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.

Futures of Twitter: Scenario Testing

Yes, I've railed against the appetite for future forecasting in this blog before. In fact, pretty much every post from the past few years is, in its own way, a screed against the kind of prediction of complex systems of long periods of time that news readers and journalists who interview academics can't seem to get enough of. And yet, when something "big" happens - a pandemic, the election of Donald Trump, Elon Musk taking over Twitter - I feel the same insatiable pull toward forecasting that everyone else feels. These are important events with far-reaching implications, and so despite their complexity, we can't seem to just say, "who knows what will happen!" We have to venture a guess.

And not just any guess. When we see worst-case-scenarios as plausible, we detest a future in which we ignored the threat so much that we have to predict doom. The unpleasantness of comprehending those futures is outweighed by our fear of feeling guilty about (and of being guilty of) not having done enough to prevent them. The other side of the argument is that there has never been a time in human history when worst-case-scenarios weren't plausible, and to spend time constantly ringing alarms is both joyless and unproductive, and that our inability or unwillingness to recall the false alarms of yesterday keeps us from learning anything about how complex systems actually work, to actually improve our prediction accuracy, and - by extension - to improve our world. I do get both sides of that argument, and so to me it seems unresolvable. 

So, to further refine my stance against long-term predictions about complex systems (the global economy, geopolitics, culture, developments in technology, etc.), I'll say that I prefer something less like predicting whether some event will spell doom for society (super vague, no timeline for when "doom" will occur, what shape it will take, etc., and so unfalsifiable) and more like fivethirtyeight's scenario testing. You start with several plausible scenarios - each one mutually exclusive to the degree that it's possible, and fairly specific about outcomes and timelines but not so specific as to be inevitably falsified by some minor quirk of history. This, at least, would allow us to learn something if our predictions are wrong, allow us to do a post-mortem and see what we missed, what variables we weighed too heavily, etc. Of course, this is dissatisfying if you are a doom-predictor because all the learning in the world won't amount to a hill of beans after the apocalypse that you failed to predict! But assuming there's at least a few people left on planet Earth, learning will be a good thing. To my mind, entertaining somewhat optimistic scenarios isn't mutually exclusive with being prepared for (though not actually predicting) the worst. 

In that spirit, here are a few scenarios regarding Musk's takeover of Twitter, some more optimistic than others. They use three metrics of success/failure: financial success (does the company turn a profit, stay solvent, continue to exist), cultural relevance (does the general public care about what's said on Twitter as much as they do now, more than they do now, or less than they do now? Does some other platform become the proxy for vox populi that Twitter is right now?), and "externalities" (affective polarization, political violence, political revolutions, cancelling/calling out people. Externalities could be both "good" [revolts against dictatorships, publicly shaming those who deserve it] or "bad" [downfalls of democracies, publicly shaming those who don't deserve it]).

Scenario 1: Financial success with lower cultural relevance and few "externalities." The most intriguing part of Musk's takeover to me, so far, is his apparent willingness to blow up the existing way that Twitter makes (or attempts to make) money. Perhaps the changes he instates drive user count WAY down, but this won't necessarily make Twitter less of a financial success. He could charge a portion of users $8, or pay the 100 most followed $1,000,000 and charge anyone who tweets more than 100 times a year $50 (a kind of 'lottery-ticket' model that, when you think about it, isn't that different than would-be filmmakers shelling out for expensive equipment and film school for a crack at a studio contract). My personal favorite idea is Willy Staley's "congestion pricing" plan - when a certain number of users have tweeted about a topic, the price of tweeting about it increases, which would - in theory - encourage people to tweet less about trending topics and more about a diverse array of topics. Or maybe a revived Vine drives profits and allows Twitter to continue to be a loss leader. Regardless of how he does it, it's possible that Twitter becomes profitable.

Meanwhile, the platform loses some of its cultural cache. The behavior (on Twitter and off) of Musk and a handful of high-profile Twitter users who would have been regulated under the old regime turns off journalists and tastemakers to such a degree that they stop paying attention to it (regardless of how outlandish it is) and pay more attention to how YouTubers, TikTokkers, and podcasters react to the day's events. Twitter will always have the brevity and "portability" of text on its side - it's easier, in the course of conversation, to tell someone what another person Tweeted than to try to describe even a short video. So, maybe a Twitter alternative (short text, highlighting trending topics) pops up and steals at least part of the cultural spotlight from Twitter. 

Regarding "externalities," there's no convincing evidence that what people say on Twitter causes political violence, revolutions, voter intimidation, cancelling, etc. These things happened before and they continue to happen, but it's just as easy to point to what people are saying on TikTok, YouTube, and podcasts as it is to point to what people are saying on Twitter as the cause of it, and so the argument that a Musk-led Twitter is leading to the downfall of society never really gains traction. 

