Hello, I'm Ellen Wartella and welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. Today, our architect is Byron Reeves. Byron Reeves is the Policy Emeritus Professor of Communication at Stanford and Professor in the Stanford School of Education. He has a long history of experimental research on the psychological processing of media and resulting responses and effects. Byron recently launched with Stanford colleagues, Nilam Ram and Tom Robinson, the Human Screenome Project, designed to collect moment-by-moment changes in technology use across applications, platforms, and screens. Byron has been involved with research at Microsoft and several technology startups and has been involved with media policy at the FTC, FCC, US Congress, and White House. He is an elected Fellow of the ICA. Today, Byron is in conversation with James Cummings, a faculty member with the Division of Emerging Media Studies at Boston University. And here is Jim Cummings.
Hello, everyone. I have the pleasure of speaking today with Dr. Byron Reeves. Byron has profoundly impacted the perspectives and trajectories of countless students, including myself. During my time as a graduate student in our years of collaborating since, every conversation with Byron has taught me something, given me a new perspective, or if nothing else has led to a few laughs. I expect today's conversation will be no different in that regard. So we'll go ahead and dive right in. Byron, good to see you.
Thank you for the nice introduction.
I was hoping if you could just tell us a little bit about your personal history. How exactly it was that you found yourself entering the field of communication?
It was really pretty gradual. I suppose I was interested early on in making media, music, graphic design arts, even in high school. I remember my high school library, actually was a community library in Webster Groves, Missouri, had a visitor who had just written a book called Understanding Media. And it was Marshall McLuhan, who sat in the library with probably nine other people from the community and I was lurking on the back wall. It was just the fact that somebody could write a book and be considered an intellectual for thinking about media and thinking about people that were making stuff. In college at Southern Methodist University, same thing. Thinking that maybe there was a profession in making media, and soon was self-discouraged from that and wandered into a visual perception course in psychology, which was way beyond my skill or intellectual level at the time, but also it was another indication that there were psychologists that were actually studying what people over in the fine arts center were making, so that was very significant. And then to Michigan State for a PhD and it all went pretty quickly into transition from making to studying.
It makes me wonder. Because media was the driving force, and you knew media wanted to be the focus, did you ever consider psychology as an entrée into this stuff?
I probably thought about a little bit. There were really no mentors or no internet catalog searches for interesting PhD programs. It was just much more casual, probably for everybody back then, because the lack of information. So no, I didn't really seriously consider that I had not taken the courses or talked to the people or gone to the places that would have let that happen. I don't even think we were saying the word psychological at the time, though. What are people thinking about when they make and process this stuff?
So without the formal mentors, then once you did find yourself in your PhD program, how did that start to play out? Who were some of the people that were inspiring you or serving as mentors formally or informally at that point?
It was a really active program. This is back in the late 60s, early 70s at Michigan State, and it was one of the founding programs of the field, I would say. They had a big PhD class, they had a College of Communication, even at that time with different departments, they had a dean, and I went in to study with Bradley Greenberg as my advisor. I'm not sure the exact number, there were 20 other students there. And within a couple of quarters soon to be a dozen, and then maybe down to ten. It was very competitive, and I just knew a lot of these students knew exactly what was coming for them and the competition to be on research teams and for advisors. And I had had a BFA and knew very little. So, I think that it was inoculated against some of the major pressures that are but it was really an active time and the field was trying to figure out what they were about and how to define basic concepts. But it was just a really interesting time. Looking back on it, substantially different than a PhD experience is now.
What would have made it so different back then?
It was just, what is the field? What is the right definition of communication? What are the different areas? How do the areas relate to each other? How do we relate to other social science units? Media topics were prominent, but it was very insular. No one was doing citation counts at that time, because I'm not sure there was digitization of anything at that time, but I'll bet all the citations were insular and not a whole lot of crosstalk, which is just the way it is now, for a much better situation.
I think right now, maybe the pendulum is probably swung pretty far in the other direction in terms of quantifying metrics and things like that. There was another comment you had made there about the beginning of your career in your Ph.D. program, and the idea of cohorts of people that came in and knew this was the escalator. This is the process. What was that process like for you, especially coming in with a BFA as opposed to more of a formal background in social science?
