IT-age originated, not least the transistor. The Bell-Heads had been the heros and prophets of the connected world.
The end of the Bell-age bears legendary traits in the meantime: how John Draper in 1972, with a whistle from some cereal-promotion would have seized the whole US telephone system. When the decentralized net-logic of TCP/IP was more and more established, it became clear to the mentors of Net culture: centralized, bureaucratic systems like that of the telcos would in the long run be inferior to the distributed chaos of the Net. The Net-heads, the evangelists of an anti-hierarchic communications architecture became the apocalypticists revelating the dusk of the old telephone world.
***
The Net without fixed hierarchy, with mere local organisation is the metaphor for a new model of society. The degree of freedom from force, of freedom of speech and the sheer unlimited possibilities of personal evolvement and creativity that we could experience since the 90ies in the Internet, has shown to us, how we also could live. The communications network became an Utopia. Reality outside the Net however looked different: 9/11, “War against Terror”, banking crisis, economic slavery, refugees that our own border patrol would drown in the Mediterranean, and the fight for “intellectual property” – just to chant a short part of last decade’s litany. Thus it is no wonder, that the Net would sometimes take downright messianic shape in our view, the place where everything shall be better. Today however I do not want to dive into deconstructing these – as always – questionable promises of salvation.
Suddenly there is disturbance in the world. People stand up and go down into the streets. But it is not ideologies, neither party platforms or union speeches that set people into turmoil. The occasion for insurgency is not the same for all events. From the Maghreb to Spain and to the US, there are definitively different coercions, against which the people rise.
What unites the demonstrators from Tahrir Square to Wallstreet, is the disire for self-determination and self-organisation. And the model is the culture in the Net.
Thierry Lhote had twittered: “like in may 68 in France a whole generation is learning meme manufacturing for their next Media VP job #occupywallstreet”; and what might read cynical at first sight, turns out to a remarkable observation. In the same way as 50 years ago, a generation has grown up, for whom a consensus about the values of the “old world” can no longer be reached. Thereby the dived cuts right through the middle of the old political wings. Right, left, green – all these groups are dominated by a generation that stays foreign to the Net culture emotionally and intellectually, even, if they do not position themselves openly hostile. And when the Net-heads try to get involved with the old structures, this does only work as far as nothing gets changed and the Old is accepted unconditionally. This was demonstrated in a tragic-comically way recently, when a case of Twitter-censorship shook the German green party.
The rise of the Pirate Party is often compared to the rise of the green party in the late 70ies. And much of this comparison fits. Some enemies of then remained the same: nuclear energy or monopolistic corporations. Some parts are even strikingly parallel. What the Notstandsgesetze, the “Emergency Laws” would have meant for our parents (this role would have played the draft for the US), for us today it is Internet surveillance, three-strikes-out, bail-out, and FRONTEX. The meme #ozapftis (the uncovering of the government malware) is the Watergate of our generation.
Damals, als wg. Sachen wie #Bundestrojaner noch Bürger auf die Straßen gegangen wären.
Those were the times when citizens would have gone into the streets on occasions like that
might @videopunk lament – but I am convinced that this is exactly what happens.
Further reading:
Disrupt politics!
Memetic Turn
I don’t like the term PR 2.0. It suggests an improved version of something that has been around a long time. Some bugs have been removed, some new features have been added. But all in all, it’s still public relations as we know it. I think this is not the case.
Why? Because we went through something that can be called the “memetic turn” or “memetic revolution”. The concept of course refers to Richard Dawkins memetic theory in his “Selfish Gene”. Basically, memes are bits of information (images, metaphors, jokes), that are spreading through a network. Originally, Dawkinsian memes are encoded in genetic material, but here I will not refer to the evolution of behavior or species, but to the evolution of media. In a nutshell: Memetic communication is destroying society – mass society to be precise. This is because the meaning of memes seldom can be decoded by everyone, but is only available to members of one distinctive community. Think of a picture of a LOLcat “I iz eating your GTD folder”) in comparison to a headline such as “USA declares war on Germany”. The first is memetic, the second isn’t.
Usually we think media evolution interdependent with social evolution. Mass society created mass media and so on. But it is exactly the other way around. When we look at the origin of the nation state, media such as national newspapers, national traditions, national novelists came first. With Benedict Anderson, we can argue that national newspapers created the first nations.
At the beginning of the 21. century, we can clearly see the demise of the national newspaper, national Television or national politics (e.g. the Volksparteien in Germany). At the same time, there is a distinctly non-national medium on the rise: the Internet. In the beginning, we framed this medium in terms of the ascent of the global age and the first iconic representations of the Web always has been the globe.
But the more we look at the Web, the more we discover that it is no global medium, but a tribal one. Ideas travel through the various social graphs not the way global mass media would do, but their path resembles the way information was distributed in the various accounts of classic ethnologists. A large part of online communication is memetic – using strong icons for communications, that can only be deciphered by relatively small tribes, and no longer considered newsworthy for the general public.
And finally, I come to the role of public relations. The bad news is that one of the first casualities of the memetic revolution has been the general public. This is a quirky situation for an industry that has been mostly about telling stories to the general public or to journalists (that in turn translated the stories for the general public).
The good news for public relations is, that after understanding the implications of the memetic turn, there are not fewer but more opportunities to tell your stories. A lot more. But the skills are changing. Public relations is no longer about writing press releases that are attractive to the general public or some vague sociodemographic audiences (e.g. “Entscheider”).
The work of a PR professional resembles more and more traveling shamans wandering from tribe to tribe and delivering their highly special and individualized services to different communities.
The skills include:
– getting to know the relevant tribal audiences and identifying the locations and communal boundaries of the tribes with the help of tools such as social media monitoring
– learning their dialects, rituals, social structure by participant observation at community gatherings online as well as offline (netnography)
– translating the story to be told for the lifeworld of the community
At the moment, the first memetic PR shamans are already mingling with their relevant communities. They are mostly self-taught practitioners, but I am very optimistic, that the skills will be sooner or later be part of the regular curriculum for public relations professionals.
As matter of fact, the memetic turn can also be understood as an appeal to practitioners to return to the forgotten task and original promise of public relations: Go and create relations! Today, one should add: And let them be sustainable relations.
“You will never be happy with strangers,
They would not understand you as we,
So remember the Jarama Valley
And the old men who wait patiently.”
Alex McDade
“Er sagte, es krache im Oberbau, und es krache im Unterbau. Da müsse sich sogleich alles verändern.”
(“He said, it cracked in the superstructure, and it cracked in the base. Thus everything would have to change at once.”)
(Bloch über Benjamin)
Communities persist by their members taking tasks within the community, fulfilling duties and profiting from the communally achieved successes. In the state’s society, the citizens delegate parts of their tasks and duties to the state’s administration. Over the last two hundred years, the citizens of the so called western world had handed over more and more even of some of their very intimate responsibilities to the state – care for the sick and elderly, birth and death, social security, education of children and much more.
How these delegated tasks would to be carried out, is defined by the process of representative decision-making of the parliamentary democracy. Elected representatives are mandated to take care over the span of several years. To fulfil these tasks, skilled persons have to be paid for and provided with their working means. And that those specialists would use their assigned means just about as planned in the society’s decision-making, an administration is needed on top.
***
Facebook is regularly compared to a nation that, regarding its population, would rank third in the world, after China and India. What makes Social Networks (and first of all Facebook) so nation-like?
In Social Networks, people affiliate with each other to communities, communicate and exchange. In most cases the exchange is rather personal; even when thousands of Arab women gather at the Persil Abaya Shapoo Facebook page, under the roof of their favourite detergent, it is at first sight all about the small things of every day’s business.
But not always things would stay to the small and private. Egypt, Tunisia, Libia, Spain, or the demolishing of Stuttgart’s main station – during the last months, huge groups of people came together, at first, to share their views, but then to form a common will – the common representation of no longer willing to accept the state of things, and finally to get organised and to jointly protest. And because the Networks it was always transparent, in how far others would join the movement, the protesters can be sure not suddenly be left out in the rain.
The protests’ content is always the getting back of responsibility and influence, that have – depending on the society’s shape rather or rather not be given up voluntarily. This calling “We are the people” is thus not without problems. Just because it is many that gather and articulate around some issue does not yet mean that a majority would share this opinion. Often the majority’s will is totally unclear, like with the Stuttgart main station. And even if it can be taken for granted that in deed a majority of those concerned would support the protest, important corrective features of democracy like protection of minorities and other, indisputable rules are lacking, that in our understanding of statehood should not be subject of change even by majorities of votes.
***
Politics will less and less work by delegation. The election terms appear to us completely inapropriate in length – but shorter terms would likely just lead to permanent campaigning and not to better representation of the will. Party platforms appear to us as irrelevant and inadequate, as the shallow content of mass media news. By the new communities and the preassure they can build through Social Networks, political decision-making is shaken. However it is not the case, that just a new variety would step alongside the established channels of representative democracy, just as Internet usage would not be additional or substituting to newspapers or other traditional media of the society.
Initiatives trying to somehow get “Net Politics” into parliamentary processes are necessarily longing to short to really stop the distortions. The speed, flexibility and intransigence that is demanded by the protesting people (attributed by mass media sometimes as angry citizens), are hardly to be balanced with whip, delegates’ conferences or presidential councils, without which a parliamentary-democratic system cannot be organised. As a stand-alone movement that is formed for realising a model for the entire society, like e.g. the Green Party in the eighties, the rather loose and spontaneous communities of interest are neither really suitable.
***
It will happen; for party politics, the newspaper’s fate is imminent. It will not help to tinker with politics 2.0 like with the symptoms of some illness. Openness in mind, admitting that even a system could fail that has been for centuries, should give us free sight of the alternative, that may lie before us. Only giving many options a try and allowing errors will bring us into the position to transpose what we treasure in the old world into the new. This change does not happen by itself, not due to nature’s law. Especially the technological infrastructure that enables the new, is shaped. If we care about how politics in future should look like, we have to take things into our own hands, not at last on the technological development and shaping of the new communal systems, like e.g. the culture in the Social Networks.
On Techcrunch, Semil Shah, regarding the uprising in North Africa, had reflected, to interpret the revolution as a new Social Media product. If therefore – like he says – start-ups would be needed, that would transform some political function into Social Media, I cannot really see. I think the infrastructure of existing Social Networks, Smartphones, video and photo networks would probably already be sufficient. In one thing, however, I totally agree:
Politics – there is no greater market to disrupt.
Read more:
Memetic Turn