Going viral (by accident)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reddit, Gawker, and The Freedom to Say Horrible Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anger Sells

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Affordance or Attribute?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A paean to cassettes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instant Gratification & Digital Media: An Assumed Connection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking Back on the Start of our Lives Online

I've been blogging for about 10 years as of last month. I started the blog during my first semester of graduate school at the University of Texas. Now, ten years later, I'm in my first semester as an Assistant Professor. I've used the blog as a way to catalog ideas related to my work and passion: understanding media use, in particular new/digital media use. I like to think that I've been able to refine my thinking on this topic through this blog. If nothing else, the blog serves as a record the evolution of my thinking. It allows me (or anyone else) to travel back in time and see how I thought.

While we're on the subject of travelling back in time (as a nostalgist, this is subject to which I obsessively return), I'd like to go back even further, about 20 years ago, to the time when I first started using the Internet. Recently, I was prompted by a question: "what was it like to use the Internet in the 90's". I took this to mean, "what did it feel like?" Here are some thoughts:

The big difference between the online experience then and the online experience now, one that many young people today wouldn't think about, is the way in which search engines changes things. In the mid-90's, you had to either hear about a specific website from a friend, a magazine, or TV (though no one in mainstream media really cared about the internet, so it was mostly through friends). Then you had to type the specific web address into the Netscape Navigator browser address bar. Good search engines (and the explosion of worthwhile websites in the late 90's) changed the online experience from hopping around a small series of content islands to something that feels like moving through one's everyday offline life. You went from hearing about a particular website (the way you would hear about a particular book or movie) to just thinking of something, anything, typing it into a search engine, and finding it.

Reflecting on the changes wrought by search engines made me think about a similar big change in media choice that affected what it felt like to use the medium: the remote control. Both search engines and remote controls came along at a time when the number of available options exploded (in websites, or in cable television channels). They made the explosion of options manageable. The feeling of the media use experience changed in both cases, from a consideration of several options (akin to being in a store or a library and making a selection) to moving through a landscape, observing things around you and reacting to them, and at the same time, conjuring or creating a world from thin air, thinking of something and having it appear in front of you.

We are different selves in those situations (this is an idea that I keep coming back to: the ways in which our environment brings out different selves). In the first, we are a chooser. But in the second situation, there are a few selves that could be brought out or summoned. In the second situation, we are potentially a react-er, but also a creator, an unrestricted curious, creative impulse. We are also, potentially, an unrestricted Id, acting on inner impulses for immediate gratification, reacting not to the outer landscape but to subtle shifts in our moods or thoughts.

One of my big questions: How do you foster curiosity and creativity and downplay reactivity and the impulse for immediate gratification? The answer, I think, lies in manipulating (perhaps a kinder word would be "customizing") the choice environment, and we've only begun to do this, and not in a systematic manner. And that is what I want to do with my research. 

The Gamified Life

Video games are a worthwhile leisure experience, something that can have positive effects on the players. If it occupies a certain place in a person's life, gaming can enrich a player in many ways. In fact, I think we've only scratched the surface on the positive effects gaming can have on individuals and communities. Even if it's a means of relaxation that allows one to more fully engage with reality after playing the game, that's a plus.

On the other hand, if gaming occupies another place in a person's life, it can substitute for real-world experiences. Even if gaming doesn't cause people to kill other people in real life (or some such horrible real-world behavioral consequence), I still wonder about what gamers would have done with the time they spend gaming, and how the gaming experience shapes their non-gaming, real world interactions and experiences.

My key interest is in how gaming is disconnected (and disconnects the player) from reality. A good game creates a kind of alternate reality with challenges, goals, and hazards and, increasingly, a social structure. All of that, it would seem, makes it easy to feel immersed in the gaming experience, to at least temporarily forget about the world outside the game and to focus exclusively on achievement and survival within the game.

There is an attempt to bridge the gap between the substitute reality of the game world and the real world: gamification. The point of gamification seems to be to incentivize a certain real-world behavior (exercise, civic engagement, etc.) by linking it to a reward.

