Social Media

Long-haul truckers gather in Mississippi to learn social media skills, burnish their image -- and fight regulations

By Irin Carmon

Disenfranchised truckers turn to twitter

(Credit: iStockphoto, karammiri / Salon)

Rich Wilson is telling a roomful of truckers how to sound less like, well, truckers. “Intelligence, not ignorance,” he instructs. “If you have to, Google a few words. Refrain from words like ‘ain’t,’ ‘gonna,’ ‘y’all’ or ‘you-know-what bureaucrats.’”

Wilson, himself a former truck driver, is speaking at the first-ever Trucking and Social Media Convention, and he’s trying to get those assembled to formally register comments on a federal transportation site in response to new regulations. That these phrases he tells them not to use are all direct quotes from previous comments will not dampen his determination. “Until we learn where to start, we’re just going to end up with that angry attitude,” Wilson says. “But let’s fight the bureaucrats with bureaucracy!”

So it’s not the fieriest of rallying cries. Most of the 170 drivers and advocates gathered at the Gold Strike Casino in Mississippi’s second-tallest building (31 stories) are plenty fired up already: at new federal regulations and local traffic enforcement, at big carriers, at the perception that despite their toil, truckers don’t get any respect. Post-deregulation realities and the decentralized nature of their jobs have largely left them without a seat at the table. That leaves Twitter.

Once, truck drivers flashed their lights at each other in an over-the-road Morse code, and they still narrate woes over CB radio. It’s not that they’ve all jumped on Twitter, but the vanguard of social media enthusiasts gathered at the Gold Strike in Tunica is hoping that’s where it’s headed. And they want to take it to the next level: They trade notes on the best analytics provider and Twitter clients. Murmurs a redheaded woman in a “Keep on Trucking” T-shirt, “I love Hootsuite.”

Unity in this atomized industry is rare, unless you count the kind that comes with a “Truckers Move America” belt buckle. Wilson was part of the 1979 strikes, when a convoy of truckers circled the U.S. Capitol and 75,000 truckers hit the brakes, but he doubts it had much impact or that it could happen today. “You have company drivers and you have owner-operators, you have small fleets and you have big fleets,” he says. “Now let me ask you a question, can you see those people all sitting in a room saying, ‘I’ll tell ya, we’re gonna strike’?”

Everyone laughs and whoops in disbelief. And then they get back to updating their Facebook business pages.

Business is something of profound interest to the truckers here. Kenyan-born Eddie Gichuhi, a software engineer who took up trucking after getting laid off, is here to talk about his new trucking-aimed bookkeeping software. Beside him, event emcee Toby Bogard, the author of several self-published books on trucking, trumpets how much weight he lost through his trucker-tailored diet and exercise program, “Shattering the Stereotype.” (Get a preview of the DVD, complete with a view inside his truck, on his “Truck-Writer” YouTube channel.)

To a lesser extent, they’re also interested in activism. Desiree Wood became an activist after speaking out about the trials of trucking while female on Ask the Trucker, the site founded by conference co-organizers Allen and Donna Smith. Suddenly, scores of comments and emails poured in from fellow women truckers about sexual harassment, poor training and much more. Wood’s off the road because of an injury, but still rallies her 8,000 Twitter followers (her bio reads in part, “Pretty+Smart)/Entertaining)=Lethal”). Conference honoree Hope Rivenburg, who was pregnant with twins when her trucker husband, Jason, was murdered while waiting for a load, took to Capitol Hill and social media alike to rally support for a federal safe truck parking law, which remains pending in Congress.

Sometimes, the lure is simpler. Sue Noonan — @trukersue [sic] on Twitter — says she got into social media for one reason: “You can say anything you f—cking want to.”

- – - – - – - – - -

“I am so proud of the deaf truckers,” beams Donna Smith over dinner. “I told them, you can’t just care about deafness. You have to care about all the issues.” And the deaf truckers, who have their own table with a service dog and an amateur ASL interpreter and who solemnly nod along with the proceedings, agreed that they would. (The hot topic on the Deaf Truckers United Facebook group has been the possibility of Department of Transportation waivers of hearing requirements for commercial driving licenses, or CDLs).

The Smiths hoped for a bigger turnout, but it’s not easy for drivers to get their dispatcher to route them through somewhere in particular, let alone to take a day off.

