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Alone Together three years on: Is social media changing us?

technology-disconnect-s from vortaloptics.com

You are not alone – Oprah Winfrey

Alone Together (1)

Three years ago, I watched social psychologist Sherry Turkle’s TED talk (2015) and then read her book: Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, (2011) which prompted me to write a blog called: Alone Together: Is social media changing us?

Rereading my blog, I see that my opinion hasn’t changed and on checking, neither has Turkle’s. She now consults on reclaiming conversation ™ to stop the flight from face-to-face conversation.

I am not so sure we don’t want to talk face to face at all, rather it’s just technology gives us the option to avoid those particular prickly peeps we’d rather not see face to face if we can.

Added to that, I don’t believe that technology is taking us to places we don’t want to go. We have no idea what we are doing online or where we need to be, and I am tired of hearing technology described as an unstoppable force outside of our control as if it were freak weather or a meteorite zooming towards earth about to destroy us all. Economics is often the driver of technological advancement and human decisions drive economics.

Glorious technology

Our behaviour online and towards technology reflects us in all our glory – the good, bad and the ugly – along with all our hopes and fears. I do not believe that we expect more from technology and less from each other. Instead, I believe that we turn to technology to plug the gaps and find solace in those moments when we feel alone, afraid, unloved, and indeed sadly, sometimes, unloveable.

Life can be crushingly hard, and many of us know that there are certain people in our lives with whom we will never have the rich, robust and trusting relationships Turkle believes have been eroded by digital technology. Some people are just not up to the job. It may be the same with our friendships online but the hope is there.

Many of us just want to get in and out of any given, often potentially stressful, situation – work, meetings, the playground, the hospital, the dinner table, events with relatives – without saying or doing anything to cause any bad feeling. So that when we do finally get to our tiny slivers of leisure time we can use them to fill ourselves up with what makes us feel better, rather than analysing what we didn’t get right.

If that means staring at a tiny screen then what’s wrong with that? One person I know spoke of their phone, and the access it gave them to an online friend, a person they hadn’t met at that point, as an Eden between meetings. And, why not? Whatever works.

That is not possible now

Turkle says that we use online others as spare parts of ourselves, which makes me believe that she hasn’t really engaged with people on Twitter in a normal way in conversation, and she hasn’t ever met people who do that offline either. Many people make new friends on Twitter and meet up #irl a long time afterwards and then only occasionally. Their relationships are mainly based online. Rather like families who live a long way away from each other. It doesn’t mean it’s less real or not important. It just means they are physically not there which might be difficult but we don’t want to not have any contact with these people because we love them. Maya Angelou said something really beautiful about this when she was on the Oprah show one time. She said:

Love liberates it doesn’t bind. Love says I love you. I love you if you’re cross town. I love you if you move to China. I love you. I would like to be near you. I’d like to have your arms around me. I’d like to have your voice in my ear. But that is not possible now. So, I love you. Go.

We want to be in contact with people whom we love and appreciate, and who love and appreciate us in return. Those people who make us remember the best bits about ourselves. We like people who like us. It is that simple and these people are not always in our daily lives. It’s not for nothing that vulnerability expert Brene Brown says that people armour up everyday to get through the day.

To cultivate the sorts of relationships Turkle feels that we should be having without our phones takes not only a lot of time and energy (and Brene Brown books) but a fearlessness which is not easy. Our greatest fear is social rejection and a robust conversation can leave us badly bruised. Online it is slightly easier because if a person drops out of your life, then you have some control over the day to day reminders unless you turn stalker, which is understandable as the grief of any online loss feels just as real. However, know this:

You are not alone

When we seek answers to our problems emotional like grief, or physical, spiritual, legal, fiscal. Technology really does say: You are not alone.

In real life, difficult relatives and tough-love friends don’t make the best agony aunts and may make us want to keep our questions to ourselves. We may forgo the embarrassment or shame by keeping our anonymity and seeking counsel elsewhere. Giving and receiving advice makes the world go round. In the book Asking for a Friend, the history of agony aunt columns is given over three centuries, and even today with all our technology, they remain as popular as ever.

