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.

What Future Does Professional Media Content Production Have?

In the Media Literacy class I’m teaching this semester, my students are engaging in a role-playing exercise in which they assume the roles of four groups that, traditionally, play a role in the development of a new medium: governments, advertisers, technology developers, and content producers. First, the students research the role that these groups played in the creation and popularization of print, radio, TV, film, internet, etc. Then, they form new groups comprised of representatives from each of these groups and discuss how to develop a heretofore un-developed medium. The first example I thought of for the un-developed medium is: virtual reality.

Most of us have an idea of what virtual reality could be. And this imagined reality of VR could have government regulation (determining how the content will be distributed, if the roll-out of VR will be subsidized like a utility, how to regulate violent/sexual content, etc.), advertising (product placement in virtual reality? Pretty much an advertiser’s dream!), and technology developers (Apple VR might have a cleaner look than Microsoft’s somewhat cluttered-looking VR), and content producers (custom-made luxury environments for you to relax in). Sounds like a good fit!

I’m going to do this exercise again later in the semester, and I’m having no trouble coming up with several other “media technologies of tomorrow”: augmented reality glasses, superior surveillance technology, a portable instant-fMRI machine, affordable 3D printing. Some of these technologies are already gaining a foothold in the market. It’s easy to see how governments, advertisers, and technology developers would be involved in the creation and development of these technologies. But where would the content producers fit in?

The more I thought about the exciting media technologies of the future, the more trouble I have thinking about how professional content producers (e.g., screenwriters or the equivalent) will fit into the picture. I’m quite confident that there will always be an appetite for well-told stories. People skilled at telling these stories, through words or pictures or sounds, will have a place in our media environment. But I suspect that people will devote less time to consuming those stories than in years past. During the golden age of radio and television, people spent hours every day consuming content created by professionals. Increasingly, we spend more and more time using Facebook, Twitter, and other activities that don’t involve much in the way of content production (yes I know, lots of conversations on FB & Twitter are about content produced by professionals, but still, most of the aggregate value of these sites, I would contend, is generated by the users and the creators of the venue, i.e., the technology developers). In thinking about the media technologies of the future, it’s hard to think of a place for the writers, the producers, the directors. I’m sure there will be a handful of greats who produce content we all talk about, but perhaps a shrinking middle ground, and a shrinking window of attention and time we all spend consuming professionally produced content. 

Aside from making my group role-playing project a bit more difficult to design, its hard to think of a downside to this future. Definitely something I'll come back to in class. 

Using Anonymous

I saw E. Gabriella Coleman give a terrific talk Friday at the New Media/Social Change Symposium on Anonymous, the loose online collective bent on wreaking havoc and occasionally bringing about positive social change. Like Alan Smithee or Luther Blissett, Anonymous is an "open reputation" or an "improper name", an identity to be used by anyone. Coleman's talk prompted me to ask several questions about Anonymous, aside from the obvious question of who uses the title: why do people use it and under what circumstances do they use it?

There's something exhilarating, liberating, and perhaps frightening about an identity that gives anyone the freedom to do or say anything without fear of reprisal. You could think of the title "Anonymous" as less of an identity and more of a tool that could be used by the powerless to subvert the creeping surveillance state. But that's not quite what this is. In actuality, there are authorities trying to identify and prosecute members of Anonymous or, more intriguingly, trying to infiltrate it and discredit it by engaging in activities in its name that are antithetical to its stated modus operandi. In order to outwit their "competition", members of Anonymous require free time and technical know-how: two things many young, unemployed or under-employed men happen to have in spades. It certainly helps explain the original aesthetic and ideological tendencies that marked Anonymous's original endeavors, and also helps explain its limits: why it can't be picked up by any group to do anything. Instead of a selfless Robin-Hood-type collective, we're left with a small, relatively homogeneous group that is the only group capable of using the tool well. They all have the same axes to grind, the same sense of humor, and very similar experiences: all markers of a relatively uncomplicated identity. Anonymous didn't have to be an identity, but there just aren't that many people who have the time and the skill to use it as a tool.  

While one anonymous collective is good at disrupting and tearing things down, another relatively anonymous collective is good at building things up: wikipedia. As an anonymite, you can create or you can destroy, but (to return to the topic of the symposium) can you really change anything, any existing power structure in the offline world? Offline world changes - changes in policy, changes in the flow of capital - usually require actors to maintain traceable identities. But maybe the disruptions caused by Anonymous are enough to spark offline changes by people who have traceable identities - voters, investors, consumers, and workers.

