Instant Validation: The Fallacies of Text Communication
(Watch video first. It’s short)
Amanda:
“Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other” (Turkle, 1).
Do you remember the first time you used a computer to send an email? What about an instant message? I do. I also remember racing to the phone and having to get it before my sisters could call their friends, staying on it until that fateful click alerting to another caller, and then having face-to-face interactions with my family during dinner-something that no longer exists.
Because when that fateful day of cellphones came. . . communication--and networking--changed forever. Instead of phone calls that lasted six or more hours, it became short sentences in text messages (each cost 10 cents back in the day of Virgin Mobile cellphones). Instead of interacting with friends over lunch, dinner, coffee--we became engrossed in the applications that our cellular devices offered us. As teenagers who went through the excitement of flip phones becoming smartphones, this experience was normalized as going through a technological fad that all who owned cellphones went through. Except that fad became longterm, stretching to new features, new media, new applications, and communication and interaction as I once knew it was gone.
Ryan: It actually aggravates me a bit to see so many people seemingly mesmerized by their smartphones on a daily basis. Everywhere you go, there are dozens of people glued to their screens and it always makes me wonder why they feel the need to use them. Don’t get me wrong, smartphone’s can be great. I agree with you that technology is convenient, but my question is, when does it stop being a convenience and become a nuisance instead? Regardless, It seems these days that networking is almost a requirement for us. In her article “Electronic Intimacy,” Christine Rosen talks about the immediacy of using social media and email to communicate, and more importantly, the ramifications it has on us. At the end of her introduction--in which she describes her experience communicating with a boy from school through handwritten letters--Rosen asks the question, “[D]oes the way we experience with each other alter the experience significantly?”
I would say yes, and based on your questions, Amanda, I think you would agree. The biggest problem that this new age of “instantaneous global communication” is that myriads of people are feeling the need for instant validation. Whereas a letter could take weeks to arrive, because texts and emails now take mere moments to send, people are experiencing “social anxiety [...] when we see that we have no messages [or have not received a response yet, as is the case with texting].”
Amanda: My sentiment exactly! The need for instant gratification has become the sole purpose for all interaction. This is especially apparent when I go out to eat with my friends. I find myself surrounded by people lost in the glow of their smartphone screens and, If I look around, I see couples on dates so engrossed in scrolling and clicking that they barely say one word to each other throughout the entire meal. And as I find myself sitting among people, alone together, I wonder:
How can we be present physically and yet so checked out mentally?
Sherry Turkle had a similar question as to why this could be, which she tried to answer in her article, Alone Together: “We discovered the network--the world of connectivity--to be uniquely suited to the overworked and overscheduled life it makes possible. And now we look to the network to defend us against loneliness even as we use it to control the intensity of our connections” (13).
Let’s be honest: technological use is very convenient. I can now respond to emails while taking notes for a lecture (but never in Alex Mueller’s course), write chapters for my book while listening to a podcast, and if I feel up to it I might respond to text messages now and again to those I consider part of my community.
Then why does it feel so lonely?
Here I am, responding to Ryan’s post regarding networking and community while we are actually located in different cities, without knowing that either one is currently present. When thinking about this it begs the question:
Although we are collaborating, is it actually networking?
Ryan:
I think we still are to some extent. According to Google, networking is “a process that fosters the exchange of information and ideas among individuals or groups that share a common interest”. So it seems that collaboration and networking are somewhat synonymous. I’d be interested to hear what other people think about this.
Regardless, in addition to the need for instant validation I mentioned before, people also seem to compare themselves to others on social media which is problematic. Rosen mentions a study published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking that found “the more time and more ‘friends’ people had on Facebook, the more likely people were to agree with the statement that others had better, happier lives than they did, and the less likely they were to believe that life is fair.” So essentially, people who spend a lot of time on social media and have a lot of “friends” feel more inadequate to others. People like that may see their friends posting about how great their lives are or posting pictures of fun experiences. I imagine, that seeing posts like this could result in a person feeling angry and even depressed. They might wonder why they are not living a life like that. However, as the above video shows, the thing about posting pictures on social media is that everyone only gets to see what the poster wants them to see. Afterall, a picture is merely a single moment separated from the complete experience. Therefore, as shown in the last clip of the video, someone in a subpar relationship may post a picture that conveys a different message to viewers.
Perhaps my favorite line in the entire article is when Rosen states that, “[l]ike instant credit, instant credit in the Facebook mold yields immediate rewards[,b] ut it also has it’s hidden costs-- costs that tend to accrue long after the pleasures of the first connection have faded” As someone who enjoys Marxist theory and tends to see applications of it everywhere, this connection between the capitalistic system of credit and “friendships” on social media jumped out at me. My question to you is this: What do you think the “immediate rewards” of making friends on social media are, and what do you think the “costs that tend to accrue” are for doing so? It might help to think about how credit works. What are the instant rewards for getting credit, and what are the costs that accrue?
Amanda: And going along with that, Turkle’s article brought up a lot of evocative questions for thought: Why is technology use so seductive that it is able to meet our human vulnerabilities? How can we be hiding in plain sight by using technology? Going off the part in Turkle’s article that speaks about the nanny interview, why did the roommate find knocking on the door to be so intrusive? Why is texting and social media use less intrusive?
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ReplyDelete(Can we really not edit comments here? I never noticed until now. Here it is reposted and edited)
DeleteThe video you guys shared had me look back at my own instagram and I left it thinking "you know what - that is actually pretty honest." Maybe I am an outlier since I barely use my instagram and certainly know people like those in the video, but then mine is just things like the soup I cooked the other day, a drink I had at a bar that I may have posted like the guy in the video, but in the description I mention that despite it looking cool it tasted absolutely awful, photos of family in Florida while I was house hunting for my dad. All things that objectively happened to me and really aren't any more fabulous or colored from what they really were. A crock pot of soup that came out really good, a nasty drink that I still remember how awful it tasted, playing card games with my family every night and documenting the winner.
Maybe the fact that my use with social media is pretty honest is the reason I don't feel that extreme pull to stare at my phone if I'm with people I'm engaged with. I've always been an early adopter of various forms of social media, but I've never worked to gain a following and I barely track down my friends on them. I mostly use them as life documentation tools for myself (maybe this is why I still use a livejournal despite that basically dying years ago), and I never really create a false life on them or feel the need to constantly update them or check how they are going. Don't get me wrong. When I am bored I will pick up my phone and scroll through tumblr for eons if you let me. But it is because I am bored with what I am doing not because I need it to tell me I'm living successfully. I never pick up my phone to look at social media when I am out with friends who I love unless we are coming up with a caption for a photo together and then putting it right back down, meanwhile at a boring work function when I don't have a connection to the coworkers I am with? No problem staring at my phone. Is that hiding in plain sight while using technology? Maybe, but I think where that comes from is so important to the discussion. So ultimately I would say it comes to engagement for me as it usually does. If technology and networking is being used with engagement in mind and we cultivate engaging circumstances for students of any age to be involved in, the tendency to mindless waste time with technology is less. And if it is coming from a lack of self-esteem and our students needing that validation? That may be beyond what we can fully address in our one subject classroom but if we can start the discussion of inclusive and welcoming settings where we can help validate our students strengths maybe that can be a helpful start to fixing the larger societal problem or at least starting that discussion.
Rose, this is exactly how I feel about my use of social media, especially Instagram. I tend to look at it as a way to document experiences with people I care about rather than to show everyone that I really am happy. To me I use it like a photo album now, the way we used to. (Although I am sure that some still use them in this day and age). I think it is important to discuss these implications with our students because this can be a ledge that they slip off of, becoming the people who seek validation through social media likes and shares without understanding how detrimental to our health it is.
DeleteAlso, I had NO idea that Livejournal was still a thing... I have to see if my old one is still active!
First of all, is the video another fakedoors.com scenario? It said I had to pay to play. Am I missing something?
ReplyDeleteSecondly, I love the dialogue format for this post, which is exceedingly appropriate for the topic.
Thirdly, I was struck by how often the work "immediate" was used to describe social media in this post. It's ironic because the literal sense of "immediate," is "without mediation." This is a central idea for Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in this book on remediation. Check out a blog about it here: https://allisonhitt.wordpress.com/2013/05/23/immediacy-hypermediacy-and-remediation/.
Fourthly, I think we should move beyond Google's definition of networking to think about how Galloway and Thacker characterize it. They claim, "networks, by their mere existence, are not liberating; they exercise novel forms of control that operate at a level that is anonymous and nonhuman, which is to say material" (5). For G and T, the network has a kind of nonhuman agency that has great power, power that interrupts and (at times) exceeds the power of humans. It's a kind of dystopian conception of the network, and given the role of social networks within the terrorist acts over the last week, I'm becoming increasingly persuaded by inhuman sovereignty of networks.
Video worked well with me! I tracked it down on Facebook as well--maybe you can access that better: https://www.facebook.com/DitchtheLabel/videos/vl.277566306060733/10154097367221008/?type=1
DeleteI tried the video again and it also worked. Maybe it was a glitch? Thank you Keiran for finding the new link for Ryan and me! I am also going to see if there is a way to just have the video on our blog so it can just be played through this website rather than switching over to Youtube.
DeleteTo Alex's points, I agree that the definition and meaning of networking are changing due to the implications of its use. To be completely honest I have never viewed technology use as a form of networking, which is odd considering the entire experience through email, social media, texting is exactly that. It makes you wonder since people do not typically define it as thus, what do they define it as? Has it become a tethered state so that those who use it do not even think about what it may be tying together? I actually think of a Japanese manga that takes a good look at the dark side of technology, and how for some it can really be a matter of life or death depending on the views, likes, shares, or messages you receive.
It’s interesting to think about the cost/rewards involved in Facebook’s system of friendships and likes. Facebook is an interesting example because there seems to be so much variation in usage user-to-user. I have long been a very passive user on Facebook, which I use mostly to message people I’m not regularly in contact with (mostly family in Ireland) and respond to shared content (my dad loves passing along videos). As such, I don’t think I experience much cost or rewards on the platform—in terms of friending/accepting friend requests, I only have two rules: I have to know you and you can’t be my student. Which is to say, I don’t think too much about it, and so I also don’t experience much cost/reward. I know many people who use the platform much more actively and just as many who use it less actively, and I think that activeness directly correlates to cost/reward. Another platform that I think has much more explicit and universal costs and rewards is LinkedIn. I’m horrible with LinkedIn, but it’s the only social media platform that I’ve felt genuinely obligated to join. Although it hasn’t gotten me a job (yet), it seems like LinkedIn has more real-world consequence—the number of connections has employment rewards. Of course, this difference pushes LinkedIn a little outside the group of websites we think of immediately as social media networks. Nonetheless, I think it’s cost/reward system, which is more explicit, has less explicit parallels on things like Facebook.
ReplyDeleteHey guys! I loved the format of your post! it's really cool! Also, it is interesting to note the isolation that social media is causing. It can be very easy to get lost in the world of instagram and facebook and whatnot. However, I also see facebook as a platform with opportunities. Apart from fols eho use the platform fpr constant validation, there are moments when facebook has been incredibly useful to me. For example, I was very concerned for a friend's safety during the North Carolina storm and facebook allows users to mark themselves safe and she did! It was one of those moments I was grateful for the platform.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think the platform has enough flexibility that it can be anythuing the user needs it to be. According to me, I think that is why so many people can get lost in it. It can be a place for making friends, it can be a place for staying connected with current events or ot can be a place where you can just watch endless cat videos. The aimlessness of most social media users is what can be really daunting.
According to me, social media gives you what you put into it. It has the flexibility and the ability to be the most useful tool as well as a death sentence.
Reshma, thank you about our format! It was a bit challenging at first, but then again I guess all networking is and can be challenging as well.
DeleteTo get to your point about how social media is a platform for flexibility, I completely agree. However, I find it is so difficult to find a way to teach students about the negative consequences of being sucked into these virtual realities, especially when it can do the same thing to any one of us. Perhaps what we can start doing is to teach how and what social media is, what it was meant to do, and how advertising companies and corporations have made it a means to infiltrate the individuals time and space by flooding them with advertisements and suggestions the longer a person scrolls. In this way it is a capitalistic scheme and may be a good way to get students to put down their devices. But who knows? The lure of getting lost in one's technological use is a powerful one.
OK I'm going to be real, I found Turkle's article to be incredibly grating and IMHO, super dramatic. In terms of the instagram video/social media use and your questions, Amanda, "Why is technology use so seductive that it is able to meet our human vulnerabilities? How can we be hiding in plain sight by using technology?" I wonder if we actually ARE hiding in plain sight with technology? If every single person is using Instagram like this, as the video implies, don't we all know that underneath all of this it's a performance? And how is this performance particularly different from what we wear or try to portray in our IRL appearance?
ReplyDeleteI think there is a danger in us comparing ourselves to others more effectively and constantly via social media. But I don't think Turkle's attitude is helpful for us to adopt as teachers -- technology and social media aren't going to move backwards, so how do we help it move forwards in healthy ways? How do we incorporate discussions of digital writing in ways that will help guide the younger generations without judging them? I'm wondering if we can talk about instagram captions as a genre, and what kind of discussions can be had about fiction/nonfiction, and where social media writing falls.
Molly, I had a difficult time myself with it because a part of me kept wondering, "okay... I get robots together with humans is quite the topic, but what on earth does this have to do with networking?" I did find I liked her approach a bit more than Kim's article, which to me felt like she was standing on a soapbox herself, speaking about the terrible things that Twitter can do.
DeleteAnd I think that, speaking of your point about how we can move forward and teach the positive elements of technology to our students, one step may be taking a full step back and reminding students that it is a platform to be used sparingly. When you mentioned the point about how using technology use is life a performance, I wondered if having students dress up in costumes and made to portray a new person would help them understand the understanding of how they use social media sites to how they should use social media sites.
And we definitely can talk about them! I have always been fascinated by the hashtag phenomenon, which still seems to dominate many Instagram captions.
I wanted to center my response around connecting these ideas to the classroom and how there are front stage and backstage versions of social networking at work with students, and things that occur unbeknownst to the teacher / instructor.
ReplyDeleteMy sister, who's a junior in high school, shared that while her teacher was lecturing, she and her friends were using a chatroom to discuss what was going on in the lecture. No, I don't condone this sort of behavior in a high school classroom, but this does have it's benefits.
It can be hard to juggle all the various voices in a high school class room. Students are often still maturing, may want to shout out answers or have their opinion be heard. In this instance, the teacher could still lecture, but various students could silently react and comment without taking away from the lecture. These students grew up using technology at a younger age than I did, so they have the multitasking skills to do this. Instead of hiding behind social media, as you both discuss, they are using it as a tool for constructive networking.
This would be an example of backstage networking because there's the curtain of the internet separating the students from the teacher. A front stage, and probably more acceptable version would be if the teacher facilitated these live reactions. Similar to adding the genius annotations in class a few weeks back, a teacher could have students comment back and forth during class and be a sort of moderator. Sometimes students can be nervous to speak up, but this could help have them be heard with the comfort of typing their thoughts and editing as they go.
Now that we communicate from home, or wherever we are, via a screen, there's an illusion of safety, especially for people who suffer from social anxiety disorder. This veil makes a person feel confident enough to say things they might think twice about saying in person for fear of being intrusive. A big part of communication is body language and facial expressions. In normal conversation, a person can pick up social cues from the recipient of the conversation and might hold back on saying certain things. Online, this doesn't happen. This is why there are so many online fights and debates that get taken to entirely unhealthy, abusive levels. There are no immediate consequences for one's behavior when they are alone in a room. In this sense, I think people do feel less intrusive on social media. I think most people think they have an intrinsic right to give their opinion without much thought because that's just how it works. People just dump opinion after opinion online.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, when the dynamics shift and a person is face to face with someone, there are social pressures to act a certain way. That's why it would feel intrusive to knock on a door in real life as opposed to messaging someone on messenger. The idea is that you are not immediately barging into someone's space because they can check your message whenever they want. This isn't true with physical interaction. The environments are completely different, therefore the behavior and expectations of communication are different.
I agree with Molly both here and in regard to her annotation on “longing” in the Rosen article. How are Rosen and Turkle’s views any different from the tech skeptics we were reading early on in this class. Yes we should have a healthy amount of skepticism when it comes to adopting new media into our lives, but these slippery slope arguments irk me. I think it’s both pretty presumptuous and pessimistic to make such a jump to the conclusion that longing no longer exists because of the instant gratification of social media. Of course changes such as these have emotional and psychological effects because they involve new ways of thinking, but I don’t think they’re taking away our humanity.
ReplyDeleteTo the video, yes, public social media posting is performance, but probably not to that extreme. Also, people have always lied about their lives, even befor the advent of social media, maybe just not to such a wide audience. And, again, I think it’s a pretty pessimistic way to view social media posting, that we’re all just sad and alone. Yes, it’s performative, but I most of my posts are not just total setups. I also don’t think its as public as these authors are leading readers to think. Communication on these apps is not always public. They used to be in their early iterations, but with their direct messaging capabilities these days, a lot of communication happens privately. I certainly do not post all of my communications publicly.
But, I still think it’s worth questioning the economic ramifications of these programs, as we do agree to allow them to profit off of our information, which I think is pretty problematic.
That video is a good example of Instagram at its most performative and fake. For sure it's a real thing, and we all know people who use social media like this, but I have to echo the responses on this post (Molly, Maddie) and the Rosen article that point out that this is nothing new. Think of those holiday cards/letters that came with a photo every year, full of braggy updates about children and jobs. While I think we're all beginning to understand how social media can exacerbate some anxiety and self-image issues, I think it's useful to identify what's useful about social media. Like Reshma mentioned, there are new opportunities here. Not everyone who posts an instagram post with a hashtag is a fake person desperate for followers - I have a separate Instagram account for my comics, and I've met lots of local comics artists through posting and hashtagging my drawings. I use these tools to make real connections that would have been more difficult 10 or 15 years ago, and I think lots of other people are too.
ReplyDeleteI share this hesitation to embrace all new media - we are absolutely being exploited by money-making corporations here - but I think that focusing on how we can use these tools in a subversive way, to meet our own needs, is more interesting to think about in terms of teaching.
I will also mirror the comments on the awesomeness of the conversational format. It's great and works super well for this topic.
ReplyDeleteI certainly agree that a lot of what we see on social media is a performative act. The effort, and edits, and the changes that can go into the crafting of a single status or photo caption speaks to this. We are consciously doing something very different than the normative form of storytelling in person. Even in private conversations using digital platforms we do this to an extent. I think many people have an online personality that differs from their own personality if even in only subtle ways. I always like the example of breaking up with someone over text. Whether or not this is okay or should be done is obviously circumstantial but I think it can be agreed on that the reason people are drawn to this option is that it is easier. We can fall back into that "online persona". It is much easier to be cruel via screen than it is to be cruel to somebody face to face. But it goes both ways. In person we often say things quickly, blurt out things we might not mean or consider carefully. Because of this, I do question the criticism of social media and online networking as too "immediate". It certainly can be, but it can also allow for careful reflection and consideration of what one wants to say. Is this in some ways performative? It certainly can be. But it can also helps us to express ourselves in a way that we might not have the ability to in a face to face (immediate) conversation. In this way, it can be somewhat more "real".
As someone who was an online gamer even before social media became ubiquitous I have to say I never really experienced the feeling of loneliness online. I have friendships that were formed over textual communication in the discourse community of the game world. Did some of these relationships fall apart when we moved on to a new game or platform? Of course. But some last to this day and have altered and changed as we have grown up, much like a "real" friendship. Just like in person, online we choose what to share and what not to share and whom to share it with. I don't see it as fundamentally different overall.
I really liked how this blog post was written because as you said, Amanda, you two are in different cities, getting this work done. There is no face-to-face interaction and the process might be slowed because you might not be working at the same time. However, as Ryan stated, you are still networking. You are still contributing to each other's comments, having a conversation, and transferring information.
ReplyDeleteI also think that with networking, there is that instant gratification that happens. With the video, all of these people are projecting what they wanted everyone else to see, which caused this chain reaction. The only thing is that what they are projecting isn't real. They want to make themselves better without all the work. They only want the opinions of everyone around them. I think in this sense, this is a way that makes technology so seductive. Because we know that social media allows us to hide, we can "do" all these things without doing any of the work. No one will know the truth and we get the approval of people who we don't even know.
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DeleteI am with Molly! I found both of these readings a little frustrating in their fears about technology. I don’t wish to discount their experiences with it, and I acknowledge that I have a much different relationship with technology as a young person, but I do think we reach a sort of impasse when we get caught up in conversations about changes in communication that express judgment towards newer forms. I admit that Turkle’s nanny and roommate story seems silly, but we have no idea what their relationship is like. I’m much more interested, as others above are, in how we can consider technological developments to be fruitful in the classroom (and specifically when dealing with literacy/ies).
ReplyDeleteIn related news, Twitter recently hinted that it would get rid of the like button. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said, “Right now we have a big Like button with a heart on it and we’re incentivizing people to want [the number of likes] to go up. Is that the right thing? Versus contributing to the public conversation or a healthy conversation? How do we [incentivize] healthy conversation?” (Copied from https://www.vox.com/2018/10/29/18037880/twitter-may-remove-like-button ). Apparently, the company wants to encourage discussion rather than simple “likes” (which, in some cases, seems like a nightmare). Consider, for example, conversations by communities facing or dealing with trauma (as discussed in “The Rules of Twitter”). Without a like button, how do we show support to victims without intervening in their conversation? In this sense, I think the value of likes shouldn’t be downplayed. But even outside of this context I am all here for the like button--especially when it comes to my friends' posts on Instagram, or what have you.
Great post! What I am really confused about in both the Turkle and Rosen readings is this notion of an inherent lack of autonomy once we have entered into a world of digitalized networking. I think it is unfair to feel that a user cannot be critical about their interactions with others on social media, text, and email. There seems to be the idea that we cannot act with restraint when communicating and managing our time presently that we were able to in the past. Yes, there is an increased influx of information in our daily lives but we can ignore and filter it as we please. This is the type of soft mastery that Turkle discusses in another of her works I have read, Life on the Screen, during my undergraduate years. Why can we not acquire a soft mastery of digital networking? A skill set that allows us to set boundaries for ourselves and others in this present time. Social media gives us tools to block or ignore other users and gives us the ability to decline "friend requests." We decide what social media tools and communities we want to be part of. Just like the written letter, we can decided whether we want to respond to an email or not. This autonomy applies to text messages as well. I understand the heightened nature of communication that these new tools allow us but I don't see us as slaves to them. I don't find them isolating either. I communicate with the same people I communicated with before just using different mediums. Additionally, I have met or reconnected with people from my past in a positive way, years after we grew up, attended college, or were members of the same social circles. Some of these reconnections have blossomed into fulfilling relationships, as we have both circled back to one another with different life experiences and from a more mature perspective.
ReplyDelete