Social Media Scrum

The scrum is an interesting social phenomenon that by most accounts originated in Canada. A scrum forms when journalists mob an interviewee, shoving their microphones in his or her face while hurling questions, while another sizeable group of photographers and cameramen film in the background.

It is an important phenomenon because it is a lingering representation of the mass. At another time, and even today in certain locales globally, similar masses with outstretched hands to beg for alms to communicate back to their starving families exhibit these behaviours. The technology has changed of course, instead of a sharp stick or knife, there are microphones and cameras. And, indeed, most significantly the object has changed to information.

Although there is more to analyze, these three points of departure from paupers to professionals, sticks and knives to recording devices, and objects to information are sufficient. In short, the products of industrial capitalism have made information a top commodity, when information is primary a camera and microphone can be just as threatening, and information is the basic unit of social exchange, indicating that the mass has materially flourished and its social life has taken primacy.

This is actually an idea about social media. Whereas the scrum developed from news feeds to television sets in a vast country, even more scrum can be observed as followers or friends on social networking profile pages. These masses of scrum use information technology to seperate information from virtual celebrities, everyday popular people, utilizing the technology's practical, but still personally threatening qualities. Any information released to these scrum can be used against you, as viciously as if the mass was actually consuming people as ideas, rending the superficial social outer layer of flesh from bone and sharing it with their friends.

to be continued