I've been ill through this week. Aside from Thanksgiving dinner, and an outing to see Skyfall (quite doped up, mind you), I've been in or close to my bed. Damn colds.
Nonetheless, I've spent quite some time online. I've noticed, amongst other things, the organization attempts around the Walmart strike for Black Friday and the Strike Debt campaign (itself an outgrowth of Occupy Wall Street).
The Walmart strike, as I expected, got covered with a pro-corporate bias to all of the mainstream media coverage. The language used, and not used, is what gave the game away; it is well known that few of the actual workforce would walk off the job, as Walmart has a long and vicious history of retaliation--often disproportionate--to all attempts, big and small alike, to unionize.
Most of the people present walking the picket line were either people that did not currently work at Walmart (these were often union organizers) or individuals that worked at stores other than the one picketed (and, wisely, did not reveal where that store was or gave their identity on camera). A minority of picketers, for reasons that varied, did walk off the job (or, at the least, wouldn't cross the line once established). Yet the mainstream media implies that, since the workers themselves--who, I remind you, would be immediately fired once management noticed--were a minority of those on the line that (a) the strike is a put-on, and (b) it's a bust.
I don't think so. The social media build-up in my Facebook stream made this event into this year's "Buy Nothing Day", for all intents and purposes, pushing the idea that not only should you not buy at Walmart on Black Friday, but you should not buy there at all until Walmart ceases its anti-union oppression and pays living wages to all employees regardless of position. The Black Friday action is just one part of a larger campaign, one that is acknowledged to take years before any positive ends will come, despite recent studies supporting a claim that Walmart could easily fix things.
(According to a study at UC Berkley's Center for Labor Research and Education, a raise in minimum wage to $12/hr for its bottom-end employees would result in an average price hike of 46 cents per trip. Yes, that study's been spread around the social networks also.)
The Strike Debt campaign is one that's gotten a far more positive response overall, even if the mainstream media's position is one like that of a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. It's very difficult to paint a group that buys the medical debt of others for pennies on the dollar, and then absolves the debt that it buys, as any kind of threat to society.
The social media presence included spreading the word of a fundraiser, one that raised several thousands of dollars in a day as the word went viral quickly, and the result is that Strike Debt is now accelerating its plans to expand beyond medical debt and into student loan debt; apparently working groups are now looking into doing this.
The interesting thing is that, here and there, now I'm seeing the idea of this being a trap getting pushed; the first is that debt forgiveness counts against you come tax time, and the second is that this has a corrosive social effect as it will just make people be wasteful with money and get back into debt. I'm not yet seeing this in the media, but rather in Facebook posts and commentary threads. Compared to the relative lack of mainstream media reaction, the reactions of social media users are intrigued if not enthusiastic.
What I see here, then, is that social media is having an interesting--if not unexpected--effect. What normally is easily handled by mainstream media (the control of a popular narrative regarding a news event) is increasingly undermined by users of social media as they can link to reliable sources directly, citing them to support the claims for their arguments. (Well, when they deign to do so.) While cat videos remains commonplace, some of us are making more of social media than that; they're the ones that services like Klout attempt to track.
In the years going forward, the social mavens and influencers will start becoming more apparent in social media- and we're going to see celebrity stop being the sole source of that influence in favor of influence being rewarded/reflected with celebrity instead.
Yes, the rise of the hubs and connectors, right?
ReplyDeleteI do think many average users of social media are dismissive of it as a news source .. or at least claim not to trust it for information. But I think you are right - the reality is that it is changing the discourse and is a disruptive force to mainstream media. Sometimes I think of the something like the Facebook newsfeed as a slow force, like erosion, that changes us not with individual drops of water but the collective action of the flow/ posts over time. So it is easy to focus on the individual posts, good or bad (and hoaxes!), but the real change is in the sum total...