The Trending Mechanism

By Phillip Quintero

There is a universal and varied interest in practices of online communications as they evolve. Not least of all, it is a centerpiece of modern economies. Email fluency is a prerequisite for entry to the professional class of labor. Corporate entities cannot expect to market competitively without a presence online. For many, virtual culture is part of our most basic socialization. This is increasingly the case for institutions as it is for individuals. Organizations that engage in activism and advocacy--charities, non-profits, political campaigns, and social movements--rely on the outreach and networking capabilities of online tools. Governments and opposition movements alike turn to these tools to convey their messages. Accordingly, experts and scholars fill journals, databases, and conference agendas with ideas, analysis, and thoughts for further consideration on the matter. This is not surprising; the capacities for networking, communicating, collaborating, working, and living in the global digital information network are already so ingrained in a large part of the world so as to be unignorable. This is especially true in the most economically developed regions, and is increasingly a global reality. The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) posits, broadband [internet access] has gone from being a luxury to a necessity for full participation in our economy and society - for all Americans.i Internet access grew from 41 percent of all American households in 2000 to 68 percent in 2010, according to the US Census Bureau. As of the 2010 Census, 156,039,000 adults use the Internet at home.ii And, even with majority coverage, the United States only ranks 19th in percentage of households with access to the Internet among OECD Countries.iii

On one hand, this is old news. Email and websites have been everyday features of life for the many Americans for at least twenty years. The difference today is that tools and services seem to emerge as fast as they can be adopted. And not only is the typical connected demographic is expanding, but that more and more groups of people are getting connected. For example, there is evidence that the digital divide, that is, the imbalance between Internet adoption in developed vs. developing countries, is shrinking, and that there are now lower barriers to digital connectivity in underdeveloped regions.iv In what follows, I argue for the greater critical assessment of the emergence and success of what is generally referred to as social media. I will begin by explaining where intellectual energy has been applied so far in studies of the social and political implications of Internet use, and in so doing show some unique characteristics of the more recent developments in social media. This will lead to some thoughts the concept of trending. My argument seeks to lay out common positions towards trending, and offers a pragmatic alternative. The paper will conclude with a look at some examples of the deliberate application of social media technologies and trending to political discourse.

Trends Towards Social Media The question I want to engage has to do with the nature of new trends in massmediated communications that are, as I see it, a direct response to the need to deal with the much larger communicative sphere that results from the rapid expansion of Internet adoption. Now, what is called social media is currently a major locus of energy online. More to the point, there is very little content left on the Web that is unaffected by the presence of social media tools. I will take a moment to describe this trend, which is at the same time a fairly recent development and one experiencing very rapid growth.

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I will refer to various social media companies and services individually, but there is also a need to be able to refer to them collectively. In other words, what do we mean when we call something social media? Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein reduce the term to the two key components of Web 2.0 and user-generated content. Web 2.0 refers to the ideological and technological foundation which reimagined the Web as a platform whereby content and applications are no longer created and published by individuals, but instead are continuously modified by all users in a participatory and collaborative fashion.v The result is user-generated content, which is information that is accessible to others, is the result of some creative effort, and is not simply the by-product of other professional routines and practices.vi I find this characterization satisfactory, though broad. What are these media platforms specifically, and how are they being used? While Facebook has been active since 2004, and its precursors even longer than that, these social media services have seen explosive growth in activity over the past few years. On its website, Facebook claims to have grown from 1 million active users in 2004, to 150 million in 2009, and 750 million in 2011.vii 100 million people have started using Twitter in the five years since its founding.viii This is an adoption rate of over 50 thousand new accounts made every day, on average. Recently, that rate of adoption is closer to 500 thousand per day, though it is hard to distill from that figure (which includes multiple accounts issued to the same user and accounts controlled by automated software) the number of unique individuals joining the service each day.ix The recent growth in social media usership is perhaps due in part to the role it played in the internal organization, as well as the global awareness, of political resistance movements in Iran in 2009, Tunisia in 2010, and Egypt in 2011. During these events, social media gained appreciation as a source for first-hand reporting. Jared Cohen of the US State Department affirmed this by asking Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance so that

