‘The Curdling of the Internet’: The Open Public Sphere Internet as Threat Amplifier

A weekend retreat to a cabin in the woods provided me with time to finally get around to reading Jia Tolentino’s essay, ‘The I in the Internet.’ In a way, I’ve been thinking about what Tolentino describes as the ‘curdling’ of the internet for the past two years, since our research team started reviewing research on various forms of online hostility. More broadly, I’ve been thinking about the effects of social media on societies for the past decade.

I’m generally opposed to sweeping pronouncements about the negative effects of the internet, smartphones, or social media, mostly because it doesn’t seem to fit the evidence. Social media use, by itself, doesn’t seem to have much of an effect on well-being or depression; that is, if one person spends three hours a day on social media and the other spends one hour, or no hours, the person who uses more social media is no more likely to feel bad about themselves or about life in general. There’s also evidence that the internet exposes users to a wider range of opinions, rather than sorting users into filter bubbles or extreme echo chambers. Bad things may be happening in today’s world, and social media use might have increased at the same time, but that doesn’t mean that one caused the other to occur.

And yet, despite the apparent lack of evidence of a strong, negative effect of social media use on individuals, I can’t help but wonder if we, as researchers, are missing something, and how we might adjust so as to capture those things.

One way Tolentino’s feeling and the lack of individual, direct effects on social media users can both be true is if the internet/smartphones/social media are having a profoundly negative effect on society in general, but it occurs in some kind of indirect way. The most concise way of describing my hunch about this would be the ‘threat amplification’ effect. These technologies amplify certain voices, making certain kinds of people and behavior that were formerly invisible more visible. A sub-set of highly active social media users see the platforms as battlefields on which an ideological war is being fought, and so they post information that furthers their agendas, and/or a subset of especially passionate people simply express how strongly they feel about some issue. These expressions are perceived as threatening by a sub-set of other users, not necessarily because they contain explicit threats of violence, but maybe because they clash with some fundamental belief of theirs, or portend an escalation in the encroachment on their rights (e.g., the right to free speech; the right to exist; the right to defend themselves). These posts stick out to many people, draw attention to themselves in the way that any perceived threat in our environment sticks out to us. If future visibility of posts is determined through the amount of attention paid to them (via algorithms or 'most read' lists, etc.), then we tend to see more and more of these types of posts as time goes on.

Also, well-meaning users (journalists, re-tweeters, etc.) draw further attention to these posts in an effort to make sure that others see the threat because to ignore the threat would be hazardous. They might do so out of a sense of duty and compassion to others (i.e., they see others are in danger from the threat and must warn them) but might also do so out of self-interest, or in-group-interest. By drawing otherwise apathetic individuals’ attention to the threat, they may enlist them to join their fight. In such a way, much of the online discourse comes to resemble either a threat or a response to a threat.  

If we react to this by leaving the internet, by not participating, this may preserve our piece of mind, but it cedes the public forum of the internet to those holding more extreme views. So, perhaps we try to meet the threat with an equal and opposite assertion of our beliefs or values (which may, of course, be viewed by others as extreme and threatening). Or perhaps we just conform to the now-established norm of value-assertion-through-strong-takes in order to be heard (because in order to gain greater visibility in the form of likes, shares, and subscribers, it helps to conform to norms of what is popular), or simply because humans are prone to unconsciously conform to social norms of expression. All of these would lead to an internet that actually is becoming more threatening (again, defining 'threats' not in terms of what was intended, but how they are perceived by someone), and exposure to it would likely lead to increased polarization, depression, abuse, harassment, toxicity, etc. The internet may not have started out that way, but it could be the case that it is becoming that.

And that’s the tricky part. The internet that Robert Kraut analyzed 20 years ago in his landmark study of the effects of internet use had certain kinds of content and certain kinds of experiences and perspectives posted by users, and the internet that the research summed up in Hancock et al. has other content/experiences/perspectives, and today’s/tomorrows internet has/will have other content/experiences/perspectives. And if those three stages of the internet are sufficiently different from one another in terms of their contents, they may have very different effects. Thus, though we haven’t observed strong negative consequences of social media use, it’s impossible to rule out them occurring in the future, or right now, given the publishing lag and, perhaps, that we're looking at the wrong outcome variables.

