“The lapses of disconnect between me and my avatar are occasional, but odd”
“social media nurtures the impulse to speak”
“since the election of Barack Obama, the worldview of online hate groups has become more violent”
“the vaunted FiveThirtyEight model is only as good as the data it runs through its algorithm”
Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson
A week or two ago, Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse’s ‘Ghosts of History’ project made the rounds online. Using Photoshop, Teeuwisse has blended photographs from World War II with modern day photographs taken of the same location. The images have been reproduced at the Atlantic, the Huffington Post, The Daily Mail, and The Sun, to name a few, and similar projects have been popping at regular intervals for awhile now – here are some different examples – so there’s evidently something compelling about this kind of series.
In an email interview, Teeuwisse tells the Atlantic’s Rebecca J. Rosen that she hopes her particular project will encourage people to “stop and think about history, about the hidden and sometimes forgotten stories of where they live.” About one image (in which World War II soldiers dash across the modern-day Avenue de Paris in Cherbourg; one of the soldiers hangs back, semi-transparent, and he appears to be fading, like a shadow growing dull as clouds pass across the sun, or a mirage) she says: “it to me sort of suggests the idea of someone being left behind, history hanging around and staying.”
The reason these kinds of images are compelling is because they present us with an opportunity to see what’s always there but has been made – by time, by forgetfulness – invisible. Here are (some of) the layers of history made visible again; here’s a kind of manifestation of place-memory; a new way of bridging whatever gap exists between then and now.
***
A complete such representation, however – a sort of visual deep map, contained in a single photograph – would be mushy, grey, like what happened when someone put a photograph through every single Instagram filter, turning a tree-lined lane into a big white splotch. If you took a photograph of the same street from every day since photographs of that street exist, say, and laid them one on top of the other, the resulting image would be virtually meaningless; instead of revealing story, the layers of memory and history and change would obfuscate each other; the swarm of ghosts would be so thick that you wouldn’t be able to discern anything.
So you could never create such a photograph anyway, at least not using conventional means; you could never quite capture everything. Our knowledge of anywhere is heavily informed by our own (rather than just a shared) past. Monuments and other markers are attempts, I suppose, to do what Teeuwisse describes – to make us “stop and think about history”, to focus our minds on specific incidents, to make certain of a place’s stories widely shared or understood. But there’s much more than just history at play: there’s also memory, misunderstanding, (mis)representation (in films, books, paintings, songs, tweets). Tim Cresswell writes that, “Place and memory are, it seems, inevitably intertwined. Memory appears to be a personal thing – we remember some things and forget others. But memory is also social. Some memories are allowed to fade – are not given any kind of support. Other memories are promoted as standing for this and that.”
So you become the monument-maker, with your photographs or your words. You say, the thing about this particular crosswalk that I want you to notice is that here is where four soldiers stood seventy years ago; or, the thing about this particular park that is important to note is that here is where I had my first kiss.
***
Initially the thing I was going to say about all this was something like: Isn’t it cool? Technology allows us to visualize history! Now we can create a different kind of cross-section of a place! The possibilities are endless! I guess what I’m surprised by is not that projects like Teeuwisse’s get so much attention – it’s that there haven’t been more of them!
And yes, it is cool. But then I thought more about it. I thought about how, when I walk back from the supermarket through my little suburban neighborhood, laden with groceries, history – even my own – is largely invisible. Here’s the house where a friend once lived, or maybe still does live, but we’ve fallen out so I’ve no idea. There’s the house that one night burst seemingly spontaneously into flames; we sat up in bed with our noses pressed against our window, watching the firemen arrive. There’s where a man in a bright red convertible once honked at me because I was cycling too slowly or because my skirt was too short, setting back my progress towards confident city cyclist by at least a day.
Even if I acknowledge these things – which I rarely do, too aware of the weight of the bags pulling on my arms, too absorbed by this or that, thinking about a problem I need to solve or making up a story in my head which has nothing at all to do with my surroundings – they seem not to change the way I’m moving or the reason I’m moving or, for that matter, the space I’m moving through. There’s an element of so what? So what if on this corner, someone was once stabbed; the blood has been washed away by rain and years (and, presumably, street cleaners). Even historical facts don’t really matter: so what if William Morris lived here? So what if Roger Bannister ran the first recorded sub-4 minute mile here?
So this: places are crowded, even at dawn when there’s no one around but the weary commuter on his folding bike. As Hardy writes: “There were poets abroad, of early date and of late, from the friend and eulogist of Shakespeare down to him who has recently passed into silence, and that musical one of the tribe who is still among us…” And there’s Edward Thomas, writing about Oxford in 1903: “The past and the dead have here, as it were, a corporate life. They are an influence, an authority; they create and legislate to-day…as I walk, I seem to be in the living past.” Places are haunted, as they are also haunts; “A haunted place has become stuck in time, or time has been scored into it,” writes Steven Connor.
