Hive, connection room and water cooler
Weird association of words? If you think of social media, maybe not so much.
My exploration this week got me through 2 interesting readings. The first one focused on produsage, a participatory mode found on Web 2.0 that "enables all participants to be users as much as producers of information" (Bruns, 2008). The second one presented a framework of seven functionalities of social media that firms could rely on to promote their reputation and sales and even ensure their survival (Kietzmann et al, 2011).
These papers had two very different focuses but were both successful at discussing abstract and somewhat complex concepts thanks to simple and efficient analogies. Interestingly, both resources relied on the hive and its honeycomb structure to support their view. As stated by Seeley (1995), "the term mind predates social media and references the complex group communications of honey bees". Jones (2017) refers to the Hive Mind to emphasize the usefulness of a social metaphor to create a cognitive presence in the classroom.
Meeting the hive analogy twice in a row throughout my readings got me digging. What other analogies and metaphors have been used in the social media context, and for what purposes?
In a humorous but comprehensive post, Sahakians (2016) compiled 20 funny metaphors that can help you explain social media to an alien. Besides the unlikely probability of this hypothetical situation, some metaphors provide a good sense of what it's like to be a human being in a social medium. Some will recognize themselves with "social media being like ancient Egypt, writing things on walls and worshipping cats". Others (like me pretty often) will think comparing social media to parenting: "Just when you think you've figured it out, they change the rules of engagement", is especially relevant. Bonnie Currin (2022) added a few more analogies to the list and compared Twitter to a water cooler ("where one would experience one-sentence opinion") and Facebook to a group of friends at a market (where "there is a little bit of everything on display, and you can learn about new things while connecting with long lost friends").
In a more academic style, Miller et al. (2022) used the Connection Room analogy to contribute to the Understanding [of] the Ethical Dimensions of Social Media, like the Cerebro machine imagined for Professor Xavier from the Marvel X-Men comic books. This representation allowed the authors to explain the complex and multifaceted role of social media providers, providing spaces for communication and expression while controlling what we watch, recording our reactions and behaviors, and eventually using our personal data for future transactions.
What do such analogies tell us?
First, using analogies to describe the structure and functioning of social media is helpful to picture the intangible reality of our virtual life. Common instructional strategies frequently connect familiar, tangible, prior knowledge to unfamiliar, new, and complex concepts to trigger cognitive associations and facilitate understanding and visualization of abstract environments. In short, analogies give us benchmarks.
Second, metaphors, comparisons, and analogies are incredibly powerful to raise awareness of how to live, thrive and survive on social media. Virtual spaces have become common living places for a lot of people on the planet; thus, like any other social space, we must be aware of its rules as well as the consequences of our actions and saying. Analogies encourage us to picture ourselves in various but realistic situations: friends meeting at a market, professionals meeting at a business dinner, or individuals screaming in a crowded room where walls are covered with some of our holiday photos, personal quotes of our political opinions, or embarrassing private content we were sure we never uploaded.
Overall, analogies explain, teach, and warn us about what to expect from Web 2.0. More importantly, analogies trigger questioning, because in the end, how we live, thrive and survive on social media is the responsibility of our virtual selves.
source: behave.net
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