I wrote about Mastodon the other day. Here's the piece I wrote on ZDNet :
http://www.zdnet.com/article/is-mastodon-the-new-social-media-star-or-imploding-black-hole/
I'm impressed with its growth and stability so far. I'll be watching closely as brands try to work out how to monetize this new audience
@eileenb As @woozle noted, when epistemic (media) systems gain significance, the attract attention:
"Because of a high percentage of the population being present, there is now substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place."
Or more accurately: as there are /returns/ to influencing an audience, those influencers will appear: direct & brand marketing, propagandists, polemicists.
So yes, the brands ... will come, like it or not.
@woozle @eileenb I see a fairly common progression of interests within a new media channel. Not necessarily in the following order, but close:
1. Technicians -- "shop talk"
2. Artistics and creatives, avant garde.
3. Organisations for internal use: business, government, academia, religion, etc.
4. External comms, management, monitoring, discussion.
5. Direct marketing.
6. Mass entertainment.
7. Mass marketing.
8. Propaganda and polemicists.
Merely changing platforms changes nothing.
@crecca How, specifically?
I'd like to see some specific examples.
@dredmorbius uh, I'm not media specialist, unfortunately. But I'll try.
Change of nature implies something more than growth, scale, and so forth. But, I'd argue, changing breadth of definition is changing the nature. And, to focus on one thing from the list, propaganda has changed its definition to include things that are not deceitful intentionally. This was enabled by medium, because sender is no longer just government, or political party.
@crecca If you're referring to "useful idiots", the ... tradition is ancient.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
Sun Tzu's "doomed spies": https://suntzusaid.com/book/13
Dating to 5th century BCE, or 2,500 years ago. Twitter and Facebook adoption at the time were somewhat smaller than today.
I'm not a media specialist either. I've come to realise that media are significant, and am making up for lost time.
Most of what I'm discussing I've learnt the past 6 months.
@dredmorbius No, I'm not, the point of origin of the propaganda is different, among other things. Message is different. Receiver is different.
In broad terms, the media that you use is affecting the message deeply, transforms it, according to the rules of the media. This is an old theory, though.
And regarding social media specifically – this is not very useful term here, and I find it artificial still.
@crecca @dredmorbius "(...) the old medium becomes the content of a new medium, which adapts, changes, and evolves":
(I'm not familiar with the book, just picked quote, which I read somewhere else)
@stefanieschulte I'm working my way through McLuhan, and have read some of tMitM, though his "The Gutenberg Galaxy" covers a bit more the elements of media and impacts on society. That was the starting point of Elizabeth Eisenstein's "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change", the paper below is shorter and covers the principle argument w/o the evidentiary padding.
http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1324149.files/Eisenstein%20Some%20Conjectures.pdf
@stefanieschulte Or, if you want to consider the rebuttle of anti-vax hoaxers rejections of vaccine as a preventive of virally-transmitted disease: it's an information war on an information war on an information war on an information war, on an information system.
"It's no use young man, it's turtles, all the way down."
Eileen Brown ☑️
Doc Edward Morbius ❌
Rafał Piątkowski
Stefanie Schulte