Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Cool blog bro


In his book, Environmental Communications and the Public Sphere, Robert Cox does a pretty good job at explaining the adapting role and benefits of social media for gathering information about environmental issues in the twenty-first century. It is important to know about the relevancy of social media because whether it is individual advocacy or a more organized advocacy campaign, “in drawing attention to, criticizing, or mobilizing around a specific environmental problem, activist today rarely rely on one social media tool” (Cox, 192).

Because of social media, the means of environmental communication and advocacy have broadened and become more accessible.  Social media and social networks have allowed for a more lubricated means of spreading environmental information from news and journalistic site and creating buzz around trending issues.  Because of the easy of creating, uploading, and disseminating information online, there is much more citizen reporting and documenting, which means more ethical accountability for public and private institutions. 

Moreover, social networking has allowed for the forming of online communities and targeted special interest groups.  These groups may stay online, but they might also mobilize in person and take their advocacy to the streets; “today, environmental, climate, and social justice activists are using the full suite of social media in their organizing efforts” (Cox, 189).

I found it interesting when Cox discusses the ironic challenge of “efficient” media, that is “social media is clearly an efficient tool for targeting key groups by my be constrained by this very advantage” (Cox, 198).  What happens when communicating to a small committed group of people is that, only the people that care, care to search, learn, mobilize, or act.  “The challenge of social media, therefore, is that it may require a wider strategic repertoire of media, enabling activists to communicate beyond the choir when necessary” (Cox, 198).  

I think that differentiation, a steady flow of new content, and promotion of utility is necessary for a social media effort to attain the interests of the masses.  In a culture influenced by a capitalistic ideology, a source’s reinvention and/or innovation are perceived as desirable, or at least interesting, traits to consumers, think about how many of your “socially-conscious” friends bought the iPhone 4gs because it had a slight, hardly noticeably, difference to the identical looking 4g.  The marketing techniques used for the iPhone, can be translated to the services of a blog, or any online site.  It has to appear different from other competitors in the market a balance of both aesthetics and function; it has to keep providing updated material, that is to stay relevant and keep people interested; and it needs to be marketed to a perceptive lifestyle, that is it "may" improve one's lifestyle. 

Or if you want your blog to be successful, for a lot of people to read it, "take it seriously", and be spread around via social networking, all you have to do is work within the Google search ranking system, that is the more hits you get, the more hits you will get.  Generally only the top ten search results, the first page after entering in your search, is all that people pay attention too.  If you don’t feel like doing the footwork of shameless wallplugs on your friends’ facebook pages, twitter blasts, and spamming forums and youtube comments, then you can always just pay for key-word search rankings with Google Adwords.  With Adwords, you can pay a fee so that when people search for “benefits of guano as fertilizer” your site will seem legit with it when it pops up number one.   

  

2 comments:

  1. Interesting that your conclusion is that it's form, rather than content, that makes something important in social media. Since Cox (and you, implicitly) talk about how social media requires/promotes a specific type of relation for "how we conceive of ourselves and the world around us," and that this is in fact the definition of environmental communication, do you think social media's form of relating ourselves to the world can do something unique for environmental communication it can't do for other forms?

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    1. Unique?...idk, probably not, not more than anything else. I think the medium can be used for any topic of thought, conversation, concern, for anybody who is motivated enough to participate in the process that social media invites. There is a lot of random content on the internet that gets shared, and only a fraction of it relates to environmental issues, all sorts of things are shared relating to sports, politics, food, cats, memes, viral videos, music videos, music, etc...and it seems that what is shared is set by trends, momentary cultural focuses, and usually set by a mainstream source that carries some sort of authority or ethos. In fact, while communicating about environmental issues through social media has benefits like connects people to people to events and information; it may also disconnect people from the non-digital world around them as it may lead to available distraction from reality; caring passivity, or limited perspective and misdirect activism(depending on the horizon of information sources).

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