New practices do not so much flow directly from technologies that inspire them as they are improvised out of old practices that no longer work in new settings.
The great linguist Edward Sapir once pointed out that speech “seems as natural to man as walking” (Reference Sapir1921, p. 3). But “eliminate society,” Sapir went on, “and there is every reason to believe that [a person] will learn to walk, if, indeed, he survives at all. But it is just as certain that he will never learn to talk” (p. 4). It is the social nature of language, Sapir argued, that differentiates language from biomechanical functions like walking and explains why language varies across social groups “as truly as do the religions, the beliefs, the customs, and the arts of different peoples” (p. 4).
The same might be said of technologies. Any given technological artifact developed by one social group may well take on new meanings and uses when it is appropriated by another social group. Indeed, the meaning of any technology is derived not so much from its material make-up as from its social and symbolic uses. By the same token, new technologies can and do inspire new configurations of sociality, new ways of constructing identities, and new frames for making sense of the world.
Rather than viewing the technical and the social as mutually exclusive domains, then, we need to understand technology as part of what constitutes the social, and the social as part of what constitutes technology. One contemporary example is the use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter to maintain social connections not only actively through direct interpersonal exchange, but also passively through ‘status updates,’ ‘posts,’ and ‘tweets’ that leave textual traces of one's activities, location, thoughts, and moods on a centralized server, accessible to ‘friends’ or ‘followers.’ These are the latest instantiation of the ancient human impulse to leave traces of oneself as one moves from place to place (think of pioneers carving their names in rocks along the trails as they headed west across North America, or guests leaving comments in registers in lodges, or students signing one another's yearbooks). But social media technology puts a new spin on trace-leaving by simultaneously reducing the traces (to transitory images on a screen) and augmenting them (by distributing them through personal networks), which creates a new relation among the trace, the trace-sender, and the trace-viewer. In this way, a new technology has redesigned a long-standing form of sociality. By the same token, how people understand what Facebook and Twitter ‘are’ is not defined by the facts of their technical infrastructure, but rather by how those technologies get used. For example, although Facebook and Twitter are not specifically designed for it, people use these and other forms of social media to organize activities, to do research, to arrange when and where and how to communicate more fully in another medium, even to organize mass popular movements, as in the Arab Spring of 2011.Footnote 1
As Carolyn Marvin suggests in the epigraph to this chapter, new practices do not come packaged with new technologies. Rather, they evolve from existing practices as an adaptive response to new tools, needs, and conditions. In this chapter we will focus on the social construction and appropriation of communication technologies, seeing how social resources such as language and other semiotic systems, cultural conventions, genres, ideologies, and cultural attitudes all affect the ways in which technologies are taken up and how meanings are designed in various forms of communication.
Culture and technology
Technologies are material, but they are also deeply cultural. They inevitably reflect and embody certain values, certain understandings of the world, and certain intended purposes. Consider, for example, how car door locks work on American vehicles. If you unlock the driver-side door, only that door unlocks. If, however, you unlock the passenger-side door, all of the other doors unlock simultaneously. The design assumption is that if you are unlocking the driver door, you may be alone, and you don't want a hoodlum hiding on the other side of your car to be able to enter your car. However, if you are unlocking the passenger-side door the assumption is that you are not alone, so all the doors unlock as a convenience for your presumed passengers. In other words, the technology is socially programmed to operate differently in different user circumstances that are envisioned schematically by designers.
We can see values and assumptions built into personal computers and smartphones as well. First, they are ‘personal’ devices in that they are highly customizable by the individual user, from aesthetic aspects (such as desktop images and screen savers) to functional aspects (such as our particular software choices and the personal content we create, store, and manipulate) to security-related aspects (such as personal access codes, firewalls, and virus protection). Few other forms of technology are so extensively configurable by their owners. We take this individual customization as ‘natural,’ but there's nothing natural (and everything cultural) about it. Post-industrial culture is not about mass standardization but rather individual customization and this shift is hardwired into the very structure and distribution pathways of new media (Manovich, Reference Manovich2001).Footnote 2 And of course, both standardization and customization are surface manifestations of an underlying constant – the corporate value of selling more goods.
Second, computers show certain ‘Western’ biases. For example, even though computers allow writing in all Unicode-encoded scripts via software workarounds, they come standard with ASCII keyboards that lend themselves most easily to Roman alphabetic writing.Footnote 3 Computers also come standard with one keyboard and one monitor, implying that they are intended to be used by single individuals. But in many non-Western contexts the ‘computer user’ is often a collective, involving the household and extended family (Bell, Blythe, & Sengers, Reference Bell, Blythe and Sengers2005). In one study, Japanese engineers reported that they rarely if ever wrote texts in isolation and avoided using computers set up for just one user (Haas, Reference Haas1996, p. 228).
Technological artifacts can be viewed as ‘texts’ to be read and interpreted in potentially multiple ways. Despite whatever purpose a technological artifact was originally designed to fulfill, people will turn it into what serves their interests and needs. In the realm of communication, the telephone is a good example of a socially shaped technology.
The telephone: connectedness at a distance
Since its early use in the late nineteenth century, the telephone has been adapted to people's needs and purposes in ways that diverged considerably from the intentions of its designers and marketers.
Before the telephone, one's choices for getting a message to someone included sending a letter through the postal service, hiring a messenger, making a trip to the telegraph office (if there was one nearby), or going in person to the addressee's office or residence. In other words, communication involved transportation. The telephone changed that, making it possible to speak directly with people at a distance without leaving one's home or office. This altered people's perception of space and time; for the first time in human history one could ‘be’ in two places at once. That change also meant that new communicative behavior and a new communicative culture would inevitably develop.
Conventions for beginning and closing conversations had to be established. Alexander Graham Bell had proposed ‘Ahoy’ as a greeting, but ‘Hello’ prevailed. With no visual contact between parties, callers needed to identify themselves verbally, and it was incumbent on them to announce the reason for their call. The timing of utterances became much more important on the telephone. Turn-taking had to be negotiated without visual cues, and overlapping talk led to pauses as people attempted to repair the conversation. Silences were much more awkward than in face-to-face conversation, as there was nothing but speech to maintain personal contact. Articulation and speaking volume often needed to be enhanced, and metacommunicative language (Can you hear me? Can you speak up?) took on new importance. Messages needed to be relayed when the desired party was not available, and apologies needed to be made when a call was put through at an importune moment or to the wrong party all together. Not surprisingly, some people were more adept than others at using these conventions – something that has not changed to this day.
Early uses of the telephone differed by gender. The first private lines connected businessmen's residences with their offices, and in its early years, the telephone was marketed as a business tool. For women, it was marketed as a tool for managing the household (such as ordering meat and groceries). As Frissen (Reference Frissen, Grint and Gill1995) points out, however, there was a considerable gap between the intentions of the phone company and people's (and particularly women's) actual uses of the phone. Women had their own ideas about the usefulness of the telephone as a way of connecting socially with others at a distance – ‘visiting’ without physical presence. Women used the telephone for conversations with friends and relatives, for making social arrangements, and for community activities. Because telephone connections were generally shared multiparty lines, however, calls had to be kept short so as not to tie up the line. The telephone companies set out guidelines recommending that the telephone be reserved for business or housekeeping matters during the day, with ‘chatting’ or ‘visiting’ restricted to the evening hours (ibid., p. 84).
As telephones were installed in more homes, however, their importance as a technology of sociability increased, and the telephone companies came to realize that social connectivity was a marketable feature of telephone use. AT&T advertised the telephone as a “highway to the wide world” and a means to fostering a “close-knit, personalized society” (Fischer, Reference Fischer1992, p. 223). By 1912, advertisements were praising the special value of socializing by telephone: “How pleasant it is to make a telephone visit to relatives or friends. The distance only adds enchantment to your chat” (Umble, Reference Umble, Gitelman and Pingree2003, p. 144). Social uses were gradually redefining the technology.
