Sherry Turkle: “I Would Rather Text Than Talk”

Turkle: Digital Conversation Feels Private, but You Are Onstage

• “We are forever elsewhere.” In class or at a meeting we attend to what interests us, and when it stops interesting us we reach for our devices
• Phubbing — Turkle’s example of a new dictionary word: maintaining eye contact while texting. Her students say they do it all the time “and that it’s not that hard”
• We exist alongside digital doubles, digital representations of ourselves that are “useful to different parties at different times.” “The digital self is archived forever”
• Gmail searches your e-mail “for clues for how to best sell to you,” yet the experience feels intimate: “You face a glowing screen and you feel alone”
• “This is one of the great paradoxes of digital conversation: It feels private despite the fact that you are onstage.” “Online you are under a kind of surveillance”

The Media as an Agent of Socialization

Blue’s Clues and CoComelon: Two Ways to Design Children’s Attention

The Media Enforce Social Norms

• The media reaffirm proper behavior by showing what happens to people who violate society’s expectations: the bad guy gets clobbered in a cartoon or thrown in jail on CSI
• The media also sometimes glorify disapproved behavior, such as physical violence, disrespect to a teacher, or drug use

Promotion of Consumption: Hyperconsumerism and Product Placement

• Hyperconsumerism — Jean Baudrillard’s (1929–2007) term for the practice of buying more than we need or want, and often more than we can afford. It characterizes postmodern societies (Chapter 5), and the media promote it
• The average child in the United States watches 20,000 television commercials a year, not counting other media platforms
• Young people cannot escape commercial messages. They appear on high school scoreboards, at concerts, and as banners on web pages
• Product placement, or “brand casting,” is an increasingly important source of revenue for media and entertainment outlets.
• It has since become far more common, from Reese’s Pieces in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial to AOC, a Taiwanese electronics company, in The Martian
• Racecar driver Danica Patrick displays brand logos on her uniform, some of which have little to do with her sport

Figure 6-1: Branding the Globe

Advertising Has Functions and Dysfunctions

The Narcotizing Dysfunction: Massive Coverage Can Numb an Audience

• Narcotizing dysfunction — Lazarsfeld and Merton’s (1948) term for the phenomenon in which the media provide such massive amounts of coverage that the audience becomes numb and fails to act on the information, regardless of how compelling the issue
• Interested citizens may take in the information but make no decision and take no action
• The media often start a great outpouring of support after a natural disaster or a family crisis. As time passes, viewer fatigue sets in: the audience grows desensitized to the suffering and may even conclude that the crisis has been solved (Baran and Davis 2015)
• Lazarsfeld and Merton named the dysfunction about 70 years ago, when few homes had television. Today commentators point to addiction to screen time, especially among young people. On overwhelming topics such as street crime, war, and HIV/AIDS, some people feel they have acted, or learned all they need to know, simply through social media

Gatekeeping: A Few People Decide What Reaches the Public

The Internet Has Fewer Gates, but Not None

• Gatekeeping is not as dominant on the Internet. You can post virtually any message, podcast, or video, or build a website arguing that the earth is flat. Information, and misinformation, spreads without any significant gatekeeping process
• Still, the Internet is not totally without restrictions:
  • In many nations, laws regulate content on gambling, inappropriate content, and even politics
  • Popular Internet service providers terminate accounts for offensive behavior
• Many countries try to control political dissent by restricting access to online comments unfavorable to the government. Authoritarian regimes have temporarily or permanently suspended Internet access to thwart those they saw as undermining the central government
• Political parties and even national militaries may spread false reports. In 2019 Facebook tried to rein in fabricated “news” of Indian and Pakistani atrocities toward each other; the reports were traced to Indian and Pakistani organizations (Goel and Frenkel 2019)
• Despite, or maybe because of, such gatekeeping, growing numbers of people take part in online communities

Box 6-1: Personalized Search Puts Users Inside a Filter Bubble

• Search engines are personalized. Google uses as many as 57 sources of information, including location and past searches, to guess which sites a person might like to visit. It has done this since 2009, and in 2012 it began using information from the websites people “friend” on social media
• Google presents personalization as a service that helps people cut through irrelevant information
• A 2019 analysis found that search engines completed the same query differently. “Immigrants are” might be completed with “law abiding,” “increasing taxes,” or even “animals.” The companies corrected the most troubling results once they were made public, but tens of thousands of problematic filters remain
• Online political activist Eli Pariser calls the result a filter bubble: when a search engine filters our searches, it encloses us in an invisible bubble that limits what we see to what we already know (The Filter Bubble). We rarely discover people, places, and ideas outside our comfort zone, and we may not even realize the bubble is there

Box 6-1: Why the Filter Bubble Matters

• Most of us go only to restaurants whose food we enjoy. What is wrong with seeing only what we like online?
• Filtering leads many people to miss truly important events. In-depth stories about Afghanistan, world poverty, and the refugee crisis compete in the same search pool with cat pictures and Candy Crush. Pariser’s solution: make the truly important issues more engaging and compelling
• Personalization was once seen as directed by the user or done for commercial purposes. The 2016 U.S. presidential election changed that view: Russia covertly placed thousands of political ads, mostly attacking Hillary Clinton or praising Donald Trump, on the Facebook or Twitter accounts of people judged susceptible to their inaccurate messages. The filter bubble was infiltrated for devious political purposes
• Researchers at MIT and Yahoo Labs propose including contrasting or opposing views in online searches, in the hope that the Internet becomes less isolating and more open to different perspectives (Pariser 2011a, 2011b; Graells-Garrido et al. 2016; Shane and Isaac 2017)

Dominant Ideology: The Media Construct What We Regard as Real

• Conflict theorists argue that the mass media maintain the privileges of certain groups, and that powerful groups may limit how the media represent others in order to protect their own interests
• Dominant ideology — a set of cultural beliefs and practices that helps to maintain powerful social, economic, and political interests (Chapter 3)
• The media transmit messages that essentially define what we regard as the real world, even when those images differ from what the larger society experiences
• Media decision makers are overwhelmingly white, male, and wealthy. The media tend to ignore the lives and ambitions of subordinate groups: working-class people, African Americans, Hispanics, people with disabilities, overweight people, and older people
• Worse, media content may create false images or stereotypes of these groups that become accepted as accurate portrayals of reality

Stereotypes on Screen and in Apps

• Stereotypes — unreliable generalizations about all members of a group that do not recognize individual differences within the group
• Some broadcasters use stereotypes deliberately, in a desperate bid for attention, with the winking approval of media executives
• Stereotyping has moved online. Some apps force people to choose a racial or gender identity and then steer their online selections, much as search filters do (Wachter-Boettcher 2017)

Dominant Ideology: Whose Culture Travels Abroad?

• U.S. programs are hits around the world. The Walking Dead and Grey’s Anatomy are popular in France, despite its “exception culturelle,” which protects French producers from foreign competition. In Japan Glee is must-watch TV and Columbo reruns still draw viewers. In Latin America, where illicit downloading is common, the favorites include The X-Factor, Breaking Bad, and Homeland. In North Korea, Desperate Housewives is a cult hit
• Officials and cultural purists may decry these shows, but U.S. media are still widely watched and imitated. Sociologist Todd Gitlin calls American popular culture something “people love, and love to hate” (2002:177)
• We risk being ethnocentric if we overstress U.S. dominance. Survivor, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Big Brother, and Iron Chef came from Sweden, Britain, the Netherlands, and Japan. American Idol began in Britain as Pop Idol. The telenovelas of Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries owe very little to U.S. soap operas
• Television is gradually moving away from U.S. domination and is now more likely to be locally produced (Bielby and Harrington 2008; Colucci 2008)

Hyper-Local Media Report What Happens Down the Street

• Hyper-local media — reporting that is highly local. What has been going on in that vacant lot down the street? Which takeout food is popular in your neighborhood? Why did all those police cars converge on Main Street the night before last?
• Schaefer calls it the most novel media trend of this century
• The term was coined in 1991 for local news on 24-hour cable channels. It now more often refers to social networks such as Nextdoor and Social Street and to sites such as patch.com
• In 2020 many Americans discovered hyper-local outlets: first during the pandemic, to learn where people practiced social distancing and which businesses offered curbside pickup, and then to follow protest marches in their own towns

The Two-Way Flow of News Between Industrial and Developing Nations

• Nations that feel a loss of identity may defend against cultural invasion, especially from the economically dominant United States. Yet audiences are not necessarily passive, so research on them must be placed in social context
• Developing nations have long argued for a greatly improved two-way flow of news and information. They complain that news from the developing world is scant, and that what news there is reflects unfavorably on them
• Ask most people in the United States about South America and they mention two topics that dominate the news: revolution and drugs. Most know little else about the continent
• In the 1980s UNESCO passed a resolution to monitor news and content crossing the borders of developing nations, a step regarded globally as protecting threatened cultures and media markets. The United States has continued to oppose UNESCO’s plans; the Trump administration withdrew from UNESCO in 2019
• Opposition to U.S. media is not limited to developing nations. South Korea limits the number of days cinemas can show foreign films. The European Union has sought to limit Netflix’s “cultural dumping,” which it sees as a threat to national identity and to the European media industry (Baran 2015; Barbière 2014)

Box 6-2: The Global Disconnect

• Bogdan Ghirda, a Romanian, is paid 50 cents an hour to play multiplayer games such as City of Heroes and Star Wars on behalf of someone in an industrialized country who does not want to spend days climbing to the highest levels. U.S.-based services can earn hundreds of dollars for recruiting such a player
• In Africa, resource-poor Rwanda is building its economy on information and communications technologies. In 2011, public investment and private competition brought mobile phone and data service to 96 percent of the country. Challenges remain: expensive energy, a shortage of skilled computer specialists, weak finances. The nation of 12 million has a per capita gross national income of just $780
• The Network Readiness Index (NRI), created by the World Economic Forum and now tabulated annually by the Portulans Institute, ranks 121 nations by how prepared individuals, businesses, and governments are to benefit from information technologies
• Through the Internet, multinational organizations can function as a single global unit, responding in real time 24 hours a day. Sociologist Manuel Castells calls this a global economy. Nations disconnected from it grow slowly, and their educated and skilled citizens emigrate to other labor markets, deepening the impoverishment of nations on the periphery (Castells 2010a; World Bank 2020)

The Digital Divide in Augmented Reality: Pokémon GO

• The smartphone game Pokémon GO, released in 2016, lets players create an avatar and search in real time to “catch” Pokémon appearing in augmented reality, next to a mailbox or in a park. Players try to collect as many of the more than 250 characters as they can
• Research found that in the United States, African American and Latino neighborhoods were much less likely than white neighborhoods to be sites of PokéStops, where the characters can be caught (Juhász and Hochmair 2017)
• The digital divide shaped even where a game placed its imaginary creatures

Feminist View: The Media Stereotype Women and Men

Interactionist View: Social Media Build Social Capital

• Interactionists are especially interested in shared understandings of everyday behavior. Turkle’s opening excerpt is an interactionist concern: how social media shape day-to-day social behavior
• Recent research focuses on social capital and on facial recognition software
• Social capital — Pierre Bourdieu’s term for the collective benefit of social networks, which are built on reciprocal trust (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990)
• The Internet, and social media in particular, offer almost constant connectivity. They increase our contact with family, friends, and acquaintances, near and far, and help us build new ties and networks (Neves 2013)

Figure 6-3: Social Networks Turn Advertising into a Relationship

Box 6-3: Apps for Global Refugees

Egocasting: Choosing Only the Media We Already Agree With

• The Internet raises troubling questions. What should be done about criminals or extremist groups who use it to exchange messages of hatred or buying weapons? About inappropriate content, and how to protect children from it? Should such material be censored, or should expression be completely free?
• The Internet also gives people greater control over what they see and hear. We can manage our exposure to avoid sounds, images, and ideas we do not enjoy or approve of
• Egocasting — legal scholar Cass Sunstein’s (2002) term for this personalized approach to gathering news and information
• One consequence may be a less tolerant society. If we read, see, and hear only what we know and agree with, we may be much less prepared to meet people from different backgrounds or to converse with those who hold new viewpoints

Facial Recognition Software: Convenience and Hidden Bias

Who Is in the Audience?

• Ever texted everyone you know to vote for a performer on a reality show? Been tempted to reveal the ending of a series to someone watching it on a phone? Found an old CD and tried to remember the last time anyone played one? We are all part of a larger audience
• The media are distinguished from other social institutions by the necessary presence of an audience
• An audience can be an identifiable, finite group, such as the audience at a jazz club or a Broadway musical, or a much larger and undefined group, such as viewers of Black Panther or readers of the same issue of USA Today
• It may be a secondary group gathered in a large auditorium or a primary group, such as a family watching a Disney video at home (Chapter 5)
• Micro level: how audience members interact among themselves and respond to the media, or at live performances influence the performers. Macro level: broader social consequences, such as early childhood education delivered through Sesame Street
• Even a scattered audience is distinctive in age, gender, income, political party, formal schooling, race, and ethnicity. A ballet audience differs substantially from an alternative music audience

The Segmented Audience: Media Target Particular Groups

• Increasingly the media market themselves to a particular audience. Once an outlet such as a radio station or a website has identified its audience, it targets that group
• Advertising drives much of this specialization. Through survey research, media specialists have sharpened their ability to identify target audiences
• Facebook lets advertisers target users by education, field of study, income, net worth, gender, marital status, age, work history, political affiliation, and whether one is Hispanic (Herrman 2018)
• British social psychologist Sonia Livingstone (2004) argues that the media have become so segmented that they look almost individualized. Has the “mass” gone out of mass media? Not yet: large formal organizations still transmit public messages to sizable, heterogeneous, scattered audiences

Audiences Are Not Passive, and Fake News Targets Their Biases

• The word “audience” suggests a passive group, but often it is not. Protesters at political rallies and crowds who boo performers, athletes, or speakers are anything but passive
• Opinion leaders may encourage such tactics, which can lead to collective action by audience members (Croteau et al. 2012)
• False news stories and fictitious events targeted at particular online audiences give the manipulation of audiences new meaning
• Online audiences are increasingly wary, but they often overlook falsehoods created to appeal to their preferences or biases. Creators of fake news identify an audience’s biases and target them efficiently through its online viewing history (Carey 2017)

McLuhan’s Global Village and Gitlin’s Global Torrent

Figure 6-4: Internet and Social Media Penetration in Selected Countries

Cell Phone Data Tracked Malaria in Kenya and COVID-19

• During a malaria outbreak in Kenya, public health researchers monitored the text messages sent on Kenyans’ 15 million cell phones and used them to map the spread of the disease
• Travelers were carrying malaria along less-traveled regional routes, not along the busy roads to and from Nairobi
• During the coronavirus pandemic, several countries used telecom data and downloaded apps to track the spread of COVID-19 once infected people were identified. Such information proved vital in concentrating control efforts (Lin and Martin 2020; Wesolowski et al. 2012)
• Where broadband is limited, people can still text. Inexpensive phones with icons, emojis, and voice recognition let people who cannot read communicate, even with people who speak another language (Jennings 2014)

Looking at the Issue: Should False Information Online Be Censored?

• Schaefer opens with a false claim about U.S. Civil War history. It first appeared in print, then spread online in the late 20th century with convincing images attached
• How should social media handle such misinformation? Ban it? Add a banner warning about false content? Redirect readers to authoritative sites? And who judges what is myth and what is fact, about the past or the present?
• President Obama decried “the wild west” of the media and called for some way of filtering for “truthiness.” President Trump regularly attacked the spread of “fake news”
• British officials pressured Facebook and Google, unsuccessfully, to take down sites and posts spreading the false claim that vaccines cause autism
• In 2019 Singapore passed the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act. The government presented it as an anti-fake news measure; it remains to be seen whether the law will stifle online dissent (The Economist 2019d; Roose 2017)

Freedom on the Net: More Sharing Has Brought More Censorship

Applying Sociology: Culture Lag and Three Perspectives on Censorship

• Culture lag (Chapter 3) — a period of maladjustment when the nonmaterial culture is still struggling to adapt to new material conditions. Technology, the material culture, changes faster than the norms for controlling its use. Too often the result is an anything-goes approach to new technologies
• Functionalists take a generally positive view of the Internet. Its manifest function is to facilitate communication; its latent function is to empower people with few resources, from hate groups to special-interest organizations, to communicate with the masses
• Conflict theorists worry about those with power, whether media companies or governments, controlling what people can read
• Interactionists see the debate over media content as an extension of everyday life. Many of us have wondered how to stop someone close to us from antisocial behavior; interactionists ask how mass media and social media influence everyday behavior, for better or worse
• Does government use of facial recognition software threaten everyday social interaction? Reflecting that concern, and abuse by law enforcement agencies, San Francisco became the first major city to ban facial recognition surveillance (Conger et al. 2019)

Initiating Policy: Cyberbullying, Companies, and Users as Censors

• In general, support for censorship is weak.
• One use of censorship that does receive attention is cyberbullying: online harassment intended to do harm, from disparaging rumors to making confidential information public. In a 2018 survey nearly 40 percent of middle-schoolers and 27 percent of high-schoolers said they had been bullied. No U.S. federal law applies to bullying unless it is based on race, color, national origin, gender, disability, or religion (McClellan 2019)
• Private companies have more latitude. In 2017 PayPal barred users from accepting donations that promote hate, violence, and intolerance, after it emerged that the company had helped raise money for an extremist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that turned deadly. PayPal described its task as balancing freedom of expression against closing sites that raise funds for hate (Passache 2017)
• Online, users often do the censoring. YouTube and Wikipedia let users flag inappropriate or inaccurate content; Facebook lets people ban certain words from their feed; Twitter lets users remove individual tweets or block an account altogether

Initiating Policy: Terrorist Content and a Splintering Internet

• Online terrorist threats, and advocacy of harmful acts or ideas associated with terrorists, pose another challenge. In 2019 a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killed 20 people and wounded 27. The shooter had taken inspiration from an attack on a New Zealand mosque that left 51 people dead. Online sites offer hints on how to maximize injury in mass shootings
• Existing laws do not make such material illegal. YouTube labels some terrorist propaganda as possibly “inappropriate or offensive to some audiences,” yet viewers can click past the warning and receive recommendations for similar material. Many who find the material offensive still argue that society should not censor dissenting viewpoints
• In the United States, censorship, especially by government, is strongly opposed. A basic democratic principle holds that society is governed best when citizens have full access to information, which is partly why the digital divide draws so much attention
• As more nations issue their own restrictions, the Internet splinters, and the idea of a single global network that looks the same wherever you are begins to vanish (Baran 2017; The Economist 2019d)

Turkle’s Observations Explained with the Chapter’s Concepts

• “I would rather text than talk”: the interactionist concern with how media reshape everyday behavior; Goffman’s impression management (Chapter 4) is easier when you can edit before you send
• “We are forever elsewhere,” and phubbing at the table: the media’s impact on social behavior (Table 6-2)
• “A tribe of one, loyal to our own party”: egocasting, reinforced by the filter bubble
• Gmail searched “for clues for how to best sell to you”: the segmented audience and the promotion of consumption
• “Digital doubles,” “archived forever,” “under a kind of surveillance”: media monitoring and the censorship and surveillance debate in the Social Policy section
• Now argue two ways. Functionalist: constant connection builds social capital across distance. Conflict: who owns the record of your digital double, and who profits from it?

Taking Sociology to Work: Lindsey Wallem, Social Media Consultant

• Wallem majored in sociology at DePaul University because she wanted to help people, perhaps as a social worker for a nonprofit
• In her junior year a political science professor offered extra credit for campaign work. At the Obama headquarters in Chicago she joined the New Media department, using Facebook and MySpace to reach voters, which was groundbreaking at the time
• After graduating in 2008 she pitched social media services to nonprofits. For a coalition working on affordable housing she live-tweeted city council meetings for supporters who could not attend
• She uses her sociology training daily: statistics to read campaign metrics (“more than just counting the number of ‘Likes’”), and a Visual Sociology capstone that taught her to tell a story through photography and video
• She also teaches an online social media course to high school students through Northwestern University, starting with sociological theory

Before You Leave

• Mass media carry messages to widespread audiences; social media let people create and share content and join networks. The line between them is not finely drawn
• Functionalists: the media entertain, socialize, enforce norms, confer status, and promote consumption. The narcotizing dysfunction leaves audiences numb
• Conflict theorists: gatekeeping, dominant ideology, stereotypes, and the digital divide reflect and deepen social divisions; search filters can enclose us in a bubble
• Interactionists: social media build social capital and friendship networks, invite egocasting, and bring tools such as facial recognition with new risks of bias
• The audience is increasingly segmented and targeted; opinion leaders and influencers shape its choices, and fake news targets its biases
• The media’s global reach creates a global village, or a global torrent, but connection is unequal
• Censorship illustrates culture lag: more sharing has brought more control, by governments, companies, and users