Pg. 18: society shapes the individual more than the other way around - Charles Cooley
Society shapes individual
1880s
Professor Cooley was a thinker of social relations
Orthodox view of society is pursuing our interests
A "social mind"
Society exchanges info and that determines collective intelligence [according to him]
Coined term "social media" in 1897
Pg. 19: Cooley thinks communication is more important and determines more of how we think and act than conventional thinking
Natural selection is not the force of social change because humans are imitative and sympathetic and we adjust our behavior because of social cues
Predecessor of the media theorists of the late 20th century
The media theorists posited that new media creates new environment, it shapes perceptions, shapes relationships. This line of thinking is similar to Mcluhan's "the medium is the message" but McLuhan and Cooley differ
Pg. 25: "technologizing" speech
Became a part of commerce and toolmaking
Efficiency of communication became most important
Books, telegraphs, fax machines, computer networks are examples of technologizing speech
Pg. 27: written word fueled rise of individualism
Freed reader from physical surroundings and local social group
Book was the first product of mass production but isolated reader in silence
Pg. 40: Cooley and Zuck on same page
Zuck's goal was for FB to become world's "social infrastructure"
FB to provide new software tools to automate groups arriving on the net.
Cooley's influence-sharing groups and Zuck’s "mediating groups" like AI and algorithms
Pg. 41: society and the Net look the same in Zuckerberg’s eyes
Society and the Net are the same in Zuckerberg’s eyes
Protocols were provided, world's sub communities would organically interconnect was their hope [and later would form a global community and it would scale]
Pg. 42: why people join groups is what Zuckerberg got wrong
Reason why people join groups
He doesn't realize humans are individuals and they join because of shared values, not technical protocols
Pg. 112: broadcasting mirrors the authoritarian structure of politics, not democracy
Centralized design
Radio and other mass communication systems could turn the state authoritarian
Pg. 114: a new many-to-many model
Intellectuals formed the Committee for National Morale
Mass media: one-to-many model
This new form of mass media: many-to-many model
Democratic personality vs authoritarian personality
Pg. 123: category of content sprouts differentiation and specialization
General category of content [text, sound, image, motion picture] branching out in differentiation and specialization, text takes many forms just like social media
Pg. 125: distinction in form meant distinction in meaning??
Not just technical, industrial, and legal distinctions but also semantic, cultural, and aesthetic
Choose a medium, choose a way of speaking
New media opened up new ways of expressing oneself
The specialization helped people sort the unimportant from the important, the personal from the political
Physicality and fragmentation of analog media helped people to not overwhelm people's sense-making capabilities
Also gave people control by giving them a conscious decision [the friction was part of the pleasure]
Pg. 154: digital blurs distinctions, content collapses
"The convergence of media technology hasn't just destroyed the bipartite regulatory framework and the divisions between media businesses. It has blurred the distinctions between categories of information - distinctions of form, register, sense, and importance - that the epistemic architecture of the analog era preserved and even accentuated. Content has collapsed, as our adoption of the drab, generic term content to refer to all forms of expression testifies. Everything now has to fit the internet's conventions and protocols, with their stress on immediacy, novelty, multiplicity, interconnectedness, and above all efficiency"
There were categories of distinctions between sense, importance, form
Now content refers to all forms of expression according to the internet's protocols [multiplicity, efficiency, immediacy]
Pg. 155: design now stressed fluidity
Original design [domain, site, page] drew upon the material world but then the connection was broken when social media platforms wanted dynamic ways to distribute info
Pg. 158: FB started making editorial decisions
2006 - FB introduced the News Feed Machine agency took over personal agency Continuous, customized streams of posts and updates
Zuckerberg was frustrated with friction [or humans selecting, evaluating, sharing info] FB's earlier algorithms were concerned with the transport function [didn't care about the meaning because they weren’t editing]
Algorithm chose content based on user’s past behavior and people like the user
Pg. 160: content collapsed because social media made categories go away All info belongs to one category "content" and goes through one channel, social media with one goal which is maximizing engagement
NOW...news, conversations, other forms of expression COMPETE for consumers' attention
The feed algorithm doesn't know meaning, it's able to match message to people's triggers
Custom stream of ads
Pg. 169: it's not about transport anymore, resonance theory can automate triggers
What is resonance theory?
Essential function of means of communication wasn't transport anymore, like Shannon thought, it was manipulation!
Before Feed, FB was a dumb network
Propagandist, broadcaster, wiretapper
Pg. 170: Facebook is now three things after the Feed was introduced
Why broadcaster?
