Do artifacts have politics author(s) langdon winnersou

Do Artifacts Have Politics?
Author(s): Langdon Winner
Source: Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1, Modern Technology:
Problem or Opportunity? (Winter,
1980), pp. 121-136
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy
of Arts & Sciences
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LANGDON WINNER
Do Artifacts Have Politics?
In controversies about technology and society, there is no idea
more pro
vocative than the notion that technical things have political
qualities. At issue is
the claim that the machines, structures, and systems of modern
material culture
can be accurately judged not only for their contributions of
efficiency and pro
ductivity, not merely for their positive and negative
environmental side effects,
but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms
of power and
authority. Since ideas of this kind have a persistent and
troubling presence in
discussions about the meaning of technology, they deserve
explicit attention.1
Writing in Technology and Culture almost two decades ago,
Lewis Mumford
gave classic statement to one version of the theme, arguing that
"from late neo
lithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two
technologies have
recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other
democratic, the
first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently
unstable, the other

man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable."2
This thesis
stands at the heart of Mumford's studies of the city,
architecture, and the his
tory of technics, and mirrors concerns voiced earlier in the
works of Peter
Kropotkin, William Morris, and other nineteenth century critics
of industrial
ism. More recently, antinuclear and prosolar energy movements
in Europe and
America have adopted a similar notion as a centerpiece in their
arguments.
Thus environmentalist Denis Hayes concludes, "The increased
deployment of
nuclear power facilities must lead society toward
authoritarianism. Indeed, safe
reliance upon nuclear power as the principal source of energy
may be possible
only in a totalitarian state." Echoing the views of many
proponents of appropri
ate technology and the soft energy path, Hayes contends that
"dispersed solar
sources are more compatible than centralized technologies with
social equity,
freedom and cultural pluralism."3
An eagerness to interpret technical artifacts in political
language is by no
means the exclusive property of critics of large-scale high-
technology systems.
A long lineage of boosters have insisted that the "biggest and
best" that science
and industry made available were the best guarantees of
democracy, freedom,
and social justice. The factory system, automobile, telephone,
radio, television,

the space program, and of course nuclear power itself have all
at one time or
another been described as democratizing, liberating forces.
David Lilienthal, in
T.V.A.: Democracy on the March, for example, found this
promise in the phos
121
2016 15:58:19 UTC
122 LANGDON WINNER
phate fertilizers and electricity that technical progress was
bringing to rural
Americans during the 1940s.4 In a recent essay, The Republic
of Technology,
Daniel Boorstin extolled television for "its power to disband
armies, to cashier
presidents, to create a whole new democratic world?democratic
in ways never
before imagined, even in America."5 Scarcely a new invention
comes along that
someone does not proclaim it the salvation of a free society.
It is no surprise to learn that technical systems of various kinds
are deeply
interwoven in the conditions of modern politics. The physical
arrangements of
industrial production, warfare, communications, and the like
have fundamen
tally changed the exercise of power and the experience of

citizenship. But to go
beyond this obvious fact and to argue that certain technologies
in themselves have
political properties seems, at first glance, completely mistaken.
We all know
that people have politics, not things. To discover either virtues
or evils in aggre
gates of steel, plastic, transistors, integrated circuits, and
chemicals seems
just plain wrong, a way of mystifying human artifice and of
avoiding the true
sources, the human sources of freedom and oppression, justice
and injustice.
Blaming the hardware appears even more foolish than blaming
the victims when
it comes to judging conditions of public life.
Hence, the stern advice commonly given those who flirt with
the notion that
technical artifacts have political qualities: What matters is not
technology itself,
but the social or economic system in which it is embedded.
This maxim, which
in a number of variations is the central premise of a theory that
can be called
the social determination of technology, has an obvious wisdom.
It serves as a
needed corrective to those who focus uncritically on such
things as "the comput
er and its social impacts" but who fail to look behind technical
things to notice
the social circumstances of their development, deployment, and
use. This view
provides an antidote to naive technological determinism?the
idea that tech
nology develops as the sole result of an internal dynamic, and

then, unmediated
by any other influence, molds society to fit its patterns. Those
who have not
recognized the ways in which technologies are shaped by social
and economic
forces have not gotten very far.
But the corrective has its own shortcomings; taken literally, it
suggests that
technical things do not matter at all. Once one has done the
detective work
necessary to reveal the social origins?power holders behind a
particular in
stance of technological change?one will have explained
everything of impor
tance. This conclusion offers comfort to social scientists: it
validates what they
had always suspected, namely, that there is nothing distinctive
about the study
of technology in the first place. Hence, they can return to their
standard models
of social power?those of interest group politics, bureaucratic
politics, Marxist
models of class struggle, and the like?and have everything they
need. The
social determination of technology is, in this view, essentially
no different from
the social determination of, say, welfare policy or taxation.
There are, however, good reasons technology has of late taken
on a special
fascination in its own right for historians, philosophers, and
political scien
tists; good reasons the standard models of social science only
go so far in ac
counting for what is most interesting and troublesome about the