Scenario 2: Financial success with the same level of cultural relevance and no apparent increase in externalities. Same as Scenario 1 except people (journalists, podcasters, YouTubers, TikTokkers, and - by extension - people who pay attention to what those people have to say) keep paying attention to Twitter. Maybe what's said on Twitter doesn't change all that much, or maybe it turns into a different kind of dumpster fire that people can't ignore. This is basically a kind of 'status quo' scenario. Sure, somethings change (the way Twitter monetizes users, the number of users, the character of the userbase), but no seismic changes to culture or to Twitter as a corporate entity. To me, this still feels like the most likely scenario. Habit and inertia are powerful forces - people will want to keep using the platform they've gotten into the habit of using, and reporters will want to keep referring to Twitter as vox populi. The bulk of everyday users who don't engage with trending topics will muddle along - perhaps as long as they have no interest in reaching large audiences with their tweets, they'll be allowed to use the platform for free. 

Scenario 3: Financial success with the same level of cultural relevance and "bad" externalities. In this scenario, there are a few instances of political violence that can be clearly and obviously linked to what people say on Twitter. Musk will point out that people are saying the exact same things on other platforms like YouTube and TikTok and that his company is being judged by a double-standard, but the sizable portion that already has it in for him won't want to hear it. On a "normal" ad-supported social media platform, this would start a death spiral - advertisers pull out, revenue craters, and they can't keep the lights on. But it's interesting to consider what would happen if Musk pivoted away from an ad-supported model, which he already seems to be doing. How bad and/or obvious would the externalities have to get before governments blocked the platform? I suppose middle-layer companies (occupying the space between users and platforms) like Apple, Alphabet, and AT&T might say 'enough is enough' and drop Twitter, but then maybe Musk uses Starlink to do an end run around them! This sounds a bit far-fetched to me, but you never know. 

Scenario 4: Financial failure. Enough high-profile Twitter users leave that the platform becomes less attractive to many everyday users, and the ad-supported models becomes unviable. Musk's attempts to charge subscription fees results in users trying to circumvent the fees, leading to draconion crack-downs, further turning off everyday users who head over to YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, Reddit, and Twitter clones. It's odd to think of a platform that still has cultural cache going belly up, but to some extent this is what happened to Vine. If you can't make the numbers work, your impact on culture is a moot point - you just cease to exist...or you get acquired, sold off, merged, etc. What might Twitter's afterlife look like if that happens? 

This, I think, gets us to focus on particular observables - financials, number of users, the extent to which people are talking about/paying attention to what's said on Twitter, political disruption - which is all I'm really hoping for in conversations about the future. 

How platform-specific is influence?

In the past, I've railed against making predictions about the future as a way to understand the present. This is different than predictions used as a way of dealing with uncertainty through humor - a pretty common, totally understandable reaction to crises. I'm thinking more of op-ed hot takes that seem to want to be taken seriously.

Predictions like this are often so vague that they're impossible to prove wrong. For example, if I predict that Twitter/Facebook/Reddit will die/fail, how and when will I know if this turns out to be true? If their userbases, sometime over the next 5 years, decline by 35%, have they died/failed? How about 50%? Do we have to wait another 5 years to judge the prophecy? There's also the problem of lacking a counterfactual. If something horrible happens after someone uses social media, we can't compare it to a world in which they did not use social media. It's possible the horrible thing would have happened anyway (or perhaps something even...horribler?), just through some other mechanism. There is no disincentive for continuing to make bold, wrong predictions because there is no mechanism for keeping score, no highly visible public record of wrong takes (though spectacularly wrong takes do tend to catch flak).

And yet I'm finding it hard not to use the occasion of Elon Musk's (apparently successful?) attempt to buy Twitter as a time to indulge in some predictions. I'll compensate for this indulgence by offering something more in the spirit of this blog - using the occasion as a way to gain insight into something more general about the uses and impact of social media. But first...

I can think of two likely scenarios:

Scenario 1: very little changes. Twitter use habits, like any kind of habit, are hard to change. There have been many instances in which social media platforms have done something that users have not liked, but most users do not then abandon the platform. We can more easily recall the instances in which they did abandon the platform: MySpace and Digg come to mind for me. But it seems that nearly every significant change to a platform - be it functionality, moderation policy, or ownership - tends not to result in a wholesale change in user behavior. The "culture" of Twitter may change, but linking this to Musk's ownership can be a tricky claim to verify, as cultures are always changing. In this scenario, there is no massive change in Twitter discourse (i.e., who participates and what is said or amplified) that can be directly and obviously linked to Musk's ownership of the platform. A handful of influential Twitter users on the Left will defect, as will a few hundred thousand less-influential users (including many journalists who will write about the experience). They will be displaced by a few newly influential users on the Right and a few hundred thousand less-influential tech bros and Far Right/Alt Right users. Musk might put the worst of the Far Right users in seemingly random "time outs," less out of any political conviction and more to reassert dominance get a laugh at their righteous indignation at having their trust betrayed. Losing the revenue they generate through ad exposure or subscriptions won't hurt, but the board will chastise him for playing fast and loose and he'll promise to be better. Pundits will pin everything the Right does on Musk and Twitter, but the connection won't be obvious and the claims won't be of interest to anyone outside of a bubble of journalists, news junkies, and academics. I consider this the more likely of the two scenarios. 

Scenario 2: things go poorly, less because of how Musk changes the functioning of the site and more because of the signal it sends to current and potential users. Far Right fringe groups and apolitical trolls will see Musk's unwillingness to regulate content as an invitation to push things as far as they can, inciting small-but-significant numbers of Far Right "activists" to engage in terrorism and assassination. A handful of violent political acts will be linked to Twitter in a way that will seem obvious and undeniable, not just to readers of New York Times opinion pieces but to the average politically-disengaged citizen, who will come to associate Musk and all his brands (e.g., Tesla, SpaceX) with toxicity rather than innovation. Musk will then belatedly recognize the damage to his brands and sell the company. 

So as to make these scenarios more falsifiable, I'll say that one will happen by the end of 2023. 

With that out of the way, I'll return to the title of the blog post, returning to a topic that I'd like to write about at greater length in the future: what is the nature of influence on social media platforms, and how does it differ (in duration, scope, domain-specificity, etc.) from mass media or face-to-face influence?

In thinking about the possibility of influential Twitter users defecting to another platform, I realized that platform-abandonment might involve losing one's audience and the attendant influence. All fine and well to say "follow me to YouTube/TikTok/Substack/Tumblr/Medium/Mastadon/whatever!", but it's hard to coordinate a mass exodus to another platform, and harder still to sustain that interest over time, especially when the new content home offers more of an a la carte content experience rather than the smorgasbord we've come to expect from popular platforms. Smaller platforms have trouble handling large influxes of digital refugees. Perhaps especially high-profile influencers will easily move their following to another platform (or to podcasting), but what of the Twitter users with followings of 500 to 50,000? How portable is their influence? 

Those who jump ship may lose some of their audience but find a more intimate relationship between themselves and a smaller group of followers on another platform, and this may be more rewarding for them. Those who stick around a less-regulated Twitter may find themselves in more direct battles with other users with whom they disagree than had previously been the case. The 'block' function and tweaks to the much-discussed-but-poorly-understood algorithms will help determine how easy it is for users to tolerate dissent in the name of maintaining influence. But no matter how it shakes out, I think we can learn something about influence by seeing what happens to the public personae of Twitter users with decent-sized followings who leave Twitter. Maybe Twitter's loss will be YouTube's/TikTok's/Substack's/Tumblr's/Reddit's gain, both in terms of users and in terms of cultural influence, however one chooses to define and measure that slippery concept.  

‘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.

The Now Audience and the Later Audience

Game of Thrones is wrapping up its run on HBO, and watching the show and the reaction to the show has rekindled my interest in storytelling and audiences. I'd like to avoid discussing the actual qualities of the show, as other online voices seem to have that pretty well covered. I'd like to focus on the abundance of voices and the qualities of the conversation about the show, and how it resembles conversations about the endings of other popular TV stories.

Twitter, Reddit, and the blogosphere (i.e., the 'now' audience) give us a segment of the public's immediate reaction to a story. As such, it seems to come packaged with the story itself: we get the show, and we get reaction of this part of the public along with it. For a long time, we'd gotten the judgments of professional critics alongside the release of cultural products like TV shows, books, and movies. These judgments would maybe help audiences to sift through the large quantity of content and decide what was worth their time, or perhaps open a door to a new way of interpreting those works. And surely, many audience members thought of critics as elitist, their opinions being worth no more than the opinions of anyone else, and thus ignored them.

I doubt that many people use the immediate judgments of the audience that is vocal on social media as a guide to help determine what they should watch and what they should ignore (perhaps the mere fact that people are talking about a show, even if they're trashing it, serves as the signal that the show is worth watching). Instead, I think it's mostly of interest for people who are already watching. Most of the conversation seems to be commiseration: finding the voices that echo the way you, as a viewer, feel but perhaps could not articulate in that way, and then amplifying those voices through upvotes, likes, share, and retweets.

