Social Media, Traditional Media and Gossip Economics
A long time ago I remember reading about the idea of gossip as currency. Sadly my memory is rubbish, so I can’t remember where I read it, but it would be some psychology textbook.
The idea, as I understand it, is that knowing something about someone (or something) gives you currency in a group. It’s social signalling that can show you are part of a group.
At the simplest level, telling someone a secret about yourself means that you trust that person. The secret becomes currency when that other person decides to share the secret.
Traditional media devalues gossip as a group forming mechanism because it comes from an authoritarian position and because they broadcast the information to people indiscriminately, regardless their groupings. It could be said that certain traditional media outlets, especially news papers, have created groups, but I think that might be more a way to identify people not in your group (“bloody Guardian readers”, “bloody Fox News viewers”, etc.).
Social media, on the other hand, inflates the value of gossip, because it is transmitted peer to peer, equals exchanging stories, rather than a father forcing ideals on his children for their edification. Unlike with traditional media, social media facilitates groups forming, their central tenet being that people follow each other. Along side this, social media allows implicit (e.g. tags) or explicit (e.g. facebook pages) group boundaries.
This places traditional media on the outskirts of conversations. People will use it when they appeal to authority, but often traditional media will be the focus of criticism, i.e. the core of a piece of gossip. It will never control the conversation itself.
Did it ever control the conversation? I would say yes, when it was the focal point of where people got their information and opinions every day.
It seems that traditional media’s information is just as second hand as everyone else’s, as they quote tweets, and try to appeal to people’s sense of community without offering the infrastructure of social media.
So social media can out compete traditional media in terms of bums in seats, and in terms of democratizing information spreading. It might be said that there is more misinformation in social media than in traditional, however, in traditional media, scientific pieces are often decried by the scientists they try to represent, and the political coverage is as biased as anywhere. It takes the social networks we are part of to pull apart opinion pieces to evaluate their truthiness and usefulness. Social media, too, can improve on scientific reporting, by engaging people as peers rather than trying to win them over by sensationalising results and misleading people.
Social media can’t stop people from being liars or violent bigots, which is something that traditional media tempers with codes of conduct. Social media replaces that with harassment and ostracism.
Gossip’s value can be seen by how media sensationalises celebrity lives. Or in how much people value their privacy. Gossip in social media is more highly valued than in traditional media. Partly because we’re still colonizing social media, so setting boundaries is very important, but also because conversations are more important than instruction.
What does gossip currency bring to our conversations, then? It brings social cohesion and the ability to set boundaries. It decreases our reliance on self-declared authoritative sources and increases our intra-group trust. However it’s down side is a potential for highly insular communities, that, at their worst, are like those of gamergate. At one end of the spectrum it creates teachers, at the other it creates demagogues.
