Digital Media and Democratic Futures

Michael X. Delli Carpini, Michael X. Delli Carpini

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780812295894
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique de communication publique

The revolution in digital communications has altered the relationship between citizens and political elites, with important implications for democracy. As new information ecosystems have evolved, as unforeseen examples of their positive and negative consequences have emerged, and as theorizing, data, and research methods have expanded and improved, the central question has shifted from if the digital information environment is good or bad for democratic politics to how and in what contexts particular attributes of this environment are having an influence. It is only through the careful analysis of specific cases that we can begin to build a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the role of digital media in democratic theory and practice.The essays in Digital Media and Democratic Futures focus on a variety of information and communication technologies, politically relevant actors, substantive issues, and digital political practices, doing so from distinct theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. Individually, each of these case studies provides deep insights into the complex and context-dependent relationship between media and democracy. Collectively, they show that there is no single outcome for democracy in the digital age, only a range of possible futures. Contributors: Rena Bivens, Michael X. Delli Carpini, Jennifer Earl, Thomas Elliott, Deen Freelon, Kelly Gates, Philip N. Howard, Daniel Kreiss, Ting Luo, Helen Nissenbaum, Beth Simone Noveck, Jennifer Pan, Lisa Poggiali, Daniela Stockmann.

PART I

Designing Digital Democracies

CHAPTER 1

Programming the Rules of Engagement: Social Media Design and the Nonprofit System

Rena Bivens

Social Media for Social Change?

A rising crop of social media managers, coaches, and self-proclaimed gurus enthusiastically point to social media as a vital platform for a wide range of marketing and public relations activities. These voices add another layer on top of advocates who once focused on the promise of printing technologies, radio, television, online discussion groups, email, and websites. In many ways, then, social media offers another tool in the contemporary marketing toolbox. Social media may recycle the logics of “old” media in their design (van Dijck and Poell 2013), but it also appears to offer new affordances, such as the ability to reach publics old and new—including journalists, politicians, and previously unknown stakeholders (Sedereviciute and Valentini 2011). Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their personal investment in the debate, social media managers and coaches regularly place social media on a pedestal, imbuing these platforms with extraordinary powers. Many have set their sights on the nonprofit sector in particular, arguing that social media is a critical tool for social change (Mansfield 2012; Kanter and Fine 2010; Diaz-Ortiz 2011).

Of course there are also open critics of nonprofit social media use. For instance: “It’s time to step away from the belief that charities have to be on social media and need to invest in it. It’s not the best marketing tool we have” (Collins 2016). Instead, the advice is to activate dormant email lists, build effective website content, advertise on search results, and focus on search engine optimization. Social media managers are quick to defend their territory, typically arguing that critics are simply not using it effectively and that, regardless, social media cannot be ignored since it is “the status quo” and has “revolutionized the very way in which humans interact with each other” (Campbell 2016). Yet, as Feenberg (2016, 25) notes, “We have had enough experience with [the Internet] by now to realize that it is a mixed phenomenon unlikely to fulfil the promise of democratic transformation it inspired in the early years.” And according to Lim (2013, 638), “Social media should not be perceived as a causal agent having a pivotal role in promoting social change or advancing democracy.” Instead, “societal contexts and arrangements around technology are key to its impact on politics” (638).

To investigate the potential for nonprofit organizations (NPOs) to use social media for social change, I argue that we must interrogate the design of the social media platforms themselves—not simply the ways in which NPOs use the platforms. Design decisions made by platform owners and computer programmers impact the everyday work of NPOs, and the values that motivate those design decisions become embedded in the technology itself. Platforms mediate communication and, as such, the design of their technological architecture matters in a very material sense. Yet, much of the scholarly literature on nonprofit communication begins with an unexamined assumption that online platforms hold great potential for the work of nonprofit organizations, and often concludes that NPOs should do better (Lovejoy et al. 2012; Waters et al. 2009; Muralidharan et al. 2011; Briones et al. 2011; Curtis et al. 2010; Echenberg 2010; Waters and Jones 2011; Zorn et al. 2012). NPOs are repeatedly criticized for either underutilizing social media or missing opportunities while attempting to engage with online networks of stakeholders (Bortree and Seltzer 2009; Waters et al. 2009; Lovejoy et al. 2012).