And yes, on one level this kind of intimate spatial history is largely irrelevant. I mean to say, as I’ve said already: I don’t walk down the street bearing in mind all of the things I know (and don’t know, but intuit, or imagine, or misunderstand) about that street at once. I couldn’t even if I wanted to: I couldn’t hold them all in my head. Like the imagined photograph turned grey by too many layers of history (or too many Instagram filters), the mind starts to cloud if it’s asked to be the bearer of all of a place’s weight for too long. People write books about the idea of place, what it means; you could spend a lifetime reading and speculating just on that. But also, a place is just a place: I mean, the street corner is just a street corner. It both contains and does not contain its own history; it creates it, hides it, displays it, rejects it, rewrites it, memorializes it. And I’m just trying to get my groceries home before the bag breaks.
***
But on another level, it’s not at all irrelevant, especially not now. Because the question that’s being asked is not about the value of making hidden or forgotten histories apparent; it’s about the technology(ies) that allow us to do so in the first place. The jumping off point for this essay was a series of photographs, but what I’m interested in is not really those photographs – after all, we’ve long been able to manipulate photographs; and photographs are themselves often both manipulators and manipulations of their subjects. What I’m interested in is the manipulation – or, rather, the potential for manipulation – of our sense of place, via technology.
As Sarah Wanenchak puts it:
Technology changes our remembrance of the past, our experience of the present, and our imagination of the future by blurring the lines between the three categories, and introducing different forms of understanding and meaning-making to all three – We remember the future, imagine the present, and experience the past.
So my question is: what does it mean that technology gives us the opportunity to give ghosts material form, to show the haunted place as haunted? And the answer to this question is, I suspect, something we’ll be dealing with and writing about for years to come. The photographs are just a metaphor: they represent a new way of being in place, an augmented reality.
***
“Augmented space,” writes Lev Manovich, “is the physical space overlaid with dynamically changing information. This information is likely to be in multimedia form and is often localized for each user.”
Ten years later, writing about Google’s “Field Trip” app, which pushes notifications to users based on their physical location (“Field Trip can help you learn about everything from local history to the latest and best places to shop, eat, and have fun”) Alexis Madrigal asks: “what parts of the digital world do you want to see appear in the physical world?”
Which question is, I think, the crux of what’s interesting here. We know that history is hanging around and staying, that places are fraught with memory, and that technology both adds to the layers of representation and experience embedded in a place whilst also providing a new way of thinking about that place. And we’ve arrived at the period in history when localized information, in multimedia form, can be (and is) regularly delivered to individual users. So where do we go from here? What place-based information do we choose to broadcast and to receive? What does that do to the places themselves – which are already dynamic, already processes as well as points on a map? And what does it mean that a place can potentially begin to intrude on me, and not just the other way round? Say I’m walking home from the grocery store. Say a notification pops up on my phone: what if it changes my relationship with the street I’m on? What if it’s just more noise?
***
“Imagine you’ve got a real-time, spatial distribution platform. Imagine everyone reading about the place you’re writing about is standing right in front of it,” writes Madrigal. “All that talk about search engine and social optimization? We’re talking geo-optimization, each story banking on the shared experience of bodies co-located in space.” And Dolores Hayden writes of the “power of place – the power of ordinary urban landscapes to nurture citizens’ public memory, to encompass shared time in the form of shared territory.”
Perhaps an interesting counterpoint to Teeuwisse and co’s layered photographs are manipulated images that depict normally crowded places as empty – Matt Logue’s “Empty LA” project, for instance (and the “Empty America” series it inspired), or Lucie and Simon’s “Silent World” project. In the worlds illustrated by these artists, LA freeways are devoid of traffic; there’s just one lone figure in a desolate Times Square.
On the one hand, you can say the city is never empty, even when it appears empty (all those ghosts, remember – Hardy’s “poets abroad”). On the other hand what these images suggest to me is a desire to show the place as a stage; to show it as a setting, as a backdrop – or, alternatively, as a player in its own show: complete without the noise of individual human lives, both a product of those lives and something quite independent from them. To me there’s something about the (apparently) empty city that invites a much more personal interpretation: when the ghosts are unseen, when even the living are hidden, the cityscape perhaps becomes more like a mirror than a window. So technology can do much to harness the power of place – to make memory increasingly social, to represent “the shared experience of bodies co-located in space” – and I think it should: I think this is part of the joy of it. But perhaps we also need to think about preserving the utterly private relationship with place – and what this preservation will look like in a “geo-optimized” world.
Miranda Ward (@aliteralgirl) is a writer and a PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is interested in the intersection of geography, literature, and technology and blogs at www.aliteralgirl.com.
Photos via.
“What happens when, as a result of social media, vigilantism takes on a new form?”
