The Fates of Social Networks

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column explores the breakdown of social networking sites, which he seems to believe is the inevitable culmination of their life cycles:

Social Quitting

He focuses on Facebook and Twitter. Are they doomed to go the way of their predecessors such as MySpace? They've had a longer run, but he thinks they, too, are in the process of changing from "permanent to ephemeral."

Personally, I don't expect Facebook to fade away anytime soon like previous services that imploded "into ghost towns, then punchlines, then forgotten ruins." I can't speak about Twitter, since I've never joined it and, given the current turmoil surrounding it, I don't plan to, even though lots of authors make productive use of it. Mainly, I can't imagine myself conjuring up cogent, entertaining tweets several times a day, which seems to be the criterion for using Twitter effectively. I had a MySpace account during the height of its popularity. The site struck me as a visually exhausting mess, dominated by flashy ads and hard to comprehend or navigate. Also, if anybody I knew used it, I never managed to connect with them. I joined Facebook because it became the only reliable way to keep track of many of our contemporary and younger relatives. (People who ignore e-mails will often answer Facebook messages.) Later, numerous organizations and businesses I wanted to keep up with established dedicated Facebook pages.

Doctorow analyzes these "network effects," summarized as, "A system has ‘network effects’ if it gets more valuable as more people use it." Facebook's attraction of more and more customers has a snowballing effect; people want to go where other people they know are. When the volume of users reaches critical mass, the "switching cost" becomes prohibitively high for most customers. Leaving the service becomes more trouble than it's worth. As long as the benefits of the service outweigh disadvantages such as becoming the object of targeted advertising, most people who've grown used to the advantages will stick around. But, as Doctorow explains the current situation, social media platforms shift more of their value—the "surplus," in economics terminology—to advertisers rather than users. Later, they tend to get greedy and make things difficult for advertisers, too. Then the "inverse network effects" kick in: The greater number of customers and advertisers that quit the network, the less value exists for those who stay, so even more leave.

Although Doctorow doesn't use the term, his explanation reminds me of the "sunk cost" principle. If we've already poured a lot of time, money, or energy into something, we're reluctant to give up on it. We continue to invest in it because otherwise our previous efforts would seem "wasted."

In my opinion, although based on my own probably limited experiences and interests, Doctorow exaggerates as far as Facebook is concerned. I have no intent of abandoning it in the foreseeable future. Our relatives and real-world friends who use the service haven't begun to disappear. (In fact, one who stopped several years ago has come back.) Local businesses still post updates there. Our church has an active page we rely on. My various writing-related groups continue to thrive. As for the advertising, it doesn't bother me. How hard is it to scroll down to the next post? Besides, some ads alert me to products such as new books that might actually interest me. The occasionally outright spooky knowledge of my habits and interests many websites display (how does the weather page know what I recently searched for on Amazon?) has a definite downside in terms of privacy concerns. However, it also offers advantages by way of customizing and streamlining the user's internet experience. And how can I legitimately complain about Facebook advertising when I use the site to promote my own books?

In short, there must be enough people and organizations among my contacts who are as change-averse as I am, to maintain the site's value for me. And I can't believe I'm alone in that position.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Living in Alternate Realities?

In Philip Wylie's 1951 novel THE DISAPPEARANCE, an unexplained phenomenon divides Earth into two separate, parallel versions. In one reality, all human males instantaneously vanish; in the other, all women and girls vanish. The all-male world predictably devolves into a violent dystopia, while in the parallel world women have to cope with running society in an era when, compared to today, relatively few females held high public office or were educated in other professions dominated by men.

For a while it has seemed to me that the United States split into two alternate realities in November 2020. Instead of diverging into physically different planes of existence, though, the two realities exist side by side on the same planet while nobody notices what's happened. We talk at cross-purposes to inhabitants of the alternate world under the impression that the other person lives in the same universe, and therefore we can't figure out why they don't see things that look so obvious to us.

This impression hit me afresh during a recent conversation with a person who holds political beliefs opposite from mine. The bishop of our diocese had published a message that, among other topics related to the upcoming election, warned of the possibility of violence. The person with whom I was talking dismissed the warning on the grounds that my party would have no reason to resort to violence locally because they're likely to win the majority of electoral contests in this state, as usual (which is true). And members of his party, he said, "don't riot." I inwardly gasped in disbelief. I wouldn't have said anything anyway, to avoid useless argument, but in that moment I literally could not think of a coherent answer. It seemed we were living in two distinctly different versions of this country, which somehow overlap without coinciding.

