Going viral (by accident)

Another fall semester here at the University of Alabama brings another media-related kerfuffle involving our students. Last fall, a student made a threatening comment on a UA sorority's YouTube video, which set in motion a campus-wide panic that circulated through social media (YikYak in particular) and lasted several days. This week's incident involves yet another UA sorority's YouTube video, but this time it centers on the video itself rather than a comment on a video. And, like the last incident, it makes for a teachable moment that is highly relevant to all undergraduate students (particularly those who were actually in the video, some of whom may be in my classes).

The video, which may or may not be available by the time you read this, was a recruitment video depicting the members of a sorority smiling and waving at the camera, dancing around, and doing what I would describe as frolicking. This is the first lesson: part of the difficulty of discussing any kind of media content is describing it. Each person will likely highlight some aspect of the content and leave out other aspects. One could note that all of the sorority sisters were white, or good-looking, or thin, or that the cinematography and editing was very professional looking for a student production, or that the young women don't seem to actually do much in the video. Coverage of the video in mainstream news and in blogs provide an excellent example of media framing: the aspects of the video that are mentioned are not chosen at random, but rather chosen so as to promote (or at least discuss) one of many possible interpretations.

The spread of the video also provides a good case study of audiences in the age of viral content. Many lessons on media creation start with the question: who is your audience? The answer to this question informs everything from aesthetic choices to the medium or venue through which you disseminate your message. In most cases, the Internet allows for a precise calibration of the relationship between content and audience, much more precise than the big-tent, shotgun approach more commonly used in old-school broadcast media. But in some cases, like this sorority video, content specifically tailored for a very small audience escapes into the wild. By now, there is a long list of media content, in particular YouTube videos, intended for a small, specific audience that, through no intention of its creators, found a much larger audience.

The prototypical example of this is Rebecca Black's Friday. Part of the pleasure of this kind of viral content, part of what makes it unique, is a result of the disjuncture between intended audience and actual audience. We're so used to seeing content that is either tailored to us or intended for a homogeneous audience that it is novel to see content that was so obviously not designed for us. Seeing this kind of content raises the question: "what were they (the creators, the target audience) thinking?" Like some kinds of reality TV, this type of content gives us a window into a culture and mindset that is foreign to us.

Also, like the Rebecca Black video, what makes the UA sorority recruitment video worth watching for so many people is that there are different ways to hate it or enjoy it. Some viewers seem to have taken unironic pleasure in the attractiveness of the video's stars, others laugh at its apparent earnestness, and others use it as evidence of an argument about the homogeneity of Greek organizations, and UA sororities in particular, or of how oblivious said sororities are of this fact, or of some aspect of a hegemonic culture that has inculcated the video's creators with this inability to see the underlying message that the video is sending, or that there is nothing wrong nor remarkable about the video and that the reaction to the video is indicative of political correctness run amok. The popularity of the video, the number of clicks and shares it gets, doesn't take into account which of these interpretations or reactions the user has. And, of course, the networked nature of social media and the way in which YouTube and similar sites highlight the number of clicks and shares facilitate the process: we watch it and talk about it because it is what everyone is watching and talking about.

I'm excited to find out what happens next, and to be a part of helping something positive come out of all this. It feels as though it could go either way. It could be yet another cultural object used to bludgeon people on the other side of the cultural divide, a prop in an escalating online shouting match. I imagine that such an experience would be thoroughly demoralizing to the content creators, prompting them to become deeply cynical about public discourse, causing them to "play it safe" by not sharing anything online or creating the most bland, benign content they can think of.

But I hope it doesn't turn out that way. I hope it leads to deeper reflection on what the video depicts, how it depicts its subjects, and how it is received by an audience with diverse, often diametrically opposed, viewpoints. If our students can get past the initial sting of intense scrutiny, I think they can learn a lot about the power of media. It certainly won't be hard to convince these students of the relevance of these lessons to their lives.

