https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4347-8787
ABSTRACT
Each year the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association curates a special issue highlighting sociological contributions to technology and media studies. That tradition continued in 2020, even as everything else changed. The articles included in this year’s special issue were mostly written pre-Pandemic, yet their implications seem amplified by the current historical moment. With a globe gone remote, mediated communication rose from a specialist academic subject to an acute social consideration, intersecting with and illuminating basic sociological concerns about inequality, the nature of work, family life, and the compounding effects of race, class, gender, and sexuality as they interplay with social and material conditions. These topics are all reflected in the articles from this year’s issue, now inflected with a post-Pandemic reality that shows insights from CITAMS are needed now, more than ever.
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Introduction
With millions of people ill from the Coronavirus Pandemic, protesters for racial justice in the streets in the wake of George Floyd's murder by police, a severe economic recession, and an extraordinarily consequential US presidential election, it hardly seems worth noting that the American Sociological Association (ASA) decided to hold its annual meeting virtually in August 2020. While going virtual was unquestionably the correct decision from a public health perspective, for members of the CITAMS section, it was still a disappointment to miss out on the exchange of ideas that emerge from sessions, receptions, and informal conversations in conference center hallways. CITAMS is a big-tent section that brings together scholars of communication and information technologies, digital and legacy mass media, as well as researchers who use media as the means to examine other sociological phenomena. CITAMS sessions at ASA meetings have long given us opportunities to learn from each other and benefit from this breadth.
But, like so many other things in 2020, ASA did go virtual, with our fair share of muting mishaps, time zone coordination challenges, and unstable internet connections. Our minor challenges were nothing compared to the issues that schools, workplaces, governments, and families faced as they ‘went online.’ Indeed, in 2020, so much of the work of CITAMS members became all the more salient. As children turned to remote learning, this year exposed the multi-faceted nature of ‘digital divides.’ As friends joined Zoom happy hours, the public recognized both the possibilities and limits of digital communications. And, as people sought information online, the dangers of misinformation and viral conspiracy theories became more apparent.
In this 2021 CITAMS special issue of Information, Communication & Society, there are few references to the Pandemic, the racial and political tumult of 2020, or the recession because most of the research was conducted prior to these events. However, we bring together a body of work that takes on new relevance in light of what has occurred in the past year. We selected eight papers that offer an indication of the extraordinary methodological, theoretical, and topical diversity of CITAMS. In the issue that follows, we encounter qualitative, quantitative, and theoretical contributions, woven throughout with attention to race, class, and gender as they entangle with technological systems. The datasets include survey responses, in-depth interviews, tweets, Reddit posts, and political emails. They offer new insights into debates about digital skill inequalities, digital political mobilization, the meaning of online play and expression, and the effects of consuming medical information on the internet. Taken together, they represent just a slice of the enormously varied work of CITAMS members, much of it more important than ever to better understanding society.
As is perhaps appropriate for an unusual year, the two lead editors (Lindner & Davis) approached the editorial process of this year's special issue differently than how it has been done in the past. Traditionally, the editorial team has been relatively tight, made up of one or two faculty editors, with help from one or two students whose work corresponds with topics in the Section. However, with everyone spread thin, we recruited a large team of collaborators to share the load of reviewing and editorial work. The team we constructed is made up of six emerging academics at various stages in their graduate training (Burgese, Fares, Hanson, Leeds, Leon & Li). Given the acute significance of CITAMS research in this moment and moving forward, this special issue welcomes, highlights, and is shaped by, the editorial perspectives of those who will define our field(s) in the coming generations.
The pandemic has kept many of us glued to our desk chairs where we improvise digital solutions for tasks we often carried out on our feet and in-person. But this sudden lurch into the digital is just an acceleration of a creeping shift toward a ‘digital by default’ world, where essential tasks like applying to jobs and paying bills assume access to and mastery of digital tools. Turning an ethnographic eye toward a public library ‘digital helper’ program, the first article of this volume by Blank and Allmann, ‘Rethinking Digital Skills in the Era of Compulsory Computing: Methods, Measurement, Policy and Theory,’ reveals why digital learning can be such a slog. This on-the-ground approach describes how widely used measurements of digital skills fail to capture what people need to make it in our increasingly online world. In lieu of existing concepts, Blank and Allmann focus on the need for would-be digital users to develop ‘path abstraction,’ whereby different tasks and skills are lined up in a coordinated series to accomplish an end goal.