Why wiretapper?
Why propagandist?
Pg. 174: 2007 is when one could upload videos, 2008 was when smartphones were introduced as media production tools
Upload videos------smartphones
After becoming media production tool because of the camera, the News Feed became main source of entertainment, news, adverts
Pg. 182: public interest is outsourced to Big Tech
Public interest is not happening out in the open like before, now being done by large corporations
Corporations don't see people as a polity
Big Tech has speech and censorship ownership
Pg. 183: news feed became template for all social media and then traditional media [because of engagement results]
Feeds, streams, loops, scrolls suited to the smartphone
Because of combo of digitization and deregulation, companies track and use data to optimize the algorithms
Pg. 184: the industrialization of communication
Pg. 184: "Behind the rise of mass media during the past century, a less visible but even more fundamental shift was unfolding: the industrialization of communication. As media systems advanced from the electric to the electronic to the digital, the spirit of the Industrial Revolution, with its stress of measurement and productivity, expanded from factories and offices into the intellectual and political realms of conversation, discourse, and debate. The push to achieve ever greater efficiency in information exchange, guided by Shannon's equations and accelerated by business competition, became a major force shaping social relations"
Pg. 187: ideal of a marketplace based on virtue of abundance
'Friction and constraints' physical goods are scarce Excitement convinced people that laws and regulations that governed scarcity economics weren't needed News Feed was the peak of industrialization of communication because machines controlled media for the first time
Pg. 192: "What fills online feeds, research shows, is content that stirs strong emotions and provokes symptoms of "physiological arousal" - a quickened heart rate, tensed muscles, dilated pupils. The nervous system is put on alert, primed to respond to incoming stimuli. We feel compelled to scroll more, see more, share more. We're drawn deeper into the feed. Whether we realize it or not, social media churns out information that's been highly processed to stimulate not just engagement but dependency"
Pg. 193: how is FB a media company? I don't understand
Pg. 194: manipulation of information is also manipulation of meaning
Algorithms regulate the content, form it takes, and how it's interpreted. It influences directly [selection] and indirectly [by promotion]
Pg. 195: how is it empowering us?
Pg. 206: emails were to the point now because its continuous
Because its continuous, emails are to the point
Emails are still used to write lengthy messages but digital stopped that
Pg. 211: the purpose of letters
Delay between writing and reading helped people organize thoughts without regard to society's demands for immediate reaction and response
Pg. 213: email pushed letter-writing out
Declined after 2000
Handwritten letter sacrificed to productivity
Pg. 214: industrialization spread into social relations
1951 book "Minima Moria" by Theodor Adorno
Pg. 218: trained for screen reading
Reading instruction stressed recognizing words visually more than sounding them out phonetically, diminished auditory sense
Pg. 221: young creating a new communication code to the new medium, visual and symbolic elements
Grammar became graphical
Reading is now more about recognizing a pattern [visual and symbolic] rather than following line of thought because efficiency is what matters
Pg. 223: kids compressed language themselves
Pg. 223: superbloom of messages made communication efficiency a “social goal”
Because it made its way into social relations not just technology
Humans were instruments of network optimization, not just using the system
Pg. 226: texting became asynchronous and synchronous
Instant messaging-----texting
Texting was both for correspondence and convo
2012 - prevalence of texting over phones
Pg. 229: textspeak thought to be because of the tech bandwidth
Pg. 230: textspeak is about conserving attention really
Pg. 231: textspeak's offshoot the meme
Meme is a still or moving image that provides a visual pop culture template, is both language and social currency
Pg. 233: this compression serves social media companies!!!!
Speeding up consumption of message gave companies opportunity to show ads and sponsored posts, helped tracking, profiling, personalization
Pg. 240: smartphone, blurred line between private and public communication
Textspeak became main language for correspondence and convo
Infiltrated more traditional news, broadcasting
Transformed journalism
Textspeak is speech that is streamlined, easy-to-skim communication
Pg. 243: language shapes the form of thought
Pg. 245: textspeak is all about System 1
System 1 is all about reactions, snap judgments, hot takes, emotion
System 2 is about the conscious application of reason
Reason requires friction of hard mental work but friction doesn't help with efficiency of digital communication networks
Pg. 246: "Open-ended, contemplative ways of thinking - the philosophical, the ruminative, the introspective - have also been marginalized. That's one of the reasons our culture has become so politicized in recent years. The screen's hegemony prevents us from experiencing art as, in Susan Sontag's words, a "form of mystification" aimed "at the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence." It turns art, like all other forms of expression, into mere message. Sticking a painting or a novel into an ideological category is quicker and easier than engaging in the slow, pensive work of aesthetic appreciation"
Cooley didn't think communication tech would alter expression or interpretation!!