Reddit, Gawker, and The Freedom to Say Horrible Things

As a Redditor and someone who is interested in how online communities work, it’s been fascinating/sad to see what happened at Reddit over the past couple of weeks.

The initial decision by the company to fire a beloved employee touched off an angry user rebellion which eventually led to the harassment of CEO Ellen Pao by a smaller group of users and the CEO’s eventual resignation. The whole series of incidents revealed to me that Reddit consists of two factions that can be defined by how upset they were at Pao. These factions always existed, but recent events make the differences more visible.

It’s important to note that the size of these two factions are not as easy to measure as it initially seems. The highly vocal, negative anti-Pao sentiment (and, more generally, strong emotions about anything) is conspicuous while the size of the other, less vocal group must be inferred by the fact that the vast majority of content on the site has nothing to do with Pao or the recent controversy. The first group is much more highly invested in the site than the second group – it likely consists of a greater proportion of moderators, heavy users of the site, and people who bother to up/downvote Pao-related posts. But the second group is likely larger. The first group consists of “strange bedfellows”: those with legitimate gripes about the seemingly arbitrary and poorly communicated decisions of their leader and those who are simply predisposed to expressing hatred. 

The small group of people with ill will is influencing the fate of the site, but it isn't being done directly through the upvoting/downvoting of content or through posts or comments on the site. Instead, sites like Gawker and traditional news coverage focus on the small, vocal group with ill will and drive public perception of the entire site, which influences who participates or invests in the website. 

The misperception of Reddit promulgated by news stories is so beguiling in part because people judge online communities in much the same way that they judge offline communities. But Reddit isn’t a community in the ways that offline groupings of people like universities, neighborhoods or even countries are communities. It isn’t structured to be one shared experience or reflect a single, shared set of values. Proof of this: my experience of using Reddit changed very little during this upheaval (it was still mostly pictures of delicious hamburgers, science AMAs, and gifs of hilarious failed attempts at handshakes). By creating self-organizing sub-communities or "sub-reddits", the structure of Reddit (and perhaps the structure of other decentralized social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) facilitate distinct, individualized experiences. However, thanks to stories like the one in Gawker, this reality may ultimately matter less than public perception. 

And so I couldn't help but relish the irony when Gawker, immediately after mocking Reddit for having a crisis over what to do with hurtful, hateful content, had a crisis of its own when editor Tommy Craggs resigned after the Founder and CEO pulled a hurtful, hateful piece of content without consulting him. 

The cynical take on what happened at Reddit and Gawker is that these websites are getting popular and trying to make the next step toward profitability, making themselves appealing to advertisers by sanding off their rough edges and eliminating some types of content that the websites used to tolerate. In doing so, they are compromising the values of free speech and/or independent journalism. Gawker CEO Nick Denton states in an email to one of his employees that "These are the stories we used to do. But times have changed." Does this refer to the commercialization of Gawker and similar websites, or does it refer to the maturation of some of its leaders, a maturation which helped them realize that there are values other than free speech and getting web traffic, values like a consideration of the harm that words can do to others even when they are protected by law, and that sometimes these values come into conflict. Perhaps the phrase "times have changed" refers to both changes. Perhaps two forces - the commercial and the compassionate - are actually pushing in the same direction for once, against hurtful content, leaving libertarians on the other side, opposing both commerce and compassion (I don't like those odds).

In both the Reddit case and the Gawker case, the way in which the decisions to alter content were made (in a kind of sloppy, ad hoc way) left the company open to criticism. Personally, I side with the upper management of Reddit in their cleansing their site of hateful speech. With Gawker, it's trickier. I suppose I feel that they set themselves up by posting news stories that had so little value to begin with and were so obviously hurtful of others. Denton found himself, as he notes, in an impossible position: he had to either run a story that was "pure poison" to the reputation of the Gawker brand or know that some of his talent would resign in protest after he pulled the article.