But, if we can’t wait for our favourite agony aunt or uncle, a quick google/bing or peek round Quora can give us the reassurance we need. No, we are not shoddy, terrible people. Our thoughts and feelings are completely normal. The article What’s wrong with Quora? says that we may prefer a dialectic communication (a chat) say on Twitter, but we don’t use it in the same way as the didactic Q and A on Quora. We may never join Quora or Mumsnet but plenty of us (lurkers) use these and similar forums to find answers and feel better about the difficult circumstances we often find ourselves in.

It is reassuring to know that someone somewhere has already asked the question, either under a real or false name, and some other lovely human has written something underneath which just may help.

I don’t really believe that anyone of us is afraid of having a regular conversation because we have a phone. Turkle mentions research done on teenagers a lot, but they are specific user group and shouldn’t be taken as representative of the general population nor the future. How many teenagers want to talk to anyone? The teenage years are torture. As adults, however, because of the way society is set up, we often have to spend time with people we wouldn’t choose to, at work or in families. In the past we may have tried harder, felt shittier, been robust or at least tried to tell ourselves that, nowadays, it is more acceptable, a relief even, to be alone together, and to save our thoughts and feelings for those we love and who love us in return, wherever and whenever they may be.

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My top blogs 2017: Stories, statistics, and social media

Post-its patterns of my blogposts

I was talking to a Bikram friend today, who said that the first 20 minutes of the Bikram yoga sequence is us getting back in touch with ourselves and she has wondered for a while how to take that off the mat and into her life.

I love it when someone articulates clearly something that I have been pondering but didn’t know where to start. I know that connection to others is necessary, not least of all, because we learn about ourselves. But, in order to connect to others in a meaningful way, we first of all need to be able to connect to ourselves.

Each December, I like to reflect on what I have been blogging about all year. I did so in 2015 and 2016 and in this way I connect with myself, and my words, which makes it easier to connect to others and their words, especially with WordPress Reader.

And then, the stats themselves can tell a story. As I said in Top Blog No 3 (below), we are living in an age when we have lots of data and very little narrative, or insight, which is why everyone is nuts about big data as they think it will give them insight. But, to get the insight, you need to see patterns, and then make them into a story.

So, let’s take a look. My top 10 blogs of 2017 are:

  1. Katie Hopkins’s #fatstory one year on
  2. Fifty shades of my grey hair
  3. Storytelling: Narrative, Databases, and Big Data
  4. Maslow’s hierarchy of social media
  5. Aggression: The social animal on social media (6)
  6. Prejudice: The social animal on social media (7)
  7. User motivation: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
  8. Designing story (3): Archetypes and aesthetics
  9. Game theory in social media marketing (2): Customers and Competitors
  10. Alone together: Is social media changing us?

In all honesty, given the nature of 3.6 billion people online and how Google gets people to come to this site, the only real common thread in these blogs is that I wrote all of them. That said, I could make all manner of patterns out of these 10 posts because if there is one thing statisticians know: if you torture the data long enough it will tell you anything. But, what I really see in these top posts is that I have been blogging away about social media and storytelling for a few years now, and I have come full circle.

I started off with no. 10, actually my first social media blog was: Emerging Technologies: What’s the story? back in 2013, but when I wrote Alone together: Is social media changing us? I wasn’t sure about us learning about ourselves online, but now 60+ blogs later I think: Absolutely yes, it is true, we do come online to learn about ourselves, in the same way we learn about ourselves in conversation with others.

I found this out during the series The Social Animal on Social Media, and how stories matter. We interpret signs and symbols and make stories semiotically to make sense of the world and ourselves. We then tell them to others which creates an intimacy, and an energy which yes, causes a connection.

The constant theme running through all the blogs is connection and also understanding how to connect (which is why 4 and 9 have made it on, we like to make sense of our connections, 1, 5 and 6 are about making sense of bad behaviour or when connection goes sour). Now I only have two blogs left to write (one on social computing, and one on connection) and then I will have said everything and much more than I intended to, when I set out to talk about social media.

I am a year behind schedule as 2017 has been painful with some difficult life events, some heartbreak, and a lot of soul-searching, so to have felt a connection to others, more often than not online, throughout 2017, has been truly lovely. We do connect and have proper conversations on social media, contrary to what some sociologists might think.