The motive is laudable: instead of just getting people to spend time getting a high score or achieving status in a world that is disconnected from reality, you get them to do something good in the real world: learn about the world, become more civically engaged, etc. So, let's assume that gamification works: it gets people to engage in whatever behavior you're trying to get them to engage in when they would not have done so otherwise. Great! But here's what I'm wondering about:

How challenging is the game, or the gamified aspect of real-life, relative to the un-gamified aspects of life? The rules of games are tweaked so that they are challenging but not too frustrating. If a game were too frustrating, the player would stop playing (and likely pick up a less-frustrating-but-still-challenging game). But real life doesn't adapt to the individual in this respect. Even a successful gamification of reality is not all encompassing. Sooner or later, gamers must confront the un-gamified world.

Here are a few possible consequences of this discontinuity.

Gamification could create the perception that life isn't fair. The experience of the un-gamified challenges in their lives failing to adapt to their ability levels will seem increasingly unfair to gamers. To someone who has no experience with a gamified reality, the fact that day-to-day existence (work, interactions with loved ones, local politics) is very often frustrating is simply a part of life; whether or not it is "fair" isn't really an issue. This perception would be easy to measure: do you agree/disagree with the statement "often, life is not fair" (or some variation of this).

Gamification could create the desire to play more games, particularly the kind of games that adapt in some way when they become too frustrating for the user. Gamers would then disengage with any aspect of reality that does not adapt, including relationships and civic involvement. They go further and further into the adaptable world of the games.

But here's the weirdest possible consequence I've been thinking about.

What if the majority of certain people's realities become gamified? When they encounter an aspect of their realities that are frustrating or boring, they gamify it. They keep doing this until their entire realities (how often they exercise, what they eat, how they interact with their spouses, work, volunteering, local politics, etc.) are gamified, so that no aspect of their daily lives becomes too frustrating or not rewarding enough. I can imagine a small group of people doing this, but I can't imagine every human doing this (at least not for awhile, but who knows?). The problems will occur when the gamified society meets the un-gamified society.

Life is a kind of game, with challenges and goals and a "score" (money, happiness, status, righteousness, or whichever metric you want to use). But the key difference is that life lacks a "user experience" designer. It is continuously and simultaneously created by things that are often indifferent to the needs and desires of the individual. One of the worst consequences for the gamer who becomes increasingly frustrated with un-gamified life might be a kind of despondence that, left unchecked, causes them to quit the game of life.

This, of course, wouldn't be the fate of most gamers. So what is it that causes some gamers to eschew reality? And when we gamify another aspect of our lives, how does this change the way we view the rough edges of the world outside the game?

Social Media and Fear: A Case Study

It has been an interesting couple of days at my new academic home, the University of Alabama. As is the case with the initial time period around many incidents involving the safety of large numbers of people, the facts are a little unclear. According to school officials and local police, here is what happened: someone posted a threatening comment on a University of Alabama sorority's YouTube video. The threat was specific, referencing a time in the near future and a place on campus, and a threat of harm to large numbers of people. Additionally, at least one student reported, and later retracted, a statement about being attacked off-campus. Very soon after, school officials worked with police and determined that there was no threat to our students' safety beyond the YouTube comment, that it appeared as though no actual person was planning on carrying out any attack. This information did not have the intended effect of calming and reassuring everyone that it was okay to go about our regular business. As misinformation spread, it prompted many of our students and their parents to be fearful, so fearful that the students did not feel comfortable coming to class, which disrupted what, ostensibly, we're here to do: learn stuff in class.

The fears were based in part on real-life events. There was, apparently, a rumor that someone was dressed as the Joker on sorority row, which relates to the shooting in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater in 2012. They were also based on something resembling an urban legend. A student of mine quoted a message he had seen that was circulating, citing it as part of the reason he was electing to stay home: "The name of the person who posted the comment on the sorority video, Arthur Pendragon, is the name of the main character in a book who went and killed a bunch of people on the fall equinox, which is tonight at 9:30...That is an actual person and he calls himself King Arthur because he believes he is the reincarnated King Arthur from hundreds of years ago and holds a celebration every fall equinox."