Finally, to get a sense of the possibilities of anonymous social action, its worth considering two competing popular narratives that revolve around revolutionaries, justice, and open reputations. Anonymous borrowed the iconography of a graphic novel and film from the 1980's/mid-2000's: V for Vendetta, which featured the open reputation of V, a freedom fighter (or anarchist) intent on bringing down a fascist regime. The story leaves it open as to whether V was sane or not, but his actions - toppling a regime that is obviously fascist - are treated by author and audience as having a positive outcome. Conversely, in Fight Club, we see a collective like so many military or para-military revolutionists, bent on washing away any trace of individuality in order to form a stronger coalition, only to re-discover the value of individual identity when one of them is martyred. But the real identity problem in this story is with the main character, who is either a downtrodden worker drone or the lead revolutionary. Instead of sloughing off his old, ineffectual identity for his gleaming new one, he's caught between the two, a stranger to himself. It remains to be seen as to whether the lead hackers behind Anonymous are less like Bruce Wayne/Batman and more like Ed Norton's character/Tyler Durden, and whether their minions are more like the group-thinking benign terrorists of Project Mayhem and less like the triumphant masses of the Arab Spring.

The Ethical Issues of Analyzing Time, Desire, and Self-Control

My tentative dissertation project (becoming less tentative as my defense date draws closer) has to do with time, desire, and self-control. One basic premise of the project is that each of us has short-term desires and long-term desires, and that these desires are often in conflict with one another. We might say that "part of us" wants to eat that chocolate cake or spend time on our favorite leisure website, and another "part of us" wants to eat less fat and carbs and spend more time working on projects, exercising, or volunteering. This, in and of itself, doesn't seem that controversial.

Through parents/caregivers and the education system, most people learn at an early age the consequences of too-frequently indulging their short-term desires. The more immediate, painful, and affective the negative consequence, the easier it is to convince yourself to refrain from future indulgence. Even before our parents/caregivers, evolution gave us in-born, visceral reactions to things that are good for us in the long run (eating nutritious berries = yummy!) and things that are bad for us in the long run (eating poisonous berries = vomit). But evolution doesn't provide the fine tuning, and in a fast-changing, complex environment, our consequence estimations need outside assistance. A different kind of convincing-of-the-short-term-self needs to happen when the feedback isn't visceral and immediate.

People have been smoking tobacco for roughly 5000-7000 years, but it wasn't until the last hundred years that large numbers of people knew that it hastened their death. Of course, most ancient smokers died from other ailments when the lifespan wasn't long enough for them to die of lung cancer. Once it became long enough, and once scientists had found a connection between smoking and cancer, a large number of people who would've enjoyed smoking in the short-term stopped or cut down (or at least felt guilty) because they had been informed by some trusted "other" that doing so would bring about long-term benefits. This isn't just self-control. Its informed self-control.

In some ways, this is the role of culture in general: to produce informed self-control (Freud's super-ego). We've all got the easy behavioral imperatives figured out: don't eat stuff that makes you puke; avoid situations that evoke terror. Rules exist because some of us (or all of us under some circumstances) may be inclined to behave in ways that are prohibited by those rules. Rules are not so much "made to be broken" as made to correct what was "broken" about our perceptions of consequences. For better or worse, this has become the domain of doctors: first physicians and perhaps now psychologists and psychiatrists. They make rules based on observations of seemingly disconnected actions and consequences. They are experts in consequences. Did psychologists, educators, or scientists aspire to the role of rule-maker? Probably not, but they're a necessary bi-product of a complex world in which our finite senses can't keep track of the many connections between actions and consequences. To believe otherwise is to succumb to nostalgia for a by-gone world.

Things get messy when we get personal about our analysis of time, desire, and self-control: media use (my area of research) and, even more personal, marriage and sex. There have been some terrific articles and commentary about marriage and fidelity in the wake of Anthony Weiner's virtual infidelity and NY's passing of a gay marriage law. A defining characteristic of marriage is the pledge of individuals to stick together. Its an attempt of the long-term-thinking self to override the future short-term-thinking selves so that the long-term self can benefit. But who is informing that long-term-thinking self? What is their evidence? What is their agenda?

