Welcome to all the news subs from NTU and Algo. I hope you’ll find a nice virtual couch, come for the curiosities and stay for the banter.
I delivered a guest lecture at NTU’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information this weekend around social media (Thank you Director Wong Pei Wen for having me!).The meat of it was supposed to be about how businesses are using or failing to use it well. But to me, the more interesting bit dawned during prep for the lecture - on how “social” has changed radically in the last decade. In 2008 I authored a paper for an academic conference called ‘An evaluation of microblogging as a marketing communication platform’ - that was about Twitter - adorable! Whoda thunk we’d be in the mess we are in today.
For a decade after that, I’d continue to associate “social” and “sharing”. That, to me, is the biggest thing that has shifted - social media is a lot more about consumption than it is about sharing. The sharing has now been relegated to spaces that feel…safer…like whatsapp or discord. Messaging, forums, video and social have all converged.
In my work, I’m interested in how this shapes culture ( I called the lecture “Sailing Culture”). Social isn’t a conduit for culture, it IS culture today. A super hit TV show doesn’t shape culture (like LOST did in 2004) until fans make detailed reviews of it on YouTube and there are clips floating around on TikTok (like Red, White & Blue). It also comes with the collapsing of what is “offline” vs “online” - queues outside a shop drive even more demand when videos of said queue is shared on social and just one post by Taylor Swift drives hundreds of thousands of people to register to vote. Social still retains this sense of “i’m not alone” - in some cases this leads to belonging, in others it can just be validation.
More on this in a future post. For now, here are the finds for the week:
- OVER WORK “In conversation after conversation, workers said they spent their days being super busy, rushing from one meeting to the next, jumping on and off the phone, and plowing through their email. It was only at what should have been the end of the paid workday that they realized they hadn’t gotten to the one big thing they really needed to do.” Refer to my Culture Of Work essay from earlier this year.
- CHANGE GROWTH Over the past few decades, the pursuit of growth has relentlessly emerged as one of the defining activities of our common life. Our collective success is determined by how much we can produce in a given period. The fortunes of our political leaders depend overwhelmingly on the rise or fall of one number: gross domestic product (GDP). Yet we seldom stop to ask how this all-conquering ascent happened and, most important, whether it’s a good thing.
- LOST, AGAIN The TV series LOST was a global phenomenon…TWENTY YEARS ago! Now, it’s coming back into public consciousness, thanks to YouTube and TikTok creators obsessed with all aspects of the show. Culture is a flat circle sometimes.
- CITY STORY Boise, Idaho, has used storytelling techniques to generate a sense of shared purpose and urgency around a complicated technical challenge that can feel removed from residents’ day-to-day lives: water-renewal capacity. Now, a nearly decade-long effort that began with a climate risk assessment is set to break ground next year on a recycling plant that diverts six million gallons of water per day for purification.
- DIS-CONNECTED In all the frenzy about AI and smart-glasses we forget that 2.6 billion people are still not connected. 1 in 3 people around the world do not have access to the internet, and 95% of those live in the Global South.