One question immediately occurred to me as all this was happening (or not happening): what was the role of social media in this occurrence of mass fear (or, if you like, fear contagion?)?

Did social media cause the mass fear?

In trying to answer this question, I try to maintain the stance of a skeptic: just because social media was involved in the event at various stages does not mean that it caused the event, or necessarily caused it to occur in a certain way. Social media could simply be standing in for face-to-face or other existing forms of communication (phone, television, radio, etc.). The underlying psychological mechanisms associated with our tendency to believe scary information that may not be true clearly pre-dates social media. Even the hint of the occurrence of a low-frequency/high-severity event is enough to set parts of our brains into overdrive (as it happens, those parts have been around for a very long time, before humans evolved). Tightly-knit groups of young people in particular were likely always especially susceptible to this kind of rumor. Thirty years ago, before social media, you could call in a bomb threat and freak out a campus. So maybe this isn't anything new.

On the other hand, perhaps some unique attributes of social media interact with those underlying psychological mechanisms in a way that brings about a new outcome that would not have existed without social media. So here is a consideration of how social media might have facilitated mass fear.

Social media as inciter

The initial threat was delivered via social media. Perhaps the person issuing the threat believed he could do so anonymously, achieving the desired goal of sewing fear in the community without getting caught. This is certainly true of lower-scale harm, such as bullying. As of now, you can (unfortunately) use the anonymity provided by social media to harass or bully another person but not get caught in the act. But once the stakes get high enough (e.g., terrorist threats), we suddenly see that even those posting anonymously can be tracked down. The person posting may not have known this to be the case. They may have believed that they could do this (because they hated the school, because they were bored, because they wanted to get out of an exam that day, who knows) and thought they could get away with it.

Social media also provides a kind of remove or abstraction that perhaps makes it easier to commit harmful or disruptive acts without considering the consequences. Even if the social media user can never be truly anonymous, not having to see the face, hear the voice, or be in physical proximity to the individuals they are harming or the lives they are disrupting likely makes it easier to do so.

Social media as effective propagator of misinformation

When you discuss a rumor with someone face-to-face, you can spread misinformation to one other person. When you post about it, you are spreading it to a larger group of people, potentially. I say "potentially" because while the potential audience for any given post is all Internet users (and, if it's picked up by the mainstream media, all users of TVs or radios), in practice, most posts are either ignored or seen by very few people. However, in events of great interest like this, each post becomes part of a whole. When people search for a specific term (e.g., University of Alabama incident), each person's post about the topic gets added to the tally. Ten people posting about a topic doesn't make it seem worth paying attention to, but if a million people post about it, even if it doesn't have much evidence substantiating it, it gets more attention which may lead it to spread more easily. When they are included in search counts and taken out of context, even reasonable social media posts (or de-bunking social media posts that attempt to correct misinformation) can inadvertently contribute to the stoking of mass fear.

Even if relatively few people post misinformation, if those people make up a substantial number of a given community (e.g., most people in your sorority, or most people in your Facebook feed), you're likely to believe that whatever they are talking about is worth paying attention to, regardless of how true it is.

It is also very easy to post misinformation on social media; easier, I would argue, than talking to another person face-to-face. For most of our students, social media is always available. Many of them are in the habit of posting their thoughts and feelings frequently.

It is also easier for misinformation to spread this way. Linking to other information sources is an integral part of the affordances and norms involved in all Internet use. Unfortunately, citing the sources of information (and the sources of those sources, until you get to a primary source) is not. One wonders whether this lack of substantiation will persist after we go through more and more of these episodes. It certainly doesn't have to. Theoretically, I'd imagine you could design a quick and simple way to track the flow of each bit of information from link to link to link, back to an original source. Those bibliographies that were so annoying to format may be more useful than we thought!

Social media as abettor of flawed reasoning

This came to mind as I tried to make sense of the fact that there were multiple alarming events reported across a period of 48 hours. People tend to see patterns, connections, and stories in human behavior even when they are not really there. This is likely especially true of people who are in a state of fear. At some point, people's flawed reasoning would run into counter-evidence that would suggest that the perceived connection among these events isn't really there. It occurs to me that in most cases, that counter-evidence comes to us from authorities: police or officials. Often, the messages from those authorities are mediated in some way, coming to us through mainstream media channels (e.g., television news). Which brings me to the next consideration of the role of social media in stoking mass fear.