“In event of power or Internet loss, just shout 140-character comments out window”
“When disaster strikes, make sure to bring your sandbags of skepticism to Twitter”
“Death is denied when a Facebook activist can never prove it”
“the [cyberspace] metaphor constrains, enables, and structures very distinct ways of imagining”
“Internet meme costumes are a cool way to share a cool joke or a story”
“All of the clocks in lower Manhattan were stopped at 8:37”
“It’s through such combination of humans and bots that memes emerge”
“The conceptual leap from dogs to drones is shorter than you might think”
“New Yorkers Have Found the Strength to Wait in Line for an iPad Mini”
“the internet’s like music. I don’t like working without it”
Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson
The semantics of Silicon Valley Capitalism are precise, measured, and designed to undermine preexisting definitions of the things such capitalists seek to exploit. It is no coincidence that digital connections are often called “friends,” even though the terms “friend” and “Facebook friend” have very different meanings. And then there is “social,” a Silicon Valley shorthand term for “sharing digital information” that bears little resemblance to the word “social” as we’ve traditionally used it. From “Living Social” to “making music social,” “social media” companies use friendly old words to spin new modes of interaction into concepts more comfortable and familiar. It is easier to swallow massive changes to interpersonal norms, expectations, and behaviors when such shifts are repackaged and presented as the delightful idea of being “social” with “friends.”
But is this “social” so social? Yes and no and not quite. To elaborate, we propose a distinction: “Social” versus “social,” in which the capital-S “Social” refers not to the conventional notion of social but specifically to Silicon-Valley-Social. The point is, simply, that when Silicon Valley entrepreneurs say “social,” they mean only a specific slice of human sociality.
To be clear, we are not arguing that social only takes place offline while Social happens online—because we are not digital dualists. What we are arguing is that we need to make a conceptual and semantic distinction between the broader meaning of “social” (as it applies to both on- and offline) and what Silicon Valley entrepreneurs mean when they say “Social” (which happens primarily, though not exclusively, through social media).
social
First, what do we mean by the traditional meaning of “social”? The landscape of social is vast and broad, far beyond the scope of this post—but this is precisely our point. Somewhat ironically, “small-s social” is huge. In adjective form, “social” means simply
Boiled down, “social” pertains to pretty much anything that transpires between two or more people (directly or indirectly; on- or offline). Given that we are indeed social creatures, and that much of what we conceptualize as personal and individual is actually shaped and influenced by the societies in which we live (for example, our taste preferences, emotions, etc), “social” pertains to nearly every component of our day-to-day lives.
Yet startup scenesters, digital media moguls, and Internet Cool Kids (to name just a few) use the word “social” to reference a much more specific portion of human sociality. That small piece is hardly interchangeable with the whole of human interaction, however, and such mislabeling threatens to obscure the wider range of interactions that fall outside that subset’s narrow scope.
Social
“Social” (capital-S) is what Silicon Valley Capitalists usually mean when they use the term “social”: interactions that are measurable, trackable, quantifiable, and above all exploitable. Whereas much (but not all) of social is nebulous and difficult to force into databases, Social can be captured and more effortlessly put to work. Thus, behavior Social to the degree that it is easily databaseable.
Social (capital-S) is the fuel of Web 2.0, the so-called “participatory web” (as if ‘the web’ hasn’t always been participatory); it is a critical source of free labor, on which most social media business models depend. When so-called ‘friends’ converse or share content through social media platforms, they support a system that incentivizes other users to log in and participate as well. Each reciprocated and initiated piece of interaction prompts a user’s ‘friends’ to log in and respond, and thereby funnels free labor into an ever-expanding and potentially self-perpetuating supply of value-adding, business-sustaining new content. Critically, these Social interactions also generate the digital traces that make up social media’s Big Data, which many argue is the real product that social media companies produce.
To illustrate the relationship between social and Social, first think of a watershed: water falls from the sky, runs down the side of a mountain, makes its way to a river, and eventually drains to the ocean, where more water is evaporating and returning to the clouds. Consider the whole of this water system akin to social. Now zoom in on the river alone, and imagine that river diverted & dammed to build a hydroelectric plant: this is akin to Social. Social (capital-S) aims to reshape sociality in ways that direct as much interaction as possible through the specific channels of digital media, in order to harness that interaction for commercial purposes. (Of course, the degree to which this results in actual profit varies widely.)
Equating Social with social is like equating that hydroelectric dam with the whole of the watershed in which it is situated. Consider, for example, Alexis Madrigal’s (@alexismadrigal) recent piece on so-called “dark social,” the “vast trove of social traffic [that] is essentially invisible to most analytics programs.” Especially given the pejorative connotations of “dark,” labeling untrackable digital interactions as “dark social” only makes sense through a Social framework. When we consider the realm of social, it’s unremarkable that people might interact with each other away from the prying eyes of cookies and modified links; after all, most social interaction escapes direct digital observation and databaseification. “Dark social” is menacing to the Social, because “dark social” threatens to let interaction escape through channels that do not turn social media turbines.