It is tempting to see the reaction to an ongoing story like Game of Thrones as the reaction to the show. However, the segment of people who talk about the show online is just a small portion of the overall audience for the show, and certainly not a representative sample of that larger group. It's hard to know what the rest of the audience makes of the show, and, in the absence of any information about that larger segment of the audience, its easy for our brains to just fill it in with adjacent, semi-relevant information (see the availability heuristic): the reaction on social media.

Beyond that, there's also a widely held assumption that the reaction on social media drives subsequent reaction or opinion. This view acknowledges that the voices on social media are but a sliver of the overall public, and that they're not a representative sample, but assumes that they wield an influence over the larger public. This may not occur through some conscious subservience of the public to the opinion-leaders on Twitter, but, again, maybe because of an unconscious mental heuristic. The social media reaction is the initial impression, and initial impressions greatly influence subsequent impressions, as people tend to ignore other relevant information (in this case, actual qualities of the show).

There's no doubt that news media plays a role in this process as well. Whereas news outlets in the past would have noted the number of people tuning in to a broadcast and used that as a kind of index of cultural importance, the news media now can talk about the reaction to the show on social media. This coverage amplifies those social media voices. I'm betting that more of the news articles about the ending of Game of Thrones are about the online reaction to the show than was the case with the endings of previous TV shows, and so the social media reaction to shows is likely 'louder' than it once was, making it more likely that the general public sees that reaction as the reaction to the show.

This topic - the relationship between voices on social media, news outlets, and public opinion - is much larger than Game of Thrones or popular TV in general. How much do people who post on Twitter or, more broadly, on social media really influence the culture at large? The answer, of course, depends on a variety of factors, though I think that many just assume it drives the interest and opinions of the rest of the masses for the above reasons.

When might this not be the case? When might the social media voices not reflect or influence the reactions of the larger public in subsequent years? I've been thinking about the importance of a mechanism to make visible, or monetize (same thing?), the non-immediate reaction of the larger public (i.e., the 'later' audience). In the case of news events, perhaps historical documentaries are the mechanism. Years after an event, we tell a story about the event and often contextualize the immediate reaction of the public at the time (it's hard to think of a better example of this than Ezra Edelman's O.J.: Made in America). The perspective of the historical documentary is a corrective one. But most news events don't get this treatment. Most news events are of such great importance to the people living through them and of such lesser importance to later audiences that there's not enough incentive to create a mechanism for registering anything other than the immediate social media reaction.

In the case of popular stories like Game of Thrones, the mechanism for capturing non-immediate reactions of the larger public are international streaming video sites like HBO GO, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Disney +. Years from now, these shows will be available in media markets to audiences who have likely forgotten, if they were aware of it in the first place, the initial reaction to the show on social media. The reaction, which was an overwhelming part of the context in which the show was viewed at the time it was first released, won't be any part of the context in which they watch the show. In terms of financial incentives, the importance of the 'later' audience is far greater than that of the 'now' audience: there is far more money to be made off a show in, say, the Chinese media market from 2025-2035 than from English-speaking media markets in 2019 (i.e., the media markets that are most likely influenced by or reflected in the online reaction to a show).

For a show that is specifically tied to a cultural moment in time and may not have much of a life after its initial run, the subsequent streaming market in other countries may not be as important (although the ongoing success of Friends, what I think of as a pretty dated product of the 1990's, suggests that we may overestimate the importance of universality in determining a show's subsequent success). But Game of Thrones strikes me as the quintessential example of a show that isn't built for a particular time or place, and was probably sold to HBO as such. Of course, the show reflects some of the values of its creators who are embedded in 2010's United States culture, but it is not nearly as embedded in that cultural context as the social media reaction to the show. The online reaction to the show is certainly about elements of the show itself - character arcs, pacing, etc. - but it also reflects the experiences, emotions, and politics of the people writing about the show in 2019. When people watch the show 25 years from now in another country, I think they'll mostly just see a show about dragons and deceit (which are pretty timeless motifs).

To an extent, I've already seen this disjuncture between the 'now' audience and the 'later' audience with The Sopranos. That show ended just as the 'now' audience was finding its voice online. Critics had already noted the way the show had lost its footing, and then came an ending that seemed, at the time (and perhaps even now), designed to piss off the 'now' audience.

But how is the show experienced by the 'later' audience in 2019? It's likely that much of the 'later' audience still finds fault with the final seasons of the show, but they don't watch single episodes or even single seasons in isolation, and they don't have time to dwell on whether or not the episode or season disappointed them before moving on to the next episode or season. Often, they consume the show as a whole. More important to this discussion, they likely don't go searching for the social media reaction to the show as it was aired 20 years ago. Some of that reaction is still there on the web, and, in some way, the reaction to the ending feels more dated than the show itself. The Sopranos, like many other shows that occasionally ran afoul of their most ardent and vocal fans, has a long shelf life. Even Lost, a show I thought of as the best example of a TV show with a disappointing ending, is apparently being reappraised.