Social media as a perceived unfiltered alternative to mass media narratives

I've been thinking more and more about the importance of trust in modern life. Our fates are connected to one another in a million ways we tend to ignore. Most of us assume that our packaged food is safe to eat, that our cars are safe to drive, that our votes will be counted when electing a political candidate. But do we trust authorities to tell us about threats to our safety? Some events have given us reason not to.

Under oppressive regimes, the authorities tells one story through government-controlled mass media while social media tells another story, a story "from the ground". We know that the authorities have an incentive and an ability to deceive, so we might be more likely to believe the social media narrative. The social media narrative also comes not just from one source but from many individuals, so it would seem that it would be less likely to be corrupted or biased. This ignores the fact that those posting on social media may have their own agendas, and though they may be posting uncensored pictures or facts about what is going on in the world, they may be purposely (or unconsciously) ignoring other images or facts. Thus, social media may only appear to be a less biased place to get unvarnished information about the world.

Social media narratives have the advantage of being more difficult to repress or control, but they have the disadvantage of not having a reputation. When the social media mob gets things wrong, the reputations of each individual posting and forwarding messages do not suffer in the way that the reputations of mainstream news organizations (or authorities like the police) do if they get things wrong. Social media can respond quicker to events and spread rumors because there is less of a price to pay if the information turns out not to be true.

This, of course, doesn't matter much if you don't trust information from authorities or the mainstream media. There was likely always some distrust of such official narratives, but there weren't many alternatives besides the odd underground newsletter or the person ranting and raving on the street corner. Social media fills this void. It presents people already predisposed to distrust official narratives with a seemingly trust-worthy ("unvarnished, unbiased") alternative.

In the case of the events (or non-events) at the University of Alabama, I wonder about students' trust in messages from authorities and their trust in messages from social media. Their trust in social media messages may not reflect an ignorance or unawareness of information from reliable sources, but a cynicism about just how reliable those mainstream sources are.

There are many important questions which will be answered in different ways by mainstream and social media sources: How many people really are dying from Ebola? How big of a threat is ISIS, really? Who we believe is, in part, a reflection of who we trust.

Teachable moments

In the end, I hope things settle down quickly so our students, all of our students, will come back to class. I'm already thinking about how we can turn this into a productive discussion about where we get information from, what sources we trust, and how we all might do things differently next time.

Survival of the Angriest

My basic sense of the discourse about politics (articles, comments on online news websites, blogs, TV shows, radio shows) is that a certain rhetorical mode or style unifies those on the far right and far left. It is characterized by anger at authorities on the opposite end of an ideological or demographic spectrum. The "bad guy" in this mode could be those who support a patriarchal society, those who support a racist society, Obama, Bush, Congresspeople, university administration, corporations such as Comcast or Walmart, "Wall Street", unions, mainstream media, etc. I'll call this, for lack of a better term, the "anger-laden" rhetorical style. It succeeds by invoking strong, negative emotions in information consumers (arguably, you could include discourse that invokes or reflects anxiety, but prior research suggests that anger and anxiety operate differently when it comes to news). We could contrast this to a drier, scientific, inquiry-based style (a la fivethirtyeight.com), or a style that attempts to present both sides of an issue in a relatively affect-less way (a la The New York Times or the BBC). I recognize, of course, that no sources are totally bereft of affect-invoking content or style, but that when compared to, say, FoxNews or the Huffington Post, it becomes clear that inquiry-based or relatively affect-less sources employ a style that depends less on pushing the anger buttons of the audience.

I sense that in the arena of news or discourse about public issues, the ratio of anger-laden style information to other styles of information has changed, and that this change is associated with increasing partisanship among political leaders (even while the partisanship of the overall US population changes very little).

It is entirely possible that the angry, negative-affect-laden rhetorical style was always dominant (see the rhetoric of some popular newspapers' editorials, muckrakers, etc.), but I would counter that by noting that the decline in consumption of mainstream news sources (which are more apt to favor an affect-less style) and the ascendance of non-mainstream sources (which are more apt to favor an anger-laden style) is undeniable.

