From the International Communication Association podcast network, welcome to this episode of JCMC: The Discussion Section.
In this series, we discuss scholarship about Computer-Mediated Communication in its various forms, as well as related topics such as how we develop communication as technology scholars, mentors, and good citizens of the broader community. My name is Scott W. Campbell, and I am the Constance F. and Arnold C. Pohs Professor of Telecommunication at the University of Michigan, as well as an Associate Editor for JCMC, the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication.
Today, we have the pleasure of being joined by Will Marler and Adriana de Souza e Silva.
Addressing marginalization has become an increasingly important goal in communication scholarship, and as scholars who do innovative and important work with marginalized communities, I'm excited to have you both on this podcast. Please introduce yourselves: tell us who you are, and where you are.
Thanks for having me! I'm Adriana de Souza e Silva and I'm a professor of Communication at NC State University. Right now, I'm in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where I'm from, visiting my family.
Hi, my name is Will Marler, and I'm an assistant professor of Communication and Cognition at Tilburg University. Thanks Scott, for making this space available.
I'm excited about this podcast. As you know, we're only starting to recognize and grapple with a lot of different dimensions of marginalization. What are some of the salient aspects of marginalization when it comes to today's digital media environment?
I've been thinking about marginalization from a historical perspective: a look at the relationship with how people use technology connected to this view of “digital divide”. That's been my focus, because you can look at marginalization from different perspectives. There are some people who have access to technology, and others don't; or, some have different accesses. Normally, the study about the use of these technologies has been framed as “adoption” – that people use technologies that are produced by designers – or sometimes “appropriation” – that people can use technology in some different ways, but, still, they're using technologies that are produced from somebody outside their communities. This “top down view” between people and technology has always been really strong in how people understand and study marginalized societies and their relationship with technology.
In digital media, a lot of us have different backgrounds/scholarly approaches to understanding similar questions. In the context of computer-mediated communication starting in the late 90s and 2000s, the study of marginalization around this question of, “Can we get everyone online? And if not, who is not online?” was the early and reasonable approach to thinking about computer-mediated communication and inequality. That question of “digital divide” became more nuanced with Eszter Hargittai, Alexander Van Dursen, Jose van Dijk – lots of researchers trying to connect social context and background, to different uses and different outcomes of digital technology use. That was the first layer of complexity moving into the digital world. There was a transition to thinking about what Seeta Peña Gangadharan has called “The Downside of Digital Inclusion”. There's been an explosion of research, in the past 5 to 10 years especially, to think about the two-sided coin of digital inclusion, such that now maybe our efforts are best spent thinking about “What are the risks of digital inclusion in a privacy poor, surveillance rich digital world?” I see lots of nuances throughout that.
Moving away from the basic assumption that technology equals progress.
Exactly. As Will said, initially this perspective was very “technocratic”, especially in mobile communication. Basically, there was an assumption that having access to a cell phone, or to a basic internet connection, would improve their lives. Studies that question, and are critical of, this perspective, see this relationship more as “having access to technology sometimes gets embedded into already existing power relationships, and doesn't necessarily improve people’s lives, and actually reinforces some of the existing exclusions”. I think the big challenge now is to think, “What's the solution?”. It's obviously not not having access to technology, but how can people create their own technologies, or have different kinds of access? Maybe the goal is not to improve their lives. It's actually understanding how social life is created, and how technology is part of their lives.
You used the word several times – “create”, “created”, “creation”. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the way that creativity provides a sense of agency at the most localized level for people to overcome issues of marginalization as it's reflected in your work.
I think this is a great transition, Scott. As technology researchers, we know that people, and users, are instrumental in making technology meaningful to them. I think it's important to understand what agency people who are marginalized have within this broader structure of inequality. In my own research, when I was conducting fieldwork in Chicago with people experiencing homelessness, I noticed that people living on the street would often carry several phones with them, and this was interpreted in the popular discourse as “entitlement”, as “criminality” (taking advantage of government funds to buy multiple phones). But what I came to learn was that more often people needed multiple phones in order to approximate that single phone that I brought with me into the field from my own place of privilege – a phone to do texting on, another phone that would actually have better internet capabilities, which folks in Chicago would use to go into a Starbucks (as long as they could stay there) and use the Wi Fi. And it helped me understand that people cobbled together these strategies here, and that basic level of access to the Internet, in order to do what other communities of more privilege do without thinking twice.
I think that the work that you've done, especially in precariously-housed individuals in Chicago, is really innovative. We're starting to see more of it now in different parts of the world.
I need to tell you a little bit of how I got to using the word “creativity”. I was early on, very inspired by François Bar’s work on appropriation. He talks about a practice called “cannibalism”. When you “cannibalize” things that you get from other cultures and subvert their meanings. About 10 years ago, we decided to do a study on people who lived in slums in Rio, to understand the way that they would use cell phones. We did interviews in three different slums. We learned people have different SIM cards, and would change the SIM card on the phone with different cell phone providers to call in different times when it's cheaper. And that actually influenced the design of technology, because people started designing cell phones with multiple SIM cards. In Brazil, you could add four different SIM cards and switch the SIM card depending on your carrier, the phone provider you wanted to use, or the time of the day. This reverse relationship, when users influence designers, was an interesting thing. A lot of times, creativity is understood from an individual perspective, but, in fact, those things normally emerge from the connections among people, and how they behave in their communities, and how they want to improve their communities.
Creativity can sometimes get marginalized as a research interest; not when it's positioned as something that socially brings about cohesion, but in terms of how it relates to agency and social structure. I think “creativities”, even creating games and art, sometimes is cast on the margins, and I'm wondering what else you might see down the road as places that we need to look for pushing this area forward?
The first would be thinking about social media as a domain for marginalization, but also amplification of marginalized voices. There's a lot of interesting work out there on the question of, “Does social media provide a platform for (let's say) LGBTQ communities to connect, to find support?”. Amy Gonzalez and Niki Fritz have done interesting work on the trans community, and crowdfunding on the margins: what do social network sites, and social media platforms, mean for people's ability to support themselves and represent themselves? That's an area that’ll continue to grow in importance. It really taps into the mainstream interests that we have as scholars of computer-mediated communication and social media, but maybe we can learn from people on the margins, as well. In the line of the downsides of digital inclusion, there's a ton of important work just in the past five or ten years, on algorithmic profiling; on privacy-poor, surveillance-rich environments that marginalized the individuals are either especially susceptible to, or deceptible to the risks of the ways that governments are taking advantage of streamlined algorithmic, apparently neutral and objective, but not in reality, systems to manage the poor, often to the detriment of those people's ability to access resources. So, it's important to look at social media as a space for marginalization, but also as a tool to combat that. And also, algorithms and profiling as a new and emerging domain that scholars can contribute to better understanding.
Yeah, I was thinking, sometimes, people really within their research fields don't look outside. For example, in computer-mediated communication, there's a whole set of literature on that topic; or in mobiles for development. There’re sets of theories that people use, but they don't communicate with other fields. I think putting those bodies of literature in conversation with each other is important, and also trying to decenter from a Global North theoretical perspective. For example, there are lots of interesting sociological theories from Brazil: anthropologist Roberto DaMatta talked about this concept “jeitinho”, a way of circumventing of being creative, to go against rules, and establish rules as being an inherent characteristic of Brazilian people, because we, since colonial times were prone and used to deal with adversities. That led to some other idea, “gambiarra”, which is “working around things” with difficult resources. For example, people in slums normally “steal” their utility services, like electricity and gas, from the “asphalt world”, or the main city, because they are not provided this basic service. So if you go into slums, there are lots of lampposts with lots of wires with clandestine connections so that people can get these services for free. They have right to the service. They're just not provided, so they find a creative way to work around it. Also, de-center this dichotomy. For example, we have this comparative study about Pokémon GO play between Rio and Nairobi, which are completely different cities from an outsider perspective, with different colonial histories and different cultures, but we found a lot of similarities in how people would play games, and walk around urban spaces, and use technologies. Understanding that sometimes differences are not that much culture, but socioeconomic. Understanding some of these creative uses embedded into issues of power, colonialism, et cetera.
I'm curious about what we can do institutionally as a field, what we as scholars, organizationally, can do with our voice to help push things forward?
First thing is more individual research to go in the field and get involved with these communities. For example, there is this recent work that I've been doing with this dashboard on COVID-19 cases in the slums in Rio. This is a project where people were producing their data about COVID-19 cases via WhatsApp to build this map of the pandemic in the slums. Instead of being a top-down government initiative, the very people in the communities were creating those representations, those data, to pressure governments, to have some influence. I started participating in their meetings and talking to these people; so it's not just about collecting data, it's actually being involved into the community’s lives and trying to figure out ways to help them. I think a big challenge for us is language. ICA journals are normally in English, but a lot of people in other countries don't have a good level of English to write papers, and often they're rejected because of their language issues. So thinking of ways that we can encourage researchers that they can either publish in their native languages, or having help with translations. We need to think of ways to be inclusive. A lot of times in other countries, universities just simply don't have money to subscribe to journals, so investing in open access journals and investing in democratizing language is a big thing.