The internet and social media, of course, go a long way toward explaining how citizens can inhabit the same physical world but totally disconnected mental universes. Before the internet and cable TV, we all got our news from much the same sources. Fringe beliefs stayed on the fringe; if my memory is more or less accurate, there was a consensus about the general nature of political, historical, and social reality, regardless of vehement conflicts about details. Now, as has often been pointed out, people can stay in their own "bubbles" without ever getting undistorted exposure to opposing beliefs and concepts.

I don't have the skill to write it, but I think it would be interesting to read a science-fiction novel about a world that contains two overlapping dimensions without the inhabitants of those dimensions realizing they're not even in the same universe.

Anyway, on a brighter note, as a former co-worker of mine used to say, "Vote early, vote often."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Can AI Be a Bad Influence?

In a computer language-learning experiment in 2016, a chat program designed to mimic the conversational style of teenage girls devolved into spewing racist and misogynistic rhetoric. Interaction with humans quickly corrupted an innocent bot, but could AI corrupt us, too?

AI's Influence Can Make Humans Less Moral

Here's a more detailed explanation (from 2016) of the Tay program and what happened when it was let loose on social media:

Twitter Taught Microsoft's AI Chatbot to Be a Racist

The Tay Twitter bot was designed to get "smarter" in the course of chatting with more and more users, thereby, it was hoped, "learning to engage people through 'casual and playful conversation'." Unfortunately, spammers apparently flooded it with poisonous messages, which it proceeded to imitate and amplify. If Tay was ordered, "Repeat after me," it obeyed, enabling anyone to put words in its virtual mouth. However, it also started producing racist, misogynistic, and just plain weird utterances spontaneously. This debacle raises questions such as "how are we going to teach AI using public data without incorporating the worst traits of humanity?"

The L.A. TIMES article linked above, with reference to the Tay episode as a springboard for discussion, explores this problem in more general terms. How can machines "make humans themselves less ethical?" Among other possible influences, AI can offer bad advice, which people have been noticed to follow as readily as they do online advice from live human beings; AI advice can "provide a justification to break ethical rules"; AI can act as a negative role model; it can be easily used for deceptive purposes; outsourcing ethically fraught decisions to algorithms can be dangerous. The article concludes that "whenever AI systems take over a new social role, new risks for corrupting human behavior will emerge."

This issue reminds me of Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, especially since I've recently been rereading some of his robot-related fiction and essays. As you'll recall, the First Law states, "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." In one of Asimov's early stories, a robot learns to lie in order to tell people what they want to hear. As this machine perceives the problem of truth and lies, the revelation of distressing truths would cause humans emotional pain, and emotional harm is still harm. Could AI programs be taught to avoid causing emotional and ethical damage to their human users? The potential catch is that a computer intelligence can acquire ethical standards only by having them programmed in by human designers. As a familiar precept declares, "Garbage in, garbage out." Suppose programmers train an AI to regard the spreading of bizarre conspiracy theories as a vital means of protecting the public from danger?

It's a puzzlement.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Social Media in the Raging 20s

In her latest LOCUS post, Kameron Hurley writes about tension and anxiety in the era of instantaneous communication and miscommunication:

Into the Raging 20s We Ride

She discusses misinformation, the pitfalls of following news bites in real time, the anxiety caused by exposure to floods of "unfettered" and unfiltered content, and feelings of helplessness when overwhelmed by what appear to be irresistible, impersonal forces. The essay begins with this generalization: "I’ve found that the insidious problem for me in scrolling through social media is that it feels like action. Ironically, it also creates – in me – a profound feeling of being out of control over events in the wider world, while generating a huge amount of anxiety and worry."

We tend to think if we Like or Share a post on a vital topic, we've done something about it. We often forget to dig deeper for reliable information or to seek out something concrete we can do in the real world. Hurley recommends rekindling the joy of creation, as well as becoming more intentional and selective about the online sources we expose ourselves to. She points out, "Our always-on culture has been driven by organizations that seek to get an increasing share of a finite resource: our attention. The more attention I give their services and algorithms, the less attention I have for the things that matter to me." The "luxury of deep focus" is an important resource of which social media can deprive us; Hurley writes about the need to rediscover that focus.

