Risks and opportunities of social media
Lectures
Lecture 1
Course introduction
Grading: individual exam (80%) & group assignment (20%)
- Exam: open questions, sample will be made available on Brightspace
- Assignment: written report. Deadline: January 9 (9:00)
Computer-mediated communication (CMC)
CMC= the process of the exchange of meaning (communication) among two or more humans
through digital channels (Carr, 2020). For example: email, videoconferencing, chatrooms but
also social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat.
➔ Allow personal conversations between people
Evolution of computers: goes back to the 90’th century
Humans vs. technology: Who controls whom?
Two dominant approaches
- Technological determinism: assumes that technologies are the cause of:
o Major societal and historical changes at the macro level of social structures and
processes.
o Subtle but profound micro-level social and psychological influences on the
general use of specific tools
- Social determinism: assumes that technology is completely subject to how people
interact with it.
o Technology does not just ‘’appear’’
o People do not always use technology as it was intended
- Both are useful → social realism
Why study CMC?
- 2 types of effects of technology ( Sproull & Kiesler, 1991):
o First level effects: are about the intended effects of digital media (the reason
why something was invented)
▪ Example email: the speed and scale at which communication can take
place, increased efficiency, increased productivity.
o Second level effects: are about the unintended effects of digital media (what
people actually do with them).
, ▪ Example videoconferencing: to form an impression of a (new) person
before meeting them in real life, or to share daily activities with friends
on a microlevel.
CMC Theories
Socioemotional cues
- Static: clothing, hairstyle, makeup
- Dynamic: Gestures, facial expressions, stance, tone of voice, eye contact, proximity
-
Impersonal CMC Theories:
Impersonal communication: an exchange between participants that facilitates
communication but does not allow the participants to form a meaningful relationship based on
their individual selves, traits and personalities
CFO: CMC does not facilitate the rich, interpersonal, and social exchange of face-to-face
(FtF) communication and is, therefore, a poor medium for interpersonal exchange
- Lost perspective
- CMC lacks aspects of traditional communication, such as physical presence and
nonverbal cues
- CMC is therefore purely functional and not relational
- Due to lack of cues, little information is available, which leads to misunderstandings
- Social relationships are superficial and impersonal
- CMC is antisocial
Social presence theory: the more social presence you have when interacting with someone,
the more present you think he/she is. The more present someone is the better you are with
having a more meaningful communication.
Media Richness Theory (Daft & Lengel, 1986) deciding what type of media people
Why and when do individuals select specific media tools to send specific messages and
make (particularly organizational) decisions? Divides media needs into two things: the
degree of uncertainty and the degree of equivocality (complexity of a message).
➔ Decides what type of media someone use
,The effect of interaction topic and social ties on media choice and the role of four
underlying mechanisms ( Croes et al., 2018)
- Goal 1: How do (a) topic of a conversation and (b) the type of conversation partner
influence medium choice?
- Goal 2: Which underlying mechanisms play a role in this? (in other words: why do
people make that choice?)
- Method: survey
o N= 238
o Scenarios
o Topic: not intimate at all- very intimate
o Conversation partner: weak social tie- strong social tie
o Underlying mechanisms ( e.g., controllability, anonymity)
o Medium choice: FtF, audio-only, video-mediated, text-based
- Main results:
o In general, preference for FtF communication was highest, followed by audio-
only and text-based CMC
o People preferred audio-only CMC and FtF for highly intimate topics, while
text-based CMC was preferred less
o People prefer text-based CMC and FtF to communicate with strong ties
o When people find it important to feel present with their conversation partner in
an interaction, they more often prefer FtF
o When people find it important to feel anonymous, they are less likely to prefer
FtF.
o The choice of medium is therefore strategic and depends on what people find
important in an interaction
Interpersonal CMC theories
Interpersonal communication: an exchange between participants that facilitates
communication and allows the participants to form a meaningful relationship based on their
individual selves, traits and personalities.
CFI (interpersonal theories): Counter to early assumptions of CMC as unable to facilitate
interpersonal relationships, we now experience daily the ability of digital technologies to
facilitate communication between relational partners.
Cues filterd in (CFI): Offers more potential for social relationships
- Liberated perspective
- CMC makes free from physical proximity and therefore offers more opportunities for
social relationships (e.g., online communities)
- CMC can be rich without socioemotional cues, or offers alternative cues
- CMC is therefore also relational
- CMC is social
Electronic Propinquity: the perception of a relational or psychological closeness you feel
towards a person. Is measured with: interpersonal attraction, homophily & social attraction.
Theory of Electronic Propinquity: predicted by several aspects
1. More information , more closeness
2. Feedback to each other or not
3. The more complex, the less close
4. The better you can interpretate, the
, closer you feel
5. The more rules there are, the less people feel physically close to each other. Chose
themselves, feeling more closeness.
6. The more media choices available, less closeness. Fewer options available, people are
forced to use the media and they experience more closeness, because they are making
the best of it. People are tend to do their best with the thing that is available.
Social Information Processing Theory (SIPT) Walther (1992)
Media users are motivated to form rich, deep impressions of each other, regardless of medium
Given enough time, users adapt their verbal communication online to accommodate for the
loss of nonverbal cues.
Adapting cues in SIPT: language, emoticons & emoji and audiovisual cues
Hyperpersonal model ( Walther, 1996)
CMC is even friendlier, more social and more intimate then FtF communication. It surpasses
normal interpersonal levels.
Study: the hyperpersonal effect in online dating: Effects of text-based CMC vs.
videoconferencing before meeting face-to-face ( Antheunis et al., 2019)
- Goal 1: Investigate the impact of audiovisual cues (text-based vs. audiovisual) in a
first online date-seeking encounter on romantic and social attraction.
- Goal 2: Investigate the effect of modality switching on attraction.
- Method:
o Speed dating event
o N = 39
o Randomly assigned to first meet via text-based CMC or videoconferencing
o Afterwards a second FtF encounter
o 5 dates
o Social attraction & romantic attraction
- Main results:
o More social attraction between interactants who used text-based CMC rather
than videoconferencing
o Findings support the Hyperpersonal Model
o After modality switch to FtF, the Hyperpersonal effect for social attraction
persisted, but the effect for romantic attraction declined.
Take- aways
- Technological and social determinism are both useful ways of thinking about the
relationship between CMC and the people who use technologies to interact.
