What do we mean by "Influencer?"

One of the most fruitful panels I attended at this year's International Communication Association conference concerned the definition of "influencer." The term has always rubbed me the wrong way, always sounded like self-serving marketer-speak that misleads us about how influential anyone is online. As Crystal Abidin of Curtin University pointed out during the panel, the term is deployed strategically. If calling yourself an influencer makes you money and avoids the kind of regulation to which professional media producers are subject, then that's what you'll call yourself. 

What are the alternatives? "Content producer" is certainly less aggrandizing, but it also makes no claim with regard to reach, engagement, or any other metric of success. Even if only a few people watch my videos, I'm still a content producer. The same could be said of platform-specific or media-specific monikers like YouTuber, TikTokker, podcaster, streamer, or vlogger/blogger. There needed to be some term that differentiated online content producers with a certain level of success - however one wanted to define and measure success - from those without it. 

For a time, that term was "micro-celebrity," a name as diminishing (who wants to be thought of as a "micro" anything?) as "influencer" is aggrandizing. Aside from their opposite associations, differences in name matter for scholars, journalists, or interested members of the public seeking out research on this phenomenon. Search the databases for articles, chapters, and books on "influencers" and you'll be missing some of the most important work on the topic, like Alice Marwick's work on successful YouTubers - highly applicable to the successful TikTokkers we now refer to as "influencers." So, that was one takeaway: if you're interested in influencers, start with the scholarly work done on micro-celebrity. 

Number of followers = Influencer?

The European Commission defines Influencers as "content creators who often advertise or sell products on a regular basis." While this jibes with most people's conception of Influencers, it doesn't seem inclusive enough. It rules out anyone with a large audience who makes money through Patreon or pre-roll ads (which, I would think, is the platform advertising rather than the content creator, but the creator still gets a cut of the ad revenue) instead of overt paid promotion. Such a user might be highly influential - raising awareness of a cause or an approach to investing or a political candidate - but would not meet the strict legal definition set forth by the European Commission.

Most of the research on Influencers, both qualitative and quantitative, points to some metric - usually the user's number of followers - as evidence that they are, in fact, an influencer. As best I can tell, the cut-off for Influencer status is arbitrary and/or based on round numbers chosen by marketing professionals. The bare minimum seems to be 1,000 followers, qualifying for the lowest tier of influencer - the "nano-influencer."

In addition to metrics, there seems to be an aesthetic component to the accepted definition of Influencer. Accounts referred to as Influencers tend to feature individuals or, less frequently, duos or families, and they typically appear in all or most of their videos, typically directly addressing the camera/audience. A popular (and, perhaps, highly influential) account that compiled thematically related clips would not fit this aesthetic description nor would an account run by a group of comedians. And yet sometimes, such accounts are referred to as influencers. 

Are Influencers Actually Influential?

Why does it matter whom we call influencers? What are we assuming about them when we take them as a starting point to studying or reporting on some social phenomenon?

All members of the ICA panel seemed skeptical that everyone, or even most, influencers are especially influential, and skeptical of the direct relationship - often assumed by journalists, users, and even researchers - between follower count and influence. Marketers would tell you that "reach" is an important aspect of influence, but not the only aspect. To be influential, it helps to be well liked. And sure, the act of following an account implies affinity, but how many of those who follow an account see every post, "like" every post, and have their beliefs, attitudes, or behavior influenced by every post? A subset of followers actually see any given post, and of that, a smaller subset might be persuadable, depending on their mood and the proximity between their current beliefs and attitudes and those of the influencer.

Most press articles and more than a few academic articles and books about influencers don't make the distinction between reach and influence. At best, these models of influence lack nuance but are still fundamentally sound. All things being equal, a content creator with 1,000,000 followers is probably more influential than one with 10,000 followers. This kind of relative judgment of influence is a logic that underpins the entire advertising industry; an industry, it should be noted, that gave rise to the term "influencer." How effective is a given ad at persuading people to purchase a product? Surprisingly, it's still difficult to tell. 

Part of the reason it's difficult to tell is that companies creating and selling ads don't have much incentive to prove the magnitude of their efficacy. All they have to prove to companies seeking to promote their goods and services through advertising is the relative advantage in the marketplace compared to their competition. As long as they are more visible to potential consumers than the competition, they're more likely to sell more products or services than the competition. 

But for those of us who care less about selling one particular set of products or services and care more about influence in general (who to vote for, whether or not to get vaccinated, changing one's beliefs about capitalism or gender equality, etc.), the magnitude of influences matter. Simply equating exposure with influence puts us back at the hypodermic needle model of media effects - everyone who is exposed to a media message reacts to it the same way. That theory was debunked (or at least modified) over 60 years ago by the Limited Media Effects paradigm.

Some might argue that its different this time around. Influencers are more influential than standard mediated promotion because audiences/followers feel as though they have a relationship with the influencer (i.e. a parasocial relationship), and because influencers are perceived to be more authentic than celebrities. At times, they actually interact with audience members through comments or replies. We know that one's peers can have an influence many times greater than that of impersonal mass promotion campaigns, and the relationship between influencers and their followers is thought to be like those of peers. For the relatively few followers who repeatedly comment and receive replies from influencers (i.e., interact with them repeatedly), this seems plausible. For the majority (90-95% of followers, I'd guess) who don't, it seems more like the relationship between a talk show host and their audience - more personal (and thus more influential) than the relationship between a fictional character and an audience or mass advertising and an audience, but less than an actual close friend. Might influencers be more influential than impersonal TV advertising? Sure, but that's a pretty low bar. 

It seems most likely to me that influencers are highly influential under certain conditions. They're probably good at directing attention to people, places, or things that have yet to attract much attention. They can take an unknown product, social cause, political candidate, or location and make it enormously popular (or enormously hated) overnight. It strikes me as far less likely that influencers can get people to change their minds about a person, place, or thing once their audience already know about it and have formed an opinion about it. This is nothing new: that's how persuasion works - easy when people don't have an awareness or opinion of something or someone, difficult when they already do. Any marketer, campaign manager, or media effects researcher from 60 years ago could have told you that. So, a more accurate moniker for influencers might be "attention directors."

The Real Influencers

Consider this alternative: perhaps the people who "like," share, repeatedly view, or discuss content online have the greatest amount of influence in our current mediascape. This largely anonymous, highly engaged group is far smaller than the general public, and in most cases smaller than the audience, which includes casual, less engaged people. The influence of the highly engaged group over the influencer is subtle, but worth thinking about. 

It might help to take the perspective of someone who sets out to be an influencer. They have something they want to say, some "self" they want to express. They express it...and get very little attention from audiences. Disappointed, they take a quick scan of the most popular influencers overall and in their particular domain (say, gaming, sports, or political commentary). They get a sense of the things those people say or do that make them popular - aesthetic choices like editing pace and clarity of message, but also ideological choices, embodiments of personality, tone, language, sense of humor, etc. They begin to adopt some of these, reluctant to wander too far away from their original expression of self, both because it makes them uncomfortable and because they worry about being perceived as inauthentic. They get a bit of positive feedback - more likes, more comments, more attention - and so they keep doing it. 

The collective influence of the highly engaged audience over the influencer might be even subtler than that. Maybe the influencer watched thousands of videos while growing up, simply seeking what most audiences seek - entertainment. Through that process, they absorbed online norms, gradually developing an intuition about what differentiates popular content on a given topic and within a given online subculture from less popular content within that context. At some point, they decide to try their hand at creating content, but what it occurs to them to create - the range of expressive possibilities - is inevitably shaped by what they've already watched. They're not consciously trying to mimic the existing content that effectively caters to audiences' preferences and values, but are apt to cater to them nonetheless. That influencer becomes popular - they have hundreds of thousands of subscribers and millions of views. But what they say and how they say it must conform to the preferences and values of the highly engaged audience, or else it wouldn't become popular in the first place. 