The second article in the special issue by Davis and Graham, ‘Emotional Consequences and Attention Rewards: The Social Effects of Ratings on Reddit,’ examines the rating features that are a key component of information infrastructures of current social platforms. How does the thumb up/down influence users’ feelings and behaviors? Focusing on Reddit, a social news site, this study reveals that vote scores can affect users’ emotional expression and engagement in subsequent comments. Davis and Graham analyze comment activity data from the three most popular subreddits (topic-based Reddit communities). They find that, for a portion of Reddit users, vote scores predict subsequent emotional expression, with upvotes preceding positive sentiments and downvotes preceding negative sentiments. On the other hand, downvoted content receives higher levels of engagement than upvoted content. These results suggest a paradox in social media communities: content that diverges from community norms may be discouraged by downvoting but rewarded by receiving greater engagement.
The third article, ‘From “Please Sir, Stay Out of It” to “You Are an Abomination”: (In)civility and Emotion in Emails Sent to Politicians,’ by Rohlinger and Vaccaro, also contributes to our understanding of emotional expression and digital communications, but using a very different medium. Using a mixed-method content analysis to examine the emotional content of emails sent to then Florida Governor Jeb Bush between 2004 and 2005, Rohlinger and Vaccaro show how state residents use a range of emotions to make civil and uncivil claims regarding the former governor and other key figures in the controversial Terry Schiavo case. Through both qualitative and quantitative analysis of these email communications, we learn how emailers strategically use negative emotional expressions to assert claims and to attempt to persuade their target. In contrast to other social media, the private nature of emails offers a chance to observe the relationship between negative emotional expressions and (un)civil communication when there is no secondary audience. Emails are, then, a valuable avenue of understanding the role that digital communication has with political engagement, emotional expression, and claims-making.
In ‘Race, Racism, and Mnemonic Freedom in the Digital Afterlife,’ Recuber analyzes the conversations animating the digital afterlife of Mike Brown and Sandra Bland through the hashtags #IfTheyGunnedMeDown and #IfIDieInPoliceCustody. One of the achievements of the Black Lives Matter movement has been to contest the racist portrayals of Black people whose lives are taken by the police or through civilian white supremacist acts. Recuber directs us toward the concept of ‘mnemonic freedom’ to understand the phenomenon of Black Twitter users who contribute to these hashtags. Participants pose their hypothetical deaths to take control of the narrative regarding their lives and selves as they want to be remembered, challenging the stereotypic discourse regarding the deaths of Black people that pervades traditional media outlets. More so, these hashtags interrogate the boundaries between the collective and the individual that bound Black grief and hope as Black communities continue to create their own digital legacies.
While social media can create spaces for resistance and political expression, it is not necessarily the most effective realm for mobilizing all groups of people. In the fifth article in this volume, ‘Context, Class and Community: A Methodological Framework for the Study of Digital Unionizing,’ Schradie proposes a model for union organizing in the digital age. The framework of the ‘3Cs’ (Context, Class, and Community) makes the case for scholars to take into account the historical specificity and structural systems of the locality in which workers are mobilizing. The author demonstrates the 3Cs using ethnographic data about union organizing and union opposition in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The college town's history of enslaving Black people has led to a strong legacy of anti-Black racist legislation and social practices that continue to affect the employment opportunities and experiences of workers. By applying the 3Cs to this case, the author diverges from recent scholarship that emphasizes the importance of social media to union organizing. Rather, the particular racialized context of Chapel Hill created a history of corporeal violence against enslaved people and workers who spoke against employers that continues to affect workers’ relationship to their employers. Contemporary workers perceive the Internet as part of the surveillance sphere of employers, demanding a context in which organizers recruit and outreach to workers through non-digital means.