But I think the major takeaway from this may be that the conflict at Gawker, like the conflict at Reddit, was kind of inevitable. You have hurtful content, and when you're small and the mainstream media doesn't draw attention to this content, you can get away with this. But once you get big and the eyes are on you, you either become associated with hurtful content or you change the brand's identity by restricting content, firing those who won't comply, and alienating part of your core users. Though I don't have that much sympathy for Denton, I find his remark about balancing the "calculus of cruelty and benefit" to be an encouraging sign for a purveyor of prurience (one that sounds oddly similar to Institutional Review Boards' policy regarding balancing risk and benefit in scientific studies).

To be sure, you can still say horrible, hurtful things on the Internet. Which raises the question: Where do Tommy Craggs and the libertarians leaving Reddit go? Do they all go to someplace like Vice Media? What does Vice do when all this happens to them? Is hate like energy: incapable of being created or destroyed, only redirected?

Anger Sells

First, a disclaimer about my disposition: I don’t like anger. I guess there’s nothing wrong with it per se, but I’m of the opinion that, like any strongly felt emotion, it can cloud people’s judgment. Want to get angry at the Slayer concert? Knock yourself out (literally). But if you’re trying to make some sort of judgment about the world around you, I think that being angry can only lead you astray.

And yet, I have to admit, right now, after reading about last night’s mass murder, I feel angry, angry and fatigued, because I know the cycle: violence happens, then people want something to be done about the violence, but that typically involves restricting or monitoring others in some way (restricting gun access, making your mental health history available to authorities, monitoring your web use, censoring (or at least condemning) certain kinds of expression). Then a group of people will become angered by the effort to control or restrict them, citing their right to be free and how it is being infringed. When I think about the seeming inevitability of the cycle, I get tired. I also think, “What can I do about it?”

Maybe my small contribution as a researcher and media educator can be to further understanding of the role of anger in this whole cycle. Being angry at some group of “unfamiliar others” (e.g., not some ex-boss or some ex-girlfriend who pissed you off) seems like a necessary-but-not-sufficient criterion for committing mass murder. The violent acts seem to grow from expressions of anger and hatred, and they seem to inspire anger and hatred.

Maybe there’s something about the way media allows us to stay “immersed” in an angry state that perpetuates this cycle. We all get angry from time to time, sometimes at individuals, but other times at groups of people we don’t know personally (Republicans, Democrats, politicians in general, liberal media, Fox News, Comcast, etc.). How much time do you spend in that angry state, and does exposure to certain media messages keep you in that angry state? My guess is that in order to engage in an act of mass violence, you need to have been in a prolonged state of anger against unfamiliar others, and that media (mainstream media messages and interpersonal content via online communities) likely plays some role in helping to sustain that anger. In this respect, I suspect it is different than violence against people you know, which might be prompted by one incident and happen in the heat of the moment.

But here’s why it’s hard to just say that expressions of anger are uniformly bad. Sometimes, you have anger at an injustice, and the anger seems to be what motivates people to take action. Without the emotional “fire” of anger, people might not take action, and injustice would be allowed to persist. But, of course, that concept of “injustice” is subjective: the people perpetrating the initial act of aggression often see themselves as bringing justice to the world. So, too, do the angry people who respond.

Maybe it’s what you do when you get angry – some people act aggressively while others take political action. While it is obvious that those who respond to mass violence do not (thank god) respond with acts of aggression that are of the same degree, I can see the responses as acts of aggression (albeit on the less harmful end of the continuum). Often, people don’t respond to acts of mass violence by being motivated to vote, which is in many ways a slow, complex process involving numerous compromises and, as such, not exactly anger-sating. They are often verbally aggressive toward others that they feel are somehow part of the “other side”. I see protests as somewhere in the middle: sometimes, they are acts of political and civic action; other times, they are not much different than coordinated verbal aggression directed at an ideological “other”.

Moreover, any attempt to say “don’t be angry” or “don’t expose yourself to anger-inducing media” to anyone will likely meet with the response: “you’re just trying to pacify and distract us from the injustice!” Who am I to say that anyone else shouldn’t be pissed off at the state of the world, or should avoid news that makes them angry and watch more cat videos instead (or this damn dog getting licked by cows, which is pretty cute), or at least maintain some balance between the two?

