Monthly Archives: September 2014

Are we all narcissists online?

The following essay is a response to a question raised in a Network Media symposium earlier in the semester:

Are we all narcissists online?”

Digital Ego: Social and Legal Aspects of Virtual Identity

Image via flickr user Kevin Lim

It’s true that social media give people more control over their public ‘me’, but what does this mean for the Network Age?

Our modern online landscape, which is littered with social networks, is the terrain where technological revolutions that allow the possibility of radically new forms of self are coming into being. We now have endless opportunities for expression and rejection of accepted norms, meaning that issues like power, control, privacy, democratisation, equality and freedom introduce themselves as updated and urgent problems.

Self image is becoming an obsession of the ‘plugged-in’ generation. Social media are used to “control others perceptions of [ourselves]” (Panek et al, 2013). The Western world glamourises being individual and successful, which prompts a pressure to convey this to others in an overt way via our online lives. Social media allow us the opportunity to edit what we present to our networks, letting us crop and change our image to portray it in any manner we wish.

The ease of connection through new forms of technology (such as smartphones and tablets) means that we are beginning to communicate not through conversation, but through the click of a button. We perceive this as ‘efficient friend management’. However, Dunbar’s Number tells us that the limit to how many comfortable social relationships a person can handle at any one time is merely 150 (Dunbar, 2010).  We are sacrificing the quality of our friends for the quantity. Instead of building up friendships, we find ourselves building up our ‘personal profiles’ which can dictate how we feel in the real world.

Social media assures us that we will always be heard, and that we will never be alone. However, this effectively leads to a mass of humans being “alone together” in the digital sphere (Turkle, 2011).

Cooley’s theory of the Looking Glass Self (1902) offers us a way of understanding this new phenomenon of our public ‘me’s, over 100 years later from his hypothesis of ‘I am who I think you think I am’. In an online context, this means that users often curate their online personas to reflect how they imagine their peers to view them.

Bourdieu’s notion of the forms of capital (1986) also provides an interesting perspective for viewing the activity of the digital age. Online profiles can become mouthpieces for displaying our cultural, financial and social capital, which culminate to determine how much power we assert. Contemporary sociologists are beginning to thinking about a new emerging form of capital: digital capital.

Celebrity social media use is now a necessary and fundamental aspect of public life. Famous figures now amass vast number of followers, which allows them to communicate and connect with their fans on the same level using the same language and conventions on the same platforms. This fuels a sense of interconnectedness and reduces the top-down nature of Web 1.0.

The world of social media has some interesting implications when considered in conjunction with Habermas’ public sphere (1964). The public sphere is defined as a conceptual space in society where all citizens can assemble to discuss public opinion. For hundreds of years, this was how society functioned and allowed the process of democracy to take place. However in the current Western world, democracy now happens under our fingertips as soon as we log on to social media. Instantly, we can contribute to public debate, comment on our fellow citizens’ opinions and assemble in an alternative kind of ‘public sphere’. So this begs the question – where does our digital realm belong in the public sphere? Is it its own public sphere? Do we have a public sphere 2.0? Are they the same thing?

The dominant culture of social media is creating an online language of the connected, making digital literacy imperative to navigate the online world. This is leading to a mega-sub-culture for the ‘plugged-in masses’, with its own vocabulary and set of social norms and rule.

Instagram is another example of our image-driven, ‘faked experiences’ online lifestyles. These attractively edited images play a central role in our perception of our friends. Krasnova (2013) speaks of how this has an malicious impact on human feelings of envy and jealousy, which acts as a threat to users’ life satisfaction overall. She explains the “envy spiral”, saying “self-promotion triggers more self-promotion, and the world on social media gets further and further from reality.”

There are inherent issues of privacy, access, infrastructure and online inequality (as with all discussions surrounding the digital network), however we do know that social media offer drastically new ways to present ideas of ourselves. Sherry Turkle sums it up perfectly in saying that “our little devices are so psychologically powerful that they don’t only change what we do, they change who we are” (2012).

List of References

Bourdieu, P. (1986) ‘The forms of capital’ in Richardson, J. (ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, New York: Greenwood.

Cooley, C. (1902) Human Nature and the Social Order, New York: Scribner’s.

Dunbar, R. (2010) ‘You’ve got to have (150) friends’, The New York Times,  December 26, p.15.

Habermas, J. (2009) ‘The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964)’, Media and Cultural Studies Keywords, Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.

Krasnova, H. (2013) ‘Envy on Facebook: A Hidden Threat to Users’ Life Satisfaction?’, 11th International conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik, Germany

Panek, E., Nardis, Y. & Konrath, S. (2013) ‘Mirror or Megaphone?: How relationships between narcissism and social networking sit use differ on Facebook and Twitter’, Computers in Human Behaviour, vol. 29, no. 5, pp.2004-2012.

Turkle, S. (2011) Alone Together, New York: Basic Books.

Turkle, S. (2012) Connected, but alone?, Ted Talks, available at: http://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together.html. Accessed 9 November 2013.

Symposium 07: Authorial intentions

This week’s symposium started out with the focus on intent.

What role does the authorial integrity of intent play? Can the content of intent be guaranteed? If the aforementioned context is supplied, can it survive?

As Adrian pointed out, the answer to most of the above is no.

Intent is problematic. 

Adrian urges us that one of the strongest skills we could learn is how to read against the intent of an author.

We then discussed semiotics, and the Cartesian separation between the signifier (body) and the signified (what it means; the rational mind). Adrian called this “the delirium of semiotics” which I don’t quite yet understand. I think it’s along the lines of meaning we are so obsessed with that something means (thinking that only that mind matters), that we almost forget about the substance (the body) itself.

Another really interesting takeaway following this was that “words can only mean by difference”. As in, something can only mean something not by what it is, but what it is not. A word only gets its meaning by virtue of the relations to other words that could have been there. The actual word is significant because you chose to use it instead of something else. Thus, the meaning never arrives.

We were encouraged to think about artefacts as a person, with a distinct personality. This is what’s interesting, and what talks to you. Not the author.
Authors/makers tend to give up a lot of their control when they move into a multilinear electronic space. However, they also gain a lot. They gain a different sort of control, and become a bit more like a choreography rather than a dictator. They can try to predict what the user will do and frame their content around this, but ultimately it is in the users’ hands.
In summation, Adrian claims it is a condition of language that you cannot guarantee the intent of your language or the arrival of your message. As media-makers, we should be prepared for this.

Readings 05: Landow

Reading 05.1

This week’s readings is a series of extracts from Landow’s book Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. 

Landow explains that hypertextuality occurs within blogs in two main ways: firstly by “[linking] chronologically distant individual entries to each other” to create context, and secondly by the comment function.

My key takeaways from the Landow reading is all about the agency of ‘readers’ in hypertext systems. They are no longer just passive consumers, but now serve dual purpose as both readers and authors themselves.

Landow also talks about the difference between blogs and personal diaries – a comparison which I find irrelevant. As Adrian has reminded us in the lectures, all our notions of the public and private are currently being rewritten by us, and the platforms we are using. I think blogs are best used when appropriated by the user in exactly the way they want. For example, a beauty blogger who posts product reviews and so on is using the blog as a platform which expresses their intentions best. Similarly, an academic with a blog can use it to collate their research and to postulate further discussions with their peers. One must (obviously) be wary of privacy online, and abandon our assumptions that anything online isn’t 100% public. But if a user wanted to utilise their blog in exactly the same way as they would use a personal diary, good on them in my opinion! Use away. You do you, and I’ll do me.

I liked the section of Landow’s chapter which talked over the role of beginnings and endings in hypertext systems. One side of the argument says that we can assume hypertext isn’t completely absent of linearity and sequence, and instead “possesses multiple sequences” (p.110). Opponents say that every hypertext system has to have a fixed entry point which you arrive at before the system of links begin. 

Landow draws attention to an interesting point which Ong makes in Orality and Literacy, that books, unlike their authors, cannot really be challenged:

The author might be challenged if only he or she could be reached…There is no way to refute a text. After absolutely total and devastating refutation, it says exactly the same thing as before… A text stating that the whole world knows is false will state falsehood forever, so long as the text exists.” (p.79)

However, I think this is quite different in online networks. Websites and blogs are so easily edited and republished, seemingly erasing any past information which has been put out there. Yes, the previous records are still stored somewhere in cyberspace, but I certainly don’t know where! The transient nature of online is something I certainly take for granted. I think it’s been built into my generation of ‘digital natives’ to expect this kind of change so frequently, that acceptance and adjustment is the only way to survive. Facebook is a perfect example of a platform which constantly reinvents itself (aesthetically), which proves my above point.

What does this mean for hypertext? Will linkages online get lost? Will we potentially keep running into ‘Page Not Found’ error messages as the online web continues to shape shift and change? What will happen to whole systems when the nodes that keep the links alive also disappear?