JCMC: The Discussion Section

Nicole Ellison 0:02
ICA presents.

Welcome to JCMC: The Discussion Section, a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. I'm Nicole Ellison, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication. I'm so pleased to have with me today the authors of a paper that was recently published in the journal titled "A Typology of Social Media Rituals." This paper lays the groundwork for understanding social media participation and digital communicative practices. Before we begin discussing the paper and related topics, let me introduce the authors and today's guests. First from Israel, we have Limor Shifman. Limor is a professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Vice Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences. Limor is also currently leading the European Research Council-funded project "Digital Values", which aims to understand how users construct value through social media content and how platforms themselves factor into the promotion or hindrance of these values. Next, from the US, we have Blake Hallinan. Blake is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the "Digital Values" project and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Blake is also the current Art Director for "Cultural Studies". And finally, from Italy, we have Tomasso Trillò. Tommaso is also a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as part of the "Digital Values" project, with his contributions primarily focusing on mimetic photography. With that, welcome to our truly international communication scholars and authors. To begin, what are rituals?

Tomasso Trillò 1:51
We define social media rituals as communicative practices on social media that formalize and express shared values. A good example would be rituals of demotion, such as Karen YouTube videos or customer complaint tweets that seek to lower the status of something or someone. They mostly do this by calling out unacceptable behavior or substandard service. By doing that, they try to inspire people to comply with shared standards of conduct and uphold social norms.

Blake Hallinan 2:22
There's a lot of research about rituals. What we try to do in this paper is start from some of the original early scholarship on rituals, I think of Durkheim here, and the kind of work that rituals do in bringing communities together, giving them a sense of who they are, how they relate to other people, what they care about, and then tracing how these ritual practices have changed along the way, alongside developments in communication technology. There is a real shift in the research, at least in media and communication studies, with Dayan and Katz's work on media events. These big moments that interrupt what's being broadcast, interrupt our daily lives, bring us all together and make us care about something. A royal wedding being one of the iconic examples here. Media events tended to be these big things bringing nations together or bringing people across many nations together, social media changes the scales at which communication can happen. We still have these big momentous occasions where everyone seems to be talking about the same thing. Think of celebrity funerals. A major celebrity figure dies and everyone's talking about what that person meant to them and sharing their experiences on different platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, so on. But there are also these little rituals that we have, that maybe are just for us, just for a few people that we are interacting with. The social media ritual is something that crosses scales from a really small community to potentially a global community, interacting or working out what those values are.

Limor Shifman 4:09
For social media rituals, we build a lot on the work of Jean Burgess. We're not the first to invoke the concept. But what we really tried to do is to find a way to systematize our approach towards it and to create a typology that would be encompassing almost any user-generated content type we can find online. Another thing that we found is that we can think about values, not only in terms of what people think is important in life but also what people think is important about communication. We defined in this article the idea of communicative values. When people communicate through social media rituals, they also invoke those values about communication. And I think this notion of communicative values could also be generative in thinking about different platforms, cultures, and the ways in which social media promotes certain types of communication.

Nicole Ellison 5:06
Could you say a little bit more about this specific paper and what you were trying to do with this particular paper?

Blake Hallinan 5:06
When people share something to social media, that doesn't exist in a vacuum. There are many ways of thinking about the different patterns between the types of things people do share, create. With our focus on values, we looked at different literature on social media rituals and then all of this research on different genres of social media content to figure out some way of organizing and making sense of all of that together. So, the main thing that the paper does is develop this typology to identify different types of rituals that many genres of content may fall within. The typology we developed includes 16 different rituals. Each ritual has exemplary genres you might associate with them and they each promote particular values. In creating this kind of action, putting up something for promotion, putting up something for demotion, they bring these values forward and share them through the content that they make on social media.

Nicole Ellison 6:17
So the same event, say celebrity death, could be part of different rituals depending on who the producer of that social media content is?

Tomasso Trillò 6:28
Depending on who posts, what the inflection of the message is, and what their intentions are, the same genre could fall in different rituals or could bring together two separate rituals. It could be a ritual of demotion, "This celebrity that died really sucked, I really didn't like their work, I really didn't like their music." Or it could be a ritual or promotion, like commemorating this person by promoting some of their lesser-known work.

Nicole Ellison 6:50
And that's where a connection to the values comes in.

Blake Hallinan 6:52
The control over meaning that might happen with a broadcast production on television, isn't there with the events that happen on social media, or not to the same degree. Messiness of meaning is something that is an inherent part of the social media ritual. When it's a distributed event with anyone capable of joining in with it, it can and does mean a lot of different things. And so looking at these individual practices that make up the event helps us understand what rituals are coming together within the event. And the different values at work.

Nicole Ellison 7:28
What was the kind of original impetus for the project?

Speaker 4 7:31
The project was actually born out of failure. The original plan was to sample user-generated genres, in five languages, in order to then look at the values embedded in them. But what we found out that after a long period of sampling and surveying is that genres are both ubiquitous and also ephemeral; there is like a mystery box genre that is popular one day and then disappears another day. We were looking for a way to categorize content online, which would be more enduring, and more robust than thinking through genres. Fortunately, we had a meeting with our international advisory board of the project and we brainstormed this idea of trying to think about social media rituals.

Nicole Ellison 7:46
What was most surprising to you about your findings?

Tomasso Trillò 8:26
To me, the most surprising thing is how patterned social media content ended up being once we looked at it through the lens of ritual. In the empirical work that we did to corroborate our typology, we ended up sampling more than 500 social media genres. In the work that we did thereafter, we were able to sort almost all of them into one or more of the 16 ritual types in our typology.

Blake Hallinan 8:50
I've created this language I'm seeing everywhere. The other thing that was surprising to me was how enduring some ritual forms are. Things like rituals of commemoration exist on social media, broadcast media, in forms of close interaction, not mediated through any kind of computer- mediated technology at all.

Nicole Ellison 9:15
I was thinking about the first two sentences of your abstract where you talk about how this universe of user-generated content seems chaotic yet it is structured by these deep-rooted patterns of communication. I guess I'm just curious, if there are any social media rituals that you think are especially emblematic of this contemporary moment?

Blake Hallinan 9:36
I think rituals of disclosure are really emblematic of the technological affordances of many forms of communication people are doing. You have ubiquitous cameras on you, you can see things, you share things, record things, you can live stream. It has taken on this kind of cultural significance in terms of the entertainment ecosystem. I think that there's also a lot of political applications of rituals of disclosure. People filming the police, for example. Sometimes this can be directed towards anyone, but sometimes it's also directed upwards towards people in power or forms of institutions. And so people looking at things that politicians have said before, trying to leverage visibility on social media as a political tool, and as a power in itself, I think is something that is really happening all the time and potentially politically important.

Tomasso Trillò 10:31
The ubiquitous presence of smartphone cameras has changed rituals of transformation. Rituals of transformation used to be mostly ceremonies marking the passage from a status to another: bar mitzvahs, marriages, transitions from A to B, from past status to another. In our work, we noticed that most rituals of transformation document step-by-step the transformation through time or through the exertion of skill of something or someone as it happens.

Nicole Ellison 11:02
How do these rituals become rituals? How do they become shared?

Speaker 4 11:08
We're all much more conformistic than we care to admit. We keep seeing others doing things and we repeat what they're doing because we want social gratification and acknowledgement. Most of the rituals are just well ingrained in culture in general. Thinking about demotion, promotion, transformation, in one way or another people always cared about those things and always did those things. What's new is how they're enacted and their visibility, now enhancing certain aspects of each one of those rituals. But the need to perform those rituals, rituals of affiliation, commemoration, there's ingrained in us as humans.

Blake Hallinan 11:52
The way that these rituals manifest on social media is not fully explained by social media itself. In one of the studies that we've done related to this work, the ritual of pledging, so looking at New Year's resolutions on Twitter in five different languages, some of the parts of the script were shared in all of the languages, "Here's what I'm going to do for the new year, this is my sincere resolution." But we found in English tweets and Italian tweets a lot of people dunking on others, kind of rituals of demotion, "You're not going to change, your resolutions are terrible." And we looked for that in German, Korean, and Japanese and we did not find that script operating there. Something about the language culture on Twitter, maybe beyond Twitter, means that there were differences in how they participated there.

Nicole Ellison 12:45
Where do you see this work potentially going from here? What are some ways that you think other scholars might pick up this foundation that you've laid and this system for understanding and categorizing rituals?

Tomasso Trillò 13:00
Our hope is that our typology could be used as a tool for comparative analysis. We envision two ways for that comparative analysis to happen. One would be comparisons across platforms. For example, it will be very interesting to see a study that compares rituals of disclosure as they're performed by users of YouTube, Tiktok, and Instagram, because that same ritual might take very different incarnations. The other lens that we envisioned for comparative studies using our typology will be that of cross-cultural comparisons. For example, investigating the relative presence of rituals in some places, and not in others.

Speaker 4 13:37
More specifically for our project, we started off this paper because we needed a tool to organize user-generated content. And what we will do now is bring this typology back to the project and we plan to sample from each ritual types a couple of genres across the five languages that we're working with, in order to actually conduct this comparison. And then we could for instance, look at Mom Vlogs and how the values in Mom Vlogs differ between Japanese, Korean and German.

Nicole Ellison 14:11
I'm wondering if each of you has a favorite social media ritual, and if so, what is it?

Blake Hallinan 14:18
I have different rituals that I love on different platforms. YouTube is all about rituals of evaluation; I want to see reviews, cultural commentary, anything that's happening there, I'll watch it and really enjoy it. Twitter, I want to see promotion and demotion, so all of your new papers that are published, your new podcast episodes, I love getting that news. And then Tik Tok, something that's tastes signaling.

Tomasso Trillò 14:41
My favorite ritual would be rituals of subjectification. I find quite interesting the work that goes into the construction of a "self" that feels authentic to the user constructing it. I am especially interested in the negotiation that is inherent in this self-construction between conformity to recognizable social categories, in order to be readable by the platform and by the users that end up liking your posts or end up sharing your content, as well as the need for genuine self-expression that goes in there. Rituals of subjectification really speak to this tension that is also inherent to digital culture and life in digital platforms more broadly and I found that very fascinating.