I love blogging here. I make sense of the world and of myself, and as psychotherapist Matt Licata puts it, I satisfy that innate yearning for intimacy and aliveness.

So for that, and for the conversations, the connections, and for the laughter, especially the laughter, I am so very, very grateful, and I can’t wait to do it all again next year!

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Game theory & social media marketing (4): Conclusions

The Royal Game of UR, Early Dynastic III, 2600BC, British Museum

[Part 4 of 4: Game theory & social media: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3]

No, I’m no super lady, I don’t have no game whatsoever,
I put my high heels on and see how that goes, yeah
– Pauline, Sucker for love

Ask a mathematician why they like maths, and they will tell you that mathematics gives a definite yes or no. There is beauty in clarity. And, everyone likes to feel that they understand and have control over what is happening in their world. This feeling of certainty is reflected in the bottom two rows of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: physiological and safety needs.

Tapping into fear and belonging

That said, we also love variety and surprise, which is the most popular information shared on social media. We crave new stimulus which is why we love games. We love the idea of chance or fortune transforming our lives for the better, and surely if we learn the rules, then we will succeed. And, that is why marketing has such a pull on us. Marketers tell us that we will have improved lives if we do/buy/or have what they are selling, and, marketers themselves will have improved lives too if we do/buy/or have what they are selling.

There are so many ways to market something, this link has 52 types of marketing strategies. The most effective, of course, aims at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – safety – which is why fear quite often drives news and coupled with specific instructions gives a compliant society.

Tapping into belonging is another way to market, which is why the connection economy and building friendship with your customers is gaining so much traction as a marketing strategy.

Modelling emotion and what-ifs

Modelling human emotion is impossible to do with game theory especially on social media, a fluid, still unknown, type of communication. We will never quite know who our audience is. We may target our demographic, but if they retweet or share something outside of that, then you never exactly know who is looking at your content, or how they will react to it. All game theory can do is offer interesting and potentially useful partial explanations to model a selection of what-ifs scenarios when employing different strategies.

In the last post (part 3), we looked at various game theory strategies from the aggressive to the altruistic, and saw that people generally behave like the people around them (hawk-dove) and that Kermit was in a bit of hurry to get together with his girl, which caused him to behave passive-aggressively, and probably not get what he wanted.

 Don’t be like Kermit

Game theory is a tool for social media marketing and the best application of it is recording trial and error attempts (with statistical significance) whilst using our emotional intelligence.

Be aware of your emotions and triggers (your personal competence) so you don’t get involved in a big wrangle either privately, which could damage a relationship, or publicly, which might be retweeted everywhere and could wreck your brand or reputation.  Even in the mathematics of game theory we need to understand other players moods and motives (social competence) and not assume anything. We need to ask for more clarification, so that when we do make a move, we do so with clarity and certainty that we are doing the right thing, and as any mathematician would tell you if you asked them, there is beauty in clarity for it gives us certainty and a sense of control, things which are harder to come by in our ever changing world.

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Game theory & social media (3): What are you playing at?

Source: buzzfeed.com

[Part 3 of 4: Game theory & social media: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4]

Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin with being personal – Kathleen Kelly, You’ve got mail (1998)

Kermit drinking his tea and throwing shade makes me laugh. However, I think we all understand his frustration. It seems that in business and personal relationships, people play games. We may not know why, and we may not know the rules. But as we saw in part 2, before we react, we might want to find out more: if a game is being played, which one, and if we want to play or not.

Games, payoffs, and winning

A game is normally defined as having two or more players, who have a choice of possible strategies to play which determine the outcome of a game. Each outcome has a payoff which is calculated numerically to represent its value. Usually, a player will want to get the biggest payoff possible in order to be certain of winning.

Dominance, saddles, and mixed strategies

Playing the strategy with the biggest payoff is known as the Dominance Strategy, and a rational player would never do otherwise, but it’s not always easy to identify which strategy is best.

So, players sometimes take a cautious approach which will guarantee a favourable result (also known as the Saddle Point Principle). Other times, there is no saddle point so players have to choose at random what strategy to play and hope for the best. They can calculate the probability of mixing up strategies and their chances of winning. If their probability skills are not great they can play experimentally and record their results 30 times (for statistical significance) to see which strategies work.