Perhaps the ascendance of the anger-laden rhetorical style of conveying political/public opinion information draws in a segment of the population that didn't spend much time reading or viewing such information at all. In other words, there was always anger-laden, affect-less, and inquiry-based styles of conveying this kind of information, but fewer people overall were spending less time with any kind of political information than is the case now. Now, we have more consumption of such information, which sounds great, but actually the people who are new to the conversation are driving the demand for (and the supply of, in a market-based news environment) anger-laden information. So yes, very few people ever consumed affect-less information and they were probably always outweighed by consumers of affect-laden information, but not to the extent that they are outnumbered now that there has been an influx of new news consumers and new news sources to meet the increased demand. The ratio of affect-less to affect-laden information shrunk in response to the demands of an influx of new consumers

This change in that ratio could push moderates out of the online conversation about politics and away from offline political participation. The moderates would still exist, and any public onion poll would detect their presence and reflect an overall population that didn't go through the increase in partisanship that our leadership has undergone. There might be a spiral-of-silence effect happening with the moderates: they see that their voice isn't represented in the articles themselves or the comments sections and so they spend their time on other things: their own families, their own hobbies and interests.

Of course, any such argument lamenting this shift toward affect-laden information leaves one up to the accusation that one is pining away for "the good old days" when sensible, logical elites dominated public discourse and the political arena while the hot-headed rabble kept to the fringes. It is impossible for me to deny the historical reality that elites often dismissed arguments they didn't agree with simply by dismissing rhetorical styles that privileged emotional, subjective experiences over scientific or quasi-scientific approaches. I certainly recognize the value (and inevitability) of emotion in public discourse, and the fact that all arguments contain some combination of objectivity and subjectivity, of "hot" emotion and "cold" logic.

But I just don't see the current use of an anger-laden rhetorical style as the reflection of pre-existing public opinions and rhetorical styles that were heretofore excluded from public discourse. I see it as driving a shift in political thought and behavior, one that excludes anything other than anger (including positive-affect messages favoring compassion, affection, or understanding). And even though it is problematic to assert (either explicitly or implicitly) the superiority of cold rationality, I think its total exclusion (or even a significant reduction) from public discourse would only lead to an increased inability to see the world through anyone else's eyes, and that this wouldn't be a good thing.

But I'm in idle speculation mode here. I seek evidence of this, and I don't have much to point to right now that would suggest I'm on to something or that I'm dead wrong. Does the ascendance of anger-laden information (if it even is truly ascendant) reflect increased political participation and/or does it increase the polarization of elected officials and the disenfranchisement of moderates, lessening any chance we have at mutual understanding?

Are School Shootings Becoming the New Norm?

It's a familiar story: a string of low-probability/high-consequence events capture the front pages and they become the subject of public discourse, including plenty of editorials. Once it was airplane hijackings or serial killings. Now, it's school shootings. We need to do something to stop this trend of horrible events. In most cases, it's beyond debate whether or not the events are horrible. But are they indicative of trends (i.e., an increase over the prior frequency level of similar horrible events)?

Recently, a statistic has been making the rounds on blogs, social media, and in the mainstream news: 74 school shootings have occurred since the shootings at Sandy Hook in late 2012. The statistic comes from a group that has a rather explicit agenda: Everytown for Gun Safety. While it does give us some information about an important social phenomenon, my initial feeling about this statistic is that when taken out of context (and it is almost always shown without any context), it is apt to mislead.

First, there's the question of how we define "similar events". Do we count incidents in which guns were discharged but didn't kill anyone, or injure anyone? Do we count homicides related to drug deals? Do we count suicides? Do we count accidental gun discharges? Do we count colleges as well as elementary and secondary schools? In the case of the above statistic, Everytown for Gun Safety has counted all of these as "school shootings".

