New Media & Society Blog - y39

Succinctly, this week’s readings focus on the manner in which information technologies reshape daily life and the activities and contacts that comprise it. Several different tactics are taken in this assessment: Robinson brings his time-budget method to bear, Quan-Hasse et. al use data from a large web survey, and Haythornthwaite brings a structural perspective to the dialog. This week is one that recenters expectations of IT, bringing a calmer approach to the assessment of new technologies’ influence. After initial research, clear evidence of stark transformations wrought by IT simply has simply not been isolated. Instead, the role IT has in reshaping the patterns of modern life are more nuanced and must be understood as supplementary not revolutionary.

The Quan-Hasse and Haythornthwaite pieces appear to emerge from the same incubator: Barry Wellman. (I could be wrong here; if the tie isn’t direct, however, it still seems very strong.) These are social network articles, and the questions posed essentially revolve around the ways that IT reconfigure social networks. Quan-Hasse finds many intuitive results that, when taken together, suggest that people have added IT to their communication toolbox and use it when appropriate but are not developing wholly new patterns of socializing or engaging with civic/political issues. (As a sidenote, I looked the other day to see if there were meetups forming yet for any of the Philly mayoral candidates. Not only were there none formed around the mayoral campaign, there were basically no politically-oriented meetups for all of Philadelphia. Grassroots organizing revolutionized? It seems not…) The findings in the Quan-Hasse piece are all very believable—even though they are spawned by a web-based survey from National Geographic’s website.

Similarly, the Haythornthwaite (is there a missing hyphen or something?) article basically makes this argument: the medium is the tie—at least in terms of weak ties. She qualifies a bit so that it’s isn’t quite 100% deterministic, but her point holds: listservs (or other media) constitute the weak or latent ties themselves and, if for some reason, the listserv is killed so is the tie. Strong ties are marked by path redundancy, which both prevents elimination and acts as a characteristic for us to identify/distinguish weak/strong ties. Academic listservs seem to be an ideal example of her thesis: a group of individuals share a common space, see each other interacting from a distance, and, given the right stimuli, may connect directly. Take away the interactive space, and the relationship collapses. Except that I disagree. It’s not the medium, in my opinion, that sustains weak ties like this—it’s the commonality that makes the medium (listserv) mutually relevant. Even without the listserv, as a scholar I’ll have a vague idea (aka weak tie) that a colleague exists based on conferences, publications, or shared contacts. This redundancy is characteristic of strong ties in Haythornthwaite’s scheme—yet it seems like weak ties may have latent redundancy as well.

In two articles, Robinson bring time-budget data in to discuss how internet use reshapes daily life. Basically, he finds very little—and suggests that IT is nowhere near as revolutionary as TV. I think this comparison and conclusion is misleading; it may be true that the internet has caused a less dramatic shift in life patterns but the context of the comparison is important as well. The Robinson TV studies begin with data from the mid-1960s—twenty years after television was launched in America. The internet data was collected about 5 years after the launch of the WWW in the US. Television entered a home-media atmosphere that was barren compared to the environment internet was met by. Additionally, there are very few jobs that integrate TV in a fundamental way; the internet, in comparison, is a vital element of the workplace. Essentially, direct comparisons should not be made. Ultimately, Robinson etc. arrive at very similar conclusions to Quan-Hasse and the Wellman camp: the internet is a part of life, but it’s not earth-shattering.

In a way, it seems like these readings echo the minimal effects period of mass-communication research. Having started out with Rheingold’s hypodermic-syringe shoot-up-the-internet-and-get-utopian model, the researchers above now have a more tempered approach. Perhaps a Zaller-esque return to massive effects will happen farther down the line in this silo of research—or maybe the massive effects of the internet will simply be felt in other venues. The IT revolution of work, manufacturing, and productivity seems like one place—also predicted by Castells—that this case could already be made today. Even IT is supplemental for now in the social sphere, the generations weened on it may make it more central. Time will tell.

1. In the Quan-Hasse piece, it is claimed that the respondents to the web-survey did not differ significantly from the GSS samples—and then its mentioned later that 23% of the respondents had a graduate degree. What’s going on here? Can web surveys ever be trusted anyways because of the self-selection? What if this survey had been administered on a wider array of sites and not just a high-falutin’ magazine’s page?

2. Imagine a world in which the internet preceded television. What kind of effect would the ‘net have had on society then? Would the interactive character of the net have mitigated the decline in activity that Putnam ascribes to TV or not?

3. Results in both the Robinson and Quan-Hasse pieces control for age, race, education etc etc. Yet, even after this, the results almost always seem to have an intuitive tint that could be imputed to age differences. Is it possible that generational factors are totally skewing these studies even after ‘holding them constant’?