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Social Theory After the Internet

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Social Theory After the Internet Ralph Schroeder Social Theory after the Internet Media, Technology and Globalization Social Theory after the Internet Social Theory after the Internet Media, Technology and Globalization Ralph Schroeder First published in 2018 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ ucl- press Text © Ralph Schroeder, 2018 Images © Ralph Schroeder, 2018 Ralph Schroeder has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as author of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Schroeder, R. 2018. Social Theory after the Internet. London, UCL Press. https:// doi.org/ 10.14324/ 111.9781787351226 Further details about Creative Commons licenses are available at http:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/ ISBN: 978–1–78735–124–0 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978–1–78735–123–3 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978–1–78735–122–6 (PDF) ISBN: 978–1–78735–125–7 (epub) ISBN: 978–1–78735–126–4 (mobi) ISBN: 978–1–78735–127–1 (html) DOI: https:// doi.org/ 10.14324/ 111.9781787351226 Acknowledgements I have taught this topic for many years, and so my first thanks must go to my students, from whom I have learned so much. I am also grateful to former colleagues at Chalmers University and current colleagues at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) for many great conversations. At the OII, they include Grant Blank, Eric Meyer, Jonathan Bright and Bill Dutton. Outside the OII, there are far too many to list, but I want to thank especially Rasmus Nielsen, Kerk Kee, Tim Groeling, Jack Qiu, Angela Wu, Cornelius Puschmann, Andreas Jungherr and Sahana Udupa. The usual disclaim- ers apply. The research for this book was partly undertaken while I was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Departments of Communication and Sociology during the winter term at UCLA in 2016 and an Erskine Visiting Fellow in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Canterbury in February and March of 2017. Several of the chapters here are based on previous publications and these are indicated in the relevant places in the text. Finally, the biggest thanks go to my family, who have taught me how to use a mobile phone and social media: as they know, I’m still a tyro. v Contents List of figures xi 1. The internet in theory 1 1.1 Theories of media, new and old 1 1.2 Summary of the argument 6 1.3 The autonomy of the media (sub)system 10 1.4 The role of the media in politics, culture and the economy: separate and different 13 1.5 A limited attention space 15 1.6 Who’s afraid of technological determinism? 18 1.7 Chapter overview 21 2. Media systems, digital media and politics 28 2.1 Theories of digital media and politics 28 2.2 Media systems in Sweden and America 32 2.3 Digital media and politics in Sweden and America 35 2.4 Media systems in China and India 45 2.5 Digital media and politics in China and India 51 3. Digital media and the rise of right-wing populism 60 3.1 Trump’s ascent via Twitter 63 3.2 The Sweden Democrats’ alternative media 67 3.3 Modi’s religious nationalism on Twitter 70 3.4 Containing online nationalists in China 74 3.5 Prospects for mediated politics 78 vii 4. The internet in everyday life I: sociability 82 4.1 Tethered togetherness 83 4.2 The spread of social media 85 4.3 Sociability and social divides 88 4.4 Visual co- presence 91 4.5 Alone or together? 93 4.6 Globalizing sociability 97 5. The internet in everyday life II: seeking information 101 5.1 A new information infrastructure 101 5.2 Seeking information 103 5.3 Search engine uses 104 5.4 Search engines as gatekeepers 108 5.5 Does Google shape what we know? 109 5.6 The Web of information 115 5.7 Is the Web global? 120 5.8 Wikipedia 122 5.9 Information seeking and gatekeeping 124 6. Big data: shaping knowledge, shaping everyday life 126 6.1 Defining big data 127 6.2 Advancing academic knowledge about digital media 131 6.3 The uses and limits of big data in the social sciences 133 6.4 Facebook’s ‘Brave New Worlds’ 139 6.5 Targeting publics, and the uses and limits of big data in everyday life 142 6.6 Big data and policy in different media systems 146 viii CONTENTS 7. Futures 149 7.1 Media, globalization, technology 149 7.2 The uses and limits of theory 151 7.3 Technological determinism revisited 153 7.4 Mediated politics 155 7.5 Information needs and an open culture of information 158 7.6 Big data and targeting 158 7.7 Digital versus traditional media 161 7.8 Separate changes and limited impact 164 7.9 What is to be done? 167 Notes 170 References 176 Index 189 CONTENTS ix newgenprepdf List of figures Fig. 1.1 Three spheres or powers (politics, culture, economy) and the increasing mediation between dominant institutions and people’s everyday practices (dashed arrows). 13 Fig. 7.1 Three spheres or powers (politics, culture, economy) and how dominant institutions and people’s everyday practices are shaped by digital media technologies (dashed arrows). 165 xi 1 The internet in theory 1.1 Theories of media, new and old Digital media have been responsible for some of the most wide-ranging changes in society over the past quarter- century. At the same time, there is little agreement in the social sciences about how these changes should be understood. One reason is increasing disciplinary specialization. For example, media and communication studies concentrates on specific areas such as the news or influencers on social media – without a broader analysis of what people do online. Other disciplines such as sociology have, with few exceptions, left the study of new media to the discipline of media and communications. Or again, political science has tended to concentrate on specific questions, such as the role of media in elec- tion campaigns or for social movements. The sociology of science and technology, meanwhile, has adopted a stance whereby generalizations across particular contexts of uses of technology are deemed impossible. The same applies to anthropology. And there is a further problem that cuts across disciplines: that theories which were suited to mass media and interpersonal communication are no longer suited to digital media – since new media often have elements of both. A few brief examples about how the use of ‘mass’ versus ‘inter- personal’ is misleading for digital media can suffice at this point.1 First, there is the growth of user- generated content, which goes beyond pas- sive ‘audiences’ and ‘senders versus receivers’. Second, news and other content is often shared among groups on social media rather than being accessed by individuals or broadcast one-to- many. Third, the way in which we seek much online information, for instance, via Wikipedia, is subject to new gatekeeping mechanisms such as search engines. A search via Google that leads to a Wikipedia entry, for example, means that the gatekeeping mechanism works differently from traditional gatekeepers, 1 such as professional journalistic fact- checking norms or control by pub- lishers of encyclopaedia volumes. One of the aims of this book is to pro- vide a theory of the internet and social change that goes beyond ‘mass’ and ‘interpersonal’ – and which at the same time overcomes disciplinary divides by arguing that a single theory can be applied throughout the social sciences. There is another problem that the book must address: research about the internet tends to focus on what is new, without recognizing that traditional media still often dominate,2 for example, during elec- tion campaigns. Yet it is also true, among younger people and in some countries such as Sweden and America at least, that digital media have largely displaced – even if they also complement – traditional media for news. One proposal for coping with this simultaneity of ‘old’ and ‘new’ is to talk of ‘hybrid’ media (Chadwick 2013), which postulates the side- by- side existence of both, in this case for the political realm. But this sweeps under the rug the very problem that needs to be solved: unless there is a clear sense of how old and new relate to one another, ‘hybrid- ity’ does not overcome the need for a theory of digital media since it leaves open the balance between the two and the differences in how they work. The few theories that have tackled the changing media landscape all have shortcomings. Castells’ theory of network power (2009) has two main elements: an ontology whereby all media are best understood as working via networks, and a theory of power whereby power is increas- ingly concentrated in a few global transnational media conglomerates but which at the same time always generates resistance. Both ideas are flawed since there are countries in which the capitalist imperatives of media conglomerates play a far lesser role, such as in China, where the party- state exercises much control over media, or Sweden, where public- service media continue to be dominant.
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