Well, it was tabula rasa for one thing, so I was starting out, but I remember one of the great gifts that Bradley Greenberg gave me was a project. He had some funding to study the perceived reality of television, how kids made sense of entertainment television programs, whether they thought that people that were in these occupational roles and social roles were behaving like people in real life. I just started working on that immediately. I often reflect on that, when thinking about the first year or two of a curriculum for a PhD student, the foundation literature, the field, methods, and general theory. But, I think the most significant thing I did was just really jump in there. And then there were other assistant professors, Charlie Atkin, was there, and he's hugely influential. He had just come from the University of Wisconsin. And then there were other people like Ed Fink was there early. Ed Fink had read every social psychology experiment that had ever been conducted and could engage new PhD students, and they were just very influential folks. Joe Woelful was doing his multidimensional scaling at the time and just very engaging.
Were you able to collaborate quickly with some of the other students at that point, too?
Yeah, we were all very close. There was a little bit of a survival thing going on. But a lot of the graduate students that were a year or two or three ahead of us, were very influential. I mean, that's where I first met Joe Cappella. We were at the University of Wisconsin together for a little bit. I think some of the people at MSU have actually tracked the folks in those early classes and really show that they are substantially involved in the field right now, in terms of PhD students, citations, and whatnot. So there was a lot of interaction.
You mentioned something earlier, too, that I found interesting, you did make it sound like there was a lot of tent stakes yet to be placed in the ground. In the decades since, have there been any particular trends or observations you've seen in those decades with respect to the field of communication, as it's formalized a bit more? Is there anything that just reflecting back that has stuck out to you as it's grown and matured?
Well, I think the extensions, or the links, in the connections to the other social sciences, have been substantial and changed the field a lot, even thinking about my own area of media psychology. There's certainly a recognition of different time domains and levels and bio-psycho-social contributions and the topical nature of the field, and celebrate that instead of critiquing. But if you're in a college of communication, especially the large land grant universities that were able to create these academic units that were gigantic, they had their own dean. And that dean was sitting next to medicine, law, humanities, social sciences, business. That was very important because they had the degrees of freedom to actually create this disciplinary field. Whereas a place like Stanford, communication was part of a social science cluster, one of three associate deans in the humanities and sciences. So you were getting promoted, hired, evaluated, and connected to the other social sciences in a very administrative way. I always thought that those were some of the more interesting milestones in the field, and how Harvard, Princeton, Yale dealt with communication topics. It's not like they ignored them, but they didn't have departments and communication. How all those organizations or universities developed there were significant influences on the field.
As you said, your initial entrance into media and communication was building it, producing it, making it rather than studying it. Do you think there have been any corresponding trends how communication and media studies broadly speaking, articulate outward facingly, towards design and policy?
We certainly have a long history of that from the very beginning, and we couldn't have created those colleges of communication or even departments without, a lot of undergraduates, taking courses about how to make media, whether it was journalism, or advertising, public relations. With all these students and degree programs, those are the lifeblood of a lot of these programs. So, that's certainly the case that interaction has always been there.
Some of the most impactful courses I've taken as a student over the years, they were the ones that allowed for the producers and designers to intermingle with the theorists. And it's really difficult to identify who can teach those courses, because the presumption is that the instructor is usually at least a day ahead, in terms of knowledge and background and everyone there, but trying to orient people from several different backgrounds towards that common ground can be quite difficult. There's a long storied history about the idea of implications and relationships between design and theory. What about policy and particularly the idea of adverse media effects. Do you see any trends that have happened decade by decade with respect to what we can inform with our research?
The similarities strike me more than the differences. I recently spent a day with Facebook executives with a couple of my communication colleagues talking about social issues, things that the company was worried about with respect to their anticipated policies and just all the things you can imagine what that list looks like. And it made me think back to the the very first time I came to the city of San Francisco with Chuck Atkin we had just done a study. We had done a study about children's television about cereal ads on Saturday morning. It was a fun experiment. We had dressed up like store clerks and hung around a grocery store cereal counter aisles, and we didn't record but we took notes about the interactions between mothers and children in the cereal counter. And then we stopped them and interviewed them about what television the kids had seen that morning. So it was a nice ability to try to get some time order in. Anyway, it was a great study, and it was done with the Federal Trade Commission in mind. So here I'm thinking about Saturday morning sugared cereal ads, and Facebook's social media policy, and there was so much feeling of deja vu. You can imagine that the different issues, from democracy to disinformation to violence, and aggression and pornography, all the different places where media psychology has been used. So there's a real similarity.