Again, this is nothing new. Novelists, TV writers, and screenwriters know that in order to reach a large enough audience to make for a sustainable career in a capitalist marketplace, you need to - in some sense - cater to a highly influential subset of that audience (critics, opinion leaders, execs). It's crass to think that way - most creators want to see their work as pure acts of self-expression and creativity uninfluenced by the marketplace. And this is not to say that there isn't any original creativity on the part of the artist or content creator. In fact, all audiences demand it: if you simply serve them up something that already existed, they wouldn't bite. There has to be some element of novelty to it, some spark of originality, individuality, and authenticity...but it also needs to fit within a set of generic conventions, and those conventions are articulated through the habits of audiences or some highly engaged subset of the audiences. In the box office business model of media, one person's dollar is as good as another's. In the ad-supported model, certain demographics are more valued than others. And in the online attention economy, the highly engaged audience determines the downstream visibility of content, and is thus more valuable and more influential.

Reasons to be Skeptical

A lot of people want to believe that influencers (or, more broadly, any content on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or X/Twitter) are influential. The content creators themselves (obviously) want to believe that they have influence, and so do many researchers and journalists. It doesn't have to be so, but I think there is a bias among many who study and write about influencers to find evidence of significant influence, to protect their work against accusations of triviality, something that scholars of popular culture have dealt with for decades. My sense is that young researchers are drawn to study social media because they believe that it matters, that it is influential, so there's a bit of self-selection bias - they enter the arena looking for evidence of influence. Social media platforms want to highlight such evidence because it makes their companies more valuable, but also (somewhat less cynically) more important; their work matters. Governments, parents, and pretty much everyone else stand to benefit by ascribing blame for every social ill on social media and, by extension, influencers. There is little downside (at least for the blamers) to blaming greedy billionaires, narcissistic influencers, and opaque algorithms for social ills. Its certainly easier than fixing other long-entrenched causes of systemic inequities or one's own personal issues, or simply accepting that humans were never designed to optimize social harmony or happiness. 

That's not to say we shouldn't strive for greater social harmony and happiness; only that we should avoid seeking comfort in scapegoats. How do we know when influencers, social media platforms, or algorithms are merely scapegoats and not genuine threats? This is the hard work of good media research.

Micro-blogging, Take 2

As a social media platform, you know you've achieved success when others start cloning you. It's easy to call to mind the successful copycat platforms that, in several cases, far exceeded their predecessors:  Facebook (MySpace, Friendster), Reddit (Digg). It's a bit harder to recall the many clones that never make it (Voat, Google+, Orkut), typically because the network effects that are intrinsic to platforms' success put those with small userbases at a distinct disadvantage or because they lack the infrastructure and/or revenue to support a rapidly growing userbase. In other words, there typically aren't enough people to make the place interesting or valuable, or there are too many people to keep running/moderating the platform for free. 

But Meta/Facebook/Instagram's introduction of Threads is different in this regard, giving us a chance to see what a clone could do if it didn't have to worry about those two problems. Threads has already successfully ported 100 million users from Instagram, maintaining the network structure among interest/affinity groups and connections between established influencers and their audiences. It also has Meta's massive infrastructure at its disposal - growth won't be a problem. And so we have a rare opportunity to see if this version of a micro-blogging platform - already operating at a scale similar to the existing leader, Twitter - will be all that different than what came before. 

Mark Zuckerberg has pitched Threads as a friendlier version of Twitter. Broad generalizations about the emotional valence of any social space are inherently oversimplifying - you can find pockets of friendliness and hostility among virtually any large group of people, online or offline. Still, it's entirely possible that one space could have the tendency to be friendlier than another - that's an empirically testable claim (provided you can agree on how to measure "friendliness"). 

Before trying to determine whether Threads has or is likely to achieve this goal (or whether such a goal is desirable, or if friendliness and ideological heterogeneity are mutually exclusive), it's worth considering how it might go about achieving it. Most obviously, more content moderation might tamp down overt hostility. Less obviously, there are facets of the platform that affect linkages among users - which users' posts are visible to other users. 

By importing lists of followers and popular accounts from Instagram, Threads imported a set of cultural norms, one that evolved over the last decade and privileged attractive or attention-getting still images over words, audio, or video. Broadly speaking, there's a kind of showy-ness to Instagram, a content ranking system that rewards positivity (some would argue to toxic levels). Then there's the sociotechnical context in which Threads is being deployed - as a kind of antidote to Twitter's perceived problem with negativity, conflict, and abuse. If Twitter wasn't an especially friendly place before Elon Musk took it over, it is much less so now. This might create demand for such a place, which Threads is well positioned to serve.

Then there's that pesky algorithm - the necessarily obscure formula that controls which posts appear at the top of your feed. Despite widespread skepticism toward algorithms, its hard to imagine a popular social media platform without one, particular one that aspires not to link small groups of people together (e.g., Facebook, Discord, GroupMe, and the way some people use Snapchat) but to give everyone the chance - however remote - to command an audience. Imagine ranking YouTube or TikTok videos chronologically, or at random. Some weighted combination or popularity, engagement (e.g., number of comments or shares), and predicted affinity (amount of time you've spent on similar posts) is the best way to keep users coming back for more. 

One way to go about ranking posts is to defer to the masses - showcase whatever is broadly popular, as Twitter does with its prominently displayed list of trending topics. Another way is to tailor it to each user's preferences - the niche approach favored by TikTok. The first kind of ranking creates a "main character of the day" a target for attention and ridicule on and beyond the platform. The second kind, supposedly, creates echo chambers (though evidence is mounting that, as intuitive as this understanding of personalized ranking is, it doesn't fit what most users actually see on social media). Inheriting its structure from Instagram, Threads seems to privilege, as Kyle Chayka put it, banal celebrities and self-branding. As masspersonal media where any user can potentially reach millions of other users, Threads cannot help but encourage a kind of performativity over connecting with a small group. 

Then there's the shift from images and short video to text. The whole reason Threads is being talked about as a Twitter clone is because its primarily intended to be used for mass conversation. In their branching/nested structure (you can reply to a reply to a post, with each reply "nested" under the previous message), conversations on Threads resemble conversations on Reddit, and it will be interesting to see if future designs of Threads nudge users to engage more in the replies.

But I wonder about the brevity of text and what that does to conversations. The whole point of Twitter - what put the "micro" in "micro-blogging" - was the character limit (originally 140, upped to 280). It's well-suited to a fragmented attention universe, but I wonder if the tone of Twitter (witty, sure, but also mean) is an inevitable symptom of its mandatory brevity. Is there something about short-form writing that is bound to regress toward snark? Is that simply the nature of the medium, regardless of the combination of people and level of moderation? That's what Threads might give us a chance to observe.

White Flight Part 2: When the upper class disconnects

It's been awhile since I've published anything in this blog. Mostly, it's been the incentive to publish in peer-reviewed journals in order to attain tenure that's to blame for the lack of blog productivity. I continue to have stray, undeveloped thoughts about media uses and effects, and there are a few drafts of blogs waiting to be finished, but in the meantime, here's one that's been percolating of late.

There are reports from the past year that many highly-educated, upper-class or upper-middle-class parents are raising their kids with minimal or no screen time, primarily out of fear of its addictive qualities. It seems to start with lay theories of people who work in the tech industry and/or people who live in Silicon Valley - people with a very idiosyncratic perspective on media technologies. One could look at this particular group of parents as experts, given their unusual access to the ways in which these technologies are developed, marketed, and used. But it's also possible that their experience skews their perception of the extent to which these technologies actually are addicting or otherwise pernicious.

One possibility is that the parents are right, that the technologies are pernicious, at least when used in what they deem to be excess. Another possibility is that they're mistaken, that the technologies are merely a new form of communication, like books or telephones, not bad in and of themselves. For now, I want to set aside that issue and focus on the repercussions of a certain type of young person - an upper-class young person - dropping out of the social media universe (or never participating in it in the first place).

There might be a new kind of digital divide, one in which upper-class young people are not participating in or contributing to online social spaces. Those young people will, of course, communicate with one another, through face-to-face social networks if not through technologies that upper-class parents look at with less fear (the good ol' fashioned phone; Facetime/Skype; maybe even texting). They'll use the internet, of course, but primarily for work, or the consumption of curated content with high production values.

