JCMC: The Discussion Section

Nicole Ellison 0:02
ICA presents...

Welcome to JCMC: The Discussion Section, produced by the International Communication Association Podcast Network. I'm Nicole Ellison, the editor-in-chief of JCMC, and today I have with me three of JCMC’s associate editors, all of whom have thought deeply about theorizing CMC in their own scholarship. Through their involvement with ICA’s Communication and Technology Division they also have keen insight into the field and how it's evolved over time. We thought it would be fun to kick off the series by engaging with the question of how we theorize social media. And of course, as part of this discussion, we need to define and clarify what we mean when we say social media. This was part of the rationale for danah boyd in my early 2007 JCMC special issue on social network sites, where researchers were using the term social network site to mean different things or were using other terms when referring to social network sites. And we saw that it was really limiting our ability to theorize and do cross-disciplinary work in a meaningful way. But above and beyond definitions, what are some productive ways to think about theory in this space? I think there's some unique attributes of the social media space that make it especially challenging. For instance, the rapid rate at which social media platforms are evolving, and the fact that every user’s social media experience is algorithmically shaped and therefore idiosyncratic, which is another challenge for theorizing and our methods as well, but we'll leave that discussion for another episode. Without further ado, let me introduce our guests. Lee Humphreys is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Cornell University. Her research interests include mobile and social media, and the ways people incorporate communication technology into their everyday lives. Katy E. Pearce is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington and holds affiliations with the Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies in the Center for an Informed Public. Her research focuses on social and political uses of technologies and digital content in transitioning democracies and semi-authoritarian states. Finally, Caleb T. Carr is a Professor of Communication at Illinois State University. He researches how new media alter communicative processes, including how social media are used to create and maintain identity online for organizational uncertainty reduction and in group collaborations. Great! Welcome all.

So, let's talk a little bit about Computer Mediated Communication and/or social media in 2022. Is there anything that's part of the social media landscape in 2022, that you wouldn't have thought of or mentioned a decade ago? How would you characterize the current social media landscape from a theorizing perspective? Caleb, do you want to start?

Caleb Carr 3:03
I think I'll start with the point that I think the landscape is murkier. We didn't think 10 or 15 years ago that social media would be ubiquitous with CMC. And yet increasingly, we see people say social media, and they mean the sweep of anything online or vice versa. And I think sometimes we cognitively know we're still there, but theoretically, we forget about things like email and messaging and group chats in favor of social media. And so, we do all this theorizing about social media and think, “Oh, this is new.” And what you're really describing is a group chat in a social media platform, which is, in fact, kind of old. And so that's an interesting part to me. The other thing, in 2015, Becky Hayes and I wrote a definition about what are social media, which has been, I think, well received and that's nice. And we laid out some stipulations with what we thought social media were and would be in the coming years. And the place that I've seen that break actually is in the infrastructure, not so much the communicative use.

Nicole Ellison 3:56
Great. Thank you, Katy.

Katy E. Pearce 3:58
I think, and Caleb had mentioned this a little bit, but the growth and the popularity of more private social media, like WhatsApp, like closed groups on Facebook – these are incredibly important to a lot of people. And I think, given that all of us on this call are based in the US, where they're popular, but not like they are internationally. It's left a real gap in terms of our theorizing. While there are certainly really good empirical papers on specific mobile messaging apps or specific types of private social media – like you mentioned with the 2007 special issue thinking about social networking sites – we need to have that kind of oomph with private social media too, because they're really undertheorized. And they matter a lot because of their more private and potentially more intimate nature. The way that people are engaging with each other in these spaces is quite different than they are in the more public more visible social media spaces that we have been thinking about in the past. And we know that the outcomes are quite severe. We look at all of the good and bad political organizing that has taken place in these spaces – that these places are notorious for being sources of misinformation spreading. And just to hook on to that, these super apps that are very popular in some countries where everything is done through an app, your shopping, your health care, etc. And, you know, we get nervous about the amount of power that Facebook or Google or Microsoft has, but you think about when one app has that much control over daily life, what does that mean? So, I think that what I'd like to see in the coming years is more work within our field – really thinking about how these kinds of spaces are different and how that matters.

