I think it's telling that the First Monday exchange we read for this week (1, 2, 3) took place in 2009, back when smartphones were much less ubiquitous* in the U.S. than they are today:
It's telling because, even still in 2009, I think the prevailing image of Facebook use was of someone sitting at a desktop or laptop computer primarily focused on a browser window. However, in the second quarter of 2016, 1.03 billion of Facebook's 1.13 billion daily active users and 1.57 billion of its 1.71 billion monthly active users accessed the site via mobile at least some of the time.
Even if the general public doesn't have these stats at their finger tips, I think it's safe to say that the average Facebook user in the popular imagination is now popping in and out of the app via mobile rather than cooped up in a dorm room spending hours at a time on the service.
Indeed, I believe the informal, non-scientific audiences that received Karpinski's study with such a gush of enthusiasm** were picturing Facebook use as potentially replacing study time: "The kids these days are on the computer instead of at their study group." Today, such popular interpretation would almost certainly be about the interruption of study time, in situ, via mobile: "The kids these days are on their smartphones while they're at their study group."
That these studies would likely have been framed, executed, and received very differently today underscores the challenge of research and even intuitive understanding of what Kietzmann and colleagues rightly describe as both "ecology" and "jungle." The pace of change and the complexity of the system really matter. I think it's important that we bring realistic expectations to studies of online behavior and especially its effects. I also think we are wise to bear in mind the moral panic that seems to always accompany technological change in the social sphere (those of you in MSTU 4016 know what I mean).
I'm not sure what conclusion(s) I have to offer here about the nature of online life or the effect of social media use on academic performance. I think both sets of authors are ultimately right that "setting the record straight" in some sort of comprehensive and definitive way is incredibly challenging. I wonder about the methodological limitations of any psychometric study within the broad systemic framework Kitezmann and colleagues lay out and would like to learn more about current thinking in this area.
Perhaps most of all, I wonder how the research will keep up with the changes to the system, especially given the temptation toward rushed work that this First Monday exchange illustrates so vividly.
*Note that this data is for all adults; it was presumably higher for college-age students throughout this time, but I couldn't easily find support of that.
** That gush, incidentally, certainly seems to be what brings out the rancor in Pasek, more, and Hargittai's critique.
(1) We asked the question in class: "Who are these 46 million [?] people who aren't using the Internet?"
Here's a nice episode of On the Media about one of them.
(2) I mentioned a social network that sort of billed itself as "Instagram for writers," i.e., social blogging, but I couldn't remember the name. It was the place where, it seemed to me, everyone was leading and no one was following.
Its name is Biosgraphy, which maybe suggests why I couldn't remember it.
Tying things back to our reading about ICT design and the reader-to-leader framework: I think Biosgraphy failed and Medium succeeded in part because Biosgraphy had a higher barrier to entry with respect to reading. It isn't strictly required to log in to read on Biosgraphy, but it's a hell of a lot harder than on Medium.
Particularly intriguing to me is the recurrent theme of diversity and how inevitable it seemed to be in 1994 that "diversity within a broad framework of shared values" would represent the Third Wave economy.
Clearly the authors have a very broad definition of diversity. Diversity here is the opposite of "mass culture -- of everyone watching the same sitcoms on television." It is represented in "the creation of 'electronic neighborhoods' bound together not by geography but by shared interests."
If the amount of time I spend listening to niche comedy and culture podcasts or following the rabid Hamilton fan community are any indication, then so far so good.
But our more culturally immediate conception of diversity (i.e., of race, of sexual orientation, of gender identity, of socioeconomic status, of geography both regionally and globally)—and particularly an awareness of how power, privilege, and access are unequally distributed across these spectra of difference—provides a lens into how the "Cyberspace" authors thinking goes off the rails. (Or at least into how the history went off the rails so enthusiastically laid by the authors' thinking.)
Drawing an explicit connection to Bruce, I think the authors fail to consistently consider how we "encode social relations into our technologies," particularly when we make them in the first place. Who makes the media and the technology matters for how it will be used and by whom.
The larger and more diverse (in the authors' generic sense) the media ecosystem, the more that access to financial and social capital, high levels of education, etc. seem to give some creators a major competitive advantage over others. Those advantages have the potential to simply reproduce existing inequalities.
Plus, if we do not have a very diverse (in our second sense) group of people making the media and especially the platforms, the biases of the makers we do have tend to become systematic biases. (For a good discussion of this phenomenon in the sharing economy, check out the "You Can’t Code Your Way Out of Racism" episode of Still Processing, which discusses Airbnb's recent announcement of new anti-discrimination policies.)
The authors' argument for the way toward a perhaps utopian Third Wave economy thought a lot about the fiscal and regulatory involved. But I don't see much evidence of a sophisticated social and cultural understanding. Obviously, this is something of an argument from silence, since socio-cultural diversities don't seem to be top of mind for our authors. But in some sense the point is that we're quite unlikely to get anything but silence on this issue.
Let me end with one last quotation:
Turning the economics of mass-production inside out, new information technologies are driving the financial costs of diversity -- both product and personal -- down toward zero, "demassifying" our institutions and our culture. Accelerating demassification creates the potential for vastly increased human freedom.
A fair summarize of the critique I'm trying to get at here is that I believe this statement is only true for those whose social standing afforded them such freedoms in the first place.
(1) I mentioned in class that some of my former colleagues in technical communication were greatly influenced by Tufte. But they do think technical presentations are a part of the culture of science and so have proposed positive examples of responsible and effective use of slides.
Michael Alley (now at Penn State) helped developed the Assertion-Evidence Approach. The basic idea here is to make sure each slide makes a concrete claim (i.e., one claim), and to support that claim with evidence. I love how this approach eliminates what Tufte calls, if I remember correctly, the "bureaucracy of bullets":
(2) I found it hugely helpful when Kristin clarified that we can think of the spectrum from hard to soft determinisms independently of each other. So someone who thinks history / behavior / the future exhibits a high degree of openness to different possible futures (i.e., agency for participants in the system) could be a soft technological determinist and a soft cultural determinist.
McLuhan, if I'm getting this right, would be hard on technological and soft on cultural. Diddo early Heilbroner, at least with respect to the industrial age. My reading of Bruce is a middling position on technological and cultural, because he believes they mutually enmeshed. (This seems to me to be the strongest position.)
As a thought exercise, we can add other orthogonal axes for other aspects of reality according to which various thinkers might think reality is determined (or not). One can imagine biological determinists, for example. And I think we get this in plenty of discussions of genetics and their effects (hard biological determinism = strongly pro-nature in "nature versus nurture"?).
I really started to "get this" when I realized, prompted by Sinan's comment on my last post, that I already know a hard determinist in a discipline I'm much better trained in: theology. Here's my picture. ;)
Myself & colleagues with WNYC's Manoush Zomorodi, host of Note to Self. Manoush is the one without a dopey name tag.
(Note: If you're not a fellow student at TC, check out the italicized hyperlinks to definitions / elaborations of acronyms, jargon, and other terms of art, as well as links to readings when they're publicly available. This felt like a good way to write more accessibly for multiple audiences.)
I'm an Episcopal priest who works to promote digital literacy among religious leaders. As such, I bring a certain set of questions to the conversation about about the possibly determinative roles of technological and social forces in shaping ongoing technical and social development.
I was struck in our readings this week (both in Social and Communicative Aspects of ICTs and in History of Communication) by how these broad and conceptual inquiries into the role of technology in society end up having a lot in common with other philosophical (and even theological) questions about freedom, necessity, and change.
As a theologian, I felt right at home grappling with these issues. Mostly I felt at home being overwhelmed and confused by really big questions that are hard to even pose clearly, let alone answer. How can we feel otherwise when thinking critically about cause and effect, human motivations, etc.?
In any event, I was confident in these ideas' resonance with my religious colleagues' that I dove right in with my aspiration of sharing my learning with them as I move through the CMLTD program.
One thing I'd like to do in this course is something like the opposite ... bring some of the questions, anxieties, and aspirations that I carry as a religious educator to bear on the material we're engaging in the course.
What are the stakes of technological determinism from where I sit? Several issues come to mind, but I want to focus for now on attentiveness/mindfulness/distractibility.
I agree with Smith and Marx as well as Ceruzzi that the public at large generally buys the idea that technology is the primary determining factor in society. I suspect most would agree with Heilbroner that this is particular true of today's industrial and post-industrial contexts.
But if you ask the average person on the street about if and how technology determines our individual and collective behavior, I suspect the answer you would get would be about social media, smart phones, teens addicted to their gadgets, etc.
Whether for social or technical reasons,* we can hardly argue with the claim that many people (myself included) feel a pull to be plugged in—a pull we don't seem to fully control. (*Though I am inclined to agree with Lee Rainie that people aren't "hooked on their devices" but rather "hooked on each other.")
One person who's done a lot of work on these questions of technology mindfulness, attention, addiction, etc. is Manoush Zomorodi of WNYC's Note to Self ("the tech show about being human"). It was fun to get Manoush in a room with a bunch of my colleagues this summer to talk about these issues.
What I said in response to Manoush's work and to the broad sweep of Ceruzzi's deceptively imprecise argument is that the problem of getting swept up by forces that carry us along into living in ways we'd rather not live (including, gasp, using PowerPoint!) is a very old problem. I'm not sure it has much to do with Moore's Law, though perhaps media (very broadly conceived) have always been a part of it.
For example, in this realm of distractibility: What I experience primarily as a desire to take out my phone during class is what one of my contemplative monastic friends experiences as a desire to fiddle with the ribbons of her prayer book during sermons. That we have very ancient poems/prayers/humble brags like this—
O LORD, I am not proud; *
I have no haughty looks.
I do not occupy myself with great matters, *
or with things that are too hard for me.
But I still my soul and make it quiet,
like a child upon its mother's breast; *
my soul is quieted within me.
—suggests that getting your brain to slow down and pay attention has never been easy.
Of course, old problems are still problems. They still require addressing in a concrete way. And it's probably true that smart phones in particular can (and have) made the problem of personal mindfulness quite a bit worse. I believe the explosive popularity of mindfulness practices are one response. Declaring war on notifications is another more immediate and technical fix.
All this is to say that as a religious educator I am interested in what we might call the psychology (or even the spirituality) of attention. In my experience, an implicit belief in technological determinism often underlies conversations about this topic, and when that is the case it is hard to steer them in a hopeful direction.
"Is there anything I can possibly do to hold back the tide of digital distraction (at school, at work, at church, wherever)?" Yes, absolutely. But only if you believe that resistance isn't futile and are willing to take some steps. Pace, Paul Ceruzzi.
Postscript:This post got out of hand fast, so I didn't get to talk about some of the other issues that came to mind. One is the social justice commitment that many people of faith share, and I mention it because a timely case-in-point hit my inbox last night. My friend Keith Anderson, a Lutheran pastor who writes a lot about technology, actually just wrote a nice piece along these lines, basically a religious leader's take on the gig economy. I love the little mini-victory over the supposed forces of technological determinism at the end (but notice he has chosen this way "for now").