Meanwhile, the hurly-burly social media universe - the YouTubers, the memes, the bullying and the overnight fame, the narcissism, confessions, and anonymous social support, all overcrowded with ads - will continue to exist. If the hostility and hate speech get worse and worse, and if other people become helplessly addicted to its pleasures? Well, that's their problem. It's hard not to think of the 'white flight' of privileged families from the sites of fear and anger of yesteryear - urban centers. Privileged young people's image of the unruly social media universe will be akin to the caricature of urban life that children of the 80's grew up with: they will see the most sensational worst-of-the-worst stories, and have no personal experience with it to temper these simplistic, negative depictions. When they get to college, whether or not they grew up on the internet could be as important as whether they grew up in a one-stoplight Midwestern hamlet or Brooklyn. The social distance between a lower-middle class child who spent hours on social media from age 9 and an upper class child who read books and played Dungeons and Dragons at his friend's house, even if those two kids grew up across the street from one another, might be immense.

Among the many fears that social media evoke is the fear of the filter bubble: that subtle social media algorithms and quirks of human behavior will work to balkanize societies. Ten years after the popularization of social media, evidence seems to suggest that the opposite has happened, that we vastly overestimated the power of those algorithms, underestimated the extent to which offline social networks of old were already balkanized, and underestimated the serendipity and unpredictability of evolving online social networks. If balkanization occurred, and if it is occurring again, it may be between those who were/are socializing online and those who were not/are not.

Nostalgorithms

Nostalgia is a feeling, to start with. We have songs and photographs we happen upon that conjure nostalgia. We have articulations of nostalgia, in poetry, in the lyrics of songs, in films, TV shows, novels. And now, we have algorithms that serve up content (songs, photographs, news) that make us feel nostalgic.

The “Your memories on Facebook” function fascinates me, as a potential mechanism for conjuring nostalgia. It's hard to know precisely how the algorithm works - how and when it decides to bring a photo up from the past and ask you whether or not you'd like to share this photo again on your timeline - but it appears to bring up pictures from the same day of the year in previous years, most likely at least 2 years from the past. It also is likely that photos/memories are chosen based on the amount of "likes" or comments they received at the time. 

That’s certainly one of the simplest approaches, and it works well enough, but perhaps not as well as it could work. I’ve only really heard people talk about this aspect of the Facebook experience (as is the case with many aspects of any kind of technology) when it doesn’t work. People make note of the times when Facebook served up a picture on an ex or, worse, a deceased love one. It’s clear that it doesn’t work perfectly, and yet it works well enough to persist. 

Does that algorithm learn from the times it presents unpleasant memories to users? Probably. Perhaps it starts by serving up memories, allowing a certain period for the memories to “steep," and, after a period of trial and error, it would be possible to identify certain types of memories that people elected to share. These types would be defined by objective qualities the shared memories had in common, qualities that set them apart from the non-shared memories. The algorithm is “dumb” in the sense that it doesn’t know anything about the concept of nostalgia, or the individual users’ lives, or about human emotion in general. But if you give it enough data, enough pictures, enough memories, it will probably get better at serving up pictures that you want to share, pictures that tap into something that we would call nostalgia. It learns not to serve up those pictures of your ex.

Perhaps there's an unseen pattern or signature to nostalgia that could be revealed by the algorithm. It's not just a matter of how much time has passed that makes us nostalgic for something. It has to do with the specific contours of social relations and feelings, all of which leave an imperfect imprint in our social media archives (less and less imperfect as more and more of our social/emotion lives are channeled through social media). 

Here's an example pattern using data that a social media company like Facebook could collect: Optimal nostalgia resides in the pictures with that person you appeared with in other pictures and exchanged frequent IMs with for a period of three years after which there were fewer and fewer pictures of the two of you together and fewer IMs until the trail went cold, but you were still "liking" and occasionally commenting on their posts, though this wasn't reciprocated, suggesting a kind of unreciprocated longing for re-connection. Or maybe it takes into account the time of day at which it was posted (maybe people are more nostalgic about things that happened at night) or the place (maybe nostalgia clings to certain places more than others, or it requires a certain physical distance from our current locations, at least 1,000 miles). Maybe it's all there, residing in the metadata. 

I think about nostalgia in terms of music, too. Pop music (and movies/TV shows that use pop music) have worked with a crude version of the nostalgia principle for decades, if not centuries. Artists arrange a song in a familiar way, or include a certain familiar phrase or melody, so as to strike a particular emotional chord in the listener. Genres are revived in part out of nostalgia. But algorithms could give us something much more fine-grained, more personalized. Imagine that your entire music listening history was archived (as will be the case for people starting to listen to music in the age of streaming services like Spotify, Pandora, or YouTube). The program would know that you really loved a particular song (you played it 100 times that one week in 2010) but then seem to have forgotten about it (you haven't played it since). One of life's great pleasures is hearing that song you loved but have not heard in years. Part of you knows the rhythm and the lyrics, but another part of you has forgotten them. Your ability to sing along with the first verse feels instinctual, but you can't remember exactly what the chorus was until it comes crashing in, and you think, "how could I have forgotten this?" 

Maybe the music program is integrated with your preferred social media app. The social media app has a rough indication of your mood and what's going on in your life. It can make a pretty good guess as to when you're ready for an upbeat song and when you're ready for something more introspective. Maybe it knows that you found a love song when you weren't in love and seemed to like it but couldn't listen to it too frequently because you weren't in love. And now that it knows you're in love, you're ready to hear it again. Maybe it knows that the lyrics to another song will be more poignant to you now that you're 40. 

There is a visceral revulsion at technology colonizing overly-personal or artistic realms of human experience. All fine and well if the algorithms make shopping more efficient, but nostalgia? Memories, and our experiences of them, are tied to identity. This may account for the way in which we need nostalgia triggers to feel serendipitous. The idea of an algorithm writing poetry is a bit unsettling, but what about an algorithm that can conjure the feeling that inspires poets in the first place?

Facebook Photo Album as Everyday Storytelling Device

Let's say you go on vacation for a week. You travel to some interesting place. How do you tell people about your vacation?

Social media is, among other things, the way that we tell people we know (and, sometimes, people we don't know) about things that happened to us. It's a kind of everyday storytelling medium, a way in which we can relate to the choices made by a filmmaker or novelist. As with any form of narrative, Facebook does not include every event that happened from every point of view. There are two "editorial moments" as which people decide what gets left in the story and what gets cut out: the moment at which they decide to take a picture and the moment at which they decide to post it. In addition to determining what gets left in or out of the story, the person assembling a Facebook photo album can re-arrange the order in which pictures are presented.

I can think of several reasons why this kind of temporal re-arranging may take place. You may want to "set the stage" for people looking through your photo album (assuming they encounter it in a linear fashion, starting at the beginning and clicking the "next" button as they go through the pictures). You may wait until the end of your vacation to take pictures of, say, the hotel in which you stayed. But you may put those pictures at the beginning of your album, to orient the viewer. You may also save a picture that you took of an amazing sunset on the second day of you vacation for the last or next-to-last picture of the album, using it as a kind of climax to the story of your vacation (although, maybe it's just me who does this sort of thing).

Do you group all of the pictures of food together? There's a kind of organizational logic to this from the standpoint of the picture arranger. And yet, I would argue, it leads to an inferior experience for the picture viewer. There's a kind of tedium to seeing picture after picture of food. But if the pictures are placed among other events and thing - trips to the beach, happy people, monuments, etc. - then it might feel more like you are experiencing the vacation as the individual experienced it.

But one wonders how much time people spend on telling stories through Facebook. Would people care about having an abrupt ending to an album? The difference between telling a story and simply putting things up is something a viewer might pick up on, at least sub-consciously.

ABRUPT ENDING

I Always Feel Like Somebody's Watching ME

While listening to a new, poppy-sounding, dance-able Nine Inch Nails song about surveillance (and recalling an older, poppy-sounding, dance-able song about surveillance), I thought about how the topic of privacy and surveillance recurs in the news and in people's everyday conversations. Edward Snowden might just be the beginning of more elaborate, widespread considerations of these topics. Certainly, it's something that many young people have an opinion on, and the songs made me think about the ways in which it is woven into themes of popular television, films, and music.

If the Administration is to be believed, the US government isn't actually looking at everyone's data though they possess the ability to look at anyone's data. There's a logic to this: if your goal is to find potential terrorists (or, hell, if your goal is to find juicy bits of gossip), you wouldn't waste your time looking in detail at everyone's data. You'd try to develop algorithms for identifying people of interest and then dig deeper into their data.

