Reflections IV

Media and Behavior: A Missing Link, chapter 2 of No Sense of Place by Joshua Meyrowitz

1. Electronic media: it's like a synthesis of all previous media, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

What does this synthesis look like? Well, oral communication is commonplace: cell phones, Skype, webcam, vlog, etc. Written communication is also everywhere: blogs, search engines, databases, message boards, etc.

Then there are things like tags, status updates, and text messaging. Would these be a middle ground between oral and literary communication? They are text-based, but happen in real time....

2. Meyerowitz says that one of the reasons there has been little interest in the effects of media environments is because they are invisible. I would argue that the Internet as a media environment is much more visible than others. It is something we say we “go to;” it is made of sites, with addresses. There are distinct communities. How is that not visible?

3. Do we live in a Global Village? I’ve never been particularly fond of the term…to me it seems like the phrase “global village” grasps all of the innovative technology and worldwide connectedness and none of the new forms of asocial behavior and divisive conflicts that come with it.

4. I do like Goffman’s idea of the “multiplicity of roles.” As in, all the world is NOT a stage, but rather it is MANY stages. It deals with the relationship between people’s behavior in certain situations and how they want to/think they should appear in those situations. Do we create “characters” of ourselves on the Internet? Oh yes, we do. (It’s super easy, because as everyone is aware, no one on the Internet knows you’re a dog.) The information about oneself that one communicates on the Internet is limited to what one chooses to divulge: speech, writing, image, etc. can change to reflect the desired “character.”

5. Social situations: what is the context of the Internet?

What behaviors are not allowed on the Internet? Are there any? LOL. I would say that situational definitions of the Internet are not clearly defined at all. Without physical interaction, some social cues (that would normally carry important information about the context) are lost. Nevertheless, trolling/hating/flaming falls within the context of most large social networks and sites with user-generated content. It’s usually expected that there will be some users who behave like this, and in some cases (i.e., 4chan), it’s guaranteed. Even on YouTube you don’t have to look far to find it. Perhaps they are attempting to define the situational definitions of these contexts by pushing the limits? Lots of research supports the concept that the situation influences the behavior, to the extent that people will do extremely bad things, given the right conditions (see classic studies by Zimbardo and Milgram). But when the context itself is unclear, what then? And when the situation is virtual, might the individual participants perceive it differently? If so, then trolling may seem like perfectly acceptable behavior to the troll while completely asocial to the troll’s target.


YouTube and You: Experiences of Self-Awareness in the Context Collapse of the Recording Webcam, by Michael Wesch

Speaking of contexts… perhaps what is actually going on here is a context collapse. Too many contexts, more than you can count, and some you don’t even know about! It’s easy to see how those aforementioned situation definitions can get impossibly complex. Maybe it is a characteristic of Internet social interaction that the situation is indefinable?