The negative effects of internet use may not be depression, narcissism, or physical aggression. They may manifest themselves in voting behavior (e.g., voting for increasingly partisan, extreme candidates, so as to counter the perceived threat from the other side), or some other behavior that reflects a distrust in others (e.g., unwillingness to live in certain places or send one’s kids to schools with certain types of people, a kind of self-segregation). Eventually, this kind of mutual distrust may manifest itself in physical violence. Or perhaps we’ll view one another as very, very different and threatening, but ultimately leave one another alone, co-existing peacefully if not without mutual resentment (stranger things have happened).

But here’s an important limitation: everything I’ve called ‘the internet’ up until this point really refers to part of the internet: the open ‘public sphere’ internet: Twitter, Reddit, comments sections on news websites, the part of YouTube in which YouTubers engage in a kind of running commentary about the world; maybe certain users on Facebook and Instagram who use those platforms in this way. Tolentino does note that she's mostly talking about the 'social internet.' This is the part of the internet in which a single individual can post something that reaches many other individuals (one-to-many). But many of Tolentino's observations also seem to apply to news online, which is tightly linked to Twitter (the bubble that journalists live in is the bubble of the open public sphere internet). It’s worth remembering that the internet is a lot more than just this. It is Netflix and other streaming services: ‘top-down’ platforms in which content is created by a small group of professionals and consumed by a large audience. It is small-group communication via messaging apps (one-to-one, or several-to-several). Tolentino’s observations about online hostility probably don’t fit as well to small group communication online (which is 'social' and is online, though maybe it's pedantic to call it part of the 'social internet), and they only apply to Netflix and other mass media insofar as they try to reflect the zeitgeist of the open public sphere internet.   

The Open Public Sphere Internet as Difference Revealer

Now that there are so many people participating in public discourse online, the open public sphere internet has exposed groups to one another that are so unlike one another to begin with, in terms of their values, experiences, and perspectives, that independent of how aggressive or antagonistic they are, this difference is so shocking and threatening that people get freaked out. That is, it isn’t necessary to have people act in a hostile way toward another group, or in a strategic way so as to counter the messaging of others. Merely by expressing themselves, by showing who they are and what they believe, they may set others off.

Human difference was depicted and conceived in a certain way by mass media. It was often visual, concise, and fictional. So yes, traditional/legacy media depicted difference, but in a circumscribed way, made generic through the use of tropes and bracketed as fiction. While we weren’t consuming images of difference via mass media, we spent our time around people who are not terribly different in terms of beliefs, values, and experiences. We spent a lot of time around family, friends, schoolmates, and workmates. If we were out of sync in our beliefs or values, we often avoided those subjects in order to avoid conflict.

The differences that we see online are differences in values being expressed. Those differences always existed (there were always people who believed something that you would have found abhorrent), but we didn’t have to see them every day. We probably were never going to be particularly good at reacting to these differences. Many of us probably always would have perceived them as a threat to our own values. So, it could be argued that the internet is the first technology, the first moment in history, where we really have been confronted with values differences as they have always been. Of course, these online expressions are not pure reflections of any group's beliefs, are manipulated in various ways (though when we’re quickly scanning a feed and clicking on links, we may not recognize this). Nevertheless, despite the fact that they are not representative of the larger group, they are expressions of the beliefs and values of many real people. And maybe we feel this when we go online; we feel how real they are. They are not fictional characters dreamed up by a screenwriter. These are actual people who actually believe the exact opposite of what we believe.

It’s not surprising that people feel threatened by those differences. And so many folks react to the threat with a kind of siege mentality, and then many subsequent cultural expressions and public life become a reflection of that. And the only alternatives seem to be to carve out small clusters within online life via group messaging apps or forsake social media entirely.

What impact does the curdling of the open public sphere internet have on the world?

Why does any of this matter? Is it just a bunch of people bickering in cyberspace or does it have some clear connection to the rest of civic life? If some of us decide ‘to hell with it’ and only use social media for small-group communication and leave Twitter to the trolls, what would it matter?