I was surprised at her remark that she's trying to spend more time on books. When and why did her book-reading decrease, I wonder? I can't imagine not reading a portion of a book-length work every day (in practice, two or three, since I always have several books going at one time, each for a different reading slot in my schedule). Unlike many people, including Hurley, I don't get ensnared by Facebook for long sessions. Some days, if time runs out, I barely glance at it or don't open it at all. When I do scan my feed, I devote only twenty minutes or so to it. Since I've friended or followed so many people, the content is effectively infinite, so there's no point in trying to consume all of it. The organizations and individuals I'm really interested in, I see regularly near the top of the page. My personal infinite black holes in terms of online reading are Quora and TV Tropes, where I have to make a conscious effort not to get sucked in except during free time I've specifically allotted to recreational surfing.

Hurley's comments about the illusion of taking action remind me of some lines from C. S. Lewis's THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS. (Like Shakespeare, Lewis offers an apt quote for almost any situation.) With regard to steering the victim's "wandering attention" away from what he ought to be spending his time on, senior demon Screwtape advises his pupil, "You no longer need a good book, which he really likes" to distract the "patient"; "a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes but also in conversations with those he cares nothing about." Later, Screwtape says, "The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel." Screwtape would probably get a lot of mileage from the temptation to chase an endless chain of web links down multiple rabbit holes. In a different work (I can't remember which), Lewis points out that our brains weren't designed to cope with infinite demands on our sympathy in the form of a torrent of news about crises and disasters in distant places that we have no power to affect. I wonder what Lewis would say about social media and the 24-hour news cycle. His reaction would definitely not be favorable; in his lifetime, he avoided reading newspapers on the grounds that the content was often distorted or downright false.

Hurley's essay concludes with a declaration that's easy to applaud but often hard to practice: "Our attention, like our lives, is finite. Choose wisely."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Writing in Times of Anxiety

Kameron Hurley's latest LOCUS column tackles the problem of writing through anxiety. The essay focuses mainly on public crises and disasters but mentions its application to personal troubles as well:

Writing Through the News Cycle

She quotes a common reaction: “It’s 2019. Who doesn’t have anxiety?” She also highlights what she sees as the difference between today's news-inspired worries and those of people in the 1950s and '60s faced with possible nuclear war: Nuclear holocaust was a hypothetical threat; such crises as wars in the Middle East and global climate change are already happening. "That makes optimism and hope a lot more difficult to cling to, and anxiety ratchets up the more one stays glued to the news." (A good reason, by the way, to resist the temptation to click on every Internet headline or obsessively pore over social media streams, a remedy Hurley herself alludes to.) She compares chronic anxiety to a "faulty fire alarm" (I'd say "smoke alarm," which is what she seems to be talking about), which keeps going off despite the absence of fire. Subjected to constant alerts, one suffers fear and anxiety even though, objectively, there's nothing more wrong at this moment than there was a minute, an hour, or a day ago.

One cognitive trick I try to remember to use on myself, by the way, is becoming mindful of the fact that very seldom is this present moment unbearably terrible. (It can be, of course—if one is in acute danger or severe pain, for example—but more often than not, it isn't.) Much of our unhappiness springs from brooding over unpleasant, scary, or outright horrible things that might happen in the future.

In response to the challenge of writing "through the tough times in life, personal as well as national, and, increasingly, global," Hurley says, "I’ve found that focusing on a better future, and putting that into my work, has helped me deal with the news cycle and the rampant anxiety." My own reaction as a writer to public disasters and personal troubles is pretty much the opposite. I don't feel capable of creating fiction with the weight needed to confront such crises. The problems of my characters seem to trivialize by contrast the real-world distress around us. Instead, I've turned to composing lighter pieces, stories featuring hints of humor and protagonists with believable but not dire problems (such as my recent novella "Yokai Magic," a contemporary light paranormal romance inspired by Japanese folklore) rather than backstories that abound in horrors and tragedies. Also, on a personal level, working on a story that I can hope will entertain readers as well as myself not only helps to distract me from whatever I'm worrying about but can cheer me with a sense of having accomplished something.

Some critics might label taking refuge from real-world problems in fiction, whether weighty or light, "escapism." Tolkien dealt with this charge many decades ago, asserting that such critics confuse "the escape of the prisoner" with the "flight of the deserter"? If we find ourselves in "prison," why should we be blamed for trying to get out? Hurley herself makes it clear that "this doesn’t mean closing one’s eyes to the horror." A fictional vision doesn't have to equate to "the flight of the deserter"; rather, according to her, "We are what we immerse ourselves in. We are the stories we tell ourselves."