Having an open access journal is huge. I was thinking about citations, because the way that we often give visibility to scholars is, unfortunately, through a Google Scholar search, which then returns the “most popular cited” and creates this effect where the rich get richer. A well-intentioned community of us are interested in citing, and raising the profile of scholars who are outside of the mainstream universities. There's a lot of great research that's been published in JCMC, and that means something is working well. I do agree with Adriana that there's some means of capacity building for these fantastic scholars that are interested in publishing in these journals, but don't have that cultural and social context and resources. That certainly was easier for me coming out of the American university system to know how to write in this genre of a publication, and how to connect with advisors more close at hand. A mentorship program that connect people with more resources in the academy with those in the Global South, could be really interesting to explore.
One way to include both researchers from other countries and backgrounds, but also these marginalized communities, is to publish research, and develop projects, in different formats. For example, we have this mobile network creativity project that we're trying to collect examples of creative practices with technologies, and the idea is that I want people to submit their examples. So I'm trying to create in different languages to give to people in slums, gathering information from the communities, giving visibility to their way of life, so that people become more aware of how creative practices unfold in different contexts. The goal is to create a visualization, or a way of mapping those practices. And that, in academia, should be given the same value as publishing in a journal and citations, so that we, as academics, can have more conversations with regular people and not just be talking among ourselves. ICA and JCMC doing this podcast is a great step in that direction, because it's a different way of making our scholarship available and public. That's not just an academic journal.
Another thing I will suggest – this is a little bit of a COVID silver lining – is that the way we've adjusted to it with our technology, (speaking of CMC), has paved the way for us to relook at the traditional boundaries that have defined our workshops, our research groups, our collaborations, and our mentorship relationships. As a result of COVID, life went online – my research went online, my work went online – and as it went online, the boundaries of time and space eroded. There is a silver lining to recognize, that we are less tied to our institutional boundaries now; we can open ourselves up, bring more voices in, and bring more perspectives in. And it can also widen what we pay attention to. The reason why we're paying attention to these journals, is partially because of tradition, and we can change those traditions.
This is extremely important. When we're talking about marginalization in COVID, it's important to think how we are talking from a very privileged position, because we have access to this computer and Zoom, and we can cross time and space; but for most people in the world, COVID was actually a struggle. People who live in slums, their struggle was they don't have the option to work remotely, so it was a really difficult situation. And one of the interesting things to think about is how they started using a lot of the technologies that were already embedded in their daily lives, like cell phones and WhatsApp to do services like telehealth. There are a lot of ways to think how COVID impacted lives in marginalized communities, and how can they use not just static technologies like Zoom, but like WhatsApp and mobile technologies to manage their mobility. That's important to talk about these different types of access, too, and how it impacted different lives depending on socioeconomic perspectives and backgrounds.
Creative ethnography, going into communities, like Adriana mentioned, can allow us to see that, even within the context of marginalization, people do have that room to maneuver, which is important to understand, and also teaches us more about their lives. I think the challenge of those of us who study marginalization is to relate what we're studying to get attention within the broader field of digital media studies, by showing that not only are we studying an “edge case”, or the periphery, but also that we're studying mediated communication processes that are at the core of what we're interested in when we think about people and technology. We can think about organizing panels, or thinking about thematics, in the sense of a marginalized case, as teaching us about those core processes, whether that is self-presentation, social support, access and uses. Even as we think about all the new technologies that allow for further marginalization – big data and algorithms, surveillance and policing, a new “regime” of digital tools that can be a downside of digital inclusion.
I think Will hit the nail in the head there, talking about how marginalization shouldn't be a separate thing. A lot of technology/computer-mediated studies started with scholars in the United States and Europe, and focused on those privileged communities. Then the study of people in underprivileged communities became the “other”. But, the fact is, the “other” is the majority of people in the world. So the margins shouldn’t be the minority of people who have access, means, and economic power to use technology, because most of the world doesn't. So that's the perspective that needs to be changed. The other thing is, sometimes there's a very negative connotation in studies of marginalization: people don't have money to use technology, they have difficult access; the risks, the subversion. A lot of studies on technology use in the Global South are talking about entrepreneurship – how taking technologies to these people leads to development in situations of hardship – but what about the artistic creative uses. There are different kinds of uses that are often under-explored. That's also important.
This has been fantastic. I want to thank you, Adrianna, and well for joining us on this podcast. It was a pleasure for me.
JCMC:The Discussion Section is a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. Our producer is Jo Lampert. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Nicholas Rowe. Please check the show notes in the episode description to learn more about me, my guests, and JCMC: The Discussion Section overall. Thanks for listening!
