Personal Connections in the Digital Age

Nancy K. Baym

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745695976
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The internet and the mobile phone have disrupted many of our conventional understandings of ourselves and our relationships, raising anxieties and hopes about their effects on our lives. In this second edition of her timely and vibrant book, Nancy Baym provides frameworks for thinking critically about the roles of digital media in personal relationships. Rather than providing exuberant accounts or cautionary tales, it offers a data-grounded primer on how to make sense of these important changes in relational life Fully updated to reflect new developments in technology and digital scholarship, the book identifies the core relational issues these media disturb and shows how our talk about them echoes historical discussions about earlier communication technologies. Chapters explore how we use mediated language and nonverbal behavior to develop and maintain communities, social networks, and new relationships, and to maintain existing relationships in our everyday lives. The book combines research findings with lively examples to address questions such as: Can mediated interaction be warm and personal? Are people honest about themselves online? Can relationships that start online work? Do digital media damage the other relationships in our lives? Throughout, the book argues that these questions must be answered with firm understandings of media qualities and the social and personal contexts in which they are developed and used. This new edition of Personal Connections in the Digital Age will be required reading for all students and scholars of media, communication studies, and sociology, as well as all those who want a richer understanding of digital media and everyday life.

1
New forms of personal connection

There have never been more ways to communicate with one another than there are right now. Once limited to face-to-face conversation, over the last several millennia we have steadily developed new technologies for interaction. The digital age is distinguished by rapid transformations in the kinds of technological mediation through which we encounter one another. Face-to-face conversation, landline telephone calls, and postal mail have been joined by email, mobile phone calls, text messaging, instant messaging, chat, web boards, social networks, photo sharing, video sharing, multiplayer gaming, and more. People have always responded to new media with confusion. In this time of rapid innovation and diffusion, it’s natural to be concerned about their effects on our relationships.

When first faced with a new barrage of interpersonal communication media, people tend to react in one of two ways, both of which have long cultural histories. On the one hand, people express concern that our communication has become increasingly shallow. For many, the increased amount of mediated interaction seems to threaten the sanctity of our personal relationships. On the other, new media offer the promise of more opportunity for connection with more people, leading to stronger and more diverse relationships. Both perspectives reflect a sense that digital media are changing the nature of our social connections. Over time, as we get used to new communication media, people come to see them in more nuanced ways. Eventually they become so taken for granted they are all but invisible. These moments in which they are new and the norms for their use are in flux offer fresh opportunities to think about our technologies, our connections, and the relationships amongst them.

The purpose of this book is to provide a means of thinking critically about the roles of digital media and devices in personal relationships. Rather than providing exuberant accounts or cautionary tales, this book provides a theoretical and data-grounded primer on how to make sense of these important changes in relational life. I began paying attention to these issues in 1990, launched my first research project into interpersonal communication over the internet in 1991, and began teaching courses in communication and new technology in Communication departments in 1994. The material in this book draws on my research projects, observations, and the large and growing body of scholarship on how digital media affect our interpersonal lives, to offer frameworks for evaluating and understanding these changes.

New media, new boundaries

Digital media raise a variety of issues as we try to understand them, their place in our lives, and their consequences for our personhood and relationships with others. When they are new, technologies affect how we see the world, our communities, our relationships, and our selves. They lead to social and cultural reorganization and reflection. In her landmark study of nineteenth-century popular scientific magazines, Carolyn Marvin (1988) showed how a new technology such as electricity, the telegraph, or the telephone creates a point in history where the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and therefore open to change. This leads to anxiety. While people in ancient times fretted about writing and Victorians fretted about electricity, today we are in “a state of anxiety not only about the PC, but in relation to technology more generally” (Thomas, 2004: 219).

The fundamental purpose of communication technologies from their ancient inception has been to allow people to exchange messages without being physically co-present. Until the invention of the telegraph in the 1800s, this ability to transcend space brought with it inevitable time delays. Messages could take years to reach their audience. The telegraph changed that by allowing real-time communication across long distances for the first time. People may have reeled in the face of writing and publishing, but it was little compared to how we reeled and continued to reel in the face of this newfound power to collapse time and space. After millennia as creatures who engage in social interaction face-to-face, the ability to communicate across distance at very high speeds disrupts social understandings that are burned deep into our collective conscience. Digital media continue these disruptions and pose new ones. They raise important questions for scholars and lay people alike. How can we be present yet also absent? What is a self if it’s not in a body? How can we have so much control yet lose so much freedom? What does personal communication mean when it’s transmitted through a mass medium? What’s a mass medium if it’s used for personal communication? What do “private” and “public” mean anymore? What does it even mean to be real?