Why does it matter how inclusive our definition of "school shootings" is? Aren't all of these shootings horrible events that we should seek to avoid? In my opinion, yes, absolutely. However, if we're trying to understand a certain social phenomenon and whether a string of recent events are part of a trend, broad definitions only muddy the water. The social and psychological processes involved in suicide-by-gun at or near schools is likely to be different in important ways than those processes as they are applied to individuals like Adam Lanza and Elliot Rodger. Obviously the common denominators are "school" and "gun", and if you're of the mind that gun control is the ONLY solution to the problem of any kind of school shooting, then you may not care about the differences. But you should. Even if you're in favor of gun control and you think it will cut down on the number of people who die each year in school shootings, it won't help to ignore other factors, and I think overly-broad definitions of "school shootings" encourage this kind of ignorance. Is the increase in school shootings due to an increase in angry-young-males lashing out at the world, an increase in drug/gang-related shootings, or both? In order to address the issue, it's important to know.

Is it really a trend? If you just tell someone how many incidents occurred in one year, that doesn't really give them a good idea of whether or not it is part of a potentially alarming trend. This is the real reason I'm writing about this. I was genuinely curious. I wanted to know if the headlines were part of a familiar kind of hysteria about a random rash of low-probability/high-consequence events or if they're on to something. It wasn't easy to tell just by reading the news or the blogs. But there IS data on this. It ain't perfect data, but I think it may help me get an answer, this is one of the things I absolutely love about today's Internet - you have access to data and can see for yourself whether there is evidence to support a conclusion.

I used this list from Wikipedia of school shootings in the U.S., defined as "incidents in which a firearm was discharged at a school infrastructure, including incidents of shootings on a school bus." It included K-12 schools as well as colleges and universities, so the definition is pretty similar to that used by Everytown for Gun Safety. The list draws from newspaper archives. By virtue of their newsworthiness, school shootings seem unlikely to have ever gone unreported, so I think we can safely assume that this list is a fairly accurate record of school shootings and doesn't contain much in the way of systematic measurement error. 

Before I show you what I found, take a moment to guess: how many school shootings do you think there were in 1880? How about 1904? 1970?

(scroll down for the answers!)














Here's what I found:

So yeah, it does seem like there's something crazy going on in the last 18 months if you define school shooting this way. Why do I designate the last 18 months as the time period to pay attention to? It's about the time that the Adam Lanza killings occurred, and it's also near the beginning of the year, but these aren't good reasons to use this date as a cut-off. But if you look at the number of shootings per month, they really seem to go up in January of 2013.

There is plenty of seemingly random year-to-year variation across the whole 164 year period, but the number of incidents tend to fluctuate between 0 and 5 per year. It's worth noting that the last year there were no school shootings was 1981, so you could use that as a the beginning of the trend if you really wanted to.

It was weird for me to read about children shooting themselves in the early 1900's at school. It doesn't fit with my conception of the culture at the time. So school shootings aren't unprecedented, but after looking at this data, it seems hard to deny that the problem has gotten much worse in the past few years (or possibly since 1995 or 2005). If there were, say, 10 school shootings in 2013, I think you could possibly say that it was due to random variation. But there have been 31 in the first half of 2014!

What if we dig a bit deeper and look at the circumstances around each shooting. Do we see differences between the shootings from, say, the early 1900's and the shootings of today? In my search through the shootings since the 1850's in schools, I tried to isolate ones that I thought were similar to Sandy Hook: not suicide; not accidental; and not directed at one particular individual for reasons of, say, revenge or a rejection; not gang-related. I call this kind of shooting "mass school shootings". I include cases in which an individual clearly attempted a mass school shooting but was thwarted (though there are only a few of these, so they don't make much of a difference). Again, I must emphasize: I'm not saying that those other kinds of shootings aren't problems that need to be solved, but only that I want to isolate Sandy-Hook-ish shootings to see if there is indeed a trend. Here's what I found:

Note that the Y axis is different than the Y axis in the first graph. If I had used the same Y axis in both graphs (or included both lines in the same graph), it would've been hard to see the mass shootings line, so this is why I used two different y axes.

If you look at most of the school shootings pre-1966, they're directed at a particular individual and the motives are typically revenge (for a bad grade or being rebuffed by a would-be lover). Again, it was weird to read about mass school shootings similar to Sandy Hook that took place in the 1800's (though there were just two, so it really was anomalous).