In Europe, aristocrats used the telephone for entertainment purposes. In Paris, the French president enjoyed ‘telephonic’ soirées at the Opéra, the Théâtre Français, and the Odéon Theater from the comfort of the Elysée Palace. The king and queen of Portugal were able to listen to the premier of the new Lisbon opera. The Belgian minister of railways, posts and telegraphs listened to live performances of the opera in Antwerp, and affluent Londoners (including the queen) subscribed to telephone connections to their favorite entertainments (Marvin, Reference Marvin1988, p. 210). In Halifax, England, the telephone was also used to transmit church services to invalids (Fairbanks, Reference Fairbanks1910). Again, these were socially adapted uses of the telephone, not ones foreseen during the telephone's invention.Footnote 4
The telephone had a dark side as well, however. It provided a pathway for the outside world to enter directly into the household. Strangers had free access to the family; women could talk with men they didn't know; nosy operators and neighbors sharing the same line could listen in on any given conversation. Marvin (Reference Marvin1988) describes how the familiar societal filters that people had traditionally relied on were no longer operative in this new medium of communication:
Asymmetries of dress, manner, and class that identified outsiders and were immediately obvious in face-to-face exchange were disturbingly invisible by telephone and telegraph, and therefore problematic and dangerous. Reliable cues for anchoring others to a social framework where familiar rules of transaction were organized around the relative status of the participants were subject to the tricks of concealment that new media made possible. Lower classes could crash barriers otherwise closed to them, and privileged classes could go slumming unobserved.
The telephone's ‘tricks of concealment’ thus anticipated very similar concerns related to online identity issues today. One difference, however, is that text-based internet environments extend the concealment even further by potentially masking signs of gender, age, and language heritage that are conveyed on the telephone by voice quality and accent.
Not surprisingly, these fears gave rise to social resistance to the telephone in certain quarters. Umble (Reference Umble, Gitelman and Pingree2003) describes how the Amish community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, was torn by conflicting views of the telephone in the early twentieth century. Whereas some saw it as a way of extending religious services to the infirm, others saw the telephone as a violation of sacred space by removing communication from its natural face-to-face context and by allowing communication with non-believers. The Amish feared that telephone ownership would engender individuality and pride rather than humility and commitment to community life. Umble reports that in some Midwestern congregations, churchgoers who owned telephones were not allowed to take communion.
To this day, the Amish reject the installation of phones in their homes, although they do not reject their use outside the home. Phone shacks located at the end of lanes are shared by Amish families, and businesses regularly use telephones. Mobile phones pose a new challenge to Amish traditions, not only because they are carried on one's person but also because they provide ready access to the Internet. Although it is perhaps an extreme case, the selective adoption of the telephone by the Amish illustrates how practices associated with technologies of communication are shaped by social needs and values.
A modern version of this kind of resistance to the integration of technology in the home can be found in the work of anthropologist Genevieve Bell, who has studied how people use technology in different cultures. In one study involving 100 households in India, China, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Korea, and Australia, Bell found that technology was not always welcomed into the home for cultural – and often religious – reasons. Bell reports that for some groups, telecommunication technologies are sites of anxiety, associated with increased divorce rates, teen suicides, political unrest, government overthrows, and personal vulnerability to theft or assault (Bell, Reference Bell2006).
What is clear is that the telephone has been socially shaped into much more than a person-to-person communication device. Today the telephone is used for telemarketing, telecommuting, shopping, banking, polling, information services, political campaign advertising, advice lines, erotic lines, dating lines, technical support lines, horoscope and psychic hotlines, and more. Smartphones connect us to the Internet, allowing us to send text messages and tweets, read our email, make travel reservations, watch movies, listen to music, or track the whereabouts of our children.Footnote 5 The incorporation of cameras in mobile phones allows us to take photos or videos and distribute them immediately. In Japan, phones have even become a medium for writing best-selling novels (Onishi, Reference Onishi2008).
All these current uses far outstrip the telephone's original intended uses, and yet the accumulation of past practices have also been preserved – at least in function, if not always in form. As further technological changes come along (such as today's Skype and other videoconferencing applications, discussed in Chapter 8), there is every reason to believe that past practices will coexist with new uses of telecommunications technology and that these social practices will both shape and be shaped by those subsequent technologies.
Social networking: the textualization of friendship
Social networking is one of the most widespread social uses of technology at the present time.Footnote 6 It is all about making connections with other people – people you know, people you used to know but have lost contact with, and people you don't yet know, but with whom you are likely to share common interests or common friends. Online social networks often overlap with face-to-face communities, and, just like face-to-face communities, members share information and provide mutual support, whether it's a matter of job hunting, getting advice, announcing an event, pursuing a hobby, or just wanting to chat – all through writing and images.