It's impossible to know for sure what the 'later' audience will think of a show, but watching the long-term success of shows like Friends and The Office on streaming platforms, and watching the amount of money streaming services like Netflix will pay to keep them, has me thinking about the ways in which it is easy to overestimate the market power, and perhaps the cultural power, of the 'now' audience.

Why do some people believe smartphones and social media are harmful?

I try to read and listen to critiques of smartphones and social media with an open mind. Typically, these critiques note the addictive qualities of these technologies and lament their effects on our abilities to engage in deep, sustained contemplation and substantive social interaction. A decade of experience conducting research on the uses and effects of social media has taught me to be skeptical of these claims. The first thing we would expect to see, if these claims were true, would be vast differences between those who use smartphones/social media a lot and those who use them a little or not at all. Among younger folks, we'd expect differences in academic achievement. Among everyone, we'd expect differences in happiness, well-being, depression, and/or the nature of their relationships with others. Even if such differences existed, this would not necessary suggest that these technologies caused changes in individuals. Perhaps individuals possess some existing characteristics (such as a lack of a clear sense of purpose in their lives) that, ten years ago, would have caused them to watch a lot of television and be unhappy, and that now causes them to spend a lot of time on Facebook and be unhappy. When I look at the sum total of what studies have found over the past ten years, I don't even see much evidence of the correlations you would expect to see if the claims were true. To the extent that there are correlations between use and negative outcomes, the magnitudes of the effects tend to be small (far smaller than is suggested by the level of concern they've prompted among many).

This doesn't rule out the possibility that within the more recent past (say, within the last year or two), smartphones and social media may have started to have the kinds of negative consequences about which many people worry. Research moves at a slow pace, and the technologies and the ways people use them are changing. Personally, it's hard to look at some of the freshmen I teach in large lecture classes, who are seemingly unable to stop using their phones, and not think, 'Maybe the worriers are right after all. Maybe we had to wait until a generation of young people had a chance to develop technology use habits at a young age to really see the effects of the technologies on people.' I'm passionate about doing whatever we can to establish solid evidence of the effects of smartphones/social media use on mental health, academic achievement, and relationships. I'm passionate about improving our measures. I don't want to set the bar for evidence of pernicious effects unrealistically high. I just want to see solid evidence before I believe the worriers.

At the same time, I think it's worthwhile for those who worry about the effects of smartphones/social media to consider alternative explanations for what they see. If there turns out not to be evidence of smartphones and social media's pernicious effects, why might it seem as though they have those effects?

I think part of it has to do with the people that worriers observe. Often, they observe young people: children and adolescents. The adults they observe, including themselves, often have the types of jobs (academic jobs; journalism; social media managers) that allow them flexibility in how they spend their time. This is what children and journalists have in common with one another: they have flexible schedules. There are no clear boundaries between work, play, and social time. Under these circumstances, social media, it would seem, can be pernicious. It can be habit-forming to an extent that feels addictive, crowd out deep thought with shallow distractions, put you on a hedonic treadmill that feels impossible to get off.

But these are not the circumstances of the average person.

Most people, in the United States and in the rest of the world, have more structured lives. They spend large periods of the day working or care-taking family members. Do they use smartphones/social media while they work and care-take? I'm sure some of them do. In the absence of smartphones/social media, would some of those folks have engaged in other non-work/non-care-taking activities such as socializing with co-workers face-to-face or watching television? Probably. In any case, it's clear that research on leisure use of smartphones and social media at work ('cyber-loafing' is the humorously antiquated name for this) and use while care-taking is important, but also clear that we should not assume that social media plays the same role in the lives of individuals with more structured lives as it does in the lives of those with less structure.

What I suspect is that many people, perhaps most people, spend most of their days engaged in work that is not especially stimulating or fulfilling, but that pays the bills. At the end of the day, they want to relax. Ten or twenty years ago, they might sit down in front of the television and unwind. Today, they might break out their smartphones (perhaps while also watching TV) and sift through social media posts, exchange messages with friends, and catch up on the day's events. This kind of use would serve roughly the same function as TV use ten or twenty years ago - relaxing after a hard day's work - while helping them to feel connected to far-flung friends and family (an especially valuable perk to those who work at home and may feel isolated).

Does their smartphone/social media use come with some bad side effects, such as exposure to an aggressively polarized online culture war, or exposure to plenty of misleading or untrue information? Sure, but when was it otherwise? Didn't exposure to TV come with plenty of bad side effects, such as exposure to a skewed version of reality, one that often trafficked in violence and ugly stereotypes? I don't mean to rely on the TV comparison as a way of excusing the many problems with online life. But I think it's worthwhile to bring up so as to correct the belief that our leisure time, in the past, tended to be especially productive and pro-social.