How does this work on social media? Well, no one knows how social media works so a trial and error approach whilst recording results can be useful. Luckily, Twitter and Facebook both provide services and stats to help.

Free will, utility, and Pareto’s principle

A major question is whether players have free will or not and whether their choices are predetermined based on who they are playing with and the circumstances in which the game takes place. This can depend on the amount of information players have available to them,  and as new information becomes available, they play a specific strategy, thus seeming as if they didn’t have free will at all.

Players assign numbers to describe the value of the outcomes (known in economics as utility theory) which they can use to guide themselves to the most valued outcome.

This is useful if we have a game where the winner doesn’t necessarily take all. If the players have interests which are not opposed and by cooperating the players can end up potentially with a win-win situation or at least a situation where everyone gains some benefits and the solution is not the worst outcome for everyone involved. This is known as the Pareto Principle.

On social media? Retweeting and sharing other’s businesses news is a nice way of ensuring everyone gains some benefits because with a potential market of 307 millions and there is enough of a market to go around for everyone to win-win and of course, reciprocate.

The Nash equilibrium

Taking this further is the Nash equilibrium which was named after John Nash, who proved that every two player game has one equalizing strategy (either pure or mixed) in each game. By looking at the equilibrium strategies of the other players, everyone plays to equalize. This is because, no player has anything to gain by changing only his or her own strategy, so it is win-win.

Are you chicken?

Ducks have been known share out the bread thrown to them so they all get some rather than one duck eating everything. This is known as the Hawk-Dove approach in game theory. When there is competition for a shared resource, players can choose either conciliation or conflict.

Research has shown that when a player is naturally a hawk (winner takes all) and plays amongst doves, then the player will adapt and cooperate. Conversely a dove amongst hawks will adapt too and turn into a fighter.

If there are two hawks playing each other the game is likely to go chicken, which is when both players will risk everything (known as mutually assured destruction in warfare) not to yield first.

We adapt very easily to what is going on around us, and on social media this is totally the same. In a 2014 study Pew Research Center found that people are less likely to share their honest opinions on social media, and will often only post opinions on Facebook with which they know their followers will agree – we like to conform.

The volunteer’s dilemma

In contrast, the volunteer’s dilemma is an altruistic approach where one person does the right thing for the benefit of everyone. For example, one meerkat will look out for predators, at the risk of getting eaten, whilst the rest of the meerkats look for food. And, we admire this too. We love a hero, a maverick, someone who is ready to stand up and be different.

The prisoner’s dilemma

But we hated to feel duped which is why the prisoner’s dilemma is one of the most popular game theories of all. Created by Albert W. Tucker in 1950, it is as follows:

Two prisoners are arrested for a joint crime and put in separate interrogation rooms. The district attorney sets out these rules:

  1. If one of them confesses and the other doesn’t, the confessor will be rewarded, the other receive a heavy sentence.
  2. If both confess each will get a light sentence. Which leads to the belief that:
  3. If neither confesses both will go free.

It is in each prisoner’s interest to confess (dominant strategy = 1) and if they both do that satisfies the Pareto principle (2). However, if they both confess, they are worse off than if neither do (3).

The prisoner’s dilemma embodies the struggle between individual rationality and group rationality which Nigel Howard described as a metagame of a prisoner cooperating if and only if, they believe that the other prisoner will cooperate, if and only if, they believe that the first prisoner will cooperate. A mind boggling tit-for-tat. But, this is common on Twitter with those: Follow me, I will follow you back and constant following and unfollowing.

And, in any transaction we hate feeling like we have been had, that we were a chump, that we trusted when we shouldn’t have, which is why some people are so angry and like to retaliate. Anger feels better than feeling vulnerable does. But, great daring starts with vulnerability, the fear of failure, and even the failure to start, the hero’s quest shows us that.

Promises, threats, and coalitions

As we add more players, all rationality may go out of the window as players decide whether to form coalitions or to perform strategic style voting. If we introduce the idea of the players communicating then we add the issues of trust in promises, or fear of threats and it all starts to sound rather Hunger Games.