subject. In
another place I have tried to show why so much of modern
social and political
thought contains recurring statements of what can be called a
theory of tech
2016 15:58:19 UTC
DO ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS? 123
nological politics, an odd mongrel of notions often crossbred
with orthodox
liberal, conservative, and socialist philosophies.6 The theor y of
technological
politics draws attention to the momentum of large-scale
sociotechnical systems,
to the response of modern societies to certain technological
imperatives, and to
the all too common signs of the adaptation of human ends to
technical means. In
so doing it offers a novel framework of interpretation and
explanation for some
of the more puzzling patterns that have taken shape in and
around the growth of
modern material culture. One strength of this point of view is
that it takes
technical artifacts seriously. Rather than insist that we
immediately reduce
everything to the interplay of social forces, it suggests that we
pay attention to
the characteristics of technical objects and the meaning of
those characteristics.

A necessary complement to, rather than a replacement for,
theories of the social
determination of technology, this perspective identifies certain
technologies as
political phenomena in their own right. It points us back, to
borrow Edmund
Husserl's philosophical injunction, to the things themselves.
In what follows I shall offer outlines and illustrations of two
ways in which
artifacts can contain political properties. First are instances in
which the inven
tion, design, or arrangement of a specific technical device or
system becomes a
way of settling an issue in a particular community. Seen in the
proper light,
examples of this kind are fairly straightforward and easily
understood. Second
are cases of what can be called inherently political
technologies, man-made sys
tems that appear to require, or to be strongly compatible with,
particular kinds
of political relationships. Arguments about cases of this kind
are much more
troublesome and closer to the heart of the matter. By "politics,"
I mean arrange
ments of power and authority in human associations as well as
the activities that
take place within those arrangements. For my purposes,
"technology" here is
understood to mean all of modern practical artifice,7 but to
avoid confusion I
prefer to speak of technology, smaller or larger pieces or
systems of hardware
of a specific kind. My intention is not to settle any of the

issues here once and for
all, but to indicate their general dimensions and significance.
Technical Arrangements as Forms of Order
Anyone who has traveled the highways of America and has
become used to
the normal height of overpasses may well find something a
little odd about some
of the bridges over the parkways on Long Island, New York.
Many of the
overpasses are extraordinarily low, having as little as nine feet
of clearance at the
curb. Even those who happened to notice this structural
peculiarity would not
be inclined to attach any special meaning to it. In our
accustomed way of look
ing at things like roads and bridges we see the details of form
as innocuous, and
seldom give them a second thought.
It turns out, however, that the two hundred or so low -hanging
overpasses
on Long Island were deliberately designed to achieve a
particular social effect.
Robert Moses, the master builder of roads, parks, bridges, and
other public
works from the 1920s to the 1970s in New York, had these
overpasses built to
specifications that would discourage the presence of buses on
his parkways.
According to evidence provided by Robert A. Caro in his
biography of Moses,
the reasons reflect Moses's social-class bias and racial
prejudice. Automobile

2016 15:58:19 UTC
124 LANGDON WINNER
owning whites of "upper" and "comfortable middle" classes, as
he called them,
would be free to use the parkways for recreation and
commuting. Poor people
and blacks, who normally used public transit, were kept off the
roads because
the twelve-foot tall buses could not get through the overpasses.
One con
sequence was to limit access of racial minorities and low -
income groups to Jones
Beach, Moses's widely acclaimed public park. Moses made
doubly sure of this
result by vetoing a proposed extension of the Long Island
Railroad to Jones
Beach.8
As a story in recent American political history, Robert Moses's
life is fasci
nating. His dealings with mayors, governors, and presidents,
and his careful
manipulation of legislatures, banks, labor unions, the press,
and public opinion
are all matters that political scientists could study for years.
But the most impor
tant and enduring results of his work are his technologies, the
vast engineering
projects that give New York much of its present form. For
generations after

