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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: DMS - Digital Media and Society
- Sprache: Englisch
The internet and the mobile phone have disrupted many of our conventional understandings of ourselves and our relationships, raising anxieties and hopes about their effects on our lives. In this second edition of her timely and vibrant book, Nancy Baym provides frameworks for thinking critically about the roles of digital media in personal relationships. Rather than providing exuberant accounts or cautionary tales, it offers a data-grounded primer on how to make sense of these important changes in relational life
Fully updated to reflect new developments in technology and digital scholarship, the book identifies the core relational issues these media disturb and shows how our talk about them echoes historical discussions about earlier communication technologies. Chapters explore how we use mediated language and nonverbal behavior to develop and maintain communities, social networks, and new relationships, and to maintain existing relationships in our everyday lives. The book combines research findings with lively examples to address questions such as: Can mediated interaction be warm and personal? Are people honest about themselves online? Can relationships that start online work? Do digital media damage the other relationships in our lives? Throughout, the book argues that these questions must be answered with firm understandings of media qualities and the social and personal contexts in which they are developed and used.
This new edition of Personal Connections in the Digital Age will be required reading for all students and scholars of media, communication studies, and sociology, as well as all those who want a richer understanding of digital media and everyday life.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
1 New forms of personal connection
New media, new boundaries
Plan of the book
Seven key concepts
Digital media
Who uses new digital media?
2 Making new media make sense
Technological determinism
Social construction of technology
Social shaping of technology
Domestication of technology
3 Communication in digital spaces
Mediation as impoverishment
Putting social cues into digital communication
Digital language as a mixed modality
Contextual influences on online communication
Summary
4 Communities and networks
Online community
Networks
Engagement with place-based community
Summary
5 New relationships, new selves?
New relationships online
Identity
Identity cues
Summary
6 Digital media in everyday relationships
Building relationships with people we meet online
Mediated relational maintenance
Uncertain norms
Summary
Conclusion: the myth of cyberspace
References
Index of names
General index
End User License Agreement
Illustrations
2.1 “The pace of modern life”; Randall Munroe; © Randall Monroe (xkcd.com)
2.2 “Hold the line a minute dear . . .”; Barbara Shermund, 1927; © Barbara Shermund / Condé Nast
2.3 “We met online”; David Sipress, 2004; © David Sipress / Condé Nast
2.4 “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”; Peter Steiner, 1993; © Peter Steiner / Condé Nast
2.5 “How the hell does Facebook know I’m a dog?”; Rob Cottingham, 2010; © Rob Cottingham / RobCottingham.ca/cartoon
2.6 Leonard Dove, 1962; © Leonard Dove / Condé Nast
2.7 “Simple answers”; Randall Munroe; © Randall Munroe (xkcd.com)
6.1 Joel Orff, 2006
Guide
Cover
Contents
Begin Reading
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Digital Media and Society Series
Nancy Baym, Personal Connections in the Digital Age 2nd edition
Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, YouTube
Mark Deuze, Media Work
Andrew Dubber, Radio in the Digital Age
Charles Ess, Digital Media Ethics 2nd edition
Jordan Frith, Smartphones as Locative Media
Alexander Halavais, Search Engine Society
Martin Hand, Ubiquitous Photography
Robert Hassan, The Information Society
Tim Jordan, Hacking
Graeme Kirkpatrick, Computer Games and the Social Imaginary
Leah Lievrouw, Alternative and Activist New Media
Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner, Mobile Communication
Donald Matheson and Stuart Allan, Digital War Reporting
Dhiraj Murthy, Twitter
Jill Walker Rettberg, Blogging 2nd edition
Patrik Wikström, The Music Industry 2nd edition
Zizi A. Papacharissi, A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age
Personal Connections in the Digital Age
2nd edition
Nancy K. Baym
polity
Copyright © Nancy K. Baym 2015
The right of Nancy K. Baym to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2015 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9597-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baym, Nancy K.
Personal connections in the digital age / Nancy K. Baym.
pages cm
Revised edition of the author’s Personal connections in the digital age, published in 2010.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7456-7033-1 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-7034-8 (paperback : alk. paper) 1. Interpersonal relations. 2. Interpersonal relations--Technological innovations. 3. Internet--Social aspects. 4. Cell phones--Social aspects. I. Title.