Perhaps the lives of certain people (those with flexible schedules) have changed a great deal due to the popularization of smartphones and social media. Perhaps they are suffering and they're angry at the creators and supporters of smartphones and social media, and in their anger, overreach in their claims about the effects of smartphones and social media. Perhaps not! But I hope to make the case that to believe that smartphones and social media are not problematic for the majority of their users is not something that only industry shills do. There is a sensible reason, if an untested one, to believe this.

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.

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.

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 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.

Will the Revolution be Tweeted?

I just went to a terrific, timely talk by visiting professor Michael Dobbs on social media's role in revolutions. It was a rare treat to be in a room with well-informed experts on media and politics and discuss something that was going on right at that moment. Dobbs gave many examples of the popular press claiming that social media, Twitter in particular, had precipitated the successful revolution in Tunisia and the still-in-progress revolution in Egypt. He brought up examples of techno-utopian views on the subject (e.g. Clay Shirky's TED talk on the revolutionary power of Twitter) as well as rebuttals such as Malcolm Gladwell's piece for the New Yorker.

One question that came to mind during his talk was: when assessing whether or not Twitter and social media are capable of facilitating revolutions, to what are comparing them? And by "we," I mean the users, the public, the press, the critics, anybody. Gladwell essentially compares Twitter and Facebook groups to real world activism. I think he does this because he believes (as do I) that a fair amount of social media activists think of their tweeting or Facebook-group-founding as more similar to participation in a protest than sitting at home passively in front of a television screen and watching it all unfold. They think they're being active, but Gladwell points out that they ultimately have little real power because, unlike civil rights protesters or other activists who actually changed our world, they are not making any real sacrifice; they are not risking much; they are not forming lasting bonds with people for whom they would make some real sacrifice (e.g. a large sum of money, risking one's life, etc). So that, Gladwell says is the key difference between real world protesters and virtual ones: shared sacrifice.

I basically think of online activism the way i think about online "friends": instead of just saying, "online _____ is no substitute for the real thing!", I think it presents us an opportunity to pull apart the real world phenomenon and ask what parts of it are duplicated by the online proxy, what parts of it aren't, and how those parts matter for outcomes of interest. So, what is the point of protesting?

First, its a way to devalue the ruling party's monopoly on physical force. If enough people get out there in the town square and don't back down after being physically threatened and assaulted, then the power to threaten and assault loses its meaning. There's also a "softer" power of protesting crowds: they can choose not to vote for someone, they can choose not to spend their money somewhere. Even if they don't live in a democracy, they can make it even more glaringly apparent to the outside world that they're living in a country that isn't even remotely democratic. Dobbs seemed skeptical that this could result in the overthrow of a repressive regime. It didn't work in Poland, it didn't work in Iran, and it probably wouldn't work here, not unless people make very real, significant sacrifices, ones that couldn't be done online.

Dobbs essentially said that Twitter is a way to share information. Like pamphlets distributed in other revolutions, they are a necessary but not sufficient criteria for revolution. Other things need to be in place: long-standing, easy-to-grasp grievances, for one. But I don't think social media is just a way to get information out. The difference has to do with social pressure. Television was and is quite good at presenting the spectacle of many people behaving a certain way. Combine this spectacle with many little nodes on a network behaving or expressing ideas in the same way and you've got the appearance of consensus, which is a powerful tool.

This gets me to the idea of a tipping point. There is a point at which the contagion of an idea rapidly speeds up, a point at which it seems like "everybody" is buying the same t-shirt or saying the same catch-phrase or using Facebook. These are all fairly benign trends, which makes sense. Buying a certain kind of t-shirt didn't involve much sacrifice: they're all pretty much the same to you, and if this one is popular, even if its a little more expensive, maybe you should buy it. Putting your life on the line or uprooting your family or risking your livelihood (all things that may be called for if you're participating in a revolution) involve significant risk. But those arguing against the revolutionary power of social media miss a key point: social pressure can convince you to make great sacrifices under the right circumstances.

Here's how I think it works. At the start, you need to have a group of people who are very similar to you, the Twitter user, and they have to be engaging in some activity that you were pretty close to doing. Then you might be convinced to do what they're doing. As the number of people doing that thing grows, it starts to matter less and less how similar those people are to you and how predisposed you were to act that way in the first place. When it comes to social pressure, there is an effect of sheer numbers. It doesn't replace or cancel out those other effects, but as the number grows, the effects of similarity and pre-disposition lessen. If you give people who want a revolution a sense that they can pull it off because there are so many other young, unemployed, pissed-off men who are ready to risk jail or a beating, then its more likely to happen than if you didn't give them that sense. This is something that pamphlets or television alone cannot do.