Moses has gone and the alliances he forged have fallen apart,
his public works,
especially the highways and bridges he built to favor the use of
the automobile
over the development of mass transit, will continue to shape
that city. Many of
his monumental structures of concrete and steel embody a
systematic social
inequality, a way of engineering relationships among people
that, after a time,
becomes just another part of the landscape. As planner Lee
Koppleman told
Caro about the low bridges on Wantagh Parkway, "The old son-
of-a-gun had
made sure that buses would never be able to use his goddamned
parkways."9
Histories of architecture, city planning, and public works
contain many ex
amples of physical arrangements that contain explicit or
implicit political pur
poses. One can point to Baron Haussmann's broad Parisian
thoroughfares,
engineered at Louis Napoleon's direction to prevent any
recurrence of street
fighting of the kind that took place during the revolution of
1848. Or one can
visit any number of grotesque concrete buildings and huge
plazas constructed
on American university campuses during the late 1960s and
early 1970s to de
fuse student demonstrations. Studies of industrial machines and
instruments
also turn up interesting political stories, including some that
violate our normal

expectations about why technological innovations are made in
the first place. If
we suppose that new technologies are introduced to achieve
increased efficien
cy, the history of technology shows that we will sometimes be
disappointed.
Technological change expresses a panoply of human motives,
not the least of
which is the desire of some to have dominion over others, even
though it may
require an occasional sacrifice of cost-cutting and some
violence to the norm of
getting more from less.
One poignant illustration can be found in the history of
nineteenth century
industrial mechanization. At Cyrus McCormick's reaper
manufacturing plant in
Chicago in the middle 1880s, pneumatic molding machines, a
new and largely
untested innovation, were added to the foundry at an estimated
cost of
$500,000. In the standard economic interpretation of such
things, we would
expect that this step was taken to modernize the plant and
achieve the kind of
efficiencies that mechanization brings. But historian Robert
Ozanne has shown
why the development must be seen in a broader context. At the
time, Cyrus
McCormick II was engaged in a battle with the National Union
of Iron Mold
ers. He saw the addition of the new machines as a way to "weed
out the bad

2016 15:58:19 UTC
element among the men," namely, the skilled workers who had
organized the
union local in Chicago.10 The new machines, manned by
unskilled labor, ac
tually produced inferior castings at a higher cost than the
earlier process. After
three years of use the machines were, in fact, abandoned, but
by that time they
had served their purpose?the destruction of the union. Thus, the
story of these
technical developments at the McCormick factory cannot be
understood ade
quately outside the record of workers' attempts to organize,
police repression of
the labor movement in Chicago during that period, and the
events surrounding
the bombing at Hay market Square. Technological history and
American politi
cal history were at that moment deeply intertwined.
In cases like those of Moses's low bridges and McCormick's
molding ma
chines, one sees the importance of technical arrangements that
precede the use of
the things in question. It is obvious that technologies can be
used in ways that
enhance the power, authority, and privilege of some over
others, for example,
the use of television to sell a candidate. To our accustomed

way of thinking,
technologies are seen as neutral tools that can be used well or
poorly, for good,
evil, or something in between. But we usually do not stop to
inquire whether a
given device might have been designed and built in such a way
that it produces a
set of consequences logically and temporally prior to any of its
professed uses.
Robert Moses's bridges, after all, were used to carry
automobiles from one point
to another; McCormick's machines were used to make metal
castings; both tech
nologies, however, encompassed purposes far beyond their
immediate use. If
our moral and political language for evaluating technology
includes only cate
gories having to do with tools and uses, if it does not include
attention to the
meaning of the designs and arrangements of our artifacts, then
we will be
blinded to much that is intellectually and practically crucial.
Because the point is most easily understood in the light of
particular in
tentions embodied in physical form, I have so far offered
illustrations that seem
almost conspiratorial. But to recognize the political dimensions
in the shapes of
technology does not require that we look for conscious
conspiracies or malicious
intentions. The organized movement of handicapped people in
the United
States during the 1970s pointed out the countless ways in
which machines,

instruments, and structures of common use?buses, buildings,
sidewalks,
plumbing fixtures, and so forth?made it impossible for many
handicapped per
sons to move about freely, a condition that systematically
excluded them from
public life. It is safe to say that designs unsuited for the
handicapped arose more
from long-standing neglect than from anyone's active intention.
But now that
the issue has been raised for public attention, it is evident that
justice requires a
remedy. A whole range of artifacts are now being redesigned
and rebuilt to
accommodate this minority.
Indeed, many of the most important examples of technologies
that have
political consequences are those that transcend the simple
categories of "in
tended" and "unintended" altogether. These are instances in
which the very
process of technical development is so thoroughly biased in a
particular direc
tion that it regularly produces results counted as wonderful
breakthroughs by
some social interests and crushing setbacks by others. In such
cases it is neither
correct nor insightful to say, "Someone intended to do
somebody else harm."
Rather, one must say that the technological deck has been
stacked long in ad
2016 15:58:19 UTC