Silicon Valley Capitalists would love to remold sociality around the logic of Social, in order to reroute as much social interaction as possible through trackable digital channels. To an extent, they’re already succeeding. Digital dualists may claim that only offline things are “real,” but young people seeking housemates from pools of strangers (for instance) have started to demand Facebook profiles as proof that applicants are “real.” For these master tenants, mere email correspondence no longer suffices; only the tracked, quantifiable, observable artifacts of candidate housemates’ lives are acceptable proof of personhood.
It is a mistake, however, to think either that you can separate Social from social or that Social is interchangeable with social. Without social there simply is no Social. Said differently, all Social is social, but not all social is Social. [Easy!]
In future posts we hope to outline more specific critiques of Social, but first we need this social versus Social vocabulary. We need to stop conflating social and Social. Silicon Valley Capitalists have incentive to pretend that they are dealing in social (and indeed they are), but let’s remember that they are promoting a very specific kind of sociality. When Facebook says “social,” what they usually mean is “Social”: that which can be easily quantified, that which can be made to fit within the rows and columns of a spreadsheet, that which success and failure can be measured against, and that which can be sold for cold hard cash.
Whitney Erin Boesel and Nathan Jurgenson are simultaneously social and Social on Twitter. You can track them by following @phenatypical and @nathanjurgenson.
Hoover Dam postcard image from http://www.nancyscollectibles.com/hooverdamnight.jpg
Bridge construction at Hoover Dam photo from http://www.wejetset.com/magazine/2009/11/10/856/the_hoover_dam_bypass
When I first began as a graduate student encountering social media research and blogging my own thoughts, it struck me that most of the conceptual disagreements I had with various arguments stemmed from something more fundamental: the tendency to discuss “the digital” or “the internet” as a new, “virtual”, reality separate from the “physical”, “material”, “real” world. I needed a term to challenge these dualistic suppositions that (I argue) do not align with empirical realities and lived experience. Since coining “digital dualism” on this blog more than a year ago, the phrase has taken on a life of its own. I’m happy that many seem to agree, and am even more excited to continue making the case to those who do not.
The strongest counter-argument has been that a full theory of dualistic versus synthetic models, and which is more correct, has yet to emerge. The success of the critique has so far outpaced its theoretical development, which exists in blog posts and short papers. Point taken. Blogtime runs fast, and rigorous theoretical academic papers happen slow; especially when one is working on a dissertation not about digital dualism. That said, papers are in progress, including ones with exciting co-authors, so the reason I am writing today is to give a first-pass on a framework that, I think, gets at much of the debate about digital dualism. It adds a little detail to “digital dualism versus augmented reality” by proposing “strong” and “mild” versions of each.* What I am asking here: Is this new categorization I’m proposing helpful? Do the new categories need different names? Are they cumbersome? Perhaps a whole different framework is needed?
To catch everyone up, let me provide some links for those not aware of “digital dualism” or the debates the term has inspired. I coined it here; how dualism is behind cyber-utopianism/dystopianism; the term’s first use in a peer-reviewed paper, on social movements; and my IRL Fetish essay is perhaps the deployment of digital dualism that I’m most proud of. David Banks, Zeynep Tufekci, Jeremy Antley, PJ Rey, PJ again, and too many others to list here have also joined the critique of digital dualism. And my critique has itself been counter-critiqued. I’ve responded to criticisms here, here, and here. Recently, observing this dialogue, Whitney Erin Boesel and Giorgio Fontana have worked to outline the issues on the table. Following Whitney’s call, let me try to patch some of the “hole” in our thinking about digital dualism.
The hole, or the confusion, has much to do with what exactly delineates dualistic and synthetic conceptualizations of the on and offline. I call Sherry Turkle a dualist yet she articulates how the on and offline interact. I claim and promote a synthetic perspective, yet I also claim the digital and physical are still very different. We use spatial language to talk about the digital and physical as different worlds, yet our experience of, say, Facebook, isn’t exactly like leaving our everyday lived reality. Right now, for the vast majority of writers, the relationship between the physical and digital looks like a big conceptual mess.**
There might be a simple solution to clean some of this mess, to take into account (but probably not solve) the various arguments being made: differentiating two flavors of both digital dualism and augmented reality. These categories should be thought of as “ideal types”, conceptual categories that are never perfectly realized in reality, but are useful to “think with.” Also, thinkers often and inconsistently move around inside these categories, which is itself a problem, and something that making these categories explicit might help solve.***
Strong Digital Dualism: The digital and the physical are different realities, have different properties, and do not interact.
