Summary: Introduction: Identity in the Age of the Internet / Turkle

Turkle S. (1997) “Introduction: Identity in the Age of the Internet” in Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York, Phoenix: 9-26.

The Internet

• Rapidly expanding system of networks, links millions of people in new spaces that are changing the way we think, the nature of our sexuality, the form of our communities, our very identities
• We are learning how to live in a virtual world (that we share with other people)
• “Cyberspace” à part of the everyday life (emails, can talk, exchange ideas, assume our own creation)
• Context à the story of eroding boundaries b/n the real and the virtual, the animate and the inanimate, the unitary and the multiple self
• In the real time communities of cyberspace, we are dwellers on the threshold b/n the real and virtual, unsure of our footing, inventing ourselves as we go along

Living in the Mud

• Multi-user computer games are based on different kinds of software (MUD refers to all of them)
• MUD put you in virtual spaces in which you are able to navigate, converse, and build
• You join a MUD through a command that links your computer to the computer on which the MUD program resides
• Most players are middle-class
• New kind of virtual parlor game and new form of community
• Text-based MUD are a new form of collaboratively written literature à MUD players are MUD authors
• It provides world for anonymous social interaction in which one can play a role as close to or as far away from one’s “real self” as one chooses
• On MUD, one’s body is represented by one’s own textual description (obese can be athletic…) you just know the name of one’s character.
• Identity refers to the sameness b/n 2 qualities, in this case b/n a person and his or her persona (you can be many).
• Windows (not Bill Gates) provide a way for a computer to place you in several contexts at the same time
• Each of these activities (can do different things at the same moment) takes place in a window; your identity on the computer is the sum of your distributed presence
• In the daily practice of many computer users, windows have become a powerful metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple, distributed system
• MUD are amazing example of how computer mediated communication can serve as a place for the construction and reconstruction of identity
• When people can play at having different genders and different lives, it isn’t surprising that for some of this play has become as real as what we conventionally think of as their lives, although for them this is no longer a valid distinction

French Lessons

• For many people it is hard to accept any challenge to the idea of an autonomous ego
• Disjuncture b/n theory (the unitary self is an illusion) and lived experience (the unitary self is the most basic reality) is one of the main reasons why multiple and decentered theories have been slow to catch on – or when they do, why we tend to settle back quickly into older, centralized ways of looking at things
• Today you use a computer and a modem at home to access MUDs.
• Anonymously, I travel their rooms and public areas. I create several characters, some not of my biological gender, who are able to have social and sexual encounters with other characters.
• In my computer-mediated worlds, the self is multiple, fluid and constituted in interaction with machine connections; it is made and transformed by language; sexual congress is an exchange of signifiers; and understanding follows from navigation and tinkering rather than analysis.
• And in the machine-generated world of MUDs, I meet characters who put me in a new relationship with my OWN identity
• Character played by people are sometimes mistaken for some little artificial intelligences – assuming that a character is a machine when the response looks too much automatic
• Not only are MUDs places where the self is multiple and constructed by language, they are places where people and machines are in a new relation to each other, indeed can be mistaken for each other.
• In such ways, MUDs are evocative objects for thinking about human identity and, more generally, about a set of ideas that have come to be known as ‘postmodernism’ – characterized by ‘decentered’, ‘fluid’, ‘nonlinear’, and ‘opaque’
• It contrasts with modernism, the classical world-view that has dominated Western thinking since the Enlightenment
• MUD exemplify the phenomenon that of computer-mediated experiences brining philosophy down to earth
• The online world of internet isn’t the only instance of evocative computer objects and experiences bringing postmodernism down to earth
• People come to a certain understanding of postmodernism and to recognize its ability to usefully capture certain aspects of their own experience, both online and off
• The Modernist Computational Aesthetic à the image of the computer as calculator suggested that no matter how complicated a computer might seem, what happened inside it could be mechanically unpacked