But still, I do want to talk to people about how anger in media, at least potentially, at least sometimes, only appears to be about rectifying injustice and improving the world, when in actuality, it is just a kind of emotional button-pushing, just working on a vulnerability in our brains, this ancient instinct to be tribal, to find a threat, to identify some Other as the source of evil or injustice. I cannot tell anyone what kinds of messages are button-pushing and what kinds will help motivate people to take action that will make the world a better place. To do so would be imposing my concept of “justice” on them, and I just don’t think people dig that.

But maybe they’d be receptive to this message: If you’re in the business of producing or circulating media content, you’ll never go broke overestimating consumers’ appetite for content that appeals to their sense of righteous anger. Put simply: anger sells. And we all like to think it’s not the media we consume, but that it’s the media the other guy consumes. So, take a step back. Take a good, long, hard look at the media content that you consume that you know makes you angry. Be open to the possibility that the messages you choose might just be, at least in part, button-pushing. Even if it (and you) is/are on the right side of justice, maybe there’s some part of it that just ends up keeping you angry and keeps you pushing the buttons for more. Keep asking, “what can I do to make the world a better place?” And if the answer is “shoot someone”, think a little harder.    

Affordance or Attribute?

Another May, another great International Communication Association conference. Each year, I get to know more and more scholars from all over the world, seeming to run into someone I know every time I walk from one panel to another. Of course, it's also an opportunity to get back together with old friends from graduate school and the professors who helped shape my research interests and teaching style, but I think the real value of ICA is its ability to foster new connections, between people and between ideas.

I was particularly excited to attend a panel on affordances as a framework for understanding computer mediated communication. The appeal of the affordance-based approach was wonderfully and entertainingly laid out by Andrew Schrock of USC, who has created The Journal of Toaster Studies. The journal isn't real; it's a kind of parody of a certain type of scholarship about technology, or really a way of thinking about technology. So many of us who study digital media or new media focus on (and start to anthropomorphize) the actual technology itself, which sounds appropriate until you start thinking about how silly this would sound if we were talking about, say, toasters.

It was easy for me to see the problems with an exclusively techno-centric approach when I started my dissertation on the new media choice environment in 2011. Since then, the problem with making declarations about rapidly changing media technologies has only gotten worse, and yet we, as scholars and laypeople, continue to make claims about specific technologies, like Facebook. I'm trying to think about (and write about) technologies in terms of characteristics or qualities rather than specific iterations of technologies. I try not to think about sharing and responding to information on Facebook, but rather sharing and responding to information using social media (even more specifically: social media that facilitates communication among a fairly large group of people who know each other in in the offline world). Who the hell knows what'll happen to Facebook, but I assume there will be media technology that facilitates communication among fairly large groups of people who know each other in the offline world. And it would be even better if we could point to some quality or characteristic of social media (perhaps it's "public-ness" or perceived public-ness) that is most commonly associated with certain outcomes.

So this is what brought me to a panel on an affordance-based approach to studying media technologies. But as I heard from the panelists and the then members of the audience, I started to think that I had made a mistake. The affordance-based approach seemed to center on who got to decide how technologies were used and how that came to be. I thought back to where I had first encountered the idea of an affordance-based approach and realized, in the middle of the panel, that it was an article about an attribute based approach. I'd just gotten the "A" words mixed up.

But that wasn't quite it. Multiple panelists had presented examples of affordances that were, to me, the same thing as attributes: searchability and persistence (e.g., the recording and archiving of expressions in online communication). Indeed, danah boyd refers to these two qualities as affordances. So maybe we were talking about the same thing. Confused, and in a room full of experts on the topic, I took the opportunity to ask the room, "what is the difference between attributes and affordances"?

