The role of events in ICT adoption: same-sex marriage and Twitter

ABSTRACT

ICT adoption is predominantly considered as a process conditioned by social structures, social situations of adopters, and attributes and features of technologies. What is often overlooked are the cultural forces that shape adoption experiences and processes. This paper focuses on events and event narratives as vehicles through which the efficacy of culture unfolds in technological change processes. Cultural sociology has shown how influential events can be for forming public opinions and facilitating collective action. This article considers the power of one event on a much smaller scale: the passage of same-sex marriage (SSM) law in New York in June 2011 was not only significant for marriage equality in the US but also for the operating logic of the news ecosystem in which the political decision was made ‒ the state house in Albany. For the journalists who covered this event on the ground, the SSM decision was the catalyst to fully embrace Twitter. Years later, the event still served as an exemplar for the potentials of Twitter and as a basis of legitimacy of associated tweeting practices reporters incorporated. This contribution is based on ethnographic research at the state house in Albany, analysis of tweets and legacy news coverage published during that period, and in-depth interviews with reporters.

KEYWORDS:

• Technological change
• technical change
• adoption
• diffusion
• innovation
• implementation
• social media
• Twitter
• cultural sociology
• eventness

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank David Domingo and Wiebke Loosen for inviting me to a special panel at the 2015 ICA conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for which I prepared the first draft of this paper, and Alfred Hermida for his discussion comments. I would also like to thank Heather Hofmeister for feedback on an earlier draft and CW Anderson, whose ‘events versus structure’-comment on a different paper sparked the idea for this one. Last but not least, I am much obliged to the state house reporters in Albany for suffering my presence and taking the time to talk to me in their eventful working lives.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Matthias Revers’s research deals with news media, political communication, and journalism cultures in cross-national comparison and is in conversations with cultural sociology, media sociology and the sociology of work, occupations, and professions. He has published in the Journal of Communication, Journalism, Media, Culture & Society, The American Sociologist, and is the author of Contemporary Journalism in the US and Germany: Agents of Accountability (forthcoming). Currently, he is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Department of Sociology at Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany. He received his PhD in sociology at the State University of New York – Albany. E-mail: [email protected]

ORCiD

Matthias Revers http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6266-4967

Notes

1 All names of journalists used in this article are pseudonyms.

2 These include responses to tweets, tweeting at these accounts, and old-school RTs.

3 Though Zvi Reich’s (2006) reconstruction interviews have shown that journalists remember a surprising amount of details when asked how they reported specific stories.

4 Since the early 2000s, LCA journalists witnessed numerous New York officials resign or being expelled upon felony conviction, such as embezzlement, bribery, and extortion. This long series culminated in late 2015 when two of the three most powerful New York politicians, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, were independently convicted on several corruption charges (Precious, 2015). The New York Times has its own, continuously updated site on this topic titled ‘The Many Faces of New York's Political Scandals,’ which currently (in May 2016) lists 30 New York politicians who have ‘have been convicted of crimes, sanctioned or otherwise accused of wrongdoing’ over the last decade (Craig, Rashbaum, & Kaplan, 2015).

5 Part of this assertion became true in June 2015 when the US Supreme Court ruled that state-level bans of SSM unconstitutional, even if it is unclear whether the decision in New York had anything to do with it.

6 Conversely, events may also act as buffers at times of radical change to pause and reassess the situation.