From a Culture of Calculation Toward a Culture of Simulation

à Programming is no longer cut and dried – its dimensions have become elusive

• The very image of a computer as a giant calculator has become quaint and dated
• Still calculations but not really relevant
• The computer culture’s center of gravity has shifted decisively to people who don’t think of themselves as programmers
• The meaning of the computer presence in people’s lives is very different from what most expected in the late 70’s – moving from a modernist culture of calculation toward a postmodernist culture of simulation (emerging in lots of domains)
• This new culture is affecting our understanding of our minds and our bodies – our brains are opaque to us, but this never prevented them from functioning perfectly well as minds
• New notion à the computer could project and extend a person’s intellect à computers may extend an individual’s physical presence
• Many people who engage is netsex say that they are constantly surprised by how emotionally and physically powerful it can be – show the reality of the gig place of sex in our lives (before you were masturbating while reading playboy now you go on the internet)
• Sexual encounters in cyberspace are only one element of our new lives on the screen
• Human beings become increasingly intertwined with the technology and with each other via the technology, old distinctions b/n what is specifically human and specifically technological become more complex (are we living life on the screen or no real life?)
• Emerson à reflected that “dreams and beasts are 2 keys by which we are to find out the secrets of our nature…they are our test objects” (like Freud and Darwin)– the computer is an object, ultimately a mechanism, but it behaves, interacts, and seems in a certain sense to know. But can it think?
• So before it was dreams and beasts (modernism) and now its computer (postmodernism) – the computer takes us beyond the world of dreams and beasts because it enables us to contemplate mental life that exists apart from bodies
• As the processing power of computers increased exponentially, it became possible to use that power to build graphical user interfaces, commonly known by the acronym GUI, that hid the bare machine from its user

The new opaque interface

• Known as the Macintosh iconic style of interface, which stimulates the space of a desktop as well as communication through dialogue – represented more than a radical change
• People were encouraged to think of understanding as looking beyond the magic to the mechanism
• 84 à Macintosh – looks perfect, finished but isn’t really – change because it wasn’t only Windows but Mac too – it is nearly universal in personal computing

We have learned to take things at interface value

• Moving toward a culture of simulation in which people are increasingly comfortable with substituting representations of reality for the real
• Use a Macintosh style as well as one on four legs
• We join virtual communities that exist only among ppl communicating on computer network as well as communities in which we are physically present
• The culture of simulation encourages me to take what I see on the screen. In this culture, if it works for you, it has all the reality it needs.
• The habit of taking thinfs at interface value is new, but is has gone quite far

We’ve used our relationships with technology to reflect on the human

• Before people were against the formalism and rationality of the machine ‘romantism’
• It expressed serious philosophical resistance to any view of people that denied their complexity and continuing mystery.
• In the 80’s it moved toward ‘romantic machines’ à encouraged a new discourse; both persons and objects were reconfigured, machines as psychological objects, people as living machines
• Biology is appropriating computer technology’s older, modernist models of computation while at the same time computer scientists are aspiring to develop a new opaque, emergent biology that is closer to the postmodern culture of simulation
• The rethinking of human and machine identity is not taking place just among philosophers but ‘on the ground’, through a philosophy in everyday life that is in some measure both provoked and carried by the computer presence

We have sought out the subjective computer

• Computer don’t do only things for us, they do things TO us.
• Today people explicitly turn to computers for experiences that they hope will change their ways of thinking or will affect their social and emotional lives
• People are seeking out the computer as an intimate machine
• Computer screens where we project ourselves into our own dramas, dramas in which we are producer, director, and star – some are private and some not.
• Computer screens are the new location for our fantasies, both erotic and intellectual – we use life on computer screens to become comfortable with new ways  of thinking about evolution, relationships, sexuality, politics, and identity

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Summary: Prime Time Ideology / Gitlin

Gitlin, T. (1982) “Prime Time Ideology” in Newcomb, H. (ed) Television: The Critical View. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 426-454.

- Gitlin's article deals with what do (television) programs mean (with regard to their social, structural context)

- He mentions several intriguing questions such as; Why are radical ideas suppressed in schools?; why do workers oppose socialism?...The answer always given is cultural Hegemony, but Gitlin says that this is not an answer…(he doesn’t go into his answer at this point)

- TV is the most pervasive (spread throughout) and familiar of our cultural sites.

- Commercial culture does not manufacture ideology but rather reproduces, repackages it.

- Everything including our leisure time has become industrialized and homogenized. TV has also. It is part of our life, now for those who can afford it, they can even get a VCR to watch the shows that they have missed.

- Commercials and adverbs which no producer would go without, led us to thinking in terms of a market as supposed to in terms of a public. As consumers rather than citizens.

- The TV show all in the family was innovative in that it brought social issues and conflicts on the show. Also (unlike previous shows where characters were static because its easier to produce and the average watcher wanted it that way) the character of the actors developed with time.

