Siobhan O'Neill is an Account Supervisor with Edelman Digital in Los Angeles. She joins us after 10 years in the interactive space as a project manager and just got her Master's from USC Annenberg. In this guest post, she applies what she learned in her semiotics class to how we listen online.

My bachelor’s degree is in Theatre, Film, and Television from UCLA and it’s a long, weird story of how I got here, punctuated by stints at Disney to online marketing/technology firms to social-media startups, all while maintaining my reformed-goth hairstyles. Suffice it to say that when I arrived at USC Annenberg in late 2004, I was well-versed in Albert Camus (I even have a quote from him tattooed on my right forearm) but as far as the French thinkers go, I admit that I was rather unprepared for Jean Baudrillard.

My first class, with Dan Harries, introduced me to the dense and often unreadable Simulacra and Simulation, but I did get a few things out of it. The study of semiotics is still something I find interesting, but Baudrillard’s view of the ever-searching society, trapped in a self-referential vacuum and sliding headlong into self-delusion, is certainly something I think about a lot these days. If, as he posited, the nature of your social relations is determined by the forms of communication that a society employs, then what does Twitter say about the state of our social relations? That we’re all suffering from communications ADD? That 140 characters is just a fad and people can’t really communicate like that? That we’re not really communicating at all? (Yes, really, people outside of the Silicon Valley bubble, people in my own social circle, have really said this to me.)

I look at tools like Twitter and I see a culture of tech- and media-folk who, at a fundamental level, get what everyone else is about, and trying to say, in an abstract sense. We’re all a bunch of social-media nerds exchanging information on conferences, events, and knowledge about our industry and craft, the craft of trying to reach people, such as it is, and we tend to talk a lot about the Twitter zeitgeist. There’s been an explosion of waves of interest about the medium, in Facebook, in every little application, open standard, and widget. Everyone, it seems, is talking about it, right?

I’ve been a project manager and product point-person in various organizations for the better part of ten years, and the person I’ve always had to go back to is John, or Jane Q. User. That is, essentially, who we build mass-market applications and media campaigns for, after all, and we have to be careful about the words we use, the buttons we use, the conventions we use, the signs we use, essentially, to reach people, to talk to people, and to invite people to participate with us. Most of my friends, those completely outside our industry, fall into a group of John or Jane Q. User who look at most social-networking sites and Twitter with patent irritation. Occasionally, people in my social group will ask me what I do, and I tell them: I’m a project manager with a fascination with social networking tools and technologies. Familiar refrains include:

• “I already have a MySpace profile, what the hell do I want a Facebook profile for?”
• “I don’t understand [Facebook, Bebo, whatever], it’s too hard to use!”
• “I don’t get Twitter.”

…replete with groans and eyerolls. I imagine that the symbols, or the signs, that create some kind of “meaning of Twitter” for all of us mean precisely zero to the rest of the world. Yet, many, if not all, of the aforementioned complainers have MySpace profiles, and a few have opened Facebook accounts as well, with that number growing every day. (Yes, Silicon Valley, most of my friends aren’t on Facebook). Less have joined Twitter. But the ones who have are mostly still Twittering, and do more of it as their networks grow and their interactions, and the signs and symbols of that particular reality, become more meaningful.

It’s well-documented that the most successful online social tools and technologies are the ones that enrich or enhance your offline life – those face-to-face interactions that occur off the grid, and that as your network expands in the medium of Online, so, too, it does in the medium of Offline. I think the story of the WELL proved that long ago, and we see it over and over in communications research, I doubt that the story will change much for Twitter or Facebook or for any of these toolsets. I’m not sure why I am even bothering with the distinction between online and off.

The more we try to dig through the whys and wherefores, the further we get from the truth of the matter of online communication, and we risk losing sight of what we’re doing in the first place;
“In Baudrillard's view, the (human) subject may try to understand the (non-human) object, but because the object can only be understood according to what it signifies (and because the process of signification immediately involves a web of other signs from which it is distinguished) this never produces the desired results. The subject, rather, becomes seduced (in the original Latin sense, seducere, to lead away) by the object. He therefore argued that, in the last analysis, a complete understanding of the minutiae of human life is impossible, and when people are seduced into thinking otherwise they become drawn toward a "simulated" version of reality, or, to use one of his neologisms, a state of "hyperreality." This is not to say that the world becomes unreal, but rather that the faster and more comprehensively societies begin to bring reality together into one supposedly coherent picture, the more insecure and unstable it looks and the more fearful societies become. Reality, in this sense, "dies out."

Oh. So, our self-constructed reality of the self-referential is actually an ever-narrowing tunnel that tapers to a point that you will eventually get your head wedged into like a duncecap at the end?

Maybe not.

Dina George asked me yesterday “what’s next?” and I wondered if that was the right question. Maybe this is just the cynical project manager in me talking, but I don’t think that Web 2.0 is all that much of a revolution. It is people communicating, as they always have, just using new mediums. The tools and technologies have changed, that is all; the current big players, like Google, clearly, have made a killing creating technology that helps people communicate and share information, as they follow their main mission to capture and organize it, but essentially those players have, in part, been successful because they have opened up navigable, usable mediums (navigable and usable being part of a different Baudrillardian discussion of semiotics and symbols, but I think I will table the heavy stuff for now).

Marketers, PR people, engineers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, and teachers are all adjusting to a world in which new mediums have opened up to them. In some cases, those technologies have made their lives a lot more difficult; I’m sure most high-school teachers would tell you that. In some cases, they have made their lives a lot easier, like my own. I have connected with other cycling nuts, people who love Nitzer Ebb as much as I do, and a guy on eBay who sells me my exact shade of hair dye in bulk for cheap as often as I’ve connected to Industry Folk who drink the same Kool-Aid I do. Either way, I’m looking, instead of at the Next Google/Big Thing, towards tools and technologies that enable people to connect to each other. There is a lot of talk around interoperability and trying to end the walled garden. I’m especially tickled by movements like DataPortability and maybe even Genome, when I learn more about it, as right now, it’s just an abstract concept to me. I’m no engineer, I just love the way the Web has helped me connect to the people around me – not just social-media and information junkies like me online, but in the rest of my life. But I am interested in the tools in practice, which is why I pay attention to that world, so while the people, and the quality of the interactions I have with them, are what give the tools most of their value, I am interested mostly in the tools that enable a high quality interaction.

So, Jean, I’m not sure that this is all that unstable. I’ll hold a fair amount of skepticism for the “Web 2.0 bubble” but in the spirit of symbols and signposting one reality against another, I’ll say that while the rest of the world sees a bubble, I simply see toolsets and technologies. A wheel here, a primitive axe-handle there, maybe even a spear. And as we move through time, the people that use those tools are going to refine and change and expand them; as a wheel becomes a drivetrain, or a spearhead becomes a bullet. I’m trying to make good use of the tools we have, try out new ones as the ones that interest me become available, and enjoy the conversations – about them, sure, but also the conversations about the millions of other things that we all have to talk about, and do, over Twitter, or FriendFeed, or Facebook, or whatever it is you use. Mostly, though, I’m just trying to listen – for new conversations, for new tools to try, for new people to meet and go to the movies with. I’m a simple creature, I guess; I like reading a book as much as my Twitter stream. I love it when I invite communication from people I want to hear from, on subjects I’m interested in, and there’s people out there who want to do so, and that’s exactly what they’re doing in both cases.

So now, you tell me. What are you listening for?