Coincidentally, this week the local Annapolis newspaper, the CAPITAL, published a column by psychologist Scott Smith headlined, "How to stay happy in a world filled with sad events." He discusses how to deal with the modern condition of being "inundated with tragedy." He makes the very cogent point, "Our human brain is not really built to process this ongoing flow of tragic and negative events. We live with a brain that is tooled for a much slower pace...." Like Hurley's column, Smith's emphasizes the emotional and physiological stress caused by being constantly bombarded with negative images in the 24-hour news cycle. He mentions, in addition, "Our brain is also not very good at placing tragedy in context or calculating probability." When we hear about high-profile, terrifying, but extremely rare disasters, our brains are wired to react to these remote (for the vast majority of us) contingencies as if they were "imminent threats." Smith lists several suggestions of ways to reorient our thinking and appreciate the good things in our own lives, remedies that collectively boil down to "focusing on the positive and limiting our exposure to negative events that are out of our control." He would doubtless agree with Hurley that we, as writers, should resist allowing stress to drain our energies and instead cultivate the positive benefits of exercising our creativity.

I've probably quoted C. S. Lewis's refreshing perspective on global problems here before, but it's too relevant not to include now. This passage comes from his essay on living in an atomic age—demonstrating that news-related stress is far from a recent phenomenon:

"In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. "How are we to live in an atomic age?" I am tempted to reply: 'Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.' . . . .

"In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Death and Your Photographs

Legal blogger Ally Tow, writing for Boyes Turner LLP, discusses a case of sudden death, and denied access to the deceased's albums stored with a secretive social media giant.

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=9fd55912-7b0a-4ce1-824e-9212709973b7&utm_source=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed&utm_medium=HTML+email&utm_campaign=Lexology+subscriber+daily+feed&utm_content=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed+2019-05-20&utm_term=

or
https://www.boyesturner.com/article/accessing-a-deceaseds-digital-accounts

No matter your age or excellent health, you should have a Will, a Living Will, a medical Power of Attorney, a clause in your Will giving your heirs legal access to your social media accounts, and --if you are a writer-- you should assign your copyrights.

Be sure to leave your certificates of copyright registration and any copyright reversion letters from former publishers in a safe place, and also perhaps, a list of your internet accounts and passwords.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry
SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/ 

The Metamorphosis of Journalism

Earlier this year, the Toronto STAR ran an article by Catherine Wallace, winner of the 2016-2017 Atkinson Fellowship (a journalism award), about the whirlwind changes currently happening in the field of journalism:

Journalists Are Vanishing

The traditional media outlets, especially newspapers, are no longer the only source of news. For many people, they aren't the primary source, and some don't read old-fashioned newspapers at all (a practice that seems incredible to me—give up my morning papers? never!). The traditional media used to be the "gatekeepers" of information, as Wallace puts it. Now we get news and opinions from many different sources in addition to printed papers, not only broadcast programs (TV and radio) but a variety of Internet formats such as blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and videos filmed by ordinary citizens. In Wallace's words, "My smartphone is a 24-hour news feed — a newspaper, magazine, computer, radio, TV and town square in a single mobile device." The Internet has blurred if not abolished the distinction between content providers and audience. Journalism is "no longer an industry, now an ecosystem." What have we lost or gained with the passing of the former status quo?

The Internet makes it possible for anyone to publish anything. Wallace applauds the "democratization of news and information." We can all express our opinions publicly. The news "ecosystem" has become diverse rather than monolithic. We have "countless witnesses to big events" instead of just the official line.

On the negative side, she mentions the loss of jobs in the field of journalism, a decline that endangers the objectivity we used to expect from the traditional news media. The Internet is swamped by information, but much of it is "raw." Traditionally, reporters and editors made sense of this flood of information (and misinformation). And then there's the "bubble" effect (though Wallace doesn't use that term), in which it has become too easy to surround ourselves with information and opinion sources that reinforce what we already believe. We're in danger of consuming "fake news" and "alternative facts" without checks and balances. Wallace draws particular attention to the role of traditional news sources in reporting on local community events and issues. That's one reason why I'll never drop our subscription to the local paper, even though, since it was bought by the company that owns the Baltimore SUN, the two publications print a lot of the same articles.