Nicole Ellison 6:02
Great, thank you. And I'd love to hear your thoughts, Lee, on this.

Lee Humphreys 6:05
Yeah. So, as someone who came into this field studying mobile phones, I can remember struggling. Can I even send my research paper to JCMC? Because I think, at the time, it felt like it might not be appropriate. And luckily, over time, phones look more like computers so, of course it's appropriate. But I do think it, it really speaks to this larger question of what are the phenomena of interest for our field. And I think the communication aspect is really central. And what exactly the medium is is probably less important in some ways. And so I think the mobile really highlights, and its growth, has continued to highlight the importance of that particular medium in social media and CMC more broadly. I also think that it's really helpful to think historically here as well. All media are social. But there are particular technological features and affordances of social media and CMC that make them unique from other kinds of media. And so I think having historical comparisons can be really helpful, but also in terms of thinking about historical trajectories of practices and policies, more broadly, that shaped the ways that these technologies get adopted and used in everyday life is an important aspect that can shed light on the contemporary even if you're looking at the historic.

Nicole Ellison 7:46
I also struggle a little bit with our role as scholars in the contemporary media environment. And I think, especially with social media, where there is this dominant narrative out there in the public, that personally I don't feel is well aligned with what the science actually says. I'm thinking specifically about work around wellbeing and social media use. And so I would also love to talk a little bit about what our role as scholars should be in this more public narrative, given what you've said about the fact that oftentimes our, academic papers may not be as accessible to journalists or the the general public. And yet these are, parents and teachers and policymakers and everyday users who are trying to understand and calibrate their own use.

Caleb Carr 8:45
If I had to wager, I'm gonna bet that the next 10 years in tertiary education is to public communication of science, as the last 10 or 20 years was to grants. In the last 10 or 20 years, we saw a lot of colleges and universities switch to looking to grants to supplant lost revenue from taxpayers. I think, in particular, the COVID-19 pandemic has shed this light that we need to get better about communicating what we're doing. And Lee’s absolutely right. We've all heard these things where they want to interview us, and the interviewer wants to ask a question, like, “Are social media good?” And the first answer is like, “Well, that depends.” They might have to explain what a moderating variable is and what a mediated moderation model is. And it's never that simple. And I think we need to get better. And part of that's going to be the public facing side. And that's some of what the institutions or the systems seem to do. But I'm also going to say, I think that's what journals need to do and can do better. And I think we're starting to see that in two ways. One, and I believe JCMC has this now, is the inclusion of the lay summary, where we ask authors to include not only the abstract for academic speak, but also like how would you explain this to your ignorant but clever mother? She doesn't have a PhD, but she's a very smart cookie and she can understand what's going on. I think that's helpful. I think the other thing is we need to be a little bit mindful, and I'm not going to argue for gatekeeping here, but cognisant about how we're framing the findings of our research. And I think we as authors, we as editors, we reviewers need to be a little bit more mindful about we're here to tell the truth and not the story we want to find.

Nicole Ellison 10:12
And I think this is exactly the tension between qualifying our science in a way that we as scholars feel comfortable with, yet doing that translation work to the public to do right by the science, but also also share insights in a way that's accessible. And I agree, Caleb, I would love to see more of that and that is a focus for us as a field in the next in the next decade or so. So let's move on and talk a little bit about what some of the up and coming research areas that each of us are excited about. And this might be topics that we'd like to see more of at JCMC, but just in general, what are some contemporary research areas that you're particularly enthusiastic about at the moment? Katy?