HM1106.B38 2015
302.23–dc23
2014042519
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my editor Andrea Drugan, and everyone at Polity who’s helped. Thanks to those who gave feedback, including Natalie Bazarova, danah boyd, Nicole Ellison, Keith Hampton, Kate Miltner, and Steve Schirra. Jeff Hall, Adrianne Kunkel, Kiley Larson, Andrew Ledbetter, Mei-Chen Lin, Michelle McCudden, Ryan Milner, Kate Miltner, and Yan Bing Zhang collaborated with me on some of my research discussed here. Kate Miltner, Natalie Pennington, Meryl Alper, Scott Campbell, Lynn Cherny, Alice Daer, Rebecca Hoffman, Holly Kruse, Adrianne Kunkel, Sonia Livingston, Alice Marwick, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, and Jessica Vitak helped point me to additional readings. I also thank Kiley, Ryan, Kate, Steve, and Rebecca for editing and manuscript-preparation help. Markus Slivka has my eternal gratitude for letting me use him as an example and for his friendship. Many thanks to the cartoonists for such wonderful work and letting me use it, especially Joel Orff, Randall Munroe, and Rob Cottingham. This book owes much to the students who took my courses about personal relationships and new technology at the University of Kansas. There would be no second edition were it not for the people who have read and taught the first. This edition has been improved considerably by comments from and conversations with them in person, via email, on Skype, and on Twitter. It has also been deeply enriched by my colleagues and visitors at Microsoft Research. Finally, I wouldn’t be who I am without my family, whose support sustains me in every medium. I thank them most of all.
1New forms of personal connection
There have never been more ways to communicate with one another than there are right now. Once limited to face-to-face conversation, over the last several millennia we have steadily developed new technologies for interaction. The digital age is distinguished by rapid transformations in the kinds of technological mediation through which we encounter one another. Face-to-face conversation, landline telephone calls, and postal mail have been joined by email, mobile phone calls, text messaging, instant messaging, chat, web boards, social networks, photo sharing, video sharing, multiplayer gaming, and more. People have always responded to new media with confusion. In this time of rapid innovation and diffusion, it’s natural to be concerned about their effects on our relationships.
When first faced with a new barrage of interpersonal communication media, people tend to react in one of two ways, both of which have long cultural histories. On the one hand, people express concern that our communication has become increasingly shallow. For many, the increased amount of mediated interaction seems to threaten the sanctity of our personal relationships. On the other, new media offer the promise of more opportunity for connection with more people, leading to stronger and more diverse relationships. Both perspectives reflect a sense that digital media are changing the nature of our social connections. Over time, as we get used to new communication media, people come to see them in more nuanced ways. Eventually they become so taken for granted they are all but invisible. These moments in which they are new and the norms for their use are in flux offer fresh opportunities to think about our technologies, our connections, and the relationships amongst them.
The purpose of this book is to provide a means of thinking critically about the roles of digital media and devices in personal relationships. Rather than providing exuberant accounts or cautionary tales, this book provides a theoretical and data-grounded primer on how to make sense of these important changes in relational life. I began paying attention to these issues in 1990, launched my first research project into interpersonal communication over the internet in 1991, and began teaching courses in communication and new technology in Communication departments in 1994. The material in this book draws on my research projects, observations, and the large and growing body of scholarship on how digital media affect our interpersonal lives, to offer frameworks for evaluating and understanding these changes.
New media, new boundaries
Digital media raise a variety of issues as we try to understand them, their place in our lives, and their consequences for our personhood and relationships with others. When they are new, technologies affect how we see the world, our communities, our relationships, and our selves. They lead to social and cultural reorganization and reflection. In her landmark study of nineteenth-century popular scientific magazines, Carolyn Marvin (1988) showed how a new technology such as electricity, the telegraph, or the telephone creates a point in history where the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and therefore open to change. This leads to anxiety. While people in ancient times fretted about writing and Victorians fretted about electricity, today we are in “a state of anxiety not only about the PC, but in relation to technology more generally” (Thomas, 2004: 219).
The fundamental purpose of communication technologies from their ancient inception has been to allow people to exchange messages without being physically co-present. Until the invention of the telegraph in the 1800s, this ability to transcend space brought with it inevitable time delays. Messages could take years to reach their audience. The telegraph changed that by allowing real-time communication across long distances for the first time. People may have reeled in the face of writing and publishing, but it was little compared to how we reeled and continued to reel in the face of this newfound power to collapse time and space. After millennia as creatures who engage in social interaction face-to-face, the ability to communicate across distance at very high speeds disrupts social understandings that are burned deep into our collective conscience. Digital media continue these disruptions and pose new ones. They raise important questions for scholars and lay people alike. How can we be present yet also absent? What is a self if it’s not in a body? How can we have so much control yet lose so much freedom? What does personal communication mean when it’s transmitted through a mass medium? What’s a mass medium if it’s used for personal communication? What do “private” and “public” mean anymore? What does it even mean to be real?
