Presider: Matthew Kirschenbaum

Participants:

• Andrew Hare (@ahare), “The YouTube War: Wikileaks, Warfare and The New Digital Politck”

• Donghee Yvette Wohn (@arcticpenguin), “Crystallization”

• Sam Han, “The Digital Milieu of Online Christianity: The Folding of Religious Experience into Sociality”

• Thomas Geary (@tmgeary), “Electracy and Digital Agency: How Attainable Are They?”

Abstracts are provided below:

Andrew Hare (@ahare), “The YouTube War: Wikileaks, Warfare and The New Digital Politck”

On April 5, 2010, Wikileaks, the Swedish-based global government and corporate watchdog group, posted a 39 minute video online of a Bagdad airstrike carried out by the U.S. military.  The actual airstrike occurred almost three years earlier on July 12, 2007 and killed 12 people, including two civilian reporters.   Once posted the video quickly became a viral sensation and held the top spot in Google search for an entire week.   On YouTube, a 17-minute abridged version of the video reached over 6.5 million hits in less than a month.

On its surface the classified helicopter cockpit video document becomes a disturbing symbol for the careless, destructive nature of collateral damage in an Iraqi war going on for the better part of a decade. The video suggestively titled “Collateral Murder,” led U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates to publicly denounce Wikileaks for releasing it and said the lack of context is like “looking at war through a soda straw.”

Regardless of any overtly political reading of the video, the Wikileaks footage demonstrates a demonstrative shift in our contemporary relationality and overall understanding of warfare.  The first-person shooter perspective and raw footage quality to the digital artifact represents perhaps the most extreme transformation yet of warfare moving from the ideological plane of physical presence, to the emerging digital plane of mediation. In particular, the maddeningly complex asymmetric technowars fought in Iraq and Afghanistan can be understood almost exclusively through quasi-communicative signs inside a new digital politick. This new understanding is inchoate and ambiguous as the visual system of raw digital information allows for a wider range of interpreting war as an event apathetic and empathetic, banal in both its masochistic or political proclivities.   However, whatever the interpretation of the sign of the digital politick, a shift in civilian understanding towards deeper abstraction and spectacle is certain.

Ultimately, I believe our Western collective conception of war itself is being transformed by digital technologies and is allowing for war to take on meaning via a radically new set of discourses that define a communications framed at an intersection of politics, media and pop-culture.  The digitized war on YouTube can be seen as mediation further abstracting war away from notions of authenticity, activity and physical space. The communications of new media instead allow war to be viewed as a digital simulation, a spectacle of terror, a new visibility and a pseudo-event.  I will analyze these key theoretical communications issues using the example of the Wikileaks Baghdad airstrike video as the model for a newly maturing political discourse rooted in digital media that could potentially alter how we perceive the very fundamentals of war itself.

Donghee Yvette Wohn (@arcticpenguin), “Crystallization”

The notion that reality is not objectively “out there” but instead socially constructed is a longstanding philosophical debate dating back to the 1800s. With the introduction of mass media in the early 1900s, scholars began to argue that mass media contribute to our understanding about reality—from Lippmann to Gerbner, researchers have suggested that the media subjectively shapes what people view as reality.

Distribution of media, however, has drastically shifted with the introduction of the Internet. Although social networks have always been influential in shaping what we perceive as being important, social media such as Facebook and Twitter are making our networks more salient.

In this media environment, we suggest Crystallization Theory as a new framework for understanding the social construction of reality in the age of social media. Crystallization Theory builds on social influence theory, which purports that people have a fundamental desire to tune their attitudes towards groups that they want to affiliate themselves with.

Amidst the sea of information, social media facilitates information produced by the members of our social networks, who become neo agenda setters. These neo agenda setters filter information from major media outlets and introduce information that one would otherwise not be familiar with. Since people are influenced by members of their social network, we will see patterns arise where people’s perception of reality will crystallize through their social networks and everyone will perceive that the information their social network produces reflects mainstream news, but there will be no true mainstream.
Although we don’t want to present a technologically deterministic view, it is important to acknowledge that when information is being distributed digitally, computer algorithms may play a large role in terms of what information is presented to the individual. This poses different concerns for mainstream media sources and social network sources.

In the case of mainstream sources, in the golden age of paper newspapers, the most important news was placed on the front page, and one could tell by the layout of the paper (in terms of headline size, columns dedicated) how important the news was. In television news, the most important news was reported first. The format of the news enforced mainstream media’s agenda setting abilities.

On the Internet however, these dynamics slightly change. Although the mainstream media still has some control in terms of which articles are presented on the main page of their website, there are other elements on the website that reflect the most popular news, such as “most emailed article” or “most-read article.” Since these statistics are generated by computer algorithms, the more these algorithms are introduced into the page, the lesser the role of the agenda setter becomes. However, as individual users, we do not know if these algorithms are indeed automatically generated based on user activity and they are vulnerable to manipulation by hackers. Thus, what individuals perceive to be important news because it appeared as “most-read article” may actually not accurately reflect user activity.