Media efficiency at the extremity no longer affords luxury of careful reading, methodical evaluation, contemplative inquiry
Pg. 250: the proximity effect definition
Nearer people lived, more likely to be friends but also opposite effect
Pg. 258: what is "dissimilarity cascades?"
Perception of similarity helps us determine whom we like
Tendency more towards dislike
One trait we see then domino effect
Pg. 263: what is the online disinhibition effect?
Emphasizes quantitative measures of social states, reward for oversharing
Emphasizes quantitive measures of social status, rewards oversharing
It's productive because we disclose more info gathering, designed for self-expression
"By emphasizing quantitative measures of social status - follower and friend counts, like and retweet tallies - the platforms reward people for broadcasting endless details about their lives and opinions through messages, posts, photos, and videos"
Pg. 266: how does it breed envy?
Pg. 271: how do we lose empathy?
Sherry Tuckle social psychologist calls social media “anti-empathy machine"
Online communication reduces someone's ability to feel empathy and reduces self-awareness
Pg. 278: "In allowing ourselves to be pinned down, we will sacrifice the self's flexibility and freedom. It's the same fear that lies behind many people's aversion to being photographed. A photograph condenses you into a single image, turns you into a pattern of information. In fixing you as an object in the minds of others, it robs you of complexity and agency. In a photo, you can't explain yourself. You're rendered mute"
Pg. 279: Altman proposed "privacy regulation theory" against social penetration theory
"Privacy regulation theory" relations require "boundary systems"
Pg. 281: "Metropolis and Mental Life" by Georg Simmel discussed psychic consequences of urban living and social claustrophobia
This claustrophobia is why I feel bad!
Pg. 282: "There are no bodies online, but there are myriad presences. With everyone pressing their virtual flesh on everyone else all the time, the communicative life becomes more extensive, and more oppressive, than it is in even the most densely populated of cities. Simmel's description of the "psychological conditions" of the metropolis - "the rapid telescoping of changing images, pronounced differences within what is grasped at a single glance, and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli" - seems if anything more accurate as a description of the social media environment than the urban one. In online society, moreover, the tempering influence of face-to-face conversation is missing. There are no sidewalks or stoops. Virtual presence entails physical absence"
Pg. 285: too much communication resulting in diminishing returns
Pg. 285: "Adam Joinson, a psychology professor at the University of Bath in England, coined the term "digital crowding" to describe the "excessive self-disclosure...and social contact" that characterizes social media's teeming but ghostly metropolis. The anxiety and enervation such crowding produces make the internet's antisocial tendencies all the more pronounced"
Pg. 286: The book “Privacy Online”
Pg. 286: Ian Bogost - social media plunges us into a "sociopathic rendition of human sociality" he wrote in the 2022 Atlantic essay, "The Age of Social Media is Over"
Pg. 287-288: nice summary, media automates judgements about the relevance and quality of info
Content collapses
Transport ----- editorial [automates judgments about relevance and quality of info]
Humans streamline
Unchecked self-expression [envy, claustrophobia]
Pg. 294: story we told ourselves about net is a story of "democratization"
Pg. 297: "Margaret Mead's ideal of a truly democratic communication medium - bidirectional, decentralized, participatory, multi sensory, enveloping - had gone underground in the sixties. Without the technology required to bring it to the masses, it lost its force as a practical social goal and, in the form of acid tests and other multimedia happenings, turned into an expression of countercultural transcendentalism, or at least hedonism. It devolved from the civic to the psychedelic - and then, like other hippie dreams, evaporated into the consumerism of the seventies and eighties. But now, thanks to the net, the ideal was suddenly back - and being realized. Mass media and mass men were at least being supplanted by democratic media and democratic men"
Pg. 298: 2000-2001 - we became not as enthusiastic about the net so we shifted scope from commercial future to social possibilities [a new democratic community]
Post stock market crash, a lot of blogs and social networks [further enthusiasm for the social]
300: A shift in power, means of media are in the people
Web 2.0 - post stock market crash
In cyberspace we can teach ourselves to be better citizens
Pg. 311: Benkler assumed the net would resist corporatism, he was wrong as well as Stevens
Content assessment, filtering, distribution Done by privately controlled, centralized software algorithms!!!
This story keeps getting told today
Why was Benkler wrong?