What influence does media, whatever it is on Facebook, or those Saturday morning cereal cartoons? What's the influence that they're having on somebody impressionable? I also want to push a little bit here for your specific area of expertise, so media psychology and the processing of interactive media. Do you think it's just going to continue to be those same questions? Do you see new questions on the horizon? Are there tweaks to those questions? And which ones are the ones that are keeping you excited? What do you think you'll see in the next decade?
Finding something that has some street value, as well as intellectual commitment, is really important. And the word “communication” just never did, or at least as I observed it, it just really never worked. Now, what's fun and exciting for me is the psychology part, we always celebrated that. And we really needed to dig into the psychological theories, and we needed to have a major commitment there, and we needed to be an expert in psychological theories. This is a term from my influential graduate colleague, Joe Cappella, he always would write that media are infinitely describable. And I would say, that's exactly right. And if that's true, we're screwed, there's so many different ways we could define this, which one will we choose, and you needed to be guided by theory and whatnot. Now, because it's just so much more complex, there's so much more content and services, so much more of life is poured into these devices, and it's so much more manipulable, and the breadth of experience, it's everything - sex, drugs, rock and roll, politics, health, friendships, money, it's all these things, and in five second segments. So it's just really tough and interesting, that it's being done in fragments and idiosyncratic ways. And along comes computational methods that can help with the description of that complexity, in ways where we don't have to commit to standard definitions. Now we have data available, about moment-by-moment changes and what these experiences are like. That really excites me. To do well in media psychology right now, you need a good psychological theory, capital “T” theory, preferably one you've named and has a crisp literature that everybody recognizes. That is just embarrassingly unacceptable, with respect to being able to look at any interesting psychological theory, or even pre-theoretical or the inductive part of theory of just diving into this infinitely complex stew and swimming around and seeing what the heck is there. What are people doing? And relax about your theory for a second, just tell me what people are doing. And then we might know what to have a theory about, rather than a preconception that we need to differentiate this particular function from this one. I'm not arguing that research should be atheoretical by any means. But, within this inductive-deductive cycle that we all celebrate, if you wanted to match that cycle, to where we are with respect to the stimuli that we've all volunteered to be interested in, we need a lot more induction right now and a lot more just figuring out what people are doing. Because it's really different than it was five years ago, ten years ago. Ten years ago, most people didn't have a smartphone. It's just hugely different right now. Media psychology, pushing the emphasis to the media part seems exciting.
It sounds like media psychology as a subfield may be swinging over the last few decades correctively in a direction of more theories of cognition and not the focus on say, the three different broadcasting networks. However, given the media environment, we're in today, maybe it's time to recontextualize or extend or reevaluate the theories that we're using, and generate brand new ones for that matter, given that we're not dealing with the classic stimulus- response scenario of exposure. So whatever constitutes a stimulus is a bit difficult to put your finger on, I guess.
We basically volunteer to be he keepers of these stimuli that these companies build. I don't want to de-emphasize or leave out the more intellectual definitions of symbolic interaction and all these different forms of media, but we volunteer to keep track of what Facebook and CBS is doing and new forms of media. You just have to be impressed that media mediated life, which is extensive, important, and fragments that are moments long, seconds long, across an incredible breadth of information where radically different content is being joined. This is really an interesting, but very different environment.
Would it be fair to say then, that for the next decade, you think theory, in turn, needs to more openly embrace an inductive component to the cycle?
