Natella Speranskaya
Social media and the economics of attention
We live in the epoch of Digital Revolution, when the ways of communication between people have changed beyond recognition. In just 20 years digital technology has completely transformed social and communication systems: it has shaped new patterns of behavior, given us new opportunities, made us geographically independent and opened access to an ocean of information accumulated by humanity.
There are no borders: today we can live in Germany and study and work in the UK or France; thanks to social media, we can create global communities, meet and work with people from other continents, and even influence social processes. Social media has become an integral part of our lives.
The increased speed of communication allows us to accomplish tasks that used to take weeks or months in a short period of time, and this is certainly one of the benefits of the digital environment. The benefits include the ability to quickly call a taxi, order a meal at home, instantly pay for selected goods, book plane tickets, etc. However, the digital environment also has its own “dark side”, which even representatives of Silicon Valley are now openly talking about. And not just talk about it, but warn against the negative influences of social platforms, which are becoming an existential threat. Fake news, cyberbullying, liking addiction, manipulation of users’ psychology and modelling their behaviour, propaganda, declining cognitive abilities, rising depressive moods – these are just some of the “symptoms” that have been diagnosed.
The study of the anthropological aspects of digital technologies and the mutual influences of the digital and physical environment (in particular, people’s online behaviour) is now a “young” but very promising field of research – digital anthropology. Its subject matter is of paramount importance in the era of algorithmization, which questions the ontological status of human beings.
There is no doubt that in the age of algorithms there have been radical changes in the very existential structure of man, and these changes are permanent, i.e. they are a “living process”.
By integrating into our lives, technology is having a gradual but irreversible impact on our ways of thinking, behavioural patterns and worldviews. However, the question of worldview would be worth considering separately. Many people today, especially those of Generation Z, have lost the ability to concentrate on reading large texts (and digital anthropology is exploring this as well). Reading a 300-page book or a 5-page article is becoming an equally impossible task for a large number of people. Texts are no longer read, they are simply scanned. Wandering attention, cliched thinking, lack of concentration, fragmentary perception of information – all that together leads to the fact that a person does not form a coherent worldview model.
When a person accesses the Internet, he or she either surfs the social media feed, or he or she makes a vague request and then drowns in new fragments of information, which he or she is unable to integrate into his or her (absent or incipient) worldview. Nielsen Norman Group, a research organisation, concluded that when a person views a web page, they scan it in the shape of a Latin letter F. This means they read no more than 20 per cent of the text. That’s a disappointing conclusion, isn’t it?
No worldview means that there is no inner axis, no centre, no reference point around which a separate world is formed. One “just lives”, unaware of the values, attitudes and desires imposed on one.
The inability to cope with the enormous flow of information, which nowadays threatens to wash away any truth, condemns him to chaotic capture, to omnivorousness. He cannot select from this inexhaustible flow of information the most important, cannot distinguish the important from the secondary, the meaningful from the meaningless. If he had a world view, a certain frame of reference, approaching the bookshelves or bumping into a succession of links and headlines in his newsfeed, he would instantly make the right decision: “take it” or “discard it”. You have to be a good architect to build your worldview. And to do that, you have to stop being a user.
A new model of social behaviour
Popular social networks, where contemporary man spends more and more time, are in no way conducive to making the right “architectural decisions” because their main purpose is to capture the user’s attention and then sell to advertisers. Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff draws a historical parallel with 19th-century English society, in which aristocrats invented only one name for those outside their circle: the “lower classes”. Anyone who was not an aristocrat was relegated to this large anonymous category. “So were the users,” Zuboff stresses. For the creators of social media, we are simply usurpers, users.
But the question arises: who uses whom, who owns the benefit itself? Of course, we receive a part of common benefit, but if we turn it into a financial equivalent, we will find that 99 percent of benefits belong to 1 percent of founders of social platforms. We – the users – only get 1 percent of the benefits. On the Gaiia platform, 100 percent of the benefits belong to 100 percent of its members. Here the principle of the “beehive” works: the more participants, the more honey, and the honey is the sole property of the participants. Thus, they become a global force. Understanding the algorithms of global platforms shapes the social-media awareness of users. Interestingly, if the users of one of the global social networks were to go on strike and leave it for at least 5 days, its stock would instantly collapse.
The social behaviour of most people today is consumerist, reflecting the values dictated by market “morality”. The time has come when the ‘consumer’, the ‘user’, must give way to the ‘producer’, the creator.
With open collective capital and new technologies, we can shape social behaviour that will change the financial and economic model of society on a global scale. That is why we have created the Gaiia Foundation and the Gaiia Communication Platform (GCP), which will generate open collective capital that can serve all those who shape it.
Gaiia Communication Platform (GCP)
What makes us different?
Today, social platforms provide users with a large number of tools to implement all kinds of ideas: people can self-organise online, create communities, make waves of protests, initiate crowdfunding campaigns. But no single user actively participating in the life of a particular platform has any stake in its economic value. The algorithms governing these platforms remain opaque to him, hidden. This means that platforms do not trust their users. Let us ask ourselves the question: should users, then, trust the platforms?