As you can see, there's a similar pattern to the pattern in the overall school shootings: not much happens until recently. But what do we mean by "recently"? You could easily put the starting point of the trend at 1985, the first year there were more than two separate incidents of mass school shootings. What about since Sandy Hook? Let's take a closer look at the data, starting at 1985:

So, 1985 was a bad year, and so were 1988, 1998 (the 90's in general were pretty bad for this type of thing) and 2006. 2013 (the only post-Sandy-Hook year in our data set) is bad, but not much worse than these other years. In the first half of 2014, there have been three mass school shootings, but it would be dangerous to extrapolate from that and estimate that there will be six for the year. Extrapolation with such small sample sizes rarely maps on to reality.

In the end, here's what I get from this little exercise. The truth, such as I can determine it from available evidence, is that school shootings in general have become a lot more common in the last 18 months, but it seems unwarranted to say that Sandy-Hook-style mass school shootings have become a lot more common in that same time period. If you wanted to identify a starting point for the cultural phenomenon of mass school shootings, you'd be better off going back to 1985. If I'm looking for a culprit or cause of this phenomenon, I wouldn't look at things that are going on right now in our culture and in our laws. I would look at things that have been around and haven't changed much since 1985.

As would be the case with any phenomenon, my attitude would change if new evidence warranted such a change. If there were no more school shootings this year, I'd stick to my interpretation: nothing new in the world of mass school shootings since '85. BUT if there were 3 or more, then I'd reconsider my outlook.

From looking at this data, I also get the impression that there is an urgent problem with shootings at schools, but that this problem isn't akin to the problem of Sandy Hook or Columbine. Like any compassionate person, I'm appalled at that rapid increase in school shootings you see in the first graph, and I want to know more about why it's occurring and what we can do to stop it. A lot of these school shootings are committed by sane people who have a deep disagreement with another person and (importantly) access to guns. If anything, I think this analysis makes the case of those who choose to pin the problem of school shootings on a lack of proper mental health care and not on gun availability (I'm looking at you, Wayne LaPierre!) a lot weaker. School shootings are skyrocketing, according to the evidence, and most incidents don't involve mental health issues as such. So, maybe addressing the issues of gun availability, conflict resolution, and, perhaps, a cultural component may be an effective way to lessen the number of overall school shootings.

This analysis does NOT make for an easily conveyed, pithy soundbite. Because they need something pithy, the news and bloggers and others have latched on to a pithy-put-misleading alternative - the "74 since Sandy Hook" stat. On the one hand, this stat may grab more people's attention, gets them to click and gets them to post. On the other hand, based on all the evidence I can see, it IS misleading. It's use opens up those trying to convince others of the severity of the issue to attacks based on their use of misleading statistics.

This is, I would say, a familiar story in the use of statistics related to emotionally-loaded, low-probability/high-consequence events. It's a story that's worth returning to when discussing media literacy.

One final note: in my search for information about this topic, I found this article on CNN that actually DID dig a little deeper and found results similar to my own. They found a few more "Sandy-Hook-like" shootings because their definition differed slightly from mine, and (importantly) they had no historical comparison so they can't really talk about trends, but still, it gave me hope for more context when reporting stats in news. Big ups to CNN (though you really need to stop with the auto-playing videos).

Data source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States#cite_ref-47

Hardwiring and Software

At last week's symposium on media choice here at Drexel, the term "hardwired" came up a few times. This term pops up a lot these days in discussions of cognition and I wonder whether its use obfuscates as much as it explains.

The particular context in which it was used last week related to news: how and why certain people attend to certain news sources. People, so the argument went, are hardwired to seek out arguments and evidence with which they agree, and when they do happen to encounter counter-attitudinal arguments and evidence (i.e., stuff with which they don't agree), they are hardwired to interpret it as biased. When used in this context, what does "hardwired" really mean?