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information coming from Tehran would not be interrupted in 2009.x This sort of growth and prominence is not limited to the number of accounts created. There is also growing perception that social media represents a potentially huge economic sector, as evidenced by the inflated initial public offering of Facebook shares. Even though the companys value on the open market did not live up to investor expectations,xi other examples, like the sale of Instagram for $1 billion USD suggest that this combination of Web 2.0 and user-generated content does in fact represent some real economic value. The number of different companies and services available is vast. Facebook and Twitter are only two of the most prevalent services Reddit, Youtube, Digg, Yelp, Flickr, MySpace, WordPress, and online gaming all comprise huge user networks that are both distinct and overlapping. Special use services, like Causes for social movements or Kickstarter for commercial entrepreneurs, have developed to harness these phenomena for specific purposes. With more venues and more users, there is also more content available. As of 2010, more than 29 billion tweets had been sent,xii and they are all being archived by the Library of Congress.
xiiiIt

is the expansion of activity resulting in rampant, accelerating content

creation that I am most interested in. It is possible to publish unedited content quickly, easily, and for free. Bits of information can be identified, grouped, and promoted based on any number of criteria. Conversations themselves can be content that is promoted and commented on. Overlapping social and professional networks can lead to unintended content exposure. One of the newest characteristics of this content revolution is that it is almost as easy to publish and consume media-rich content as it is to publish text. With the increased amount and diversity of content that is both a contributing factor to and a result of social media, traditional forms of managing content are insufficient. A simple keyword search on Twitter, population for instance, is bound to return thousands

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of results from individual users within the last 24 hours, while the same search on a traditional search engine returns a ranked sampling of well-known news publications, major websites, census results, and non-profit organizations. An emergent way that social media sites deal with the bounty of content is through trending.

The Trend Towards Trending Twitters Trending Topics algorithm identifies topics that are immediately popular, rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis, to help people discover the most breaking news stories from across the world.xiv

While only certain channels of Internet-mediated communication use the term "trending," as the above example in a statement from Twitter does, I will use it to refer to a broad collection of content processing mechanisms. Most importantly, trending is the promotion of new, popular content in near-real time. Facebook has developed a dataengineering project around the same idea, which they refer to as memology.xv Facebook Data Scientists Eytan Bakshy and Jonathan Chang describe the companys interest in the importance of trending: There are these really large events, and they might appear as peaks [in related activity], but its not necessarily because of some viral effect. Its just that this is an important cultural event, and its reflected in this conversation that people are having.xvi Google+, Digg, and reddit employ similar mechanisms by which the level of user activity surrounding a piece of content will determine whether or not the content is promoted to other users. This is why reddit calls itself the front page of the Internet. I have found that there are many opinions and only some research into the phenomena of trending. What content gets promoted? Who benefits from this model? Are individual users exposed to more or less information than they were five years ago? What about twenty years ago? Is the information generally more or less useful? In other words,

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what are the consequences of trending? To address this question, I will start by asking the critics of this trend towards trending.

Trending Content as Frivolous One dominant response to the trends I have identified is a disparaging one. There is a widespread reaction, especially among ICT and media professionals, that the topics focused on by trending are somehow not serious. On the one hand, it is tempting to write off such criticism as a subjective complaint. In this version of the critique, the claim that social media users preoccupation with celebrity status, or sharing personal details is equivalent to the claim that social media users are, in that capacity, unrefined, uneducated, or boring. Their topics of discourse are uninteresting, unimportant, and those who engage in them are wasting their time. This perspective is well represented among journalists who cover ICT developments.xvii The critique is not unfounded.xviii Neither, however, is it particularly helpful, nor is it the only way critical perspectives can be framed. There is a more sympathetic formulation of this critical stance. In a way that is not often discussed, the critique (to restate, the claim that the discourse facilitated via social media is dominated by unimportant topics) is making a claim about the relation between form and content. We could simplify and rephrase the claim as follows: If content is publicized through a medium like Facebook or Twitter, then the majority of the content is likely to be of limited relevance. I have purposely constructed a straw-man, here, but it is one that captures the core of the critique I would like to start with. It is important that, in the trending model, the merit by which a piece of information is judged to be a feature, worthy of promotion and distribution, is not the content of what is said, but the number of people who have said it. This represents a (potential) kind of

