Beyond the media optimized society

By Herlander Elias

In this society 3.0 we are past the revolution of media, computing and networking. Since we live in a media-optimized society we do not notice the swirl. We stand right in the middle of it. We still have to figure out the Internet's beneficial impact on society. The real Zeitgeist (Keen, 2018, 11). What we take for granted is that we are on the cusp of change, we are way beyond the media-optimized society. Everyone is linked up, logged in, connected, streaming, downloading, uploading, sharing, saving. We do not notice but our behaviors match the technological framework around us. And this is a technical framework we are dealing with here. First there was the Printing Press, then came the Mass Media, and as the microprocessor triggered a revolution in computing power we aimed for a world of networks and opportunities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Aug 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685834609

Herlander Elias

Elias is a professional of Communication Sciences. Early as a graduate student he is concerned with research issues. He graduates in Communication Sciences at the University Lusófona of Humanities And Technologies, in Lisbon, and in a fast pace he finishes the first book on "Cyberpunk". Since 1999 the author endeavours in working as a Journalist on Internet-focused and multimedia-driven, IT news and entertainment magazines.

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1. Society 3.0: Beyond a Media-Optimized Society

In this society 3.0 we are past the revolution of media, computing and networking. Since we live in a media-optimized society we do not notice the swirl. We stand right in the middle of it. We still have to figure out the Internet’s beneficial impact on society. The real Zeitgeist (Keen, 2018, 11). What we take for granted is that we are on the cusp of change, we are way beyond the media-optimized society. Everyone is linked up, logged in, connected, streaming, downloading, uploading, sharing, saving. We do not notice but our behaviors match the technological framework around us. And this is a technical framework we are dealing with here. First there was the Printing Press, then came the Mass Media, and as the microprocessor triggered a revolution in computing power we aimed for a world of networks and opportunities.

The downside is that this media-optimized society and this hyperconnected world are becoming a surveillance space. In an increasingly sensor-based and surveillance society, in which digital data are continually gathered on people as they use digital technologies and move around in space and place, massive data-sets are generated (Kitchin apud Selke, 2016, 62). And it is precisely these massive datasets that are generated by algorithms that find patterns in our usage of social media and websites that happen enable Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based tools to better profile us. Living beyond the media-optimized society means to live in a digital world of media, one in which either we are being tracked by advertisers or in one in which we self-track ourselves. And let’s not forget that Self-tracking may thus be further conceptualized as a data practice that produces data assemblages. A data assemblage is a complex sociotechnical system composed of many actors whose central concern is the production of data (Kitchin [2014a, p. 24] apud Lupton cit. in Selke, 2016, 63). In other words, beyond the media optimization we have control and data production. We are always producing data, either on purpose or even when we are unaware of it.

Authors like Helbing speak of an emerging Big Data Society. We are told that:

it’s high time to create suitable institutions for the emerging Big Data Society of the twenty-first century. In the past, societies have created institutions such as public roads, parks, museums, libraries, schools, universities, and more. But information is a special resource: it does not become less, when shared, and it can be shared as often as we like. In fact, our culture results from what we share (2015, 110).

One key-point of the media-optimized society is that people start to be formatted like the media they use. Like Helbing we are forced to accept that a media-optimized society relies on how we look at reality based on data, numbers, statistics, patterns and computer models, simulations, and trends. We are using digital media to predict the future. Well, the future will always be unpredictable. On the other hand, it will always be enigmatic and repeat some things of the past as well. We could say that society is being redefined by the very same media it uses. When we think of something like what lies beyond a media-optimized society we have a glimpse of control, purity, aesthetics, noise-free and clusters and clusters of datasets that enable us to best respond to the challenges we may come across with. As Pariser tells us:

The structure of our media affects the character of our society. The printed word is conducive to democratic argument in a way that laboriously copied scrolls aren’t. Television had a profound effect on political life in the twentieth century—from the Kennedy assassination to 9/11—and it’s probably not a coincidence that a nation whose denizens spend thirty-six hours a week watching TV has less time for civic life (2011, 15).

But what is more concerning is that today we use digital media in an average use of at least 6 hours a day, for checking email, reading the news, using meditation apps, buying things online, checking the bank account, playing games, writing an essay; pretty much most of what we do today at home involves digital media. This media-optimized society of ours is not our final goal, but rather a new starting point. It means we start things digitally, and as Pariser says, the structure of our media affects the character of our society. Put another way, we have changed ourselves with the very same media that harnessed optimization. Optimization began with organization, digitization, collection, data gathering, channeling, connections, sharing, storage and then the final stage: examining the data pools for patterns in order to best understand who we are by knowing what we type, think and do on digital media. To speak of media-optimized society is to speak of Society 3.0. Data comes first. Media come in second place, and People stand in third place. Data outmaneuvers People. This is a revolution of sorts. Some authors called it an information revolution, others label it as a Big Data revolution, or Cloud-based, or AI-based, but what is certain is that this is nothing more than a move beyond a media-optimized society. Helbing notices this too, as he states:

We are in the middle of a digital revolution—a third industrial revolution after the one turning agricultural societies into industrial ones, and these into service societies. This will fundamentally transform our economy and lead us into the ‘digital society' (…). Again, we have difficulties to identify the responsible people—we are facing a systemic issue (2015, 4).