Almost no one fits cleanly in this category all the time. Even cyberpunk fiction paradigmatic of digital dualism allows minimal interaction between, say, Zion and the Matrix. The usefulness of this category is for those who to critique digital dualism to recognize this category as largely a straw-argument. Appealing to this position as anything other than rare is a mistake regardless one’s position in this debate.
Mild Digital Dualism: The digital and physical are different realities, have different properties, and do interact.
When I critique digital dualism, it is usually this position. The most famous thinker I would place here is Sherry Turkle. Her “second self” demonstrates not one self with digital and physical components, but a second self, one that can influence and be influenced by a first self. A mild digital dualist does not need to maintain that the first and second self, or the on and offline, always interact, but just that they can interact. Both mild and strong dualisms have a zero-sum conceptualization of the on and offline: if you are offline, then you are not-online, and vice versa.
Mild Augmented Reality: The digital and physical are part of one reality, have different properties, and interact.
This is the position I argue from. The digital is seen as one flavor of information of many. And these different types of information, including the digital, have different properties and affordances. Interaction on Facebook is different than at a coffee shop, but both Facebook and the coffee shop inhabit one reality. And, of course, the many flavors of information interact. Both mild and strong synthetic perspectives do not have a zero-sum view of the digital and physical: reality is always some simultaneous combination of materiality and the many different types of information, digital included.
Strong Augmented Reality: The digital and physical are part of one reality and have the same properties.
That is, the digital and physical are the same thing, which precludes asking if they interact. This is a rare position, though people do sometimes land here, if only briefly. Sometimes those agreeable to theories that blur boundaries around technologies equate, say, humans with technology. This view claims that the differences between humans and technology or the on and offline are false. This is a perspective I disagree with as much as the variations of digital dualism; for instance, on January 25th, 2011, I was rooting for the protesters in Tahrir Square, not their phones.
Or, play this fun game:
Sometimes mild dualism and mild augmentation look very similar. Researcher A can view identity in the age of Facebook as two selves in constant and deep dialogue and Researcher B can see one self influenced differently by digitality and materiality, and the research might otherwise be very similar. For me, this is a best-case-scenario, where the disagreement is “merely” ontological and semantic but, in consequence, the research questions asked, the methods deployed, and the conclusions drawn are more alike than different.
However, remembering that research within each category can still look very different, mild dualism often means different questions are asked, methods used, and conclusions made as contrasted to a mild augmented project. Mild dualism is often used to demonstrate a second self still too detached from material bodies and offline existence. For instance, different than the best-case-scenario described above, some mild dualists will often claim that the first self influences the second self, but still carve out moments where this does not occur, where the first or second self is momentarily detached. The augmented perspective precludes this as even a possibility; instead, the on and offline are always in conversation, even if in different ways at different times. Further, mild dualists are far more likely to study, say, Facebook, by only looking at the site itself, a radically myopic methodology from the augmented perspective.
The big difference here is the basic dualist presupposition that one goes “on” and “off” line in some zero-sum fashion. As stated above, the augmented perspective rejects this unfortunate spatial vocabulary we’ve created and understands materiality as always interpenetrated by information of all varieties, of which ‘digital’ is only one.
An Example
I recently came across a short piece for the print edition of The Economist. While joining the important task of recognizing that the digital and physical interact, the author, Patrick Lane, describes the modern situation as a mild dualist:
But the opportunity would not exist had the physical and digital worlds not become tightly intertwined …
it also demonstrates the importance of physical location to today’s digital realm …
Today’s worker may leave the office physically but never digitally: he is attached to it with invisible tethers through his smartphone and his tablet …****
the physical realm also shapes the digital one …
In recent years there has been an explosion of investment in creating online representations of the real world …
The digital and the physical world are interacting ever more closely
Sounds like mild dualism: different worlds interacting. But then, the last line of the article is,
The digital and the physical are becoming one.
What to make of this? After taking great pains throughout the story to discuss the digital and physical as separate but interacting worlds, Lane concludes that they are “one.” In one line, it seems that Lane jumped from mild dualism to strong augmentation. These inconsistencies are prevalent across academic research and into less formal tech-writing, and is something I’d like to help resolve.
More important to me than convincing anyone of what the “correct” category to think within is getting these conceptual categories clear. From my perspective, the bigger problem than digital dualism is that people so often waffle back and forth across each of these categories, often within the same paragraph. I’d like for thinkers to be conceptually clear with respect to their very unit of analysis. Once we have our positions clear, we can begin discussing which stance best describes the realities we are studying.
Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson
*I could create more than just four here, but categories can proliferate infinitely, causing a loss in clarity, so I want to be careful to only use them as needed.
**This is not to say others have not tried to untangle these theoretical knots in various ways, often weaving new ones in the process, as my first introduction with Actor Network Theory has begun to make clear. I’m still very new to ANT, and while I have not been convinced that it solves the dilemma here, I am too amateur with respect to the theory to make a convincing argument that it isn’t fruitful, and remain open to moving in this direction in the future.
