De-Cognition: Social Media and the Information Architecture

Demystifying the Internet Pragmatism: A Cognitive Approach

Any media ecosystem evolves around the currents of communication. How different is Social Media from the mainstream media and the traditional formats of a communicative medium? The levels and depth of commoditization has liquidated the reach of communicative rationality in the media formats such as Television, Film, etc. Social Media has evolved around the concept of social networking and the inherent non-linear and decentralized nature of Internet. Social Networking as a concept has roots in Sociology and demands a wider narrative. To analyze Internet as a Public Sphere, we need to demystify various abstractions to reach the political economy of the worlds largest producer and consumer of information.

Can Social Media, with its base in Social Networking topology has always offered a potential for becoming the next generation cognitive network. It has even been visualized as the axis for a semantic web where information becomes a self organizing network. Is this technological pragmatism anywhere near real life possibilities? If not, why so? This is the vantage point of this critique. Why do we need this much of information in Social Media. What is the driving force behind the information architecture and the accumulation of information in the social media space. Big Data and the information overloading has becomes the prime movers for the Social Business. Social Business has been predicted as the game changer in the information technology landscape. Thus it is a big business now. 

The question is has the cost of business sacrificed the potentials for developing cognitive networks around Social Media. When it comes to the information architecture, we need to know the basics. Who is the producer of information. It is each of us. How is the Search Engine giants generating wealth of information and the uniform resource locators (URL). The URLs act as the nodes in the information graphs. It is each of us, consumers, who creates various paths around these nodes and make them alive. This is largely forgotten. Thus the real value of information is generated by the end users like us. Information machines are thriving on the cognitive networks created by our information production, consumption, circulation and re-production. Search Engines are only one side of the coin. The present generation content aggregators are also only dynamic nodes of information. 

Cognitive networks created by us becomes commodity in the split of each second. This commodity again circulates among the networks of us. In each turn and twist of this information nodes and network, it generates money, the real money ! Thus we are working for a global system of finance capital virtually not knowing the sweet sweat that we shed in front of the the dumb terminals of computers. It is indeed a great state of hibernation or a glorified state of social pathology. 

+Gokul Alex 

Some Pathological Trends in the Social Media

On the Ideological Apparatus behind the Social Media Measurements

Social Self? This supposed to be 'oxymoron' has been with us for quite some time now. Now we believe that the more we are social in social media, the more we become identity conscious and identity empowered. May be a small leap of faith for the humanity and a giant step for the technology. What is happening in this flurry of affairs? 

Now we have conceded that the Social Media spread across the nation states has generated a huge volume of data about the humanity. May be this is the data store about the people with the access to internet and the world market forces believe that they are going to the the drivers of growth for the decades to come. Hope their predictions and reasons stand the test of time. 

Looking at the state of Social Media, now we can see that every other social media preaches to measure our online presence and to rationalize it. In other words, formalize our social self. But a moment please, what is that we are doing? Are we becoming more social and empathetic towards each other? Are we becoming more conversant in real life. If not, we need to look beyond the social media metrics that projects our presence in scores and dashboards. 

The Social Media is making us more and more eloquent about our thoughts, our connections, the number of friends in our network, the number of different profiles we have, so on and so forth. In other words, this semiotic framework is centered around each of us. Thus each of us becomes the target for different market segments. It is a really intricate mathematics where an end node is being referred by different graphs and each graph generates a different visualization out of the same node based on its diverse semantic potentials. Hence each of us becomes the perpetual sources of information for various networks and they generate insight out of our primary, secondary, tertiary and virtually an infinite set of semantic connections. As my interest is least on this mathematical modelling let me go beyond this abstraction.

I have just stated a problem provoked by my endless nights wandering in different social media systems to create an inflated ego. Now I am working on resolving this illusion and beyond the semiotics of this media ecosystem. Rather than being inflated about the semiotics of this ecosystem  we need to make it as conversant and communicative as possible. Here comes relevant the study of communicative rationality devised by Habermas. Rationality and reason can only decipher the signs and lead us to the real world of affairs. This post by no means is a call to boycott social media instead to understand the ways not to get paranormal by its illusory apparatus.