Is Social Media About Being Opaque?

Something occurred to me during the Nestle chocolate meltdown in Social Media the other day. I picked up on the story from @jamiec and took a wonder over to the Facebook page seeing straight away that the language used might well be one of the last examples of unvarnished corporate sentiment we'll get to see. It's the language of 'fuck you' isn't it?

"it's our page, we set the rules, it was ever thus"

So among other digital dropped jaws, I tweeted that part. It was picked up State-side where it started to do the rounds. I can't imagine too many multinationals making that mistake again. It's inconceivable that a Facebook fan page will instruct its fans how to behave and even more damagingly resort to biting sarcasm.

From this it's clear that many are still naive about what makes for participation in social media. Who are still drawing on legacy sentiment from the past. That is the mechanistic and 'professional' corporate bullying tone. Invariably a top-down, hierarchical monologue model (both internally and externally).

But somewhat surprising to me about the whole affair is the sheer hypocrisy of the blogging and digital social media community. The people who jumped on the band wagon who profess to understand social media. These are people who seemingly claim to partake in its values and yet who time and again dodge being transparent, authentic or  in current parlance, human.

Sure it's one thing to gasp in surprise at Nestle's coming out party. But the number of bloggers who are missing a human side to Nestle's use of Palm Oil by Indonesia's deforesting Sinar Mas conglomerate didn't escape me. New meeja's transparent schadenfreude at Nestle was easy to see and yet seemingly opaque when it came to their own positions on the issue. You do have a position right? It's only human after all.

It's one thing for Nestle to parade their sensitivity to local issues by creating say regional flavour variants of Kit Kat in Japan (how Kawaii), but it seems the locals of Indonesia's Riau province on the island of Sumatra are taking a good pasting while trying to protect the land from deforestation by Sinar Mas. All three Youtube clips are still below two thousand hits despite Nestle + Social Media search terms on Google being around half a million.

What does this tell me? It tells me that the sit-on-the-fence, have no controversial opinion, follow-the-dollar attitude that contributed to the decline of advertising's reputation is spilling over into social media. I just don't know how y'all can profess to being authentic, human, transparent and 'keeping it real' if you have no opinion on the issue. Which isn't about Nestle messing up in Social Media. It's about the deforestation for palm oil in Indonesia. Or did we just hijack it so we can wave it in the face of the next corporation to put us on the pitch list and who are stuck in the 20th century so that we incentivise them to work with us? 

Transparent, human and authentic us.

Google Retaliates Against China's Great Firewall

In a timely move leaked details of Google's beta firewall breaker is emerging on the internets. Could this be information warfare? Is the Empire Striking Back? More details over at Sinosplice.

Skinput

Clay Parker Jones brought my attention to this after an impoverished skim the first time it hit my life stream a couple of weeks ago. It made first draft and so I'm finishing it off before it starts to rot in my draft folder although I suspect the high resolution art directed shots like the one above contributed towards its renaissance. 

User interface on your skin developed by Chris Harrisson

So anyway, I was listening to another McKenna podcast a while back that conveyed some of his anomalous thinking on the big picture stuff that I find refreshing against what I'm labelling random theory; which is the prevailing explanation for anything prior to a low entropic state.

I'm also re-reading Taleb's Black Swan as part of a process of disposing of anything extraneous including books. I may have lost a lot of important stuff last year but I'm focused on not acquiring replacements and furthermore want to go completely minimal. Too much has been lost over the years, and in various countries to take possessions seriously any more, though I notice The KLEIN would be like having a few fingers amputated should that go missing or need to be jettisoned.

This rationalisation process means my wardrobe is a little less hip than when I was carrying the first division threads in a suitcase carrying way too many other important things, but I can't justify not being resourceful, when I have more 2nd Division T Shirts than I could get through in a lifetime. You realise this isn't just aesthetics, though that in itself is a radical departure from my life until now. It's also an alignment with how I want to live the remainder, which offhand can't be that much than four or five hundred months if I take an unhealthy interest in actuarial norms. Which I don't.

Back to McKenna. he was riffing on as he does so well, about nature being in principle a conservative and conserving force, and about how its frugality driven if that makes sense at all within the context of an abundance machine that we plunder without precedence.

There was also something said about nature's answers being fundamentally elegant solutions, and about that being a good indicator of how to think when trying to solve problems usually belonging within the remit of the natural sciences. Which brings me back to the topic of this post.

Skinput strikes me as a great use of existing human biological real estate. I just made that line up but bear with me because I really think Skinput is clever and resourceful. It's low on atoms and somehow for me begins to change the way we think about the stuff we're hell bent on possessing; principally that will be possessions, or am I over egging with alliterations now? Sorry if it's annoying.

Sure we're always going to be attached to social objects and badges of modernity, sentimentality, nostalgia and utility. However, as it becomes increasingly unnecessary (through possession convergence) to require a watch, a notebook, a phone, a portable music device or even spend time teasing apart the UX debate on the demise of QWERTY keyboards as Apple's iPad has instigated, I can see an evolutionary change in our relationship to stuff which changes quite a lot of what we assume our BIOS will be like in the future. I hope it's not the same. I can't see why it would remain the same if I look at other fundamentals that have shifted as culture does.

In any case, there's a video  about Skinput that I have embedded here for a lot less atomic space than was possible before the emergence of digital delivery. It's a bit dry but worth a look (Though I'd like it if Youtube allowed users to review videos at a faster speed than is conventional. Double and quadruple. That sort of thing.

Anyway, my only niggle is that the line Skinput have used is:

Appropriating the body as an input surface.

It is that already isn't it?

It's also a genius output surface and a lot lot more.

I guess it's the implied subservience of nature to science that annoys me with their endline. Mainly because I feel that nature is often most fiercely legislated around when it comes to sports of all things. Even the EPA hasn't earned the same gravitas and respect for nature that sports do. Whole forests and canyon, whole elements still in the ground don't get the same reverence for nature that sports does when considering the notion of purity and artificial helpers.

Sad, but over the years, I've never met anyone who supported my view (apart from a sports ethics philosophy professor who  I listened to on The Forum) that we should allow sports participants the choice of pharmaceutically enhancing themselves. I think the enhanced Olympics would be more special than the Special Olympics were that to be the case, well it would be ace and well worth watching.

I'm not quite making my point clear. I see glimpses of neurological rewiring from Skinput, in much the same way that Google's anschluss of my neo cortex coupled with stealth tech creep of real simple syndication (RSS) has changed the way I digest data. Not just the way I think but my self awareness (not to be confused with self consciousness as I learned last week)

 I like what Google did, no question they raised my IQ if we're flexible about the definition of intelligence, but I had no idea it would or that there's a quid pro quo. 

So now's a good time I guess to think Skinput through. Spontaneous prodding is OK on Facebook but I can't imagine I'd like my skin to be less than mine if say a Blackberry Skin were to come on the market.

Update: The bioethicist I was looking for is Julian Savelescu