Class notes
New Media Challenges (SS4S) (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2021/2022)
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Lecture 1: IntroductionTRENDS IN MEDIA AND MEDIA-USE
● From push to pull: consumers choose from a large offering of media content (Youtube on demand,
Blendle)
● Dissolving media boundaries (Browsing internet on phone, listening to radio on laptop)
● Increasing interactivity (Online multiplayer games, chat functions on webpages)
● Content creation by consumers: social media (Writing reviews, blogs, vlogs, Instagram, Facebook)
UTOPIAN / DYSTOPIAN PERSPECTIVES
● Utopia: a community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its citizen
● Dystopia: a community or society that is undesirable or frightening
FUNCTIONS OF UTOPIAN WORLDVIEW
● Optimism about the future
● Strong belief in technological development
● Push to invest in technological developments
● Cultural change toward individuation and individual empowerment
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
● A major change in an economy marked by the general introduction of power-driven machinery or by an
important change in the prevailing types and methods of such machines
○ First: mechanical production, railroads, and stream power
○ Second: mass production, electrical power, and the advent of the assembly line
○ Third: automated production, electronics, and computers
○ Fourth: artificial intelligence, big data, robotics, and more to come
,Lecture 2: Personalization, Privacy and Surveillance
WHAT IS PRIVACY?
● Defined by cultures
○ Uncertainty avoidance: the extent to which a society or groups relies on social norms, rules,
and procedures to minimize the unpredictability of future events
● Defined by time
● Defined by individuals
POLITICAL-SCIENTIFIC APPROACH (WESTIN, 1967)
● Privacy is:
○ a basic need that helps us adjust to day-to-day interpersonal interactions.
○ a dynamic process (we regulate privacy so as to serve momentary needs and role
requirements)
○ non-monotonic (you can have such a thing as too little, just enough, or not enough privacy)
○ “the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to
what extent information about them is communicated to others”
● Purposes of Privacy: functions of privacy, i.e. what is privacy for?
○ Personal Autonomy: not being manipulated
■ Realization of individual choices
■ Personal development
■ Stable relationships
○ Emotional Release: freedom from roles and outside expectations
■ to relax / to let go
■ to escape from stress
■ to “be oneself”
■ anger, grief, frustration, etc.
○ Self Evaluation: freedom to think, process information, and make plans
■ Process and evaluate information
■ Make / change plans
■ Be creative
○ Limited and Protected Boundaries: ability to limit who has access to what information
■ What to share, with whom, and when
● States of Privacy: means behind the functions, i.e. how can privacy be achieved?
○ Observation
■ Solitude: no observation from others
■ Intimacy: small group of people with a strong bond
○ Identification
■ Reserve: the right not to share some information, respected by others.
■ Anonymity: the right not to be identified
PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH (ALTMAN, 1975)
● Irwin Altman formulated the Privacy Regulation Theory, which aimed at understanding why individuals
alternate between states of sociality and solitude.
● Privacy is “a selective control of access to the self or to one's group”
● Five elements of privacy:
○ Dynamic Process: Individuals regulate what they (do or not) want to share differently,
depending on the situational or social context.
○ Individuals vs Group Level: Individuals perceive their own privacy differently from that of their
community/family.
○ Desired vs Actual Level: A desired level of privacy might be lower/higher than the one other
individuals have in the given context.
○ Non-Monotonic: There is such a thing as both too much and not sufficient privacy (“stranger
on the train”, the sauna principle)
○ By-directional (inwards and outwards): Individuals might have different sensitivities for their
actions towards others’ privacy and others’ actions towards them.
,COMMUNICATION APPROACH (PETRONIO, 2002)
● Originally known as Communication Boundary Management
○ Privacy is “the selective control of access to the self” (Altman, 1975)
○ We need to regulate the boundaries we put between ourselves and others.
● How do we manage our privacy? (from physical privacy to information privacy)
○ According to Smith, Dinev & Xu (2011) one of the big shifts in how we understand and measure
privacy has been that of:
■ … progressively speaking less of physical privacy (sharing things, spaced)
■ … and more about information privacy.
■ … and more and more about what we do “online”
● Who are our audiences online?
○ Who is listening? → Actual friends, Family, Friends of friends, Other acquaintances,
School-mates, Ex-friends/partners, Colleagues, Former colleagues, Employers, “Scouts”
● Context Collapse: the “flattening out of multiple distinct audiences in one's social network, such that
people from different contexts become part of a singular group of message recipients.”
○ In practice, this means that:
■ While audiences online are diverse and complex…
■ … the information users share tends to present a single, individual identity.
● Study imagined audiences:
○ In 2013, an experiment carried out by Facebook on over 30 million viewers (!) compared their
perceived audience with their actual audience. Results indicated that the vast majority of users
vastly underestimate their post and general audience.
○ People underestimate how many of their friends are seeing what they post
FUNCTIONAL SELF-DISCLOSURE IN SOCIAL MEDIA
● H1: People pursue different disclosure goals in Facebook status updates, wall posts, and private
messages
● H2: Disclosures directed at a familiar other, as via Facebook wall posts and private messaging, are
associated with relational development goals more than disclosures directed at general others, as via
Facebook status updates (geen verschil tussen wall posts en private messages)
● H3a: People pursue greater social validation goals in nondirected status updates compared to directed
wall posts and private messages
● H3b: Social validation goals are more salient in public wall posts compared to private messages
● H4: SNS users can adapt to different affordances by choosing to reveal less intimate and private
information via public status updates and wall posts than via private messaging on Facebook
● H5: Disclosure goals are expected to affect disclosure intimacy
● H6: Less intimate disclosures are associated with social validation goals compared to other
self-disclosure goals, especially the more personally involving relational development goals
● H7: Disclosure goals are predicted to mediate between Facebook communication forms and disclosure
intimacy
, Lecture 3: Personalization, privacy and surveillance
FROM PHYSICAL PRIVACY TO INFORMATION PRIVACY
● Privacy as a right → privacy as a commodity (something we can exchange in turn for something else)
● While privacy stays a basic human right (see: Westin) we are progressively more likely to consider it a
commodity, like time or money.
THE TRADE-OFF OF INFORMATION SHARING
MANAGEMENT OF PRIVATE INFORMATION
FROM TRADE-OFF TO CALCULUS
● Especially in the context of online communication, privacy has been studied not as an absolute concept,
but in economic terms (Smith & al, 2011).
● This leads to the idea that before disclosing personal information, users might carefully evaluate the
benefits and risks
PRIVACY CALCULUS
● “Individuals are assumed to behave in ways that they believe will result in the most favorable net level
of outcomes” (Stone & Stone, 1990)
● Sharing benefits are generally classified as belonging to three main categories:
○ Financial rewards (discount, time-saving)
○ Social benefits (gaining access to specific groups)
○ Personalization (personalized offers, validation)
● Sharing risks can be thought of as “the potential for loss associated with the release of private
information to a firm”
○ In considering these risks, people need to distinguish between:
■ the likelihood of the risk: the chance that information is “misused”
■ the severity of the risk: the consequences of this “misuse”
PRIVACY PARADOX
● But in fact, when assessing users’ perception of privacy versus their privacy-protecting behavior
scholars have often found the results paradoxical (e.g. Barnes, 2006; Norberg & al, 2007; Ütz & Kramer,
2009).
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