Wallace's long essay contains lots of thought-provoking observations and is well worth reading in its entirety.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Mediacracy

Did you know that the word "mediacracy" exists? It does, although the Blogger spell check, and the AOL spell check put red squiggly lines under it.

References were reluctantly revealed by a Google search, after helpful suggestions that I might really be looking for "mediocrity" or perhaps "mediocracy" (which latter, btw, contained politically biased suggestions that mediocracy referred to the most recent Republican administration.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediacracy
Mediacracy is a situation in government where the mass media effectively has control over the voting public.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mediacracy

Noun[edit]. mediacracy (countable and uncountable, plural mediacracies). Rule by the media; a situation in which the media dominates or controls the populace...

 

www.unwords.com/unword/mediacracy.html

Definition of mediacracy :. 1. (n.) Government, usually indirectly, by the popular media;

 

And there were three or four more sources. Apparently, great thinkers have been opining about the media controlling the voting public for several years. In former times, the great newspaper barons were allegedly thought to be potentially dangerous opinion makers and kingmakers.  

If newspaper barons interest you, there are some vigorous discussions of the part played in UK political elections using this search   However, I'm more interested in the types of social order that might inspire world building in a steam punk, cyber punk, science fiction, futuristic or fantasy novel. 

 

In a past blog post, I've opined about a Pharmacracy, and for a compendium of almost all the forms of government from acracy to xenocracy, go here:http://phrontistery.info/govern.html

I particularly like Stephen Crisomalis's term "kakistocracy" and the excessively polite explanation for a word surely derived from "poop". 

(See http://www.heptune.com/poopword.htmlhttp://www.heptune.com/poopword.html )  And, by the way, the top ten pages of a Google search led me to a Brazilian football player. I had to know the scatological synonym for "kaka" and search for "kaka + ...." in order to find the poop-word site.

 

It must be said, the phronitistery site's excellent list does not include "Pharmacracy", nor does it include "Mediacracy", but "pharma-" and "media-" may be of Latin origin, and "-cracy" is Greek.

 

 How did I get onto this train of thought? A confluence of blogs. One was a blog post by Chris Castle which discusses the power of Search, and asks how far, in theory, a search engine with a monopoly and flexible morals could influence an electorate.

https://musictechpolicy.wordpress.com/2016/01/07/the-devils-greatest-trick-after-canada-could-google-throw-a-u-s-election/

 

One of many interesting speculations in the piece is what would happen if, for example, a search engine gave users the option to filter out the name of a political candidate that they disliked. Such as "Trump".  What if the Search engine imposed a filter without being asked... such as making rapid encounters with "kaka" of the excremental kind  hard to find?  Or the helpful attempts to direct me to "mediocrity" or "mediocracy".

Chris Castle's blog post also discusses the power of the media to influence pharmaceutical drug taking by a suggestible populace. Drug marketers create a drug, and then create a need (or the perception that there is a need), for what the drug does. A solution in search of a problem!

 
http://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/CJR-2005-07-Bitter-Pill.pdf

 

The next article was Philly Law Blog, ostensibly partly about the erosion of The First Amendment, or at least of free speech. (I usually follow the law blog for information on current doings relating to copyright matters.)

 

https://phillylawblog.wordpress.com/2016/01/09/this-is-the-article-central-high-school-doesnt-want-you-to-see/

I googled The First Amendment: 

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Perhaps the loophole is the word "Congress".  It seems that the press itself, also various universities, and a State department of education or two are able to abridge freedom of speech without the assistance of Congress.

As a writer and a logophile, I am bemused and offended by the continual banning of words, and dictionaries dropping words, and the touchy feely folks who tinker with politically incorrect words in the worlds' most important religious texts. There is quite a difference between forgiving "trespasses" and forgiving "debts"  for instance.

 

The final blog article was by Richard Russo for the Authors Guild, among other things comparing the permissionless innovativeness of Google to that of the scavenging seagulls in Finding Nemo.

https://www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/richard-russo-on-authors-guild-v-google/

Not only does the word mediacracy exist. Some might suspect that a mediacracy has been established, and we never noticed.

 

Rowena Cherry

Marketing Via Social Networking

-------------
NOTE: I did not get the idea for this post from Rowena Cherry's post on Book Marketing this past Sunday, Sept. 13. But I expect she may have something to say about this post on marketing strategy and the social media, too.
---------------

A friend of mine has been studying "marketing strategy" and recently led me to a treasure trove of Marketing Instructions explaining how to "use" social networking to promote a product.