Most acknowledge that authorities (governments, corporations) can "watch" us in this sense. Even the authorities themselves acknowledge that it is technically possible. But who is likely to believe that the authorities are telling the truth when they say that they're not looking at them, in particular?

Certainly, the degree to which one trusts authorities plays some role in this. But I think there's something else at play, something that I've been digging into in my recent research: narcissism. To assume that one is being watched, that one is a "person of interest", is to assume that one is interesting enough to be watched. It would follow that a certain type of person who tended to have narcissistic thoughts would be more likely to think that they were being watched and would express greater concern regarding privacy and surveillance.

Those who exhibit narcissistic tendencies in the age of digital media are in a bind. They want to get more information about themselves and their thoughts out there because they believe it's worth hearing, but they might be more concerned about the nefarious use of this information if they assume this information to be valuable (not just incriminating). They're the most exposed and the most concerned, so the thinking goes.

There's some preliminary evidence suggesting that those higher in narcissism have fewer privacy restrictions on some of their social media, which is, in a way, the opposite of what I would expect. Maybe if an individual high in narcissism were primed to think about corporate data miners or government surveillance with a news story, they would be more likely to change their privacy settings than another person. Maybe not.

If nothing else, the iconography and slogans of the pro-privacy movement are telling: Big Brother isn't watching us. He's watching you.

Do you have a Candy Crush Habit or a Candy Crush Addiction?

Most of my recent research concerns media habits and/or what you might call "unconscious" media use. These are the times when we open up a tab on our web browsers and go to a website without thinking too deeply about why we're doing this or considering the long-term value of such an act. Over time, such behavior become habits, and habits can be hard to break. It seems that if habits are sufficiently difficult to break, we call them addictions.

But I, like many others in the field of psychology, am not too keen on applying the term "addiction" to habitual media use. Why not? If you're playing Candy Crush Saga five hours a day and you feel unable to stop playing, what is the difference if we call this a bad habit or an addiction?

Well, I suppose it has to do with how our culture currently understands addiction. We treat it as a disease that requires professional intervention. We assume, as is the case with most diseases, that the afflicted is not responsible for their affliction and that it is unlikely that they can get better on their own. They need help. This diagnosis is well-meaning in the sense that when people are going through something bad (and the feeling of being unable to stop doing something is usually bad) it would be worse to heap the extra guilt that comes with responsibility for their current condition (and for altering the condition) on top of their existing troubles. In addition, professionals have years of experience dealing with addictions and decades of research to help develop systems for fighting addiction.

But there's something that's lost: the individual's sense of self-efficacy, the sense that they can do something about the behavior. In some cases, it's possible that self-efficacy can be an important part of altering habitual/addictive behavior, that the individual finding a way to change their behavior is more effective and efficient than sending all of those individuals to professionals and/or through a series of institutions.

As more people find themselves with habits/addictions to games like Candy Crush, it's important to address the following questions: What role does self-efficacy play in breaking habits? If we call the habit an addiction, does this diagnosis reduce the person's sense of self-efficacy thereby making it harder (or perhaps more expensive) to quit?

This isn't to say that simply labeling this kind of behavior as "habits" isn't without drawbacks. People may not take the threat that their behavior poses as seriously if they call it a habit (most of us have bad habits, after all). Even when we do call the behavior addiction, we're increasingly liberal in our use of that term which waters it down (much like the term "stalking", which is used in a casual, everyday sense).

So, whether we call this kind of behavior "addiction", I think, is not just a matter of semantics. It is possible that diagnosis affects self-efficacy, which affects likelihood of behavior change. Whether you call it addiction or habit, the end game should be the same: understanding how people stop doing things that they, at first, feel they are unable to stop doing. But it's important to recognize the role of words and diagnoses in that process.

What were they thinking?

When someone (usually a high-ranking public figure, but sometimes a high-school or college student) tweets something embarrassing or incriminating, the question is often asked: "what were they thinking?" The implication of this rhetorical question, it seems, is not to express some genuine curiosity about their decision making process but rather as a way of calling these people incomprehensibly stupid. The older or less familiar people are with social media and its role in young people's lives, the more likely it seems people are to be unable to understand why someone would do such a thing, or to dismiss the people as simply stupid or bad.

But I am genuinely curious about such behavior, and I think there are some untested assumptions many people make about it. Here are three plausible explanations

1. Ignorance of public/privacy distinction within social media. It is possible that social media users simply don't know that their messages, in some cases, can be read by anyone anywhere at anytime. While this may seem obvious to many, it can be confusing in that not all social media is uniformly public/private. Facebook messages are between two people but could be re-posted in another forum. Facebook wall posts are visible to between 20 or 1000 people who relate to you in different ways depending on your privacy settings and how many friends you have. Twitter has its own privacy settings: not all tweets are public. Instragram is different. So it is not a straightforward obvious fact as to whether social media messages are public or private.

2. User believed it was unlikely that anyone would pay attention to their tweets. This seems like a very common, justifiable explanation for why people say embarrassing or incriminating things in social media, and I think its one that doesn't get much attention. Anyone could read this blog. Does that mean that anyone will read this blog? Of course not. While potential audiences for public tweets are huge, actual audiences are most often very small and familiar. It would be foolish (and conflict with much of what we know about decision making in communication) to assume that people who repeatedly got feedback indicating that their messages were being received by a very small, familiar audience would stay aware of the possibility that others might receive the message. In fact, the odds of these messages reaching those other people are so low that, in a sense, its not really a very bad decision to tweet something a little embarrassing or incriminating. People take into account likelihoods of outcomes when they make decisions. To imagine that they would, in any instance, counter their experience and sensible unconscious calculations of likelihoods with some rule ("don't ever tweet anything that might be seen by your boss or your girlfriend's mother"), doesn't make much sense.

3. Momentary lapse in judgment/self-control. I wonder how many people who do this do it not out of ignorance but because they were drunk, had some momentary lapse in judgment, or were really upset. You would think that people would then delete the tweet or message after they came to their senses (most social media allow you the opportunity to revise history in this way), but maybe they forget about it and/or just don't care.

The likelihood of any of these explanations explaining this behavior depends on people's awareness of how public/private various social media messages are. I think this is an ever-shifting variable, both in terms of how public/private the social media messages actually are (the applications change their privacy settings often) and how aware people are of the current privacy settings (I'd like to think that media literacy classes such as the one I teach at East Carolina University have some influence on this).

I also think that the lack of nuance in our conversations about privacy doesn't help. The knee-jerk reaction to over-sharing seems to be to tell people to imagine that anyone (potential bosses, significant others, exes, parents, grandparents, police, governments) will read/watch what you post online. To me, this is the equivalent of telling kids that "drugs are bad". You put a diverse group of things into one category (because its simply easier to think of things this way), some of which are extremely dangerous, many of which are mildly dangerous. Young people inevitably experiment, usually with the least dangerous things in the group. They suffer little or no immediate negative effects. They conclude that you're not trustworthy, that all drugs/social media posting is fine, and don't learn the distinction between good/kinda bad/REALLY bad until it's too late.

The Greener Pastures of the Internet

Recently, I visited an old friend who is currently living in Japan. On the train ride from Tokyo to the Sea of Trees, we caught up, talking about our lives, relationships, careers, plans for the future, speculating on happiness and ambition and satisfaction, the paths we took, where to go from here. As the skyscrapers of the city outside the train’s window gave way to jagged hills and manicured hamlets, we kept coming back to the truth of the old adage/cliché: the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Realizing this, and living by this, had helped us, so we thought, to feel happier and more fulfilled (or at least less miserable). All the talk of relationships and careers and places to live seemed couched in this. And yet, strangely, that whole day, as I walked around in the crisp autumn air with Mt Fuji in the distance, relishing the company of an old friend and several new friends, I kept thinking “this is the place to live! I’d be happier here” even though I knew that my happiness had more to do with my attitude (or perhaps other qualities like self-control, grit, etc.) than where I was. The grass was still greener on the other side. Like an optical illusion, I couldn’t not see it even though I knew it wasn’t real.

This got me thinking about some aspect of living in the world of many media options.