With social media, there is a different problem where the visibility of information about one’s social network relies on the algorithms of the social network site operator. For example, Facebook has certain algorithms that selectively show the status updates of one’s Friends. Although we can presume that Facebook shows status updates of people we communicate with more, we don’t really know what criteria Facebook is using. Although individuals can certainly choose to look at all of the information their network is producing by clicking on individual profiles and such, as we are increasingly seeing social media use as a default rather than an option, the algorithm Facebook uses in constructing one’s News Feed may have a large impact on what information individuals actually absorb, especially for users who have low technological expertise. In this case, sites such as Facebook may even become a third-level agenda setter.

Sam Han, “The Digital Milieu of Online Christianity: The Folding of Religious Experience into Sociality”

This paper examines the relationship of religion and digital media technologies as it is in evidenced in “Internet campuses,” an emergent phenomenon in mostly evangelical, tech-savvy Protestant churches. These campuses hold worship services at a specific URL and contains their own graphical user interface that includes video and chat, its own pastoral staff and, crucially, meets strictly online. Internet campuses also make great use of social networking, especially Facebook, and uses social media as not only an extension of the fellowship of the church lobby variety but also for high-contact pastoring and ministerial contact.

I suggest that today, Christian churches that utilize the Internet in this way form what I call a “digital milieu,” which is founded upon the coexistence of religious participation and sociality. I propose that the lobby, where the fellowship occurs, and the sanctuary, where worship occurs, are both remediated in contemporary online churches. I do so by first presenting a sustained discussion of the online churches, wherein I provide a phenomenological analysis of a particular digital milieu, LifeChurch.tv, whose use of social media is acute. I look specifically at its Church Online, Facebook page, and its microsites (e.g., its blogs). I then move onto an analysis of the discourse of Christian-oriented, technology magazines and blogs centered on online worship and online churches. This will allow us to analyze, albeit via proxy, the Christian response to the advent of online churches in its full diversity. Thus, I suggest that online churches’ digital milieux have effectively redefined extant ideas of religious community and religious experience. Specifically, drawing on the work of French sociologist Michel Maffesoli, I argue that a major consequence of the ever-growing intimacy of Christianity and the World Wide Web is that religious experience and religious community have folded into each other, with the experience of the online milieu of religion is becoming sociality itself.

Therefore, in showing the religious use of technology or the latent “theology of technology” in these churches and the “religiosity” of everyday technological practice, I aim to enter into recent debates on modernity, secularism and secularization in the sociology of religion on two levels. On the one hand, I wish to trouble the narrative of modernity that largely perceives technology, as a simple proxy of science, and therefore primarily an instrument of “disenchantment.” Contrary to this argument, I suggest that the particular relation of new media and religion that we see today has allied them even further. On the other hand, I wish to move away from the epistemological tension between religion and science that is assumed in many discussions of secularization in contemporary sociology, which effectively excludes technology as an area of focus. Moreover, I wish to make specific contributions to the understanding of the basic categories of the study of religion, including “religious experience,” “community,” and “sacred space.”

Thomas Geary (@tmgeary), “Electracy and Digital Agency: How Attainable Are They?”

In Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy, theorist Gregory Ulmer describes how in today’s digital zeitgeist, one’s understanding of and facility creating within electronic media has become an alternative to orality and literacy. Ulmer labels this digital literacy as electracy. One who is electrate possesses the skills to competently navigate, create, read, and analyze in the digital realm, whether it is a Web site, a social network, a multimodal Flash project, a virtual world, or computer software. Knowing historical context and the implications of working within each medium are important factors in determining one’s electrate knowledge. Yet electracy does not require an architectonic knowledge of computers, languages, hardware, and codes. User interfaces for Web site creation tools (i.e. Wix, Blogspot) and social networks (i.e. Facebook, Twitter) simplify editing for users. Anyone can blog or develop a digital persona in a few clicks and minimal maintenance. Can the average Web user, which safely describes most of the general public, claim an electrate knowledge if he or she does not possess the knowledge to work outside of the basic interface options provided? In this presentation, I would like to explore how much digital media knowledge one must possess in order to be labeled electrate. If I regularly use Twitter, do I simply need to know how the social network functions or must I also know how and why developers construct its Web interface? Since not all software, Web sites, or operating systems are open source, does the average user have the agency to become fully electrate or is he or she interpellated – “always-already subjects” according to Louis Althusser – in any digital space?

In this postmodern Web 2.0 world, the question of how one fosters rhetorical agency has become relevant and exigent. Modern rhetorical theorists, often in reaction to Michel Foucault and Althusser, have “allowed agency to wither away in the shadow of structuralism and relativism,” contends Dana Cloud. The Alliance of Rhetoric Societies expressed a “permanent anxiety” about rhetorical agency, which to some is merely illusory and to others greatly weakened by the interplay of media, audience, and context. Communications scholars have analyzed how to form engaged communities and/or promote agency – traditionally defined as political action and good citizenship but increasingly seen as the capacity of the rhetor to form meaningful action – in cyberspace through institutionalization, Web blogs, hacking, and ethnic media; no one, however, has satisfactorily responded to the dilemma posed by Cloud: how do we gain agency – and similarly electracy – in a postmodern world? Are they unattainable? Does they require immersion in a discourse community and classical Marxist solidarity as Cloud proposes? On the Internet, would this mean regular participation in digital native communities such as API groups? Or is this quite simply being an informed denizen of the Web, reading RSS feeds and popular Web sites that pertain to that piece of electrate knowledge? This presentation will analyze these questions of electracy and agency and how scholars can help promote electracy and digital agency in our pedagogy for today’s digital natives.