When a medium is private property
DECEMBER 11TH, 2016 — POST 334
“Social media”. The term catches software and service products that allow users to create online identities, connect with each other, and post content. The reflexivity with which the term is deployed so frequently today smoothes over the work the two words do. “Social”: well, we get that. But “media”: there’s more going on here.
It might be a consequence (or cause) of the inevitable loss of the term’s plurality. “Media” ought to be the plural of “medium”, even if “mediums” seems to be an error we’re just going to have to live with. But if we think of “social media” as a plural, we can then say Facebook is a social medium, Twitter is a social medium. As with any other media — novel, newspaper, magazine, photograph, painting, sculpture, movie, television show — each social medium sets up its own specific rules.
What works on Snapchat doesn’t work as well on Instagram which works even worse still on Twitter. A tweet doesn’t really have a cross-platform life: even if those 140 characters can appear in an iMessage or in a Facebook status, they’re not going to do the same work as they would on Twitter itself. Recode yesterday published a Q&A with one Twitter user who knows this platform-specificity more intimately than most.
Jonny Sun (@jonnysun on Twitter) is a writer and comedian who’s gained followers on the platform for his specific tone of heartfelt comedy. Sun is just one of many users who those like myself are a little jealous of: people that just get Twitter. Users like @jonnysun, @darth, and @dril seem to have the 140 character thing on lock to the point that I can’t conceive of how most of their content could exist outside of Twitter.
The Recode interview of @jonnysun concluded with a question that sought to prompt him into considering this very possibility: “What if @Jack DMs you and says ‘this is all shutting down tomorrow’?” asked Eric Johnson. @jonnysun replied
“I’m not really interested in putting my tweets on Facebook or posting my tweets on Instagram. I think every platform serves a different purpose.”
That a social network could disappear overnight is not hard to conceive of. But that a medium — a specific mode of expression — could disappear along with it is particularly strange. When a movie theatre or movie studio goes out of business and is closed down, the idea of moving images synchronised to sound used to tell a narrative of around 120 minutes in length doesn’t go away. We don’t lose an expressive medium when the network supporting it falls away. And yet, if Twitter falls, its social medium will surely evapourate.
We’ve seen this most recently with Vine. The Twitter-owned short-video sharing service announced in October it would be shutting down. Vine had a specific set of rules — 6-second video, autoplay, looping — that yielded a unique expressive social medium. Despite the endless stream of Vine compilations that would flood to YouTube, there was something about these little videos as they lived inside the app that didn’t translate elsewhere. When the service goes, so too will this medium, a medium that arguably had more value to certain users than most ever saw. For those invested in the network, it’s not just a community of like-minded individuals to interact with that falls away. The medium — the mode in which these users were able to express themselves — will be lost.
It feels strange to say it but the novel, the TV show, the album are open standards — a medium that doesn’t depend on the fortunes (or lack thereof) of one company. But with the rampant explosion of social services, many centring on a discrete medium, expressive modes themselves become owned. And in being owned they might well be short-lived, their specific brilliance ultimately lost in time without the network to support them. Occasionally, one comes loose — like when Instagram pinched the Story from Snapchat — and a more open medium is produced. But for the most part, social networks yield their own modes of expression that will either be shut down or usurped by something new.
If you enjoyed this, please take the time to recommend, respond, and share this piece wherever you think people will enjoy it. All of these actions not only help this piece to be read but also let me know what kinds of things to focus on in my daily writing.
Thanks, I really appreciate it.