Kenneth Gergen (2002) describes us as struggling with the “challenge of absent presence,” worrying that too often we inhabit a “floating world” in which we engage primarily with non-present partners despite the presence of flesh-and-blood people in our physical location. We may be physically present in one space, yet mentally and emotionally engaged elsewhere, a phenomenon on which Sherry Turkle dwells in her book Alone Together (2011). Consider, for instance, the dinner partner who is immersed in his mobile phone conversation. Since he is physically present, yet simultaneously absent, the very nature of self becomes problematic. Where is “he?” The borders between human and machine, the collapse of which was celebrated in Haraway’s (1990) “Cyborg manifesto,” and between self and body, are thrown into flux. In a time when some people feel that their “real self” is expressed best online (McKenna, Green, & Gleason, 2002), long-distance romances are built and maintained through electronic contact, and spaces for media are built right into the clothing we wear, how do we know where, exactly, true selves reside? Furthermore, what if the selves enacted through digital media don’t line up with those we present face-to-face, or if they contradict one another? If someone is nurturing face-to-face, aggressive in one online forum, and needy in another online forum, which is real? Is there such a thing as a true self anymore? Was there ever?
The separation of presence from communication offers us more control over our social worlds yet subjects us to new forms of control, surveillance, and constraint. Naomi Baron (2008) argues that new media offer us “volume control” to regulate our social environment and manage our encounters. We can create new opportunities to converse. We can avoid interactions, talking into a mobile phone (or pretending to) to avoid a co-present acquaintance, or letting calls go to voice mail. We can manipulate our interactions, doing things like forwarding nasty emails or putting people on speakerphone. We can use nonverbally limited media such as text messages or emails to shelter us from anxiety-inducing encounters such as flirting or ending relationships. We can see where our contacts have checked in on Foursquare (now Swarm) or Facebook and choose to go elsewhere (Humphreys, 2011). But, just as we can use these media to manage others more strategically, others can also more easily manage us. Our autonomy is increasingly constrained by the expectation that we can be reached for communication anytime, anywhere, and we will owe an appropriate and timely response. We are trapped by the same state of “perpetual contact” (Katz & Aakhus, 2002) that empowers us. In light of revelations about government surveillance of mobile phone communication, web activities, and online games, it’s evident that, even as we engage in increased control of our behaviors and relationships through digital media, the digital traces left by our activities are used for surveillance on a previously unimaginable scale.
One of the most exciting elements of new media is that they allow us to communicate personally within what used to be prohibitively large groups. This blurs the boundary between mass and interpersonal communication in ways that disrupt both. When people gather online to talk about a television show they are a mass communication audience, but the communication they have with one another is both interpersonal, directed to individuals within the group, and mass, available for anyone to read. If, as increasingly happens, the conversations and materials these fans produce for one another are incorporated into the television show, the boundaries between the production and reception of mass media are blurred as well.
Furthermore, what is personal may become mass, as when a young woman creates a videolog for her friends, which becomes widely viewed on YouTube. The ability for individuals to communicate and produce mediated content on a mass scale has led to opportunities for fame that were not available outside of the established culture industries before, but confusion about the availability and scale of messages has also led to unplanned broadcast of what was meant to be private, as when a politician inadvertently posts a sexually explicit selfie to his public Twitter feed rather than sending it through direct messaging.
This is just one way in which the boundaries between public and private are implicated in and changed by digital media. Internet users have been decried for revealing private information through online activities. Mobile phone users have been assailed for carrying on private conversations in public spaces (and shooting nasty looks at those who don’t pretend not to notice). Puro (2002: 23) describes mobile phone users as “doubly privatizing” public space since they “sequester themselves non-verbally and then fill the air with private matters.” Homes, especially in affluent societies, exhibit a “privatized media rich bedroom culture” (Livingstone, 2005) in which people use media to create privacy and solitude. All of this happens in a cultural moment when individualism is defined through consumerist practices of purchasing mass-mediated and branded products (Gergen, 1991; Livingstone, 2005; Walker, 2008) and publicizing one’s self through “self-branding” may be essential to career success (Marwick, 2013).