At the end of Dobbs talk, another professor pointed out how many billions of tourist dollars Egypt is losing each day. China's economy can withstand a repressive government, but it doesn't look like this one can. We'll just have to wait and see.

Decoding a Media Spectacle: 'June 17th, 1994'

I just got sucked into a terrific documentary on ESPN. "June 17th, 1994" chronicles a very strange day in sports. The New York Rangers celebrated winning the Stanley Cup in Manhattan, Arnold Palmer played his last round of golf, the World Cup kicked off, there was game 5 of the NBA Finals, and OJ Simpson led LA police on a chase. The lack of voice-over commentary lets us judge the events for ourselves, though the editing and the music offer some commentary.

What do I find so compelling about this documentary?

The moment that most intrigues me is when the news (Tom Brokaw, specifically) reports on the crowd that develops to cheer on OJ as he flees police. The crowd was created by the news media (crowd members learned of the car chase via television) and then the news media was bearing witness to the amoral attention seekers it created.

Everything happened in real time. As we watch the news broadcast of OJ driving down the freeway, we hear a psychologist describe what he is going through. That psychoanalysis was not added after the fact; it was done while OJ was fleeing. Crowds convene on overpasses, cheering for him. At this point, its not clear whether those people offered their support, if you can call it that, because they thought he was innocent, because they thought he was guilty but didn't want to see him kill himself (which he was threatening to do), or because they wanted to be part of some pop culture event as it unfolded, regardless of whether or not it had to do with murder or sports.

What is so striking about this moment is that it revealed this scary power of live television that lies dormant most of the time, a power that may have been inherited by twitter. Television binds millions of people together. Live television gives people the impression that they can quickly and radically change something. It is true that large numbers of people are capable of such feats, but like any organism, a crowd would not be very effective in altering its environment if it didn't have any sort of sensory feedback about the consequences of its actions. Live television (and now twitter) can act as that sensory feedback mechanism. Telethons work on this principle, but there's something inert about their orderliness. The OJ incident felt alive. Even though I was watching it 16 years after it happened, I got the feeling that the whole culture was in a state of flux.

This documentary reveals something about how people interact with one another and how media plays some role in enabling the tendencies of people to congregate, to gawk, to seek attention and to see a bit of themselves in the groups (sports teams) or individuals (OJ) they support.

Crowds gather for all sorts of reasons. While the distinction between supporting a murderer and supporting a sports team may seem obvious in retrospect, its possible that this distinction doesn't feel as important when you're part of a big group. There are well-known conformist tendencies that overrule our individual senses of morality. In addition to that, I think members of crowds engaged in unsavory behavior can distribute the guilt so that even if they are guilty of some sin (supporting a murderer, standing up for a tyrannical government), you're somehow less guilty than if they were committing the act as individuals. Television extends the crowd. Live television allows the crowd to see itself, to be impressed or repulsed by its spontaneous, amoral power.

The style of the documentary - free from talking heads telling us what to think about everything we're seeing - provoked me to ask this question: are sports trivial? Many non-sports fans I know believe they are, and in a way, I agree with them. That is what's pure about sports: the outcome of the game does not directly link to the election of an official or the fate of an economy. Of course, sports can indirectly affect politics, economies, and pretty much everything else, but that's only because of the value we assign the games.

As we see the juxtaposition of deadly serious police press conferences with tickertape parades and a round of golf, we might ask: How can the New York Rangers fans talk about winning the Stanley Cup in terms of life and death? How can announcers wax poetic over the retirement of an over-privileged geezer in bad pants hitting a ball with the stick? How can people talk about these things like they are that important? Surely, this is the sign of a warped culture. At the same time, the serious countpoint - the OJ murders - isn't especially remarkable without its connection to sports. People are murdered everyday. These murders mattered because they involved a well regarded professional athlete. To ignore a huge news story in favor of watching an especially competitive game 5 of the NBA Finals seems callous or crazy, but the story was only huge because of other (ostensibly trivial) games played years ago, games in which OJ Simpson ran faster than the men who were chasing him. None of it really mattered in the macro-economic sense. Or rather, it mattered, but only in an indirect way (again, billions of dollars were made: this was one of the highest rated television spectacles of all time). Like all sports, it only matters because of the meaning we assigned to it.

Is this a Big Deal? Hysteria, Social Media, and the News

I am watching, listening, and reading (and now writing) about a news story as it unfolds: a gunman has shot himself in the undergrad library of UTexas. The story is especially salient to me because I'm going there for a conference tomorrow, I spent two years there as a Master's student, and I know a fair amount of people who live there, some of which attend the university.

