How will Society Respond? Back to the Street with Social Media Creates New Theory Phase
Abstract
The culture industry of the mid to late 20th century may have “narcotized” publics, resulting in people withdrawing from public discussion of motivating and policy-changing discourses, but rapid technological advances such as social media have brought people back out into the virtual publics once again. Rereading Elihu Katz’s Back to the Street: When Media and Opinion Leave Home (2014) provides a lens through which human agency on social media and its cultural impacts are considered. Public discourse on Twitter, use of social media for persuasion, and use of social media to incite protest, are examined for how people use social media to bring publics back out onto the street. I contend that while past and existing theory provides considerable insight into the role of social media in public connection and reaction, new theory is required to consider how those social media connections, dialectics, and economy are creating societal and institutional change.
If people took to their homes due to the narcotizing effects of mass media in the 20th Century, then the 21st Century effects of social media could be called explosive. People are back in the publics with renewed vigor, active participants in shaping society. But rather than creating a virtual salon whereby publics engage in civil discourse, as envisioned by communications theorist Elihu Katz (2014, p.454), social media has created paradigmatic social change that requires renewed and new theory to address its societal effects and potential for democracy.
Katz (2014) uses the Tarde formula to examine how social media has brought people back into the street, the cafés and the salons (p 455). “To repeat, we are suggesting that the social media — more than the mass media — may well contribute to the mobilization of protest outside the home” (Katz, 2014, p. 459).
Gabriel Tarde’s theories (Tarde, 1898, as cited in Katz, 2014, p. 455) proposed diverse crowds, the publics, were brought together by the newspaper, which Tarde contended holds democracy together and provides a menu of ideas for public discussion and discourse. Tarde’s formula examines media’s effect on the manufacture of public opinion and its societal influence. “It is not enough to be a faithful reader of the newspaper, or a persuasive discussant in a focus group. These elements of the system have to be connected to each other, and to make the ongoing connection to political action and policy making” (Tarde, 1898, as cited in Katz, 2014, p. 456).
Katz agues the long-term effects of mainstream media, called “narcotizing dysfunction” by Lazerfield and Merton, (1984, as cited by Katz, 2014, p. 455) have been to move the publics off the street and into homes. The dysfunction arises, he explains, when people are deluded into thinking they’re good citizens who participate in political discourse, but in reality are going home, listening to the evening news, and failing to engage. “Their attentiveness, and ostensible participation, failed to enter the policy-making process. Their presumed participation did not feed back into real political activity” (Lazerfield and Merton, 1984, as cited by Katz, 2014, p. 456).
New media, Katz argues, has potential to bring people back out again, but only if people have somewhere to go with their informed opinions and if social media can mobilize people again as “citizens” (Katz, 2014, p. 461). Social media has, however, provided a means of diffusion so impactful that people have found or formed the places to go.
Survey results documented by the Ryerson University Social Media Lab show that an overwhelming majority of online Canadian adults (94%) have an account on at least one social media platform, making Canada, with 25.35 million social media users, one of the most connected countries on the planet (Gruzd et al., 2020). Such statistics indicate, as Katz proposed, that new media has potential to bring people back out into the cafés of the publics.
Texts posted by Twitter users illustrate how social media’s used to inform, criticize, and debate, and demonstrates that social media has, indeed, brought the publics back out onto the street via social media. An Edmonton Journal, April 14, article examines public discourse on Titter 34 days into the COVID19 pandemic. It features the “tragic, the serious, the heavy and the light, and the often conflicting opinions and statements from experts, politicians, commentators and citizens of the world on Twitter for Day 34 of the pandemic” (Staples, 2020, Edmonton Journal). Those Tweets encompassed a range of pandemic-related reaction from people sharing their frustration with being forced to work from home, to political commentary, and demands for action.
People may be getting out of their comfort zones to vocalize in Twitter’s virtual café, but what’s happening to the quality of discourse in this new realm of open, unregulated communication? And how is it being used to influence?
What FDR was to radio and JFK to television, Trump is to Twitter (Gabler, 2016, as cited by Ott, 2017). Brian Ott, in The Age of Twitter: Donald J. Trump and the Politics of Debasement, explores the changing character of public discourse in the “Age of Twitter” (Ott, 2017, p. 62). Adopting the perspective of media ecology, the essay highlights how Twitter privileges discourse that is simple, impulsive, and uncivil. This effect is demonstrated through a case study of Donald J. Trump’s Twitter feed.