Pg. 321: we create a mental "pseudo-environment"
Lippmann turned pessimist about democracy
Simplified picture of reality, then we fit thoughts and actions into this wrong perception. We manipulate the info we receive and are willing to be sucked into attempts to modify that sense of reality
Pg. 322: intuition, not analysis
More distracted, more shallow
Process of info becomes and relies on stereotypes
Pg. 327: he anticipates the critique of the rational decision-maker "homo economicus" of classical economics that would arrive later heralded social and cognitive psychologists
Herbert Simon, 1950s
Pg. 328: cognitive psychologists found out how people make decisions, rationality is absent!
Pg. 329: the ideal of a rational consumer of ideas
Pg. 331: more educated, more distorted
Pg. 332: purpose of media democratization was to widen gap between pseudo-environment [where people think] and where they act [real environment]
Pg. 333: info flows like a snowball
Frictionless sharing of computerized media
Pg. 336: networks used electronic repeaters??
Pg. 346: now the platforms play 3 roles
Supply end - content producers, posts, comments
Middle of network - repeaters, they boost traffic
Demand end - audience members, geared towards taste and bias
Pg. 351: different points of view exposure actually backfires
Polarization is not because of algorithmically generated echo chambers, they actually share stories that show opposing side
Pg. 352: don't need an echo chamber, need a lot of info
More balanced feeds do not even moderate people’s “pseudo environment”
Pg. 356: propaganda created for free now with the net, the net doesn't promote pluralism
Propaganda created by companies that want engagement for the sake of profit
Unstructured info [populist leader, human meme, decentralized communication] we blame platforms for our mistakes, two party structure didn’t evaporate just more factions created within existing party structure, sprouted single issue identity groups
Pg. 359: Evan Williams says in NYT 2017 that internet is broken
Pg. 362: commercial interests, tech, human nature determine how a new medium shapes society
Commercial interests
Tech
Human nature
We let Net off the hook and ourselves by placing blame on social media
Pg. 364: why is it not virgin territory?
We adapt to tech's contours
Cooley: mechanisms of communication, don't change our nature but they accentuate aspects of it
We adapt our thoughts and speech to requirements of the computers network
Pg. 364: accentuate aspects
More affective!
Pg. 369: Lippmann had it right
John Dewey, philosopher and educator, impressed by Lippmann but still optimistic Dewey's Great Community but we live in its ruins
Pg. 370: "The way we see the social and political environment, the way we create a picture of reality through the welter of messages furnished by our ever more encompassing media, is and always will be refracted by scanty attention, by the poverty of language, by distraction, by unconscious constellations of feeling, by wear and tear, violence, monotony. These limitations upon our access to that environment combine with the obscurity and complexity of the facts themselves to thwart clearness and justice of perception, to substitute misleading fictions for workable ideas, and to deprive us of adequate checks upon those who consciously strive to mislead" - Lippmann, "Public Opinion"
Pg. 376: we already socially distanced before Covid
Pg. 378: we are always performing
Pg. 391: old design mirrored traditional socializing
"The feed replaced the old structure of the social world with the logic of the computer. It erased the divisions and disrupted the sequences, removing social interactions from the constraints of space and time and placing them into a frictionless setting of instantaneity and simultaneity"
Pg. 392: "Digitization acts as a universal solvent for all that's tangible in culture"
Pg. 397: why companies like the uniform self
FB wanted to package humans as a bundle of data and sell to advertisers
Pg. 400: "The looking-glass self has turned into the mirrorball self, a whirl of fragmented reflections from a myriad of overlapping sources. We see bits of ourselves in the responses (or nonresponse) to our posts. We see bits of ourselves in all the messages we receive and send. And because we know the feed algorithms are tailoring all the content we see to their assessment of who we are, we see bits of ourselves in everything else as well. We piece together a self-image, as best we can, out of "shattered edges," as Taylor Swift sang on her aptly titled 2020 lockdown hit, "Mirrorball"
Pg. 401: 13 yr old is now the young adult
1999 IM windows juggling conversations
Multiple threads on the phone is what IM turned into
The self competes, media programs take place within us [pressure]???
Pg. 405: we reimagine ourselves as streams of text and image
This has only happened with social media! Not any other medium
Pg. 405: emotions filtered through algorithm, solipsism?