At the heart of this boundary flux is deep confusion about what is virtual – that which seems real but is ultimately a mere simulation – and what is real. Even people who hang out and build relationships online contrast it to what they do “IRL” (In Real Life), lending credence to the perception that the mediated is unreal. Digital media thus call into question the very authenticity of our identities, relationships, and practices (e.g. Sturken & Thomas, 2004). Some critics have noted that these disruptions are part and parcel of a movement from modern to postmodern times in which time and space are compressed, speed is accelerated, people are ever more mobile, communication is person-to-person rather than place-to-place, identities are multiple, and communication media are ubiquitous (e.g. Fornås, Klein, Ladendorf, Sundén, & Sveningsson, 2002; Haythornthwaite & Wellman, 2002; Ling, 2004). Others have emphasized how, within these cultural changes, digital media are made mundane, boring, and routine as they are increasingly embedded in everyday lives and social norms coalesce around their use (e.g. Haythornthwaite & Wellman, 2002; Humphreys, 2005; Ling, 2004). The first perspective forms a necessary backdrop for contextualizing and making sense of the second, but the emphasis in this book is on the mundane and the everyday, on how people incorporate digital media into their routine practices of relating and with what consequences.
Plan of the book
In the remainder of this chapter I identify a set of key concepts that can be used to differentiate digital media, and which influence how people use them and with what effects. I then offer a very brief overview of the media discussed in this book and a discussion of who does and who doesn’t make use of them. Chapter 2 is an orientation to the major perspectives used to understand the interrelationships between communication technology and society, and an exploration of the major themes in popular rhetorics about digital media and personal connection. Chapter 3 examines what happens to messages, both verbal and nonverbal, in mediated contexts. Chapter 4 addresses the group contexts in which online interaction often happens, including communities and social networks. The remaining two chapters explore dyadic relationships. Chapter 5 shows how people present themselves to others and first get to know each other online. Chapter 6 looks at how people use new media to build and maintain their relationships. Finally, the conclusion returns to the question of sorting myths from reality, arguing against the notion of a “cyberspace” that can be understood apart from the mundane realities of everyday life, and for the notion that online and offline flow together in the lifeworlds of contemporary relationships.
Seven key concepts
If we want to build a rich understanding of how media influence relationships, we need to stop talking about media in overly simplistic terms. We can’t talk about consequences if we can’t articulate capabilities. What is it about these media that changes interaction and, potentially, relationships? We need conceptual tools to differentiate media from one another and from face-to-face (or, as Fortunati, 2005, more aptly termed it, “body-to-body”) communication. We also need concepts to help us recognize the diversity amongst what may seem to be just one technology. The mobile phone, for instance, is used for voice, texting, picture and video exchange, gaming, and, with the new dominance of smartphones, nearly endless other applications. The internet includes interaction platforms as diverse as YouTube, product reviews on shopping sites, email, and Instant Messaging (IM), which differ from one another in many ways. Seven concepts that can be used to productively compare different media to one another as well as to face-to-face communication are interactivity, temporal structure, social cues, storage, replicability, reach, and mobility.
The many modes of communication on the internet and mobile phone vary in the degrees and kinds of interactivity they offer. Consider, for instance, the difference between using your phone to select a new ringtone and using that phone to argue with a romantic partner, or using a website to buy new shoes rather than to discuss current events. Fornås and his co-authors (2002: 23) distinguish several meanings of interactivity. Social interactivity, “the ability of a medium to enable social interaction between groups or individuals,” is what we are most interested in here. Other kinds include technical interactivity, “a medium’s capability of letting human users manipulate the machine via its interface,” and textual interactivity, “the creative and interpretive interaction between users (readers, viewers, listeners) and texts.” “Unlike television,” writes Laura Gurak (2001: 44), “online communication technologies allow you to talk back. You can talk back to the big company or you can talk back to individual citizens.” Indeed, these days customers often expect that, when they talk back, companies will respond swiftly. The social media marketing site Convince and Convert (2012) reports on a survey finding that everyone who contacts a brand, product, or company through social media expects a reply within a few days, and a third expect a response within half an hour. Rafaeli and Sudweeks (1997) posit that we should see interactivity as a continuum enacted by people using technology, rather than a technological condition. As we will see in chapters to come, the fact that the internet enables interactivity gives rise to new possibilities – for instance, we can meet new people and remain close to those who have moved away – as well as old concerns that people may be flirting with danger.
The temporal structure of a communication medium is also important. Synchronous communication, such as is found in face-to-face conversations, phone calls, and instant messages, occurs in real time. Asynchronous communication media, such as email and voice mail, have time delays between messages. In practice, the distinction cannot always be tied to specific media. Poor connections may lead to time delays in a seemingly synchronous online medium such as Instant Messaging. Text messaging via the telephone is often asynchronous, but needn’t be. Twitter can function both ways. Ostensibly asynchronous email may be sent and received so rapidly that it functions as a synchronous mode of communication. Sites like Facebook may seem to be a single medium, but offer both asynchronous modes of interaction such as wall posts and messaging, and synchronous chat, and it is not unheard of for people to use comments on wall posts as a real-time chat medium.