This leaves us with an uncomfortable reality: those who can demonstrate the negative long-term consequences of things you know are pleasurable in the short-term and you think are not harmful in the long-term are telling you what to do, and people tend to not like being told what to do. For good reasons, too. Those in positions of power abuse it for their own gain. If I own stock in a cookie company, I'll fund research and coverage of research suggesting that another indulgence is particularly harmful, leading people away from that indulgence and toward cookies. Similarly, certain relationship experts might promote a certain view of monogamy because they benefit from its success in the marketplace of ideas, not because its any more accurate at predicting negative consequences than any other theory. The same might be said of a media effects researcher. Those who reject the findings of so-called experts analyzing this complex causal world can simply blame another aspect of that complex world that isn't under their control, freeing their short-term selves from blame. If people who aren't in long-term, monogamous relationships aren't happy, its not because they couldn't exert the self-control recommended by experts; its because they're being judged by an unfair, retrograde society intent on maintaining a certain kind of social order. If people who play lots of violent video games are more aggressive, then its because you measured "aggression" wrong or its due to some variable the researchers didn't control for. Basically, this leaves everybody believing what they want to believe, deferring to no one, and assessing consequences based on personal experience and the limited experience of those around them.

Since I don't want this entry (or anything else I write) to be an empty exercise in hand-wringing, I'll suggest some priorities for research and reporting on research.

We'll have to move from a proscription paradigm to an explanation paradigm, one that is supported by replicable empirical evidence. It is best to demonstrate how to find the links between short-term behavior and long-term consequences, to let people "see for themselves" as much as you can. Our society has become more complex, making it difficult to see the connections. Much of the study of the world, in science and the humanities, has become equally complex: full of impenetrable jargon and statistics. We've got to make explanations clearer, better educate ourselves so that we have some basic fluency in these languages, and support an education system that helps students understand how to find connections for themselves. Yes, we live in an extremely complex world, but the good news is that we've just scratched the surface of how technology can be used to explain concepts, patterns, and connections to large numbers of people in a customizable, individualized way, for free. Behavioral scientists and theorists might be at the forefront of finding patterns in behavior across time, but they can't maintain the trust of the public unless the public can see for themselves.

Not only can the public see for themselves, but maybe they can do the restricting themselves, too. We've all got a conscience. We just don't have the societal restrictions to assist it, and physically/temporally proximate temptation makes it harder to listen to that voice. We're not all tempted by the same thing, so the restrictions really shouldn't be one size fits all. If people can design their own restrictions, you avoid the possibilities of reactance and the totalitarian manipulation of taste that inspires it.

So, I'd like to run an outside-the-lab experiment to provide evidence that supports my dissertation hypothesis, but I'd also like people to be able to try the experiment on themselves, to plug in their own individual variables.

Getting attention

I'm sitting here in a lecture. I should be listening, but instead, I'm writing. I'm doing this because I just thought of a flip side to the debate over attention span, distraction, and the use of networked media by young people. Even if we ban the laptops in lecture, their/our minds might have been altered in some way that makes lectures like this pointless.

Sure, maybe people who use networked media a lot are accustomed to instant gratification (the emphasis being on "gratification": experiences that offer pleasure). And yes, media experiences are briefer than ever before.

But maybe this just means they're engaged in the expression and consumption of important ideas in a more efficient manner. Rather than thinking of networked media users' listening, reading, and thinking skills as being hobbled by networked media, they may just have become more efficient at finding and using relevant information. Thus, when they are forced to sit through a linear lecture with a lot of information that is not relevant and cannot be searched or scanned, they tune out, not out of boredom or lack of discipline necessarily, but because they prefer a more efficient flow of information.

So we sit here, slackjawed, unable to concentrate on a lecture. Whose fault is this: the speaker or the listeners? My hunch is that its a little bit of both. Of course, those who use networked media a lot would tend to think the problem is with the old fogeys who still lecture in the same way, insist that we consume information in the same way we did hundreds if not thousands of years ago. Those who do not use networked media (the tendency to use such media more likely being an effect of age cohort and/or income than an effect of holding any ideological disposition; the ideological disposition is a justification for an existing behavior, not the other way around) would tend to think that young people cannot think with the same depth and rigor and are thus intellectually stunted by their near-constant use of networked media.

I think what we need to isolate are the types of media experience or content. If consumers of information choose indulgent experiences over virtue experiences, then they are at fault. But if there isn't a significant different in virtue/vice value that one seeks out when using networked media, then perhaps producers of information should be more efficient in the manner in which they convey information.

I keep returning to the questions: What does it mean to be efficient communicators? What is the goal of communicating information? There is a category of media use referred to by Uses and Gratifications researchers as "information seeking." Its time to start scrutinizing that category and splitting it up into smaller ones. So much of what we do now is information seeking, but clearly, some of it is in our collective long-term interest and some of it is not. Some of what might look like dawdling is really the kind of creative play that leads to new ideas. And some of it really is dawdling.

