Who are our social contacts, and where are they?

Dit is het tweede 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!

Introduction

To start this reflection, I will 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’. I am trying to gain more knowledge by reflecting the articles of this week on my theme.

Who are local?

An interesting point in the article of Churchill and Ubois (2009) is about the definition of the term ‘local’. According to Churchill and Ubois, ‘local’ wasn’t only used to describe things physically proximate or within a proscribed neighborhood. ‘Local’ was also used to relate to affiliation and personal identity. The result that the most common news ‘channel’ is word of mouth through groups one identifies with underscores the different use of ‘local’, and that it may be based on human relationships in friendship and identity networks, and not just geography. Boyd and Ellison (2008) state in their article that some social networks help people who don’t know each other to connect based on shared interests, political views, or activities. Boyd and Ellison (2008) also mention that many social networks attract very homogeneous groups. Referring the statements by Boyd and Ellison (2008) to the point about locality by Churchill and Ubois (2009), we could say that the digital world is a great opportunity to provide users with ‘local’ information, where ‘local’ is defined as based on human relationships and identity networks, because of the easy connection between people with shared interests. Another advantage of digital media is that newspapers are a static form of news, so they could never provide users tailored news based on their human relationships, interests, or identity networks. New forms of digital media are in most cases very dynamic, and can deliver news based on these interests and relationships. As mentioned by Churchill and Ubois (2009), consumption of news has moved from reading newspapers to other contexts. The rise of internet news sites, and mobile devices that can have access everywhere means that more information is readily available, but also that information can be tailored on specific needs and interests of the user.

Important question concerning my theme is how does this ‘local’ news consumption relates to having more social contacts in the digital world? As said before, the digital world provides a lot of opportunities to provide tailored news to users. Social networks for instance have possibilities to join communities for people with the same interests. News is shared on this communities, but there is also the possibility to get to know other people who also joined this community, with that same interest, or in other words, people who are ‘local’ to you. The important question that remains after this analysis is: Does the mere exposure to people with the same interests (who are ‘local’ to you) all over the world lead to more social contacts?

What are contacts?

As noted in the first paragraph, my theme is ‘having more social contacts living in a digital world’, but what are contacts exactly? And do people have the same definition and criteria for social contacts? Boyd and Ellison (2008) state that friends on social networks are not the same as friends in the everyday sense. According to them, “friends on social networks provide a context by offering users an imagined audience to guide behavioral norms”. They also state that the term friends can be misleading, because the connection not always means friendship like in our everyday language, and that the reasons why people are connected are varied. I think this is a very interesting point for discussion, because this raises the question if it is really true that we have more social contacts living in a digital world. Couldn’t it be that we changed our definition of social contacts? And that in the digital world we mention more people as social contacts than in other contexts?

Parasocial interaction

An example I would like to show here is the form of parasocial interaction. This occurs when we respond to a media figure as though he or she is a real person. Or in other words it is the complex web of relationships between individual media users and the people who populate the media environment (Giles, 2003). When you look at for example the death of Michael Jackson, you can see that a lot of fans responded to his death in a way that they felt a personal bond with Michael Jackson. Can we call this bond a social connection?

Two essential functions of parasocial interaction are companionship and personal identity. Personal identity is undoubtedly the basis of the appeal of audience-participation television. Viewers recognize versions of themselves on screen, and the processes operated then can be defined as parasocial interaction. Van Dijck (2009) states that the surge of reality television has boosted the participation of ‘ordinary people’ in broadcast productions, making the user an ‘active participant’. Could the passive recipient create a parasocial relationship with this active participant? Unfortunately my knowledge of parasocial interaction is small, so this raises some questions with me. Can we define a parasocial relationship as ‘having a social contact’? And if so, does the participation of ‘ordinary people’ in broadcast productions creates more social contacts because we can identify with them? If a parasocial relationship is as ‘having a social contact’, this would still be a question like “which came first, the chicken or the egg?”. Could it be that parasocial interaction reshaped our definition of social contacts? Or could it be that parasocial relationships become social contacts because of our reshaped definition?

Van Dijck (2009) argues that we can see a definite paradigm shift in the way media content is produced and circulated. With the media technologies of today, ordinary citizens can be media producers and consumers. In other words, citizens can be sender and receiver, which can create online relations or contacts. Van Dijck (2009) makes a distinction in user behavior, and comes with six levels on a participation ladder: 13 percent are ‘active creators’, 19 percent are ‘critics’, 15 percent are ‘collectors’, 19 percent are ‘joiners’, 33 percent are ‘passive spectators’, and 52 percent are ‘inactives’. Van Dijck (2009) concludes by saying that participation is thus a relative term when over 80 percent of all users are in fact passive recipients. But is being a so called ‘passive spectator’ so passive? ‘Passive spectators’ perform activities such as watching created video’s and reading posted blogs. Referring to parasocial interaction, this could mean that for example a ‘passive spectator’ feels a bond with an ‘active creator’, who creates online content and shares personal items.

Staying in touch

The article of Lazonick (2007) is about globalization of the ICT labour force. The article shows how the development strategies of the East-Asion nations interacted with investment strategies of ICT companies from the US to generate a global supply of ICT labour. In this article the problem of brain drain is mentioned. Brain drain occurs when developing nations invest in their education of engineers and scientists, but when the most attractive employment opportunities are abroad. Challenge for countries like Korea where reversing this brain drain. They succeeded in this, partly because of many highly educated and very experienced Koreans or Taiwanese who had been pursuing successful careers in the US who played key roles in building indigenous research institutes and companies (Lazonick, 2007). As mentioned, ,most of these very experienced Koreans or Taiwanese had a successful career in the US. To stay in contact with their contact network they created in the US, they could use digital media. Boyd and Ellison (2008) say that the goal of making connections on for example SNSs are frequently between ‘latent ties’ who share some offline connection, instead of meeting strangers. This could mean that social networks don’t create a larger social network than your ‘offline world’, but what if we reflect this on the globalization like what happened with the experienced Koreans or Taiwanese? With the use of digital media they can maintain these social relationships, instead of losing them over time. In this case, globalization plays an important role in my theme, having more social contacts living in a digital world. When people stay ‘at home’ all their life, they will not create that much social contacts with they can’t maintain without a digital world, but with this growing globalization, people have to use digital media to contain social relationships with people far away. An important question concerning my theme after reading the article of Lazonick (2007) is what the relations are between the constructs ‘globalization’, ‘digital world’, and ‘a growing social network’.

References:

Boyd, D. M. & Ellison, N.B. (2008). Social network sites: Definition, history and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13, 210-230.

Churchill, E., Ubois, J. (2009). Lead type, dead type: New patterns of local news production and consumption. Paper presented at EPIC 2009, Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, Chicago, IL. August 30th-September 2nd.

Giles, D. (2003). Media Psychology. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

Lazonick, W. (2007). Globalization of the ICT Labour Force (pp. 75-100). In: Mansell, R., Avgerou, C., D. Quah and R. Silverstone (2007). The Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies, Oxford University Press.

Van Dijck, J. (2009). Users like you? Theorizing agency in user-generated content. Media Culture & Society, 31(1), 41-58.