Book Review: Human as Media
Introduction
Human as Media by Andrey Miroshnichenko explains how the internet is changing society and individuals.
The book is anchored around five topics:
Impact of technology and progress on humans
Three major content revolutions
Drivers and impact of individuals publishing content
Role of the viral editor
Social impact of the net
Technology and Progress
“Everything is amazing right now, and nobody’s happy” Conan O’Brien
In the past technology moved slowly and people were able to bring it into their lives at their own pace. As technology progressed rapidly and the life-span of humans grew, people found themselves living through two or more technology eras. When the pace of technological change and progress exceeds people's ability to adapt to the change, it causes temporal stress.
As progress gives rise to constant stress, the defence response becomes reactionism, which resembles regression and recoil to medieval values. Extremism is motivated not by poverty, but by a feeling of injury and loss. Reactionism is particularly strong in societies where tradition has always been a more important regulator than adaptation.
Proponents of humanities who maintain social cohesion by transforming the new into a habit, have not been able to keep up with the technocrats. Technocrats who move human abilities forward are focused on the monetization of the new. Technocrats have set a scorching pace for progress, and the pace of change is only accelerating by the day.
Content Revolutions
So far we have had three revolutions for freedom of content.
The first revolution relates to the appearance of the demotic script in ancient Egypt in the 7th century BC. This represented the emancipation of writing, resulting in palaces and religious institutions losing their monopoly over the production of content
The second revolution relates to the invention of the printing press. This represented the emancipation of reading, resulting in palaces and religious institutions losing their monopoly over the interpretation of content
The third revolution relates to the democratization of access to publishing tools (mobile devices, internet, platforms). This represented the emancipation of authorship. This means individuals have the unlimited right to share their thoughts with others, resulting in religious institutions losing their monopoly over the production of meaning.
Individuals Publishing Content
Our goal on the internet is not to inform or be informed. Our goal is resonance.
Thirst for a response drives publishing of content. To get a response means to be somehow reflected in someone else.
Reactions can be classified into two types:
Reactions from the largest number of other people
Reactions from the most important people
The quantitative nature of the response explains the relationship between response and convention. More accurate an author's personal understanding of social convention, greater is the response (more people respond). A person who is capable of receiving a resounding response from large groups of people becomes a leader. A good response is often generated by bad information - base, vulgar, scandalous.
The qualitative nature of response facilitates society's delineation into groups. This is how people find others like them. This is how communities take shape in society
Sufficient or insufficient satiation of the thirst for a response can prompt action and bring about pleasure or stress.
Sharing is not simply the publication of information, but also a way of exhibiting one's status of awareness. The closer (earlier) you are to a source of information, the cooler you are.
In the old institutional world, power was built on a lack of information among their audience. On the web, in order to show you are significant to other people, you need to share information. I share therefore I am significant. Whoever communicates more frequently and earlier, and conveys the most important information, achieves a higher status.
Social hierarchy based on possession of content, from lowest to highest:
An individual does not know what everyone else knows
An individual knows what others know
An individual knows that others know, but knows before many of them know
An individual knows and communicates what many others do not know yet, but would like to know
Increasingly publishing is turning from an opportunity to an obligation. If you only consume content you become invisible.
Viral Editor
Most of the breaking stories today are formed and shaped on social media platforms by viral editors.
The viral editor identifies something of interest, passes this information through his or her personal interests filter and micro-edits it with a goal to elicit a response.
The viral editor improves people as it cultivates their individuality and exposes them to the judgement of others while remaining within socially approved boundaries.
The viral editor is capable of filtering lies. If a lie is significant it is spread by the viral editor until witnesses or experts who are capable of disproving it gets wind of it. If a lie is insignificant, it is never disproved and is not spread.
A good example is the reporting and information provided by viral editors on Covid19. Horrendous reporting by traditional journalists was called out by the viral editors. Example: mortality rate is not the same as case fatality rate.
Social Impact of the Net
Content published on the net has an impact on people’s lives. Once an individual begins publishing content, they evolve through the following stages:
Primitive authorship
Popular authorship
Quasi-professional media activity
Civil involvement
Volunteer activism
Political activism
Not all people see this path through to the end (political activism). Each individual stops at a particular activity level according to his temperament and talents.
Emancipation of authorship is strengthened by the growth of consumer culture, which leads to a competition for status and sharing, together these become a volatile mixture that in a closed society menaces old institutions. A consumer culture habituates people to consumer standards. When state services seriously lag behind commercial services in terms of quality, consumer demands unavoidably turn into political ones.
Content published by the individual impacts social reality in four ways:
Stewing in your own juices: User gets fired up and makes a noise. The only way this has an impact is when a large number of people start looking at a subject of mutual interest in a new way
The boomerang: Content results in real events, but the main objective of such events is subsequent resonance in the blogosphere itself
Let them do it: People from the internet strive to influence someone in the real world. Examples: petitions, appeals, complaints
Let us do it: Generate initiatives on the web that they then carry out in real life themselves
When the actions of the “let us do it” group overlap with the services provided by an institution, the institutions launch a relentless battle accusing them of subversive actions. This is why emancipation of authorship will detonate the old institutional world.
The four ways in which authorship impacts social reality fits well with Clay Shirky’s motivational scale for people's participation in collective action:
Personal sharing: done among uncoordinated individuals
Communal sharing: which takes place inside a group of collaborators
Public sharing: when a group of collaborators actively wants to create a public resource
Civic sharing: when a group is actively trying to transform society
Television a shared passive addiction swallowed up people’s free time that was made possible by technological progress. The internet converts the entire vast volume of man-hours previously spent on television from a passive state into an active one. If the free time is not occupied by anything a social cataclysm occurs.
People are irritated by abundance and discrepancies in information on the internet. They would prefer to get their information from a single source that is understandable and unambiguous. Good journalists understand this need. The journalist is the priest of social navigation and readability. They are not only authors but mediators between the social demand for order and the personal demand for suitable reference points.
Before content was filtered before publication, now content is filtered at distribution. The three filters that help us sift through content:
Personal settings
Viral editor
Algorithms of relevance
With an exponential increase in the number of authors, we need to become our own gatekeeper and whom you trust for information. People have to move away from the tendency to believe if information is published, it has undergone a selection process and has received the stamp of the establishment.
Thanks to David Perell for recommending this book. I recommend subscribing to all his newsletters.