And here is your social media host...
Listening to D Double E’s new album Double Or Nothing, I was struck by a line on the closing track 24/7. Usually known for his sharp delivery, this slightly restrained closing track reflects on the nagging demands of his Instagram feed. Someone tells him he really needs to be more active on there, he needs to keep updating. Jaded by a hectic schedule, in that moment the sheer monotony of connection seemed to weigh heavily. He responds: ‘24/7 I've got to be a host'. It's delivered with a weariness about the seemingly endless demands for his time and attention. There is both a sense of being overwhelmed and of not being able to step away.
On this track, amongst the many expectations placed on him, D Double E captures something of the toils of social media. His line captures something else too, the idea that social media users are required to be hosts.
Hosting is perhaps a way of thinking about social media that encapsulates both its demands and its draw. Being a host is to bring together a gathering. It's a generative and connective role. Yet the host is also responsible for what happens, for setting the tone, for being amusing, for facilitating connections and for being a visible presence. The host’s role also brings an expectation to entertain.
Maybe the lyric leads us to picture something less personal than a small gathering, perhaps this is more like hosting or presenting a TV show, a festival or a live event. The host here has to engage, be active, hold people's focus and still entertain. It was this showbiz type of hosting that was my first image on hearing that line. The pressure of being on public display and of having a particular role to play and a persona to occupy.
Social media has been seen as a form of work or ‘free labour' for sometime, from its beginnings even. It has long been said that it blurs the line between consumption and production. Seing the labour of social media as being a form of hosting gives that work a certain form and a particular collection of properties. Amongst these properties is the requirement of the host to stay active, to keeping mixing, to work the room and to entertain. It is the inescapable role of social media host that seems to be the particular trap that makes D Double uneasy. An endless gathering that the host is expected to keep working.
As D Double's lyric suggests, it is a type of hosting without limits. Whereas a host can leave an event once it concludes, the demand of social media is that the user needs to keep being a host and to keep hosting. Social media is a constantly unfolding event with many hosts. Hosts hosting other hosts. That gives a sense of the scale of the demands of platform cultures, as expressed in D Double E's pointed lyric and its slightly resigned delivery.
Meme-ness…
Idil Galip is building a meme studies reading list. This is a really useful resource. There can't be much that is more important than memes in understanding social media content and connections.
Laws of AI…
Following up on his influential book The Black Box Society, Frank Pasquale has a new book out. The book New Laws of Robotics: Defending human expertise in the age of AI has recently been published by Harvard University Press.
The waters…
I see from Ian Leslie’s newsletter The Ruffian that he has a book called Conflicted out in the new year. He describes the book and its development in this issue of his newsletter.
Digital life…
I've been keeping an eye on the Digital Life Initiative.
Paying for content…
An interesting story here about Facebook paying for news content from 2021. I suspect there will be some further detail to follow on how this will work. I wonder if the problem here is that it will go from content circulating for free to news being further adapted to suit Facebook’s logic and visibility (in order to make the type of news that attracts revenue from Facebook). There will be more to the exact way that payments are made and the consequences of that. It is crucial that revenue flow to those producing the news content, but if the balance of power in the distribution of content is not attended to then there may be further issues. I’ll keep an eye on this story and may post more about it as things develop.
The alter…
Perhaps creativity has limits. Boxes. People want more of the same. There are expectations to match up to. That's the tone of an interesting article on musicians using alter egos. With the artists mentioned, it seems that the alter ego created a space in which they were freed of their persona and so could experiment a bit more. I'm not sure why they couldn't experiment without an alter ego. Their is an implicit sense that these artists had something to protect or defend that could have been undermined by something out of the ordinary.
It's interesting how success seemed to limit the possibilities rather than opening them up. There’s also something here about how artists once aligned with an audience and genre perhaps wanted to maintain that alignment.
If you are not already a subscriber, if you want to receive future emails you can sign up here…