Kenneth Gergen (2002) describes us as struggling with the “challenge of absent presence,” worrying that too often we inhabit a “floating world” in which we engage primarily with non-present partners despite the presence of flesh-and-blood people in our physical location. We may be physically present in one space, yet mentally and emotionally engaged elsewhere, a phenomenon on which Sherry Turkle dwells in her book Alone Together (2011). Consider, for instance, the dinner partner who is immersed in his mobile phone conversation. Since he is physically present, yet simultaneously absent, the very nature of self becomes problematic. Where is “he?” The borders between human and machine, the collapse of which was celebrated in Haraway’s (1990) “Cyborg manifesto,” and between self and body, are thrown into flux. In a time when some people feel that their “real self” is expressed best online (McKenna, Green, & Gleason, 2002), long-distance romances are built and maintained through electronic contact, and spaces for media are built right into the clothing we wear, how do we know where, exactly, true selves reside? Furthermore, what if the selves enacted through digital media don’t line up with those we present face-to-face, or if they contradict one another? If someone is nurturing face-to-face, aggressive in one online forum, and needy in another online forum, which is real? Is there such a thing as a true self anymore? Was there ever?

The separation of presence from communication offers us more control over our social worlds yet subjects us to new forms of control, surveillance, and constraint. Naomi Baron (2008) argues that new media offer us “volume control” to regulate our social environment and manage our encounters. We can create new opportunities to converse. We can avoid interactions, talking into a mobile phone (or pretending to) to avoid a co-present acquaintance, or letting calls go to voice mail. We can manipulate our interactions, doing things like forwarding nasty emails or putting people on speakerphone. We can use nonverbally limited media such as text messages or emails to shelter us from anxiety-inducing encounters such as flirting or ending relationships. We can see where our contacts have checked in on Foursquare (now Swarm) or Facebook and choose to go elsewhere (Humphreys, 2011). But, just as we can use these media to manage others more strategically, others can also more easily manage us. Our autonomy is increasingly constrained by the expectation that we can be reached for communication anytime, anywhere, and we will owe an appropriate and timely response. We are trapped by the same state of “perpetual contact” (Katz & Aakhus, 2002) that empowers us. In light of revelations about government surveillance of mobile phone communication, web activities, and online games, it’s evident that, even as we engage in increased control of our behaviors and relationships through digital media, the digital traces left by our activities are used for surveillance on a previously unimaginable scale.

One of the most exciting elements of new media is that they allow us to communicate personally within what used to be prohibitively large groups. This blurs the boundary between mass and interpersonal communication in ways that disrupt both. When people gather online to talk about a television show they are a mass communication audience, but the communication they have with one another is both interpersonal, directed to individuals within the group, and mass, available for anyone to read. If, as increasingly happens, the conversations and materials these fans produce for one another are incorporated into the television show, the boundaries between the production and reception of mass media are blurred as well.

Furthermore, what is personal may become mass, as when a young woman creates a videolog for her friends, which becomes widely viewed on YouTube. The ability for individuals to communicate and produce mediated content on a mass scale has led to opportunities for fame that were not available outside of the established culture industries before, but confusion about the availability and scale of messages has also led to unplanned broadcast of what was meant to be private, as when a politician inadvertently posts a sexually explicit selfie to his public Twitter feed rather than sending it through direct messaging.

This is just one way in which the boundaries between public and private are implicated in and changed by digital media. Internet users have been decried for revealing private information through online activities. Mobile phone users have been assailed for carrying on private conversations in public spaces (and shooting nasty looks at those who don’t pretend not to notice). Puro (2002: 23) describes mobile phone users as “doubly privatizing” public space since they “sequester themselves non-verbally and then fill the air with private matters.” Homes, especially in affluent societies, exhibit a “privatized media rich bedroom culture” (Livingstone, 2005) in which people use media to create privacy and solitude. All of this happens in a cultural moment when individualism is defined through consumerist practices of purchasing mass-mediated and branded products (Gergen, 1991; Livingstone, 2005; Walker, 2008) and publicizing one’s self through “self-branding” may be essential to career success (Marwick, 2013).

