Reflections III

Overview of Media Ecology, by Lum

Lum’s overview deals with how we as humans perceive media as sources of sensory information. Specifically, different media provide sensory information dependent on the type of media. That is, the nature of sensory information of an audio recording is different from that of written text. Incidentally, the media of the Internet can be a highly complex combo of audio/visual/literary/tactile/? information that creates an entirely novel setting or environment for the exchange of information. Lum discusses the environment of the Internet and lists a set of theoretical propositions regarding media and communication; they are here in brief:

1: Different media = different structures = different information
(even when the source is the same.)

2: There are biases inherent in each form of media.
(Is a picture worth a thousand words? Maybe, but those words convey a different message than the picture does.)

3: These biases affect the relationship between technology and culture.

But which way does it go? According to Lum, this process falls on a continuum: soft determinisim (culture affects technology) to hard determinism (technology affects culture). Of course there is a middle, too: a symbiotic relationship between the two.

Lum describes four “epochs” of communication: orality, literacy, typography, electronic media. The first three are pretty straightforward, with the idea being that there is a fundamental change in the way knowledge is transmitted, received, organized, and perceived following the introduction of new media.

The fourth, electronic media, blows all its communication technology predecessors out of the water. Lum describes how through each “epoch” knowledge becomes more easily recorded, accessed, shared, and learned. But in the epoch of electronic media especially, we’ve taken it a step further: now we can create machines/programs/applications that learn and organize this information for us; we can build our knowledge faster and more efficiently by using the technology as a sort of springboard or a booster. It’s like taking the elevator to the top floor when previously you had to expend the time and effort to walk up flight after flight of stairs.

Also, electronic media is complicated (no, really). There is a high level of interaction that was not possible in earlier “epochs” due to the constraints of time and space. But with the Internet especially, the distance between people does not matter; space is irrelevant. And things are increasingly happening in real time (status updates, etc.). Does this affect how we use this technology?

Of course it does. That’s a silly question. That’s why popular things like Facebook have applications compatible with cell phones, so that people can use them whenever, wherever. And when the technology makes it possible for you to update your status anytime and anywhere, of course you will do just that. So people adapt to the technology as the technology is developed to adapt to people’s demand.

So this brings us back to determinism: does technology determine culture or does culture determine technology? I tend to take the middle ground; sometimes one and sometimes the other.

What does this mean for my project? Well, trolling is something more or less unique to the setting of electronic media. If the goal of trolling is indeed to get a reaction out of people (who can do nothing to get back at the troll), then this is really the only type of communication setting in which that is possible. So did the Internet create the trolls or is trolling just an adaptation to the technology of the Internet? Hmm....

Web ushers in age of ambient intimacy, Clive Thompson

Ah, the Facebook news feed. I remember when that appeared. Yes, there were people known as Facebook stalkers before the feed – those kids who spent hours looking through other people’s photo albums and wall posts without actually communicating with them. Everyone did it every now and then.

But then came the news feed, and suddenly Facebook did the stalking for you! Stalkerbook! Now you know everything you never wanted to know about your friends, because it is all organized nice and neat on your homepage, with timestamps and thumbnails, a perfect record of others’ activities, ready for your perusal. Now everyone can be a creeper. ;) And what’s more, now everything YOU do is brought to the attention of your friends, as well.

It made a lot of people rethink what information they really wanted about themselves on their Facebook. Not that it stopped them. The privacy feature was added, but despite that, users came to rely on news feed to learn what’s up with their friends.

Thompson quote’s Mark Zuckerberg as saying, “A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”

This is very interesting. Did social norms change in response to the introduction of the news feed? I would say people are definitely more comfortable with ‘going public,’ but is it because social norms have changed, or is it just that the news feed forced people to realize just how public they already were? Yes – because after people got comfortable with it and quietly adjusted their individual privacy settings, news feed became wildly popular, in general.

About this concept of “ambient awareness,” then: why is it that people update Facebook/Twitter with all the little, meaningless things they do each day? Thompson suggests that the continuous flow of information over time from everyone serves to (in a sense) bring us closer to them, at times streamlining communication with them. No need for asking how one is or what one has been up to. Can this potentially make us feel less isolated from each other, as Thompson says? Sure it can, if you truly feel you are connected to the people whose statuses you read. A relationship that is primarily maintained through technology is easy. No effort required; the data is all in the system, updates will be sent directly to your feed as your ‘friend’ publishes them. So two people need not directly communicate with each other in order to have a relationship; the technology takes care of it for them. But as Thompson notes, this is a loose tie… strong ties take more personal effort. But exactly how loose are ‘Twitter-ties’? When can you truly say you know someone? When you’ve met them? When you know their likes and dislikes, their goals in life? When you are familiar with their daily routine? I think that relationships are being redefined… the word ‘friend’ is especially ambiguous these days. Are friends people you know personally, or is the word ‘friends’ simply a label for a category of people with whom you hold loose ties on a community such as Facebook?

And what’s more, when you are updating about yourself as the people you are with simultaneously update about themselves and those around them, uploading pictures and changing statuses, your online identity is more than simply what you want it to be. With something as tied to our ‘real’ identity as Facebook is, it is hard to separate the two sometimes. Thompson describes the dilemma of some student athletes who want to go out and party but are taking a bigger risk than in the past because of how connected those around them are. Who doesn’t check their Facebook to see if any embarrassing/unwanted information has been posted about them? Sometimes, this super-connectedness with a bazillion loose ties can be a bad thing. But will it ever reach a point when people will back off from it, abandon some of their ties in favor of a smaller social group?

Regarding my project: Trolls like to attack people who (they perceive) have too-big egos, a sense of self-importance. Updating one’s status constantly with information about yourself has a quality of narcissism to it. It would makes sense, then, that trolls would attack users of Twitter, as they did last month.