Alvin Chang, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, shares his perspective on the best social media practices so we can move through this digital world confidently and avoid missteps.
Alvin Chang, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, is like a magician -- he makes the invisible, visible by telling data-driven stories in visually compelling ways. It’s an especially relevant skill because, in this digital world, it can be hard to wrap our heads around everything happening and our role inside of it when the forces that shape it aren’t necessarily visible. Alvin walks us through the evolution of social media and the risks that come with its use so we can be more deliberate about how and why we are using social media at UNDP.
Elyse:
Welcome to Digital What?, a podcast series where we join UNDP personnel and experts in conversation about the digital communications questions you’ve always wanted to know, but were afraid to ask.
Today we speak with Alvin Chang, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal. A lot of his work is data driven, and ends up being told through incredibly visually satisfying doodles or interactive media, whatever it takes to kind of get people interested and engaged in the actual story at hand. It’s really compelling work, and I’ve never really seen anything like it, so I asked him...
Elyse:
So if you were to describe to...say a child, your grandmother, what you do, what would you say?
Alvin:
I mean, this is a good question because my family, for the most part doesn't consume what I make because they're you know, they were my parents are first generation immigrants and my grandparents don't read English. So. So usually I just tell them I'm a journalist and they have a picture in their heads of what I do. And then I tell them that I make things visual and they think, oh, like you do like the comics or something. But a lot of the conversation then turns to...well, the thing I like to make visual is the things that you can't really see are happening. For example, how certain attitudes you have might be influencing the way political elections happen. And so I think a lot of times I say, the only reason I visualize things is because there are lots of things that are happening that are invisible. And so I'm trying to make them visible in some way with abstractions I guess. I guess for a five year old, I'd say I'm visualizing things that are invisible so that you can see them for yourself.
Elyse:
And so that’s one of the reasons why we are speaking with Alvin -- to get a better sense of this invisible, digital world that we all live in now, to understand its benefits and its risks so that at UNDP we can more confidently navigate and use social media. To start, I asked Alvin, how would he visualize this world?
Alvin:
I think traditionally there would be, you know, at a town center, a town square, where all of the neighbors would come flood out and listen to one person in the center of the town square speak, where only one person would get to talk. And social media is when everyone gets to talk. Everyone gets to say whatever they want. This is why certain instances you have people who speak the loudest, get the most attention, because if everyone's talking, how do you get people to pay attention to you? You talk the loudest. And so that experience, that kind of if you can imagine a town circle where there is no lecture, there is no center. Everyone is talking. That entire phenomenon is in my head social media.
Elyse:
And one thing about this world that makes it so tricky to dive into, is how many paths you can take when inside of it. It’s hard to know where to go, what to say, where to say it.
Alvin:
Now you have communities that are formed specifically online and identities that are formed explicitly online. It's a kind of strange shift in that still you have the most interesting things being the things that are news about people that you know, or people that, you know, same things that you're like, whoa, you said that?! But I think the large majority of it is people just shouting into the ether to their tribe.
Elyse:
And honestly, all this sounds kind of overwhelming -- identity and communication are hard enough to navigate in the real, physical world. So in the digital world, it just seems kind of risky to put myself out there like that.
Alvin:
I like to think of risks and two buckets, one of them is an individual risk. You could create a social media account and send out a message that you isn't necessarily good for either your personal life or your professional life or your relationships. That's like kind of a baseline risk we are all aware of now. So that's one risk. I think the other risk is a little out of our control in that when you sign up for a social media service, you are not a customer. You are the product being sold. You are literally everything you are posting is for the profit of that social media company. And that means that all their policies are all their privacy policies, all of their policies around what's visible, what's not visible, how you're portrayed. They control that and they control it for their benefit. And so if we go back to this town square, metaphor, you know, there's obviously the risk that you might yell something that you regret. But you can control that a little bit. What you can't control is what if they build a wall in the middle kind of the town square and all of a sudden you are stopped talking to people you don't necessarily want to you or what if they stick a microphone in front of you when you don't expect it? You know, all of those risks are out of your control because you don't own that space. As comfortable as you might be in on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, you don't own it. And that means that they control everything that happens there. That's the other risk that I think is more invisible, but is a larger concern.
Elyse:
So now that we have a better idea of what this world looks like and how this world works and how to move inside of it, I asked Alvin how he moves through this world to avoid missteps?
Alvin:
Yeah, so I am, you know, generally an introvert. I don't love being in places with lots and lots of people. And it kind of drains my energy. So when Twitter first happened, I didn't love it. I didn't like the space. I didn't like the kind of atmosphere. When Facebook first happened, same thing. I just didn't love it. And I think the lesson is, I'm actually not good at this. I'm actually not good at being at a party and being the center of attention or turning myself into the center of attention, which is what social media rewards. That's kind of like the candy that's tingled in front of you that you chase after. But, you know, I've had to use it. And I think a thing that has always been in the back of my head is, is this something that the people that make me most anxious in life...I'm okay with them reading. You know? like my mom. My mom favorites all of my tweets and likes all of my Instagram posts. And I...you know, I've never talked to her about any of them, but am I okay with that? Or am I okay with my bosses. Because, you know, I think a lot of companies will say, “remember, when you tweet or when you send something out, you're representing your company”. And I think, well, yeah, but I'm also representing myself. In fact, that might be more important because I can change companies all the time. A lot of times companies have pretty weird rules about social media and data. They're leveraging that community you built online for their advantage. And so I think the more important question to first ask is, are you representing yourself in a way that you feel comfortable with? And the next question after that is, okay then how does it fit into all of these things that I value, like the way my boss feels about me or whether my company is gonna be okay with it? And I think those need to kind of be the priorities.
Elyse:
And these risks are all pretty familiar to me -- I find myself thinking about whenever I use social media. But what’s less clear for me is making sense of the larger social media scandals that have occurred and how they might apply to me.
Alvin:
Probably the one that comes to mind for most people is Cambridge Analytica. So just for some background, it came out a few years ago that there was this company that had worked with the Trump campaign to harvest a whole bunch of Facebook profile data without people's consent. And it was seen as kind of a scandal or as a hack, because the idea was that the Trump campaign was able to use all of that information about political leanings, about kind of political preferences, and then use that information to either micro-target people or use that information to somehow win the election. And I think that storyline kind of got out of control. And the reason it got out of control is because there were these ideas that the Trump campaign apparently or the company that was working for them, Cambridge Analytica, that they had somehow hacked Facebook to make this happen. And the really scary part is they didn't have to do that at all. All they did was they made a Facebook app that was something like “take this quiz and you'll get to you know, we'll tell you something about yourself”. We've all taken these silly quizzes before. But the way that you can interact with Facebook as someone who builds those apps. So this app could not only look at your profile, but it could look at the profiles of all of your friends. And say like approximately like one hundred thousand people took this quiz. But if you look at all of their friends, it went up to 87 million people. So 87 million profiles were exposed to Cambridge Analytica for them to collect data on all these people. Now, like you're not supposed to do...Facebook had this thing like, hey, you're not supposed to use this data to make a profit or so on and so forth. They had all these regulations. But at certain point, it's, you know, they already have your information. So if one of my friends took that quiz like I had no control over it, I haven't logged on to Facebook in days, maybe weeks. Yet everything I've done or whatever information Facebook had collected about me was now available to them. And so I think that was even scarier than a hack, because a hack is pretty simple. It's a company that has your information and someone takes it from them. This was a system that was designed to allow this to happen and it was exposed. And so I think that was high profile because it was related to something so politically charged. But it revealed a larger problem with the way we think about social media and some of the governance policies around social media.
Elyse:
And the reality is that today, we are still exposed if we are using any social media platform.
Alvin:
Almost definitively information that you don't want a certain organization, company, person to have..they probably have it because that is what it is designed for. It is designed to provide enough information for people who are giving these companies money to target you with advertising, with personalized content. So I think it's not a question of if it is happening. It is what are you going to do about it and how much do you care about it?