The beauty of synchronous media is that they allow for the very rapid transmission of messages, even across distance. As we will see, synchronicity can enhance the sense of placelessness that digital media can encourage and make people feel more together when they are apart (Baron, 1998; Carnevale & Probst, 1997; McKenna & Bargh, 1998). Synchronicity can make messages feel more immediate and personal (O’Sullivan, Hunt, & Lippert, 2004) and encourage playfulness in interaction (Danet, 2001). The price of synchronicity, however, is that interactants must be able to align their schedules in order to be simultaneously engaged. Real-time media are also poorly suited to hosting interaction in large groups, as the rapid-fire succession of messages that comes from having many people involved is nearly impossible to sort through and comprehend, let alone answer. There is a reason that dinner parties are generally kept to a small collection of people, and guests at large functions are usually seated at tables that accommodate fewer than a dozen. Accordingly, most online chat rooms and other real-time forums have limits on how many can participate at one time.
With asynchronous media, the costs and benefits are reversed. Asynchronous communication allows very large groups to sustain interaction, as seen in the social network sites and online groups like fan forums, support groups, and hobbyist communities addressed in chapter 4. Asynchronicity also gives people time to manage their self-presentations more strategically. However, word may filter more slowly through such groups and amongst individuals. We can place fewer demands on others’ time by leaving asynchronous messages for people to reply to when they like, but we may end up waiting longer than we’d hoped, or receive no reply at all. One of the biggest changes wrought by digital media is that even asynchronous communication can happen faster than before. Time lags are created by the time it takes a person to check for new messages and respond, not by the time messages spend in transit. In comparison to postal mail, the internet can shave weeks off interactions.
Most of the questions surrounding the personal connections people form and maintain through digital media derive from the sparse social cues that are available to provide further information regarding context, the meanings of messages, and the identities of the people interacting. As chapter 3 will address in more detail, rich media provide a full range of cues, while leaner media provide fewer. Body-to-body, people have a full range of communicative resources available to them. They share a physical context, which they can refer to nonverbally as well as verbally (for instance, by pointing to a chair). They are subject to the same environmental influences and distractions. They can see one another’s body movements, including the facial expressions through which so much meaning is conveyed. They can use each other’s eye gaze to gauge attention. They can see one another’s appearance. They can also hear the sound of one another’s voice. All of these cues – contextual, visual, and auditory – are important to interpreting messages and creating a social context within which messages are meaningful.
To varying degrees, digital media provide fewer social cues. In mobile and online interactions, we may have few if any cues to our partner’s location. This is no doubt why so many mobile phone calls begin with the question “Where are you?” and also helps to explain some people’s desire to share GPS positioning via mobile applications. The lack of shared physical context does not mean that interactants have no shared contexts. People communicating in personal relationships share relational contexts, knowledge, and some history. People in online groups often develop rich in-group social environments that those who’ve participated for any length of time will recognize.
Though, as we will address in more depth in chapter 6, much of our mediated interaction is with people we know face-to-face, some media convey very little information about the identities of those with whom we are communicating. In some circumstances, this renders people anonymous, leading to both opportunity and terror. In lean media, people have more ability to expand, manipulate, multiply, and distort the identities they present to others. The paucity of personal and social identity cues can also make people feel safer, and thus create an environment in which they are more honest. Chapter 5 examines these identity issues.
Media also differ in the extent to which their messages endure. Storage, the maintenance of messages on servers or harddrives over time, and, relatedly, replicability, the ability to make copies of messages, are highly consequential. Unless one makes an audio or video recording of telephone and face-to-face conversations (activities with laws governing acceptable practice), for the interactants they are gone as soon as they are said. Human memory for conversation is notoriously poor. To varying degrees, digital media may be stored on devices, websites, and company backups where they may be replicated, retrieved at later dates, and edited prior to sending (Carnevale & Probst, 1997; Cherny, 1999; Culnan & Markus, 1987; Walther, 1996). Synchronous forms like IM and Skype require logging programs that most users are not likely to have. Those that are asynchronous can be easily saved, replicated, and redistributed to others. They can also be archived for search. Government agencies, such as the United States’ National Security Administration, may capture and save data and metadata from enormous amounts of internet and mobile phone traffic. Despite this, online messages may feel ephemeral, and, indeed, websites may be there one day and different or gone the next. The popular photosharing application Snapchat found its niche by emphasizing the ephemerality of its photos which, much like the mission instructions in Mission Impossible, self-destruct soon after viewing (although what actually happens is that the file extension changes and the photo remains cached).
