#focusser

There was a tremendous spike in traffic to the @columbia digital repository on a Sat due to 1 tweet from @timoreilly #altmetrics

Digital pioneers and theorists like John Perry Barlow, Howard Rheingold and Kevin Kelly argued since the 70’s that digital media is emancipatory. One of the targets of this liberation would be the ossified corporate and state hierarchies of mainstream society. Their vision was that of direct peer to peer communication, rather than one to many broadcasts. This they thought will usher in if not total equality, a community of peers, while others put an emphasis on new media's meritocratic potential. 

Over the years these ideas were embodied in protocols, digital tools and found its way into business and in particular social media marketing discourse. In 2006 Jay Rosen confidently asserted that power had shifted, now we have writing readers and audiences with cameras. To the criticism of who would listen if everybody is a speaker he retorted - the “...people formerly known as the audience do not believe... ‘too many speakers!’ is our problem”. Recently talk of the amateur and hierarchy-less power of digital media reached a new apogee during the Arab Spring and Occupy Movement. The apparent leaderless nature of the uprisings and protests were noted. The network it was said had subverted the hierarchy.

But at the same time the very democratic nature of networked digital media production is producing an abundance of content. Unlike print, radio and TV the economics of creating and delivering digital content means that there is an ever increasing amount of it. Attention however remains finite. In this attention economy a wealth of information has created a scarcity of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently. 

This allocation is being done today by the increasing use of algorithmic filters in digital tools that allow users to see relevant content (and the producers of content). To achieve this relevance these filters often rely on social and interest graphs and on new measures of popularity that is often confused with merit. 

One result of this has been a significant change in an key affordance for most new services. Services like Twitter do not require reciprocal ‘following’. This allows users to allocate their attention in a more individual and efficient way.  It allows some individuals to follow very little people, while being followed by thousands. Connection numbers has suddenly become far more significant.

Today a very visible part of online profiles is the display of following - follower numbers. Because users can be followed by many, but don’t have to follow back (and vice versa) these numbers are said by the marketing and software industry to embody influence, and tools like Klout has been built to try measure this influence.

In reality though it is more complex. These profile metrics embody a hitherto unknown hybrid of potential-to-reach and social status at the same time. And while the internet’s promise was that of a meritocracy, often these follower following numbers reflect unearned ascribed status. What's more the very public nature of these numbers make them impossible to ignore. And there is evidence of these profile reach/ status signs are augmenting our reality (to use Nathan Jurgenson's phrase) - having real world effects. 

This paper will show whether through user experience design, developers are indeed creating these new inequalities described.

What is this inequality? I will try and unpack the relationship between the potential to command attention (reach), and social status, to what extent the one can be parlay'd into the other?

I will ask if these new social status systems are even more overt and total that other signifiers of status - like brands and clothes.

It will ask how are these new status and reach systems - which are often exposed universally as open API’s - used by companies to promote some users and obscure others?

I will look at what advantages and problems can accrue to individuals that acquire a lot of this potential reach / status, and what are the downside to being left behind?

And I will ask whether this very visible inequality in status and ability to command attention might not negatively impact the other digital utopian credos: like the sense community, authenticity, interactivity, peer to peer production and perceptions of individual self worth.