Hardwired reactions to stimuli in our environment are automatic and, as the metaphor would suggest, more-or-less permanent. Hardwired cognition/behavior are the products of adaptive processes that occurred over thousands of generations. We are born with these reactions; we don't need to be taught. Our startle reflexes, our orientation to faces, and our fear of spiders are all hardwired. Then there are reactions that are learned and, through repetition and conditioning, become automatic. It's easy to just lump both of these kinds of reactions together because they both involve automatic, quick processing of information without any voluntary control. But the hardwired reactions, I think, are harder to change than the automatic learned reactions because they have been around longer.

So let's assume that the aforementioned tendencies relating to news are, indeed, truly hardwired. None of us had to learn to seek out evidence we agree with and to view evidence that we don't agree with as biased. These information processing strategies evolved over many generations. Perhaps they're extensions of our need to preserve a stable sense of self or a coherent picture of our environment and where the rewards and threats lie or our social standing within a group of allies. This leaves us with a few important (and oft ignored) questions about our hardwired reactions to our information environment.

Can hardwired reactions to stimuli be "rewired"? Not easily, if at all. I don't think you could condition folks to seek out counter-attitudinal news and expect them to pass this tendency on to their offspring through their genes (which is what I take "rewired" to mean).

Can hardwired reactions to stimuli be overridden? Yes. Actually, I think this happens all the time. All of civilization, it's been said, is a kind of imposition on many of our hardwired reactions to stimuli, an attempt to override and otherwise control (i.e., repress) reactions that would be destructive in the long run to large numbers of people trying to live together (i.e., society). The repression of impulses is so ordinary that we forget the many ways the contours of society keeps them in check, through laws, rules, social mores, and restricted availability.

How strong is a hardwired predisposition? Put another way: how hard would it be to override a hardwired reaction to stimuli? This is another case in which the question of magnitude (what I like to call the "how much" question) is ignored, and I think it's ignored strategically. If you ignore the fact that some hardwired reactions are far easier to overcome than others, you could say that an inborn impulse that is not that hard to control is just like another inborn impulse that is almost impossible to control - they're both "hardwired". If it's somehow to your advantage to say that some behavior is unchangeable (say, if you're defending ideologically polarizing news coverage because it caters to our hardwired orientation toward information), you'll note how it's hardwired and leave it at that.

Just how hard is it to change behavior that is hardwired depends on the behavior, maybe on when it evolved and what's at stake (i.e., how great the reward or punishment for behaving in ways inconsistent with the predisposition). You can get most people to overcome their hardwired desire for sweets easier than you can get them to overcome their hardwired desire for sexual gratification or desire for novel stimuli or inclination toward competition or cooperation. Hardwired reactions or behaviors vary in the extent to which they are capable of being overridden. It is possible to know how hard it is to change a particular hardwired behavior through experimentation.

What the heck does this have to do with software?

The design of software affects what types of information are available to us in certain places at certain times. There are various reasons we're averse to the idea of restricting availability of information in any way. Information is speech, and speech should be free. More information and more freedom to choose just seem like inherently good things. But really, our access to information is restricted, in some sense, all the time. We see a fraction of all available information, if only because we can only process so much information and the amount to which we have access via the Internet has grown exponentially. The fraction of the total news information to which we pay attention is determined primarily by the aforementioned hardwired reactions to stimuli and software that makes certain information available to us based on our prior impulsive behavior (i.e., what we click on without thinking too deeply about it). Perhaps our hardwired reactions to stimuli determine our news consumption behavior not because they're all that hard to change, but because nothing bothered to stand in their way.

Here's some good news: experimenting with information environments is actually much easier than experimenting with our environment in general (i.e., the one we walk around in everyday). Simply installing browser extensions can remove ads from our information environment or restrict access to whatever websites we choose. Algorithms can recommend counter-attitudinal news stories. Installing a "Respect" button on comments sections, next to the "Like" and "Recommend" buttons, can increase the likelihood of exposure to counter-attitudinal messages.

You can't get rid of those hardwired impulses to seek out information we agree with. But can you override them? I don't think we've explored that question fully yet.

The discussion of hardwiring gets at an important underlying issue: how fixed are any of our characteristics? It's an emotionally loaded question. There's a lot at stake. But it's exciting to be able to explore the possibilities of changing ourselves and our hardwired impulses by changing our software.