Reducing Uncertainty in a Digital World

Dit is het eerste bericht van serie van vier berichten met als onderwerp ‘leven in een digitale wereld’. Deze berichten zijn allen onderdeel van het vak ‘living in a digital world’, onderdeel van de track ‘New Media and Communication’, afstudeerrichting van het masterprogramma ‘Communication Studies’. Het door mij gekozen thema bij aanvang van dit vak was ‘het hebben van meer sociale contacten in de digitale wereld’. Aan de hand van de wekelijkse artikelen heb ik gezocht naar verklaringen en zijn er nieuwe vragen bovengekomen. Reacties en / of opmerkingen zijn altijd welkom!

To begin this reflection, I would like to introduce my theme during this course. In my opinion is having more social contacts a great advantage of living in a digital world. A larger social network has advantages for networking and other social activities, and is in my opinion a great improvement of ‘life’. This theme has some connections with the five articles, and I would like to discuss these connections.

At some points the articles give an explanation why the number of social contacts are growing in this digital world. Since the telegraph there was a lot of remediation, improving older media, all with the goals to be “present” at places where one was not and to contact others when you need them (de Vries, 2005). Most remediation is seen with the mobile phone, which is to date combining all the possibilities of existing media, especially with new devices like smartphones or iphones. With creating such so called ‘devices’, we get closer to an environment where we can ‘communicate like angels’, and have the ability to access the information network at any time, at any place (de Vries, 2005). Is creating such an environment an explanation for a growing social network in a digital world? Without a digital world, we wouldn’t be able to contact people easily who are far away.

The article of Gergen (2002) states that we are present but simultaneously rendered absent, because one is absorbed by a technologically mediated world of elsewhere. This is an effect of living in a digital world, but what are the effects of this on the growing social network? Gergen (2002) says that we may see a shift from vertical relationships to horizontal relationships, which means that technologies of absent presence spread our attention, with the effect of an expanding relationship network. This shift can lead to a devaluation of relationship depth. This could be an explanation for having more social contacts in a digital world, but it doesn’t give me a fulfilling explanation why the shift from vertical relationships to horizontal relationships is happening.

Could the Uncertainty Reduction Theory be an explanation for this? Core assumption of the Uncertainty Reduction Theory is that people want to reduce uncertainty about themselves and each other when meeting other people, to increase each other’s predictability. The mechanisms by which people exchange information may be limited in Computer Mediated Communication settings (Tidwell & Walther, 2002). For example, a weak point of communicating with a mobile phone or through the internet is the absence of visual cues in most of the cases, which can lead to miscommunication (de Vries (2005). Could the limited options of reducing uncertainty be an explanation for the loss of relationship depth, and the existence of more horizontal relationships? Because of the loss of non-verbal cues, CMC relationship partners don’t use indirect questions, that are normally used in FtF relationships. Instead, CMC relationship partners appeared to use more direct, interactive uncertainty reduction strategies than did their FtF counterparts. Their exchanges were more intimate and led to confidence levels similar to their FtF counterparts. It is even stated that CMC relationship partners are more effective with these intimate exchanges than FtF relationship partners who act similarly (Tidwell & Walther, 2002). The conclusions of Tidwell & Walther don’t show any sign of a weaker reduction of uncertainty in CMC relationships, which leads me to a conclusion that Uncertainty Reduction Theory isn’t a good fit for explaining the shift from vertical relationships to horizontal relationships.

Can the Uncertainty Reduction Theory be seen as an explanation for the growing group of social contacts in a digital world? An unstated boundary of the Uncertainty Reduction Theory is that partners encounter each other physically when they interact, but this boundary is theoretically irrelevant, and could be dismissed (Tidwell & Walther, 2002). Westerman, van der Heide, Klein and Walther (2008) conducted an experiment about the ways people seek information about others. This study shows that people use anonymity-channels to seek information about less-known targets, and identifiable channels to seek information about more well-known targets. Social networking sites for example give the opportunity to be both identifiable and unidentifiable, and are used for seeking information about both lesser-known and better-known targets.

This article discusses the use of Uncertainty Reduction Theory to answer the question of what channels people use to get information about other people, but doesn’t mention a growing social network because of Uncertainty Reduction Theory. With the existence of al digital media, we have the opportunity to seek information about each other, and, in this way, reduce uncertainty. Could this be an explanation for a growing social network? It isn’t only the information we have stored online which can reduce uncertainty, but also the option to use for instance Skype to contact someone who is far away. With the use of this software, we can still reduce uncertainty, even when someone is far away. The assumption that I make of this is; since we have the opportunity to reduce uncertainty in many digital ways, we can have relationships with people from who we couldn’t reduce uncertainty without the use of the digital media.

One of the disadvantages of these options to reduce uncertainty by using digital media, is shown in the article from Coutu (2007). This article shows the job application of Mimi Brewster. After her very positive interview, the HR department found something to worry about using the Google search engine. In this case, we could say that HR tried to reduce uncertainty about Mimi Brewster, but because she didn’t took care of her Google results, this attempt failed. These old searchresults are a threat for people, because information posted today will still be available years from now, and could cause a situation like Mimi Brewster’s situation.

What will the effects be of these Google results for Mimi Brewster, and should she have done some things different? The article of Ryan (2006) is about notification norms (information-handling imperatives), and depends of the variables ‘who’, ‘when’, and ‘how’. With the growth of digital media, it is even harder for careful notifiers to control the subsequent trajectory of information, because, as in case of Mimi Brewster, information is spread through a lot of digital channels, and in her case is uncontrollable. This so called third-person notification is hard to manage, because you are in most cases dependent of a third party sharing information about you. Could it be that the change of the digital world goes faster than the change of our notification norms, and that this is an explanation for the fact that Mimi Brewster did not mention about these Google hits? We should be aware of the digital speed and possibilities, and adapt our notification norms to these properties.

The most important question I have after reflecting on these five articles is the question about Reducing Uncertainty and making social contacts. In that case I would refer to the research of Westerman et al. (2008), and would ask the following question: Do the possibilities to search information about each other using the digital world lead to more social contacts, because we can reduce uncertainty about other people?

References

Coutu, D. (2007). We Googled You. Harvard Business Review, 85(6), 37.

De Vries, I. (2005). “Mobile Telephony: Realising the Dream of Ideal Communication?”, in: Lynne Hamill & Amparo Lasen (eds.), Wireless World: Mobiles – Past, Present and Future (London: Springer).

Gergen, K. J. (2002). The Challenge of absent presence. In: Perpetual Contact. Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance (pp. 227-242). Eds. J. E. Katz and M. Aakhus. Cambridge University Press.

Ryan, D. (2006). Getting the Word Out. Notes on the Social Organization of Notification. Sociological Theory, 24(3), 228-254.

Tidwell, L. C., & Walther, J. B. (2002). Computer-mediated communication effects on disclosure, impressions, and interpersonal evaluations: Getting to know one another a bit at a time. Human Communication Research, 28, 317–348.

Westerman, D., Van Der Heide, B., Klein K.A., & Walther J.B. (2008). How do people really seek information about others? Information seeking across Internet and traditional communication channels. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13, 751-767.