2. Lecture contents
1. Media saturation: an introduction to today’s media environment
2. Digital inequalities: global and regional divides
3. Media effects: the complex nature of ‘media influence’
4. Shifting media production: the producer-consumer interface
5. Engagement and democracy: chasm between theory and practice
6. Social relations: as the internet evolves…
4. Quick scan
Penetration In Flanders 2012 - BE
Internet Connection
Laptop
Desktop
Game Console
Handheld Game Concolse
Tablet
Mobile phone
Smartphone
Mobile Data Subscription
Digital TV
Flatscreen
Tube TV
In %
91
80
66
36
25
28
73
39
36
82
78
20
Adoption speed (Global)
Radio
Television
Internet
…
Facebook
50M users in years
38y
13y
4y
…
100M in 9 months
5. Convergence – Multiple layers (1)
• In terms of media technologies:
• Proliferation of media platforms and channels
• Digital 1/0 information: liquid asset
• Merger of functions, countless mixtures
• Before: silo structures, now blending into each other
6. Convergence – Multiple layers (2)
• In terms of market/economy:
• Media production and telecommunication/IT companies grow near
and merge
• Trend of concentration: both horizontally and vertically
• Changing production processes: further integration, digitization,
changing role of audiences
7. Convergence – Multiple layers (3)
• In terms of media policy:
• Since 1990 general trend towards deregulation and liberalization
(e.g. EU Green papers on convergence)
• Quick progress and interdependencies require overarching media
regulation (e.g. Ofcom – UK: convergent regulatory body)
• Complex exercise: safeguard pluralism and diversity (role of public
service media, media and democracy, ownership and concentration,
net neutrality, IPR, etc.)
8. Diffusionism versus mutual shaping
•
User acceptance of technologies: competing schools
• Diffusionism: technology develops on its own
•
Social construction of technology: social and cultural factors
Typical example: evolution of SMS
9. (Perceived) Affordances
•
•
Not because technology has a capability that it is identified as such
Norman 2002 (p. 9): perceived affordances – ’the perceived and actual
properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that
determine just how the thing could possibly be used’
•
Compilation of a mental model of objects, sketching the flow of how and for
what to use objects, including various physical, semantic, cultural and logical
constraints.
10. Life with media, life in media
• Media life: the symbiotic intertwinement of media consumption and
everyday life
• Pervasive media ’form our constant remix of the categories of everyday life
(the public and the private, the local and the global, het individual and the
collective), they become invisible’ (Deuze, 2011, p. 137).
12. Multiple divides worth considering
•
•
Original debate centered on access: ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’
Regionally mostly redundant, but not globally
•
Multiple access model: (Van Dijk)
•
Motivational divide: emotional versus rational
•
•
Material divide: investment, availability
Skills divide: supporting literacies
•
Usage divide: quality and diversity
13. North-South?
80
77,3
70
60,8
60
%
Percentage of households with Internet access, by region, 2013*
50
45,7
40
41,3
33,6
32,7
30
20
10
0
6,7
Europe
The Americas
CIS**
World
Regions are based on the ITU BDT Regions, see: http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/definitions/regions/index.html
Note: * Estimate ** Commonwealth of Independent States
Source: ITU World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators database
Arab States
Asia & Pacific
Africa
16. Mobile connections as emancipatory tools
•
Micro-level:
• Support of economic growth, better organization
•
•
Enlarges buyer/supply networks
Macro-level:
•
Mobile communication infrastructures impact a country’s GNP and
its productivity rates
•
Still inequalities between developed and developing countries:
e.g. Finland .23%/year, Nepal, .07%/year
19. Evolving thought on media effects (1)
First phase: all-powerful media
•
Change attitudes and behaviour
•
Propaganda, advertising (new-sprung social psychology)
Second phase: challenging powerful media
• More empirical study on effects of media content
• Harmful effects on children, democracy?