Speaker 4 15:23
Can I invoke a ritual that I dislike? So the one that I really dislike is rituals of sensation, and particularly ASMR. I just don't get them. I know that as a digital scholar, I need to be open, identify those rituals, but I just don't get those, whereas all the other rituals I can relate to, in a way.

Nicole Ellison 15:49
What you've all talked about is differences across platforms and how they tend to map onto the different rituals. And I guess I'm just curious to hear you talk a little bit about what you think is the most productive lens for thinking about why different platforms may be more likely to include some rituals versus others. For instance, I could see potentially it being about the affordances of the platform, the fact that there's different users that tend to gravitate to different platforms, generational differences, the origins of the platform may come into play.

Speaker 4 16:30
We made a joke about how we demote on Twitter and promote on Instagram. I do think there are strong affiliations between some types of rituals and some platforms. It's a combination of all the factors that you have invoked plus particular national or subcultural characteristics of use.

Blake Hallinan 16:55
There's a lot of interesting work around the perceptual component of affordances and how that depends on who's doing the perceiving about what this platform could do. One of the things that's come up in the research that we've done so far is that there can be quite meaningful cultural differences in those perceptions.

Tomasso Trillò 17:15
What rituals are imagined as popular on what platforms really depends on platform cultures, and subcultures, and demographics that are associated with different platforms. I am working on a paper on Good Morning memes, the memes that are shared with the kitsch images and good morning message. We did interviews around those and turns out that a lot of people associate them with Facebook or WhatsApp, depending on the country, but consistently with older people. The aesthetic that coalesces around the specific aesthetic of those memes imagined as belonging to older generation, and either platform, could be called "Facebookesque". One of our interviews actually called it "Facebookesque", which I found quite evocative and quite poignant as a way of describing what is imagined as belonging on Facebook and what rituals are imagined as belonging where. The Instagram aesthetic that has been spoken about in a lot of forums is mostly associated with millennial youth and Tik Tok dance challenges are strongly associated with Gen Z. This association between genre-platform-generation is very strong.

Nicole Ellison 18:23
That make's me think a little bit about the way in which these rituals may or may not be found in newer communication technologies, such as augmented or virtual reality, which have very different affordances than social media in many ways, in terms of persistence and synchronicity, are two that come to mind. Any thoughts on how this framework might apply to newer technologies that aren't necessarily social media per se?

Blake Hallinan 18:54
There is research on computer-mediated rituals before the big rise of social media that may be more relevant to what's coming in terms of augmented and virtual reality. I'm thinking particularly of Ken Hillis' work on digital rituals, because it deals with some synchronous forms of interaction, whether on Second Life or other early virtual platforms. One of the things that really distinguishes virtual and augmented reality is the sense of people interacting at the same time, even if not the same place. And something that really changes when it comes to social media is making forms of presentation, particularly ways of communicating on social media that let people participate over extended periods of time. There are moments when everyone's talking about the same thing and maybe participating in the sense that way. Hashtags can do some of this on Twitter, but a lot of it is something that is put out there. people encounter it later, then make sense of it, interact with it. And you have this really ritualized interaction distributed both over space and time.

Nicole Ellison 20:08
What related projects are you working on now or will work on next?

Speaker 4 20:12
What we're trying to do now is use this framework as a working tool. I see this not as the last typology but maybe at first in a series of trying to think broadly about social media in big categories. What we're trying to do now is actually look at specific ritual types and see if different cultures perform them in different ways. Our plan is to do it with many genres. The idea is to take this dual lens of platforms and cultures and try to see whether they produce different meanings when they execute those rituals.

Blake Hallinan 20:53
The case study that I'm focusing on right now is rituals of evaluation. We argue that rituals of evaluation promote the values of knowledge and excellence but how people indicate they have knowledge, what type of knowledge is relevant, and then what counts as excellence can really vary. So what I'm doing with the first project is looking at review videos in English across different types, makeup products, tech products, video games, movies, and seeing the justifications that people offer for what makes something good and not so good, and how they position themselves as reviewers. Are values as you but beauty YouTube completely different than video getting YouTube? Or are there things that are shared broadly against people making review videos on YouTube? After that is sorted out I want to do a follow-up study comparing videos in different languages as well, then moving from beyond different areas of interest on the platform to different languages, cultural backgrounds.

Tomasso Trillò 21:55
Since we mentioned them, I'm currently working on a project on Good Morning memes which could be conceptualized as rituals of relationship work, because they work towards maintaining a dyadic or group relationship between the sender and the receiver or the receivers. I'm also working on another project focusing on rituals of promotion through hashtag values on Instagram.

Nicole Ellison 22:15
Thank you all so much for sharing your work with the JCMC readership and podcast-listening audience. I really enjoyed this piece and I'm so excited to see where it goes. So, thank you again. JCMC: The Discussion Section is a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. Our producer is Sharlene Burgos. Our executive producer DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Nicholas Rowe. Please check the show notes in the episode description to learn more about me, the articles we discuss, and JCMC: The Discussion Section. Thanks for listening!