Some of the most widely used social networking sites are Facebook, Twitter, Qzone, MySpace, Google+, RenRen, Friendster, LinkedIn, Cyworld, Tagged, Hi5, MyYearbook, and Bebo. As of this writing, Facebook is the largest social network site, with over 1.28 billion active users worldwide, over half of whom log on to Facebook in any given day. According to the company, 81 percent of Facebook users live outside the United States, and more than a billion users access Facebook through their mobile devices.
The stated purpose of Facebook is to keep up with friends, to share photos, links, and videos with them, and to learn more about the people one meets. As the website puts it, “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Of course, the real purpose of Facebook is to make money for Facebook stockholders by monetizing social communication.Footnote 7 Like other Web 2.0 applications, its business strategy is to get its more than one billion users to produce all the content. What the company produces is a structured platform where those users can create, display, share, view, and comment on their content. Most of these data can then be shared with advertisers in aggregate form and used to target marketing directly at likely shoppers for services or products. For advertisers, this is nirvana: where else can you get the attention of one-seventh of the world's population?
Social networking in itself is of course nothing new – nor is the idea that it might be a questionable use of people's time. European coffeehouses of the 1660s, for example, were sometimes criticized for distracting people from their work or studies, and yet they proved to be breeding grounds for important innovative ideas (Standage, Reference Standage2013), just as some studies today suggest that technology-mediated social networking may be productive in both work and education.Footnote 8 What is new is the commodification of social networking by companies, making it a marketable product.
It did not start out that way. Social networking sites originated with online communities such as the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), which was founded in 1985 by Stewart Brand, editor of The Whole Earth Catalog, and Larry Brilliant, a physician, professor, and philanthropist, long before the World Wide Web was publicly accessible. The idea was to bring into dialog the writers and readers of the Whole Earth Review (an offshoot of the Catalog) to create a community that quickly grew to become highly influential (members founded, among other things, Craig's List and the Electronic Frontier Foundation). In the 1990s, a number of friend-linking sites developed, the best known being sixdegrees.com, which was designed around the idea of ‘six degrees of separation’ (i.e., that any individual is separated from any other individual in the world by at most six intermediate acquaintances). It was at this point that the advertising revenue model was established. The model did not sustain sixdegrees.com, but did allow many of its successor chain-of-friends sites to flourish.
Let's be friends
One important aspect of social network sites is their appropriation of the word ‘friend.’ On Facebook or MySpace, for example, members of one's social network are called ‘friends.’ I sometimes get email messages from people I hardly know (and sometimes people I don't know at all) inviting me to ‘friend’ them (not the old fashioned verb ‘to befriend’). This is an artifact of the technological infrastructure of social networking sites, which allows users to browse friends’ friend lists and to ‘add’ people they think would be good to have on their own network for one reason or another.Footnote 9 To complete the process, permission must be granted by the person to be added. On Facebook the standard message goes like this: “So and so added you as a friend on Facebook. We need to confirm that you know so and so in order for you to be friends on Facebook.”Footnote 10 Each decision to friend someone (or not) can have implications for one's off-screen social life. For instance, it can be awkward when students send friend requests to their teachers – teachers don't want to be rude by turning down their request, but they also don't want to be privy to their students’ personal lives, much less create the impression that certain students are favored over others.
The original intention of social networking sites may have been to allow people to keep up with ‘real’ friends online. But early on, users went beyond that close circle, friending people encountered at parties, casual acquaintances, and unknown people who had interesting profiles. Based on interviews and surveys of young people using social network sites, danah boyd (Reference boyd2006) identified a number of reasons why Facebook users friend a broad range of people. First, there are image-based motivations, such as looking popular or gaining prestige through association with people with cool profiles. Second, there are face-saving reasons (for instance, the above mentioned awkwardness of turning down a friend request from someone you know). Third, there are practical, technology-based reasons having to do with privacy settings – one has to friend someone in order to see their profiles, bulletins, or blogs, and the more friends one collects, the more opportunities one has to view these. So, the norms for friending partly follow mainstream social norms and are partly influenced by the design features and technical limitations of online social network environments.
People materialize their online network identity by textualizing their friendships. They do this by creating friend lists, a textual profile and updating their textualized status, and by posting texts that are viewed not only by their direct addressee but also by ‘onlookers’ within their social network. Online, one is what one displays in terms of friend list, profile, current status, posts, and responses to one's posts.
