Week 2 group discussion assignment

I’ll be traveling the week of Sept. 15-21, so in lieu of in-class time I would like you all
to complete the following group discussion assignment, based on the week’s
readings and a short film titled Noah.

Failure to complete this assignment will take 2% off of your overall

attendance grade.

Here are the week’s readings, you’ll find the Couldry & Hepp chapter in the MyLS
content area:

 Baym, Nancy. “Communication in Digital Space” in Personal Connections in

the Digital Age. P.57-79.
 Couldry, Nick, and Andreas Hepp, “The Social World as Communicative
Construction” in The Mediated Construction of Reality. Cambridge, UK ;
Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2017. P.15-33.

…and here’s the link to watch Noah, a short film about 21st-century young romantic
relationships:

https://vimeo.com/65935223

After watching Noah, your goal will be to respond to the following questions, based
on excerpts from the readings and some related video clips that total around 25
minutes of watch time. You may answer the questions on your own if you choose,
but obviously there are benefits to gathering in a group to discuss them together.
This is not an essay or exam: note-taking style bullet points are fine to
summarize your discussion and thoughts.

Once you have compiled responses to all questions, please submit them to the
appropriate Dropbox folder on MyLS, in .docx or .pdf format. If you had a group
discussion, list the names of participants at the top of the document, and designate
one person to submit to Dropbox.

Questions arising from the Baym chapter:

1) On p.57, Baym writes that “A medium’s ability to convey social cues
about interactants and context is an essential component of its
communicative possibilities and constraints.”

But also: “…limited social cues may affect people, relationships, social
hierarchies. Media with fewer social cues trigger hopes that people will
become more equal and more valued for their minds, but also raise
fears that interactions, identities, and relationships will become
shallow, untrustworthy, inadequate.”

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 How might we apply Baym’s diagnostic concepts to Noah? Give
examples.

2) Baym on p.59: Early social presence research around computer-

mediated communication defined it as “the degree of salience of the
other person in the interaction and the consequent salience (intimacy /
immediacy) of the interpersonal relationships.” That is, based in non-
verbal cues (gaze, facial expression, posture, dress, etc.) to
demonstrate attentiveness, for example.

How is social presence demonstrated, or even stylized in

Noah? Think in terms of both articulation (eg. how characters
communicate feelings, practices, and experiences, and how
you as a viewer of the film tend to interpret them, or are
“made to feel”) as well as assemblage (eg. what role do the
many app interfaces, windows, and the tools and tech play, eg.
webcams, computer keyboard). By the way, what did you think
of the film?

3) Over p.61-62, Baym explains that, “The “cues filtered out” approach to
mediated presence argues that most media are ‘lean’ and impede
people’s ability to handle interpersonal dimensions of interaction.” …
and that, “Computer-mediated discourse was long seen as a social
vacuum in which anything went,” and researchers thought this would
“…lead to less social and emotional communication, and more
negatively loaded emotional communication.”

What’s been your experience with social media when it comes

to social cues being filtered out? Does ‘filtered out’ make
sense as a framing, or do you feel more capable of successfully
communicating “social presence”, eg.

- I’m here with you in this moment,

- I have solidarity with you, or respect you in this particular
context/role,
- I’m thinking about you, even if I’m not expressing it in
words?

On examples of how we put social cues INTO digital communication, Baym

lists on p.63: typographical art, salutations, the degree of formality of
language, paralanguage, communication styles, message headers.

What are some ways that you achieve social presence over
social media?

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 4) …and here’s a related technology that we might say represents some
kind of ‘cutting edge’ of social presence research, Facebook’s Social
VR:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuIgyKLPt3s
Facebook Social VR Demo - Oculus Connect 2016

Would you seek out this technology? Why or why not? When
would you use it, and when would you decline to use it? Are
there still ‘cues being filtered out’ of Oculus Social VR? What
are they, and are they consequential?

5) Watch the following NY Times video segment from Amanda Hess:

https://youtu.be/5qm0LwUHDqE
The White Internet’s Love Affair with Digital Blackface (2017)

Tying Hess’s ideas together with Baym’s account of social presence,

coming up on the end of the chapter Baym concludes that “As people
appropriate the possibilities of textual media to convey social cues,
create immediacy, entertain, and show off for one another, they build
identities for themselves, build interpersonal relationships, and create
social contexts.” (70)

But she also later writes on p.77 that “Race is often ‘routed around’
online, rather than brought to the front. Many online sites that make
users select gender and even species do not make them select race.
This may be celebrated as an erasure of an unnecessary social
division, but it can also be read as an assumption that most users are
White.”

Do you agree with Hess’s diagnosis around digital blackface?

Why or why not? What kinds of broader impacts do you see
coming along with the expanded use of GIF keyboards and
memes to produce social presence through pop culture
references? Eg. the circulation of more outright racist tropes
via meme.

Questions arising from the Couldry and Hepp chapter:

1) On p.16, C&H writes that “The social world is fundamentally
interwoven with media. Media emphasizes that the social world is
something constructed by us as humans, the process is historically

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 located.”

What are some historically-located moments of ‘rupture’ that

are fundmentally interwoven with media, speaking to the
construction of the social world? What were some effects of
their intense and global mediation? One example to get you
started might be the Twin Towers falling on September 11th,
2001.

2) For C&H, the social world is not just given, we make it as human
beings. Social construction is a radically uncertain process.

(Recall Slack & Wise on articulation and assemblage: that achieving

unified, stable identities for things, people, and institutions is a
contingent process largely based in articulating/disarticulating/re-
articulating struggle, which changes over time based on who has the
power to ‘make things mean’. The equivalent language for C&H is that
meaning is kept stable through institutional facts, but that these facts
can and do fall into dispute over time.)

Eg. P.25: Couldry and Hepp’s modification of common accounts of

social constructivism is that “we should not base our understanding of
social construction on implicit/fixed agreement, somehow imminent in
the functioning of social life. Instead, DISPUTE and DIVERGENCE should
sit at the heart of social bonds.”

To give an example, watch this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2sDrJ8AOzU
The Future of Food: Eating Insects

What would be involved in reconciling North American

societies to the regular consumption of insects? How would
shared patterns of practice be put under dispute or
divergence? What kinds of institutional facts would need to
disappear? What kinds would need to APPEAR? Who would be
involved in pressing for their consumption? What role would
media, especially those on social media, play?

3) On P.15 C&H ask, “What does it mean when the social world as we
know it is constructed in and through mediated communication? …Not
just mediated, but mediatized.” That is, as producing “More complexity
when forms and patterns are sustained in and through media and their
infrastructures.”

To put it another way, media infrastructures feed back on one another,

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 such that there is a “shift in the overall balance from direct
communication to mediated communication as the regular means of
sustaining social relations.”(28) Add to this, a shift towards media as a
current (ongoing) resource in face-to-face communication.

How does the film (Noah) present these shifts?

a) the shift in the balance of direct communication with

other people versus mediated communication;
b) the shift to feedback loops that especially involve inputs
from past mediated communications, and
c) the shift towards media as current resource in face-to-
face communication?
d) Also, the film is now six years old. How might this film be
different in 2019?

4) On the subject of everyday reality, on p.19 C&H write that, “everyday

reality is the foundation of the social world. It is constitutive for our
living in the social world. The everyday is “the province of reality in
which [humans] continuously participate in ways which are at once
inevitable and patterned.” …what each of us does in the world,
individually and in relation to each other.

But, they continue, what we do in the world is not separate from the
technological means by which we act in the world. Sociology thought,
for a long time: FIRST face-to-face AND THEN supplementation by
technological mediation. The reality is that human societies have
always been linked to technology and media. In other words, it makes
no sense to separate ‘pure experience’ from ‘mediated experience’ –
everyday reality is mediated from the beginning.

On the basis of what they are saying, how would you read this
scene from everyday reality in San Francisco? What does tell
us about patterned, inevitable, continuous participation in the
reconstruction of the social world?

https://cdn-images-
1.medium.com/fit/t/2400/1008/1*ySmV3DgC6QpebhaAP4R43w.jpeg

5) Over p.27-30, C&H lay out a distinction between Umwelt and Mitwelt
(Oom-velt and mitt-velt). It’s one taken from phenomenology, a
philosophical tradition that has been deeply influential on the the
social sciences and humanities.

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 Your Umwelt is ‘the world of consociates’, ‘directly experienced social
reality’. One’s face-to-face reality, our core experience. Your Mitwelt is
‘the world of contemporaries,’ more distant from Umwelt. In the case
of Mitwelt, we know that others exist (‘everyone else’, ‘friends of
friends’) and they build the social world with us, but we are not in
direct contact with them.

Alfred Schutz: Because of media, the distinction between face-to-face

experiences and other experiences of the social world was less
absolute, and more a continuous gradation. C&H write on p.28 that,
“We rely on media to construct ‘collective entities’ like the nation” for
example. They continue that “Media are changing not only our Mitwelt
but more basically our Umwelt. Refiguring the world in and on which
we act.”

Watch this brief clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGaJPC51QR4
Legion - Chapter 4 / Umwelt [CC] [HD]

What are some analogies that we might draw, between the

Umwelt of a tick or a bloodhound, and the Umwelt of a human
being? What are some non-conscious features of how things
‘show up’ in the world for us through social media? (Think:
bodily and/or unconscious habits, drives and desires,
organizing and steering your mood without you even
recognizing it) What are some conscious features of social
media? (Think: interacting with friends of friends, strangers, or
being a part of broader populations, like ‘being a Canadian’)

6) On p.29 C&H conclude that “media are changing not only our Mitwelt
but more basically our Umwelt. Refiguring the world in and on which
we act.”

Watch the first six or so minutes of this clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgJTHPeBn9I
This Smart City Will Sense Your Every Move: Sidewalk Labs

How do you think smart city technology might restructure your

Umwelt? How might it change your relationship to ‘everyone
else’ – our Mitwelt? Would you want to live in Alphabet’s
proposed smart city? Why or why not?