I do wonder if the relationship between what is said on the open public sphere internet and power (political power, economic power) could change, or is changing. Perhaps when the open public sphere first became widely used in the United States, most people, including journalists and politicians, saw it as a kind of proxy for public opinion, overlooking the fact that only certain types of people expressed themselves. The apparent connection between what went on in the run-up to the 2016 election (expressions of extreme partisanship, particularly an insurgent group of Trump supporters engaging in a kind of online battle on behalf of their chosen candidate) and the outcome of that election (the election of that candidate) supports this view. 

But what if, in the coming months, the same open public sphere internet were to heap praise on Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren while continuing to deride Donald Trump and deriding or ignoring Joe Biden, and Biden or Trump end up winning the election? What if that inconsistency between opinion on the open public sphere internet and a democratic election outcome were to happen a few more times in high-profile elections in different democracies? Many people might come to believe that opinion on, say, Twitter, neither reflects nor causes shifts in larger public opinion. Once this is acknowledged, I do wonder if at least some people, either in the general public or in positions of power (e.g., widely-read journalists), would be less likely to take their cues from opinion expressed on the open public sphere internet.

There’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy aspect to it, I think. When people believe that Twitter is a bellweather, they look to Twitter and are subsequently influenced by opinion on Twitter. The evidence on which they initially base their belief that it is a bellweather might be suspect, but that doesn’t matter: once they believe it, they essentially bring it into being by assuming that it is public opinion writ large, are influenced by it as such, and, through their writing, influence others. That is, opinion leaders see a popular trend on Twitter and write about it as though it were popular more broadly. Others take cues from the opinion leaders and act on that information, turning it into a truly popular opinion. However, if opinion leaders stopped believing this (and again, it wouldn’t matter whether the reason they stopped believing it made much sense or was supported by evidence), they might ignore it and thus Twitter and the like would lose its power to influence public opinion writ large.

Maybe people in a certain social stratum are already leaning this way, avoiding social media (or at least the open public sphere internet) themselves, raising their kids to avoid it as well. These people are often quite powerful: upper class, working in tech, politically active. If they start ignoring opinion as expressed on the open public sphere internet, I can imagine all of it becoming like certain comment sections of certain news websites: it exists, it is ugly, but most readers simply ignore it, and it doesn’t really have much of an impact outside of itself.

In any case, it’s important to not simply assume that the open public sphere internet has a stable relationship with public opinion in general. I think it’s also worth thinking about the popularization of the open public sphere internet as the first moment in human history that we saw how different our views of the world really are, how directly they conflict with one another (there is also much agreement, though the current iteration of the open public sphere internet doesn’t seem suited to highlight that). It’s hard to imagine such a moment going smoothly. But perhaps it’s a matter of getting over the initial collective shock of it. Or perhaps we just need a little time to ourselves.

Recording each other for justice

Each Saturday, a recurring conflict takes place outside of an abortion clinic, a conflict that sheds light on how media technologies raise questions about the ethics of surveillance and privacy. It's a good example of how these issues are not just about how governments and corporations monitor citizens and consumers, but how these questions arise from interactions among citizens. My understanding of precisely what occurs around the abortion clinic is based on anecdotal evidence, so take everything in this entry with a grain of salt. This is one of those phenomena that I'd love to devote more time to understanding, if only I had the time. There is a compelling ethnography waiting to be written about it, one that would be particularly relevant to communication law scholars.

The space outside the clinic is occupied by two groups: protesters seeking to persuade individuals entering the clinic not to get abortions, and a group of people (hereafter referred to as "defenders") seeking to protect or buffer individuals entering the clinic from harassment from the protesters. This particular arrangement of individuals could have occurred long before the advent of digital networked technologies. What I'm interested in is what happens when you add those tools to the mix.

Protesters are often seen using their phones to take pictures of defenders and the license plates of defenders' cars. Protesters are, by law (at least as far as I know), permitted to do this. Both the protesters and defenders occupy a public space, or at least a space that is not "private" in the sense that one's home is private. Protesters are not, as I understand it, allowed to take pictures of individuals entering the clinic, as this would violate their rights to privacy as patients of the clinic. Even though they are not yet inside the clinic, if they are on the clinic's property and they are patients, their rights to privacy extend to the area around the clinic. If defenders believe that protesters are engaging in unlawful picture-taking, the defenders will use their phones to video record the protesters taking pictures.