- he discusses different genre and how and why they developed (i.e. the growing black middle class led to black comedy…not black drama because that mey be to much for the majority white audience. Etc). Genre changes with culture.

- With TV sports we see how they don’t even trust us to watch the game. So there is an announcer. But the announcer not only describes the events, he interprets them (i.e. “isn’t it great to be here!”) Its like they took human qualities and put them into the product (i.e. ‘sexy perfume’)

- also in televised sports they feed us with unnecessary stats about the players and all that kind of stuff as to market the whole thing, because it serves to flatter those in the audience who knew that tidbit or fact, and it makes the person who knew that tidbit feel like he really knows something about the world.

- By making the game more amazing the channel hopes that you will stick around to watch the commercials (that cost millions)

- just like we discussed how genre changes and evolves, so does the settings and character types: while in the 50’s there were happy people with happy problems, the 70’s were more complex and saw unhappy people with unhappy problems

- Character types have also evolved because the structural changes in TV with advertisers: while in the 50’s the advertisers used to contract the show and therefore wanted a happy setting, the 60’s saw the producers taking (back) control from the advertisers and they were more intoned to the wants of the audiences. Also the 60’s saw the near universality of TV ownership thus opening it up to a larger range of audiences and thus a larger range of characters

- While there is a larger range of characters, network elites will still not allow a hero that challenges the values of a capitalistic society.

- He discusses that every show has a slant which pushes a certain public issue or position

- the hegemonic system is not ‘cut-and dried’. It constantly needs to be refurbished and reproduced with the ‘indigestible’ parts cast aside.

- There is much inner tension and contradictions in capitalist ideology (urges people t work but than says that leisure is where real satisfaction id found, etc) today the ultimate satisfaction is considered consumer satisfaction and that is how corporate domination over the economy is justified.

Gitlin – hegemonyl

→ US contemporary mass media as single cultural system promoting re-production

1. hegemony + coercion : process by which ruling classes secure consent of dominated.
2. took working class seriously enough – fear of revolution

-       high toned gossip – ask to be taken into spotlight with and in system they criticize

-       how does TV encourage viewers to see themselves as anti-political accumulating individuals?

→ commercial culture doesn’t manufacture ideology but rely, reproduces packages and focus ideology that arises from social elite and active groups.

“agenda setting fundtion

→ tv preffers hegemonic ideology, opposition brought in  domesticated.

1. format and formula

-       changes seem to affirm sovereignty of audience while keeping deep alternatives off agenda

-       central operation of hegemonic capitalist society – assembly line leisure

-       industrialization of time – confined to those who cant afford their way out of standardized social reality

-        consequence : a. behave as market not public. B. colonize consciousness c. consenting to commercial dominance of public sphere

→ hegemonic ideology change in-order to remain hegemonic – populist?

→ majour social conflicts are transported into cultural system  where hegemonic process (form and content) into compatibility wit dominant system.

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Summary: Living with Television: The Violence Profile / Gerbner and Gross

Gerbner, G. and Gross, L. (1976) “Living with Television: The Violence Profile”. Journal of Communication 26(2): 172-199.

The environment that sustains the most distinctive aspects of human existence is the environment of symbols. We learn, share, and act upon meanings, derived from that environment.  TV is most likely to remain the chief source of repetitive and ritualized symbol systems, which will lead to a common consciousness and heterogeneous mass publics in history.

TV was found to have established order and serves primarily to extend and maintain rather to alter, threaten, or weaken conventional conceptions, beliefs, and behaviors. TV is a medium of socialization of most people into standardized roles and behaviors.

The social, political, and economic, integration of modern industrial society has created a system in which few communities can maintain an independent integrity. TV is the common ground among different groups that make up a large national community. No national achievement, celebration, or mourning seems real until it is confirmed and shared on television.

Never before have so many classes and groups shared so much of the same culture and the same perspective while having little to do with their creation.  Representation in the world of television gives and an idea, a cause, a group it’s self of public identity, importance, and relevance.

Television, the flagship of industrial mass culture, now rivals ancient religions as a purveyor of organic patterns of symbols- news and other entertainment – that animate national and even global communities sense of reality and value.

The authors do not believe that TV violence is to be found in the stimulation of occasional individual aggression. The consequences of living in a symbolic world ruled largely by violence might be much more far reaching.

TV violence is a dramatic demonstration of power, which communicates much about social norms and relationships, about goals and means, winners and losers and about the risks of life and the price for transgressions of society’s values. 

