New Media and Society

Deana A. Rohlinger

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781479851959
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A sociological approach to understanding new media’s impact on society We use cell phones, computers, and tablets to access the Internet, read the news, watch television, chat with our friends, make our appointments, and post on social networking sites. New media provide the backdrop for most of our encounters. We swim in a technological world yet we rarely think about how new media potentially change the ways in which we interact with one another or shape how we live our lives. In New Media and Society, Deana Rohlinger provides a sociological approach to understanding how new media shape our interactions, our experiences, and our institutions. Using case studies and in-class exercises, Rohlinger explores how new media alter everything from our relationships with friends and family to our experiences in the workplace. Each chapter takes up a different topic – our sense of self and our relationships, education, religion, law, work, and politics – and assesses how new media alter our worlds as well as our expectations and experiences in institutional settings. Instead of arguing that these changes are “good” or “bad” for American society, the book uses sociological theory to challenge readers to think about the consequences of these changes, which typically have both positive and negative aspects. New Media and Society begins with a brief explanation of new media and social institutions, highlighting how sociologists understand complex, changing relationships. After outlining the influence of new media on our identities and relationships, it discusses the effects new media have on how we think about education, practice our religions, understand police surveillance, conceptualize work, and participate in politics. Each chapter includes key sociological concepts, engaging activities that illustrate the ideas covered in the chapter, as well as links, films, and references to additional online material.

1

Virtual Selves and Textual Encounters

KEY CONCEPTS

Self refers to the relatively stable set of perceptions we have about who we are relative to others. The self is shaped through interaction with others in a variety of settings.

Identity is the behaviors we perform in a setting that are related to the self. We perform many identities including student, sibling, child, friend, worker, partner, and so on—all of which make up the self.

Family consists of people who consider themselves related by blood, marriage, or adoption. Family is a universal social institution. This means that while its form may vary, no matter where you go in the world or how remote the culture, you will find family.

Socialization is a major job of family. Socialization refers to teaching children the language, social skills, and values of a society so that they can fit into a larger community.

Ontological security refers to our existential sense of self. According to Anthony Giddens, ontological security comes from our relationships with family members and friends and is achieved when we experience the positive and stable emotions that help us deal with events beyond our control.

If you have taken a sociology class, you probably have spent some amount of time contemplating the effects of mass media on the self, or the relatively stable set of perceptions we have about who we are relative to others. We compare ourselves to what we see in glossy magazine pages or on the screen and often find ourselves lacking. If you are a woman, then you may find yourself wondering how you measure up to the models and actresses you see. The points of comparison will vary. Some women will focus on how their bodies compare with those of celebrities. Others will pay attention to actresses’ clothing, hair, facial features, and skin tone. Most women, however, find themselves not quite measuring up and looking for exercise programs, diets, and products that will help them inch closer to the ideal we see in virtually every place we look. This is no less true for men, who compare their looks, bodies, abilities, and successes to the images of muscle-bound, handsome actors, musicians, and athletes that dominate the media landscape. Now imagine that you don’t fit one of these gender ideals and neither set of images reflects your lived experiences. This is true for more than a million transgender individuals in the United States who, until recently, were almost completely absent from the media landscape. The absence of narratives is just as affecting as skewed ones. When there is no one that looks, feels, or has experiences like you in the vast offerings of mass media, it is easy to think that something about you is wrong—even when it’s not true. Mass media, in other words, influence how we think about ourselves—our looks, our intelligence, our abilities, and our worth.

Mass media also can affect how we behave in the world. The gorgeous actors, actresses, musicians, and athletes that we see are successful. They have wealth and fame. They have made it, and we pay attention to their behavior. We look for cues on how to make it too. As we discussed in the introduction, the behaviors that lead to celebrity are not always socially desirable. For example, if Teen Mom actually causes young women to get pregnant because they see the show as a way to fame and fortune, then the show has the opposite of the desired effect, which is to reduce teen pregnancy. This, of course, is a dramatic example. Mass media can affect how we behave in more subtle ways—how we walk or dance and what products we think express our identities.

To get a better sense of how this works, watch the PBS Frontline video “The Merchants of Cool” (the link is at the end of this chapter). While it is a bit dated (Britney Spears was at the top of her game in 2001 rather than trying to make a comeback), the video illustrates two important points. First, the video shows how the economic function of mass media affect what and how products are sold to us. Recall from the introduction that we discussed how mass media are a social institution but that they have a profit-making function as well. As a result, television programs sometimes give mixed messages to the audience. Teen Mom is designed to prevent teen pregnancy but also uses the episodes to showcase clothing and products that are too expensive for the average young mother. In “The Merchants of Cool,” the narrator of the video Douglas Rushkoff explains how media giant Viacom packages and markets “cool” to teens on MTV. Second, and more important for this discussion, the video shows how the teens, who gobble up MTV’s programing, mimic what they see. In a particularly poignant scene, a group of teens realize the cameras are taping them at a dance and they begin cheering and dancing just like the musicians, dancers, and spring breakers featured on MTV. The teens are presenting what they believe is desirable behavior. In short, the video shows how mass media shape our behavior, or, more specifically, how we present ourselves to others—even if we cannot see them.