Basically, my hunch is that the Facebook/jealousy effect (Facebook use can inspire jealousy) encompasses a larger swath of our experience each day. When you interact with warts-and-all people, you get frustrated at times, you have to work through problems, and you hone your abilities to cope with and deal with problems. When you deal with people on Facebook, you deal with co-constructed entities, products of those other people’s attempts to hide their “warts” and your desire to avoid seeing some of their warts (maybe not that simple. Maybe we’re trying to see imperfections at times and maybe we’re blind to them at other times, depending on mood, individual characteristics, etc.). I suppose those given to the language of communication theory would call these relationships “pseudo-relationship” and call the larger phenomenon I’m talking about the creation of “pseudo-environments”.

If these are pseudo-environments we live in, filled with pseudo-relationships, they are different than the pseudo-environment informed by the mass media and constructed by the Powers that Be. The priorities in their creation are different. They are similar in that they lack some important characteristics of unmediated relationships and reality. But the distortions are different. They are animated not by The Powerful’s desire to control the powerless, but by some aspect of our brains that wants a fantasy, an aspect that, in real life, runs into obstacles, gets sad, adapts, and overcomes obstacles, but now, in some sense, runs amok. We’re losing out abilities to revise our conceptions of what is possible in response to adversity because we’re often seeking new realities instead of trying to fix the problems of the old realities. We still live in a world of real, material relationships and must always, eventually, return to them and confront them, but our abilities to adapt in that environment have atrophied, and so we’re left in a world that seems depressingly unfair. But it’s not because the world is depressingly unfair so much as it is because we’re less and less capable of re-making any of it or ourselves in order to bring the two in sync. We grasp for explanations for this seemingly insurmountable disconnect: our own inherent inferiority; malevolent, powerful authorities. Maybe we’re partially right. Maybe unchangeable flaws in ourselves and changeable flaws in The System (i.e., corrupt authorities) are part of the problem. But maybe that sense is exaggerated by feelings of powerlessness that comes with our atrophied ability to adapt to adversity.

The features of the options we browse through, be it Facebook profiles or places to lives, are shaped by those presenting them in a mediated form. The options, as they appear to us, are optimized for online searches, edited to attract more people and/or the “right” people. We eventually encounter their hidden flaws in a patterned way. At first, we can’t see them because we’re hopeful about the New. Eventually, as we get to know the option better and its ability to hide flaws decreases, we become disappointed. Not to worry: there are always other untried options, other greener grasses.

Once you’ve tried many, many options and are still running into seemingly insurmountable obstacles, you feel all the more hopeless. The infinite possibilities that initially seemed so liberating are now just more ideas that didn’t work. The notion that nothing will “work” (in the sense that it will provide enough meaning and happiness to keep you fulfilled, or at least extant) seems more likely as the number of failed options grows. Perhaps it’s right to think, as a hopeless person might, that all those options you haven’t tried – the people you haven’t met or dated, the places you haven’t visited or lived, the books you haven’t read, the religions you haven’t experienced – aren’t that different than the options you have tried. Perhaps they never were “different” in any objective, meaningful way. But it might have been the ability to adapt to the disconnections between fantasy and reality, hardened by the rough edges of reality with its dearth of options, that provided us with enough meaning and happiness.

But this is idle speculation. How could we test this hunch? It would be interesting to see to what degree belief in this statement (and other adages, like “no man is an island” or “wherever you go, there you are”. I’m a big fan of adages these days) predicts happiness in a world of more options.

Related questions:

What exactly does the green grass statement convey? Is it the opposite of jealousy? It is, but it’s also something that runs counter to hope, or “hope” as most people think of it. It’s being happy with what you have, which may be the opposite of striving as well as hope.

What do you do with the world of expanded options? That is, what is the practical response to our media environment for someone who acknowledges the truth of the green grass statement? You can think of ways to make the options not seem quite so infinite. And you can identify the characteristics of those who flourish and languish in these environments.

Who survives best in the world of infinite options? What is the relationship between striving, hopefulness, jealousy, number of options, qualities of those options (how mediated they are, how curated they are) and life satisfaction? What about other individual characteristics like self-control and grit?

This might lead us to the Green Grass Theory: In a world of many options, those who are high in striving and hopefulness yet low in jealousy (i.e., those who agree with the aphorism that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence) flourish. Those who are not languish.

Our actions and moods are in part determined by our notions of what is possible or probable in the future. Media are tools for considering possibilities and probabilities. The extent to which they distort depends on our orientation to them. 

How much of the media we consume is really user generated?

Like most media users today, I enjoy two kinds of leisure media: user-generated content (UGC) and professionally generated content. The former costs WAY less to produce than the latter. On one of my favorite user-generated content websites, Reddit, there was a pretty good description of why cable costs so much, and a good part of it has to do with the cost of professional production of content. But if we're using our internet connection to access UGC, well then, we shouldn't have to be paying so much for the professionally generated content that we're not using. This got me to thinking: how much of the content I use is user-generated?

I don't think I'll ever abandon professionally generated content: I still love sports and a handful of television shows like Mad Men and Charlie Rose. I also loved relaxing at the end of a hard day by flipping on the TV and channel surfing. But I don't really do that anymore. I think that what has replaced that for me are two things: Facebook and Reddit, both of which are primarily UGC. Facebook occasionally contains references to content that was professionally created: a link to an article on NYTimes.com, a link to a video clip from a TV show posted on YouTube. But MOST of the information I encounter on there is generated by my friends: status updates, photos.

The same is true of Reddit. Let's take the most up-voted stories on reddit today as a sample. Of the 25 items on this front page, 16 of them are pictures or statements or links to content ostensibly generated by a non-professional (someone who did not create the content with the understanding that it would generate revenue for them personally). So again, its not clear cut. Facebook and Reddit and YouTube derive SOME of their value from professionally generated content, but it seems disingenuous to say that they're similar, in terms of what it costs to maintain the quality of the experience, to the former great American past-time: channel surfing.

I accept the fact that Facebook, Reddit, and sites like them provide a useful service by providing a venue for all this interaction between users. I accept that this takes a lot of hours of coding, and I accept that I must pay for that service in some way: with my attention to ads or having those companies mine my data or sell it to advertisers. But clearly, the overhead of running such sites is much less than running a television network: you don't have to pay writers, actors, set designers, animators, etc. So yes, I should pay for my time on Facebook and Reddit, but not as much as I should for my time watching a television network.

It wouldn't be that hard or time-consuming to code a random sample of Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit content as UGC or professionally generated content, and then to do a rough calculation of the true cost of producing and distributing this content. Another project for the back burner!

Gender, social networks, the rise of Pinterest

I've been hearing more and more about Pinterest: via my Facebook feed, via a field observation study of media use of undergraduate students. Curious, I checked it out and, to the extent that I could understand the function of the site without actually becoming a member, noted some similarities between Pinterest and social media like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and, to some extent, news and entertainment aggregation sites like Reddit. As I understand it, users post images and other users comment or "like" things or re-post them, thereby boosting their overall visibility.

What struck me immediately about Pinterest was the fact that all the users seemed to be female (female user names). I went over to alexa.com and confirmed that, by Alexa's estimates, most of Pinterest's users are female, far more than any of the aforementioned social network or aggregation sites. Also, Pinterest is growing at an astonishingly quick pace, already the 16th most visit website in the US, trebling its traffic in 2 or 3 months.

So, why is Pinterest so popular among only females and what are the implications of this? It wasn't seeded with a particular kind of content. Is there something about the site's design that appeals more to females than to males? If there some kind of network effect where the first users were female, posted things that interested them, told other people about it, and only other females were interested in it because the kinds of content posted only appealed to women?

Is the discourse on the site any different than the discourse on other sites because of this gender difference? At first glance, it seems to conform to the stereotypical norms of female interaction: more supportive comments, less one-upsmanship via crude humor, less hostility (which makes you wonder if the rest of social web is dominated by discourse embodying hetero-male norms if not by actual 14-year-old boys). Of course, maybe we're only looking at a particular kind of female (Alexa indicates that the users are mostly 25-34).

I'm betting that most Pinterest users look at the site as a supplement to their use of other social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. But its interesting to consider the possibility that use of this site, which is essentially a self-selected portion of the overall public, might be eating into time spent on sites that have no gender/race/interest skew like Facebook and Twitter. There are advantages to using "big tent" social networking sites like FB and Twitter, but perhaps as time goes on, they will become places that you feel you have to go to keep up on the goings on of those you know well, those you barely know, and those you don't know. They'll chiefly be tools for social surveillance, places to see and be seen. But they'll stop being the places (or at least the only places) you go to indulge your interests or have conversations and share things with others. Those activities will increasingly become the domain of sites like Pinterest that cater (though not purposefully) to a certain segment of the population that has something in common.