Media also vary in the size of an audience they can attain or support, or reach. Gurak (2001: 30) describes reach as “the partner of speed,” noting that “digitized discourse travels quickly, but it also travels widely . . . One single keystroke can send a message to thousands of people.” Face-to-face communication is inherently limited to those who can fit in the same space. Even when amplified (a form of mediation in itself), physical space and human sensory constraints limit how many can see or hear a message as it’s delivered. The telephone allows for group calls, but the upper limit on how many a group can admit or maintain is small. In contrast, many forms of digital communication can be seen by any internet user (as in the case of websites) or can be sent and, thanks to replicability, resent to enormous audiences. Messages can reach audiences both local and global. This is a powerful subversion of the elitism of mass media, within which a very small number of broadcasters could engage in one-to-many communication, usually within regional or geographic boundaries. The gatekeeping function of mass media is challenged as individuals use digital media to spread messages much farther and more widely than was ever historically possible (Gurak, 2001). Future chapters will address how enhanced reach allows people to form new communities of interest and new relationships.
Finally, media vary in their mobility, or extent to which they are portable – enabling people to send and receive messages regardless of location – or stationary – requiring that people be in specific locations in order to interact. The mobile phone represents the paradigm case of mobility, making person-to-person communication possible regardless of location. The trend toward mobile devices is further enhanced by the rise of tablets and “phablets” as well as the increasing preference for laptops over clunky personal computers tied to desks and landline phones. In addition to offering spatial mobility, some digital media allow us to move between times and interpersonal contexts (Ishii, 2006). Mobile media offer the promise that we need never be out of touch with our loved ones, no matter how long the traffic jam in which we find ourselves. When stuck with our families, we may import our friends through our mobile devices. As we’ll see in chapter 6, mobile media give rise to microcoordination (Ling, 2004) in which people check in with one another to provide brief updates or quickly arrange meetings and errands. However, more than other personal media, mobile phones threaten autonomy, as we may become accountable to others at all times. Schegloff (2002), one of the first to study telephone-mediated interaction, suggests mobile media don’t create perpetual contact so much as offer the perpetual possibility of making contact, a distinction some exploit by strategically limiting their availability (Licoppe & Heurtin, 2002).
These seven concepts help us begin to understand the similarities and differences between face-to-face communication and mediated interaction, as well as the variation amongst different kinds of digital interactions, even on the same web platform. Face-to-face communication, like all the forms of digital media we will be discussing, is interactive. People can respond to one another in message exchanges. Face-to-face communication is synchronous. It is also loaded with social cues that make one another’s identities and many elements of social and physical context apparent (although, as we will return to in chapter 5, this does not guarantee honesty). Face-to-face conversations cannot be stored, nor can they be replicated. Even when recorded and, for example, broadcast, the recording loses many elements of the context that make face-to-face communication what it is. As discussed above, face-to-face communication has low reach, limiting how many can be involved and how far messages can spread. Face-to-face communication may be mobile, but only as long as the interactants are moving through space together. This combination of qualities grants face-to-face a sort of specialness. The full range of cues, the irreplicability, and the need to be there in shared place and time with the other all contribute to the sense that face-to-face communication is authentic, putting the “communion” in communication.
In contrast, some forms of mediated interaction are asynchronous, enabling more message planning and wider reach, but a potentially lower sense of connection. Media such as Skype or other video chat technologies offer many social cues – voice, facial expression, a window into the physical surroundings – but lack critical intimacy cues including touch and smell. Most digital media have fewer social cues than that, limiting interaction to sounds or even just words. By virtue of their conversion into electronic signals, all digital media can be stored, and often are even when individuals delete them (Facebook, for instance, saves drafts of messages that were never posted). Even when conversations and messages are not stored, however, they may leave traces such as records of which phone numbers called which other ones, which IP addresses visited which websites, or how many tweets a person has tweeted. Digital messages are easily replicated if they are asynchronous, but less so if they are synchronous. The reach of digital media can vary tremendously depending on the medium. A phone call generally remains a one-to-one encounter, as does much instant messaging and chat, but social network sites, emails, mailing lists, discussion groups, and websites are among the digital modes that can have extraordinary reach. Digital media are becoming increasingly mobile as the internet and mobile phone converge into single devices, meaning that these technologies make communication possible in places where it wasn’t before, but also that they can intrude into face-to-face conversations where they never could before. As a result, people can have very different experiences with different media, yet none may seem to offer the potential for intimacy and connection that being face-to-face does. These distinctions and convergences all bring with them important potential social shifts, which the remainder of this book will address.