***During the day I first posted this essay, I changed the word “worlds” to “realities” in the definitions of strong and mild dualisms in light of a good critique by Sarani Rangarajan.
****What’s with The Economist publishing weirdly sexist gendered terms? STOP THAT BECAUSE SEXISM, FEMINISM, AND IT’S 2012.
“The digital and the physical are becoming one”
“Design is one of the linchpins of capitalism, because it makes alienated labor possible”
“My hologram rendered somehow less complete. A broken stream in the data mind”
“Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world”
“Facebook is broken, on purpose, in order to extract more money from users”
“Writing for a general audience, he said, was “a responsibility of scholars”
“Scrobbling might be “social,” but it’s not very personal”
“Wikipedians may be their own worst enemy”
“I would challenge the idea that trolls, and trolls alone, are why we can’t have nice things online”
“Memory on the Internet is both infinite and fleeting”
“In this climate, it gets hard to draw strict distinctions between living systems and mechanical ones”
Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson
“if you haven’t visited the Deep Web, you ain’t seen nothing yet”
“nothing in society makes sense except in the light of power. And that goes for speech, too”
“Red Bull will most likely never fund a trip to Mars or a high speed rail line”
“A 3-year-old shouldn’t know which of her actions are worthy of being documented”
“Surface is going to make some kind of history for Microsoft, one way or another”
“I always react negatively against the idea that technology is a foreign body inside the human” (1997)
“to design with an eye to how clothes look online, perhaps sacrificing how they feel on the body”
Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson
Ready (Re’Search Wait’S), 2009-2010 from Ryan Trecartin on Vimeo.
Many have linked political conservatism with “the authoritarian personality,” which, in part, involves the willingness to view power structures as legitimate, less reluctance to submit to those in authority over you, and an increased tendency to exercise authority over the less powerful. Social media is often seen as counter-authoritarian, however, we also have good evidence that the Web in general, and social media in particular, also replicates existing power structures.
With these different concerns in mind, we might wonder if those with different political orientations use social media for politics in different ways. More specifically, are those on the right, even in a social media environment that permits more expression, voice, and creativity, more likely to submit and follow? Theodore Adorno, pictured above and pioneered work in this line of thought, I think, would predict that Republicans would be more passive, more likely to listen and restate, whereas those on the left would be a bit more likely to create new content.
I post these very brief thoughts (certainly much more would be needed to substantiate the sweeping claims I just made above; this is only a short blog post!) because The Pew Internet in American Life Project just today released some new findings on Social Media and Political Engagement [pdf]. Here are most of the findings:
- 38% of those who use social networking sites (SNS) or Twitter use those social media to “like” or promote material related to politics or social issues that others have posted. Liberal Democrats who use social media are particularly likely to use the ‘like’ button—52% of them have done so and 42% of conservative Republicans have also done so.
- 35% of social media users have used the tools to encourage people to vote. Democrats who are social media users are more likely to have used social media to encourage voting—42% have done that compared with 36% of Republican social-media users and 31% of independents.
- 34% of social media users have used the tools to post their own thoughts or comments on political and social issues. Liberal Democrats who use social media (42%) and conservative Republicans (41%) are especially likely to use social media this way.
- 33% of social media users have used the tools to repost content related to political or social issues that was originally posted by someone else. Republican social media users are more likely to do this on social media —39% have used social media to repost content, compared with 34% of social media using Democrats and 31% of independents.
- 31% of social media users have used the tools to encourage other people to take action on a political or social issue that is important to them. Some 36% of social-media-using Democrats have done this as have 34% of Republicans. This compares to 29% of independents who are social media users.
- 28% of social media users have used the tools to post links to political stories or articles for others to read. The social media users who are liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans are the most likely to have used social media this way (39% and 34% respectively).
- 21% of those who use SNS or Twitter belong to a group on a social networking site that is involved in political or social issues, or that is working to advance a cause. There are no major differences by ideology or partisanship when it comes to using social media this way.
- 20% of social media users have used the tools to follow elected officials and candidates for office. Some 32% of the conservative Republicans who use social media follow officials on social media and 27% of liberal Democrats who use social media do so.
The main finding, I think, is that those more politically extreme, right or left, are more likely to use social media for civic or political reasons. However, these active political social media users differ from right to left. While much of the behavior is similar, Democrats are found to be more likely to use the “like” button for political material and to use social media to encourage others to vote. Republicans are found to be more likely to use social media to repost someone else’s content as well as “follow” elected officials and candidates for office.
These last two points get at political behavior that is more about listening and restating someone else’s content is more associated with the political right, whereas measures that focus on creating unique content are more balanced or lean a bit left. This is only one survey, so I want to recognize that it would be a stretch to draw strong conclusions here. However, this does mesh with previous research that has linked political conservatism with “the authoritarian personality” (e.g., see Bob Altemeyer’s terrific work).