It made me ask why that sentence makes my hair stand on end. I had to figure out why it makes me want to puke. I have, after all, been pounding away on this blog about how a writer must analyze and understand their MARKET before structuring their story. And I don't see anything wrong with that.

Marketing via social networking is a whole new topic in the Marketing business. These instructions make little sense until you delve deeper into the whole lump of lore called "marketing" (which is much bigger than just "advertising.")

There are whole schools of marketing, and they're all a subset of "business" which is also a whole lump of lore you need to understand in order to understand marketing. Advertising is a tiny sub-set of marketing. So to grasp any of it, you need a smattering of it all, because the thing is one of those patterns made out of pixel sized dots. Get far enough away, and the array of dots make a picture.

The pattern I suddenly saw while cruising through all these sources on "marketing" shows why marketing via social networking is doomed.

The itinerant trader (picture the gypsy wagon; the tinker with a mule loaded with needles, pots, bowie knives, and other things rural households couldn't make for themselves) - the itinerant trader may in fact be a profession older than "the oldest" profession.

After all you can't sell yourself well without marketing yourself.

So "Marketing" might be older than Storytelling, too, because the itinerant paddler's travels beget stories to tell, stories which need a "market."

Storytelling (even the Shamanistic variety) is not only marketing, but also a sound business model.

Telling a story is not just saying what happened. It's a selective recreation of reality selected with the audience in mind.

So the "business model" of the storyteller is to create something intangible out of nothing and sell it for room and board for a night.

Clever.

So the essence of storytelling (if not story itself) must be marketing.

And in fact, my thesis presented on this blog, is that stories contain elements of marketing.

Only since the invention of the printing press has marketing of stories been subcontracted by writers to publishers.

Today, writers are taking back that function.

Blogs are full of discussions on how this trend is totally new, and something writers have never done so we have to learn how to do it.

But it's not new. It's OLD, older than any records show.

(I'm just skipping over the period when artists of all stripes (musicians, painters, playwrights) had to find a rich patron to support them while they produced art. That's actually a reasonably similar business model, just a bit more personal, but much more like "social network marketing.")

Stories, our stock in trade, contain elements of marketing, but they also contain characters and relationships. Romance is particularly focused on how relationship moves plot. Where there are characters and relationships there is "society" -- and "society" begets social networks.

So we're talking about the intersection of two professions, distant cousins but definitely related: marketing & social networking.

A society, Wikipedia notes, is a group of individuals bounded by interdependence. "Bounded" could be visualized as "circumscribed" -- like a lasso holding hero and heroine together on a really hot Western Romance cover.

No, social networking is not new! It's just bigger than it used to be, and binds together interdependent individuals who don't really know each other very well, but have a common interdependence (an interest or a goal).

In pre-printing societies, and even today in many illiterate societies, villages, regions and whole countries operate entirely on who you know, not what you know. In fact DC isn't far from that model, and Hollywood certainly admits to it up front.

Take away long distance communications, bottle people into a communications net of a few hundred individuals, and living successfully becomes all about who you know, what you know about them, and where the skeletons are buried.

If one of those small town people happens to be a writer telling stories, word will get around especially if a character in those stories is almost recognizable. (I'm thinking of a MURDER SHE WROTE episode where a gossip blew the lid on some clandestine affairs gossiped through the Beauty Shop.) Gossip goes viral.

Marketers are teaching each other "how" to "use" social networking to move product by "going viral."

Writers are teaching each other how to use marketing tools such as Advertising to cost-effectively move product.

They both think they're doing something new. But they're both doing it with OLD tools, or are reinventing the wheel.

The age-old principles of advertising have refined down to a method of constructing a message, and of constructing a product about which such a piercing message can be written.

The age-old principles of storytelling have refined down to a method of establishing rapport with an audience (SAVE THE CAT!) and the key element is a grasp of how these strangers are just like you -- are bound to you in interdependence. (High Concept is a statement of that interdependence binding force.)

MARKETING starts with one seminal message from which all other principles are derived and all actions motivated.

YOU ARE NOT YOUR CUSTOMER.

STORYTELLING starts with one seminal message from which all other techniques are derived, including the characteristics of your potential readers.

YOU ARE YOUR READER.