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divorce between the content of information and its value, where value is understood either in terms of privilege and priority in promotion and propagation, or in terms of economic value. There are some simple examples that affirm this. One, which has received increased scholarly attention lately, is the way the logic of trending can be co-opted by the strategic logic of private interests. Li, Irani, Webb, and Pu, for instance, detail the practice of trendstuffing.xix Trend-stuffing is an abuse of the trending mechanism by accounts that use popular trending topics to promote unrelated material. An example would be a user who includes many popular keywords to a post on a social media site, with the intention of promoting that post through a trending mechanism and redirecting viewers to an unrelated website where the individual collects advertising revenue. The related critique is that the trending mechanism is open to abuse, because trend-stuffing is difficult to prevent. Similar critiques have ben brought to bear against what is now a major industry, Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO often works by associating a web page with popular keywords in order to give that page a higher prominence in keyword searches. Corporate viral marketing campaigns operate according to the same logic. It is worth noting that valuable industries have arisen from this divorce of form and content. SEO, Marketing, and even Spam provide jobs and services that are important forms of capital in an increasingly information-based economy. However, I would like to move on to other critical responses to trending.

Trending Content as Pastiche Rob Horning wrote an excellent article in which he identifies a likeness between the logic of social media and fast fashion. Fast Fashion is a business model that operates by producing clothing to appeal to the latest trends as quickly and cheaply as possible. A store like Zara, for instance, can design and distribute a new garment in 15 days. The situation is

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similarly a divorcing of form and content. Value, instead of being derived from the products themselves, is derived form the information economy produced by the processes of mass production and consumption. To paraphrase Hornings analogy, the cheaper the clothing is, the more of it a store can sell, regardless of profit margin. The more clothing it sells, the more information it has about trending styles. The more effectively it can identify and design according to breaking trends (and in so doing, reinforce those trends), the more effectively it can move appropriate merchandise. He makes a very sharp critique in comparing this business model to the ubiquitous social media services:

Facebook and other social-media companies have a similarly parasitic business model. They also appropriate the content and connections we generate as we recreate our identities within their proprietary systems, and then repurpose that data for marketers who hope to sell tokens of that identity back to us. Much as fast-fashion companies are routinely accused of pirating designs, Facebook continually oversteps once sacrosanct norms of privacy, opting users in to datadivulging mechanisms by default and backpedaling only when confronted with public outcry. It offers a space akin to the fast-fashion retailers changing room for the ritual staging of the self, inviting users to seize upon stylistic elements from wherever they can be grabbed. We become involuntary bricoleurs, scrambling to cobble together an ad hoc identity from whatever memes happen to be relevant at the time.xx

Hornings critique operates in many registers. It brings a social, psychological, and philosophical insight to bear on the way trending (to which he refers by memes) becomes something of an economy of empty signifiers, or postmodern Pastiche whereby entire communicative transactions can take place and achieve some kind of value that is entirely independent of their content. While Ernesto Laclau and Frederic Jameson did not have social media in mind with these concepts, their theoretical point does, in fact, play out in it. For instance, one of the most popular memes on Facebook in 2011 is the tag lms for like

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my status.xxi The tag asks readers to like a statement that the user has made on his or her personal profile, contributing to the quantifiable popularity of the profile, thus raising its visibility and value. The persistent problem addressed by these positions is the way the trending model dissociates value from content though, to my knowledge until now, the critique has not been stated as such. This is often done knowingly and towards a certain end, as in the case of corporate viral marketing, and trend-stuffing. It is also performed and accepted unknowingly, as in the scenario Horning has created. This critique paints a bleak picture, as it implicates beloved services and their individual users in the devaluation of the content of their intellectual production. However, in and interesting counterpoint, there is a complementary trend to the lms meme. Lms interactions are commonly linked with tbh or to be honest. The practice is one where a viewer can like another users status, and in return, the user will respond with a personal message. While the lms trend is in-line with the idea Horning is criticizing, the way it works in practice does not exclude meaningful content or personal communication. While this is just a small example, I would like point towards a more optimistic reframing of the critique.

