JCMC Ep: 1

SONIC Northwestern23min

Nicole Ellison

00:02

ICA presents...

Nicole Ellison

00:16

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.

Nicole Ellison

02:44

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

03:03

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

03:56

Great. Thank you, Katy.

Katy E. Pearce

03:58

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.

Processing audio...