I'll paraphrase Cliff Lampe's answer: attributes are uses that are designed by the media technology producer while affordances have more to do with how users perceive the designed object to be useful, or what it should or could be used for. This helped un-confuse me a bit, but I was still left wondering why I thought of something like "persistence" as an attribute.

From what I heard at the panel and what I've read in various articles, the affordance-based approach seems to be in direct opposition to technological determinism. In fact, I see it as defined by it's opposition to this view of the relation between technology and people. In this respect, it is of a piece with the theory of Social Construction of Technology. There are two assumptions being made by these approaches: that people (who possess certain priorities and perspectives) shape technologies and not the other way around, and that this shaping process should be the central object of study. As much as I agree that technological determinism, in its purest form, is wrong-headed, I don't share the aforementioned assumptions.

I agree that people often use technologies in ways that were not intended by designers, that future design is informed by these unintended uses, and that various social and economic factors influence the likelihood and prevalence of these unintended uses. But concentrating our attention so exclusively on when and why unintentional use takes place ignores a lot of important aspects of how certain, very common uses of media technologies result in certain outcomes right now. It is important to study these common uses and outcomes because the outcomes are important (e.g., wellbeing, depression, social support, health outcomes, sexist attitudes) and our initial, untested assumptions about how certain common uses relate to certain outcomes are often wrong.

If people typically use a one-to-one communication technology like text-messaging in which messages typically persist, then this may more likely result in a certain outcome than if people typically used one-to-one communication technologies like Snapchat where messages typically do not persist. Can someone use text-messaging in such a way that messages don't persist? Yes. Can someone take screenshots of Snapchat messages so that they do persist? Yes. Could both technologies be altered by hackers so that they don't do what they were intended to do? You bet. Is this relationship between hackers, users, technologies, and designers worth studying? Totally. I care deeply about why technologies are the way they are and why certain uses become common and why others do not, but I also want to further understanding of how certain uses, regardless of how they came to be, result in certain outcomes.

Sometimes, connections between affordances of media technologies and outcomes occur regardless of socioeconomic or cultural contexts; people with lower self-esteem may believe that fewer people actually read what they post on social media regardless of whether they live in Bangor, Bangkok, and Bangledesh. Other times, such connections only occur under certain specific conditions. By looking at how affordances and outcomes relate to one another, we are not ignoring context or individual differences. Assessing the influence of those factors are part of any robust inquiry. The fact that we often find that the same effects in incredibly diverse socioeconomic and cultural circumstances should not be taken as a wholesale dismissal of the importance of such factors.

So, here's what I'm left with. You can concentrate on a few aspects of the intersection between media technologies and people. You can examine the relationships among designers, hackers, and users as articulated through different uses of the technologies (designed attribute vs. affordance). You can examine how uses come into being and become more or less popular (affordance as outcome). You can examine how common uses of media technology relate to outcomes (affordance as cause). Do we all use the word "affordance" to describe what we're studying? On a practical level, this doesn't work for me right now. When I search for the word in Google Scholar, most of the research concentrates on the first two parts of the technology/human intersection and not the third.

It's something I'm continuing to think about, and ICA, specifically that one panel, helped me zoom out and think about this issue as I continue my research.

A paean to cassettes

While leafing through the book "mix tape: the art of cassette culture", which was recently given to me as a gift from a good friend, I got to thinking about how I came of age at a time when cassette tapes were the dominant mode of conveying music, and a time when VHS cassettes were the dominant medium through which video was disseminated. But the big innovation that came with cassettes - both audio and video - was that you could record on them. They were, to my knowledge, the first widespread medium for recording audio and video.

The other widespread recording medium that was already established was photography. But you typically took pictures of other things or other people, not pictures of existing artistic products (though, I suppose, plenty of people took pictures of paintings, causing some crisis regarding the value we place in an image). Of course, the influence of technologies that allow people to reproduce or copy art on the value of art has been thoroughly explored (probably beat into the ground at this point). I suppose I'm less interested in the ways cassettes allowed people to copy music and video and more interested in the ways in which it facilitated the re-purposing of existing work.