At the heart of this boundary flux is deep confusion about what is virtual – that which seems real but is ultimately a mere simulation – and what is real. Even people who hang out and build relationships online contrast it to what they do “IRL” (In Real Life), lending credence to the perception that the mediated is unreal. Digital media thus call into question the very authenticity of our identities, relationships, and practices (e.g. Sturken & Thomas, 2004). Some critics have noted that these disruptions are part and parcel of a movement from modern to postmodern times in which time and space are compressed, speed is accelerated, people are ever more mobile, communication is person-to-person rather than place-to-place, identities are multiple, and communication media are ubiquitous (e.g. Fornås, Klein, Ladendorf, Sundén, & Sveningsson, 2002; Haythornthwaite & Wellman, 2002; Ling, 2004). Others have emphasized how, within these cultural changes, digital media are made mundane, boring, and routine as they are increasingly embedded in everyday lives and social norms coalesce around their use (e.g. Haythornthwaite & Wellman, 2002; Humphreys, 2005; Ling, 2004). The first perspective forms a necessary backdrop for contextualizing and making sense of the second, but the emphasis in this book is on the mundane and the everyday, on how people incorporate digital media into their routine practices of relating and with what consequences.

Plan of the book

In the remainder of this chapter I identify a set of key concepts that can be used to differentiate digital media, and which influence how people use them and with what effects. I then offer a very brief overview of the media discussed in this book and a discussion of who does and who doesn’t make use of them. Chapter 2 is an orientation to the major perspectives used to understand the interrelationships between communication technology and society, and an exploration of the major themes in popular rhetorics about digital media and personal connection. Chapter 3 examines what happens to messages, both verbal and nonverbal, in mediated contexts. Chapter 4 addresses the group contexts in which online interaction often happens, including communities and social networks. The remaining two chapters explore dyadic relationships. Chapter 5 shows how people present themselves to others and first get to know each other online. Chapter 6 looks at how people use new media to build and maintain their relationships. Finally, the conclusion returns to the question of sorting myths from reality, arguing against the notion of a “cyberspace” that can be understood apart from the mundane realities of everyday life, and for the notion that online and offline flow together in the lifeworlds of contemporary relationships.

Seven key concepts

If we want to build a rich understanding of how media influence relationships, we need to stop talking about media in overly simplistic terms. We can’t talk about consequences if we can’t articulate capabilities. What is it about these media that changes interaction and, potentially, relationships? We need conceptual tools to differentiate media from one another and from face-to-face (or, as Fortunati, 2005, more aptly termed it, “body-to-body”) communication. We also need concepts to help us recognize the diversity amongst what may seem to be just one technology. The mobile phone, for instance, is used for voice, texting, picture and video exchange, gaming, and, with the new dominance of smartphones, nearly endless other applications. The internet includes interaction platforms as diverse as YouTube, product reviews on shopping sites, email, and Instant Messaging (IM), which differ from one another in many ways. Seven concepts that can be used to productively compare different media to one another as well as to face-to-face communication are interactivity, temporal structure, social cues, storage, replicability, reach, and mobility.

The many modes of communication on the internet and mobile phone vary in the degrees and kinds of interactivity they offer. Consider, for instance, the difference between using your phone to select a new ringtone and using that phone to argue with a romantic partner, or using a website to buy new shoes rather than to discuss current events. Fornås and his co-authors (2002: 23) distinguish several meanings of interactivity. Social interactivity, “the ability of a medium to enable social interaction between groups or individuals,” is what we are most interested in here. Other kinds include technical interactivity, “a medium’s capability of letting human users manipulate the machine via its interface,” and textual interactivity, “the creative and interpretive interaction between users (readers, viewers, listeners) and texts.” “Unlike television,” writes Laura Gurak (2001: 44), “online communication technologies allow you to talk back. You can talk back to the big company or you can talk back to individual citizens.” Indeed, these days customers often expect that, when they talk back, companies will respond swiftly. The social media marketing site Convince and Convert (2012) reports on a survey finding that everyone who contacts a brand, product, or company through social media expects a reply within a few days, and a third expect a response within half an hour. Rafaeli and Sudweeks (1997) posit that we should see interactivity as a continuum enacted by people using technology, rather than a technological condition. As we will see in chapters to come, the fact that the internet enables interactivity gives rise to new possibilities – for instance, we can meet new people and remain close to those who have moved away – as well as old concerns that people may be flirting with danger.

The temporal structure of a communication medium is also important. Synchronous communication, such as is found in face-to-face conversations, phone calls, and instant messages, occurs in real time. Asynchronous communication media, such as email and voice mail, have time delays between messages. In practice, the distinction cannot always be tied to specific media. Poor connections may lead to time delays in a seemingly synchronous online medium such as Instant Messaging. Text messaging via the telephone is often asynchronous, but needn’t be. Twitter can function both ways. Ostensibly asynchronous email may be sent and received so rapidly that it functions as a synchronous mode of communication. Sites like Facebook may seem to be a single medium, but offer both asynchronous modes of interaction such as wall posts and messaging, and synchronous chat, and it is not unheard of for people to use comments on wall posts as a real-time chat medium.

The beauty of synchronous media is that ...