Photo Credit: David Dufour
If attention is the new currency in the social web, the richest among us are those who have earned the most attention. With their ownership of our captive thoughts, is it possible that they could (perhaps unintentionally) be a new bourgeois, using their attention-wealth to exploit for their benefit?
The basic economic idea
In his analysis of capitalism, Marx showed us that the bourgeois are those who are able to use the wealth they’ve amassed to purchase wage workers for the purpose of completing tasks that allow them to amass even more wealth. This is the shoe factory owner.
The proletariat on the other hand, are those that have no material wealth on their own, and therefore must work for a bourgeois employer in order to survive. These are the shoe makers.
In order to maintain a position of power, the shoe factory owner must continue to exercise his/her power over the workers by keeping them less powerful (i.e. less wealthy).
I believe the trust economy shares some of these same characteristics.
How the trust economy is slightly different
In a capitalist economy, the proletariat are dependent on wages they get from their bourgeois bosses. But in the trust economy, the proletariat are in control of the currency—attention.
What’s interesting to me is that even though the power is reversed, we’ve still found a way to transfer our newfound power to social media rockstars who appear now as our “thought leaders.”
Sure, you can argue that social networks have deconstructed and decentered the bourgeois/proletariat split because they closely align the motives of “trust-agent-rockstars” and the community they serve. But I’d argue that if social networks were really decentered, then we wouldn’t have any rockstars. If you look closely, you’ll see centered hegemony and clear hegemonic exploitation is alive and well in the social sphere.
The good thing, though, is that incentive for influencers isn’t solely on manipulating audiences—after all, they have to align their motives with the motives of their communities if they want to stay in social power.
The connection between capital and trust economies
The problem with closely aligning a leader with a community is that the person who rises to social power must therefore feed the masses with what they want—often less than intellectual “true-isms” that are easily compressed to sound bytes and quickly spread.
The fact is, just as the shoe factory owner must continue to feed off the labor of his/her workers, social media influencers must continue to feed off of the attention they receive from the community, forcing them to behave in away that exploits and maximizes their potential for gaining attention.
I would venture to say that many who “trust” Chris Brogan’s blog have never had a personal interaction with him beyond one or two tweets. Sure there’s the guise of “relationship,” but while getting @replied by a Twitter celebrity may stroke your ego, it doesn’t constitute a bona fide relationship.
An interesting phenomenon is that once you’ve amassed enough attention to be a “rockstar” you don’t have to prove your value to every new person who comes along. In fact, you don’t have to even have a personal interaction with any of them—the value of the content you’re producing carries with it enough social status that trust is easy to build.
This means that as rockstar status rises, so does the level of connections you have until finally, it’s not worth your time to interact with the little people (the proletariat). As Damien Basille recently stated in his case for building influence on Brian Solis’ blog:
while it’s important to have a large network to spread a message as wide as possible it’s even more important to have a smaller more concentrated network to make things happen.[...]The one question you need to ask yourself is this: what is my purpose for connecting? Connecting just to connect is aimless.
The point is, as rockstars gain more power they have fewer reasons to engage with or challenge their followers. At the same time, followers have fewer reasons to challenge the rockstars, because their voices are drown in a sea of praise.
What I’m doing about it
Immediately: I refuse to mindlessly retweet anything. I hope you’ll do the same (even with this post :-> ).
As we continue to work out business rules on the real-time web: Social media rockstars are only rockstars because we let them be, so just because the community as labeled someone as a thought leader doesn’t I have to agree with what they’re saying.
In understanding that the global conversation is much more valuable than worshiping the cult of a single personality, I’ve decided to get confrontational. As Mack Collier asked on Twitter :
Started to write a post on this, but wanted to ask you guys instead. Do you think some blogs are becoming less conversational? [tweet]
I’m noticing that in the comments there seems to be less disagreeing happening, and what little is the ‘you suck’ variety [tweet]
I’m wondering if people r less willing to ‘challenge’ or disagree with their favorite bloggers & that means fewer comments less discussion? [tweet]
I guess that means reading the blogs of rockstars, and if I disagree, I’ll say so.
But most importantly, I believe I cannot be content following the new bourgeois. As a member of the online community I believe we cannot allow the rockstars to dictate our entire course of action. I think in order for this space to avoid the shallow cult of celebrity, we must spend more time thinking about specific applications of our newly acquired connectedness, and less time blindly passing along the words of our “gurus.”
What do you think?
-Andrew
Photo Credit: David Dufour (davedufour on Stock Exchange); original image here