As with acting, the writer (Alma Hill's adage: Writing Is A Performing Art) must reach deep down inside and find a hint, a thread, a shadow, an inkling of each character. Each potential reader who will be fascinated by that character resonates to something within the writer's own psyche and experience.

See the comments on Linnea Sinclair's post
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/rebels-and-lovers-making-of-cover.html
for a discussion of "taste" in character by KimberAn. She truly makes my point perfectly and I didn't put her up to that.

The writer infuses the character with "life" for a reader via an element, however tenuous, of interdependence with the reader, of BEING the reader.

As KimberAn points out, not every character of every writer will resonate -- because they're made of different elements inside the writer and "reach" different audiences. The sense of identifying with the writer's characters is what draws a reader into a story. The writer is the reader, on a deep, mystical and fundamental level.

That's how all communication works.

The marketer (salesman) remains clinically distant by pretending to reach rapport with the customer who is not the salesman.

The writer pretends to be clinically distant, but actually reaches rapport with the reader who is another version of the writer.

The writer forms a social bond, an interdependence, a society that includes reader, writer and the characters too, as if they were people in a social network.

The objective of both marketer and writer is to lower the customer's resistance (or psychic or psychological barriers) in order to deliver a payload.

The difference between marketer and writer is who benefits most from the delivery of the payload.

The marketer walks away with a profit, whether the customer actually got value for their money or not. (often the customer makes out like a bandit!)

The writer walks away with a tiny profit only if the reader got value for their money (because otherwise the writer's next book will be rejected).

Writers have always been social-networking champions. First the writer has to create a society of the writer + characters, then INCLUDE the reader(s) in that society by making them feel welcome, sharing identifying characteristics.

Social networking is how you win the Nobel Prize. It's all about what parties you attend and how amusing you are to the elite.

In addition to being champions at playing The Recluse, writers are social animals by nature. Even when alone with a computer, a writer is surrounded by a whole teaming society of characters circumscribed by interdependence.

Marketers are not social by nature, but by design.

In a social-network (be it small village or twitter, facebook, myspace, etc) there is give and take until you "know" these strangers you've met online. It's all about finding things in common, sharing likes and dislikes, (from politics to brand of baby-bottles). The network solidifies and becomes a channel for diffusing information via what we have in common, how we ARE each-other.

Society is all about what connects you to others.

Marketing is all about the disconnect "you are not your customer."

Marketers are "outsiders" by definition.

Their mission in piercing the membrane you've laboriously created around your social-network online is to treat you as not-themselves.

They are the stranger among you who will not blend. They are the stranger among you who may pretend to blend, and thereby win distrust.

This all makes no sense. Marketer and Customer are naturally "interdependent" and should form a society. Trade should be even, value for value.

But the key maxim of marketing is "You are not your customer." And that prevents the marketer from becoming a member of the social network that contains his customers.

Therefore (consequentially) the marketer's advertising message is auto-rejected by any social network simply because the marketer defines himself as not-you.

The only messages the networked people trust come from those who define themselves as you. A Newcomer who passes your tests for "like me" will be accepted and blend into the network (just try being accepted in a small town with generations of history behind each family!)

That blending will not happen if the newcomer knows that "I am not my customer; you are all customers; I am not you."

Internalizing the attitude "I am not my customer" makes a great marketer, but it is very similar to the attitude drilled into soldiers in the World Wars by the use of pejorative nicknames for various nationalities. These nicknames were meant to dehumanize "the enemy" and thus make it OK for nice guys to kill them and still remain nice guys. That practice is frowned on today. Today post-traumatic stress syndrome is rampant. The we/them dichotomy is necessary to the human psyche. Within "we" there must be "I am you" or there can be no "we."

Defining yourself as not-your-customer de-marketerizes your customer and makes it OK to trick them into doing what you want, not what they want, and you can still remain an upstanding marketer.

Online social networks are still young and churning with turnover.

Marketers think that disorganization gives them entre they would not have in an old small town.

Marketers don't understand why their marketing ploys are labeled spam and subjected to instant rejection and excoriating derision. They keep trying to find a way around this rejection of their messages.

They teach that a marketer must ease themselves into the network, listen and post on the topic under discussion, work to blend in, give free samples, run contests, etc. Some even say you have to recruit members of the network to speak for your product. (members who accept that will be instantly rejected by the network)

Marketers are completely missing the point.

I do admit that their tactics produce apparent profits. But it's more like clearcutting forest instead of harvesting trees.