On social media aggression and threats are common, because of prejudice, or group think, especially on Twitter where there is no moderation. And, online and off, we have all been promised things and relationships which have ultimately left us disappointed, and told us that we have been misinformed, like the fake news, we’ve been hearing about a lot lately.  Fake news is not new, in other contexts it is known as propaganda.  And, if it is not completely fake, just exaggerated, well that’s not new either, New Labour loved spin which led to a sexed up dossier, war and death.

Kermit’s next move

Philip D. Straffin says in his book Game theory and strategy, that game theory only works up to a point, after which a player must ask for some clarification about what is going on because mathematics applied to human behaviour will only explain so much.

And so we turn back to Kermit. What is he to do?  He has passive-aggressively asked for clarification and had a cup of tea. What’s his next move? Well, he could wait and see if he gets a reply (tit for tat). Who will crack first (chicken)? But, with the texts he has sent her, it is likely that her response is somewhat predetermined, or perhaps not, perhaps she will repond with Nash’s equilibria, or at the very least the Pareto principle of everyone not getting the worst outcome.

Alternatively, he could take a breath and remember that he is talking to someone he likes and with whom he wants to spend some time, someone human with the same vulnerabilities as him. He could adopt the volunteer’s dilemma approach and send her an honest text to explain that his feelings are hurt, he thought they had something special, and that she liked communicating with him as much as other people. By seeking clarification in this way, Kermit may just end up having a very nice evening after all –  or not. Whoever said: All’s fair in love and war, didn’t have instant access to social media and all the complications it can cause.

[Part 4]

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Game theory in social media marketing (2): Customers and competitors

Source: rarewallpapers.com

[Part 2 of 4: Game theory & social media: Part 1, Part 3, Part 4]

In part 1, we saw how people love to play games. Game theory was first recognised in 1928, by John Von Neumann’s paper which was about two people playing a game together with only one winner (known as: two person game-zero sum).

If we apply game theory to social media marketing, we could say that the customer and the marketer are playing a two person game, zero sum – winner takes all. Before social media, this might have been the case, for customers believed that shops were acting in their own self interests and so they, the customer, did too. Everyone was out to get what they could. In reality though, the relationship is more of a win-win: Without the marketer, the customer might not learn about the product on offer and not buy or benefit from the product, and without the customer, the marketer doesn’t have a job at all.

Playing your customer

In his book, Social Media Marketing, Eric Anderson describes the marketer-customer as a two-way mutually dependent conflict and, points out that in the world of marketing everything is described combatively. There are marketing campaigns, killer apps and dead lists, which fit with game theory: Two parties with opposing and mutual interests both engaged in winning the outcome of combat.

For if the customer doesn’t engage and play the game then, they effectively kill the product, or even the market the product exists in. More worryingly for a marketer, if a customer engages and is an influencer, this customer with a few well placed tweets and reviews on a social computing site (their blog, Amazon, Goodreads) can begin a campaign which can sink a product. On his blog, Nathan Bransford describes how books have been effectively killed prior to publication due to bad reviews on Goodreads.

A nice equation given by Kyle Wong on Forbes describes what an influencer does as follows:

Influence = Audience Reach (# of followers) x Brand Affinity (expertise and credibility) x Strength of Relationship with Followers

Influencers have immense power to kill or create sales, which is a totally new thing in marketing. This is potentially such a powerful way to sell to millions across the globe, especially amongst certain demographics – mums, millennials –  that many companies view social media marketing as the only way to market nowadays. They know that they must, like influencers,  build relationships with their customers. One way to do this is by creating content.

Playing your competitor

In a great blog on coschedule.com, Julie Niedlinger, describes how game theory approaches to creating content can help marketers decide whether their strategy (another military word) is appropriate with the competitors and with their customers.

Niedlinger advises marketers to take a moment, before reacting to comments that potential customers will leave on blogs, in order to ask whether there is a game going on. If so which game? And most importantly, are the rules clear? Once they are then and only then should a marketer make a move.

Secondly, she looks at competitors producing a similar blog of content rich potentially market cornering information and asks what is the next move?  Do you steal their writers? Mimic them? Join forces? Or, follow trends in an effort to win their share of the market.

It is important to know your game, it’s rules, and the moves you should be taking.

In part 3, we will look at specific game theory theories and see what moves and games we could play.

[Part 3]