Two approaches might help us tell the difference between the two: experiments that restrict people's access to parts of the vast quantity of information and detailed tracking of people's work using networked media, tracing the paths of new ideas to certain types of free-association information seeking.

Discipline & Privacy

I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to showcase some of my ideas on networked media, selection habits, and immediate gratification (which is shaping up to be my dissertation topic) in front of some esteemed colleagues from the psych department here at UMich. The great part about giving talks like this is that it can get you to look at a problem you've been staring at for way too long in a new way.

Something Ed O'Brien said prompted me to return to the issue of privacy. Research suggests that we keep our immediate desires (or inner hedonist, if you will) in check in various ways: by making a habit of things that we don't like doing but know will help us in the long term, by taking temptations out of our immediate grasp, by having reminders of what will happen to us if we fail to curb our immediate desires, or by exercising good ol' fashioned self control. There's also another thing that prevents our inner hedonists from taking over: public censure, or the judgment of others. We don't fill our faces with chocolate cake, fritter away our time on leisure pursuits instead of working, cheat on our husbands/wives, or buy boatloads of porn for various reasons, but one of them is likely that we will be looked down upon by others. We will be publicly embarrassed. But what if you could do all of those things in private, taking the punishment or barrier of public censure and embarrassment out of the equation?

I posit that new media allows us to do just that. We can do so many things that we would have been judged for without being judged because we can do them in private. In many cases, this is good. We can pursue our true passions without repressing who we really are for fear of some sort of cultural judgment. But in other cases, the selves that are being repressed by public scrutiny are just our inner hedonists. The inner hedonist is just one aspect of a self, an aspect that has been kept in check by public scrutiny for probably all of human history in one way or another. Give that aspect of the self space to do whatever it wants and you're going to get behavior that does not reflect what you consider to be "your self." You will get behavior that reflects one aspect of your self.

Here's the counter-intuitive part of this. Most people think our privacy is being eroded by networked media, that more and more of our lives are on display. There are two problems with this line of reasoning. First, though that information is out there and it is attainable, we must look at who is attaining it, how its being used, the extent to which we know about those things, and the extent to which that feeds back to alter our behavior. I would submit that most of the information about our online habits either sits unused, is used in some sense that ultimately doesn't embarrass us or punish us directly or indirectly (used to show us various kinds of ads), and thus does not alter our patterns of behavior. Its all fine and well to quote Orwell and come up with possible future scenarios in which our data is used by others to alter our desirous behavior, but I haven't encountered any evidence that indicates that has happened or is happening.

Here's the second problem. We never had the opportunity to do so many things that we can do now with networked media. Doing any number of things that feel good in the moment but are frowned upon by society (be it cheating on your wife/husband, learning how to build a bomb, trading bigoted jokes, etc.) were just too logistically difficult to pursue. It would be too much of a pain in the ass to find the right people or goods to carry those things off, and you had to sneak around to do them. These are just much, much easier to do now with networked media. We didn't do those things partly b/c we would not have had privacy when we did them and thus we would have been punished for doing them. Now, we can use the privacy that we should expect (privacy regarding our bank statements, voting behavior, private conversations with family members) to cloak the privacy that we never had (privacy regarding things that we know we shouldn't do but do anyway, not because they don't line up with the current public's social mores, but because they conflict with our own long-term goals). Online privacy is expected to cover a wider range of activities, some of them fine and some of them not so fine, than old school offline privacy. Is privacy eroded by these technologies? The technology allows it to be eroded, but I don't see that happening.

So if the eyes of the public can't keep your inner hedonist in check, then who can? Your inner disciplinarian, of course! And various kinds of technologies (like the program Freedom, or the Me timer or time tracking software for firefox) can do something that has never been done before with such efficiency and to such an extent: it can put your self at one point in time (the self that sits there not in direct proximity to temptation, well aware of what it should do) and allow it to exert power over your self at another time (the self that is surrounded by temptation and requires the discipline of some outside force to prevent it form acting). Think of it as a more nuanced, self-imposed chastity belt.

The most important difference is that we need to realize that the inner hedonist was always being kept in check, but that he was being kept in check by forces (i.e. the public, the government, mom, dad, etc.) that didn't always have our best interests at heart and had their own incentives for altering our behavior. We've found ways around them, but are we really any better off with our inner hedonists running the show? Now we can discipline our inner hedonist while preserving our autonomy and privacy. That's a big deal, and that's what I'll most likely be studying for the next couple of years.