The title of this post refers to the statements of Burke and company about the nature of relationships and bridging social capital, the value of which cannot be measured by outgoing messages.  Rather, it can only be seen to increase bridging through the responses the original message generates.  Almost by definition, communication must be (at least) two-way to facilitate a relationship.  Though I am always charming, amusing and informative company, I build little social capital by talking to myself.

The most important thought (for me) from the readings came from what I initially viewed as indepth research into the obvious.  It seems obvious that people with lively and active social and communication habits in the physical world are also the most likely to have lively and active social and communication habits online, and that the converse would also be true.  However, discussions of new media and technology generally too often come from “best of times” or “worst of times” perspectives.  We are either damned of saved through its use.  I appreciated that the tone of the conclusions in these studies seems to be that while we may be influenced  and changed in some ways by this technology, we are not defined by it and that our basic nature as humans remains fundamentally one of social animals just trying to find our place in the herd.

Politicians and pundits alike have lamented the increasing polarization in Congress.  Recent books and articles describe an increasingly divisive atmosphere in our nation’s capital that stretches back to the 1980s.  In addition to the anecdotal evidence offered in these books, recent studies have offered empirical evidence of increased partisan division.  Beyond documenting the rise of partisanship, several hypotheses have been suggested to explain this trend.  These explanations include redistricting efforts which produced more politically homogenous districts supporting one party over another and fewer competitive districts in which either party could win.  Others have argued the rise in partisanship is the result of a top down effort by party elites, or conversely, the trend is a bottom up phenomenon. However, studies of these explanations have failed to provide strong evidence to support them.

A possible influence on the increased polarization which has yet to be carefully examined is the role of media in this trend.  The rise in partisanship coincides with changes in traditional media coverage and the use of new sources of information and communication technology.  This paper reviews the evolution of communication technology and new media and its impact on the political arena in America and makes the argument that new media enables and supports the fragmentation of society by political ideology resulting in the rise of partisanship.  While new media can generally be considered to be internet based and mobile communication platforms, for the purposes of this paper, cable news networks will also be considered because their introduction marked a shift away from the traditional and fairly centrist broadcast news coverage.   Beginning in the early 1980’s, cable television provided directs access to Congressional proceedings, allowing voters to see first-hand and in real time what their representatives were doing and saying.  Research on the “CNN Effect” and the 24 hour news cycle strongly reveals the impact this change has had on foreign policy.   In the same decade, changes in FCC regulations allowed media outlets to provide political coverage with a specific bias without having to offer equal time for opposing views.  The result was that media consumers could select information sources which reflected their political ideology.

Technological advances in communication have also fostered individuals’ abilities to participate in the political process by increasing the ease with which voters can communicate with their representatives, as well as monitor the votes, finances, and other activities of elected officials.  These same technologies have allowed candidates to raise substantial campaign funds through the aggregation of small donor contributions to an extent not possible previously.

Research on the behavioral and attitudinal outcomes of media use highlights several important phenomena that ripple through the political process and have the tangible effect of polarizing our legislative bodies.  Well established theories of agenda-setting, framing, and cultivation applied to political activities shed new light on the overarching discourse and practice of politics in the past few decades.  Additionally, the dynamics of reinforcing spirals of media selection and personal attitudes offer valuable insight into the relationships between media, voter, and elected official.  The article concludes with a detailed description of how shifting news coverage and new communication technology fostered the growth of ideologically focused, non-collocated communities which circulated messages previously considered extreme or from the fringe. These messages were then carried through a complicated and self-reinforcing network to the national conscience.  This communication process developed concurrently and symbiotically with an increased dependence on ideologically connected individuals and small groups by candidates for financial support.  The end result is an escalating trend of partisanship and polarization in the American political system.

Selected References

Abramowitz, A. I. and Saunders, K.L. (2008). Is polarization a myth? The Journal of Politics, 70 (2),542-555

Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M., Signorielli, N., & Shanahan, J. (2002). Growing up with television: Cultivation processes. In J. Bryant & D. Zillman (Eds.), Media effects: Advances in theory and research (pp. 43–68). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Fiorina, M.P., Abrams, S. A., & Pope, J.C. (2008).  Polarization in the American public: Misconceptions and misreadings. The Journal of Politics, 70 (2), 556-560.

McCombs, M., & Shaw, D. (1993). The evolution of agenda-setting research: Twenty-five years in the marketplace of ideas. Journal of Communication, 43(2), 58–67.

Scheufele, D. A., & Moy, P. (2000). Twenty-five years of the spiral of silence: A conceptual review and empirical outlook. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 12, 3–28.

Schermer, C. (2010). Reinforcing spirals of negative affects and selective attention to advertising in political campaign. National Center of Competence in Research. Berne, Switzerland.

