Media Power, Networked Publics, and Digital Organization

Media's Influence on Perception and Belief

I believe that media exerts tremendous power on people. I certainly subscribe to McLuhan's view that media allows humans to perceive the world differently. The world in which we live is rich with media, and most of our interactions with the world are today governed by some form of it. In McLuhan's day it was television, radio, newspapers, and telephones. Today, those are one device, and we might have three or four of them in our homes, with at least one on our person at any given time. Even face-to-face communications are governed, interrupted, and sometimes mediated through media. The information that we receive about the world almost always comes via media — and if not, it comes from another person who did receive it from media.

McLuhan's point was that our world today is vastly different from the pre-technology era with respect to media. For most of human history, people more or less only knew what they could see, touch, or hear themselves; many were illiterate and unable to consume whatever media did exist. As technology has proliferated, more media forms have emerged, providing us with ever-greater quantities of information. Arguably, almost everything a 21st-century person knows about the world has been mediated through one form or another.

If media is ubiquitous — and for most of us it is — then it necessarily changes the ways in which we perceive the world. This was one of Stone's (1996) main premises: that people do not necessarily view each other the same way when identities are anonymous. This can sometimes remove barriers to free communication, as people do not focus on differences. It can, of course, also erect barriers to communication, as the basic respect we normally afford others can disappear when we fail to associate the bits on our screens with the living, breathing humans behind them.

As for our beliefs, we absorb knowledge via media and have done so for a long time. When holy books were our sole media, they managed to exert a profound influence on our perceptions of the world. Today, when we consume media, it can be difficult to discern fiction from fact, as both are presented in the same way — transferred to us via the same screens and the same printed pages. Our beliefs about the world need not be grounded in reality at all, as evidenced by the state of political discourse and how uncritically too many people consume it. We have a great deal of media, but not much media literacy, and so our beliefs about the world can be very much shaped by the messages that arrive through various media forms.

Networked Publics and Online Social Dynamics

Boyd (2007) argues that networked publics are characterized by certain dynamics. Each such public will have its own codes of behavior, but often there is little official policing, leaving members vulnerable to outsiders. Each public has come together on the basis of shared values or interests, and these social contexts are critical to differentiating between publics. People can also enter or exit a public at any given time and may belong to multiple publics simultaneously.

To some extent, social networks mirror real-world publics, though the barriers between participants differ. Geography, race, class, and gender are less conspicuous online than they would be in person — and this is true among adults, let alone among teenagers. Other elements can still form barriers online, however. Membership is self-selected to a point, but many communities will exclude those who do not fit in, placing greater emphasis on codes of behavior.

Those codes of behavior can be broken, and this is where the open nature of these publics can differ sharply from other communities. Cyberbullying has emerged as a significant social problem. Young people become so engrossed in their networked publics that they can barely conceive of a social order outside them. As a result, they may often seem unaware of the recourse available to enforce social norms — using a real-world technique to solve a networked public problem almost seems unreasonable to many, because doing so would appear to violate the unique nature of the community.