• ‘Mass communication does not ordinarily serve as a necessary or sufficient
cause of audience effects, but rather functions through a nexus of mediating
factors’ (Klapper,1960)
20. Evolving thought on media effects (2)
Third phase: rediscovering powerful media
• Neglect over second phase’s outcome
• Methodological issues, shift short-term to long-term
• Rise of television in the 1960s as a medium with mass appeal
• More attention for organizational processes and shaping of content
Fourth phase: negotiating media influence
• Media texts as constructed meanings, systematically transferred but
prone to negotiation, turning into personal structures of meaning
21. A milestone: encoding/decoding
• Stuart Hall: raised awareness for content of media messages, role of receiver
in the sense-making process (i.e. in-built genre guidelines, as well as own
ideas and experiences)
• Four archetypical reading positions: dominant codes, professional codes,
negotiated codes, oppositional codes; gives rise to audience agency
• Corroborated by David Morley (BBC Nationwide): oppositional readings
provoked not only by individual background, but also cultural and class
attributes
22. Recurring moral panics
•
•
Concern – awareness about possible negative effect
Hostility – towards a group in question
•
•
Consensus – on the threat to society
Disproportionality – measures taken do not match the problem
•
Volatility – highly volatile, disappear quickly
23. Recurring moral panics
•
•
•
•
Concern – awareness about possible negative effect
Hostility – towards a group in question
•
•
•
•
Consensus – on the threat to society
Disproportionality – measures taken do not match the problem
•
•
Volatility – highly volatile, disappear quickly
25. Review of academic research status
• Fearsome, polluted debate: politics, ideology, personal beliefs
• Relation video games and real life violence: refuted by US Supreme
Courts, Swedish Media Council, Australian Attorney-General Dept.,…
• Disagreement in findings and interpretations (i.e. aggressionassociations as aggressive thoughts), methodological trench wars (i.e.
hot sauce-paradigm)
28. Directionality of media and communication
• Traditionally: broadcastmedia transmit to mass audience(s)
• Interactive media: bi-directional relation
• Forms of communication (Jensen & Helles): one-to-one, one-to-many,
many-to-many
29. Properties of social media
• According to Bechmann and Lomborg; Social media…
1. … afford de-institutionalized and widely mediated communication,
handing its users the locus of control to address self-chosen
audiences,
2. … consider users as active producers and distributors of content,
and
3. … supply interactive and networked communication, inherently
based upon interaction between users that constantly shift between
production and reception modes.
30. Types of user-generated content
• User-to-user, user-to-document, user-to-system
• Ideas of Remediation; remix, mashup, DIY, found footage, repurposing,
bricolage, produsage
• Problematic as it challenges the concept of the author, and reinforces the
struggle between production and consumption
31. Cult of the amateur?
• Web platforms: little-c creativity is all around…
‘… the interaction among aptitude, process and environment by which
an individual or group produces a perceptible product that is both novel
and useful as defined within a social context’ (Plucker, Beghetto & Dow,
2004)
Making is connecting:
• Creativity as combining elements: materials and ideas
• Social connection through creativity
• Means to communicate creativity
32. Example of YouTube
Structures of creative combinations: latent class modeling of
disclosed video characteristics and variables from content analysis
• Personal Creativity (46%):
• Mostly self-edited, self-made sounds and images
• Highest chances of demonstrating creativity
• Remix Creativity (32%):
• A lot of self-made video (not sound), incorporates
extracts from pop culture (more sound than video)
• Borrowed Creativity (22%):
• Very high chances to contain sound and images of
third-party creativity (e.g. artistic performance)
33. Example of YouTube
• Discourse on Web 2.0: mostly positive nature, despite critical sounds…
(e.g. Keen’s Cult of the Amateur, 2007)
