Has Social Media Cracked the Code to the Crowd?

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2018

⏱️ 45 minutes

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Summary

Author of Fully Connected Julia Hobsbawm, Social Media director at DEMOS Jamie Bartlett, writer Laurence Scott and tech blogger Abeba Birhane switch off their phones to focus on the impact of tech on the way we behave. Social media has allowed us to express our individuality and at the same time to interact like never before. But as the forces behind our digital lives become more sophisticated and powerful, are we in danger of succumbing to mass manipulation? Presented by Anne McElvoy with an audience at Sage Gateshead.

Julia Hobsbawm’s most recent book Fully Connected explores how to cope in an age of data and deadline overload by proposing new ways to develop healthy connectedness with and without technology. She writes and speaks about Social Health and about how to form satisfying interpersonal relationships with each other.

Jamie Bartlett is Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos with the University of Sussex. His book The Dark Net describes underground and emerging internet subcultures and his forthcoming Radicals looks at how the influence of radical groups on the political fringes is growing.

Laurence Scott teaches at Arcadia University and became a Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker in 2011. In his book, The Four–Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World, Laurence explores how life is being reframed in a digital age.

Abeba Birhane is pursuing a PhD in cognitive science at University College Dublin. She blogs regularly about the evolution of algorithms and the ethical considerations around such technology.

Producer Craig Smith.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?
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0:32.1	Hello, I'm Anne McHawoy.
0:34.1	Welcome to BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas discussion program, bringing together leading artists, writers and thinkers in conversation and debate.
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0:55.6	this is the BBC welcome everyone and thank you for doing something that may well seem like an alien
1:10.8	concept your grandchildren congregating in a physical space, to join in a conversation with other human beings. It might even catch on.
1:19.5	Now, at this point in the proceedings, we always ask people to turn off their mobile phones, and usually this is for technical reasons, but it's also so we can concentrate for more
1:28.7	than 20 seconds on the subject in hand, social media. Yes, today we're asking whether social
1:35.2	media has cracked the code to the crowd and to what extent it's changing the way we behave
1:40.3	as individuals and en masse. My unvirtual guests are Julia Hobbesbourne.
1:46.4	In her book, Fully Connected,
1:48.3	Julia advocates for what she calls social health
1:51.3	as an antidote to the age of overload
1:53.8	for businesses, government and individuals.
1:57.1	Julia has been described as the Wizard of Modern Connection.
2:01.6	Jamie Bartlett is social media director at the think tank Demos and author of several books,
2:07.0	including the Darknet and from last year Radicals, a collection of essays documenting anarchic fringe groups.
2:14.0	Abe Bih Biharney is postgraduate researcher in cognitive science at University College Dublin,
2:20.1	and in her blog anti-Cartesian rants, she considers ethical issues surrounding the technology
	...

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