It wasn't radical re-purposing in most cases. It wasn't like we were using Photoshop to create some sophisticated blending of images, or using some audio editing software to create a unique mash-up. We were just putting songs next to other songs on a mix tape, or an episode of Late Night with David Letterman next to an episode of Square One. The juxtaposition still creates something unique, but the way in which it changes the meaning or mood of the listening/viewing experience is more subtle than the total reconfiguration that digital tools facilitate.

The other defining characteristic of that era, to me, only becomes apparent in retrospect: we couldn't disseminate the thing we created very widely. That is the difference between the mix tape and the Playlist on ITunes, Spotify, or YouTube. The mix tape was like a private joke, only intended to be relevant to certain people at a certain time and place, which makes it seem more intimate as I remember it. It makes me wonder about various kinds of hyper-local, hyper-personal social media like Yik Yak and Snapchat that have arisen in the wake of broadcasting social media like Twitter. Will the teens of today look back wistfully on the Snaps or Yaks they sent one another in the same way that I look back on mix tapes I made and received, and those cobbled-together VHS cassettes containing whatever I found funny in 1995?

Of course, the difference is that Snaps and Yaks are also intentionally ephemeral while cassettes were intended to preserve. Also, cassettes were intimate in that they were meant to be shared with one other person, or a small group, but they were comprised of elements from popular culture, which kept them from being too intimate or personal (though when I think back to some of the mix tapes I made for others, they do seem as embarrassingly soul-baring as an ill-conceived Yak). There wasn't even the possibility that the cassette mix would ever leak out into the wider public and impress anyone other than its intended audience of one or a few intimates.

With cassettes, we had a kind of circumscribed freedom to play around with the music and video that informed who we were and who we were becoming. Obviously, home recordings are worth preserving - the home videos and, though there aren't very many, the home audio recordings we made when we were young. But the mix tapes and the VHS tapes of TV shows seem to me to be more indicative of that time, more unique because of their limitations.

Instant Gratification & Digital Media: An Assumed Connection

At this year's South by Southwest Interactive conference, I attended a panel about the connection between instant gratification and digital technology. While these types of gatherings are great because they bring together people from so many different disciplines (e.g., education technology designers, academics, filmmakers, bloggers, etc.), this can result in conversations in which folks are talking past one another rather than listening and responding to one another.

The panelists at this talk tended to fall into two camps: "hand wringers" and "digital media apologists". The hand-wringers spent their time listing concerns about the ways in which overuse of digital technologies would lead to a society in which people could not delay gratification (which was assumed to be necessary to forge lasting, fulfilling relationships and for general social harmony). They relied on the growing body of evidence supporting the importance of gratification delay and grit (i.e., persistence in the face of multiple setbacks) in a variety of domains, including work and relationships. The apologists pointed out how the instantly gratifying digital media badmouthed by the hand-wringers (e.g., Twitter) connects and empowers formerly disenfranchised members of our society and gives rise to important social movements like #blacklivesmatter.

I kept waiting for a more nuanced discussion to break out, but it never happened. The experience did, however, make me think about how the conversation about this topic would benefit from some clarification of arguments and concepts. So, here would be some starting places:

1. Is there solid evidence of any kind of link between digital media use and any of the effects discussed (namely, reduced attention span and reduced ability to delay gratification)? The connection between these things is assumed to exist by almost everyone. Even many the digital media apologists assume that it exists, but differ in that they think that in addition to these effects, there are positive effects as well. I've found there to be a link among American college students between self-control and social media use as well as digital video viewing,  but I didn't find a connection between self-control and cell phone use. This data was gathered before smartphones became truly dominant, so I might find different connections if I replicated the study.

But what about this assumed connection between grit (or lack thereof) and digital media use? Has anybody even tested this yet?

2. Does this affect young people or every user? There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the habits we acquire as younger people affect our behavior later in life, and that greater neuroplacticity of younger brains mean that media affects young minds, habits, and other behaviors more profoundly. But it is possible that adults who start using digital media in adulthood may be affected by it (specifically, may experience reduced ability to delay gratification as a result of heavy use of digital media).