The problem with the systemic issue is that a media-optimized society is changed on its structure and it behaves like any other system. But a system in the age of digital media, cloud, social media, AI, and so on, is a smart system. It is still a system, so do not get me wrong, but nevertheless is still a system like any other. This means it can be changed, reformatted, upgraded and updated. Like computer data. The rise of a ‘reputation society’ (Gandini, 2016, 31) also seems concerning. Half the world is beyond the media-optimized society, whereas the other weak part is sharing, accessing, shopping, browsing, scrolling. They are all too much concerned with their online reputation. Too dependent on whether or not third parties will like them. They do not put themselves in first place. They need a crowd. The rationale is simple: the means of communications, like the means of transport, is a touchstone of a free society (Wilhelm, 2004, 13-14). And we are starting to notice that we seem less and less free. It is not like before the media-optimized society. And this is why we dream of what comes beyond the media-optimized society. Some people call Society 3.0 the electronic society (Carey & Quirk, 2009, 90), while others speak of an emerging surveillance society (Wilhelm, 2004, xii). It starts to seem that everything is the same. And control is more powerful than ever because we are distracted, by news, social media feeds, gadgets, entertainment, and streaming fiction. We forgot we could change the world.

Pariser believes that the digital world is fundamentally changing. What was once an anonymous medium where anyone could be anyone (2011, 8), is now something entirely different. We cannot escape from ourselves. We are logged in, locked on, locked in, we are no longer free in the digital realm. In its inception, the visionaries thought the digital media, the now media-optimized society, would pushes in a futuristic fashion towards a Digital Nation. A more utopian and democratic place to be. The goal of a Digital Nation is not just to do things faster; it’s to do them differently, revolutionizing the way we educate people, deliver health care, and engage in productive work (Wilhelm, 2004, xiii). The good news is that this is happening. The bad news is that this is not happening to everyone.

People, or user-consumers, as I prefer to call them, are under the spell of Narcissus. Their self-image is a double-edged sword. It is a goal, a purpose, an asset, and also a trouble, all they have left, empty bodies’ image. Alison Hearn sustains the existence of an emergent ‘digital reputation economy’ based on the ‘flexible’ and ‘branded’ forms of self-presentation across offline and online environments (Gandini, 2016, 33). The problem with flexible is that while we are too fond of and too obsessed with self-presentation, we forgot our values, ethics, ideas, concepts, mindset, goals, and training the mind for what is best and worst. Nobody now has a plan B. People tend to stick to the story they were dealt with. There is a generational change taking place now. In the media-optimized society the media are optimizing society to make it what it is supposed to be: another kind of system. That is it. In Berardi’s view, the issue is more complex:

With the concept of generations we are making reference to a human togetherness that shares a temporally defined technological, cognitive and imaginary formative environment. In the past era of modernity this formative environment changed slowly over time, while productive and economic relations and the relationships between social classes changed in a much more pronounced way. But once alphabetic technologies gave way to digitalization, this transformation has intervened to radically modify the modalities of learning, memorization and linguistic exchange, and the formative density of generational belonging has become decisive (2009, 12).

What he is saying is that the time frame that once guided society was once more based on rules and togetherness. Technology was a tool. Society came first. But thanks to digitization, the speed of the media turned society into an amalgam in which the length of time reserved for learning and fitting is no longer needed. Things happen so fast now that society of today is not the same society of modernity. We call our times hypermodern times for that reason, as for the first time in history, all generations come across the same media feed. The media-optimized society has been unraveled. We cannot go back. Relations have changed and we cannot go back to that moment of before the media. This train is not stopping for no one. Dijk says that

Within less than a decade, a new infrastructure for online sociality and creativity has emerged, penetrating every fiber of culture today. Social media, roughly defined as ‘a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content’ (Kaplan & Haenlein 2010: 60), form a new online layer through which people organize their lives (2013, 4).

This is the problem: the layer that social media and digital media in general create, and which on top of what we organize ourselves, is what makes the media-optimized society both a positive oasis and news feed problem. We are doing our activities based on the optimization principles. This layer of technique, the framework of digital media is what turns us into assets into its machination, its gears. We have become the appendices by which all things are measured. We, user-consumers, our sole mission is to provide the media-optimized society with more data so that the layer of technology" can soon outsmart us all. This is the age of AI first. Remember that.

Today, this layer of platforms influences human interaction on an individual and community level, as well as on a larger societal level, while the worlds of online and offline are increasingly interpenetrating. Originally, the need for connectedness is what drove many users (Dijk, 2013, 4). The question is that when we speak of media-optimized society we keep in mind the societal level. That is where the problem lies, because everything we do now echoes in society. The media-optimized society means optimization