Thinking social media:

Analyzing the systemic contexts from phenomenological parameters

Dr. Cândida Almeida PhD in Comunication and Semiotics

Professor at SENAC-SP (Brazil)

Abstract �  This paper presents a conceptual analysis study of the social medias in

its interactive communication context. The proposal starts from the systemic context of these mediatic processes and the proposition of the analysis parameters reasoned by the peircean phenomenology. Thus the objective is presenting a way of the systemic and phenomenological study to understand the modes of informational exchanges occurrence and the complex relationships that establishes in the dynamic contexts of social media, based on the analysis of three parameters: emergence, circumstance, movement. These parameters are therefore understood as essential conditions to clarify languages, contexts and processes inherent to digital social networks in the internet. The proposal is understanding under the phenomenological point of view, how signs in this context can be presented, how they behave in their different systemic contexts - socio-cultural, technological, graphics - and how the mediatics evolutionary processes in social networks tends to occur.

�  Key-words: social media; peircean semiotics; social networks; phenomenology

Proposal �  I’ll demonstrate a proposal that I’m elaborating to understand

the systemic context and the phenomenological process on the social medias.

�  When we analyze the context and the interaction processes that occurs between the web actors (not just users), we access the dynamic systems that involves the language of internet's social media.

�  The language of social media is very complex because it depends not only on the characteristics of the physical supports. But, there are something else.

�  The human relationship on social media are active (the web actors can post and exclude some signs) and it is part of these language processes. It provokes some floating energy that’ll be determined by the changes. This floating energy is the open doors of the possibility of the signs to be in material mode.

Systemic context �  The interfaces are changing every time. One of the

mainly consequences of this is the great capability of the constantly arrival of new signs in these contexts.

�  So, what similarity we can detect, for example, between the communication process in WhatsApp and Facebook? We can consider they both as social media products. �  The answer is not only in the physical supports, but in

how it arises and causes constantly changes. The changes are social media movements, that come as a result of each mediatic circumstances.

Social media as a system �  The social media language is a process, such as

dynamic system. So, we just access its characteristics if we should have an open mind to revise these characteristics every time.

�  The dynamical systems are growing constantly, in movement, in semiosis.

�  All the registered information with internet address are doomed to lose some or all of their informative capability in short time when compared to other media systems.

Social media as a system �  We consider the study of the sign composition such as a

dynamic system that promotes many proprieties exchanges. This also includes the relationships with external signs that exist in the environment.

�  The signs relations in the system causes some mutation in the set, as a consequence of the exchanges in internal relations and the contact with the environment in which the system is immersed. This movement characterizes what can be considered by the General Systems Theory as systemic evolution. Such as the living systems, such as the semiosis.

�  I understand the social media as a dynamic system that is immersed in an environment that promotes uninterrupted modifications of its properties. One environment is the web (not only) and it is more comprehensive system in which the social media systems are included. It adds several other systems that, in course of the time, will favor their systemic evolution.

The three parameters �  The proposal is to introduce three parameters to analyze the

language processes of the social media.

�  The parameters are founded from Peirce's Phenomenology.

�  The goal is to guide the critical analysis of systemic movements of languages, contexts and processes inherent to the internet social networks.

�  The three parameters are: emergence, circumstance and movement. �  1) Possibilities - All sorts of signs emerging on social media

networks; �  2) Actuality/Resistance - The circumstances of the

connections, society, technology, time, space and others things that occurs in the communication actions;

�  3) Contiguity - The movement of information, supports, interfaces, bonds, identities, networks specificities and the interconnection possibilities in these exchanging contexts.

Emergence founded by Firstness

�  The emergence is one of the three parameters proposed here and should be understood as engendered with the others: circumstance and movement.

�  The emergence’s condition corresponding to the category of firstness in Peirce’s Phenomenology.

�  It must be considered because the social media is updated continuously (signs are emerging) in several layers, such as: �  Language – modes, contexts and formats as signs tend to

arise; �  Social – the possibilities of the different forms of

relationships; �  Cognitive – the changes in the forms of reading, information

processing and production of knowledge in these contexts.

Emergence founded by Firstness

�  Dialoging with systemic theory – Peter A. Corning

“ I would propose that emergent phenomena be defined as a “subset” of the vast (and still expanding) universe of cooperative interactions that produce synergistic effects of various kinds, both in nature and in human societies. In this definition, emergence would be confined to those synergistic wholes that are composed of things of “unlike kind” (following Lewes’s original definition). It would also be limited to “qualitative novelties” (after both Lewes and Lloyd Morgan) — i.e., unique synergistic effects that are generated by functional complementarities, or a combination of labor ”. (Corning, 2002)

Emergence founded by Firstness

�  Some emergence examples: �  The possibility of the new interactive way;

�  The variety of the signs that can exist in material form in timeline or feed area;

�  The potentiality of emerging new web actors with them connected in the network;

�  The possibility to share information and the arise of new narratives, histories and subnetworks;

�  The new platforms, apps, supports, screens, interfaces that are in study or production by the industry.

Circumstance - Secondness �  The connection in the social media is an action that

promotes the conflict, the reaction, the update. Finally, the mode of being of experience.

�  These media are happening in the processes of materialization of various types of signs: visual, verbal, audiovisual.

�  This signs are contacted in differently circumstances of forms, time and spatiality and they can determine: posts, tags, new links (internal or external to the media), the actions of contact between people, the actions of sharing information, the updating interfaces, among other situations inherent a materialization of the signs, even if at intervals of non-linear time and space connections ubiquitous.

Movement - Thirdness �  The movement is the growing, the systemic

evolution, the new ways of the social media, the force that moves technology.

�  The information in social media is not still. If it is stopped, we must consider that the specific circumstance are not occurring in social media process. It exists but in another mediatic context.

�  In a social network, any comment, like, sharing are ways that open ways to new manifestations and is full of deliberate mental attitudes that becomes the mediators processes, that will turn into new processes and so on.

Movement - Thirdness �  In every moment we learn to deal with new features,

new languages, new standards. These are clear manifestations of a changing, growing, evolutive universe that requires us to interact in contiguous processes.

�  The changes possibilities propitiated by social media are the force of the evolutionary movement. We conceptualize this to consider its own systemic dynamics of social media. A dynamic network that is established every emergence in its given circumstances.

Some questions about the language of social medias

�  One of several issues is to identify how we can set the language of internet social media.

�  The first thing is: it’s not possible to define exactly what is this language, but how this language occurs.

�  It’s better to say ‘social media language process’ than to say ‘language of social medias’.

�  The social medias language is a process because it’s inserted in the internet and its dynamic context.

�  So, we are trying to understand something that is emerging in dynamic environment system.

Contact candidaalmeida@yahoo.com.br

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