Dynamic Perspectives on Media and Information Technologies

This year’s Communication, Information Technologies and Media Sociology (CITAMS) special issue of Information, Communication & Society received a record number of submissions. While a large number of high-quality submissions certainly made our jobs as editors difficult, it provided us an opportunity to spotlight the diversity of the work being done on ICTs as well as digital and mass media more generally. This, we believe, is particularly important to do in a quickly growing and changing area. The special issue includes theoretical papers, methodological papers, empirical papers, and research notes. Amidst these, we selected works with distinct theoretical orientations, a range of methodological approaches, and a myriad of empirical concerns. Theoretical contributions traverse science and technology studies (STS), social psychology, symbolic interaction, and broad debates about structure and agency. Methods represented in the issue include qualitative interviews, quantitative surveys, experimental design, and both ‘big data’ and ‘small data’ approaches to social media analysis. Authors use these methods to answer pressing research questions about artificial intelligence, education, digital inequality, media framing, and the interplay of racism and sexism online. We made a concerted effort to include work by scholars at different stages in their careers, doing research on different parts of the world and working inside as well as outside of academia.

We open the issue with four papers presenting theoretical and methodological advances in ICT studies. The central theoretical and methodological concerns of these works feature in subsequent empirical papers and research notes within the issue, demonstrating their relevance to ongoing intellectual conversations. Attending to critical questions of theory and method is crucial for a rapidly changing field, as such work defines and refines the ways scholars approach dynamic objects of study.

Locating agency remains an ongoing concern for sociologists and STS scholars theorizing human-technology relations. In the first theoretical paper, Maria Erofeeva reviews several approaches to agency, synthesizing them into a four-part model. Erofeeva draws on the ventriloqual perspective on communication, actor-network theory (ANT), and contemporary affordance theory. Distinguishing between inscription (built-in technological agencies) and attachment (human perceptions of technologies) the paper argues that the ventriloqual perspective is overly human-centred, ANT is overly object centered, and contemporary affordance theory strikes a human-technology balance but requires more explicit attention to how agency operates. Erofeeva uses existing empirical work to model four types of agency that account for actual and potential agentic performances of both humans and technologies. The paper concludes with a shift from the agency of things to the agency of situations. Situational agency is a way around cyclical debates about people vs. things and applies a distinctly sociological and structural approach to human-technology relations.

Nils Klowait is interested in how the ‘material turn’ intersects with classic symbolic interactionism to account for digitally mediated interaction structures. Klowait takes us through the ways symbolic interactionists have worked to incorporate new digital technologies into their analyses. The paper argues that symbolic interactionists have depicted technology as relatively static. By treating technology as static, the symbolic interactionist literature does not adequately address materiality. At the same time, advances in STS have remained trapped by problems of technological determinism. Drawing out key debates from STS, Klowait concludes that symbolic interaction and STS can combine towards a ‘middle ground’ that attends to materiality while maintaining a sharp focus on human subjectivity.

In a methodological piece, Joe Murphy, Patrick Yuli Hsieh, Michael Wenger, Annice E. Kim, and Rob Chew, examine the relative breadth and accuracy of Twitter data and survey data. Through a case study of e-cigarette information exposure, the article parses through methodological questions about measurement, ethics, and generalizability. The authors find that a combination of Twitter metadata with survey self-reports is stronger than either method alone. Not only does this article demonstrate creative methodologies, but also guides readers through pressing methodological issues which social media researchers would do well to consider.

Finally, Jenny Davis and Tony Love merge theory and methods by addressing the question of generalizability from social media data. Social media data has ushered in significant research opportunities but at the same time, remains plagued by lingering critiques about generalization beyond the site of study. Researchers often make broad social claims that they derive from ‘big data’ methods. However, these data are necessarily partial and nonrepresentative. Davis and Love invoke formal theory as a solution to the problem of generalizability. Traditionally used by experimentalists, formal theory generalizes to theoretical propositions rather than empirical populations. Through theoretical generalization, researchers can extrapolate from social media data to learn about general social processes. In explicating theoretical generalization, Davis and Love distinguish between studies of social media and studies with social media. Studies of social media are tied to research about specific digital platforms. In contrast, studies with social media use digital data to answer general social questions. This distinction is methodologically and theoretically useful as practitioners define research questions and identify data sources.

The special issue contains three full-length empirical studies. The empirical papers touch on a range of topics and employ various methodologies. These works address artificial intelligence, education, and gendered access to mobile phones in a global context. One paper uses an experimental design, another uses qualitative interviews, and a third uses existing survey data.

Daniel Shank, Alyssa DeSanti and Timothy Maninger examine moral attributions in AI-human teams. They conduct an experiment that manipulates written descriptions of four real-world scenarios involving artificial intelligence to see who (humans, artificial intelligence or both) is blamed for a moral violation. Here, the authors are primarily interested in whether artificial intelligence, which is typically considered a tool rather than an autonomous agent, takes the brunt of the blame in human-AI teams. Amazon Mechanical Turk participants completed an online experiment which involved four decision-making structures varying the presence and role of humans and AIs. Decisions were either made by AI alone, humans alone, an AI with human monitoring it, or a human who is provided recommendations from an AI. They find the moral attributions of AI do not differ even as the roles they play in decision-making do. This is not true for humans, who are faulted less for moral violations when AI are involved in the decision-making. The authors conclude that this suggests that the moral perceptions of advanced technologies may have more to do with reducing the fault of humans than blaming machines. Nonetheless, they argue, AI in human-AI teams may be used as moral scapegoats for human failings. For example, if decision-making allows, but does not require, humans to monitor AI (such as the case of self-driving cars), it is likely that AI, rather than humans, would be blamed for wrongdoing (such as accidents).

Brooke Dinsmore uses qualitative analysis to examine contextual variation in the affordances of digital technologies and new media within an education setting. Drawing on interviews with 37 students and 19 teachers, Dinsmore analyzes student and teacher negotiations over smartphones and social media use in the classroom at a ‘technologically permissive’ high school. Dinsmore finds that both teachers and students worked to limit the impact of digital technology on the existing balance of power in their relationship. Specifically, smartphones compromised teachers’ control by allowing students to access shared social spaces during class time. Since teachers were unable to restrict students’ phone usage, they relied on their institutional power to define (ill)legitimate uses of technology in the classroom. Students regarded the blurring of the physical and digital as ordinary and they tried to maximize access to online social spaces while at school. That said, student norms discouraged the acknowledgement of online sociality during school hours. Student norms, in other words, reinforced a traditional power relationship between teachers and students. Dinsmore’s analysis illustrates that power relationships shape the availability of affordances; an observation that builds on recent advancements in the literature on affordances.

In a global study of gender and digital inequality, Aarushi Bhandari uses data from the International Telecommunications Union to examine the factors associated with women’s unequal access to mobile phones across 51 countries. Bhandari introduces and operationalizes variables associated with three development frameworks ‒ the Growth Imperative, the Gender and Wellbeing perspectives, and World Polity Theory ‒ to assess what factors best explain gender disparities. Using quantile regression methods Bhandari finds that women’s reproductive autonomy is the only significant predictor increasing women’s relative access to mobile phones across the countries. This finding, she argues, casts doubt upon assertions that access to ICTs alone improves women’s status. Instead, it appears that women’s abilities to make decisions regarding their own bodies might be a prerequisite for digital equality.

The issue also includes four research notes. These short papers touch on pressing issues and present findings in a clear and easily digestible way. Not only do these notes add to the literature on ICTs, but also deliver complex material in a format that is ideal for classroom teaching. All four research notes are based on rigorous empirical studies.

The first two pieces spotlight news media coverage and its potential effects on political deal-making and social problems. In her research note, Julia Sonnevend compares two cases to illustrate how ‘villian’ countries, in this case, Iran and North Korea, strategically launch ‘charm offensives’ that emphasize the personal magnetism of their leaders in an effort to improve their international images. Drawing on an analysis of hundreds of news stories from around the world, Sonnevend argues that the two countries used charm offensives to temporarily enable their leaders to engage the US in conversations based on equal partnership. How they did so vary dramatically. During the 2015 negotiations of the nuclear deal with the United States, the Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mohammad Javad Zarif, presented himself as a calm negotiator who wanted to make a deal that would bring peace. This was very different from the approach taken by Kim Jong-Un during his 2018 charm offensive. North Korean diplomacy cast Jong-Un as a world-class entertainer who was prepared to host spectacles, such as a meeting between himself and South Korea and an appearance with his sister at the Winter Olympics, for global audiences. In their note, David Russell, Naomi Spence and Kelly Thames examine media coverage of Ohio’s opioid epidemic as well as Facebook users’ responses to this coverage in the comment sections of 42 newspapers between 2013 and 2019. They find that newspapers use several frames when covering the opioid problem and offer readers a steady stream of stories on drug-related crimes and overdoses. Although stories at times elicit sympathy, responses are more often negative. Facebook users express pessimism toward programs designed to deal with the epidemic and use negative language to discuss opioid use (e.g. labeling users as addicts and drains on society). The coverage and response to it, the authors suggest, may further stigmatize opioid users and undermine public support for programs intended to combat opioid use.

The last two research notes explore the relationship between ICTs and inequality. Anne Groggel, Shirin Nilizadeh, Fabio Guillermo Rojas, Yong-Yeol Ahn, and Apu Kapadia, assess whether social media users’ perceived gender, race, and physical attractiveness influence other social media users’ evaluations of their trustworthiness. Through an analysis of 816 Twitter accounts evaluated by Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) workers, the authors find that Mturk workers are more likely to associate physical attractiveness with trustworthiness. However, the authors also find that evaluations of trustworthiness vary by race and gender. Mturk workers were more likely to evaluate Twitter accounts with White profile pictures as trustworthy. Black male and female Twitter accounts were viewed as less trustworthy compared to their White counterparts. The authors argue that these findings indicate that inequalities offline as they relate to race, gender, and trustworthiness, are replicated online. Finally, Howard Welser, M. Laeeq Khan and Michael Dickard examine whether online learning communities can help students from rural backgrounds overcome digital deficits in the classroom. The authors introduced an online learning community to two sections of an introductory college course and integrated collaborative learning into students’ weekly activities. They find that students who grew up rural have a clear and significant disadvantage in digital skills. They also find that the students (rural and non-rural) who participated in the online learning community showed substantial improvements in their digital skills. The authors conclude that rural students may need, and benefit from, digital remediation programs that build their experience with online collaborative skills, and that these programs can help students overcome some educational disadvantages.

Alongside general articles and research notes, the CITAMS issue contains a symposium on political communication and social movements. Papers in this symposium were part of an ASA panel organized by past CITAMS Chair, Jennifer Earl. Earl invited scholars working across disciplinary divides to address two general questions in the session. First, how do panelists see the relationship between the areas of political communication and social movement studies, and, specifically, how might they contribute to one another? Second, how is audience critically developed in social movement studies, and does this require development or change? The panel resulted in four short papers and a lively discussion at ASA. The papers have been revised and included in this special issue.

The symposium begins with Deana Rohlinger, who likens the research areas to two ships passing in the night. She argues that while there are several scholars who seriously engage in interdisciplinary research, their numbers are not enough to connect the two thriving academic areas. In her essay, she outlines how communication research can help movement scholars realize the importance of adopting a less movement-centric view of social movements. Rohlinger points out that actors such as trolls and bots are rarely studied by social movement researchers, but can impact the course, content and consequences of collective action. Likewise, she identifies how social movement scholarship benefits academics interested in political communication. Rohlinger argues that communication scholars often reduce collective action to a (one-way) communication process and make it a dependent variable in their analyses. Social movement scholars have identified several factors (such as identity and emotion) that can help communication researchers better understand how messages are received and their effect on participation. She concludes the piece by arguing that the two disciplines can construct a common port based on a shared set of definitions (e.g., regarding what constitutes activism and its various dimensions) and methods.

The next symposium essay by Sarah Sobieraj identifies three divides between political communication and social movements and discusses how these divides disadvantage both disciplines. The first divide is between communication scholars who focus on the political communications that take place in and around electoral politics and social movement scholars who primarily focus on the communications happening outside elections. Sobieraj points out that political communication scholars have conceptual and empirical blind spots as a result of the narrow focus on electoral politics. The second fissure she argues is caused by the differences in the level of analysis. Political communication researchers tend to adopt a psychological approach to communication and understand it as an internal, interpretive process. Movement scholars, in contrast, often embed their analyses of communication in a broader socio-historical context. Sobieraj argues that the tendency of social movement scholars to ignore audiences and how they respond attitudinally, affectively, behaviorally, linguistically, and even physiologically to ideas has limited their understanding of how messaging influences movement participation. The last divide Sobieraj identifies is methodological. Communication scholars rely heavily on experimental research; a method all but ignored by movement scholars. Sobieraj concludes by urging scholars working in both areas to increase their interdisciplinary collaborations.

In his piece, David Karpf takes the problem of disciplinary bridge-building head on. Karpf observes that social movement research has a canon, and that this has benefits and drawbacks for scholars working the area. On the one hand, canon provides a ‘campfire’ around which scholars may gather and discuss their common interests. Since research defers to this canon, contributions to social movements are clear. On the other hand, canon can stifle innovation, particularly in an area roiling with change. In this regard, political communication has benefited from the lack of canon. Scholars are intellectually nimble and better able to capture changes happening in the real world. Karpf concludes by urging social movement scholars to interrogate their canon and determine whether it will serve them well in the digital age.

Finally, Jennifer Earl offers readers a coarse typology of audiences in an effort to push forward research on social movements. Her typology considers five different audiences (current movement participants, potential movement recruits, uninformed or uncommitted bystanders, movement opponents, and movement targets), movement goals relative to these audiences (such as moving potential recruits from their armchairs to the streets), and the messages, structures and actions that support goal achievement (such as non-divisive persuasion processes that develop potential recruits' interests in a movement). More important, Earl convincingly argues that social movement scholars would be wise to pay more attention to audiences. Among other issues, Earl notes that it is difficult to argue that a movement choice is strategic without referencing a target audience. Likewise, Earl argues that social movement scholars' relative inattention to audience assumes that the same underlying models of power and influence are applicable to all audience members. Earl concludes by arguing that movement scholars will be better able to understand collective action if they combine insights about audience from political communication with social movement scholarship's attention to structural and material influences on social movement dynamics.

Common threads and a pathway forward

Although we are proud of the diversity represented in this special issue, we think it is equally important to point out the common threads that weave these papers together. Empirically, the papers show continued attention to structures of power and inequality. For example, Groggel et al. examine the status effects of race, gender, and beauty on Twitter, Bhandari demonstrates how women’s rights are tied to ICT access, and Welser et al. record intervention strategies to minimize digital inequality among rural college students. Theoretically, the papers show continued attention to issues of structure and agency, along with syntheses between STS and traditional sociology. Although distinct in their approaches, Klowait’s and Erofeeva’s papers focus on similar theoretical questions. In particular, their use of affordances and ANT to address issues of structure and agency place these articles in direct conversation with each other. These theoretical orientations inform subsequent empirical analyses throughout the special issue, such as Disnmore’s study of mobile phone use in a school setting. Methodologically, papers variously focus on the local and generalizable. For instance, large scale surveys, experimental methods, and social media metadata are used to make broad social claims, while qualitative accounts and small-scale case studies illustrate how ICTs operate in context. These diverse methodological approaches resonate with Davis and Love’s thesis on the generalizability of social media data, in which they position theory as a driving force behind large- and small-scale analyses. Thus, while the special issue showcases diverse approaches to ICTs and media studies, clear commonalities emerge which shed light on the pathways forward for the field and the CITAMS section.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Deana A. Rohlinger is a Professor of Sociology at Florida State University. She studies mass media, political participation, and American politics. She is the author of Abortion Politics, Mass Media, and Social Movements in America (Cambridge University Press, 2015), New Media and Society (New York University Press, 2019) and dozens of research articles and book chapters. Rohlinger is the current chair of the American Sociological Association's section on Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Society. [email: [email protected]].

Jenny Davis is a technology theorist and social psychologist. She is a Lecturer in the School of Sociology at The Australian National University. Her current projects focus on technological affordances, role-taking processes, and AI/Machine Learning. [email: [email protected]].

Pierce Dignam is a doctoral candidate at Florida State University in the Department of Sociology. He studies the intersection of social movements, gender, collective identity, and politics in the digital age. [email: [email protected]].

Cynthia Williams is a PhD candidate at Florida State University, where she researches the role of science in society, media, social movements, repression, and environmental sociology. [email: [email protected]].