Slater, M. D. (2007). Reinforcing spirals: The mutual influence of media selectivity and media effects and their impact on individual behavior and social identity. Communication Theory, 17, 281-303.

As I read the Gilpin article, I was reminded of the way the Chinese have a very relationship oriented approach to doing business.  It is not uncommon to have multiple dinners together before discussing actual business.  This has been a source of mild frustration for Western professionals who like to “get down to business.”  With the context collapse that seems inherent in new media, a relational approach to professional interactions takes on more of a Chinese flavor than the previously distinct personal and professional compartments of Western culture.

While public relations has always been front and center in creating and maintaining the identity of a client, and by necessity, their relationship to the public, the public relations of PR as a profession has received relatively little attention.  Previously, PR involved countless phone calls, faxes and other measures that required significant investments of time of resources and manpower.  Traditional venues for public relations rely on the resources of the client, yet current technology allows PR professionals to “practice was they preach” without significant investments of time or money.  As stated by the article, “Activity on Twitter can be seen as a means of increasing one’s professional visibility, as well as driving traffic to one’s presence in other online venues” (p246).  While it may be true that, “that this visibility is not necessarily a reliable indicator of overall expertise” (p247), there is something compelling about the sales pitch that says, “What I have done for myself, I can do for you.”

The Mendelson and Papacharissi article empirically captured a significant moment in personal development: the breaking away from one’s family as an individual and the attempt to connect with the larger social body.  I was also intrigued by the brief discussion of meta-photography and the way the camera becomes and en extension of the body.  While there are moments from my early adult life that I wish I had been able to capture with the ease of a camera phone, there are far more moments for which I am glad there is no evidence.

The “always-on lifestyle” makes perfect sense to me.  As Boyd states, it’s not that I always want to be connected, but I always want access to the network.  Before the proliferation of the internet, I began amassing books on a wide variety of topics so that I could easily have information at my fingertips.  Similarly, I kept phone numbers, business cards and phone books from many cities so that I could contact who ever I wanted with ease.  I may never use a number or need someone’s card, but it was nice to know I had it if I needed it.  I wonder how many others in the always-on cohort have or had similar stockpiles of material prior to present technology?  I blog only occasionally; I don’t Tweet, nor is my digital consumption as great as many, but I want it there whenever I have urge.

The antelope consume the grass and produce meat for the lions. The lions consume the antelope, die and produce grass for the antelope.  The nature of an ecosystem is defined by the ways in which all members consume and produce resources.  Economic systems are another form of ecosystem.  As such, each member of an economic system is and has always been both consumer and producer.  Ritzer et al correctly point out that the traditional consumer/producer dichotomy limits our understanding of social and cultural interactions.  However, rather than thinking in terms of members as prosumers, it would be more helpful to view those interactions as manifestations of the ecosystem.  Economic and power relationships can then be illuminated by understanding the ways in which resources are allocated.  In this way, we can understand that production is mediated by the basic needs of consumption.  The allocation of resources devoted to the production of a blog (time, and technology) are mediated by the consumption needs of the blogger (food and shelter).  Sustaining a blog can only be accomplished when its production does not consume more resources than are available to the blogger.  Popular and successful blogs require a good deal of time.  Time that could otherwise be spent working on something that returns more tangible rewards, like a job.  As the article states, very few blogs are actually consumed enough to sustain their producers.  In this regard, there is nothing special about bloggers.  Just ask any poet, actor, minor league ball player or any of a number of other professionals where all but the elite practitioners have to support their activities with another job.  For those blogger on the cusp of financial viability but worry about selling their souls, they can take heart that their dilemma is nothing new either.  How many musicians have faced “selling out” to make the big time? A closer corollary can be found in traditional forms of journalism and media.  Newspapers and broadcast networks constantly balanced independent reporting and production with the need to sell the advertising  which enable the production in the first place.  We have long since become comfortable with the paid spokesman on radio, tv, and in print.  Ethical questions arise when there in not transparency in the relationship.  We have enacted laws and other forms of regulation to create that transparency in older forms of media, and we will do the same for the blogosphere.  Regulation has always lagged behind technology and regardless of what is enacted, there are those who will find ways to exploit the system.  Caveat emptor!