In early online communities, such as chatrooms, maillists, and Usenet groups, context and group identity were defined in terms of common interests or activities. According to boyd, in sites like Facebook and MySpace, context and identity are now defined by friend lists: people choose people first, interests second. And their choice of people is tied to the image that they want to project of themselves and the audience they seek to address through their online profiles, comments, and blog posts. For boyd, then, context is ‘egocentric’ in the sense that information is shared through personal affiliations rather than interest-based affiliations (boyd, Reference boyd2006). If that is the case, it raises the question of what ‘personal affiliations’ really are. If I am not interested in befriending you because you and I share interests, then what can I know about you, and why would I bother? If affiliations are no more than notches on a totem, it would seem that both ‘frienders’ and ‘friendees’ are being duped.
Some people collect friends like trading cards, with lists in the thousands. Even college admissions officers are getting inundated with friend requests from student applicants who hope to gain an edge. Clearly, the meaning of ‘friend’ in online social network contexts is much more inclusive than in face-to-face contexts, and does not necessarily imply either mutual trust or fondness. That everyone on one's network is a ‘friend’ is only because the computer programmers who designed Facebook didn't provide any more nuanced alternatives.Footnote 11 One can only wonder whether Facebook semantics will spread to the offline world and young people growing up with Facebook will have a different understanding of what a ‘friend’ is compared to pre-Facebook generations.
In any event, the English language is well matched to Facebook, since it gives comparatively wide latitude to the meaning of friend. By contrast, French ami generally implies a stronger and more enduring tie than is necessarily found in an American friend, and it contrasts with un/une camarade, with whom one might hang out and have fun, and une connaissance, a mere acquaintance. With the translation of Facebook ‘friend’ into ‘ami’ who knows how the semantic fields might eventually realign. For the moment, the French version of Facebook deals with this difference by putting ‘ami’ in quotes and stipulating the following definition:
Sur Facebook, vos « amis » sont les connaissances, les amis et les membres de votre famille avec qui vous communiquez déjà dans la vie.
(On Facebook, your ‘friends’ are acquaintances, friends, and family members you already communicate with in day-to-day life.)
The appropriation of the word ‘friend’ is not innocent or playful. It is deeply manipulative in that it is tied to a value shift. Prior to the social networking technologies of today, we used other means to build networks of friends and colleagues, and we were satisfied with the relatively small scope of our networks. Now, more is better. There was nothing deficient, or parochial, or ineffective about the social networks of the pre-internet age. But because technology now allows us to greatly exceed them, we are told by marketers that having more ‘friends’ makes for a better life, better business, better personal esteem, and so forth. Who can argue with the value of ‘friends’? But ask young people, and many will talk about how comparing themselves to the glossy, happy, well-connected images of online ‘friends’ does nothing for their self-esteem except diminish it. Of far graver concern is cyberbullying, where networks of ‘friends’ can literally destroy people. When it comes to numbers, it may be that a few good, flesh-and-blood friends will serve far better than hundreds of minimally related strangers called ‘friends.’
A second, and related, value shift is described by sociologist Manuel Castells (Reference Castells2009), who argues that the common culture of our global network society is not based on shared values, but rather on “the sharing of the value of communication” (p. 38). He goes on to elaborate that “Global culture is a culture of communication for the sake of communication” and that what holds it together is “the common belief in the power of networking and of the synergy obtained by giving to others and receiving from others” (p. 38). On the positive side, this shift reverses people's traditional passive dependence on the media and gives them new means to effect cultural change. But it also raises the question of whether we are being led in the direction of a more shallow life, communicating a great deal more, but doing so less meaningfully.
Threat to literacy?
The overwhelming predominance of Facebook and other social networking environments in many young people's lives has also spurred debates about literacy consequences. One side of the debate views Facebook as a narcissistic and voyeuristic environment that is the literacy equivalent of junk food. As one high school student interviewed in a New York Times article put it: “Facebook is amazing because it feels like you're doing something and you're not doing anything. It's the absence of doing something, but you feel gratified anyway” (Richtel, Reference Richtel2010a, p. 20). Critics see the short bursts of texts that young people generate on Facebook as spelling the death of extended narrative and a distraction from the kinds of literacy practices that they might otherwise be engaged in (presumably reading books and newspapers, writing letters, journals, and creative pieces with extended narrative – but would they actually be doing these things?). Moreover, questions arise about how spending long hours online might affect the development of young people's ‘normal’ face-to-face social skills (Stout, Reference Stout2010). The other side of the debate highlights the benefits of frequent and personally meaningful writing and reading on young people's creativity and fluidity of expression. While narrative threads on Facebook might be fragmented and non-linear, they can frequently be collaborative and complex, and no less interesting or valid as texts.