This event (which may be in the past or may still be occurring, depending on whether reports of a second gunman who has yet to be apprehended are true) came to my attention through reddit. I woke up, fixed breakfast, watched a little Sportscenter on ESPN, and then opened my computer to go online. Although I have my browser homepage set to the NYTimes, I rarely start a day by opening a browser but instead click on a bookmarked page from my already-open browser, usually checking my email or going to reddit first out of habit and out of a desire for self-relevant information (email) and appealing, brief distractions (reddit). So if, say, some event of great consequence were to happen, it is likely that I would find out about it this way. But if it were truly of GREAT consequence (e.g. 9/11), I would've found out about it either on NPR (which I flipped on when I was barely awake, as is my habit) or ESPN.

So there was the headline on reddit: Shooter at University of Texas library RIGHT NOW. Rather than click on the link or the comments, I went to NYTimes to corroborate it. Oddly, the story didn't appear to be there. I thought that the shooter maybe didn't kill anyone, or that it was a hoax. But then, buried in smaller headlines on the page, I saw mention of it. I read that story and it said that the gunman fired shots and killed himself, but no mention of anyone else being hurt. I then turned on CNN and, oddly, they weren't talking about it. Neither was Fox News. Other news stations were playing commercials.

I didn't have all the details of this story, but the fact that it wasn't plastered all over the front page of the Times and that CNN wasn't covering it at that moment led me to this conclusion: it is not a big deal. Because of the lack of coverage, it is extremely unlikely that anyone I know was hurt in anyway as a result of this event. It would be safe for me to assume that everything was fine with them, everything was fine with me going there tomorrow, and that everything would, in general, be fine.

This is not the picture that I got when I went to Facebook and twitter. Many people in my online social network have connections to UT, and so many of them posted links to news stories about the shooting, just within the last hour, with very little supplementary information other than brief declarations of fear or concern. With twitter, I had to search for Austin, UT, but the result is the same: brief expressions of fear, rumors of a second shooter still on the loose. From this information, it seemed like a big deal, a huge deal. Reading my Facebook feed, I was...well, not necessarily gripped with fear or concern, but I got the impression that I needed to keep monitoring the situation out of concern for people I knew and to see if I would still be traveling to Austin tomorrow. If I watched mainstream media, I wouldn't get that feeling. I would get the feeling that I could relax and go back to work.

There's this narrative that mainstream media is too big, too ad-supported, to get at the truth. The truth percolates up from the blogosphere, from citizen journalists. If this story isn't covered by CNN or NYTimes right away, its because they're slow moving dinosaurs who just got scooped, and they don't know what's really important but instead promote the values of their sponsors. But here, in terms of "level of appropriate concern," I think that the mainstream media has it right. If I step back and look at the situation, at least what I know of the situation (seems like an isolated, botched shooting, not a coordinated, successful attack by several people), the appropriate reaction is: don't panic, its okay, no one is in more danger than they were a day ago. I just don't get this from the little social network newsfeed that's evolved over the past few years. There have been legitimate criticisms of coverage of disasters like 9/11 and Katrina saying that certain frames used in the coverage gave viewers the impression that there was more panicking and more reason for panicking than there really were. I've had this feeling before about bias in the news, but I think it applies here, too: you thought this was a problem when mainstream interests were handling reporting the news? Just wait until 'the people' start doing the reporting.

I think that in some cases, crowdsourcing news helps information get out faster and that the crowd can, counter to our intuition, promote the accurate, relevant information over the inaccurate information in an efficient manner, more efficiently than MSM. But the emotion that seeps into our facebook feeds, the undiluted fear that cannot help but contaminate our accounts of our experiences and is being mistaken for "news", doesn't move us any closer to gaining an accurate impression of what the true risk is to our selves and people we know and love when a bad thing happens. Its self-relevant and is provided by many different people, and thus appeals to us as "truth," but its laden with emotions that aren't present in detached MSM accounts of events. One may say that those emotions are part of the truth of an event. That sounds good, but I think that emotional reporting of an event as it is happening is likely to be associated with overestimates of how threatening the event is to our selves and others (I'll avoid using the loaded term "hysteria").

One thing that really stuck with me about the coverage of 9/11 was the strangely detached monotone of many of the anchors as we all watched the World Trade Centers collapse. Certainly not the way twitter would've handled it. I feel like this change has happened in the past couple of years and that it is significant: many people no longer turn on the TV when disaster strikes. They go online. Online promises more viewpoints, more immediate updates, deeper and broader accounts of everything. Which is better? Which is truer? Which leads to worry and which leads to action?