The Wilken and Sinclair article describes one of the challenges faced by advertisers in adapting to new media and changing communication technology.  For advertisers, the “space” of advertisement went largely unchanged for decades. As traditional forms of advertising in traditional spaces decreased in effectiveness while increasing in cost, the rapidly growing mobile market seems like a dream opportunity.  With it, a company could reach hundreds of millions of people for less cost than one 30 second commercial on one network, or one print ad in one magazine.  While I agree with many of points that Wilken and Sinclair make for the failure of mobile advertising to reach its full potential, I would also suggest two other considerations.  First, despite everything else it can do, the mobile phone is still a phone.  Telephone based advertising or sales have never been well received.  The fact that almost every state and the federal government have “Do Not Call” lists, should clue advertisers into that reality.  Some of this may stem from the invasion of privacy that Wilken and Sinclair mention (p. 432).  However, I also think resistance comes from the required interaction that advertising on mobile devises requires.  In keeping with their notion of ecology, advertisements on mobile devises require effort and resources to be expended by the target.  Answering the phone or opening a text message requires an investment of time (however small) and resources in terms of memory or application speed.  I think people resent having to do something to deal with something they didn’t want and may not be relevant to them, and which uses something they pay for.  Traditional tv and radio ads are passive.  You don’t have to open them, save them, or delete them.  Just ignore them and they go away.  Those forms of advertising also come when they are expected, so they don’t interrupt other activities.  Finally, people accept that ads are the “cost” for free programing.  People resent ad on their phone because they are paying for the platform.  I think people would be equally resistant to ad interrupting programs on premium channels like HBO.  I think failure to attend to this underlying premise limits the utility of the Kolsaker and Drakatos study.

I was not at all surprised by the relatively inconclusive findings of the Paek et al study.  Even a cursory review of peer vs. expert influence on persuasion reveals an inability to make definitive claims about the difference in their effectiveness.  Furthermore, the general ineffectiveness of PSA across all forms of media has been a persistent problem for decades.   This is acutely felt in the Health Communication area.  Testing an historically inconsistent and inconclusive variable on an historically ineffective message just seems like a bad research project, regardless of the media.

Now I’m in a grumpy mood.

I thought this was really interesting and very appropriate for a discussion of advertising in new media.  The Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab page has a lot of good stuff and worth spending time looking around.

Captology is the study of computers as persuasive technologies. This includes the design, research, and analysis of interactive computing products (computers, mobile phones, websites, wireless technologies, mobile applications, video games, etc.) created for the purpose of changing people’s attitudes or behaviors.

There are several videos on the site.  One video specifically addresses advertising on Facebook.

I thought this story from Friday on NPR was fascinating in the way it talks about posters on lampposts in Berlin.  Even though modern communication technology abounds in the city, people still use modes of communication from an era when the ability to reach out was much more limited.  People advertise sales, lost items, political rants, and sometime just personal statements. It makes me think that new media is just another way of doing the things we have always done.

The reading for this week raised a number of issues that I have mulled over at one time or another.  Rather than summarize each article, I will address the points that stuck out for me or which raised questions.  I appreciated how well Beldad et al. provided typologies and various ways in which privacy has been discussed.  The belief that people own their information (p223) and that privacy is control over that information (p221) strikes me as problematic.  I agree that these are accepted notions of privacy, but they are untenable beliefs.  Unlike intellectual property discussed in last week’s readings, we are not the producers of our personal information.  A person’s social security number, voting history, address, or even their birthday are not thing produced by the person.  At most they are co-productions of one’s existence and actions in the context of some other institution.  I can think of no other example where I can claim ownership of something I neither produced, purchased, nor use outside their respective institutions.  And while I agree that personal information is a commodity, the idea that it has “become” a commodity denies that it has always been a commodity and may blind researchers to the ways in which that information is used in the expression of power by looking too hard at the means by which the information was collected and disseminated.  The belief of ownership of information runs contrary to core democratic principles of open government.  We demand individual privacy while at the same time we demand the openness of government and access to what it produces (which is why we have the Freedom on Information Act).  This ignores that the productions of a democratic society are the collective productions of individuals.  All so called personal information is created to facilitate our involvement and participation in that society.

The problematic nature of these beliefs is further illustrated in the Bodle article.  Not as an express point, but in its glaring absence in the discussion.  As a student of rhetoric, particularly how it can be used covertly, I found Bodle’s article interesting and compelling; and I cannot disagree with any of observations or conclusions.  However, what I believe was left unstated or understated was how the information at the heart of the discussion was produced.  While the thrust of Web 2.0 is user-generated content, the means of production still resides wholly with the company.  If I let a person into my shop to use my tool and my materials and bore the cost of production, what rights do I have relative to what is produced? I would argue that I have quite a lot of say in what happens to the final product.  While the language of Google’s Privacy Policies is vague and misleading, to assume information you provide while using their services (usually for free) should remain under your strict control without clear and explicit statements to the contrary is naive.