These critiques stem from a user-centric approach that positions the potential of social media as an a priori benchmark against which the actual use of social media is judged. As a consequence, the affordances (or opportunities) ascribed to social media are not directly assessed. Instead, social media merely offers affordances that ought to be capitalized on. For example, if NPOs were to follow Bortree and Seltzer’s conclusions that “advocacy organizations should post frequently to their own profile [in ways that] will serve to stimulate discussion” (2009, 318–19), they would do so without contending with the programmed limits of these platforms. The potential for stimulating discussion is tied to algorithms that determine how content propagates through the network. These algorithms are programmed into social media software and directly impact how many users and which users will see posted content.

It is these sorts of design decisions and the material rules of engagement they engender that I investigate when considering whether social media is a critical tool for social change. The analysis presented in this chapter draws from a larger project that explores the design of Facebook and Twitter (the two most popular social media platforms used by NPOs) and how and why antiviolence NPOs use these spaces. While many of the issues discussed will relate to NPOs broadly, bear in mind that the research underpinning this chapter is specific to the antiviolence sector (including shelters, rape crisis and domestic violence centers, and other gender justice organizations, many of which specifically highlight the needs and experiences of marginalized populations like LGBTQ and racialized groups). The methods for this project include platform analysis, using historical screenshots alongside the current user interface, help and information pages (especially the “Facebook for Nonprofits” online guide), news stories about updates to the software, newsletters, blog posts and opinion pieces written by social media managers that discuss software changes, interviews with antiviolence nonprofit social media workers, and many years of participation in antiviolence NPO communities.

Antiviolence Nonprofits Navigate Both Software Design and the Nonprofit System

There are two sets of material rules of engagement that I am interested in, and my work here reads one set of rules through the other. The nonprofit system has its own set of rules, while social media software have been programmed with another set. These rules are material in that they refer to infrastructures, interfaces, resources, arrangements, conditions, and relations that are productive in so much as they enable and disable, encourage, reward, and obscure. Ultimately, the notion that designed artifacts “reflexively design us” (Bardzell 2010, 1307) structures my broader analysis of how social media design shapes and bounds nonprofit work. This section briefly sketches the issues that inform this analysis, beginning with materiality and software design before turning to criticisms of the nonprofit system. I draw from two sets of disparate yet loosely connected fields of scholarly inquiry: science and technology studies, human-computer interaction, and critical communication studies on one hand and feminist, queer, and trans theories on the other.

Materiality and Software Design

To analyze the material rules of engagement embedded in social media platform design, I draw from work that offers a complex understanding of the relationship between technology and society. From this perspective, technology and society are never separate, “never merely technical or social” (Wajcman 2010, 149). Mainstream science and technology studies (STS) analyses unpack the processes of technological innovation and design, considering the projected users and uses that designers embed within their technical artifacts (Wajcman 2004; Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003). From the perspective of human-computer interaction research, assumptions about users are inseparable from design processes. While users can help make these assumptions more reasonable by participating in design processes, it is impossible to conceive of every potential future user (van der Velden and Mörtberg 2012). Instead, “every design projects its own ‘ideal user’ ” and “the closer actual users conform to this ideal, the easier, or more powerfully, or more pleasurably they will interact with the design” (Bardzell 2010, 1307). During the design process, “ideal users” and expected uses are anticipated. Certain uses are deemed more valid than others, and design decisions are oriented toward encouraging or rewarding them.

By centering the technical artifact itself, the values that are embedded in it can be made visible. This does not mean that people and social practices are overlooked in the process. It is always a sociotechnical artifact that is built by people and used by people. However, when we bracket software design by choosing to target surface discourse alone (e.g., profiles, posts, and “likes”), any problems lying underneath can become further entrenched (Bivens 2015). Deeper software levels—including database structures, algorithms, and code—function as another structural arena through which social life is regulated (Bivens 2015, 2017). Barad (2007) suggests that the apparatuses that we assemble to investigate our research interests always make ethical cuts by determining what is included and what is bracketed off to the side. Including software design in our apparatus has become an increasingly important choice that we can make. Alongside those working at the intersection of critical communication studies and science and technology studies, I am concerned that materiality has been “consistently overlooked” in favor of constructivism and representation (Gillespie et al. 2014). As a result, I draw again from Barad (2007) when I emphasize the material dimensions of power. As Mayer and Simon (2013, n.p.) explain, power ought to be considered “in terms of who/what matters and who/what is excluded from mattering.” In the context of this chapter, then, I explore which elements of social change work by nonprofits materialize and come to matter, as an outcome of the rules of engagement embedded through software design, and how these elements relate to the rules of engagement that nonprofits are already contending with in the nonprofit system.