The return to segregated online social spaces isn't simply a recapitulation of the interest-driven message boards of the early internet. These sites will draw people not through people actively deciding, declaring, and seeking out particular sites dedicated to topics, but through much subtler avenues, spreading through social networks that have their roots in the real world. Their content will reflect the collective preferences of their users, which, as strange as it may seem in a technological world in which we were supposed to slough off our corporeal identities, appear to be dictated to a large degree by our physical selves.

Over-sharing, time dilution, and the weaponization of words

If there are classes on "how to use social media" that will be taught in secondary school, its likely that one of the topics will be the hazards of over-sharing. There's a common sentiment, typically expressed by digital immigrants like the New York Times' Timothy Egan, that young people share too much via social media. Many people seem baffled as to what the reward might be for telling people so much about your inner thoughts and feelings. Egan suggests, like many others, that this compulsion to share is driven by (and drives) the sharer's narcissism, though some research I'm working on right now with a colleague indicates that no such connection between narcissism and social media use exists. In fact, if there is any connection between tweeting and narcissism, its actually in the opposite direction than is suggested by Egan and Co.

What really concerns many digital immigrants are the consequences of over-sharing. Drunk status posts live forever in the digital archive of the internet, preserved word for word, undistorted by individual memory. Most conversations about this topic concern employment or election: one's past indiscretions come back to haunt those seeking work or public office. Its interesting how the conversations about reputation that only used to apply to celebrities and politicians and reality TV stars apply to all of us now. We can all be publicly disgraced and publicly redeemed.

The argument against sharing assumes that collective, disembodied digital cultural memory operates like the collective, disembodied pre-digital cultural memory and pre-digital individual memories. But I wonder if there might be some differences that aren't being accounted for. There might be a kind of dilution of the past going on. Perhaps each bit of information about the past matters less because there's simply so much of it. We judge gaffes the same way we judge everything else: on the extent to which they are rare. People also speculate that more information shrinks our attention span and with it the duration of the news cycle, so that people move from topic to topic quicker. We might move through the cycles of admonishment and forgiveness more quickly as well.

But maybe the critics of over-sharing are right. Maybe each person who has tweeted something stupid or left a stupid status update is instantly and permanently discredited by some for doing so. In a market where there are so many people out there who are equally accessible online, employers, voters, consumers of entertainment content, and even online daters can discard people for single infractions because there's always a comparable replacement who hasn't said anything stupid (yet). Dismiss anyone for tweeting something stupid and you'll be dismissing a lot of people, but maybe that's not such a problem when you've got so many people to choose from.

There's another way in which over-sharing might be changing the nature of conflict. If you tweet something potentially embarrassing and it lives forever, does that mean that everyone's words can be used as weapons by their enemies against them in the future, the way it happens with politicians now? This might just be the next frontier of human hostility: searching people's pasts and using what they've said as a point in an argument against them, context be damned. Maybe we could only forgive because we could forget, because our memory of ugly, hostile behavior softened with time. Now that we can't forget, now that every ugly, hostile remark is retained, we'll stay mad at people and never give them another chance. We've started to get cynical about politicians because they were the first to have every one of their moves recorded and re-broadcast out of context. Soon, when this happens to many of us, we'll become cynical about human nature.

Here, I must make a point similar to one I've made about privacy: digital social media gives people ammunition to hurt others, but it doesn't create the will to use it, nor does it assume that we can't make rules, laws, or norms that prohibit using past or private information against people.  The preservation of information doesn't necessarily mean that anyone will dig it up and broadcast it in the future. Someone has to care enough about finding the information to search for it and have some reason to defame another person. So maybe you can go on sharing as much as you'd like on twitter and facebook. Just don't get on anybody's bad side so that they will go to the trouble of digging up something stupid you'd said years ago and use it against you. And if they do, know how to fight back in the ways pioneered by the frontiersman of character assassination, the political operative: dig up something on your opponent or dismiss their efforts as "mud-slinging".

The outlandishly stupid tweets used by those making the over-sharing argument are rare and, so long as these "be careful what you post" stories are out there, liable to become rarer still. I just don't see people cutting back on sharing, despite the fact that the preservation of day-to-day sharing can make any heartfelt sentiment seem stupid when taken out of context. If people are pre-disposed to disliking a person, they'll take a questionable post from the past as evidence to support their dislike. It they are pre-disposed to liking the person, they'll shrug and say "so what if a person tweeted something embarrassing 5 years ago? Who cares?".

Many assume the words and pictures that preserve and transport our past acts have a certain power, but our view of just how powerful they can be is distorted by our experience with how they were used in the previous age. Before print, television, and film, these things were ethereal and hard to use against anyone or for advancing any agenda. During the broadcast era, they could be used to convince a great many people of a great many things. I imagine that many were initially inclined to the "sticks and stones" way of thinking about preserved, portable information. After some rough lessons, they came to see that the pen could be mightier than the sword. Underlying all of these shifts in the way words and images convey our pasts are conflicts and allegiances that revolve around scarce resources. The power of words to advance any individual or group's agenda depends on its permanence. The print era, with its centralized authority, taught us the power of words and images to shape our view of the past and of individuals and their reputations, but we shouldn't assume that words and images will be just as powerful when the power to create and distribute them was in the hands of the few.

A Perfectly Social World

There's an interesting window of time between when you've heard that something new and supposedly "game-changing" is about to happen and when know what it is, the moment before the unveiling. Once you find out, it usually disappoints, but before you hear about the reality, knowing that something big might be on the horizon gets you thinking about what's possible. I remember that happening in the months leading up to the release of the Segway scooter. We knew that an inventor with an incredible track record and lots of resources had secured some very interesting looking patents, but we didn't know if this thing would fly, how it would be powered, or how fast it would go.

It feels like a similar situation now with a supposed re-design of Facebook on the horizon. This article speculates that Facebook will put an emphasis on passive sharing: rather than signifying that you like something by clicking the "like" button or posting a link on your profile or on someone else's, you will just go about your web browsing and other people will see it (or, more likely, just the parts of it that you want seen). Let's just assume, for a moment, that Facebook does something like this.

The first gut reaction is that its too much of an invasion of privacy, and I'm sure people will write tons about this angle if this ends up happening. But its more interesting to think about why passive sharing might be appealing and what it might feel like to live in a world where more moments of every day are shared and social. So, start out by imagining there's a magical switch that is thrown each time you browse on something that you don't want certain people to know about. It filters out exactly the people you want to keep from knowing what you're doing and it does so without you needing to actually do anything. If this existed, what would be the appeal and effect of increased passive sharing?

As I read articles for my research, design experiments, read the NYTimes, watch ESPN, go to reddit, I have an inner monologue, sometimes an inner dialog, a kind of hypothetical conversation about what I'm reading or writing. Heavy posters on Facebook or twitter (or even heavy texters) have taken to transcribing this inner mono/dialog so that it can start a conversation, and they can do this at any place or time. But passive sharing doesn't necessarily initiate social interaction of any kind. It might act as a pretense for conversation ("I saw that you were reading that article I read yesterday. What did you think of it?") or we might just use it as a more finely tuned means of social comparison than just seeing what people actively post about themselves. You run out of new actively posted items to look at on Facebook pretty quickly, but I doubt you'd ever run out of passively shared activity of others to look at. Plus it seems like more of an "honest" look at how they really are, not just the happy, shiny selves they present in their pics.

Since I'm in dissertation mode right now, thinking about one theory and how everything fits (or doesn't fit) it, I'm thinking about this in terms of choice, value, and delaying gratification. You could always use Facebook and other social media (even a phone) to have a social experience, but for people to connect with you or even to see what you're doing, you had to take some initiative. The people taking initiative - the frequent posters, the tweeters, etc. - may not have been all that relevant to you, in terms of your mood or your pre-existing social connection to them. But what if you always had the option of having an interesting conversation with someone you wanted to converse with about something you wanted to converse about? If that option is sitting there in that little rectangle of light you're staring at right now, you would probably choose it over most other activities.

