Social Media Developments in the 21st Century Real-Time Economy

by Sam Inkinen and Teemu Arina

Today we are living in a new reality: the reality of digital media as catalyzed by new forms of social media. Digitalization can be characterized as the avant-garde of our society today, as digital services push the known boundaries of media and relationships within. The shift in ways of doing and relating requires new participative architectures to understand the move from the age of speed (industrialization and mass-production) to the age of real-time (digitalization and mass-customization as affected by new forms of social processes, i.e. Web 2.0).

A project called the Real-Time Economy Community addresses the move towards digitalization, participative architectures and real-time service interactions with new and innovative ways to engage business organizations and creative individuals tackling with the implementation of digital services and underlying emergent cultural forms.

The spirit of the age (Zeitgeist) can be described as a move from traditional mass media (the broadcast paradigm) to digital, interactive new media (the social media paradigm). Various kinds of experiences, spectacles and effects of digital culture will dominate how we interpret reality and engage ourselves in various activities. It should be noticed that in addition to being tools for communication and expression, media are also identity devices that affect the persona, world view and subjectivity of an individual.

In his classic, Transparent Society (1989), Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo has aptly stated that in the contemporary media culture “everything becomes a subject of communication”. Different kinds of extended experiences will irrevocably lead to the expansion of the sphere of media publicity to touch areas that have been previously considered private. This can already be seen in the development of the social web as people start to record each others’ experiences, put them online and utilize the web as a platform to connect those experiences. Big Brother, in this instance, is, well, us.

As media based on images, audio and text – i.e. dynamic, interactive multimedia, MMORPGs, blogs and social networking sites – is assuming an increasingly central role in digital culture, the interpretation, decoding and understanding of multimedial and multimodal messages becomes more important. The aesthetic element, that is part of the original definition of education, gains new meaning and its role is emphasized. This can already be seen in interactive services like Facebook, where human communication becomes increasingly visual. Not only are our exchange of symbols much richer, but also to cope with complexity we have stretched our attention to its limit – something Linda Stone calls continuous partial attention – as we struggle to pay attention to several things at once.

When considering digitalization in the context of creating new services, better service also means elimination of unnecessary services. A good example would be online banking, where a bank is making itself invisible – but not necessarily irrelevant – in transactional activities through digital payment systems, electronic invoicing and full value-chain integration. Digital media has the ability to embed, hide and automate certain service interactions in transformative ways. This shift is not just affecting business processes, but also how individuals operate in general.

For an industrial worker speed and repetition was key. For a knowledge worker new modes of working are activated when the culture of speed is replaced with real-time processes and repetition is complemented with non-linearity and contextual adaptive applications. Knowledge work becomes network work when the nodes become less important than the network formation activities themselves.

The underlying technical architecture of a Real-Time Economy can be seen as the automation of transactions, utilization of ubiquitous computing appliances and the web as a platform. This includes e-invoicing, where Finland has had a leading role in Europe with the Finvoice standard. However, this is just the first step: new opportunities and layers are activated once we have the ability to process transactions in real-time. Participative service interactions online and new ways to tap into collective and collaborative intelligence in the trail of Amazon’s and Wikipedia’s example becomes key. Digitalization enables users to have a central role in value creation through user-generated content, social navigation and experience-based metadata, namely folksonomies (folk-created taxonomies).

In Real-Time Economy wise companies operate like their users own them. We are living in the age of experience design: mediated, first-hand experiences are giving way to synthetic experiences generated by new media.

It must be emphasized that technology per se does not alter the world or social reality, but by being connected to different cultural forms and social processes it affects the forces that construct identities and mould personalities. The industrial production line technology existed long before the it was merged with scientific management by Frederick Taylor and the assembly line logic by Henry Ford, ultimately connecting people with technology. The same can be said about Web 2.0, the internet technology has to merge with new forms of social processes to become effective.

Thus, in the post-modern media society, one can say without exaggeration that digital information, telecommunication technology and new media intrude even deeper into people’s everyday lives. Rapid convergence of digital media brings telephone networks, television and the internet closer to each other. Broadly speaking, multi-channelling, multiple media, cross-media, polymedia and hybrid media are synonyms and closely related to the new dynamic interrelationships of new digital technologies (so called online paradigm) and their integration with traditional offline technologies. These terms refer to the merging of two or more media environments and/or transmission channels, for example, the internet, mobile communications and digital television. In other words, the media world today is dominated by convergence and hybridization.

The significance of interaction (as a paradigm shift from the traditional broadcast paradigm to the interactive social media paradigm) has been underlined in the new media contexts and discussions. Interactivity points to creating information, meanings, experiences, identities or even new cultural expressions together.

Real-Time Economy Community is an online community, social network and idea-generation platform for visioning the future of our society based on real-time processes in transactions and service interactions. In this community people share their ideas, stories and practical case examples on how digitalization and new ways of working are transforming organizations. Real-Time Economy Community will launch in the beginning of 2008 and will be based on a participative architecture to join users, service providers, researchers, educational institutions and businesses to generate and cultivate ideas around digitalization. Together we will escape the age of speed, for good.

To conclude, composer Richard Wagner (1813–83) defined the Gesamtkunstwerk approach as the idea of a massive work of art combining and shaking different senses. In can be seen that the interplay between digital media, social media and conceptual frameworks like Web 2.0 in the context of an important paradigm shift like the Real-Time Economy is the Gesamtkunstwerk of our time.

Links:
www.realtimeeconomy.net
www.inkinen.org
tarina.blogging.fi

Please contact:
Dr. Sam Inkinen
Dept. of Communication Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Vaasa
E-mail: sam.inkinen@uwasa.fi

Mr. Teemu Arina
Dicole Ltd. and the Real-Time Economy Community Project
E-mail: teemu@dicole.com