CS371-Social Media and Social Life (Fall 2021)
Midterm Essay Assignment
On October 23, 2021, the Toronto Star published an article entitled “Wilder than ever: why a pandemic backlash and social media are fueling mayhem at Canada’s universities” (Wilder than ever: why a pandemic backlash and social media are fuelling mayhem at Canada’s universities | The Star). The article focused on recent homecoming street bacchanals at Western, Queens, and Dalhousie Universities, which have been chronicled on You Tube by celebrity and social media influencer, Jack Denmo (Jack Denmo – YouTube).
(Jack Denmo, with crown and sword in centre of photo)
Here is a quote from the article
“[Patrick] Deane [Queen’s university’s principal and vice-chancellor] has studied the evolution of these parties over decades.
“It is a human phenomenon that I think has taken an interesting turn because of social media.”
Denmo, the Hamilton-based YouTube star whose Canadian university homecoming and prank shows in recent years have attracted millions of views, agrees.
“These guys all live that,” he says. “Anything for the Snapchat, anything for the video. They want to get featured flipping the car. Until the hammer drops.”
Deane recalls the first time he saw a bird’s-eye perspective of a Queen’s party on Aberdeen Street, about 15 years ago. “I remember being in the police command centre and looking at the image on the street below and being struck that it was sort of like an amoeba.
“It had form and shape. But it had no centre. For many of us, the feeling is you’re always trying to address the problem on its margins because the centre is not knowable or reachable. Who organizes it? Impossible to say. It’s an organic thing.”
He still sees the amoeba but he also sees something else.
“These are many students just desperate for a social opportunity or students feeling rebellious after a year and a half of constraint. We do understand it. But at the same time, we have to communicate that this is a challenge for the whole good of the community as well as a potential danger to themselves.”
(The whole article can be found here (Wilder than ever: why a pandemic backlash and social media are fuelling mayhem at Canada’s universities | The Star) as well as linked to and copied on the MLS site)
In the Agora of ancient Athens around 370 B.C. concerns about another social media form and its impact upon the nature of public communication and the integrity of individual identity unfolded when Socrates had the following conversation with a fellow citizen of Athens and interlocutor named Phaedrus about the superiority of speech and dialogue over writing and reading (http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/seventh_letter.html):
Soc. I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.
Phaedr. That again is most true.
Soc. Is there not another kind of word or speech far better than this, and having far greater power-a son of the same family, but lawfully begotten?
Phaedr. Whom do you mean, and what is his origin?
Soc. I mean an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner, which can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent.
Phaedr. You mean the living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of which written word is properly no more than an image?
Soc. Yes, of course that is what I mean
In her book, Personal Connections in the Digital Age, Baym argues that contemporary social media create anxiety about the “boundary flux” between mass and interpersonal communication, the public and private spheres, and “what is virtual—that which seems real but is ultimately a mere simulation—and what is real” (page 5). Using as many of Baym’s seven concepts of mediation (interactivity, temporality, social cues, storage and replicability, reach and mobility-pages 6-13 in Personal Connections in the Digital Age) as is appropriate to the task, write an essay (5-7 pages double spaced) in which you apply the Platonic argument against writing to Jack Denmo’s YouTube channel, especially his “movies” about Homecoming street parties at Queens, Western, and McMaster.
Why were the ancient Greeks critical of writing as a medium and as a communicative practice? What boundary fluxes were they concerned about? In what ways do similar concerns manifest themselves in the reaction to the fame (or infamy) of Jack Denmo’s work as “social media influencer”? Can such parties be understood as a contemporary manifestation of Robin Dunbar’s (he of the legendary Dunbar number) theory of the communicative “social brain” formed in grooming behavior” in primates? What role does social media play in forming what the vice-chancellor of Queens, Patrick Deane, calls the “organic “quality of the “amoeba”-like gatherings of students at these street parties? How might such parties be considered an example of what Couldry and Hepp call the “mediatization” and “media manifold” of everyday life?
Please note: You will be helped by Standage’s discussion of Dunbar’s research on pages 8-14 of the reading from Writing on the Wall and his discussion of Plato, Socrates, and the Phaedrus on pages 18-20. Couldry and Hepp discuss mediatization and the media manifold on pages 53-56 on the “History as Waves of Mediatization” reading. Both readings, of course, can be found in the “Electronic Readings” section of the MLS site.
This paper will be due on Thursday, November 11 by 430PM on the MLS site.
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