Predictably, tempers occasionally flare, voices are raised, people get in each others' faces, and when behavior that approaches the legal definition of harassment or assault occurs, everyone starts recording everything with their phones. The image of extremely worked-up people wielding cameras as one would wield a weapon, recording each other recording each other in a kind of infinite regress of surveillance, strikes me as ludicrous, partly because the act of recording someone with your phone makes you appear passive, somewhat nerdy, and almost...dainty.

What is the point of all this recording? In most cases, the intention seems to be to catch others in an act of law-breaking, to create a record of evidence to turn over to the police that could be admissible in a court of law. But in other cases (e.g., the protester's pictures of defenders' license plates), the intent seems to have little to do with the actual law. The police would have little interest in the license plate numbers of law-abiding citizens. So, why are they doing this, and what happens to these pictures?

Enter social networking sites (SNS). The pictures, as I understand it, are subsequently uploaded to a SNS group page which contains a collection of pictures of defenders and their license plates. It is possible for SNS users to make such groups "secret" and/or invitation-only, so that the groups could not be found by those in the pictures. My understanding is that this leads to those who are in the pictures disguising their identities online so as to infiltrate the secret groups, acting as moles.

But what is the point of developing these online inventories of people who are defenders or protesters or, for that matter, publicly state any particular belief? Is all of this just an intimidation technique? And if so, is it effective? Is there a kind of panoptic logic at work here, in which the fear comes from not knowing precisely who will see those pictures and in what context they will be seen (e.g., by a would-be employer 20 years from now)? Are they using the pictures as part of a concrete plan to take action against the individuals in the pictures, or is it not that well thought-out? Do people taking pictures and amassing inventories like this do so because they imagine that someday, the law will change, or collective sentiment will change, at which point it will becoming damning evidence that one was affiliated with a group that is then seen as abhorrent? Is it akin to a German taking a picture of a Nazi sympathizer in 1939, banking on the fact that while being a Nazi at that time was socially acceptable, it would not be so for long, and that when it became unacceptable, the picture could be used to discredit or blackmail the person?

I don't think this phenomenon is relegated to protesters or defenders of abortion. I often think of it in a much more benign context: traffic violations. Let's say I were to record individuals making illegal U turns (or not using their fricking blinkers). The police may not be interested in my small-stakes vigilantism, but what if I were to start to amass an online inventory that included recordings of lousy drivers caught in the act, and the database included their license plates and pictures of their faces. The judgment here isn't taking place in a court of law. It's a kind of public shaming via peer-to-peer surveillance.

Aside from questions of motivation, the phenomenon raises questions of legality and ethics. It's my understanding that it is okay to take pictures of other individuals in public places, and/or their cars and license plates, and post those pictures online as long as the individuals and cars were in public. Perhaps at some point, were someone to take thousands of pictures of someone leaving their office everyday, it becomes an illegal activity (stalking), but I imagine the line to be blurry (are two pictures okay? Is it only not okay when you've been told to stop?). But what if you only take a single picture of an individual in public, and that individual isn't breaking the law, but you put that picture together with pictures of many other people engaged in a similar activity in an effort to publicly shame them or intimidate them? That seems illegal, but how do you prove what the effort or intention really was? Would it qualify as defamation?

Maybe it hinges on whether or not someone is a public figure. If a protester was quoted in a newspaper or their picture was on the front page of the New York Times, then this seems like fair game. The individual in the paper might suffer negative consequences as a result of being widely known for his quote and his behavior, but what are we supposed to do, not allow the press to depict protesters? What if a blog quoted a protester and featured a picture of him? Functionally, the blog isn't much different than the newspaper, and the lines between the two are blurry. The case of the protester quoted in the New York Times is realistic but rare, whereas there will likely be a great many quotes and pictures on SNS of people stating all sorts of beliefs and doing all sorts of things that may be worthy of judgment to some people at some time.

Even if we decide it fits into a certain legal or ethical category, this may not matter if the behavior remains secret, if technology enables it but doesn't bring it to the surface (i.e., the problem of policing secret inventories).