On the other hand, we should recognize that the main measure of creating new content did not point strongly to the left or the right. Further, even these so-called ‘passive’ (to be clear, *I’m* the one calling these measures “passive”, not Pew) are not completely passive. “Following” someone on Twitter, for example, is indeed about listening and consuming content, but I’ve always thought “follower” is an unfortunate term. One can “follow” someone without passively consuming their content; one can disagree and do many active, productive, things like comment, favorite, retweet and so on. Further, the percentage-differences, between around 5-10%, are, in my opinion, substantive, but certainly not massive.
All that said, I do think this points to some interesting research questions for future thought. I’m especially interested in the idea that, when encountering political content, liberals are more likely to “like” whereas conservatives are more likely to share or repost. What is behind that? Is it that those on the left, whom are more anti-authoritarian, feel that simply reposting content is a threat against their autonomy? Both a “like” and a repost help perform the political-identity we want to construct, to demonstrate our individuality, however, a repost is also about submitting one’s identity performance to the words of another.
Last, since I’m being so speculative here, I’d appreciate if any readers could point me to more formal research on this topic in the comments. Thanks!
Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson
I’d like to point readers to a terrific three-part essay by Laura Portwood-Stacer on three reasons why people refuse media, addiction, asceticism, and aesthetics. We can apply this directly to what might become an increasingly important topic in social media studies: social media refusers, already (edit: and unfortunately, as Rahel Aima points out) nicknamed “refusenicks”. There will be more to come on this blog on how to measure and conceptualize Facebook (and other social media) refusal, but let’s begin by analyzing these three frameworks used to discuss social media refusal and critique some of the underlying assumptions. [A note I’d like to include after reading some comments to this piece: the reasons for refusal listed here are certainly not the only reasons people refuse media. Second, critiquing some of the assumptions made by current refusal paradigms is not an attempt to argue we shouldn’t theorize refusal; indeed, it is an attempt at just the opposite, to build towards a more accurate understanding of refusal.]
I. Addiction
The “addiction” framework seeks to pathologize media consumption practices, and if we agree with Foucault’s point that much of the discourse around pathology (for him, mental illness) is actually about constructing its opposite, the “normal,” we might see the “Internet addiction” genre as really about normalizing our own supposedly non-addict behavior. The result is that, according to Portwood-Stacer,
Consumer culture and the corporations which power it are thus left unproblematized, while individual pathological behaviors are subjected to scrutiny and critique
We are encouraged to understand the tendency to succumb as indication of personal moral failure […] a rehash of the neoliberal responsibilization we’ve seen in so many other areas of “ethical consumption”
Vaughan Bell has a terrific piece on how “‘internet addiction’ relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the internet is.” Further, on Cyborgology earlier this year, Jenny Davis provides additional critique, looking at how the addiction paradigm wrongly assumes that the Web is separate from everyday life. If social media is simply socializing, or communicating, can we really be “addicted”?
Putting these thoughts in conversation with each other, it seems that the “Internet addiction” paradigm is not about refusing this media at all, it is about reframing our anxieties and difficulties as something we can fix. We construct an Internet Illness to create an Internet Normal; both of which are predicated on a digital dualist fallacy: these are technological problems with technological solutions. When problems are wrongly centered on technologies and the responsibility is laid on individuals we forget the social problems at root in service of a self-help industry ready to sell you treatment, or, at a minimum, get lots of advertiser-supporting page-views.
II. Asceticism
Second, Portwood-Stacer describes asceticism as another reason for refusing media. The ideas is that one’s life could be improved by eliminating a specific media platform, like Facebook; that is, to,
subject their personal behaviors to ethical scrutiny, and then, importantly, to employ technical solutions aimed at satisfying any problems which are identified
This tendency involves “depriving the self of a desired object in the interest of purifying the self,” Further,
Many media refusers, instead of or in addition to wanting to become more productive selves, also express the desire to become better friends, partners, parents, and community members through their reduction in media consumption. Might we see these kinds of selves as resisting the logic of neoliberal individualism then?
I agree fully, but would like to diverge a bit from Portwood-Stacer’s essay because I see this a bit differently, and perhaps a bit less optimistically. In my essay on The IRL Fetish, I argue that the social media fast/diet genre is really about making two mistakes in order to demonstrate how special and real one is while others are robotically attached something virtual and trivial. The first mistake is to underestimate the offline-ness inherent in social media. Research shows those using social media more tend to do more offline and face-to-face. Indeed, much of Facebook is what you do when not on Facebook; your Facebook contacts are mostly your face-to-face contacts, your Facebook photos are mostly of what you are doing when not tethered to a screen, etc. The second mistake follows from the first: incorrectly thinking logging off of Facebook is really disconnection. Spending the day off of Facebook is where we build interpersonal connections that flow back onto the site when we next log on. Not-Facebook is where we take the photos we’ll later upload, where we think the thoughts that congeal into status updates, etc.