Katy E. Pearce 11:01
Well, for me, because I do most of my work outside of the US, I am quite keen on the growth in general and communication on work that comes from outside of North America and Western Europe. And I'd like to see more of it submitted to JCMC. I think that moving towards greater acceptability and also celebration of theorizing from the ground up, that things that are occurring in different cultural environments that really matter. And that people that do work in North America or Western Europe, should be reading this work and get excited about it and learn from it. And there's a lot of bigger questions about understanding that there are different traditions of how we have ways of knowing. There's different traditions in how we conduct research. And this is much bigger than JCMC but I think that social media, computer mediated communication is an area where there might be one of the more easier openings to looking at communication phenomenons that are occurring outside of where most communication research takes place. But so, for listeners out there that are doing global work, please do not be hesitant at all to be submitting to JCMC. There's great opportunities for it. And so that's that's my big hope in the coming years – to see more work that's coming in from different places than we've seen traditionally.

Nicole Ellison 12:40
Great. I agree. 100%. Caleb?

Caleb Carr 12:43
Increasingly, I am interested in post-textual social media. And Dr. Humphreys has reminded me that lots of things, including pictures, can be text – but post alphanumeric sounds very clunky. But for 40 years, all of our CMC theorizing has been predominantly around text based messaging, maybe with the occasional inclusion of like a profile photo. We've seen a little bit start to do theorizing about memes and Brian Spitzberg has done this and sort of how we overlay often different text on the same picture. And so it's still about the text, but our unit of coding is so often about the alphanumeric words and letters noted. And I'm really interested as more of our communication is done audio visually pictographically, pictorially. How do we measure that? How do we theorize that? What does it change about things? That's one very interesting area for me. The other thing that I'm very interested in is sort of the empirical side of media multiplexity. Increasingly, our relationships and our interactions happen across multiple platforms. Media multiplexity is a great theory, that's to say, as our relationships deepen we tend to use more channels. Cool. But methodologically, that's a problem because to trace my relationship with my dear friends, the conversation migrates, and it moves between a social media platform and a texting platform and a coffee talk and a written letter. And we don't have particularly good theorizing yet about, not the use of the platforms, but the migration and the continuation of communication transplatform as it goes between platforms. And I think that's from the human side of communication and technology, the thing I'm particularly interested in the next probably five or 10 years.

Nicole Ellison 14:19
And Lee?

Lee Humphreys 14:21
Yeah, thanks. There's so many different things that I'm excited about. So I think, like Katy, I also am really interested in more knowledge coming from more diverse communities and participants. So certainly outside North America and Western Europe. But even within North America and in Western Europe, I think we can do a much better job of thinking and working more deeply with communities across race, gender, class, ability. And, having grown up on a farm, I'm always interested in questions of rurality in different communities. I will say JCMC recently published a piece by Will Marler about people who are housing insecure and their use of ICTs. I would love to see more submissions around marginalized or precarious populations, because the role of this technology is really important in their lives as well. Another area that I'm really interested in is different kinds of technology beyond maybe just what we think of as social media, but other kinds of communication technology. And even thinking, what does it mean to be thinking about the data that's created through these systems as communication? I'm one of the guest editors on a special issue on sensor mediated communication. What does that even mean? What does it mean to bring communication to these kinds of technologies? I think is going to be really important for our field to maintain relevance, but also we bring a lot to these more technologically oriented fields as well. And then the last kind of research that I'm really excited about is more community based participatory research. We've published things in JCMC demonstrating this, but it would be great to see more.

Nicole Ellison 16:19
Great, thank you. Okay, so just to bring our conversation to a close I would love to finish with a walk down memory lane perhaps. And I know that all of you are published and readers of JCMC and I'm so grateful for your time as AEs. But what are some of your favorite JCMC pieces?

Katy E. Pearce 16:41
For me some of the best pieces…Mirca Madianou had a piece in 2014 about smartphones as polymedia. She's an anthropologist by training and works with Daniel Miller, who's an anthropologist. And it's a big crew of people in the UK that do great work about social media, particularly in different cultural environments. And this piece is really great, because it engages in some deep theorizing about this idea of polymedia – polymedia being something that's bigger than affordances about thinking about media and the larger environment. And in this piece she argues that smartphones, they themselves, are a polymedia environment. And also it's about migrants using smartphones. So, it's a good example of a piece that the theorizing is incredibly relevant for everybody, but the content happens to be about a community that wouldn't necessarily be studied as often. So that's a really good one.

Nicole Ellison 17:41
Great. Thank you. Caleb.

