Love or Loathe Loose Ties? Laugh and Learn about Social Media Norms with Garfunkel and Oates

If you connect ML4ML with all your facebook friends, we promise to always wish you a happy birthday with lots of exclamation points, clever punctuation, and emojis, when prompted by an alert message, unless we forget or have something else to do--which you will be totally okay with because we don't really know each other anyway, we just like some of the same things, maybe. Yeah, emerging online behavior norms and interpersonal ethics are pretty tricky. If we are going to have any hope of sorting out the emotional confusion between our close friends and myriad acquaintances that our social media apps refer to as our "friends," we need to activate our digital media literacies. With help from musical parody act, Garfunkel and Oates, let's see how laughing with their song "Happy Birthday to My Loose Acquaintance" can help us consider some key questions about emerging interpersonal ethics.

"We coexist in a mutually unstated /unattached cohesion that facebook created...
to keep our minor affinity with minimal maintenance"

This song has a couple of brilliant moments, like the lyrics in the caption above, that offer tight definitions of what Internet scholars call "loose ties," connections to people that only exist through shared interests or other mutual acquaintances, often supported or created by digital algorithms in social networking apps and maintained with minimal attention and effort. This post offers resources for using the Garfunkel & Oates song to explore the value of loose tie relationships in social media, and how they affect our behavior, beliefs and attitudes towards friendship. First, enjoy a hot minute of crack-up from G&O:

Above is my Vialogues post with the embedded video featuring my annotated discussion questions and comments, and here is a link to a pdf of those notes. I have also uploaded the lyrics text, and my annotated questions/comments to Genius (embedded below), the awesome annotation app that I highly recommend (there is a way to get a free educator account to restrict the annotation/ discussion to your group's work, but my post is public). So, you can 1) focus on the lyrics conversation through Genius if that works best for your group, 2) start a group Vialogue of your own (or add to mine); or 3) do the group analysis analog, without tech, using the annotated printout pdf to support discussion for a group viewing or listening session. I also did a Vialogue post of just the lyrics, and here is a link to a pdf of the lyrics.

Read “Happy Birthday to My Loose Acquaintence” by Garfunkel & Oates on Genius

Once you've had a good discussion of this song, it can make for a nice model of how parody can be constructive (and instructive). Making funny songs is actually really hard (I'll reflect on my own experience in a musical comedy writing workshop in an upcoming post), but young media makers often strive to make their peers laugh through mocking familiar behaviors in the style of pop culture media they enjoy. It's hard to fine good models of doing parody to spark constructive discussion--so, this sort of video/song and discussion provide an opportunity to link analysis to learner's own production interests. Look for a post soon about some strategies for making musical comedy.

Often the best question to ask is the simplest; so, I recommend asking: Why is it funny? Ask for any given joke, like the line "Happy birthday dear person who I sort of know." The typical response is that it’s funny cuz it’s true. But that’s pretty weak. Push for better articulation. For this song, I think it’s more accurate to say that it’s funny because it seems like a contradiction ["dear person” instead of friend, who I “sort of know”] that many of us use without thinking about it. This makes us conscious of our error, and the inconsistency is funny (partly because it’s safe too, since so many people do it, we’re not feeling like the outcast or feeling like we’re cruelly singling others out). It’s nice to know we are wired to get pleasure from finding out our own mistakes and foibles.

Clearing Social Media Debts: Do You Need a "Human Bandwidth Manager"?

Overloaded with email? Tired of tweets? Pissed at pinterest? Instaslammed? If you ever feel guilt from neglecting social media participation or fatigue from trying to fit in connecting to all your online "friends," you're in good company. On last week's Portlandia episode (Season 4, Episode 3), Carrie Brownstein declares "Social Bankruptcy" taking the "nuclear option" to erase herself from the Internet and social media against the advice of her "human bandwidth manager." Kick off a discussion about love/hate relationships with social media using this clip.
The premise of posing a financial counselor for social media participation may be particularly poignant for college students, powerfully casting our time spent online as an investment. Possible discussion questions to pose before viewing: What are the techniques used to deliver the humor? What's the premise for each joke? What messages does the sketch deliver about the costs and benefits of retreating from social media use? What values and lifestyles are represented? What would happen to you or your friends if you took similar action to Carrie? How do you balance and value your social media participation and offline activities? Discussion could connect to classic media literacy activities like keeping a media diary/log for a week to assess your own time management and types of engagements, or experimenting with a media retreat to gain perspective on our investments in online culture and relationships.

An avalanche of messages buries Carrie. How would you visually portray your relationship to social media? 

The opening sequence of the Portlandia sketch visually communicates the prominence of social media messages in Carrie's character's life. How would you visualize the role of social media in your life? Production activity extensions might include making short documentaries on your social media commitments, or those of friends and family; or making your own comedy sketches to exaggerate the cost/benefits and parody media management strategies. You might even try creating interview scripts for the "human bandwidth manager" and improv roleplaying to discuss media management strategies.

Using humor to introduce discussions of love/hate relationships with communication technology may help to keep participants open to learning about each others strategies and styles of media management, rather than slipping into a mess of judgmental jockeying and defensiveness--especially with this sketch that gets at familiar feelings, both positive and negative. By showing the costs of extreme immersion and extreme withdrawal, the sketch opens up space discuss strategies of balance for digital media participation.

Muppets Meta-Mock Instagram

How would you categorize these Muppets Instagram images?
 clockwise from top left: Swedish Chef selfie; invading Beeker's privacy; found sight gag of Gonzo; pranking Zoot with the old banana in the horn

Among my fondest early media literacy experiences was sitting in a theater watching the first Muppet Movie when the film appeared to break apart and get replaced by a scene of the muppets in a theater watching the film they had made break and complaining about the projection error. To promote the latest movie to the millennial generation, the Muppets have an Instagram site pulling the same tricks--making you laugh while seeing the construction of the stuff you enjoy. The site is a genre study of Instagram images--selfies, sight gags, photo bombs, ad remixes, celebrity shots, privacy invasions, etc. It's worth talking about for kids to explore and discover the unwritten, unspoken rules and categories that emerge, like a grammar in their social media just as in any other communications. Ask: What are the categories of images? Do you see commonly these types of pictures on Instagram sites of friends, celebrities, others? What do you notice about the production values of the images?

Playful marketing? Or, do the Muppets have "Evil Plans" to co-opt your authenticity in social media?

About half of the shots look like ads of different genres/styles with professional production; the kind of stuff a fan might forward to friends with excitement about a new release. The other half look like amateur shots, suggesting the idea that the muppets themselves took them. The attention to detail given to the amateur, "real" look of many of the images--poor framing, blurred exposures, low resolution--is quite remarkable. It's a nice clear example of mass media taking up the spontaneous aesthetics of grassroots media with calculated precision in order to sell back to the masses a familiar style. That makes this site a funny way learn about how big entertainment and marketing companies use emerging structures of communication as well as a way to examine how genres, codes and conventions structure our personal uses of social media.
[inspired by Steph Harmon at Junkee; activity ideas after the jump]