You can start to see why sociologists are interested in studying the self. As we talked about in the previous chapter, sociologists are interested in how individuals reproduce and challenge social institutions. Remember that the behavior of one actor is shaped by the behaviors of other actors and by changes in the institutional context. We generally behave in predictable ways because it allows us to achieve our goals. At a more basic level, the interactions we have with one another also shape the self. Sociologist Erving Goffman used the theatre as a metaphor to explain how our interactions affect the ways in which we think about ourselves. Goffman argues that we can understand how we craft our sense of self by studying how we “perform” in front of others in different “settings” or different social situations where interactions take place. Think of it this way. In a setting, we are on stage, and we perform an identity—or a particular version of our self—for an “audience” through our language, gestures, and actions. This performance is calculated. We behave in ways that are consistent with the situation and the expectations of the audience.

As you can probably guess, there is more than one stage, and we give more than one performance over the course of the day. Since there are multiple settings where we interact with others, we have multiple identities, many of which are associated with a social institution. For example, student, sibling or son, congregant, and friend are all identities that we may have that correspond with different behaviors and settings. As a result, how you interact with a religious leader in a place of worship is probably very different than how you interact with your friends at a party. This does not mean we lack an authentic identity or that we simply perform for whomever we are interacting with. We are able to navigate the social world because our different identities fit together in the “back stage.” Like the theatre, the back stage is the place where the audience cannot see us and, consequently, we can be ourselves and drop the identities that we enact when we are in front of others. In the back stage, we can make sense of our various identities and their importance in our lives. While the relationship between self and identity can be complicated, Goffman’s point is that we shouldn’t understand the self as a biological characteristic that we are born with. The self develops through interaction as we anticipate, interpret, and respond to others.

Now imagine all the stages available to us in the digital age. It is not uncommon for individuals to have several different profiles so that they can perform different identities to several different audiences simultaneously. For example, my personal website, WordPress site, LinkedIn, Academia.edu, Research Gate, Facebook, and Twitter profiles are all slightly different. I present my professional self on my website and WordPress site. These sites are full of information regarding research I’ve done and interviews and talks I’ve given. I view this website as my first point of contact with the larger professional world, and I spend time updating the content and minimizing the information that is available about my personal life. This is far less true of my LinkedIn, Academic.edu, and Research Gate profiles, which I spend very little time working on. Here, I present myself as a colleague. Since I know that my colleagues—other academics—often are pressed for time and have a lot of professional demands, they won’t care that my profiles are updated sporadically and, in fact, will understand exactly why this is the case. I communicate with my friends and close colleagues primarily through Facebook, so what I post is far more personal. I present myself as a friend and person with an active life so I share my political views, headlines from the Onion, and lots of family photos. I use Twitter as a semiprofessional place, since I also use it to post relevant material to my course websites. The identity that I perform is “professor who is interested in engaging with the world and who also is a person with a life and some opinions.” My Twitter profile includes a picture of me with family, but I am careful not to tweet too many of my personal opinions, since I don’t want my students to view my classes as biased. Once I am done teaching, I am a bit freer with my political and social commentary as well as the pictures of my kids—although I try to remember that students can search the last couple months of tweets.

None of these identities are inauthentic. My profiles simply reflect different identities and meet the expectations of the intended audience. Journalists who visit my website want to quickly figure out if I am the appropriate person to weigh in on their story and, in the case of live radio or television, see if I have any media experience. My colleagues who visit my professional pages want to see if I have uploaded copies of recent publications, and my friends who follow me on Facebook want to know what I think of different issues and what my family is up to. Of course, this scenario was not envisioned by Goffman. For one thing, our interactions transcend time and space, meaning we do not have to be in the same place at the same time to interact with one another. Email and texting do not require us to be anywhere near the person or people we are interacting with, nor do they require an instant response. For another thing, the back stage envisioned by Goffman isn’t completely outside of the view of the audience. We reveal so much about ourselves online that audiences can easily find the different ways that we narrate our lives.

In this chapter, we will explore how new media have changed our relationships. We will begin by looking at the family, since, as we discuss below, familial relationships play a critical role in our overall well-being and affect how we interact with one another. As we will see, it is not clear how new media affects socialization, or how parents teach their children about the world and their place in it. This is not completely surprising. Social scientists have always struggled to determine when and how mass media affect socialization and this research is not easier to do in the digital age. However, we can see that new media have altered how parents and teens communicate dramatically. Then we will turn our attention to how new media have changed the ways in which teens interact with their friends. We will see that new media can make teen friendships more guarded and superficial. In the digital age, sometimes the number of connections becomes more important than the quality of the connection, which makes friendships less secure. At the same time, it is impossible to deny that new media allow teens to connect with others in ways that were impossible just twenty years ago. Social media, for instance, allow teens to make and maintain virtual friendships with people on the other side of the world. In short, we will see that new media shape relationships and our sense of self in complex and contradictory ways.

CASE STUDY

TallHotBlonde

Have you ever pretended to be someone else online?

In 2006, a forty-six-year-old father of two named Thomas Montgomery killed his coworker over an eighteen-year-old woman named Jessi, whose handle was TallHotBlonde. They met online in a teen chat room. In this deadly love triangle, however, almost no one was who they said they were. Jessi claimed to be a high school senior who loved to play softball. When Jessi sent Montgomery provocative pictures of herself, Montgomery, who went by the handle MarineSniper, sent Jessi thirty-year-old pictures of himself from boot camp. That’s right. Montgomery pretended he was eighteen instead of forty-six...