Ott examines Twitter through rereading Neil Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Postman,1985, as cited by Ott, 2017, p. 59), which argues the medium of television substantially undermined the quality of public discourse in America. “As with all communication revolutions, the rise of Twitter, along with other social media, does not signal the disappearance of older media like television. Emerging media do, however, typically transform existing media” (Ott, 2017, p. 64). Ott contends Trump’s popularity on Twitter, with his offensive and bullying comments that were retweeted on average 2,201 times in January 2016 (Tsur, Ognyanova, & Lazer, 2016, as cited by Ott, p. 64), amounts to a type of “contagion.”
“Frankly, I can think of no better word than “contagion” to describe the toxic effect that Twitter, as a mode of communication, and Trump, as a model of that mode, have had on public discourse … they spread those ideologies like a social cancer” (Ott, 2017, p. 64). But is it the medium or the message which incites such toxicity? Katz argues political uprisings are not sprung from the medium, but rather begin at the ground level and only achieve mass mobilization when change is perceived as possible (Katz, 2014, p. 457). Diffusion is through word of mouth as it has been throughout history. Mainstream media such as print and television, diffused information but have also been the gatekeepers of information, and, in part, to its public, word of mouth, dissemination. “Diffusion in modern societies may not be so different except for the wiring” (Katz, 2014, p. 460).
According to Adam Sharp, Twitter’s head of news, government, and elections, ‘it was less Twitter coming to politics, and more politics coming to Twitter and finding it as a platform to communicate and to organize effectively …” Twitter allows candidates to put forth their opinions, and gauge voter reactions without passing through mainstream media’s gatekeeping process (Wang et al., 2016, as cited by Buccoliero, et al., 2016, p. 92).
While users of the Twitter platform were often quick to pick up Trump’s offensive rhetoric, the microblogging platform also provides opportunity for protest, a key element according to Katz. Dr. Shelley Boulianne et al. explore the role of social media in protest participation in the essay, Mobilizing Media: Comparing TV and Social Media Effects on Protest Mobilization, Information, Communication & Society (2020). They found, while studying the social media effects on the Women’s March and March for Science, “that Twitter use offers more consistent effects compared to Facebook in relation to the cycle of protest. In contrast, television use has no impact on awareness and thus, limited potential for mobilization (Boulianne et al., 2020).
They conclude social media’s distinctive networking features are successful because they “allow people to learn about specific events, discuss the issues, expose people to invitations to participation, as well as identify members of one’s social network who are also interested in participation” (Boulianne et all, 2020, discussion section).
As people come back out onto the streets, increased social media discourse such as the Women’s March and Black Lives Matter has resulted in mass protest, violence, and policy change. But the predisposition of media such as Twitter to prioritize the negative, plus citizen journalism, targeted disinformation, deep fakes, and algorithmic influence on today’s publics, distorts and limits the lens by which media is viewed, consumed and reacted to. Despite more active publics in the salons of social media, are we losing human agency through subversive algorithmic control by private, capitalist entities of our media choices?
According to communications theorist Harold Innis, when a technology or type of knowledge dominates a society, the society begins to organize around it, maintains it, and gives it greater social power. What better example of this than corporate conglomerate control over our data, which includes gatekeeping of what we consume and react to, and how mobilization and protest is disseminated. Does that concentrated power over our media challenge our free market or jeopardize democracies?
Founder and director of Google Ideas Jaren Cohen believes connectivity is key to modern protest movements and for democratic reform. “At the end of the day, there is a lot that connectivity can do to get people in the streets. But there is a fundamental need for alternative leadership and institutions to go beyond mobilization and actually change regimes … Yet, we remain optimistic because the population so outnumbers the regime online. The virtual world is a “public square” much more vast than Tiananmen Square … it will be a battle for the future between open and closed. Some of the closed-minded will be looking to build up their cybercapacity in a new version of the minerals for arms trade. Cyberarms for cybertechnology.
Through social media, politicians have direct access not only to message production but also to distribution channels. This has changed the power of the relation between politicians (and their campaigns), journalists, and mainstream media. Furthermore, social media differ from broadcasting and newspapers in their interactive potential, which becomes a fundamental pillar in any discussion about political communication. (Buccoliero)
Social media is key to empowering people to once again get out into the streets and take action. Communication theory needs to now be considering, how will society respond?