Topic All things media? UvA | 1
Summary Topic All things media?
Emerging communication technologies and their impact on us
and society (2020)
Overview literature
Lecture 1: introduction
- No preparatory readings required
Lecture 2: Making sense of (emerging) technology
- Vishwanath, 2015 Walther, Van Der Heide, Ramirez jr., Burgoon, & Pena, 2015 Nass
& Moon, 2000 Sundar, Jia, Waddell, & Huang, 2015
Lecture 3: Social media and mobile communication
- Ellison & Vitak, 2015 Valkenburg & Peter, 2011 Fardouly & Vartanian, 2016 Waytz
& Gray, 2018 Appel et al., 2020 Stoycheff, Liu, Wibowo, & Nanni, 2017 Cumiskey &
Ling, 2015
Lecture 4: Avatars and digital agents
- Nowak & Fox, 2018 Krämer, Rosenthal-von der Pütten, & Hoffmann, 2015 Ferrara,
Varol, Davis, Menczer, & Flammini, 2016 Hoy, 2018 Maréchal, 2016
Lecture 5: Virtual reality
- Steuer, 1992 Lee, 2004 Wirth et al., 2007 Yee & Bailenson, 2007
Lecture 6: Social robots
- Broadbent, 2017 Peter & Kühne, 2018 Zhao, 2006 Fong, Nourbakhsh, & Dautenhahn,
2003 Dautenhahn, 2007
Lecture 7: Internet of Things, Wearables, and Big Data
- Nord et al., 2019 van Deursen & Mossberger, 2018 boyd & Crawford, 2012 Shorey &
Howard, 2016 Van Est, 2014
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Lecture 1: Introduction
Mass communication
Five characteristic of mass communication:
1. Public: communication is in principle, generally accessible to the public. It does not
have a defined group of recipients.
2. Technologically mediated: communications that are controlled and facilitated by
technology tools and applications.
● Not talking face to face, for example: telephone conversations, Internet based
text chats and videoconferencing.
3. Indirect: the receiver of the message is seperated (in time) from the sender.
4. One-sided: the relationship between the receiver and the sender is one-sided. There is
no reciprocity.
5. Dispersed audience: the audience is spread across space and time.
Face-to-face communication
Characteristic of face-to-face communication:
● Intentionality/Awareness of all involved persons: all persons involved are aware of
the situation.
● Mutual co-orientation: two or more are simultaneously oriented to one another.
● Direct: literally face-to-face.
● Negotiation of meaning (encoding and decoding): understanding each other by
using the opportunity to negotiate the meaning of the sender.
● Exchange of communicator and receiver role: reciprocity.
● Process: face-to-face communication is constantly changing, it is dynamic.
● Common signs, symbols, and rules of communication: for example, speaking the
same language.
● Multifunctional: communication can have different functions. For example, talking
about the weather is not about the subject but to break the ice.
● Multimodal: different modes, for example verbal or non-verbal communication.
● Basic components: people, message, feedback, code, noise, channel.
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Computer-mediated communication
Computer-mediated communication = human communication achieved through, or with
the help of computer technology.
Dimensions of computer-mediated communication:
1. Mode (text, audio, visual);
2. Synchronous vs. Asynchronous;
3. Public vs. Non-public;
4. Dyadic (interaction between two) vs. Group;
5. Anonymous vs. Nonymous;
6. Professional/Work-related vs. Private.
Emerging technologies
Technology = a manner of accomplishing a task especially using technical processes,
methods, or knowledge.
How to define emerging technologies:
1. Radical novelty;
2. Relatively fast growth;
3. Coherence: the technology develops its own identity, for example (the term) social
media.
4. Potential to have prominent impact on socio-economic domains;
5. Uncertainty and ambiguity in the emergence phase.
The hype cycle of emerging
technologies visualises the situation
around the emergence of new
technologies.
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Characteristics of innovation (by Rogers)
1. Relative advantage: of the technology over preceding technologies.
2. Compatibility: with other existing technologies.
3. Complexity: in learning to use the technology.
4. Trialability: ability to test the technology on a limited basis.
5. Observability: the perceived visibility/ability to vicariously observe its consumption.
Typology of adapters (by Rogers)
1. Innovators (2.5%): people who are willing to take a risk. They want the newest
technology.