Yeah, I really do. But we need to be guided by theory. So, you can go into cognitive psychology, and they'll tell you that pictures are different than words. So how about differentiating the pictures from the words and thinking about definitions so it's not how many hours you spent on Facebook that day, but it's much more complicated look at the different symbol systems that people had. Training for any of us to contribute in this research just really needs to change and is changing in chaotic ways. And it'd be exciting to be a PhD student now, but also, it'd be hard, because there's just new expertise that is really required. So, rather than only, between group cross- sectional analysis of variance, thinking about data, there's this intra- individual ideographic time series, moment by moment, or multiple time domains, looking at how seconds influence minutes, and how weeks influence hours and how they stacked up. And that's a very different computational task and involves all the AI machine learning techniques that are being done. Different ways to think about collaboration, how that's done, all data are really hard to collect. And you're not going to have much of a chance unless you're on a team that has a lot of different expertise and involves some serious computational questions and scholarship as well as the psychological stuff. So it's really up in the air right now.
Working with the average curriculum now, where do you think a PhD student needs to fill in the gaps with their electives?
Well, computation is one place. You need to know three people who want to be your colleagues in natural language processing on vision, image recognition, and computation. Knowing R and Python, and having experience and the management of data, and interacting with colleagues who may have more expertise in those areas. Those experiences are available. And I'm not sure you need to know exactly how to do all those things, but you need to know what people are doing in those areas.
And important, but I think, over emphasized critique in the data science area is that the worst thing you could do is just jump into these stews of data without a good theory that's just gonna cause catastrophe. That's a reasonable thing to say. But I think there's also ways to be guided generally, in this new opportunity of being able to look at so much data so quickly that the place you start is just less important. An important, but I think, overemphasized critique in the data science area is that the worst thing you could do is just jump into these stews of data without a good theory. That's just gonna cause catastrophe. That's a reasonable thing to say. But, I think there's also ways to be guided generally, in this new opportunity of being able to look at so much data so quickly, that the place you start is just less important. It used to be so important to do good theory because you were running around the stacks of a library, and that took a long time. And if you could take out some of the stacks early on by a good idea or a theoretical perspective, that was very useful, but now it's like the definition of media. Since there's so much data, great opportunity to find things, paces, rhythms, ways of describing pictures, and just the efficiency that you can bring, the detail that you can bring.
What do you think are going to be the big societal challenges and opportunities towards which communication scholarship and particularly the area of media psychology, can make a significant contribution in the next few years?
Hopefully, we can help out with the misinformation, disinformation, trust, truth area. That's just a huge one and trying to figure out how to study the psychological making, processing, remembering, and attention giving related to those areas. I think that's a huge one. And relation to fundamental concepts of democracy and just survival in political life. That's a huge one. There are a bunch of opportunities, I think, to do a little bit better in social research. I worry that a lot of areas that have been difficult to study, especially for young scholars, are really important.
Finally, to wrap things up here Byron, since this podcast series is titled Architects of Communication Scholarship, what would you say that you've built or designed within the field of communication?
I think building “media psychology” as a descriptive term that has street relevance and academic credence as well, I like that. I think it's helpful to have that umbrella and the journals, and that took some architecting. It was tough. At the University of Wisconsin, when we were first thinking about psychological responses to media, you couldn't put the word psychology in your syllabus without four different interdisciplinary academic councils credentialing your use of that term. So, I think building that was really useful, and doing it within the topics of communication, but not within any disciplinary, grand theory of communication. I liked that little building. I've had fun architecting other things. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to build technology that relates to the research. I think that's where I got the biggest appreciation for this notion of stimulus sampling. When you actually go try to build something, you realize that that's one of a million things that you could have built, having read this really important theory piece. And yours may work or not, but it's no reflection on the theory if five work and five don't. Just the complexity, that's where you get this appreciation of the complexity of media and how many things are part of any psychological experience.
So you've been able to build a bunch of different things, for research purposes. And that had been informed by that research, too. I also don't think it'd be any exaggeration to say that many people, myself included, would not be able to study and teach the topics that we love without your own foundational work. But, quite a lot of what you've constructed has been perspective, and the legitimacy of being able to focus on the stuff that we like to focus on.Thank you then for sitting down today for this interview. It's been wonderful as always to hear your perspective on the field, past, present, and future, but also at least a little bit here at the end to take a moment to recognize your specific contributions to that trajectory.
Thanks to you for the good questions, Jim and ICA for doing this.
This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association Podcast Network, and is sponsored by The Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. This episode was produced by Jacqueline Colarusso and Bennett Pack. Our executive producer is DeVante [Dee-Von-Tay] Brown. The theme music is by Humans Win. For more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description. Thanks for listening.