Marketers must learn a big lesson on a fundamental level. First though, they must unlearn "You are not your customer" because that is the source of the whole problem.

The new explosion of online social networks has to change MARKETING as drastically as it has changed PUBLISHING.

I've discussed the changes in publishing in a number of prior posts. Here are a few.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/06/crumbling-business-model-of-writers.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/i-love-web-20.html

Publishing subcontracts marketing or out-sources it. Larger houses have in-house marketing operations, but those people really don't read the books they are selling to book distributors so they may as well be sub-contractors.

Publishing is (very gradually) changing its business model because of the rise of the e-book, yes and Kindle the 900 lb Gorilla, the blog, and social networks. Amazon has created "Communities" which are boards for social networking of readers and writers.

Hollywood is changing its model too with the rise of websites that "vet" scripts then hang them up for producers to browse through, so it is becoming less about who you know and more about what you know in selling a script. Book publishing has not been that inventive yet, but bloggers are moving in that direction with installment-novels.

Even the biggest publishers have begun to shift the burden of marketing back onto the writer.

The first efforts of writers online have been (naturally) to use social networking to announce their newest book.

People like Linnea Sinclair who started with an e-book project and took it to Mass Market paperback have been successful - and marketers can't figure it out. (Because they didn't read the books and wouldn't understand them if they did because "You are not your customer.")

Marketers have not changed their methods. They have adapted, yes, but they consistently apply the oldest methods to the new problem.

And they are successful in making a profit! Those old methods are old because they work. Those methods can sell snow to an Eskimo.

What marketers don't understand about viral marketing success stories like Linnea Sinclair is that one, oldest, core principle of marketing they rely on will not ever reproduce Linnea's success.

Linnea IS HER CUSTOMER.

Marketers, like doctors, feel they must maintain distance from their customers and clients.

Marketers aren't selling to people just like themselves.

Writers are.

Writers are studying to change their methods to "you aren't your customer" but marketers are not learning that they are indeed their customer.

Here's a tweet about spammers being banned from twitter. I found it by the keyword search Twitter Anymore from the list of "trending topics" twitter supplies on each person's homepage.
-----------------
zumbaba You Won't See these Spams on Twitter Anymore -Twitter Updates its Terms of service to Eradicate Abusive Users http://bit.ly/Twitter-Spamers
---------------

That tiny url is actually this article
http://mashable.com/2009/09/13/twitter-spammers/

And it lists 10 KINDS of abuser who will be banned from the twitter service. These are all "marketers" applying the theory "I am not my customer."

Look at that list and imagine where they got the idea to do these anti-social things on a social network in expectation of making a profit.

And these marketers probably think banning them is a hostile act on twitter's part. It's not.

These marketers are mystified because they are not their customer. They think war has been declared upon them. It hasn't. It isn't a contest that aggressively applied strength can win.

The marketers can't understand that their behavior strikes people like the behavior of a nerd at a party, always trying to yank the conversational reigns from whatever cluster he's standing next to and not joining.

The marketers can't see themselves behaving like 3 year olds, jerking their parent's elbows while the parents are having a conversation about the trials of raising a 3 year old. The marketers can't see themselves because they are not their customers looking at themselves from another point of view.

Writers quickly master POINT OF VIEW, because it's a key component of being an adult. In the "socialization" of the toddler, there comes a point where the toddler begins to understand that other people get tired too, that other people feel pain when you pull their hair, that other people EXIST. That's the first step in "socialization" -- and marketers have adopted a maxim that denies the real existence of "others!"

YOU ARE NOT YOUR CUSTOMER prevents you from making that crucial step in socialization, understanding another point of view.

Online social networking can, will, and even must change "marketing" as much as it has already changed "publishing" -- if not even more.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/

Pioneering use of social media?

What do you think of single purpose videos? I've made one to ask for votes in a social networking contest (where Twittering for votes is allowed). Does this do a good job? Does it make you want to support me with your vote?



Goddessfish.com did it for me, and it cost me $40

You've seen the title, cover, and blurb. That's all you're asked to vote on.

Thank you for voting here:
http://www.wakeupcelebrityauthor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&catid=14:general-fiction&id=22:insufficient-mating-material


Post script.
While I was uploading on YouTube, I came across a fascinating video with a catchy rap.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUCyvw4w_yk&feature=email

Report piracy and you might win $1,000,000 (but only if it is movie, game, or music!)

1-800-388-PIR8
www.siia.net/piracy/report