3. Lowered attention span vs. Inability to delay gratification. Many people seem to conflate these two. Some experimental designs would conflate the two (e.g., an experiment in which people had to choose between reading for homework, which often requires sustained attention AND an ability to forego something more immediately gratifying, and a video game, which provides greater engagement and novelty as well as an immediate sense of accomplishment and pleasure). But it is worth testing these two things separately. It could be that digital media presents us with short bursts of information, and so it hurts our ability to concentrate on or pay attention to anything for a sustained period of time, and/or it may hurt our abilities to forego more immediately gratifying options for less immediately gratifying ones.

4. Hedonic experiences vs. habitual "empty" experiences vs. social surveillance. As the hand-wringers were talking about how digital media provides us with so many opportunities for feelings of accomplishment and affirmation and stimulation, I thought, "what about email?" Email seems to be one of the hardest habits to break, and yet almost everyone I know hates using it. It may be "gratifying" to check one's email in the way that scratching an itch may be gratifying, but I wouldn't call it pleasurable or hedonic. I'd imagine many people feel similarly about social media use: they don't like it, and they don't want to be doing it, yet they feel compelled to do it.

This gets me thinking about designations between things we have to do (like work), things we want to do (like reading a book or climbing a mountain), and things we end up doing (like channel surfing or frittering away time online). It also gets me thinking about the use of the term "addiction" in the media context. When we say that we are addicted to some kind of media use, maybe this just means that it's something we do but don't have to do, like work, nor do we want to do it (i.e., it doesn't give us pleasure), like having a blast with friends. It's value isn't immediately apparent in the way that the value of work or the value of hanging out with friends is. And yet, it could present us with some value: the value of social surveillance, of knowing where we stand with those around us, our family, friends, and co-workers. Email and social media provide us with relevant information about where we stand with these folks.

At the same time, there may be a "purely habitual" component to email and social media use. That is, through repetition, one might do it without thinking about what value it holds. It just is what you do when you pick up your phone, when you sit down at your laptop, or when you aren't otherwise engaged. There is evidence to suggest that when we aren't otherwise engaged, our brains "default" to self-reflection. Perhaps our seeking out of information on where we stand with others (i.e., the standing of our social self) is a symptom or a consequence of this kind of thinking.

5. Do the effects of digital media use carry over to non-digital contexts (e.g., eating), or does the inability to delay gratification assume that digital media is available at all times? When we talk about the poor decisions that people who have reduced ability to delay gratification make, is it because they are choosing some proximate digital instantly gratifying option, or is it because the use of digital media has reduced their abilities to delay gratification of any kind (not just digital kinds). If it were the former, then simply taking the digital temptation out of the environment would immediately reduce the harm, but if the effects of digital media use manifest themselves in other domains, then changing one's ability to delay gratification would take a bit longer, and you would need to take the digital temptations out of the environment for a longer period of time to change the habits of the individual in all domains.

So, going to the talk made me want to think more carefully about how to test these connections. It also reminded me of how easily discussions of this topic can fall into something repetitious, resembling age-old battles between hand-wringing finger-waggers and apologists. Keeping an open mind going into the process of inquiry is essential, but so is greater specificity regarding the concepts and claims we are putting to the test.

Sports, Controversy, and the Court of Public Opinion in the Digital Age

As a fan of the New England Patriots, I feel compelled to think about (if not to speak about) the current kerfuffle regarding improperly inflated footballs. From what I gather, it is the general consensus that the footballs that the Patriots were playing with were not properly inflated, and that this gives the team an unfair advantage (hence, the existence of official rules regarding the proper inflation of footballs). It is not known (or not agreed upon, anyway) who, if anyone, is responsible for the fact that the footballs were not properly inflated. If the coach or the quarterback were aware of this or caused it, then that would be a big problem for the team. If it was an equipment manager who was responsible for the misdeed, that would be a much smaller problem.