Digital media
Just as it’s important to clarify core concepts that may shape mediated social interaction, it’s helpful to walk through the media in question. It’s also important to recognize that the media we use today have historical precedents whose traces may have been as disruptive in their own time and traces linger today. Tom Standage’s 2013 book Writing on the Wall: Social Media – The First 2,000 Years offers a lively walk through such precedents, including literal writing on walls in ancient Rome, as does William Powers’s (2010) Hamlet’s Blackberry. Asa Briggs and Peter Burke’s (2009) A Social History of the Media demonstrates the precedents of earlier technologies, and also the continuities between old and new media. Such books reveal that many of the phenomena and concerns associated with new media began long before electricity, let alone digital media – a topic the next chapter will address.
I assume readers are familiar with the mobile phone, so I focus below on a brief historical overview of the internet. I emphasize the extent to which the interpersonal appeal of digital media shaped their development. Unlike the mobile phone, the internet was not built as a personal communication medium, let alone a way for fans to connect around their objects of pleasure, for people to find potential romantic partners, for employers to find or investigate potential hires, or any such social processes. It was developed to safeguard military knowledge. When the first internet connection was made in 1969 through what was then called ARPANET, funded by the US Department of Defense, no one envisioned that an interpersonal communication medium had been launched. However, what became the internet was not the only networked computing system being built at that time. Hobbyists built dial-in bulletin board systems for interactive file exchange, interaction, and games. Universities developed computer networks such as PLATO. Indeed, as a child in Urbana, Illinois, home of the University of Illinois where PLATO was developed, in the mid 1970s I used to stay after school to read jokes, play games, and chat with anonymous PLATO users in other locations (little did my classmates and I realize how ahead of our time we were!). In those same early years, bulletin board systems users dialed into servers in people’s homes to chat. As Kevin Driscoll has written (2014), the received history of the internet as having begun with ARPANET, covered in detail in Janet Abbate’s (1999) history, is one of several origin stories that could be told about “the internet.” It is beyond the scope of this book to cover either the technological or social development of the internet. First, though, a disclaimer: trying to list specific types of digital media is frustrating at best. Between this writing and your reading there will be new developments, and things popular as I write will drop from vogue. Let this be a reminder to us of the importance of remaining focused on specific capabilities and consequences rather than the media themselves.
The textual internet
For its first quarter-century, the internet was text-only. With its limited social cues, it seemed a poor match for personal interaction. Yet it took mere months for its developers (who were also its primary users) to realize the medium’s utility for personal communication. Within three years of the first login, email was in use, and within four years, three-quarters of online traffic was email (Anderson, 2005). By 2000, the ability to use email was a significant reason that people first got online and one of the main reasons that those already online stayed online (Kraut, Mukhopadhyay, Szczypula, Kiesler, & Scherlis, 2000).
Synchronous person-to-person and small-group communication also developed early in the internet’s history. “Talk” was an early synchronous internet communication genre. When using Talk, a horizontal line divided the top and lower halves of the screen, each half showing messages from one interactant. It was as minimalist and purely textual as a communication medium could be. Talk remained in regular usage into the early 1990s. When I began using the internet in 1990, I used it almost daily to tell my then-boyfriend that dinner was ready – I couldn’t call since his phone line was tied up with his modem’s internet connection. Talk provided a convenient work-around. Talk was followed by Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and, later, chat rooms that allowed distributed groups to converse in real-time. Instant Messaging, developed in the 1990s, can be seen as an advanced version of Talk. A person-to-person medium, IM was distinctive in its use of a buddy list and provision of continual information about who on that list was online and available for contact.
Not long after email, mailing lists were developed, in which a single email could be sent to a large group of subscribers, all of whom would receive it and (usually) be able to respond. Although the technological specifications of email and mailing lists are the same, there are some important differences. Specifically, on mailing lists, senders may very well not know most (or any) of the recipients. Mailing lists are often large. For instance, the Association of Internet Researchers’ mailing list, AIR-L, has approximately 5,000 subscribers in many nations. In contrast, others are small private lists of family and friends. A colleague of mine, faced with a family member’s cancer, created a mailing list of family members so that they could all share news with a single message. Private mailing lists may also be made up of school friends who have graduated or other such small groups of people seeking to stay in touch as a group.
In the early 1980s, another means of asynchronous group discussion with wide reach developed. Usenet newsgroups are asynchronous topic-based discussion forums distributed across multiple servers. Although these groups have become magnets for spam, they continue to house discussion. Originally, one read newsgroups through newsreaders built into Unix operating systems. This later developed into stand-alone newsreaders. Now most people access Usenet through the web, most notably through Google groups, where they may well not recognize them as Usenet newsgroups. These provided an early model for the topical web boards and social media groups so common now. They were also my own entrée into online group communication and the subject of my earliest work on online communication.