No doubt both sides have some merit. But the terms of this debate have been limited by a fairly narrow, traditional essayist conception of literacy. What has not been widely addressed are the broader critical literacy issues related to people's ability to evaluate the discourse-shaping features of new technologies of communication, to identify the ideological (and commercial) underpinnings of those technologies, and to ‘read’ the social trends that accompany them. We have alluded to commercial underpinnings and social trends in the discussion above. Let's consider one example of the discourse-shaping features of Facebook.
One critique of Facebook (as opposed to some other sites like MySpace) is that the platform stifles people's creativity by making them conform to default designs (i.e., pre-fab formats). One example of a default design in Facebook is the user profile, which allows each member to craft a self-presentation through personal information and verbal statements, photographs, and sometimes visual design and layout.Footnote 12 And since social networking abides by the notion that you are who you know, profiles include a list of people with whom you are linked. Creating a profile is a matter of completing an online form (see Figure 3.1). The program identifies the categories of information, obliges you to share things about yourself you might not necessarily want to reveal, and may not provide you a means to everything you do want to present. A quick look at the Facebook categories in Figure 3.1 shows how biased they are toward the marketing interests that underlie the company's business model. If you don't fill in information (for example, your current status) the category of ‘current status’ will still appear and it will be blank – and the blankness will itself be a sign to be interpreted (like silence in response to a question in conversation). The upside of all this is that creating a profile is easy; anyone can do it. The downside is that personal agency is really no more than an illusion, since the resources for profile design are pre-set and relatively limited, and one's personal information is handed over to marketers (unless one goes to the trouble of fiddling with privacy settings).Footnote 13
Figure 3.1 Basic information in the Facebook profile template
So, while there is no doubt that social networking sites provide many important benefits to their users, we must also remind ourselves that they are sites that also feed on our narcissism and naivety about how our personal information is used to manipulate us as consumers and citizens. This is the kind of literacy that has not yet entered the mainstream debates and that is rarely addressed in educational programs (see Chapter 10).
Broadcasting to one another: democratic expression vs. groupthink
It might seem like sending status updates about what you are doing at any given time is a trivial time-wasting activity. But consider what happens when people do it en masse, as in the popular uprisings in the Middle East in late 2010 and early 2011. The series of events began with a spat between a permitless street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi and a policewoman in a small town in an isolated part of Tunisia. The policewoman allegedly slapped the young Bouazizi, who later set himself on fire in front of a municipal building. According to a New York Times column (R. Cohen, Reference Rosen2011) the incident was not covered by any Tunisian newspaper or TV network until Al-Jazeera was alerted through Facebook. As the events were textualized and disseminated, the narrative was embellished. The street vendor, who, it was later revealed, did not have a high-school diploma, was reported to be a university graduate unable to find work. This version of the story, which quickly circled the globe, played well to educated Tunisians frustrated by high unemployment and became the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, triggering massive popular uprisings, which were captured by mobile phones in images, videos, and verbal descriptions that rippled instantly through online social networks like Facebook and Twitter, with each new confrontation with the police fueling more protest. All this led Tunisia's President Zine el-Abedine Ben Ali to flee the country less than a month after Bouazizi's encounter with the policewoman.
Just days after the Tunisian overthrow, massive protests arose in Egypt against President Hosni Mubarak. Despite the government's attempts to block internet and mobile phone connections, social networking sites had already been instrumental in organizing the protests, and Hosni Mubarak relinquished power to the military eighteen days after the Egyptian protests began. All accounts of the revolution stressed the importance of social media, the ‘bottom-up’ and distributed nature of the movement.Footnote 14 As Egyptians put it, “Nasser was killed by poison, Sadat by a bullet and Mubarak by Facebook” (Slackman, Reference Slackman2011).