Its been said that we're social animals, that all humans need social interaction and that society grows from this. But all social interaction has been embedded in the rules and systems of culture and physical space. You were surrounded by people, but they were people whose personal lives you didn't care about all that much. Its interesting to think about a world in which you could always look over and see what your friend is doing and strike up a conversation about it.

The Two Facebooks

Facebook has changed the way that it presents updates of information about a user's friends, starting the familiar cycle of backlash and revision. Setting aside the inevitable grumpiness of many users who are averse to change, why did Facebook make these changes? How and why is it hoping to reshape the user experience?

As I posted before, Facebook's appeal depends to some extent on the "freshness" of the information presented in the feed. There's probably thousands of hours worth of "content" available on most people's Facebook pages. If I considered all the updates from all of my friends as the total information available on Facebook, I (like most people, I would assume) have seen very little of it. The value of each little bit of information about my friends depends on a few things: its recency (wouldn't I rather know what happened to my friends within the past few weeks than know what they were doing last year?) and its relevance to me. Facebook's privileging of the "top stories" over the "most recent" may be an attempt to get users to more relevant information.

They haven't taken away the "most recent" option. Instead, they've turned it into a ticker and put it on the side of the page. Really, they're just preventing users from opting out of seeing the information it deemed to be "top stories" by simply clicking on "most recent". Its interesting to consider the differences between the "most recent" and "top stories" experiences of Facebook. Its likely that people are more apt to merely read "most recent" news and not to actually post anything about it. Facebook has an interest in getting people to post and interact more and be less passive about the experience. That gets them more involved and attached to the application, more "embedded" in some sense. More interaction also gives Facebook more data on users. They can't track what you're looking at when you're scanning "most recent", but they can track posting patterns and use that data to make the "top stories" even more relevant, more satisfying, and better at keeping people on the site.

"Most recent" is really a way of using Facebook for social surveillance, not as a venue for interacting with close ones remotely (which is significantly more valuable a service). Some people may have become accustomed to using Facebook to see the news of people that they really wouldn't classify as close friends, even if Facebook gave them the chance to parse their friends into groups more easily. Maybe they were using it for downward social comparison or "stalking" people, and asking them to create a group of people they like to gawk at and not interact with breaks some sort of spell, makes people more aware of their inner voyeur. In this way, this particular user backlash might be about preserving the "mis-uses" of Facebook, not as a tool for better communication but as a way to look at people without being looked at.

Rechargeable Value

In trying to think through how I will have media users rate the immediate gratification value of their media selections in scheduled and un-scheduled choice environments, I've run across some artifacts that make it difficult to re-schedule certain media experiences in people's lives and still have them be enjoyable or valuable to them. For instance, if you insist that people only send text messages between 3 and 5 PM each day, they may not get much value out of text messaging at those times because the motivation to send those messages was time sensitive. They needed to re-schedule an appointment or make arrangements for dinner that evening. I think we tend to over-estimate the time sensitivity of the value of such communiques (including online chatting). Would you really feel deprived if you had to wait a few hours before learning that someone cared for you or want to make plans for the next day, or learning a bit about how someone's day went? Probably not, but we've gotten so used to having the ability to message whenever we'd like and we don't see a reason to change.

So, there's at least the perception that the value (in terms of enjoyment and utility) of messaging is affect by time in this way. Other mediated experience can be time shifted without losing enjoyment or utility. People are fine with planning to Skype at certain times and would be fine with switching the time if needed. People are fine with shifting a TV show to fit their schedules. They'd probably like to watch it as soon as possible because they're anxious to find out what happens next and they'd like a dose of the pleasure brought on by the show as soon as possible. If I had a choice between the next Batman film coming out tomorrow and having to wait a year to see it, I would choose to see it tomorrow. I might even pay a bit more to do so. But if I had to wait an extra few hours or even a few days to see it, it wouldn't change the value of the experience. I'm sure I would still enjoy it.

There are some interesting exceptions to this rule, some non-interactive media experiences whose value are somehow contingent on the timing of the experience. News and sports seem to decline in value over time after their live broadcast in a way that other types of content do not. For some reason, live-ness (or, to use a grocery metaphor, freshness) matters. Of course, a classic game might still be fun to watch on ESPN classic years later and old news might be fascinating to some, but for the most part, "yesterday's news" isn't very enjoyable or useful.

I had an interesting experience when I deprived myself of a few kinds of media experiences that I partake in a lot: NPR, Facebook, and Reddit. I was away on vacation for a few days and just didn't have time to check any of these (that is what one does with these sources: they check on them). I then experienced more pleasure than usual when I checked these at the end of the vacation. It was as if their value had been recharged since the last time I checked on them. Many interesting bits of news about my friends and about the world had accrued since I had last checked in. When I'm in my normal media habit, I check on these things regularly, getting some utility and enjoyment, but then quickly exhaust their value, having used up the best parts, having to wait until people in my Facebook feed post interesting things, until Talk of the Nation has another media-related offering, or until enough interesting/funny things are posted on Reddit. When I check on them often, their values are quickly exhausted, but when I don't check on them for a bit, their value accrues and lasts longer.

This isn't quite how the value of traditional current events news works, I think. I wasn't adamant about going back and finding exactly what had happened in Washington or Libya while I was off the grid. An even more obvious example would be weather reports: I'm not going to go back and read weather reports for Ann Arbor for the days I was out of town. If there's some sort of commentary about the events, like I'd find in Slate, NYTimes, the New Yorker, or Grantland, then the pieces hold their value. The less commentary, the shorter the "expiration date" for the experience.

People check Facebook many times throughout the day because they can, because its there. Each time you check it, you can only go so long before you've read all the good stuff and you're making due with the dregs. The same goes for any continuously updating site: blogs, Twitter, online newspapers, etc. If it weren't, if you had to check it between 3 and 5 each day, you might be able to read longer and enjoy it more, not having to make due with the dregs. You're dealing with a fully charged-up experience. You might even say that this is true for email accounts: if they're accounts you typically get pleasurable emails in, then you'll have more of a chance of getting that pleasure of an inbox full of pleasurable messages if you wait longer to check your email. If you only get messages that you consider to be unpleasant, then the longer you wait, the more unpleasant the moment of checking will be. The trouble is that its too hard to resist the not-fully-recharged version because its always accessible.

The other privacy setting on your Facebook account

After attending another stimulating International Communication Conference, I've been thinking a bit more about the issue of privacy and everyday use of social media such as Facebook. Its one of those issues that seems to interest nearly everyone, not just theorists, but teachers, parents, even teenagers.

I have problems with the popular narrative that Privacy is a human right and that it is eroding or otherwise disappearing in the age of networked selves ( I fully articulate most of these in this earlier entry). To echo Ron Rice's argument in 'Artifacts and Paradoxes in New Media', I think we just assumed that the level of privacy we knew was somehow the natural state of things, and that we only tended to think about privacy when it was obviously breached, but not about how it was constructed with the help of older technologies in a certain way, to hide certain information from certain people. One example of many: having a private conversation required certain kinds of architecture: small rooms in big structures with sound-proof walls. I supposed these technologies kept some of the privacy we'd grown accustomed to when we weren't living in tightly packed urban centers. Still, it seems likely that, as individuals and as groups, we would have a strategic advantage to achieving our own ends and outwitting our competitors if we were able to trade information with allies while our enemies weren't able to overhear, and that this (along with the simultaneous drive to survey our environment for threats or resources) drives innovation in privacy enhancing and destroying technologies. While I'd agree that anyone totally robbed of privacy would be at a distinct disadvantage compared to those doing the robbing, and that this imbalance between those with and those without must privacy is to be avoided, talking about it like its a fundamental human right implies that it is somehow absolute or that, once upon a time, we actually had the ability to communicate with many others and keep those communications hidden from others, or that such a world could or should exist, which I don't buy.