As much as we think like, oh, if only like we were educated on this, we could somehow safeguard our own practices. I think that's true to some extent and we could protect ourselves. I think the larger thing that really horrifies me is how much the world is being shaped by data that we are providing companies that are trying to make money and how little we know that our world is being shaped by that. I don't think we can help but feed into it. If we use the Internet, if we use anything connected to the Web, we are feeding into it. But I think a lot of times will kind of...if you're staring at your phone or your computer for twelve hours a day, those experiences are quite literally shaped by your previous experiences, the experiences of people like you. And I think that's really scary because I stare at a screen for most of my living life. And I just think, you know, this is my world now. There's literally a lens over my eyes that I can't unsee certain things that are so built in that are invisible to me.
I think the top immediate risk is the immediate content that you are putting out and the immediate content that you're allowing strangers to see. Because what we reveal on social media is our vulnerabilities. I think the secondary risk is a larger societal risk of what are we putting in front of our eyes? What are we seeing reflected back at us? And I think that can be pretty misleading characterization of reality or it can be pretty toxic. The things that you're putting in front of yourself are a toxic community of people, because it's kind of self-perpetuating. Those are the communities that thrive on social media because they can get the most attention they get. If there was a fight in the Times Square, you can't help but look at the fight. You can't help but go over there and be like you “oh what's going on?” And so it's an environment designed to have just enough conflict so that people will stay engaged.
Elyse:
And how should NGOs or non profit organizations approach social media?
Alvin:
A lot of nonprofits I think immediately think “I have to get on social media”. But it's unclear what they want to accomplish there. So that's a problem that news organizations don't really run into because the thing they want to accomplish is clear. They want to reach a wide audience with accurate information. The thing that businesses don't run into is not a huge problem because they want to establish a brand and make more money for their company. But I think for NGOs, they run into this problem of what are we doing here? Are we trying to be cool? Are we trying to inform? What are we trying to further? So I would highly encourage folks to define what the goals are for having a social media account. Because otherwise it'll just be up to the whims of whoever is whoever is running it. And there will be no way to determine whether or not things are going off the rails or not.
Elyse:
So at UNDP, when we plan our social media strategy, we need to have a real conversation about what we want to accomplish, who we want to reach and who's going to help accomplish these goals.
Alvin:
You can't just send stuff out into the ether because that's kind of how a lot of us experience our own personal social media. You post things on Facebook and all of a sudden you get all this positive reinforcement or negative. And we think that's how it works with organizations. That is completely not true. You can't just post things into the world and hope that you get positive reinforcement. In fact, you're almost guaranteed to get one or two reactions if you don't think about it. One is nothing. No reaction, which is just the saddest. And the other is a very negative reaction of what are you doing here? What are you offering us? Why should we follow you? But I think as you start to dig into this further, you realize that it is the window into your organization. It is the way that increasingly people are finding you. And the question is what? What do you want them to see when they find you?
Elyse:
And so, moving forward, I asked Alvin what should be our guiding principle when using social media?
Alvin:
I would say be deliberate. In a world where we are inundated with information that is maybe not clear or concise or relevant or has purpose. I think those of us who have something to say need to be deliberate in what we want to say and why we're saying it, because otherwise we're just in it to join the fray for no purpose whatsoever.
Elyse:
And in our personal lives, that’s fine, after all we’re social creatures, but for UNDP, as Alvin says, social media is where the town square has moved to -- this is where the conversations are being had - and so, although there’s some risks to consider when using social media, it’s really worth putting ourselves out there -- it’s how we stay connected, it’s how we learn and it’s how we support one another.
This episode of Digital What!? is produced by Oscar Durand and myself. Our theme music is by Lemon Guo, and additional music is by Chris Zabriskie, and sound design by myself. Special thanks to journalist Alvin Chang of The Wall Street Journal for taking the time to speak with us. To listen and subscribe go to wherever you find your podcasts or DigitalNow DOT UNDP DOT org.
I’m Elyse Blennerhassett. Stay with us.