Facing a rhetorical explosion

It's risky business admitting you're a late adopter, especially when this adoption is something you're supposed to be professionally involved in. I don't think it would be fair for me to bore you with details of my psychological malfunctions over the past five years or so in trying to deal with the Mypace explosion and subsequent Facebook dilemma.

Why an explosion and why a dilemma?

Well, I think I  used to place an awful amount of trust in representation, regardless of the medium employed; believing that whatever is thought about and applied through such representation - however unqualified, inaccurate, incredible, unpopular or vice versa - is an 'histo-cultural' artifact whose (infinite) value is reckoned through the jadedness of having absolutely no idea of what the future has in store. On this basis, I used to think, every mediated representation is imperative in the anxious preparation for the unknown, to serve as records and/or references in a puzzle-solving exercise in the distant future.

Nauseatingly romantic? Maybe. A firm basis for engaging professionally with media, particularly those of the social kind? I'd have to say yes based on two things. Firstly (this is the most obvious reason) because the word 'social' in the term 'social media' implies having to deal with psychological malfunctions and dilemmas inherent in the randomness of social interaction; and secondly because approaching something professionally allows one the privilege of detachment, allowing for the selective implementation of communication ranging from personal interaction to full-blown rhetotic.

Now, if I wasn't a late adopter, chances are I would have been sucked in on the consumer end back when Myspace was thought to be everyone's chance to get noticed. You made your page look sexy then you made friends to show them how sexy you are. What's more is that everyone else was doing it so you didn't have to feel alienated, as most actors probably do. Enter Facebook and its marvelous promise of connectedness, 'safety' and easy in-group sharing - packaged more like a sterile directory vis-a-vis a sexy TV show - and you figured that Myspace was more for people who regarded their activity on that channel as products (e.g. musicians, bands, actors, etc).

Facebook, in all its sterility, presented a solution to being noticed in a slightly more modest way, a retreat from being exposed on Myspace to a simple listing. Here's the dilemma: in listing yourself on Facebook while acknowledging it as a social network, you inadvertently exposed yourself as a potential product much like an electro-glitch band's flashy neon Myspace page.

You may ask how and why a product and not a participating consumer, but isn't that exactly what a participating consumer is, especially when considering relatively new terms like User Generated Content (UGC) and User Generated Media (UGM)? It's simple, at some stage you're going to accept a friend request from a person whom you may or may not have met in real life and know something about them through some association, that person is a group or Fan Page administrator, his/her profile or page status updates appear in your news feed, you decide whether to click through or not but either way, you got the message in headline form which means you're already an indirect contributor to the product's overall representation.

Now all you have to do is click the 'Like' button...

But is being a product by virtue of being a participating consumer really that bad? After all, there is a transaction taking place whereby the sender constructs a message to elicit a response from the receiver and the only manner of gauging the effectiveness of such construction is whether it is responded to upon reception. Similarly, the only manner of gauging your personal success on social media channels is selecting and effectively responding to messages that are of interest to you, thereby enhancing your profile.

Coming from the perspective of a late-adopting Facebook ghostwriter, this dilemma is one that helps explain things more than it does cause retraction because it is likely that through a seemingly dichotomous situation a dynamic solution can be derived.

Kind regards,
Ahmed Patel