The influence of social media is not just what happens when looking at the screen, but also how the logic of social sharing via those sites is carried around with social media users almost all the time. Thus, as Whitney Erin Boesel states,
it may be technically impossible for anyone, even social media rejecters and abstainers, to disconnect completely from social media and other digital social technologies
And PJ Rey,
social media may not have a direct impact on the lives of non-users, but non-users are nevertheless part of a society which constantly changes as the mutually-determining (i.e., “dialectical”) relationship between society and techonology unfolds. Social media is non-optional: You can log off but you can’t opt out.
The result of making these conceptual mistakes about social media refusal is to invent and valorize one’s own disconnection: ‘I don’t waste my life on something so trivial, I appreciate the real; my life has depth and meaning.’ While the Internet Addiction paradigm is about constructing a pathology to declare our own normalcy, the Internet Asceticism paradigm is constructing the normal, boring, ordinary, quotidian blind follower of social media to declare our own special non-use, casting ourselves as a little more real, deep, special, and unique than the rest. And now, as we will see, we have intruded on Bourdieu’s territory, making for an easy segue:
III. Aesthetics
The third reason for media refusal in Portwood-Stacer’s essay is aesthetics, that we might develop a taste for refusal. The essay rightly points out that while taste is often thought to be something that cannot be helped, it is also a product of one’s socialization. Boudrieu’s Distinction looked specifically at how taste is much like a massive social competition, a constant recreation of social hierarchies via taste-declarations and performances, and that all of this has everything to do with class, status, and privilege. From Portwood-Stacer’s essay,
Statements like “I don’t even own a TV” rub some people the wrong way precisely because they seem to indict the tastes of those who do enjoy watching television. Even if that’s not what the TV refuser intended, the underlying reification of taste hierarchies is what makes their aesthetic preference seem so hipstery and off-putting.
It takes some amount of priveledge to opt out of certain things, and we can apply this “asceticism of the privileged” to Facebook as well. To the degree that Facebook is about maintaining social networks and connections, knowing about the right trends and events, or what Bourdieu called “social capital,” then rejecting this capital can itself be a display of privledge (even if it is not always). Brushing off Facebook is sometimes a way of saying ‘I don’t need this common form of connection like everyone else, I am so well-connected I can do without it.’ Being able to navigate a world of complex social networks without Facebook, a platform that facilitates this process in many social circles, is a profound display of privilege and status, one that the Facebook abstainer might (consciously or unconsciously) want others to marvel at.
The tl;dr of all of this is to move forward in studying media refusers, social media refusers, Facebook refusers, “refusenicks”, etc, and I think we need to begin by shedding the digital dualist “online” and “offline” conceptualization that “refusal” seems to imply. This has four main consequences for thinking about social media refusal: (1) Social media communication is not something one can be “addicted” to any more than offline communication. (2) Because, for many, social media is enmeshed in everyday life we cannot simply blame social problems on the technologies themselves. Nor should we pathologize individuals by victim-blaming ourselves out of taking on the social processes that create the problems. (3) We should not mistake social media use as the opposite of refusal; on and offline as zero-sum is a common misunderstanding. Getting offline is often what drives the content of what is posted online. (4) Refusal should not be conceptualized as time away from the screen. This is far too literal understanding of social media, it affords too much agency to someone to simply “opt out,” and it obscures the fact that refusing the effects of social media is not simply achieved by tapping the ‘log out’ icon on a screen.
The still tl;dr is that the Facebook refusal paradigms (1) normalize our social media use by constructing the addict ‘other’; (2) fetishize our social media non-use by inventing some pretend pure offline to (3) declare our own special privilege as someone who doesn’t need Facebook.
Note: Boaz rightly observes in the comments that I originally stated that these three are the “most popular” frameworks, which is not something I can really support.
“There is an essential lack of any heroic narrative in most films about the second Gulf War”
“In twenty years universal television will be an everyday affair” (1927)
“Romney campaign’s presence on Tumblr is more subdued”
“The pay-to-promote feature disrupts the interest-based algorithm”
“The symbiotic relationship between us and our apps will be seamless”
“ESC became a kind of “interrupt” button on the PC — a way to poke the computer and say, “Cut it out””
“the concept of ‘internet addiction’ relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the internet is”
“Will there ever be a laptop that needs to be broken in, and improves as you use it?”
“With these gardens as crypto-water-computers, they were taking measurements of the universe”
“A troll exploits social dynamics like computer hackers exploit security loopholes”
“the fighting of war is now augmented – war by physical and digital means are now inseparable”
“there is no compelling evidence that any online dating matching algorithm actually works”
Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson
