Baym Chapter 3Notes - Summary Personal Connections in the Digital Age PDF

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Digital Media and Society: Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Nancy K. Baym)

Chapter 3 – Communication in digital spaces 

Asks what happens to communication itself (the messages people exchange) when it’s digitally mediated

MEDIATION AS IMPOVERISHMENT Reduced Social Cues 

1970s – First research comparing mediated interaction to F2F communication b/c audio and video conferencing becoming popular (when is it ok to hold a teleconference and when should employees get together F2F?) o Social Presence Theory (Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976)  how different degrees of social cues invoked differing senses of communication with an authentic person during synchronous interaction  Important thread in Internet research  Social presence – how interactants perceive one another, not a feature of a medium; perception of social media attributed to nonverbal cues enabled or disabled by mediation  Focuses on the perception of others as real and present o Media Richness Theory (Daft & Lengel, 1984)  focuses directly on the medium  Medium’s richness is its information-carrying capacity, based on four criteria: 1. The speed of feedback 2. The ability to communicate multiple cues 3. Its use of natural language rather than numbers 4. Its ability to readily convey feelings and emotions

Both theories are “cues filtered out” approaches (Walther, Anderson & Park, 1994)  this assumes that to varying degrees, mediated communication is lean and therefore impedes people’s ability to handle interpersonal dimensions of interaction   

Text only Computer-mediated interactants are unable to see, hear, and feel one another so they can’t usual cues conveyed by appearance, nonverbal signs, and features on the physical context Cues filed out studies examining how reduced cues affect social qualities of communication had several expectations: 1. Mediation would make it more difficult to maintain conversational alignment and mutual understanding; harder to coordinate messages

2. Because social identity cues would not be apparent, interactants would gain greater anonymity a. People “depersonalized”, lose their sense of self and other 3. The lack of social cues would result in contexts without social norms to guide behavior

The Example of Antagonism 

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Flaming  messages that include swearing, insults, name calling, negative affect, and typographic energy o The behavior the cues filtered out approaches predict o Flame wars Trolling  hate speech against both individuals and ethnic groups o Make a deliberately offensive or provocative online post with the aim of upsetting someone or eliciting an angry response from them Lack of social presence and accountability in a reduced-cues medium is seen by some as a platform for launching attacks o But do we overestimate the amount of flaming online?

PUTTING SOCIAL CUES INTO DIGITAL COMMUNCIATION – what people do with mediated communication; enthusiasm for digital social interaction 

Conveying nonverbal social cues when limited to textual communication: o Emoticons and emojis o Asterisks, upper-case lettering, letter and punctuation repetition (soooooo busy) o Immediacy cues – information, filled with non-standard spellings, deletions, casual and slang vocabulary, greetings, sign offs (LOL, ROFL)  Inventing new works and even dialects

DIGITAL LANGUAGE AS A MIXED MODALITY - combines elements of communication practices in embodied conversation and in writing 

Online language – blends elements of written and oral language with features that are distinctive to that medium o Context must be created through the prose

CONTEXTUAL INFLUENCES ON ONLINE COMMUNICATION Gender  

Gender influences mediated interaction just as it influences unmediated communication People perform gender through the way they communicate

Culture – includes nationality, language, race and ethnicity  

Race “routed around” online, rather than brought to the front Internet was created in the English-speaking world, not represents half of the internet’s language

SUMMARY  

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Mediated online messages are shaped by both technological and social qualities Deterministic perspective – two primary sources that influence online language use the paucity (small quantity) of social cues, or media leanness, and the potential asynchronicity of a medium People’s familiarity with the medium is an influence, as are their motivations for participating...