One possibility is that the law has simply been outstripped by technology. In place of the law, people respond to unethical uses of technology with, you guessed it, more technology. In this case, technology developers make it harder to take surreptitious pictures of people by making it difficult to turn the camera shutter sound off on camera phones. Other tech developers have engineered clothing that reflects light back at cameras in such a way that renders their images invisible. It could be argued that we have been living in a world in which every step of the justice system now functions through technology outside of traditional channels of justice administration, and that the best thing we can do is acknowledge that reality and consider how best to create an ethical world given the imperfect state of things, at least for the foreseeable future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Hanging out in Ye Olde Towne Square

I was chatting with a friend this evening about the proliferation of cellphones in other countries, specifically Mexico. As is the case with a lot of Non-US towns, many towns in Mexico made the leap from very few telephones to tons of cellphones, skipping the intermediary step of many household land-lines. She was saying that before the rise of cellphones, young people would go to the town square to hang out at night. You could count on seeing your friends and peers at the square, and you couldn't really make plans to hang out in smaller groups at more specific places because you lacked the means to coordinate plans on short notice.

I'd never really thought about it before, but phones and email allow young people the opportunity to make plans to hang out. I suppose you would also see people at school and make plans there to hang out later, but the point is that you'd always have to be somewhere where there were a lot of people in order to see your friends. For older people, the pub or the coffee house were the places where you would see your peers and socialize. Once you introduce phones, you allow people the means to selectively hang out with certain people while avoiding others. Its not that we don't go to public places like bars or malls anymore, but I wouldn't be surprised if hanging out with small groups of friends substituted for hanging out with larger groups in public, especially in places where they went from having no means of communicating with peers to everyone having a device that allows people to coordinate plans on very short notice.

I'd always thought of the influence of cellphones on the public sphere in terms of the actual number of people you talked to, or how long you talked to them for. But now, I'm prompted to consider how phones are used to make plans for meeting in physical space and how those plans are different than the ones you could've made without that device.

What are the implications of this? You'd be less apt to see extreme differences in the US. We've had phones for quite some time, and the adoption of phones was concurrent with the adoption of many other domestic technologies (namely the television) which might've contributed to the destruction of the public square as a social hub. But in a place where they had television, film, and radio already and then suddenly get cellphones, you might see a drastic change in the hanging-out habits of youngsters.

Of course, we now have online equivalents of the public square in the form of Facebook and other social networks and fora. But what about the places where accessing those online public squares is difficult (maybe b/c they've got cellphones that can't access the internet or that make it much easier to communicate P2P but not in groups)? Its important to pull apart these two 21st century technologies - cellphone and internet - and examine their influences on societies independent of one another. If you've got no public space to see your peers, would you have a strong sense of community with those who lived around you, with your town, with your country?

Levels of online discourse on message boards

After perusing two comments sections that relate to the Virginia Tech massacre - one section under the killer's video on YouTube and the other under a column written by a Dartmouth student on the NYTimes page - I've come to the conclusion that there are many different levels of discourse online. At first, it appears as though there is only one - the shrill, profanity-laden dialog you see on high-profile, heavily trafficked sites like YouTube. There's lots of talk of the disinhibiting effect of anonymity, and how it will result, inevitably, in mean-spirited discourse. But its likely that the majority of online discourse takes place "below the surface" of this level of discourse, involving groups of people with similar values who are less likely to flame one another.

The more "public" the discussion is (that is, the more hits that website gets), the more likely the discussion is to be about pecking order. The more "private" it is, the more the discussion will be about sharing information. To say that online discourse is uniformly public just because it can all be accessed by anyone misses the point of how we actually use these spaces to interact with others. We use them according to our particular tastes and desires, which are largely pre-determined by our real-world circumstances (our upbringing, what neighborhood we're living in, our profession). The way sites are linked together continues this trend of linking like-minded people to one another, resulting in smaller, less angry conversations. YouTube is a place for looking at what everyone is looking at. Blogs (where smaller groups of people congregate with like-minded folks) are the place to discuss them.

Then there's the matter of moderation (the NYTimes blog comments board makes more of a point of letting people know that its being moderated than the YouTube one). Presumably, the smaller the site, the less moderation would be needed. But that wholes process (what gets cut, why it gets cut, how many comments get cut) is never really clear. Not that we seem to mind.