Libya, Bahrain, Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, Albania, Syria, Lebanon all followed suit in civil unrest. Although these uprisings in the Middle East are frequently dubbed ‘Facebook revolutions,’ political scientist Steven Fish argues that Al Jazeera was really far more important for breaking the lock of government control of information and revealing government corruption over the course of many years, and that this is what provided the motivation for the masses to be willing to sacrifice their lives in protest. In Fish's analysis, what Facebook did was help organize the protests, but did not motivate them. And, in retrospect, it certainly did not ensure durable social reform in the countries concerned, where conditions have continued to degenerate.Footnote 15 Nevertheless, from a sociotechnological perspective, what is remarkable about this story is how an isolated incident in Tunisia was amplified to extraordinary proportions through textualization and recontextualization on Facebook and Twitter – very much like the butterfly effect of complex systems, whereby a small change in initial conditions at one location can set off a chain reaction that produces a major effect elsewhere.
The story also reminds us, however, that social media do not represent an advance in the direction of clarity, accuracy, and reliability in the communication of information. The circulation of rumors and misinformation that contributed to the amplification of citizen outrage was sometimes picked up by the press and further circulated, producing a groupthink dynamic. There is nothing new about the dissemination of bad information, but one wonders whether such lapses in journalistic responsibility are attributable to the general euphoria surrounding social media technology and its ability to capture ‘live’ accounts of events as they unfold, making the information seem somehow more accurate.
There is another dark side to the use of social networking for organizing social resistance. During the Iranian presidential election in June 2009, official election results indicated a landslide victory for standing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi and his followers believed these official results were fraudulent. Thousands of enraged Iranians took to the streets to protest the re-election of Ahmadinejad. The demonstrations, which represented the most significant challenge to the government's authority, were suppressed through violence and mass arrests. Although electronic communications were almost completely shut down, there was speculation that Twitter was not shut down precisely so that the government could monitor and perhaps even locate protesters (Grossman, Reference Grossman2009) or to manipulate the Twitter network to its own advantage, spreading false information about the United Nations having ‘approved’ Iran's election (Cohen, Reference Cohen2009). So, when protesters communicate on a social network, they communicate with their oppressors as well (Morozov, Reference Morozov2011; Shane, Reference Shane2011). This raises the larger question of authenticity and authorization in electronic media.
Authenticity and authorization
In most forms and uses of writing, writers are separated from their readers in both space and time. Because this separation introduces the possibility of dissimulation and deceit, the need to authenticate a writer's identity is as old as writing itself (see Chapter 5). But authentication has become especially important in the digital age, when texts can be produced by electronic authors as well as human authors, and human authors can easily assume multiple identities.Footnote 16
Because digital texts can be made to look as official as one would like, and because electronic ‘signatures’ are often simply typed names, digital media can be easily used for ill. Critical evaluation of the source and quality of information is therefore especially important in today's educational programs. In one experiment, Don Leu and his colleagues (Reference Leu, Zawilinski, Castek, Banerjee, Housand, Liu, O'Neil, Rush, Eakle and Berger2007) assessed seventh grade readers’ ability to critically evaluate information online. They posted a spoof website, Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, which gave ‘factual’ information about the tree octopus with the support of photos, graphics, and links to external resources about the tree octopus (including several YouTube videos) and information about other endangered species (including a link to a site for ‘People for the ethical treatment of pumpkins’).Footnote 17 Leu's research showed that even the most proficient young readers could be fooled about the reliability of information they found on the Internet, even when they were well aware of how unreliable online information can be. In this case, the majority of students not only believed the fabricated information, but also persisted in their belief that the tree octopus existed, even after researchers explained that the information had been made up.
Of course it is not just young students who can be deceived. Figure 3.2 below shows an email sent out to university faculty and staff at Berkeley. Apparently, a number of faculty and staff were ‘taken in,’ because a subsequent message went out from the administration explaining that the information technology office never requests information about campus email accounts and that members of the campus community should never respond to such requests. How do we know when a seemingly authoritative message should not be heeded?