2. Early adopters (13.5%): people who want to adapt, but are a little less willing to
take a risk.
3. Early majority (34%): they want the newest technology, but they will only take the
risk after they’ve seen some feedback from the innovators and early adopters.
4. Late majority (34%): by seeing the technology more, they get more interested.
5. Laggards (16%): don’t feel the need for new technology.
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Lecture 2: Making sense of (emerging) technology
The context of emerging technology
Crucial technological changes:
1. Exponential increases in computing power;
2. Mobile connectivity;
3. Datafication = a technological trend turning many aspects of our life into data;
networked information;
4. Miniaturization of sensors, microphones and cameras;
5. Cloud computing (instead of saving things to your device);
6. Progress in artificial intelligence, machine learning.
Digitalization affects all aspects of our lives. Affordances of digital information:
1. Storability/persistence;
2. Replicability;
3. Searchability/retrievability;
4. Distributability/scalability.
The psychology of the diffusion and acceptance of technology. Vishwanath, A. (2015).
The key to understanding the psychology of adoption is in the examination of:
● Perceived attributes of a new technology;
● How these beliefs emerge;
● How the beliefs influence the individual’s decision to adopt (or reject) the technology.
Three theories in the acceptance of technology:
I. Diffusion approach (by Rogers)
II. Management-information-systems approach ➔ economical purposes
III. Cognitive approach
I. Diffusion Approach (by Rogers)
The diffusion of innovations theory focuses on the forces that influence individuals’
decisions to adopt a new technology:
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● Macro societal forces: culture, system norms, mass media influence, and change
agent efforts.
● Micro level influences: the decision context, the degree of autonomy in the
decision, and the perceived beliefs about the technology.
The theory holds a broad definition of what constitutes an innovation (= any idea,
practice, product, technique, or technology that diffuses through a social system).
The technology adoption process: technology produces uncertainty due to the
newness and inability of adopters to predict the consequences of its use. To reduce
this uncertainty, potential adopters are driven to seek information from the mass
media, from opinion leaders, and through interpersonal exchanges with other
individuals. The information received from these sources shapes adopters’ perceptions
or expectations from the new technology ➔ these perceptions ultimately determine
the individuals’ decision to adopt or reject the technology.
Roger's diffusion model
An important aspect of Roger's diffusion model is that it neither prescribes the
relationships among the major independent variables nor specifies the extent to which
the factors within each major independent variable might influence each other.
Three inherent advantages to the study of technology adoption:
1) Easy to adapt to study the diffusion of any technology in any system.
2) Easy to study various components of the diffusion process in isolation of each
other, due to the descriptive nature of the relationships between the predictors.
3) The diffusion theoretic measures tend to have high content validity,
particularly with regard to the measurement of key psychological attributes,
because the measures are drawn directly from the study population.
● This also has the added advantage of uncovering new dimensions and
discovering new, unexpected factors that might influence the adoption
of a technology.
II. Management-Information-Systems Approach
Two models are used:
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1. Technology acceptance model (TAM)
● Perceived ease of technology use.
● Perceived usefulness to achieve the goal.
2. Unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT)
● Performance expectancy;
● Effort expectancy;
● Social influence;
● Facilitating conditions;
● Gender, age, and technology experience affect influences.
III. The Cognitive Approach
Human cognition = the human mind organizes all stimuli based on their conceptual
similarity with other objects, such that objects that are similar are more closely
associated than those that are dissimilar
Three main ideas of the cognitive approach:
● Technology is a concept in a person’s mind;
● Adoption of technology is a cognitive process;
● In that process, elements or linkages in the cognitive concept change.
○ Technologies that are similar share concepts, are closely linked, and
have similar conceptual structures, while technologies that are
dissimilar share fewer concepts, are farther apart in the cognitive
space, and result in different conceptual arrangements.
○ A map of the cognitive associations between the concepts represent
the individual’s attitudes, values, beliefs, and likely behaviors with
regard to various technologies.
➔ In the cognitive view of the diffusion of innovations, mapping the cognitive
structure and tracking the changes in the conceptual configurations about a
technology among its present and potential users within a system is thus considered
key to understanding the process of adoption of any technology.
New technology leads to rearrangement of concepts. This happens quicker when:
