Strategic Communication, Social Media and Democracy

The challenge of the digital naturals

W. Timothy Coombs, Jesper Falkheimer, Mats Heide, Philip Young, W. Timothy Coombs, Jesper Falkheimer, Mats Heide, Philip Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317554905
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

Today almost everyone in the developed world spends time online and anyone involved in strategic communication must think digitally. The magnitude of change may be up for debate but the trend is unstoppable, dramatically reconfiguring business models, organisational structures and even the practice of democracy.

Strategic Communication, Social Media and Democracy provides a wholly new framework for understanding this reality, a reality that is transforming the way both practitioners and theoreticians navigate this fast-moving environment. Firmly rooted in empirical research, and resisting the lure of over-optimistic communication dreams, it explores both the potential that social media offers for changing the relationships between organisations and stakeholders, and critically analyses what has been achieved so far.

This innovative text will be of great interest to researchers, educators and advanced students in strategic communications, public relations, corporate communication, new media, social media and communication management.

1 Meet the digital naturals

DOI: 10.4324/9781315732411-1

Philip Young and Marja Åkerström

The emergence of the Internet and related technologies has brought profound economic and social change, arguably on a scale paralleled only by the invention of the printing press. As with printing, the most significant changes have concerned the ability to exchange information.

Printing enabled those with access to the technology to distribute information in a manner that had permanence and scale. Although there was cost associated with the replication and distribution of printed documents, this was far less than that associated with handwritten documents. There were also particular skills associated with accessing the information – the receiver needed to be able to read (or be read to).

But although those who could read a handwritten text could read a printed text, those who couldn't read a handwritten text were no more able to read printed text. The division between literacy and illiteracy was almost entirely dependent on access to education, determined by the intertwined parameters of social class and economic means. Age had very little influence, and it is hard to imagine anyone defining their competences with reference to the invention of the printing press. Likewise, the spread of printed materials could be reasonably measured and expressed only across centuries, with huge variations in adoption by geographical location.

With the Internet, it has all been rather different. It is beyond question that the information experience of someone living today in a highly developed industrial nation, such as Sweden, is profoundly different to that of a person living 20, 30 or 40 years earlier. Any organisation concerned with strategic communication is obliged to assume that Internet-enabled technologies will have significant influence on its ability to achieve objectives.

The speed of change has been dramatic, but it is still surprising to see professional communicators and academic researchers employing the terminology of “digital natives” and “digital immigrants,” outmoded and unhelpful concepts that are linked to equally unhelpful framings that stress a divide between online and offline interaction.

It is time to move forward. Meet the digital naturals, individuals who are comfortable in an online environment, being equipped through experience and exposure to both its cultural norms and the technological competencies required to operate effectively.

The framing reflects the degree to which the technologies of digital communication have become commonplace, an accepted, almost unnoticeable and no longer noteworthy part of everyday life; for many interactions, the distinction between online and offline is no longer applicable (Jurgenson, 2011). This acceptance that to be digital is the natural state in a twenty-first-century developed economy does, however, open up for exploration the ways in which “naturalness” can be expressed, ranging from competence, literacy, acceptance and availability to the degree to which individuals are comfortable in the environment. At the same time, it demands that we recognise the new pressures, fears and uncertainties that it brings. To be at home in an environment does not imply that we therefore feel safe or secure there, or even that it is a place we really want to be.

As we will see, there are many reasons for rejecting the notion of natives, and they can often concern the unintended consequences of exclusion. At the same time, communicators and communication theorists are constantly required to differentiate among audiences, stakeholders, publics or whatever else. Very few messages are designed to reach a global audience, and differentiation and segmentation are integral to the vast majority of communication activities. Age is quite obviously an important criterion when delineating many groupings, but that is no justification for drawing a strong causal connection between birthdate and digital competence and acceptance. Furthermore, the digital natural framing pays little regard to the distinction between online and offline, and the redundancy of digital dualism is regarded as a natural and swift development for which age has little relevance.

As William Gibson, the science fiction writer who coined the phrase cyberspace, has observed, “The future is here – but is not evenly distributed.” Something very similar could be said about the digital naturals.

Deconstructing the digital native

As the following section explains, the term ‘digital natives’ arose from a need to capture what appeared to be a significant change in learning habits that was being driven by new technology. Once coined, the framing gained traction and began to have some influence on debate, sometimes in positive ways, but as shown, by placing significant emphasis on chronological age, ‘natives’ began to distort perceptions in ways that can be seen as unhelpful.

Background

In 2001 Marc Prensky published ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants’ (in On the Horizon, 2001). His intention was to focus attention on the changing expectations of university students, and to alert educators to the challenges of teaching the first generation to have grown up with new technology: “They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age” (p. 1).

He believed the change represented “a really big discontinuity” and a “singularity” and made a strong call for action. He sought to divide the world into digital natives and digital immigrants, claiming those born from the 1980s on had grown up with skills that older people would have to learn, often with difficulty and little prospect of fluency.

Prensky wasn't the first to use the term digital natives (that was probably Barlow, who published A Declaration for the Independence of Cyberspace in 1996), but the coinage gained traction. Indeed, for a short time it provided a useful lens for focusing a new debate, but the terminology has been appropriated to suggest a divide between those who are deemed by birthright to enjoy a privileged relationship with online technologies and those who are forever outside. For Prensky, the digital immigrants would learn – some better than others – to adapt to their environment, but they would always retain, to some degree, their “accent” … their foot in the past.

The “native” position was strongly expressed in 2008 by Palfrey and Grasser in Born Digital, which is subtitled Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives.

Five years later, Brian Solis (2013) was claiming,

Gen Y and Z were born with digital in their DNA. While that may seem like a given, it is the very detail that separates them from their parents, teachers, businesses, governments, and any organization other than those already run by Gen Y and Z.

He concluded, “As a result, our society splits into two camps, those who “get” these connected generations and those who do not or will not.”

Bennett, Maton and Kervin (2008) identify two main assumptions in the literature on which the emergence of digital natives is based: First, that young people of the digital native generation possess sophisticated knowledge of and skills with information technologies, and second, that as a result of their upbringing and experiences with technology, digital natives have particular learning preferences or styles that differ from earlier generations of students.

There is certainly some truth in the observation about learning styles, but it becomes problematic when inflated to embrace a much broader change. As Jenkins notes in Reconsidering Digital Immigrants (2007):

Talk of “digital natives” helps us to recognize and respect the new kinds of learning and cultural expression which have emerged from a generation that has come of age alongside the personal and networked computer. Yet, talk of “digital natives” may also mask the different degrees access to and comfort with emerging technologies experienced by different youth. Talk of digital natives may make it harder for us to pay attention to the digital divide in terms of who has access to different technical platforms and the participation gap in terms of who has access to certain skills and competencies or for that matter, certain cultural experiences and social identities. Talking about youth as digital natives implies that there is a world which these young people all share and a body of knowledge they have all mastered, rather than seeing the online world as unfamiliar and uncertain for all of us.

Implications

The digital native framing necessarily encourages the notion of the digital immigrant. Unfortunately, immigrant is seldom used to convey notions of enhanced status; rather it carries associations with colonialism, perhaps racism and certainly “othering”. Few people emigrate to reduce their status, opportunities or quality of life: the implication is that migrants either are escaping challenging circumstances or believe they have identified an opportunity for advancement. From the outset, the new arrival must begin a process of assimilation, to adjust to and accept the cultural norms of the adopted environment, by embracing its language, customs and norms. In many situations, the immigrant who fails to assimilate, for whatever reason, is criticised, even ostracised by those who consider themselves to be native.

Continuing with this literal interpretation of the terms leads to two further understandings. Sometimes, the number of immigrants comes to greatly exceed the number or power of the native population, causing great damage to the indigenous population. But as Jenkins observed earlier, there are dangers in assuming that natives have the competence and awareness to maintain their position in society, never mind enjoy benefit and privilege. Furthermore, the Prensky framing – the singularity – seems to imply a clear and abrupt change which scarcely reflects the fast moving nature of technology. The digital ecology of 2001, which he believed to be so novel, has long been left behind. Prensky's ‘native’ had yet to experience Facebook, YouTube, smartphones, Wi-Fi and high-speed broadband, and would no doubt feel disorientated and lost if catapulted forward to 2014.

As boyd (2014, p. 177) observes, the notion of digital natives has political roots, mostly born out of American techno-idealism; 15 years on, it is quite clear that chronological age offers few insights that deepen understanding of communicative behaviour.

In a paper delivered to the seventh International Political Marketing Association conference in Stockholm in September 2013, we made the case for a more constructive grouping. The concept of digital naturals was initially coined to describe a cohort of students brought together to discuss the implications of new media for democracy (see Chapter 8). This was a group of young people (under 30) whose experience of democracy was developed over a time when social media and digital technologies were becoming commonplace. From a social constructivist perspective, it was reasonable to conclude that the way the cohort accessed information – be it news or propaganda – and the way they shared and discussed opinion would be significantly influenced by digital platforms and channels. Interestingly, the majority of respondents did appear to believe that their use of digital networks gave them a superior knowledge of the world, and they made frequent reference to the perceived differences. They were naturals insofar as they were comfortable with technologies employed to access and discuss political issues, but the most obvious distinction between them and the (older) researchers was that they could not remember a time before digital.

Age does matter

The digital naturals framing does not deny that the use of technologies has an age dimension, but argues that this has very little to do with chronology of adoption, and a great deal to do with natural life cycle. Yes, teenagers use social media in different ways than, say, those in their fifties, but they conduct most of their social activities differently, too. They may well wear different clothes, and wear them differently, have different hairstyles, listen to different music, have different sleep patterns and so forth, but this is due to an interplay between the need to construct an individual identity and the need to negotiate new types of social relationships that just happen to coincide with fashion or available technology.

The construction of identity through the exchange of opinion and the need to establish broader and deeper relationships are particularly strong in adolescence and early adulthood, so it is entirely to be expected that those at this life stage share more information through social networks. The acts of sharing are part of a social calibration, linked to peer esteem and positioning, that has always existed. The difference is that some facets of this process are more visible to those outside the groupings, and as would be expected, the interactions are mediated by digital affordances. If a 15-year-old uses Facebook more regularly than a 50-year-old, it is more likely to be a result of social pressures and circumstances than a native affinity for the technologies.

As danah boyd and others explain, teenagers have a different view of privacy than do other age groups. Although they are seen to be willing to put more online, they spend more time creating personal space, shared to some degree with peers, but jealously protected against the intrusion of adults.

Defining characteristics of the digital environment

The term ‘digital naturals’ has conceptual and operational uses. As a theoretical framing it allows investigation across a range of interests and particularly encourages examination of individual behaviours linked to values. For those concerned with operational issues it opens opportunities for a more sophisticated analysis of stakeholder interactions, not least by highlighting competences linked to character and experience rather than technological affordance.

The changes brought about by digital communication can be categorised in a number of different ways. Some refer to logistical qualities, including reach and timelessness (identified by Fawkes & Gregory, 2000), to implications that highlight evolutions in notions of transparency and porosity, and those relating to the accumulation of knowledge, including aggregation and curation, which have seen expression in loosely defined concepts such as groundswell (Li & Bernhoff, 2008) and crowdsourcing, which are linked to user-generated content and co-creation of meaning. This has in turn fostered an emerging language of social media, which privileges conversation, engagement, openness and interactivity. (The value and authenticity of such terminology are discussed in Coombs, Holladay and Young in Chapter 3.)

The adjustments to reach and timelessness can be considered commonplace; there can be few people in the developed Western nations who are not aware that given access to the appropriate technologies, messages can be transmitted and received almost simultaneously by people in any part of the world and, increasingly, at no perceptible cost. Some may use these technologies to keep in touch with friends and relatives a continent away; almost all will accept that news of an event of global significance will be visible to global audiences within a very short time of occurrence. The networked and aggregated elements of reputation and understanding may be more opaque, but the vast majority of those who access online content will have used a search engine, and thus encountered an element of aggregation.

Engagement with Facebook means engagement with what Fuchs (2014) describes as participatory culture, and this interaction is facilitated by “spreadable media” (Jenkins, 2007). Even the most limited interaction takes the user into areas associated with peer review, endorsement and value sharing.

The very act of logging on to a social network involves a renegotiation of notions of privacy. Any activity conducted i...