Figure 3.2 Scam email sent to Berkeley faculty and staff
The real intent here – phishing for the user's login/password – is what is expressly denied in the language of the message (“It is not Phishing Mail”). The clues that this is a ‘phishy’ request are many, however. First, the ‘From’ line indicates that the message comes from the University of California, Berkeley, but with an address of <chang60796543@singnet.com.sg>, the last two digits of which tell us that the message is actually coming from Singapore (confirmed by the time stamp given in Singapore time). The ‘Reply to’ line is yet another external address (customer.careservice@live.com), which also has nothing to do with the university. Any valid message about email accounts would not even come from the University of California, Berkeley, but would come from the campus Information Services and Technology office (ist.berkeley.edu). Second, it is a ridiculous request: institutions never ask for employees’ login and password information because they already have it. Dealing with a ‘very strong virus’ (a phrase that would never be used by the IST people) is not something that would be facilitated by having everyone's login information anyway. And the threat of losing one's account in the absence of an immediate reply is absurd. Third, the language of the request marks it as suspect: the term ‘webmail account’ is not used at Berkeley, and we don't ‘subscribe’ to university email accounts, so the words ‘subscribers’ and ‘subscription’ are alone dead giveaways. The phrases ‘We are trying to find out the specific person’ and ‘have them cleared against this virus’ are not idiomatic English. Finally, there are irregularities in the typing that suggest this message does not come from a university office: there is no space after one of the periods, a semi-colon is used instead of a colon following ‘information to send,’ and the capitalization of Account is anomalous.
With so many clues, why do some people succumb to phishing schemes? One problem is the ethos of speed that has become associated with computers. Because the computer can relay messages fast, we feel some pressure to respond fast. This pressure is not technological, but social. And it translates into socially shared conventions of ‘acceptable’ delays for responding to messages in different mediums (compare, for example, letters, emails, and text messages). Moreover, different mediums involve different communication loads: for many people, email is overwhelming in its quantity, whereas postal mail is not. Different loads lead to different reading styles, and much email is read fast. The designer of the ‘email termination’ message above is counting on it being read in haste. Because staff and faculty are deluged with email, they are likely to read a message like this quickly, and the faster they read it, the more likely they are to miss the phishy clues and accept it as a legitimate message from the administration. Critical evaluation of online information has become a standard fixture in education, but as scams become increasingly sophisticated, more and better critical awareness programs will need to be developed in schools, colleges, and in the workplace. We will revisit this need in Chapter 10.
With each medium of writing comes its own techniques of authentication. Today, we use electronic signatures, which usually take the form of a code sent to our email address, which we then type into a document to certify our identity. The tiny profile pictures similarly serve an identity verification purpose. ‘Security images’ are increasingly common on the websites of financial institutions to protect customers from website fraud. And when we create online accounts for online services we typically have to copy a series of skewed letters (known as CAPTCHAs, for ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’) to prove we are not web robots signing up for the service. The idea is that CAPTCHAs (see Figure 3.3) are readable by humans, but not by machines, so by copying the skewed string one is in essence proving that one is human and not a computer program.Footnote 18 Theoretically this procedure reduces comment spam, protects website registration, and prevents online polls from being rigged.
Figure 3.3 Two CAPTCHAs
The point here is that dissemination of misinformation, deceit, and fraud are age-old issues of human communication that technologies of literacy have always had to deal with. How we cope today may be quite different from how we did in past centuries, but the underlying social phenomenon is the same. As technologies of communication change, we adapt and redesign our techniques of authentication, which constitute an important dimension of literacy, but it is the social ecology of communication, not technology, that provides the fundamental impetus.
Conclusion
Language, technologies, and literacy are ultimately all constituted and propagated socially. Social conventions, genres, ideologies, and cultural attitudes all affect the ways that technologies are taken up and how language is used in conjunction with them. In this chapter we have looked at two technologies – the telephone and computer-mediated communication – and seen how people have adapted their uses of these technologies in different social contexts, and how particular communicative practices as well as ideologies have evolved from these adaptations. We have also seen that these socially adapted uses can also diverge significantly from the purposes for which the technologies were originally intended.
The point of this discussion was to show how social ecologies and technologies interact. New technologies can act as catalysts in the creation of new social configurations, as when members of a special interest group living in different locales develop an online community. At other times, new technologies reshape and extend existing social groups, as in social networking, where an existing face-to-face social network is transformed and extended online. But the practices that people establish in these environments are fundamentally social, not technological.
In the next chapter we will turn to the role of the individual. If technologies of literacy are always socially embedded, involving relationships, shared assumptions, and conventions, they also involve individual personal acts of imagination and creativity.