There will be no users on the Gaiia communication platform. Everyone who registers on the platform does not become a user, but a member or beneficiary of the platform itself. Gaiia’s algorithms will convert time, content and communications into data capital that is transparent and accessible to each beneficiary. Participants’ actions that create a culture of social behaviour as well as interesting and innovative ideas will be rewarded. All this will motivate participants to a fundamentally new idea of what it means to be successful.
How does communication become capital? Communication between people generates a collective resource called “social media capital”. Every action, from likes to comments, serves to create this capital. On Gaiia, it is calculated on the basis of the active time spent online. In other words, participants’ activity is converted into capital.
Since Gaiia is not a commercial project, the peculiarity of this capital is that it will not be owned by specific individuals and will not have a narrow circle of final beneficiaries. All of the value added and capitalisation of the project will not be withdrawn in the form of dividends or capital for the owners. It will remain within the system and serve as “collateral” for the internal currency G-coin. The main part of the internal currency issue will be backed by real gold, which will be physically purchased for this purpose.
Each participant can perform different actions with the content: generate, react, distribute, comment, and thereby give and receive appreciation in the form of open collective capital. Every action a participant takes online has a direct economic effect in the system. A liking, a sharing, a message sent, a comment – all are economic microtransactions carried out in full transparency. The Gaiia communication platform itself will be the provider of unlimited internet and telephone access to all participants within the network.
Against surveillance capitalism
Our gadgets know more about us than we do: smartwatch sensors read our health information, smartphone is aware of our movements in space, daily routines, consumer preferences, financial transactions, etc. They know who and what we are communicating with. Every day we leave many digital footprints. Unfortunately, this data is often used for selfish purposes. And we don’t know for what. We are transparent to corporations, but corporations are not transparent to us. The principle of data symmetry is missing.
Digital giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon are collecting Big Data, getting their hands on an effective tool to not only predict user behaviour but also to moderate it. Jaron Lanier, a philosopher and one of the creators of virtual reality technology, calls social media “behaviour modification empires”. And the previously mentioned Shoshana Zuboff speaks directly to “surveillance capitalism”, as she calls an economic system whose foundation is the technology of collecting, processing and selling personal data. So our data belongs to the so-called supervisory capitalists, and there is no doubt that data today is one of the main resources of the modern market economy; in fact, it represents modern capital.
Through GCP algorithms, we propose to give this resource to its true owners, that is us – the people who form this capital with their time, intellect and emotions.
What is the capitalisation of any social network without active users? The online presence of users and their online activity forms the capitalisation of the network they are on. People generate hundreds of billions of dollars each year. If those billions were left at the disposal of those who generate them, this capital would be enough to solve not only global problems that modern politicians are powerless to solve, but also to service any social initiatives and collective and individual projects that have been approved by a new elite formed on the basis of transparency with the help of GCP algorithms. At the very least, this capital could provide users with free communication as well as modern gadgets and computers – simply as a reward for participating in its formation. It would also play a key role in raising the economic self-esteem of the system’s participants.
Share More Get More
Active users are always earning, and the more they interact with other users, the more currency they generate. On the Gaiia platform, the Share More Get More principle will apply. The system creates capital that can help each participant realise their goals. Open collective capital is able to fund any open project within the system.
An open project is any economically viable project submitted for funding that receives a rating from participants, automatically converted into a project budget.
Popularity rating and reputation rating
Today, bloggers and Influencers have a far greater influence on public opinion than political leaders and the media. Moreover, they have overtaken politicians and media outlets in the trust rating. Increasingly, online users are making decisions based on the position of bloggers and opinion leaders who are the most trusted. However, this trust is often built on empty popularity and hype and does not at all take into account the reputation of an individual.
On the Gaiia platform, each contributor will have two ratings: a popularity rating and a reputation rating, affecting their opportunities in real life: getting funding, influencing community processes, etc. This would be more equitable than credibility credit given based on a mere (often inflated) rating.
The currency system
How conscious are we economically? When we say the words “currency”, “money”, “capital”, do we understand the meaning behind them? There is a big difference between currency and money. Currency is an empty container, and each of us, trusting it unconditionally, fills it with value which we call money. There is an exchange rate (called “inflation”) between money and currency, and people’s lack of knowledge of how it is formed allows those behind the issue of currency to manipulate that exchange rate so that some get rich at the expense of others.
There is a need to create new capital, access to which is not restricted to anyone.
The basis of the Gaiia Communication Platform project is a currency system.
The platform will issue its own currency 100% backed by physical gold – the G Coin. G Coin is pegged to the world’s gold exchange rate. Each token created on the platform has an equivalent to G Coin. For example, 1 G Coin = 100 tokens. There is also a special charity token on the platform called “Golden Hards”, which is a superlake that is equal to 0.5 G Coin.
The main feature of this currency system will be the easy execution of microtransactions. A transaction of 1 cent or less will be a one-click transaction. Another feature of the system will be its openness and transparency. By default, all transactions in the system will be public. This is one of the elements that will affect a participant’s reputation.
Any participant will be able to issue “coins” or tokens, which will be secured by their commitment as an individual or a company.
A new economy
The innovative Gaiia Communicatin Platform is an opportunity to create a new virtual state, hence a new political and intellectual elite with new moral values. By uniting around one idea, we will not just challenge the current market system, but create a completely open financial model that will stimulate a completely new economy.