Intelligent Habits There is an industry built up around using and making sense of the trending mechanism that is found across the social media spectrum. The Stream, a social-media based news show from Al Jazeera English, makes an effort to distance itself from the perception that social media sites are dominated by news of pop music icons, celebrity scandals, or vapid self aggrandizement.xxii The show claims to be based on the ideals behind social media - viewer participation, global perspectives, low cost of contribution, real-time

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input, and capacities for network-building. The show, for instance interviewed Icelands Foreign Minister ssur Skarphinsson after that countrys decision to formally recognize the sovereignty of a Palestinian state.xxiii Viewers were invited to participate in the conversation in real time through video submissions and questions submitted via Twitter that were then fielded by the shows hosts. The show also bases show topics on what is trending, though the topics are curated to those with global political relevance. The show, despite being based on the trending mechanic, is extremely contentoriented. Guests are directed to respond to critical questions stated very plainlyoften in 140 characters or less. The show, based in DC, almost always features international voices, even on issues of American domestic policy. For instance, the episode discussion the Stop Online Privacy Act opens with a video submission from a teen in the United Kingdom who points out the international implications of the legislation. The show also highlighted that its viewers believe immigration policy is a racial issue, and brought that topic into discussion. One contributor stated that racial integration is a matter of fact, while another participant pointed out a discrepancy between actual political preference and party rhetoric. This industry is, after all, one that can pay attention to quality content. The question is one of fostering more of the same.

Many long-held beliefs are taking a beating chief among them the idea that if you want to connect with young people, youd best keep it short, funny and stupid. -David Carrxxiv

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References:
i

http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/connecting-america accessed December 18, 2011 http://www.census.gov/hhes/computer/ accessed December 18, 2011 iii November 2011 OECD Report: http://www.oecd.org/document/23/0,3746,en_2649_37441_33987543_1_1_1_37441,00.html accessed December 18, 2011 iv Robison, K. K. and Crenshaw, E. M. (2010), Reevaluating the Global Digital Divide: Socio-Demographic and Conflict Barriers to the Internet Revolution. Sociological Inquiry, 80
ii v

Andreas M. Kaplan, Michael Haenlein, Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media, Business Horizons, Volume 53, Issue 1, January-February 2010 vi ibid. It is interesting that this definition is based on a paper published by the OECDs research on Internet and information economies. vii https://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?timeline accessed December 18, 2011 viii http://blog.twitter.com/2011/09/one-hundred-million-voices.html accessed December 18, 2011
ix x

http://blog.twitter.com/2011/03/numbers.html accessed December 18, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/world/middleeast/17media.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Twitter&st=cse accessed December 18, 2011

xi

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-06-01/the-backsplash-from-the-facebook-ipo-bellyflop accessed June 19, 2012 xii http://gigatweeter.com/counter accessed June 19, 2012 xiii http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/1005/twitter.html accessed June 19, 2012 xiv http://support.twitter.com/entries/101125-about-trending-topics accessed December 18, 2011 xv https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10150391956652131 accessed December 18, 2011 xvi interview with Facebook Engineering: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10150515096128109 accessed December 18, 2011 xvii Some notable examples of this perspective: Twitter as educationally detrimental: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/magazine/the-twitter-trap.html accessed December 18, 2011 Twitter as vapid entertainment news: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/09/17/don-t-tweet-on-me.html accessed December 18, 2011 Trend-promotion marketing as commercially unviable http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/29/the-challenge-of-advertising-on-promoted-trends-royalwedding/ accessed December 18, 2011
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see 2011s top trends on twitter: http://twend.it/year/2011/ accessed June 19, 2012 Li, Irani, Webb, and Pu, Study of Trend-Stuffing on Twitter through Text Classification, CEAS 2010 Seventh annual Collaboration, Electronic messaging, Anti- Abuse and Spam Conference July 13-14, 2010, Redmond, Washington, US xx Horning, Rob. The Accidental Bricoleurs. In N+1, 3 June 2011. Accessed December 19, 2011 http://nplusonemag.com/the-accidental-bricoleurs accessed December 18, 2011 xxi http://allthingsd.com/20111207/like-my-status-was-facebooks-breakout-meme-in-2011/ accessed December 18, 2011 xxii http://stream.aljazeera.com/about accessed December 18, 2011
xxiii

http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/campaign-palestinian-recognition-succeeding-0021909 accessed December 18, 2011

xxiv

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/17/business/media/17carr.html?pagewanted=2 accessed December 18, 2011

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