There may be a connection because the expectation of violence or passivity in the face of injustice may be consequences of even greater concern.

Real life is hidden from our eyes, motives are obscure, outcomes ambiguous, personalities complex, people unpredictable. The truth is never pure and simple. On TV this is different it offers us clarity, and resolution.

TV provides the broadest common back ground of assumptions not only about what things are but also how they work, should work and why?

We assume that TV’s standardizing and legitimizing influence comes from its ability to stream line, amplify, ritualize, and spread into isolated or protected subcultures of the mass produced information and entertainment.

All the media research that has been done on the correlation between TV and Violence has missed the point because they look at a particular  program or isolated scenes and cases. What they missed is that TV drama consists of a complex and integrated system of characters, events, actions, and relationships who affects cannot be measured with regard to any single element to program seen in isolation.  

Their analysis looks at the contribution of TV drama to the viewer conceptions in conjunction with such other sources of knowledge as education and news. And how these sources of facts, images, beliefs, and values play into assumptions of reality.

Representation in the fictional world signifies social significance, absence means symbolic annihilation.

TV can present promises of the way that society, people and issues can be.  Which puts the symbolic world in a place where it has meaning of it own.

Violence plays a key role in the world of Television because it is the simplest and cheapest way to show the rules of the game of power. In the symbolic world, physical motion makes dramatically visible that which in the real world is usually hidden.

Violence on TV does not stem from close personal relationships like it does in the real world.

The structural characteristics of television drama are not easily controlled. The reflect basic cultural assumptions that make a show entertaining by fitting into dominate notions about social relations and thus demonstrating conventional notions of morality and power.

Result: a heightened sense of risk and insecurity, is more likely to increase dependence on a established authority, and to legitimize it use of force, than it is to threaten the social order.

Television maybe does not cultivate fear and aggression but it does cultivate a sense of mistrust and danger. Violence on TV appears to cultivate assumptions that fit into socially functional myths.

Does TV incite or pacify? The environment that sustains the most distinctive aspects of human existence is the environment of symbols. We share, learn and act upon meanings from that environment. TV is and will remain the biggest source of symbols and symbolic systems that makes up common consciousness of mass publics.

The reach, scope, ritualization, organic connectedness, and non selective use of mainstream TV makes it different from other media of mass communications. 

Gerber + gross

-       does TV incite or pacify?

-       Tv as main source of ritualized and repetition of symbol system cultivating common consensus most heterogeneous society in history

→ investigation of violence in network TV drama, 60s + 70s

Assumption → tv as central cultural aim of American society

                   → agency of established order – maintain rather than alter

                   → spread and stabilize social structure

                   → medium of most people socialization into standardised roles (?)

• ‘living’ in the world of tv cultivates conception of its own conventionalized reality.

-       time of program more important than individual tastes

-       “system” of message

-       Fear as historical instrument of social control

-       Expectation of violence and passivity in face of injustice (diff than enforcement of social norms)

-       Reality looks of tv hides its selective nature –trojan horse of facts of life

1. tv vs reality
2. tv answer vs real

Violence - 6/10 characters involved in violence!

-       social reality cultivated morein heavy viewers

-       especially in areas of little personal expirience

→→ heightened sense of risk and insecurity → leads to dependence upon established authority and legitimizes its use of force.

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summary: Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action / Lazarsfeld and Merton

The Social Role of the Machinery of Mass Media

The influence of and implications of mass media on our daily lives is difficult to determine. Comparing American society with other societies, or even with an earlier period in America, would not yield precise results.

Lazarsfeld however, feels that the effect of mass media has been overestimated:

• Although the average American watches 3 hours of TV a day, these numbers show only consumption rates, not the social or the psychological impact of the media.
• Compared to the effect of an automobile, the mass media influence is relatively minor.

If the effect of the media has indeed been overestimated, why is there so much popular concern over the problems of the radio, TV, film and press?

The reason may be the following:

• Social changes and innovations, like reduced work hours, free universal education and longer leisure time have allowed people to gain greater access to cultural heritage. The mass media seem to have cheated the proponents of these social developments. Instead of Shakespeare and Beethoven, people now get Britney Spears in their leisure time.