The effect of reimagining ourselves as streams of text and image produces solipsism when behind screens, the sympathetic imagine weakens
Pg. 408: identity and self-categorization, identity as stand-in for body
Pg. 408: identity to Zuck - descriptive or ideological codes for transmission through high speed networks Only works through explicit process of group affiliation
Pg. 410: "In social media's flux, identity serves as a defense mechanism. It gives the entropic mirrorball self an appearance of stability and cohesion by reducing it to a set of ready-made tribal markers: hashtags, emojis, slogans, gestures, acronyms, in-jokes, buzzwords. "This" is who I am. "This" and "this" and "this." The self is expressed through curation"
Pg. 423: why narrowly focused empirical studies don't work
Studies don't work because of the "dose-response" methodology
Social relations in GENERAL
Pg. 429: illnesses caused by the Net
Pg. 431: "From the moment of its founding, Facebook pushed users to express themselves by categorizing themselves - by picking personal descriptors such as "relationship status" and "political views" and "gender" from dropdown menus, by forming or joining groups with catchy names, by identifying and tagging their friends, by citing their favorite bands and movies and their high schools and hometowns. The users happily complied. The site seemed benign, its categorization features serving to reveal connections between people that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. When you placed yourself into a category - listing, say Scissor Sisters as a favorite band or "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" as a favorite movie - you immediately saw everyone else who had placed themselves into that same category. In joining a big social network and going through the routines of self-categorization, you expanded your own personal network. You broadened, it seemed, your social possibilities"
Pg. 432: voyeurism is a primal instinct
Pg. 432: "A week after Facebook launched at Harvard in 2004, a junior named Amelia Lester wrote an exceptionally perceptive article about its appeal of the "Harvard Crimson", the campus newspaper.......Just about every profile is a carefully constructed artifice, a kind of pixelated Platonic ideal of our messy all too organic real-life selves." She understood, as well, how the site's emphasis on categorization had the effect of turning complex beings into legible objects. What made the network "endlessly fascinating," she wrote, was the way it allowed everyone to sort themselves into "neat little categories" that were easy to scan and parse"
Pg. 456: "In the first stage, machines took on the transport or carriage role that defined traditional communication systems, replacing human couriers with over-the-wire and through-the-air mechanisms for transmitting messages and other content. In the second stage, with the incorporation of feed algorithms with social media platforms, machines added an editorial function, supplanting media and publishing professionals in selecting which content to communicate to which audience. In the third stage, now beginning, the machines are engaging in content production itself, taking on the roles traditionally played by writers, photographers, musicians, and filmmakers. With generative AI, the technological takeover of media is complete. Machines create the content, choose who will see it, and deliver it"
Pg. 514: the brain is not changing, the culture is
Because we aren't working with our hands as much anymore
Pg. 517: "As our conception of ourselves and our surroundings comes to hinge on our ability to transmit representations of them through apps, - as mediated communication becomes a defining activity of our daily lives - we train ourselves to see everything as potential fodder for messages. We develop a vision of the "camera eye" that leads professional photographers to see the world as though framed in a viewfinder"
Pg. 518: smartphone extension of human nervous system
Pg. 519: Baudrillard - full account of media-transformed society, dismissed Marxism stating world is not defined by production anymore "hyper-reality"
Baudrillard was a century after Cooley
Dismissed Marxism in 1970s
Physical goods central to people's lives and self-conceptions
Mid seventies wrote about "hyper-reality" and how it will TRANSFORM
His writing is VERY IMPORTANT!
Pg. 523: Zuboff in her book argues we didn't enter virtual world with free will, now new sociopathic form of capitalism!?, insufficient argument
Pg. 527: the material world, tames the seeking impulse and produces art science philosophy
Pg. 528: we lost the real but also the hope of going beyond it
TV tore down walls of living room, didn't even need to get off couch to get our seeking instinct
Net made the simulation interactive and then phone made it so we never have to leave it
Pg. 529: the major design innovations want to make seeking more efficient
Pull-to-refresh button
Infinite scroll
Multi-directional swiping
Autoplay routines
Algorithms make it productive because we find what we want
Pg. 545: frictional design is the answer
Reformers, legal scholars, academics propose frictional design
System needs to be dismantled and rebuilt
Limits on messaging
Delays on posting
Infinite scrolls, autoplay functions, personalized feeds and ads banned!
Pg. 546: "Unlike antitrust actions, privacy regulations and opt-in requirements, which fail to address "the rampant techno-social engineering of humans by digital networked technologies," government-mandated design constraints would, they write, transform the "digital architectures [and] interfaces that shape human interactions and behavior." The constraints would change social relations by, to once again drawn on Cooley's terms, altering the mechanisms that determine how information flows and associations form"