Caleb Carr 17:43
My favorite article is actually one that I got to read as a Master student and have loved and it's an area I don't do. And it's a type of study I don't do. And yet the findings in the way it was done was so interesting and engaging. I think that's a hallmark of a great study. It's a piece by Jonathan Donner on “The Rules of Beeping: Exchanging Messages Via Intentional ‘Missed Calls’ On Mobile Phones”. So this is back in the days where you had minutes on your phone, it wasn't just unlimited and you got charged per minute for a call. So looking at these Rwandan students and microentrepreneurs using basically telegraph signals, via calls and hanging ups and calls and hanging up and therefore not getting charged minutes, to have really intricate meanings. Everything from “Mom, the movies over pick me up at the theater” and beyond. And it's, again, it's a qualitative interview bordering on ethnography. And it's an absolutely brilliant insight into some very daily uses of a common tool that we don't often think of. And then the last thing I'll bring up, because the the question what do I go back to is the very, I think first issue of JCMC, Rafaeli and Sudweeks having a discussion about the nature of interactivity online. And that's something that I probably go back to every three years and just read. It's them chatting, it's having a dialogue about what is interactivity and what does this mean and online media spaces. And it's something that's interesting and inspiring. And just hearing them sort of kick around ideas in a way we get to at conferences, but not often in journals is it's a really neat phenomenon.

Nicole Ellison 19:04
Great. And Lee.

Lee Humphreys 19:06
Yeah, probably one of my favorite pieces in JCMC is the article by Patricia Lange that came out in the special issue that you did back in 2007 with danah, Nicole and its title is “Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube”. And I really enjoyed this piece. And again, continue to come back to it because because it looks at the ways really that users play with publicness and privateness on YouTube, which it’s so interesting to, again, continue to put YouTube in the mix of social media platforms, even though I think it often gets sort of pushed to the side. And interestingly, this was before Google even bought it and and really transformed it. But the main argument is that she found that people on YouTube – there were kind of two camps that they thought about privacy. One, people shared a lot. This is the privately public, they would share a lot about very intimate details. But they hid certain identifiers, like their names or other kind of key attributes. Whereas the publicly private group use their real names, but didn't share anything particularly private. And so one of the reasons why I really liked this is it speaks to this kind of continuum of sharing, but also the continuum of identity markers that we use as we think about navigating these platforms. So it's a great piece.

Nicole Ellison 20:48
I agree. And I think also highlighting privacy issues, which of course, we are now potentially more than ever aware of as both scholars and users. So I'll just chime in and say from that 2007 piece. I'm especially fond of and go back to Judith Donath’s “Signals in Social Supernets” piece, where she's looking at different ways of signaling and verifying identity cues in online spaces. And I think just to circle back around to Caleb's initial comments when we first started this conversation, that these questions of identity and self presentation and veracity and deception and privacy, and that these are all kind of foundational concepts that we are still engaging with today, even though the landscape in 2022 looks so different from 2007. And since we're talking about that piece, I'll also just give a shout out to Susan Herring, who was the editor of JCMC and took a chance on a young, Michigan State University Scholar and I believe danah was still finishing her doctorate at that time, and just gave us the freedom to explore and play with this new area of scholarship. And so I really, I hope that I and all of us as AE’s will be able to engage with that same kind of openness and receptivity to new ideas. So please listeners out there, if you've got a piece that you feel is a big idea piece, maybe a little bit more risky, we would love to see it and to potentially use JCMC as a platform for that kind of thinking and theorizing moving forward. So with that, I will just say thank you to the three of you for for everything, and especially for sharing your thoughts with JCMC: The Discussion Section. So thank you again Katy, Lee and Caleb, and I'll see you online. JCMC: The Discussion Section is a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. Our producer is Maria Caamaño. Our Senior Production Coordinator is Nick Song. Our Executive Producer is Aldo Diaz Caballero. The theme music is by Nicholas Rowe. Please check the show notes in the episode description to learn more about me, the articles we discussed and JCMC: The Discussion Section overall. Thanks for listening!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai