Nicole Wheatley

June 21, 2011

Social media web-based Utopias—do they exist?

When people hear about social media, many tend to think about popular social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and YouTube. YouTube has about 258 million users, and more than 50 percent of them log in weekly. Facebook has about 101 million users with more than 50 percent who log in daily. If you haven't spent any time on these sites, I highly recommend setting up an account and jumping into a conversation or community. It's one thing to talk about social media and another to experience it firsthand.

What is Social Media? Social media essentially is a category of online media where people are talking, participating, sharing, networking, and bookmarking online. Most social media services encourage discussion, feedback, voting, comments, and sharing of information from all interested parties. It's more of a two-way conversation, rather than a one-way broadcast like traditional media. Another unique aspect of social media is the idea of staying connected or linked to other sites, resources, and people. With this explanation it brings to the point, social media sites could be considered as web-based utopian or dystopian (depending on the person’s perception) communities.

Being a Communication major, who is drawn to this world of social media, how it affects everyone on an everyday basis with its perceptions, opinions and its own bias; of products, relationships, agendas, politics, religious beliefs, basically anything relating to the senses of human nature itself. This had me start asking the question, when in Dr. White’s Utopian Literature class, how are social media web-based sites any different from the Utopias depicted in the Literature we are reading: Thomas More, Utopia; Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland; and Any Rand, Anthem. The definition of Utopia according to Webster’s Dictionary, is in its most common and general meaning, and refers to a hypothetical perfect society. It has also been used to describe actual communities founded in attempts to create such a society. The adjective utopian is often used to refer to good but (physically, socially, economically, or politically) impossible proposals, or at least ones that are very difficult to implement. After much research it brings me back once again full-circle to the question how or are there any real differences in the social media web-based sites from the Utopias depicted in Literature in the early 1900’s?

I initially started my research due to a phrase used in Gilman’s, Herland, where Van feels his courtship with Ellador is completely on display within the community of Herland, and he explains how he is courting not just Ellador; but the whole community (Gilman 129). Then Ellador asks Van a question on when he marries her he will marry her community. Van replies, “Confound it! I hadn’t married the nation, and I told her so. But Ellador only smiled at her own limitations and explained to Van she had to “think in we’s” (129).  This immediately made sense to me and gave me the vision of “The Wall” on facebook. How 100 million people each day share their mood, their happiness, their goals, their dreams, their political views, their oppositions, their beliefs, their life happenings with over a million different status updates a day. This is the exact same thing as being on display within a Utopian community during a courtship. The similarity is uncanning and almost humorous in the fact if you think about it. Utopias now are unlimited with their accessibility to society as a whole, and the humorous part about it is WE (the people) are basically unaware of the ramifications it brings or entails.

Such is the term “Techno-utopia” which was created in this generation of social media. According to the Encyclopedia II, techno-utopia is defined as a technocracy is a socio-economic system, one that is based upon abundance, as opposed to scarcity-based economies like capitalism. A core conclusion reached by the group is that a price system, or any system based on scarcity, is an illogical means of distribution in the technologically advanced world in which humans live. Technocracy sees established economic, political and administrative forms as relics of a traditional past. Most of these paradoxes are lost on Western observes of the Internet and its role in the politics of Iran and other authoritarian states. Since the publication of John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” in 1996, they have been led to believe that cyberspace is conducive to democracy and liberty, and no government would be able to crush that libertarian spirit (Morozov 1). New media technologies may be shaping the structure, identity, opportunity and protest dimensions of social movements. It offers important opportunities for cost-effective networking, interpretive framing, mobilization, and repertoires of protest action (Loader 1).  All of the same things Utopias in the 1900s were built on, but are now utilized through cyberspace.

The answer to my question was answered when in my research I found, Singularity University. Its founders hold dear and often discuss with a techno-utopian bravado: the arrival of Singularity – a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state (Vance, 1). At the point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past (1). This was the answer to my question are there any real differences in the social media web-based sites from the Utopias depicted in Literature in the early 1900s – it gave the WOW answer of NO there are no differences on the premise that both are built on. The only difference being one was built as a community with people living side-by-side, and the other built decades later in cyberspace with knowledge and people who do not live as one in a community. They live as a community on the web. Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process (Vance, 1). “We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology, “ Raymond Kurzweil said, the inventor and businessman who is the Singularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman and boasts that he intends to live for hundreds of years and resurrect the dead, including his own father. “That is what it means to be human – to extend who we are.” If you think about it, Utopian values are the same – utopias are created to extend to others who “WE” are and what “WE” believe.  

Works Cited

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland. New York: Signet Classics, 1992. Print.

Loader, Brian D. “Social Movements and New Media.” Sociology Compass, Nov. 2008 2:6. 21 June 2011.

Morozon, Evgen Y. “The Myth of the Techno-Utopia: The Digital Dictatorship.” The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 2010 28:16. 21 June 2011.