The most compelling way to talk and write about technology and privacy would be to reveal the ways in which technologies unintentionally and subtly enhance or erode personal privacy. This got me thinking about Facebook. Most of the public debate over Facebook and privacy has been about its settings: how customizable they are, how easy they are to use. The mere existence of buttons that you click to change your level of privacy stops many users from thinking about other ways you can use the technology to alter your level of privacy. In particular, I'm thinking of the number of friends one chooses to have. As that number creeps up, the photos and the status updates you post gradually become more public and less private. The more gradually this happens, the harder it is to notice. It would be interesting to know the rate at which people acquire (or get rid of) friends on Facebook and if this rate is associated with how aware they are of their level of privacy and if that affects their behavior in any way.

More generally, this is about technologies of self-performance that allow us to set our privacy or "reach" at one point, letting us grow accustomed to one imagined audience. After we set the settings, we think "okay, I know who I'm performing to and I'll tailor my performance to that group", even though social media audiences are always changing in unpredictable ways. Even this blog and others like it are written with one imagined audience, but then that audience changes in ways that would be very difficult for the author to predict: encompassing people from various spheres of the performers' life.

As always, changing the technology can help us out of this bind. Maybe there could be a little graphic representation on every social media that let the author know what kinds of people were in the audience and how that was changing over time. It would take into account the current occupation and place on a professional network of each audience member (a color-coded "status" marker) and the social distance from you based on frequency of interactions between that person and other people you know. You could probably find that information if you really dug around for it (google insights and the like offer good data on web audiences), but what you need is something that is up in the face of the performer, just as it would be in the real world when you enter a room and start speaking. Technology will always change our levels of privacy. Instead of stopping it or trying to reverse it, the best we can do is to make it explicit.

The Pecker at the Party: Immediate gratification, social media, and social situations

Imagine you are at a cocktail party. Most individuals are talking to one another while some are pecking at their smartphones. One of the guests at the party confronts a “phone-pecker”, explaining that she finds this behavior to be rude and cannot understand why the individual is engaging in what appears to be “anti-social” behavior at a party. The “phone pecker” retorts, claiming that he is actually being quite social, just with people who do not happen to be in the room at that moment. He is looking at photos of friends on Facebook, answering emails and sending text messages, reading tweets. How, he asks, is his socializing any different (or inferior) to the socializing that is happening at the cocktail party?

This situation - in which an apparently solitary individual stares at a screen and pecks at the screen or a keyboard or, in some cases, talks to the screen - is increasingly common. More social interaction is mediated - taking place via text messages, emails, social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) - and more people are concerned about the implications of this for individuals and society. The cocktail party guest’s identification of this behavior as “rude” suggests a breach of etiquette, but the perception of these acts as rude may only be a symptom of some people’s failure to understand how the technology is being used. Such a failure might be a result of the rapid diffusion of the technology and the predictable failure of social mores to evolve at a similar rate. Older generations lamenting the corrupting influence of new technologies is likely as old as technology itself. Once the technology is sufficiently common, such complaints are seen as the mark of a curmudgeon rather than a legitimate qualm. So the fact that this is seen as rude fails to distinguish between a public act that is simply new and will eventually be harmless and no longer seen as rude and an act that is, in some way, harmful to the social fabric and will always be seen as rude or aberrant.

Before proceeding, it is worth noting that the phone-pecker may not be being social at all. He may be scanning his Facebook feed (the equivalent of looking at other guests at a party while not conversing with them) or checking sports scores. Given the size and orientation of networked mobile devices and the expectation of privacy that is associated with the use of such devices, it is difficult for observers to be able to tell the difference between social interaction on mobile devices and non-social behavior.

Let us assume the phone-pecker is interacting with others via the mobile device. Are there really no differences between the nature of heavily mediated person-to-person relationships (that is, those that take place chiefly via text message, email, Skype, and Facebook) and those that are not as heavily mediated?

Older individuals often marvel at the sheer number of texts that teenagers send in a day. Half of all American teens send over 50 texts per day, according to Pew, 2010. Some teens send hundreds per day. This number is not shocking if one considers the text messages to be similar in purpose and content to turn-taking conversations. Teens engaged in long turn-taking conversations on land-line telephones and, before that, in person. The length of statements in such conversations was and is likely to be short, no more than the 150 characters allowed by most SMS (i.e. texting) services. So the length of individual statements and the frequency of text messaging and social media use, while initially seeming alarmingly different, do not to differ significantly from other existing forms (mediated or not) of communication.

What about the people participating in the interaction? There has been fear surrounding social media and one-to-one technology (dating back to the introduction of the telephone) that remote communication devices would facilitate relationships between vulnerable populations (e.g. children) and those seeking to take advantage of these populations (e.g. sexual predators, advertisers, etc.). Though there have been instances of such behavior, the bulk of mediated social interaction (on Facebook and text messaging, if not on Twitter, which, in any case, operates more like a micro-broadcast medium like blogging and less like a rapid interaction application) is still between parties that are acquainted with one another from non-mediated social worlds like school, work, and get-togethers in real world locations like bars and parties. In other words, the people on the other end of the phone-pecker’s pecks are likely to be similar, in terms of their connections to the phone-pecker, to the other cocktail party goers. So it seems, again, that what initially appeared to be different may not be that different at all.

But there's another possible area of difference: the nature of the relationship. The maintenance of relationships, like any other endeavor, is comprised of acts that are immediately enjoyable but do not pay long-term or collective dividends (being able to complain about work to a friend, flirting with a married co-worker, playing a game of basketball with a friend) and other acts that are not immediately enjoyable but do pay off in the long run (changing a diaper, attending a boring work meeting, discussing a difficult topic with a spouse). This isn’t to say there aren’t many (if not most) social interactions that are both immediately gratifying AND help foster long-term gains for the self and others (great sex, great parties, enjoyable collaborative work), but that some relationship maintenance, like many other things in life, is not immediately gratifying but pays off in the long run. An overindulgence in immediately enjoyable social interactions and a failure to engage in any other kind of social interactions may lead to shorter-duration relationships as individuals more frequently (and accurately) accuse one another of being selfish. A failure to think about one’s long-term goals in relationships goes hand in hand with being self-centered or selfish.

Throughout most of human history, our relationships were constrained: by the surveillance and judgment of others, by geography, by class, by time. The proliferation of networked communication devices allows us to (at least partially) remove these constraints. For some, this is a good thing: relationships hindered by repressive regimes are allowed to flourish online. For others, I think it is not. These constraints often kept immediately gratifying interactions at a distance, forcing us to talk with co-workers about work when we would rather be flirting with our partners, to talk with our parents when we would rather be talking with our long-time friends, conversing with our long-time friends when we’d rather be talking to someone new and exciting, talking to our spouses when we’d rather be flirting with a co-worker. They were shaped by the randomness of geographic distribution, by the history of institutions developed by those in power, and in these cases, circumvention of such constraints is, ultimate, a good thing. But either by accident or by design, those constraints kept us from indulging our every social whim.

Again, this isn’t to say that individuals without networked communication technology did not indulge in selfish interactions not in their or anyone else’s best long-term interest. However, when you make immediately gratifying options more easily accessible, you make them more likely to be chosen, particularly by those low in self-control. Why would the choice of whom to interact with and what to converse about be any different than any other decision (in which the temporal and spatial proximity of temptations make them more likely to be chosen)?

To return to the phone-pecker, it is possible that he simply prefers talking to someone who is not at the party. The pecker was invited to the party because of an assumed mutual interest in interacting with those at the party, but given his inattention to other party goers, he cannot count on this assumption lasting very long. He uses technology to develop and nurture several intense, mutually beneficial relationships with co-workers (frequently answering work emails), romantic partners, and close friends (frequently texting at parties), but ignores those very same people at other times so that he can communicate remotely with others. When spending time with his romantic partner, he frequently converses with friends through text and answers email, neglecting his relationship with his partner. When spending time at work, he frequently blows off work to flirt with his partner. It isn’t that he ignores certain people, but that, given the choice between one conversation and another, he chooses the more immediately interesting conversation.

By doing this, he may be training himself to become intolerant of social situations that are not immediately gratifying, becoming accustomed to the immediately gratifying interactions provided by networked communication devices. At a party, this is relatively harmless, though he might find himself invited to fewer parties in the future. But if he bows out of important discussions/ arguments with his partner before they can be resolved, if he pays more attention to work emails and less attention to his children, if he talks to his partner more than his co-workers about work, or flirts more to his sexy co-worker than he talks to his partner about their finances, eventually, his relationships with all parties will suffer through lack of attention.