While making an early feminist intervention into the field of human-computer interaction, Bardzell (2010, 1307) emphasizes that we must “attend to the ways that design artifacts in-the-world reflexively design us.” From this perspective, we can begin to imagine how social media software can pressure certain types of users into existence, evoking, for example, programmatically inspired forms of sociality. As Bardzell explains, “we can also see that using software constitutes users as subjects; that is, it makes us become the kind of user the software is for, bracketing aside the rest of ourselves that is not relevant to the software” (2010, 1307, original italics). This aligns well with Barad’s (2007) emphasis on the material dimensions of power. What NPOs bracket aside in their social change work—because of the material rules of engagement they face when using social media software—can influence what they come to understand as relevant and useful for their social change work. The dimensions of social change work that come to matter are the dimensions that are programmatically possible through social media, anticipated by design, and rewarded through visibility and favorable analytics.

Criticisms of the Nonprofit System

The material rules of engagement stemming from the nonprofit system take on a different form than those embedded in software design, yet they often have similar effects. Feminist, queer, and trans theories have been instrumental in naming and critiquing the “nonprofit industrial complex” by exploring the origins of the nonprofit system, particularly in the U.S. context, and the ways in which the state and funders have bounded social movements to work within their systems and adhere to their logics (Incite! 2007; Spade 2015). Three specific rules of engagement are worthy of note here. Encouragement and rewards are bestowed upon NPOs who (1) maintain policy-focused strategies that work within current systems; (2) target permissible forms of violence; and (3) advance professionalization of the industry.

Working Within Current Systems

First, encouraging and funding policy-focused strategies has the effect of curbing advocacy work. In the United States, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations were established and accompanied by support from foundations, which helped secure the wealth of the elite who set up the foundations by permitting them to contribute to NPOs through tax-deductible donations (Smith 2007). Yet these funds often came with strings attached, as did nonprofit status, prohibiting “direct involvement in political advocacy” (Smith 2007, 7). Government restrictions on the nonprofit sector have broadly led to “a climate of advocacy restriction”¹ (Bonisteel and Green 2005, 1). In this climate, social media use can be risky since content added by NPOs is easily replicated and may remain cached or accessible through search engines even after it has been deleted (boyd 2010).

Rewarding policy-focused strategies also encourages NPOs to work within current institutions and systems, such as the legal and prison system. Yet, as marginalized actors in the antiviolence movement (including trans and gender nonconforming folks, racialized groups, people with disabilities, and those dealing with fraught immigration policies) will attest, historical and ongoing violence is not merely something to be dealt with by the state. This violence also originates from the state and its institutions. As Razack (2015) explains, structured by the legacy of colonialism and its ongoing effects, Indigenous peoples are overrepresented in the prison population, receive harsher penalties, and die in custody in disproportionate numbers. Meanwhile, the state obstructs trans people from obtaining ID and accessing social services and health care, measures that effectively shorten their lives (Spade 2015).

Despite these and other examples of state-inflicted violence, many antiviolence NPOs have worked to strengthen elements of the state—like the criminal justice system—as a means of reducing sexual and domestic violence (Smith 2005). Yet, advocating for increased criminalization (in the form of mandatory arrest laws, for instance) exacerbates the problem since “racial bias permeates legal and other state systems, with disproportionately devastating effects on communities of color, poor, and immigrant peoples” (Dasgupta 2003, 12). As Spade (2015, 208) puts it, “expand[ing] the punishing power of the criminal system that targets us” is an impossible option. While the nonprofit system as a whole may be a worthy target of critique, it is important to acknowledge that some nonprofit workers would argue that it is possible, and often preferable, to avoid carceral responses to violence altogether. That is, NPOs can choose to work within current systems whil...