The next article in the special issue, ‘Priority Pixels: The Social and Cultural Implications of Romance in Video games’ by Tomlinson, turns our attention from organizing to subcultural gaming communities, which have become major sites of online interaction. As such, these communities provide an opportunity for social scientists to study how gamers situate themselves in relation to the games they play and each other. Tomlinson offers a sharp analysis of gamers who engage in emotional and romantic storylines in order to more deeply enjoy the game. Since contemporary video games allow for multiple romantic options, and therefore offer many emotional possibilities, these gamers use romantic storylines as ways in which they can understand each other and deepen their experience as a community. Video games provide people a medium through which they can bring themselves joy, despair, attraction, and more. The findings of this timely piece show that games can be about more than solving puzzles or blowing up bad guys and suggest a need to better to understand gamers on their own terms.
Like gamers, those who snap and share selfies also deserve deeper understanding, argue Grindstaff and Torres in ‘The Filtered Self: Selfies and Postfeminist Media Production,’ the seventh article in this volume. Many people scroll past dozens of selfies every day. Taken individually, they may seem insignificant and mundane. When analyzed together, however, selfies are valuable sites of online self-production in response to and defiance of common stereotypes in the digital ‘gaze economy.’ Drawing on qualitative interviews with young people who frequently post selfies (mostly women, many Latina), Grindstaff and Torres offer insight into how young women navigate a gendered selfie culture, as well as their decision-making process about what to share and where to share it. Through a postfeminist framework, this research offers a novel discussion of the empowering capacity of selfies to forge new narratives for a population that is often excluded by traditional media.
The final article in the special issue, ‘In Internet We Trust: Intersectionality of Distrust and Patient Non-Adherence’ by Seckin et al., explores how consulting online e-health information for a second opinion is associated with patients deviating from the recommendations of medical professionals. Using original survey data, Seckin et al. examine the association between e-health information consumption and medical non-adherence across the socio-demographic variables of gender, race, and education. The availability of easily accessible e-health information empowers patients to take control of their own health while eroding their trust in medical professionals and making it harder for them to foster productive, collaborative partnerships. These findings contribute to the ongoing scholarly conversation about the Internet's impacts on our health.
Conclusion
With an extraordinary new class of vaccines already in distribution, we can begin to look to a future with the promise of a ‘return to normal.’ But, of course, the social conditions that lay ahead of us won't be identical to those of the pre-Pandemic. People's relationships with online communities, devices, workplaces, classrooms, and even entertainment are likely to have been changed in some profound and durable ways.
Much of the knowledge that CITAMS members produce and share in venues like ICS will be of immense value in understanding the transformations afoot. On the other hand, a frustrating and exciting feature of studying subjects like ICTs and media sociology is the unending race against obsolescence. As much as some of our insights will carry forward, things will change, and we will need new research.
We believe the articles in this special issue all make exciting contributions that are likely to hold value even in the face of great change. But we hope they also provoke and inspire a next set of studies that reflect what changes come to pass. The real promise of CITAMS is not a single issue, but a scholarly community linked with venues like ICS, which allows us to keep the conversation going.
Acknowledgements
The 2021 Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology (CITAMS) section of the American Sociological Association (ASA) special issue of Information, Communication & Society has greatly benefitted from the generosity and efforts of many people during an extraordinarily difficult time. We thank the entire staff of ICS, especially Editor-in-Chief, Brian D. Loader, and Pre-Production Manager, Sarah Shrive-Morrison. We also thank Tova Petto for editorial assistance during the review process.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Andrew M. Lindner
Andrew M. Lindner is Associate Professor of Sociology at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY. He is the co-author of All Media Are Social: Sociological Perspectives on Mass Media (2020, Routledge) and the current chair of the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association.
Jenny L. Davis
Jenny L. Davis is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University. She is the author of How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things (2020, MIT Press) and chair elect for the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association.
Tyler Burgese
Tyler Burgese is a PhD student at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. His research interests include cultural sociology, social media, and sexuality.
Phoenicia Fares
Phoenicia Fares is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Riverside. Her research examines social psychological processes of the self, relationships, and digital communication.
Kenneth R. Hanson
Kenneth R. Hanson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oregon. He researches people and communities who exist at the cutting edge of technology and sexuality.
Tyler Leeds
Tyler Leeds is a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies politics and journalism.
Rocio Leon
Rocio Leon is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include immigrant and ethnic entrepreneurship, racialized geographies, and Latinx digital culture.
Muyang Li
Muyang Li is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at York University. Her research interests include digital sociology, cultural sociology, authoritarianism, and gender.