On some early sites, developers and participants used words and code to create a rich geographical context for synchronous interactions, and a highly developed range of characters. In the late 1970s, Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw developed MUD1, an interactive online role-playing game. Around the same time, Alan Klietz independently developed Sceptre of Goth, a MUD game (Bartle, 2004). Readers who play World of Warcraft or related massively multiplayer online role-playing games will recognize MUDs as their precedent. MUD stands for either Multi-User Domain or the less antiseptic Multi-User Dungeon, which better captures the phenomenon’s origin in the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. Many MUDs offered predetermined categories by which to define one’s character. People might choose their sex (often from a list with more than two choices) and race. Depending on the MUD, people might choose to be elves, fairies, cats, dragons, trolls, vampires, and other fantasy creatures.
Lambda MOO (Multi-User Domain Object-Oriented, a distinction that is of minimal importance here) and other MUDs, MOOs, MUCKs, MUSHes, and other oddly acronymed parallel sites followed, many of which were simply creative environments in which fictional rooms and landscapes served as spaces for social interaction, not games. Though MUDs and MOOs have always been obscure uses of the internet (unlike the later graphical games they inspired), they were the object of an inordinate amount of early research about the internet.
The World Wide Web
A major transformation in digital communication occurred in the 1990s when a group of physicists led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at the Swiss physics laboratory CERN developed the World Wide Web. This heralded a shift from communication that was purely text-based to multimedia communication, and gave rise to more new forms of mediated interaction than I can cover here. These include web boards, blogs, wikis, social network sites, video and photosharing sites, and graphically intensive virtual worlds.
In the 1990s, web boards took up where the promise of Usenet left off, facilitating asynchronous topic-based group interaction amongst people who did not need prior connections. Blogs, authored by either single people or collectives, are websites in which recent updates appear above previous updates, creating a reverse chronology of messages. Their content may be personal, political, or anything else, and their audiences may be anything from zero to millions. By convention and design, blogs almost always include a list of hyperlinks to other blogs (a “blog roll”), which serves to create connections and drive traffic amongst blogs. Groups of bloggers may read one another and comment on each other’s blogs, creating communities of like-minded individuals and semi-organized grassroots social movements.
Also during this time, websites such as Active Worlds began to develop graphically rich environments. These have exploded in the early 2000s, in the form of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs – an acronym usually pronounced “more pigs”), such as World of Warcraft, League of Legends, and non-game spaces such as Second Life.
The 2000s brought what has been called “Web 2.0,” the hallmark of which is often taken to be user-generated content. But, having been through the paragraphs just above, one must wonder what content on the textual internet and much of Web 1.0 was not generated by users. Wikis, the most famous of which is Wikipedia, are among the stars of this generation of digital media. Wikis are collective encyclopedia-authoring sites in which people can collaborate to produce informative entries. Though this may sound sterile, behind the editing of entries are rich social worlds of interconnected users with shared histories, conventions, and practices. Social network sites (SNSs) such as Facebook or Sina Weibo, in which individuals have profiles to which they can upload many diverse media (photos, videos, music, links, and more) and connect their profiles with others through “friending,” have been wildly successful and are near-ubiquitous, especially amongst young people, in some countries. boyd and Ellison (2007) locate the origins of SNSs in the advent of SixDegrees.com in 1997, followed by AsianAvenue, BlackPlanet, and MiGente, then LiveJournal and Cyworld (1999) and LunarStorm (2000). MySpace began in 2003, and Facebook in 2005. The professional SNS, Linked In, began in 2003. Video and photosharing sites such as Instagram (owned by Facebook), YouTube (owned by Google), and Flickr (owned by Yahoo!) may be considered a subset of SNS. Other popular, more specialized platforms that could be considered SNSs include Tumblr and Spotify. In these sites, people can create personal accounts, upload their own materials, and share them with others publicly or only amongst approved recipients. Social network sites are unique in combining multiple modes of communication and, hence, in the breadth of and control over social cues they may provide. As more people have acquired mobile phones with data plans, locative media such as Swarm, which allow people to “check in” from their locations, have become more common.
The move from the early internet to the Web and mobile phone can be seen in part as the rise of “platforms” and, more recently, apps. Tarleton Gillespie (2010: 348) argues that platforms have inherent politics, shaped by the incentives of their creators as they position themselves relative to users, clients, advertisers, and policy makers. These platforms have become “the primary keepers of the cultural discussion as it moves across the internet.” José van Dijck (2013), in her critical history of social media The Culture of Connectivity