The convention’s renegade spirit may not help. “You do know the trucking industry is against this,” Donna says, lowering her voice conspiratorially. The powerful lobby that is the American Trucking Association is no one’s favorite here. An invitation to the Federal Motor Carrier and Safety Administration, which issues safety and hours of service regulations for truckers, drew a cautious reply but never went anywhere.

Hence the lure of blogging and tweeting, which can be a platform for niche causes as well as a booster for morale and community. The problem is not just the stereotypes of truckers as ignorant, fat or even dangerous, though along with the official classification of trucking as unskilled labor, they hurt too. Since the deregulation of the trucking industry in 1980, drivers have paid some of the price for the fast, cheap products Americans enjoy. According to Michael Belzer, author of “Sweatshop on Wheels: Winners and Losers in Trucking Regulation” and a professor at Wayne State University, truckers’ real wages fell by 30 percent in the three decades after deregulation, as union membership cratered and carriers rapidly entered and exited the industry. (Even if the traditional anti-union sentiment among the truckers were to subside, the companies all have nationwide operating rights, and many are independent contractors, making it nearly impossible to organize long-haul truckers.)

The irony is that truckers themselves helped pave the way for all this. Those occasionally violent strikes throughout the ’70s were led by Mike Parkhurst, the editor of Overdrive magazine, who testified before Congress on behalf of deregulation: “If the mood of America is for a rebirth of free enterprise, there is no nobler cause than that of the independent trucker.” It was in keeping with tradition; the first long-haul truckers were farm boys who resented the government-planned food economy, railroad monopolies and union power all at once. Still, despite the romantic image of the trucker as the “last American cowboy,” the reality of an independent trucker’s life was more like a sharecropper’s, according to Shane Hamilton’s “Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy.” But there were few rural alternatives, and being a trucker carried the allure of being “a man in control of his time and possessing an untamed sexuality … the antithesis of the ‘organization man’ or the ‘man in the gray flannel suit.’”

The federal government is still cramping that style, imposing new safety and accountability standards and metrics on drivers — a sore point at the convention. Belzer says, “To blame the drivers is generally the rule,” but argues that instead of focusing on the individual trucker’s behavior, regulators should be looking at how the broader system incentivizes them to take risks, including violating required hours of service. Trucker pay is by the mile and the load, not the hour, but Belzer’s research suggested that truckers spend a quarter of their work time waiting, unpaid, for a terminal or warehouse operator who, in turn, has no incentive to hurry up. As Paul Taylor, an attorney who often represents truckers, puts it at the convention, “You work 100 hours a week, log 70, get paid for 40.”

At 50, Tony Hamilton can still remember the old days. “It seemed like it was a profession, like everyone was more dedicated. Now people fall back on this as a secondary job because it’s basically easy to get into,” he says, adjusting his suspenders over an American flag button-down. “You go to a school, you get your CDL, you’re put on a rig. Do you know what you’re doing? Probably not. Are you going to be around long enough to learn? You never know. Are the companies taking advantage of you? Yeah, probably.”

He says he’s making maybe 10 percent more than he did in 1985, without adjusting for inflation. In the last year, the carrier he worked for shut its doors without paying its drivers what they were owed. Hamilton’s trying not to let it get him down – he’s here representing a group that helps truckers in a jam as well as one that uses truck routes to transport animal rescues.

And the conference has encouraged him to join Twitter. “I’m a loner … so I’m trying to learn how to use it,” he says. But he already uses Facebook and call-in phone chat rooms for drivers. “Why [do you] have to talk to the one in front of you if you can talk to the one 3,000 miles from you? If you’re got the media, why not use it?”

: Irin Carmon is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @irincarmon or email her at icarmon@salon.com. More Irin Carmon

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Losing my husband, 140 characters at a time

After Kevin got cancer, all my rage and isolation went onto Twitter. Was I embarrassing myself, or rescuing myself?

By Lee Ann Cox

Losing my hubsand 140 characters at a time

Topics:Twitter, Social Media, Life stories, Cancer, Coupling, Real Families, Editor's Picks

There was a time when I kept private journals, chronicling stories of time with my husband as if words could nail down a life and build strong, warm walls around us. That was before cancer. A kind you’ve hopefully never heard of, a sure, slow killer. Once we’d slogged through a couple of years there, I logged into Twitter and didn’t grapple with whether or why. Rather than holding us together now, I was a spectacle of flying apart. Twitter unleashed my inner ranting-woman-on-the-subway. You know the one — no inhibitions, breaking the code of civilized silence.

Obsessed with idea of being alone in a room w/old unwanted glassware & crockery, obliterating things till satiated, then someone else sweeps 7:25 AM Aug 3rd, 2009 from web

Consider the supermarket sagas. It was a place I spent a lot of time, both because I had young children to feed and because that’s where the pharmacy was. I would wait in line to pick up the narcotics and antiemetics, trying not to look at the varied pleasure-enhancing condoms. If my husband Kevin hadn’t “followed” me, I would have whipped out my phone to share some bitter thoughts about ribbed strawberry rubbers. But when I wheeled my cart away after begging for one or two pills to get him through a Sunday night, I did tweet:

sobbing in Hannafords where pharmacist unmoved by pain of stage IV metastatic cancer. 4:38 PM Jun 14th, 2009 from mobile web

HE, unlike me, would be a more diligent caretaker of his loved one. He basically said this. 4:41 PM Jun 14th, 2009 from mobile web

With a bit of distance I see my tweets as a record of how stress and trauma affected me. Most times in my life, I surely would have headed to the car at any early sign of impending tears. But I just didn’t care. I needed juice boxes and cat litter.

When Kevin and I met, we uprooted each other. He was all Berkeley and blue eyes with lightning wit, crazy intellect, consuming passions — books, politics, computers, for some reason, me, even if I had to kiss him the first time, sitting on a beach in winter as a cold wind came off the Pacific.

But we lived on opposite coasts. I was seven years older. It was improbable and romantic, but he quit a good job, packed his belongings — with a bit of the grad student’s soul still — into a two-door Honda Civic and drove to my house in northern Vermont. Kevin missed his friends and the rhythm of the city, but we got a Newfie and we cooked, and when his favorite Latino band came from L.A., I danced like never before. Through it all I made notes of the absurd and the beautiful. The idea of tweeting that time would have felt as substantial as blowing bubbles into the sky through a child’s plastic bubble wand.

Yet soon enough we had both the child and the requisite plastic wand. Kevin would blow hundreds of bubbles — the signal that bath time really was over — to the sound of riotous laughter as they popped over sweet soaped toddler skin. I can still hear the giggles.

We had eight years together, a son and a daughter before cancer turned vibrant life fragile. It was mostly Kevin who fought to make the time count, even when it was hard, but I would try. Between rants I told some lighter stories on Twitter.

When taking a hot bath to relieve an aching back, allowing a 5 yr-old in is approx. as therapeutic as tubbing with a dolphin. Cheerful tho. 5:16 PM Jun 20th, 2009 from web

What’s most apparent, however, looking back over my tweets, is the isolation and the anger. No one in the supermarket ever asked if I might need help, at the hospital it was worse.

Why do people say things like “you don’t look too happy” to a woman standing alone outside surgery waiting room? 4:56 PM Aug 14th, 2009 from mobile web

I was almost always alone in hospitals, waiting for news from the operating room, waiting at Kevin’s side in the E.R. or by his hospital bed, often watching agonizing pain and struggle for breath. He had epithelioid sarcoma that originated in his pelvis then made its way through the lymph system to his lungs causing repeated collapse on both sides. The cancer itself was inoperable, but its side effects, along with radiation and various experimental chemotherapies, kept the specialists and the baby sitters busy.

Our social circles were small, our families far away. We were our own closest friends, content together, somewhat to our detriment I recognize now. Still, we were introverts not hermits. People are busy, I know. Medical drama is scary. But the ache and fatigue of relentless crisis gets etched in deep. I now view these dispatches as a defiant cry to be seen, to testify, bearing witness to suffering in 140 characters or less.

Kevin out. Surgeon-shoes splattered red-said it was hard but successful. Says he left him with two large tubes, minus couple cups of blood. 4:38 PM Aug 19th, 2009 from web

The surgeon had put in chest tubes to reinflate the lung, a procedure that gets trickier with repetition, we were told, as the penetrated skin grows thick and crinkly. Finally they let me into the post-anesthesia care unit to sit with him where the nurse drifts close as he slowly shakes off the bliss of unconsciousness.

Obvious I guess but hospitals r so gory. In PACU, neighbor dramatically swallowing blood. Then he laughs & wonders how the other guy (K) is. 6:37 PM Aug 19th, 2009 from web

Never did this become routine for me. I couldn’t read or surf the Net. I sat rigid with anxiety and sorrow, my eyes traveling from the beeping electronic monitors to the tubing that snaked from multiple parts of Kevin’s body to the strong arched cheekbones in his faraway face.

“The other guy” much more peaceful, tho im watching his blood gurgle disconcertingly thru tube. Thankful no twitter while I was giving birth 7:09 PM Aug 19th, 2009 from web

Dismissed to a room on the oncology floor, everything changes. Anesthesia is over. In less than two hours:

Peace turned to pain. Incomprehensible. 8:51 PM Aug 19th, 2009 from mobile web

There were friends and even loving daycare teachers who did take stints with our little ones, 5 and 2 when it all started. But I suppose I was hoping for more of a reaction from my tweets, maybe a SWAT team, though someone said that following me was like watching a distant train wreck through binoculars. What we got was a flurry of casseroles and “How can we help?” queries at the beginning and at the end of a nearly four-year ordeal. One person asked if we’d like bagels. Probably someone showing up with an assortment of poppy, pumpernickel and plain would have felt nice. We didn’t need bagels; we needed people. I didn’t know how to answer, and bagels never came.

I guess “tweeting” is too gentle, like a birdsong rising into the skies. Is there a shouting social network? 9:57 AM Sep 11th, 2009 from mobile web

Panic in the E.R. came in two forms. There was whatever-was-happening-to-Kevin, and there’s me, frantically walking from his curtained cubby to somewhere I could get cell reception, piecing together, while the battery lasted, a complicated plan to get the kids from daycare and school (at times in different towns) and through the evening until I felt OK leaving him. In the order of things, that had to be first. But just once, so early they hadn’t yet diagnosed the problem as cancer, Kevin was having a scary surgery on a Sunday night when the waiting room was ghostly quiet. A friend called. She’d made a plan with the other buddy in our triad. They showed up with knitting and a bottle of wine that we drank surreptitiously from paper cups. I actually laughed through the fear.

Hard being invited to a party, location: casa bon vivancy. People SHOULD celebrate life. But in casa de cancer, you’re living on an island. 9:51 PM Aug 6th, 2009 from web

I put us all in a shop window, and I didn’t make it easy to follow me.

One definition of heartbreak: 9- and 5 1/2-year-olds bending over a bed rail to give a last kiss & say, “I love you Daddy. I’ll miss you.” 5:34 PM Nov 17th, 2009 from web

Sometimes I ask myself if I regret the raw edge of this display. I read mocking reviews of “yet another cancer memoir,” and I wonder if the writer has walked those particular library stacks (that’s how we did it, pre-Amazon, back when I was 28 and my dad was dying of cancer) or paced those hospital floors.

Maybe I did get something I needed from Twitter. With no one’s permission, I gave myself a voice. Sometimes tender, furious or frantic, sometimes quivering with fear from bed in the middle of the night, listening to the too-labored breathing beside me. I needed to say these things and imagine some heart in the Twittersphere absorbing my crazed reality. My tweets may have merited the discreet, embarrassed looking away that we give the seemingly unreachable ranting woman on the train. I’m OK with that.

Since the first surreal days and weeks after Kevin died, my tweets have tapered to barely a trickle, though if I thought he would DM me I would tweet all day.

The first time his birthday came without him, I did post:

Kids and I just launched balloons into the night with glow sticks attached, green light disappearing into the sky. We love you Kevin. 9:22 PM Sep 28, 2010 from web

@leeanncox now turning off #cancer, #death, #widowhood.

: Lee Ann Cox is a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times and other national publications. She is working on a memoir weaving her Tweets and excerpts from Card Blue, her late husband’s blog, into a tale of love and cancer, online and off. More Lee Ann Cox

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The Army is reading your Bradley Manning tweets

Military public affairs officials in WikiLeaks case use software that specializes in tracking Twitter

By Justin Elliott

A sketch of Private Bradley Manning during his Army Article 32 hearing. (Credit: Reuters)

Topics:Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks, U.S. Military, Social Media, Twitter

(UPDATED BELOW)

Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports on the extent to which the Army’s public affairs office is interested in public and media opinion of the Bradley Manning case, noting that P.R. staffers prepared daily summaries of the coverage of the ongoing legal proceedings. This bit jumped out at me:

The Army used a commercial service called VOCUS to track traditional and social media coverage of Manning’s hearing. The Pentagon pays close attention to the volume of tweets about the U.S. military during high-profile incidents, like the Air Force One flyover that distressed New York City residents in 2009 …

: Justin Elliott is a Salon reporter. Reach him by email at jelliott@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin More Justin Elliott

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Klout is bad for your soul

The social media tool is being taken up as an actual measure of value and influence. And we should be wary

By Bonnie Stewart

The social media service that is bad for your soul

Are you your metrics? (Credit: Realinemedia via Shutterstock)

Topics:Klout, Social Media, Justin Bieber

You’ve heard of Twitter. Twitter is the contemporary canary in the coal mine of world events. A coup? An outrage? A celebrity death? Twitter gets the news out fastest, even mourning the loss of leading figures before they themselves hear they’re dead (sorry about that, Gordon Lightfoot).

You may not have heard of Klout — not yet.

But that doesn’t matter. If you’re on Twitter, or even Facebook, Klout has heard of you. And Klout has ranked you, with a single tidy number meant to sum up your influence and engagement in the social media sphere. Klout.com is a social media analytics company based in San Francisco. Three years ago, it began ranking Twitter users according to the splash their links and witty repartee made among their followers. Since then, it’s grown to include activity across social media platforms, and has established itself as a major arbiter of influence in social media circles. Klout, in effect, has clout.

Late last month, Klout altered its ranking algorithm. The Twitter canaries promptly launched into alarm mode, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth. An #OccupyKlout movement even sprang up on Twitter.

The reaction pointed out three significant shifts now occurring in social media.

Klout defines influence as “the ability to drive action.” It claims to measure influence across social media platforms: it collects data on users’ engagement on Twitter, Facebook, G+, Flickr, etc., and collates them. You go up if you’re doing well, down if you’re losing influence. Or, say, if you spent a whole day offline. Merciful heavens.

If you’ve been in the habit of checking your Klout, you likely saw a change in your score last month. If you had Klout anywhere above, oh, 55 or so, you may have seen a drop. The system ranks out of an ostensible 100, but it grades on what my undergraduate professors affectionately called “the British system”: Basically, nobody except a superstar gets higher than 75. Justin Bieber, King of Klout, hovers close to 100. Ellen DeGeneres, that teacher’s pet, has an 87. Poor Jon Stewart only scores 73.

Klout had suggested before the shift that the majority of users would see their score stay the same or go down, but a straw poll of the canaries tweeting out sturm und drang on my Twitter feed on Oct. 27 suggests that the people clipped hardest by the new algorithm were the bigger fish in the non-celebrity seas, the ones who’d actually noticed they had Klout.

(Full disclosure: I went from an all-time high of 64 to a 58. Pass the hankies.)

The three shifts

Talking about Klout scores to a non-Klout-using audience sounds a bit ridiculous. Mind you, so did talking about Twitter in 2007. In the academic presentations I give, mentioning Klout is akin to bragging about the high score I got in Super Mario Brothers back in 1993. Except that unlike Super Mario, Klout and its ilk — the increasingly complex measurements of influence known as metrics — are poised for real-world impact far beyond social media. Like Twitter.

Social media has involved metrics from the beginning: comments, Technorati rankings, numbers of Twitter followers. These have always been visible measures of how big a fish one might be in the social media pond.

When Klout emerged, however, in 2008, it was something new. It was one of the first tools to measure both reach — how many people you influence — and scale — how much you influence them. Klout’s algorithms also take into account the influence of those you influence. Meaning, on the surface, if you engage with leaders in your community or little corner of the Internet, you yourself are more likely to exert leadership influence.

Klout has been embraced as an objective third-party tool for business to tell which self-promoting social media gurus actually have the know-how and influence they claim they have. Thus, even though many of us may not even be aware we have Klout, it’s already driving hiring in social media spheres. Its algorithm is being taken up as a factual assessment.

And that’s where three shifts in social media’s societal role become evident.

1. Social media has leaked beyond the boundaries of online interaction.

In truth, social media was never contained by the bits and bytes of computers. From the beginning, social media’s social-ness meant that it linked people in ways that stretched far beyond the boundaries of their digital lives. But as people’s Twitter and Facebook and blog identities become more and more central, integrated parts of their everyday living, and more and more people use these platforms, the actions and practices valued and reinforced online begin to bleed out into the larger society. Once a practice becomes normalized in one dominant environment of one’s life, it’s human nature to carry it over into others.

Social media is becoming a powerful force in society like the education system, or the corporate world. Social media has a profound influence on the daily practices of a majority of members of our global culture. As of July 2011, Facebook had 750 million users, a number far exceeding the population of most countries on the planet.

And as social media practices shift from their open source, peer-to-peer connection origins to an emphasis on summative rankings and metrics, we need to pay attention.

Why?

2. Because we’re being influenced by our own “influence.”

Klout isn’t only measuring us, it’s assessing us. It’s designed on behaviorist principles, with rewards and virtual pats on the head when we — ratlike, often not entirely sure what we did to warrant the praise — succeed on the terms its algorithm values, and framing losses in score with banners that proclaim, “Oh no! Your Klout has fallen -1 in the past 2 days!”

We are highly conditionable beings. Klout is conditioning us to care about Klout, and to value ourselves — in the identity economy of social media — in terms of it. It works to devalue the nature of many social media communities, particularly those whose networks and relationships aren’t based entirely in use value.

In the new Klout, I now get notices along the bottom of my screen about which of my contacts have gone down in score recently: in case I want to dump them, I assume, like dead weight. Bye, Mom! Farewell, shy cousin Ernie! Adios, infrequent Twitter user! It’s all business.

Social media wasn’t intended to be all business, especially business as usual. Social media is relational: Part of its phenomenal success is that it’s enabled people to connect on terms far beyond those of use-value networking.

But because Klout rewards use-value networking over other forms of engagement, it fosters an increasingly use-value environment. The peer-to-peer relationality of social media is undermined by the kind of behavior that cultivates status over relationships. Status is part of the game. But when it becomes the whole game, the broad, rhizomatic networks get boxed in and wither, and then we’re back to something a lot less interesting than social media. And like the new Google Reader, a lot less social.

Yes, there is a pattern here. We are gradually being directed away from sociality and toward businesslike behaviors by the business interests that design and profit from the platforms we use.

Social media, which was once a bit of a rogue blowing smoke at the establishment, is being taken in hand and given a tie and a briefcase. We’re like the rebel who’s been told s/he got the highest mark on a class test: We suddenly don’t know what to do with ourselves.

The problem: The test was rigged. And will always be rigged.

3. We’re allowing a metric to do a human’s job.

I’m not saying Klout isn’t trying, in terms of assessing influence and engagement fairly. The problem is, it can’t.

Klout attempts to boil down complex social interactions into a single, absolute number.

Systems of standardization, which is essentially what Klout is, have a particular potent history of this kind of reductionism. Until the 19th century, education systems didn’t use grades as we know them. As they became standardized within the broad societal push for public education, they became a shared language and currency for everyone enrolled in that system. You know what an A means, more or less. So does everybody else.

For over a hundred years, now, we’ve conditioned generations of kids to see themselves and their capacities in terms of these standardized letters: even though we KNOW that an A with sweet ol’ Mr. Wilson is just plain easier to get than an A with IronFist Ives, the history teacher.

Rankings are useful as relative assessments: My score on Klout in relation to yours, or on Mr. Ives’ history test this month as compared to last, can be indicative of meaningful change.

But my Klout score does not tell you — and cannot tell you — what kind of influence I have in my community, not really. Such scoring may be handy in a competitive neoliberal economy looking to quantify and compare abilities, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually valid.

On Babble.com, the day of the algorithm shift, Cecily Kellogg wrote, “Whether we love or hate Klout, the brands and agencies we work with utilize Klout scores to make determinations about our perceived value, so this is an issue important to us.”

It should be an important issue to anyone using social media. Unless, of course, you believe in a world where Justin Bieber is actually the most influential human alive.

What Klout is good for is giving people a reflective surface on which to see their own social media activities and interactions, relative to themselves and the context of their communities. Klout is good for letting you know whether you’re succeeding in your efforts to improve: It is not and cannot be a measure of success.

Klout is only valuable if one is embedded enough in the relational networks it claims to assess to know when to take it with a more than a grain of salt. We need to stop handing over so much power to metrics. They have a place. But it’s their use-value we need to assess, not the other way around.

: Bonnie Stewart is a Ph.D student at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada, researching social media identity and education. She blogs ideas at http://theory.cribchronicles.com and creative non-fiction at http://cribchronicles.com. More Bonnie Stewart

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Intelligence agencies step up the Twitter and Facebook trawling

Department of Homeland Security works to catch up with the CIA in the social media monitoring department

By Alex Pareene

CIA actively monitors social media, DHS claims they don't

(Credit: VikaSuh via Shutterstock)

Topics:CIA, Homeland Security, Twitter, Social Media

A couple of days ago, the Associated Press reported that the Department of Homeland Security claims not to be “actively monitoring” social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. Lest you worry that status updates that present a threat to national security are going unread, the AP today reports that the Central Intelligence Agency is actively monitoring social media networks.

The story in the earlier article was that our sprawling intelligence and national security apparatus was caught off-guard by social media-fueled uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, and that they were going to take steps to be better prepared in the future.

DHS Undersecretary Caryn Wagner said the department was still trying to figure out how to use Twitter and Facebook information for law enforcement purposes. And they seem to be starting completely from scratch:

Wagner said the department is establishing guidelines on gleaning information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook for law enforcement purposes. Wagner says those protocols are being developed under strict laws meant to prevent spying on U.S. citizens and protect privacy, including rules dictating the length of time the information can be stored and differences between domestic and international surveillance.

(Hah, “strict laws meant to prevent spying on U.S. citizens.”) (Hah also at the idea that the laws would be respected even if they were strict.)

Speaking of international surveillance, there’s a government agency that is already on top of this Twitter-monitoring thing. The CIA has “several hundred analysts” (we are not allowed to know precisely how many) reading and translating social media content from all over the globe, for all sorts of reasons. And according to the CIA, these CIA analysts are totally cool, like the goth hacker lady in those books you like:

The most successful analysts, Naquin said, are something like the heroine of the crime novel “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” a quirky, irreverent computer hacker who “knows how to find stuff other people don’t know exists.”

Sure, translating Twitter messages from Urdu in order to gauge anti-American sentiment in Pakistan is basically the same thing as solving mysteries with hacking.

It’s not mentioned how the CIA’s social media department avoids “monitoring” the Internet behavior of Americans, which would be a violation of the agency’s charter. The reason that’s not mentioned is probably because they don’t avoid it.

What seems likely is that there are multiple government organizations monitoring your social media usage — the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the NYPD — even if they’re not coordinating their efforts. And sifting through and analyzing publicly posted information is just one piece of the monitoring. What I’m interested to learn is how much ostensibly “private” information — like real names and private messages and locations — these agencies are obtaining, and the means by which they’re obtaining it.

[Via Josh Sternberg]

: Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene

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Why Chomsky is wrong about Twitter

When the linguist claims that social media is "shallow," he isn't very deep or convincing

By Nathan Jurgenson

Noam Chomsky (Credit: iStockphoto/Reuters)

Topics:Social Media

Noam Chomsky has been one of the most important critics of the way big media crowd out “everyday” voices in order to control knowledge and “manufacture consent.” So it is surprising that the MIT linguist dismisses much of our new digital communications produced from the bottom-up as “superficial, shallow, evanescent.” We have heard this critique of texting and tweeting from many others, such as Andrew Keen and Nicholas Carr. And these claims are important because they put Twitter and texting in a hierarchy of thought. Among other things, Chomsky and Co. are making assertions that one way of communicating, thinking and knowing is better than another.

Chomsky, of course, is a left-wing icon. As an accomplished linguist, prominent political activist and perhaps one of the most important public intellectuals of the last half-century, people pay attention to what he has to say, especially since he has been so pointed in critiquing mainstream media. But is Chomsky himself “crowding out” social media at the expense of voices that ought to be heard?

Back in March, Chomsky did an off-the-cuff interview with a D.C. “scene” blog where he spoke about many things, from familiar political and linguistic topics to the more earthy subjects of baseball cards, Bad Religion and WikiLeaks. It was his comments about new communication technologies — which he admits he doesn’t even use — that most caught my attention.

“Text messaging, Twitter, that sort of thing […] is extremely rapid, very shallow communication,” he said to interviewer Jeff Jetton. Chomsky said. “[I] think it erodes normal human relations. It makes them more superficial, shallow, evanescent.” Chomsky expanded on this point in another interview last December with Figure/Ground Communication, a site devoted to technology and society.

“Well, let’s take, say, Twitter,” he said. “It requires a very brief, concise form of thought and so on that tends toward superficiality and draws people away from real serious communication […] It is not a medium of a serious interchange.”

Maybe I should not read too much into these statements, but “off-the-cuff” remarks often reveal much more than we might assume. They illuminate Chomsky’s larger view of media and, most importantly, highlight the larger trend of established first-world intellectuals dismissing digital communications as less deep or worthwhile than the means of communication that they prefer.

Chomsky has a long (and, I think, mostly terrific) history of criticizing the shallowness of media. His 1997 essay, “What Makes the Mainstream Media Mainstream,” is a classic as is his seminal work “Manufacturing Consent.” His argument, which is anything but shallow, has been that the few control media content and seduce people into believing what they would not otherwise.

Today, of course, the top-down media Chomsky attacked is often said to be in “crisis” because of a new, more social and participatory media environment. Some tech-utopians say this trend has provided a voice to the masses and fueled social revolutions across the globe. Other tech-dystopians view social media as just another venture-capital funded way of exploiting people under the guise of empowerment. But in the world of Chomsky this important debate is instead undercut by the view that communication on digital media is inherently “shallow.”

To be fair, this is not Chomsky’s area of expertise and his is just one voice in a chorus of complaints about digital depthlessness — be it Keen’s “Cult of the Amateur,” Carr’s “The Shallows” or even in mainstream news commentary such as this New York Times panel discussion on digital books where panelist after panelist, including Carr, claim that the digital is shallow. And then there are all those we encounter in our everyday lives who dismiss tweeting and texting as trivial.

Claiming that certain styles of communicating and knowing are not serious and not worthy of extended attention is nothing new. It’s akin to those claims that graffiti isn’t art and rap isn’t music. The study of knowledge (aka epistemology) is filled with revealing works by people like Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard or Patricia Hill Collins who show how ways of knowing get disqualified or subjugated as less true, deep or important.

And this is where it gets more interesting than Chomsky seems to realize.

Digital communications are produced more by some groups than others. Texting, tweeting and the like are not just the domain of wealthy kids and knowledge workers, as some assume. Research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project has demonstrated that nonwhites are much more likely to connect to the Web, communicate and create content on mobile phones than are whites. Globally, the same trend may be playing out. Research here and elsewhere indicates these so-called shallow ways of communicating are precisely the ways those in the Third World are connecting to and interacting on the Internet.

“In many cases, historically disadvantaged groups have used social media technology to find opportunities previously foreclosed to them. For these folks, social media is hardly trivial,” observes my fellow cyborg, P.J. Rey.

And this is to say nothing of the instrumental role social media has played in the Arab Spring or the current #occupy protests spreading globally. As I’ve written elsewhere, new ways of communicating facilitated in part by smart phones and social media have given voice and audience to protestors. To some degree (and we can debate how large this is) social media has enabled a mass manufacturing of dissent.

Chomksy, of all people, ought to take note. When he defends his form of communicating (printed books and periodical essays) with claims that tweeting/texting lacks depth, he is implicitly suggesting that nonwhites and those in the Third World are inherently communicating less deeply than their white and first-world counterparts. He doesn’t seem to know enough about the reality of social media to examine his own assumptions.

In fact, in the debate about whether rapid and social media really are inherently less deep than other media, there are compelling arguments for and against. Yes, any individual tweet might be superficial, but a stream of tweets from a political confrontation like Tahrir Square, a war zone like Gaza or a list of carefully-selected thinkers makes for a collection of expression that is anything but shallow. Social media is like radio: It all depends on how you tune it.

But even if we grant Chomsky, Carr and the others that social media is less deep and more instantaneous, the important questions then become: Is instant, digital communication less true? Less worthy? Less valuable? Less linguistically creative? Less politically efficacious?

Chomsky, a politically progressive linguist, should know better than to dismiss new forms of language-production that he does not understand as “shallow.” This argument, whether voiced by him or others, risks reducing those who primarily communicate in this way as an “other,” one who is less fully human and capable. This was Foucault’s point: Any claim to knowledge is always a claim to power. We might ask Chomsky today, when digital communications are disqualified as less deep, who benefits?

: Nathan Jurgenson is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Maryland who blogs at Cyborgology. Follow him on Twitter @nathanjurgenson More Nathan Jurgenson