Alfred Hermida: clear eyed about contemporary culture but blind to his own contradictions.
To tweet is human. That's what Alfred Hermida tells us in his new book, Tell Everyone: Why We Share and Why It Matters, about the origins and implications of our social media obsession. "People are not hooked on YouTube, Twitter or Facebook but on each other," he writes. "Tools and services come and go; what is constant is our human urge to share." Hermida makes sweeping arguments like this throughout his book, and, although he doesn't prove them, he delivers fascinating insights along the way. Tell Everyone can be wonderfully clear eyed about contemporary culture but blind to its own contradictions.
That's a shame, because Hermida is the kind of person you'd hope would write a study on tech. He has a background in television, radio, and web journalism – most notably with the BBC – and he's now a University of British Columbia journalism and media studies professor. His lucid, energetic prose demonstrates his reportorial instincts, and he's totally at ease with scholarly sources. Unfortunately, he sometimes lapses into teacherly rhetoric, which seems pitched at that dozy undergrad at the back of the classroom. "The press is presumed to report events accurately and without bias," he explains, "but media coverage tends to mirror prevailing attitudes in society." Fair point, but you already knew that, right? You probably also knew that camera phones are ubiquitous and that, in 2012, America's incumbent president, Barack Obama, ran against a fellow named Mitt Romney.
Hermida is at his best when breaking new ground. Have you ever griped about the narcissism and distractibility of social media users? Apparently, that's not always a valid complaint. In high-stakes situations, Hermida tells us, the Twitter community can be attentive and altruistic. Consider the Virginia Tech students who created ad hoc data repositories, listing survivors and fatalities with remarkable accuracy, in the immediate aftermath of the 2007 massacre; or the anonymous Twitter users in places like Monterrey or Veracruz, Mexico, who keep citizens secure by reporting on regional upsurges of gang violence – a task that the local media mostly avoids.
Have you ever complained that the Internet is an echo chamber, a place where complacent people go to reaffirm their beliefs? Not so fast, says Hermida. It's true that, when it comes to re-posting and re-tweeting, we favour our closest, most like-minded friends. But, within our networks, these people, of course, are outnumbered by causal acquaintances and near-strangers. We may go online seeking to validate our beliefs, but the mathematics of the Internet favour pluralism.
As Hermida moves from topic to topic – politics, marketing, revolutions, labour unrest, etc. – he delivers many similarly thought-provoking insights. The book works well as a collection of essays. It's less effective as an argumentative whole. His thesis, to the extent that he has one, seems to be that, despite dramatic technological upheavals, we bipeds are basically the same as we always were. "The tools have changed," he says, "but human behaviour remains consistent."
Really, though? You might counter this argument by culling examples from Hermida's book. In a chapter entitled A Nervous System for the Planet, Hermida discusses the 2010 Haitian earthquake, which was documented worldwide in real time, enabling rescue crews to move efficiently through the debris to where living people were trapped. Hermida cites a study by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, which captures this development in utopian language: "The 2010 Haiti earthquake response will be remembered as the moment when the level of access to mobile and online communication enabled a kind of collective intelligence to emerge." Collective intelligence? A worldwide planetary nervous system? It's hard to reconcile these ideas with Hermida's insistent claim that, when it comes to human behaviour, nothing much has changed.
True, social media didn't make us into sharers. The practice of exchanging information predates Facebook by at least 100,000 years. Nobody would deny that Zuckerberg, Dorsey and other tech pioneers tapped into preexisting human inclinations, but they've since shaped those tendencies to suite their interests. As journalist Michael Harris points out in his smart book The End of Absence, social media applications are designed and redesigned to be as addictive as possible. That's why so many people will tune out the breathing fellow human in front of them and commune with the silicon device in their hands.
Clearly, we're not just hooked on each other; we're hooked on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook too. And so our behaviours are changing. Since social media entered the tech landscape, we've developed compulsions and expectations that didn't exist before, and we've become emotionally interdependent with people – or a mediated idea of people – who, in the offline world, can be very far away. I'm willing to grant Hermida that, maybe, these behavioural changes are a difference of degrees, not a difference of kind. If that's true, though, the number of degrees is awfully high. Perhaps we've always had the need to share, but we've never done it like this before.
Simon Lewsen is a writing instructor at the University of Toronto and a contributor to Hazlitt, Reader's Digest, Toronto Life and The Walrus.