Some Social Functions of the Mass Media

Three social functions:

• The status conferral function – conferring status on public issues, persons, organizations and social movements. Positive attention by the press raises the status of persons or social policies because the media are perceived to have expertise and good judgment. Moreover, the notion that one's ideas and behavior are enough to be singled out from the large anonymous masses legitimizes their status.
• The enforcement of social norms – exposing certain deviation from social norms to public view. Public exposure occurs when deviations from public norms shift from the private realm into the public realm. When abnormal behavior cannot be tolerated privately, the individuals seek public exposure, which requires every member of the society to take a stand on the issue. The issue thus becomes either "publicly acknowledgeable" or "publicly repudiated". The function of publicity to close the gap between "private attitudes" and "public morality" is institutionalized in the mass media of communication.
• The narcotizing dysfunction – large masses of the population become politically apathetic and inert. Although the public receives vast amounts on information about current events, their concern may only be superficial. Such exposure cloaks mass apathy, as individuals mistake knowing and intellectualizing about issues for actually doing something about them. The average person is concerned and well informed, but after going through all the daily news, it is time for bed.

The Structure of Ownership and Operation

In public service systems the customer supports the enterprise, while the government sets the agenda. In America, the advertisers finance the media and therefore the big corporations are the ones who set the media agenda.

Social Conformism

Since the mass media are supported by great business concerns within the current social and economic system, the media contribute to the maintenance of that system – supporting the status quo. This contribution stems not only from active media support of consumerism through advertisement, but more significantly by failing to raise essential questions about the structure of society.  Even the few exceptions, in the context of social objectives (such as raising racial tolerance), are consistently surrendered by commercialized media when they clash with economic gains. Sensitive issues, that may alienate appreciable parts of the audience, or clash with the advertiser's interests, are omitted for economic reasons.

Impact upon Popular Taste

Since a large portion of the media is devoted to entertainment, popular taste is affected and even dictated. However, this development needs to be put in a broader historical and sociological perspective in order to understand this alleged "fall of standards". With the emergence of new technologies, media and arts have become available to a much larger audience. The high arts that are a standard for good taste, as opposed to pop culture, may only be the remnants of past elitist societies, which they once signified. While in the past persons with cultivated esthetic standards constituted the whole audience, today they are a small fraction. It is misleading to speak simply of the decline of popular tastes. The average level of esthetic standards has dropped, but the tastes of some sectors of the population have been raised, and the total number of people exposed to mass media has increased.

Can popular tastes be raised, or are the mass media producers caught up in a vicious circle of attending to the economics of popular culture?

o   Audiences refuse to tune in on classical music or discussions of public issues. People like tasteless crap! They cannot see the educational value of the Sex Pistols.

o   Small creative talents suited for selective audiences may provide a counterbalance to the mass art.

Propaganda for Social Objectives

What are the conditions for effective use of mass media to promote social objectives (i.e. educational reforms, race relations, etc…)? At least one of the following aspects needs to be present:

• Monopolization – no opposition to the mass media interpretation and diffusion of policies, values, or public images. This is inherent in authoritarian regimes, like the one in Nazi Germany. The media however, is used for propaganda in democracies too (Example: during WW2 in the U.S.). Commercialized propaganda is another example of media monopoly, where some popular media idols exercise moral authority in their field and are not subject to counterpropaganda.
• Canalization – mass media entrenches and capitalizes on existing basic attitudes in society. Once an American has been socialized in the use of a toothbrush, he/she can be directed towards a certain brand of toothbrush through advertising. Propaganda however, is not very effective in changing existing social attitudes because altering the underlying societal principles is much more difficult than merely directing them. Thus, if the objective is to canalize, instead of evoking concrete changes, the propaganda may succeed. 
• Supplementation – localized centers of organized indoctrination (face to face propaganda). In the USSR, the ideological elite organized numerous gatherings in order to discuss communist ideology. Local discussions reinforce the content of mass propaganda and legitimize the significance of the political movement. Thus, the national speaker ensures the audience for the local organizer and vice versa.      

Because in democracies the three principles stated above are rarely met, the media do not exhibit the degree of social power commonly attributed to them. Thus, the media are geared toward maintaining the existing social and cultural structure rather than toward its change.

See also: Social Structure and Anomie – Robert Merton

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Summaries in communication studies

Here you'll find a list of links to summaries of important article in communication studies:

Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action / Lazarsfeld and Merton 
Living with Television: The Violence Profile / Gerbner and Gross
Prime Time Ideology / Gitlin
Introduction: Identity in the Age of the Internet / Turkle