The Dark Side of Social Media Alarm bells, analysis and the way out Sander Duivestein & Jaap Bloem Vision | Inspiration | Navigation | Trends [email protected] II Contents 1 The Dark Side of Social Media: r.lassche01 > flickr.com Image: a reality becoming more topical by the day 1 Contents PART I ALARM BELLS 7 2 2012, a bumper year for social media 7 3 Two kinds of Social Media Deficits 9 4 Addiction in the Attention Deficit Economy 10 PART II ANALYSIS 12 5 Ten jet-black consequences for Homo Digitalis Mobilis 12 6 Social media a danger to cyber security 20 7 The macro-economic Social Media Deficit 21 8 How did it get this far? 22 PART III THE WAY OUT 25 9 Dumbing-down anxiety 25 10 Basic prescription: social is the new capital 27 11 The Age of Context is coming 28 12 SlowTech should really be the norm 30 13 The Slow Web movement 31 14 Responsible for our own behavior 33 References 35 Justification iv Thanks iv This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0 Unported (cc by-nc-sa 3.0) license. 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The opinions expressed Text Jaap Bloem, Sander Duivestein & Thomas van Manen are the collective ones of the team of authors and do not mean any Book production LINE UP boek en media bv, Groningen. the Netherlands official position of the sponsoring companies. 1 The Dark Side of Social Media: 1 a reality becoming more topical by the day Expelling the darkness “Massive fail — the anti-social world of social media” “For everyone to use” was what the word social in social http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/ media was meant to mean back in 2004 when O’Reilly’s massive-fail-the-anti-social-world-of-social-media Silicon Valley guys coined the term Web 2.0. That libera- tion was fine as long as it would air voices out of the “Asocial Media is on the rise” critical masses that had been oppressed by big com- http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/asocial-media merce and the mass media elite. Unsurprisingly however, the social media groundswell thereafter also unleashed a “Social Media Madness — join or die” frantic chaos in the name of democratization that, given http://da.scribd.com/doc/43733307/Social-Media-Madness-2010 Media Side of SocialThe Dark our liberal values, wasn’t easy to contain. “Terrorism 2.0: Al Qaeda’s Online Tools” Instead of stimulating a classical “aphorisms, epigrams http://schedule.sxsw.com/2011/events/event_IAP5405 and repartee” culture, as Tim O’Reilly wanted us to believe in the Fall of 2008, so-called social media today “The Dark Side of Social Media” rather unify mankind in the caricature of rabbits caught http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/Feature-Articles/ in the headlights of their own mobile devices. The The-Dark-Side-of-Social-Media/ba-p/880 uniquely new focus of precious social media gadgets has brought us attention and knowledge deficits, financial “Crime and Social Media Sites — Catching Criminals and Learning to and societal deficits that tend to darken the bright ben- Avoid Them” efit which was so badly sought after. http://source.southuniversity.edu/crime-and-social-media-sites- catching-criminals-and-learning-to-avoid-them-75131.aspx From the beginning, for instance in Germany, there was a sound skepticism rising fom the mere meaning “The 10 Types of Social Media Addicts” of “sozial” since that word used to be exclusively related http://mashable.com/2012/10/12/ to true societal value as opposed to just popular (Latin the-10-types-of-social-media-addict-infographic/ “populus”), its intimate cousin vulgar (Latin: “vulgus”) or even worse. Many Germans still refuse to speak of “The dark side of social media: Fake tweets during Hurricane Sandy” “soziale Medien” and deliberately use the English phrase http://www.firstpost.com/world/false-tweets-on-hurricane-sandy- instead. reflects-darker-side-of-social-media-512959.html Many now openly have begun to question the social “Call It Antisocial Media: Even Twitter Has a Dark Side” nature of social media, which should have raised eye- http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/12/call_it_antisocial_media_even.html brows from the start given the intimate combination of social in its basic tribal sense and media as the platform “Parents, Beware: Big Commerce is Watching Your Kids, Courtesy of for and mirror of our human egos. Their Phone Apps” http://www.forbes.com/sites/robwaters/2012/12/11/parents-beware- These musings sum up our concern, not as to deny the big-commerce-is-watching-your-kids-courtesy-of-their-phone-apps/ bright side. We just need to continuously and actively expel its darkness to reap the benefits of social media. “Huge rise in social media ‘crimes’” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20851797 Twelve selected sources from the past four years may serve as an initial reminder: “The 10 Types of Twitterers and How to Tame Their Tweets” http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevefaktor/2013/01/04/the-10-types-of- twitterers-and-how-to-tame-their-tweets-twitter-users/ “Quote” 2 IA report went to press — was published in the South D E China Morning Post on 15 September. The observa- M tions that were made about whipped-up hatred were AL perfectly in line with our books Me the Media (2008) I C and The App Effect (2012). In fact, this report, The O S Dark Side of Social Media, is a further elaboration of We never look up anymore the same issue. E OF OF E In the first week of January 2013 a Tumblr website put our D I S society into a fearsome perspective. The website features a collage of images of people staring down at their cell A phones. They are lost in time. Frozen in the moment. Their D body is in meatspace, but their mind is in cyberspace. They are completely detached from their surroundings. The blog THE RK is created by a researcher on mobility who lives in Helsinki, via Finland. The About page contains the following statement: Free download Free download via http://www.ict-books.com/ “The world has gone mobile. We live in an information http://www.ict-books.com/books/ books/inspiration-trends/ society and are connected to information anywhere we go, inspiration-trends/me-the-media- the-app-effect-pdf-lowres- and whatever we do, 24/7. And that has changed how we as pdf-lowres-en-1-detail en-detail people behave. We never look up anymore.” Good grounds for our efforts present themselves on a The blog went viral for some days. Newspapers from all near-daily basis. Lucid enumerations, such as Criminal Use over the world payed attention to the site. According to of Social Media (2011) by NW3C, the American National the international Metro the “New Tumblr illustrates our White Collar Crime Center, are quite explicit. And accord- tech-dependent society”, tech website Mashable named it ing to recent statistics, a Facebook crime is being commit- “Beautiful Tribute to the Tech Obsessed” and newspaper ted in the UK every 40 minutes. Social media are so easy Daily Mail made the following statement: “Photos capture to use, so fast, so accessible and so widespread, that this the way mobile phones have changed the way we interact should not cause anyone any surprise. with the world around us”. The power of social, now open to all The Tumblr website “We Never Look Up” visualizes the Andrew Lam, the author of the Chinese Dark Side article, society we now live in. It creates awareness of the effect denounced the fact that “the power of social media, now that social media and smartphones are having on our lifes. open to all, means even fools can cause chaos in far-flung In an interview with Metro the creator made the following places, with only an ill-made video.” Lam was referring to comment: “I’m not saying it is a negative thing, when done the anti-Islam film Innocence of Muslims, which provoked safely. It’s just that we need to be aware of that times change, worldwide emotional protests, one of which resulted in the and behavior as well. But in social context, with friends, death of Christopher Stevens, the US ambassador to Libya. etc., it’s kind of rude to finger on your mobile the whole time. My message is not to judge, just to make this behavior con- Me the Media deals with the “power of social media” crete.” Just like the creator of the Tumblr site, we have been which came into vogue in 2007 when, for the first time, keeping track of it all, of course: beginning with the English more information was produced in one year than had been search string Dark Side of Social Media. The latest remark- produced in total since the invention of writing, 5000 years able article under this heading — right before our own earlier.