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The Social Media Machine
Keynote speech given at Social Media World Forum on Tuesday 15
th
March
Intro
Hi my name is Toby Beresford, I'm the founder of the Facebook DeveloperGarage London and commercial director of Nudge Social Media agency basedhere in London. I've been creating web applications all my professional careerfrom Groupware with IBM through Social Network Site Maker software to SocialApplications since 1997 to now.
What
I expect you like me struggle with the same key issue within your organisation.How to change a fundamental misunderstanding from Marketing to Legal as towhat is social media and why it's different.We've all scratched our heads having been given a brief like - here's my Twomillion dollar TV advert - "make it go viral on Youtube" or perhaps it's the personwho asks - now how can we get all these kids on Facebook to look at ourwebsite?I'm sure you all can sympathise with this issue. For me it's the fact that, evenamongst those of us here who work in social media itself, we have not fullygrasped the nature of the revolution that has taken place. That we are using oldlanguage like “channel” and “audience”; old paradigms that we are being slow ingrasping the scope of what has happened, and what it means.Missing this paradigm shift stops us from moving forward.
I'm here to argue that the future has already happened - its effects areeverywhere, from the most mundane interactions in our daily lives to the sphereof geo-politics.Social media may look like "just the web" to an outsider but to those of us on theinside it's the sharp end of change.
What it is
I want to frame this keynote in terms of man versus machine, in a senserecycling a very familiar theme - Blade Runner, I- Robot, 2001, Star Wars and Terminator have all played with this too. But I believe that in this case themachine has already won, that the matrix has already been installed and we'venot fully realised this, and are not operating it to its full potential.Rather than clever web sites I like to think of social media as machines. Highlysophisticated, global digital machines that present a simple interface to theirusers.We're all familiar with the simplicity of the Google start page yet beneath is aclever machine that can find the information you're looking for from billions of items content worldwide, in a few seconds. The seeming simplicity of machine'scontrol panel can be very deceptive. Take this quote from
Age of Absurdity Michael Foley.. With the growth of communication technology, the machines doing the work are often no longer visible, but somewhere out inthe ether, as intangible and mysterious as the mind of God. All that remains is the interface, the screen. So image triumphsover content, presentation over understanding, description over analysis. There is no longer a beneath, there is only thesurface; no longer a complex machine, only a bright interface"
Lets take a social media machine we know- Digg.com - and understand why it's amachine.
The Digg tool ranks news items in terms of popularity, or "diggs". That's it,simple voting. The machine lists articles on its home page that have the mostdiggs. Yet underneath the machine is doing a lot more besides. Most importantlyit is authenticating the diggers (who dug what), and continually seeking out thefraudsters who would try to game the digg machine for their own end to get theirarticle to the top. No small feat of engineering in itself. The Digg machine takes away the traditional job of editor who would say whatstories are on the front page and what is relegated to the classifieds.And this is really the problem we all face – to collaborate with the machine wemust understand it.
History of Machines
Let's look at some examples from history - and I acknowledge that I am not thefirst person to draw parallels between the arrival of Gutenberg's printing pressand the internet's. And in fact they are very comparable: each heralded arevolution whose consequences were total; where the change was systemic. Inboth cases there have been victims: the scribes, the calligraphers who soonfound themselves out of business find their counterpart today in the print journalists and editor who right not are being laid off by the dozen. In bothinstances different establishments have sought to control and limit - thebehaviour of Paul III, Pope in the 16th century who tried to ban the works of renegade Catholic priests like OChino who converted to Protestants and wereusing Swiss presses to publish their works perhaps finds echoes in the reactiontoday of Rupert Murdoch. We are in the equivalent period to when the printingpresses and the calligraphers coexisted - but, at least from our perspective,there could be no doubt about which way the wind was blowing.
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