• Flood of poorly made videos, available for the mass! However…
• ‘Uninteresting content’: aimed at small, yet closely connected audience
• Content for the broader public: contains extracts of pop culture
• Too easy to make and distribute content… everyone’s doing it. We can’t see the
wood for the trees! However…
• Independent raters could rightfully determine a proportion of creative
personality traits of YouTube uploaders through their videos
35. Democracy in crisis?
• Combination of globalisation, changing role of nation state,
neoliberalization,…
• Crisis of democracy:
• Declining voting rates
• Fragmentation of political parties
• Single issues
• Mediatisation of politics
36. New Media & Democracy
• High expectations because of open/direct character of the internet
• Facilitating a ‘networked democracy’ (Hague & Loader, 1999):
• Information democracy
• Democratisation of decision-making power
• Creation of deliberative democracy/expressive politics
37. Civic engagement
• Engagement does not equal participation or concern
• Disagrement on definition; nevertheless: action to improve one’s
community/society, both locally and globally
• Different dimensions of engaging
• Actively versus passively
• Individually versus collectively
• Instigatively versus following
• Offline versus Online
38. The role of media
Traditional media:
• Television: (+) knowledge, more engaged; (-) displacement/mean world
• Newspapers: source of information, less for younger generations
New media:
• Interactivity, easy and quick access, networked character
• (-) Time discplacement, lack of social trust, homogenous virtual
communities, techno-optimism
• (+) Higher degree of social contact and trust, mobilization and
activation
Online participation: (a) politically driven, (b) non-politically driven, (c)
friendship driven
39. The Arab Spring
• Iran: Green Revolution, 2009; Twitter and Facebook as a tool to get
attention; impact on local politics quite limited
• Unrest spread to Tunesia, Egypt, Syria; catalyzation to organize and
mobilize
• Jasmin revolution in Tunesia: mobile networks to agitate, keep contact with
refugees, spread of information
• Bottom-up information: user-generated matrials, alternative channels
(need for nuance)
• At the same time vulnerable: Vodaphone incident
41. Triple revolution – Rainie & Wellman
• Social Network Revolution: from groups to visible networks
• Internet revolution – individual empowerment
• Mobile revolution – always on principle
The intersection: networked individualism, we have a new networked
operating system, various social repercussions
• Impact on relations, families, work, creativity, information
• More friends than ever; Online friends are offline friends
42. Alone Together - Turkle
• Move away from social relational structures: individualism, isolation
• People rely more on technology, and less on other people; detrimental to
in-depth social interaction
• Emphasis on convenience and control as a priority, lowering our
expectations of one another
• Online life promotes superficial, emotional incompetence and laziness
43. Specifics of computer-mediated communication
• Anonymity: control richness of cues (positive/negative)
• Asynchronicity: delay in communication
• Accessibility: low boundaries
44. Consequences for identity development
• Self-concept
• Self-concept fragmentation hypothesis
•
•
Self-esteem: environmental control and peer approval
•
•
•
Self-concept unity hypothesis
Blogs/SNS: enhancement
Beware of compulsive nature
Sexual development
•
Self-exploration: safe exploration
•
Online sexual solicitation
45. Consequences for identity development
Development of intimacy
Cyberbullying: features of CMC amplify occurrence
Friendships formation; two hypotheses: (a) the rich-get-richer, (b)
social compensation hypothesis
Existing friendship quality; two hypotheses: (a) displacement/
reduction hypothesis, (b) stimulation hypothesis
46. Social consequences: historical perspective
•
•
•
An early article on online friendship (Parks & Floyd, 1996)
Debate between: (a) Illusion of creating friendship and community and (b)
Internet and CMC as liberating
Empirical support for both, but different in nature (laboratory versus field
research)
•
Reduced cue experiments (verbal aggression, less shared views, less
connections due to lack of cues)
•
Field research reports on increasing quality of online relations, albeit
if supplemented with other means of (face-to-face) communication
“Even within the Internet itself, the information available to relational
participants continues to expand as more people use the World Wide Web to
exchange pictures, sound, and video. The reduced-cues perspective may simply
become a theoretic antique, given the continuing advances in network
technology.”
47. Ten years later
•
Making new friends:
• Social compensation: beneficial lonely/socially anxious
•
The-rich-get-richer: socially advantaged turn more to the internet;
although the anxious prefer the internet more for communication;
suggests absence of new friendships
•
Displacement: online activities hinder well-being, could be time spent
with existing friends – stranger assumption, poor quality
Stimulation: CMC enhances quality, it stimulates
•
•
Early evidence for both (correlated with loneliness and
depression scores, life satisfaction, pos/neg affect; others found
relations with time spent with friends, closeness, well-being:
mixed empirical grounds)
48. Ten years later
• So far making new friends and existing friendship relations
• Major growth in overlap online and offline social networks (e.g. Reich et
all, 2012); almost 60% of top offline contacts also named as important
online contact
• Social media adoption became commonplace (across generation);
Staying in touch with good friends, and people you don’t see often as
primary uses
• Renders displacement hypothesis fairly obsolete? After all, it was hard to
supplement
49. Concluding on social consequences
In conclusion: online communication poses both potential threats and
opportunities for adolescents, but not automatically
Nature of consequences depends:
1. Use of communication; is it anonymous?
2. Is the communication partner friend/stranger?
3. Type of use: compulsive?
4. Timeline of data collection (the Internet and our use of it has changed!)
5. Primary motivation to use (communication/entertainment)
50. Social Aspects of Media ICT
• Diverse, interesting, yet complex field
• Be sensitive for methodological issues
• The public debate is not always rightfully informed
51. Thank you, any questions?
Contact: cedric.courtois@ugent.be - +32 9 264 91 54 - Korte Meer 7, BE-9000 Gent