What really seems to have changed is the ease at which information can be accessed and the ease at which it can be cross referenced with other information.  To illustrate this further, consider the Supreme Court Case earlier this year about the use of GPS trackers.  While the tracker gathers the exact same information that a “tail” would, the ease at which this is possible caused the court to find that the use of GPS trackers require warrants while the traditional “tail” has not and does not. (A discussion of this can be found here: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/scotus-gps-ruling/)

Finally, regarding Ford’s use of a continuum to distinguish between public and private, I believe her model misrepresents the nature of two concepts.  However, Jurgenson and Rey also fail to address this fundamental misrepresentation.  Whether they are distinct and separate concepts or part of a continuum, this view implies that information can be placed on this continuum by the user with the assumption that it will remain where placed.  Furthermore, such a scale also implies that public or private can be measured or marked in some objective way.  Concepts of public and private are very subjective.  In truth, public and private are imaginary concepts to which we arbitrarily assign meaning for our own comfort.  Nothing is private that cannot be made public.  To act with an expectation of privacy is to justify actions which you already know would cause embarrassment or harm your relationship to another.  It is an excuse for duplicitous behavior.  Mitt Romney could argue that the fundraiser where he made the recently posted comments was a private event.  I don’t think he should get a pass on what was said just because he intended it to have a certain degree of privacy.  More than the contemptuous nature of the statements, the fact that someone who has been running for president for the past seven years would carelessly assume that anything he said could not potentially be broadcast worldwide displays a cognitive flaw that argues against his qualifications to be president.

I do want to make one additional clarification.  To me, there is a very real difference between privacy and security, even though the actions we take to acquire both are similar.  The Hope Diamond is on public display at the Natural History Museum, yet it is very secure.  At the same time, many things I might wish to be private are not very secure.

Perhaps Vaidhyanathan and I just got off on the wrong foot.  I might have felt better about him if I read his post on the Chronicle of Higher Education Blog.  But, I read the Social Media Reader chapter first, so I didn’t think much of him.  We made up in the end though.

Open source is not the way we have always worked.  From Socrates complaint that writing would undermine his proprietary knowledge, through trade guilds of the Middle Ages, to the resistance of the Catholic church to printing the Bible in the vulgate, humans have sought to guard and horde knowledge.  Teaching slaves or wo

Open Source for Blacksmiths. Now it’s a Jack Hammer.

men to read was dangerous.  They might think for themselves or want to vote.  Knowledge, and more importantly, control of its dissemination has been a basis for power throughout human history.  So don’t give me any techno-hippie garbage about free love and source code being the natural state of man.

I absolutely agree that copyrights and proprietary restrictions squash creativity and potential.  On the other hand, they enable creativity and potential for others.  Overwhelmingly, most people who use computers today do not engage in basic programing.  They want a word processor with spell check, an easy way to post and view cat videos, and a simple and fairly reliable connection to other people and information.  Vaidhyanathan is correct when he distinguishes between software and music or literature; it is not an expression.  What he fails to see is that software is simply a tool for most of us.  It’s a way to do other things.  Like most of the tools in my blacksmith shop, I want them to work without thinking much about it.  There probably is a better design for a particular hammer or saw, and if someone wants to spend their time thinking about it, more power to them, but that’s not me.  The same is true for software.  People are willing to accept just pretty good programs if they have wide compatibility, ease of use, and dependable customer support.  Linux is a great operating system that you can adapt for various uses and you can depend on it to be stable, but you can’t run most programs on it and I couldn’t watch Netflix with it, so to Hell with it.  I will spend the money to get Windows 7, because I am not just paying for a program to run my computer, I am paying for familiarity with the product, compatibility with other computers and software, and a 24/7 hotline for customer service.  Sure with open source software, I could fix the clitches myself, provided I learn the programing language. Software is kind of like pharmaceuticals.  Lifting copyrights and proprietary restrictions would result in low cost production of medication that could save millions.  But then how would we pay for the years of development and clinical trials?  Without those copyrights, many drugs would never be developed.  Please don’t get me wrong.  Micro-Soft and big drug companies are creations of the Devil which are fueled as much by the souls of consumers as their dollars.  However, if left in hand of well-intentioned programmers and designers and without corporate investment of time and money, computers would still be as large as a house and run on punch cards, thus making this whole argument moot.It is with similar skepticism that I view MOOCs.  Here, Vaidhyanathan and I are in agreement.  I love the Khan Academy, but it is not the same as attending a class for a semester.  MOOCs will be a great tool for those who seek to learn new skills or acquire knowledge.  I also believe that access to learning should be as wide spread as practically possible.  But I have no fear that my years of study and dollars paid for a PhD will be wasted as millions of people steam forth waving online degrees.

I am posting this in response to a question I received in the comments section earlier about posting pictures.  Unfortunately, the comments box does not allow me to demonstrate what I am trying to explain.

When you create a new post, there is an icon at the top of the dialog box that is the insert media tool (in red).   I hope this is helpful.

Clicking the Add media button opens a new window what you can images. Below the “drop files” box, is a set of formatting options. Captions (like this) are entered in the “caption” box.