I am well aware of the way in which my fandom biases everything I might think or say on the matter. So it seems uninteresting to offer any opinion regarding the guilt of the parties involved. But the whole incident did cause me to reflect on the nature of controversies and how we, the public, judge whether or not someone is guilty based on information we received through the media. I'll offer three factors which play a role in this process. Note that none of these three factors has anything to do with determining what actually happened. That is, they should not matter, but they do.

1. Having something that is easy to make silly jokes about changes the tenor of the conversation about the controversy. In this case, we have the word "balls" and sentences describing how "balls are perfect". Even if this incident did involve a breach of rules which compromises the integrity of the game (which I would take to be a relatively serious thing), the fact that people keep saying "balls" keeps it from being very serious. Comedians have a field day with it, as does meme culture on the Internet, which tends to silly-fy everything. This got me thinking about news events in general and how the presence of any potentially silly element can change public perception of an issue. Let's say someone tried to assassinate a head of state and the assassin shot him/her in the leg. Now imagine that the assassin shot him/her in the ass. In the first case, the public's discussion would contain little if any humor. In the second case, it would probably contain a lot of humor, leading people to take the whole thing a bit less seriously. I have to wonder how the discussion around something as deadly serious as Eric Garner's homicide would have been different if his name was Ha Ha Clinton-Dix.

2. Breaking the rules matters more when it may have affected the outcome of something. Most people (Pats fan or not) seem to agree that the improper inflation of the footballs did not cause the Patriots to win the game in question (which the Pats won 45-7). I seem to recall reading somewhere that the improperly inflated footballs were swapped out for properly inflated ones at halftime. After halftime, the Pats continued to dominate the other team. The circumstances under which cheating takes place shouldn't matter when judging guilt, but in the court of public opinion, they clearly do. And it certainly matters when you discuss proper punishments. To punish the Patriots by banning them from the Super Bowl would seem a bit much, given the fact that no one argues that they would have achieved that goal regardless of the inflation status of the football. But imagine if the same controversy had occurred in the other conference final playoff game, which went into overtime and hinged on a handful of key plays. Any minor change to the catchability of a football could have easily swayed the outcome of that game. The tenor of the discussion, again, would be more serious if the circumstances were different.

3. We live in an era of amateur forensic detectives. This, to me, is the most interesting thing to reflect on, and to consider how it may apply not only to this incident, but to all kinds of controversies in the era of digital media. My hunch is the increase in the ease with which we can record things and spread them around the world instantly has given people the expectation that if something occurred, they should be able to see visual evidence of it. They should not have to rely on the word of others, or trust in larger organizations, to determine the truth. Consider other recent sports controversies: L.A. Clippers' racist owner Donald Sterling was caught on tape saying racist things; Ray Rice was caught on tape punching his fiance. The presence or absence of this kind of evidence does not determine whether or not someone did something wrong, nor does it necessarily determine whether the person will be punished either by their employer or by the law. It does, however, play a huge role in determining whether the public feels that you are guilty and, again, affects the tenor of the discussion. When visual evidence is absent, as is the case with the Patriots' purposely deflating footballs (at least as of 1/25/15), then people are less willing to assume guilt. This expectation of visual evidence has troubling consequences for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. By their very nature, these acts occur in private and are not recorded easily (while virtually everything that takes place in public is recorded, whether we like it or not). Our waning trust in authorities coincides with our need (and our ability) to "see for ourselves". We need to at least see the evidence, even if we can't agree on how to interpret it.

We do love a good controversy, and there is clearly an agenda setting effect present in this case, whereby ESPN analysts spend lots of time discussing this aspect of the sport and the Internet follows (though I wonder about the backlash against ESPN's tendency to beat a dead horse, as seemed to happen when Tim Tebow became popular). So it is unlikely that we will stop talking about improperly inflated footballs until after the Super Bowl. But I'm interested to see how the tenor of the discussion plays out.