Personal connection in digital age - Baym
Chapter 1 - New forms of personal connections
As of this day and age there have never been more ways to communicate with one another.
When first faced with new technology, people have reacted in two ways. The first one being
that people tend to think that our communication has become shallow. The second one being
that new media offers more opportunity for connections.
New media, new boundaries
Digital media raise a variety of issues and lead to social and cultural reorganization and
reflection. Fundamental purpose of communication technologies has been to allow people to
exchange messages without being physically present. Before the 1800 it could take years before
a message had reached its audience.
Gergen 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
instead of physically. We might be physically present in one space but mentally and
emotionally engaged somewhere else.
Baron argues that new media offers us ‘volume control’ to regulate our social environment and
encounters. We can avoid or manipulate interactions by pretending to be on a call or
forwarding nasty emails.
New media allows us to communicate to large groups. Think about group chats or fandoms.
Furthermore, what is personal may become mass. The ability for individuals to communicate
and produce mediated content on a mass scale has led to opportunities for fame. Boundaries
between public and private are changed by digital media. This boundary flux contains deep
confusion about what is virtual - that what seems real - and what is real. Digital media calls
into question the very authenticity of our identities, relationships and practices.
Seven key concepts
Media is not easily defined. That is why seven key concepts are presented to make it more
understandable. The key concepts are:
1. interactivity,
2. temporal structure (synchroon of asynchroon),
3. social cues,
4. replicability,
5. storage,
6. reach
7. mobility.
These seven concepts help us to understand the similarities and differences between
face-to-face communication and mediated interactions. Face-to-face is interactive and
synchronous. They cannot be stored or replicated and has a low reach. In contract, some forms
of interaction are asynchronous which enables more message planning and a wider reach. It
does lack critical intimacy and limits interactions.
Digital media
,There are books written that demonstrate the precedents of earlier technologies and
continuities between old and new media. The books reveal that many phenomena and
concerts associated with new media began before electricity. The internet was not build as a
personal communication medium or for people to find partners. It was developed to safeguard
militar knowledge.
The textual internet
For the first quarter-century, the internet was text-only. It seemed a poor match for personal
interaction but within four years of the first login, three-quarters of online traffic was email.
The World Wide Web
CERN was where the World Wide Web was developed. It was a shift from communication that
was purely text-based to multimedia communication. Web boards, blogs, social network sites,
video and photo sharing sites slowly started integrating in society. When people started using
more online platforms, locative media like Swarm have become more common, it allows
people to ‘check in’ from their locations. Platforms have become ‘the primary keepers of the
cultural discussion as it moves across the internet’. van Dijck shows how the human desire for
connection that drove the growth of the internet has been parlayed into connectivity - the
making and storing of connections between individuals and sites. More and more platforms
use algorithms in order to determine which content is made visible to which users at which
time.
Who uses new digital media?
In its early years, the only people using the internet were the ones developing it, almost all of
whom were located in the US and UK. By the end of the decade, students, universities and
scientists had started using it too. Around 1995 the internet started spreading out. Those most
able to use new media improved their lives in ways that those who do not use them do not,
increasing social and economic disparity.
, Chapter 2 - Making new media make sense
When faced with new media communication, the immediate challenge for users is to make
sense of it. To understand new media and their potential consequences, we need to consider
both the technological features of a medium and the personal, cultural and historical
presumptions and values that those features evoke.
Most anxieties around both digital media and historical precursors stem from the fact that
these media are interactive. Other anxieties arise out of the temporal structure of digital
media. Through communication people assign symbolic meanings to technologies. The
message we communicate about technology is reflective, revealing as much about the
communicators as they do about the technology.
When people explain the consequences of a new medium in terms of technological or social
forces, or some combination of these, they rely on theoretical assumptions about causality.
Technological determinism is when new technologies are viewed as causal agents, entering
societies as active forces of change that humans have little power to resist. The social
construction of technology argues that people are the primary sources of change in both
technology and society. The social shaping perspective sees technology and society as
continually influencing one another. Through a process of domestication, they become
taken-for-granted parts of everyday life, no longer seen as agents.
Technological determinism
Machines change us
Nick Carr is worried that Google was sapping out intelligence, widesreap news coverage of a
forthcoming academic lecture compared Facebook’s ability to ‘enhance intelligence’ with
Twitter’s power to ‘diminish it. Popular visions of new technology have tended toward
technological determinism as far back as Ancient Greece. Language and forms of evidence may
have changed but the concern that communication technologies make us dumber is as old as
writing.
There are several variants of technological determinism. One, is that “the medium is the
message: is that technologies have characteristics that are transferred to those who use them.
Calude Fischer calls this an “impact-imprint” perspective in which technologies change
individual and collective syches. Such direct effects of technology may be strongest when a
technology is new because people do not yet understand it. Rather than “using it” people may
be “used by it”. The more you use them, the more they use you, the more you are influenced
by them. Many studies of internet use measure time spent online, divide people into heaving
and light users, or users vs. non-users and then correlate that measure with outcome variables
such as loneliness or time spent with family. What a person was doing online is not addressed.
In a milder form of technological determinism, media choice & technological features are seen
as having direct consequences, but people are seen as making strategic and usually rational
choices.
Americans made sense of new technology by describing it with three utopians, envisioning a
world improved by technology, and three dystopian visions of a world made worse. The
utopian stories, technologies are seen as natural societal developments, as improvements to
daily life or as forces that will transform reality for the better. Dystopian reactions emphasize
feares of losing control, becoming dependent and being unable to stop change.