126 LANGDON WINNER
vanee to favor certain social interests, and that some people
were bound to
receive a better hand than others.
The mechanical tomato harvester, a remarkable device
perfected by re
searchers at the University of California from the late 1940s to
the present,
offers an illustrative tale. The machine is able to harvest
tomatoes in a single
pass through a row, cutting the plants from the ground, shaking
the fruit loose,
and in the newest models sorting the tomatoes electronically
into large plastic
gondolas that hold up to twenty-five tons of produce headed for
canning. To
accommodate the rough motion of these "factories in the field,"
agricultural
researchers have bred new varieties of tomatoes that are
hardier, sturdier, and
less tasty. The harvesters replace the system of handpicking, in
which crews of
farmworkers would pass through the fields three or four times
putting ripe to
matoes in lug boxes and saving immature fruit for later
harvest.11 Studies in
California indicate that the machine reduces costs by
approximately five to sev
en dollars per ton as compared to hand-harvesting.12 But the
benefits are by no
means equally divided in the agricultural economy. In fact, the

machine in the
garden has in this instance been the occasion for a thorough
reshaping of social
relationships of tomato production in rural California.
By their very size and cost, more than $50,000 each to
purchase, the ma
chines are compatible only with a highly concentrated form of
tomato growing.
With the introduction of this new method of harvesting, the
number of tomato
growers declined from approximately four thousand in the early
1960s to about
six hundred in 1973, yet with a substantial increase in tons of
tomatoes pro
duced. By the late 1970s an estimated thirty-two thousand jobs
in the tomato
industry had been eliminated as a direct consequence of
mechanization.13 Thus,
a jump in productivity to the benefit of very large growers has
occurred at a
sacrifice to other rural agricultural communities.
The University of California's research and development on
agricultural ma
chines like the tomato harvester is at this time the subject of a
law suit filed by
attorneys for California Rural Legal Assistance, an
organization representing
a group of farmworkers and other interested parties. The suit
charges that
University officials are spending tax monies on projects that
benefit a hand
ful of private interests to the detriment of farmworkers, small
farmers, con

sumers, and rural California generally, and asks for a court
injunction to stop the
practice. The University has denied these charges, arguing that
to accept
them "would require elimination of all research with any
potential practical
application."14
As far as I know, no one has argued that the development of the
tomato
harvester was the result of a plot. Two students of the
controversy, William
Friedland and Amy Barton, specifically exonerate both the
original developers
of the machine and the hard tomato from any desire to facilitate
economic con
centration in that industr y.15 What we see here instead is an
ongoing social
process in which scientific knowledge, technological invention,
and corporate
profit reinforce each other in deeply entrenched patterns that
bear the unmistak
able stamp of political and economic power. Over many
decades agricultural
research and development in American land-grant colleges and
universities has
tended to favor the interests of large agribusiness concerns.16
It is in the face of
such subtly ingrained patterns that opponents of innovatio ns
like the tomato
2016 15:58:19 UTC

harvester are made to seem "antitechnology" or "antiprogress."
For the harves
ter is not merely the symbol of a social order that rewards some
while punishing
others; it is in a true sense an embodiment of that order.
Within a given category of technological change there are,
roughly speaking,
two kinds of choices that can affect the relative distribution of
power, authority,
and privilege in a community. Often the crucial decision is a
simple "yes or no"
choice?are we going to develop and adopt the thing or not? In
recent years
many local, national, and international disputes about
technology have centered
on "yes or no" judgments about such things as food additives,
pesticides, the
building of highways, nuclear reactors, and dam projects. The
fundamental
choice about an ABM or an SST is whether or not the thing is
going to join
society as a piece of its operating equipment. Reasons for and
against are fre
quently as important as those concerning the adoption of an
important new law.
A second range of choices, equally critical in many instances,
has to do with
specific features in the design or arrangement of a technical
system after the
decision to go ahead with it has already been made. Even after
a utility company

wins permission to build a large electric power line, important
controversies can
remain with respect to the placement of its route and the design
of its towers;
even after an organization has decided to institute a system of
computers, con
troversies can still arise with regard to the kinds of
components, programs,
modes of access, and other specific features the system will
include. Once the
mechanical tomato harvester had been developed in its basic
form, design altera
tion of critical social significance?the addition of electronic
sorters, for ex
ample?changed the character of the machine's effects on the
balance of wealth
and power in California agriculture. Some of the most
interesting research on
technology and politics at present focuses on the attempt to
demonstrate in a
detailed, concrete fashion how seemingly innocuous design
features in mass
transit systems, water projects, industrial machinery, and other
technologies
actually mask social choices of profound significance.
Historian David Noble is
now studying two kinds of automated machine tool systems that
have different
implications for the relative power of management and labor in
the industries
that might employ them. He is able to show that, although the
basic electronic
and mechanical components of the record/playback and
numerical control sys
tems are similar, the choice of one design over another has
crucial consequences

for social struggles on the shop floor. To see the matter solely
in terms of cost
cutting, efficiency, or the modernization of equipment is to
miss a decisive
element in the story.17
From such examples I would offer the following general
conclusions. The
things we call "technologies" are ways of building order in our
world. Many
technical devices and systems important in everyday life
contain possibilities for
many different ways of ordering human activity. Consciously
or not, deliber
ately or inadvertently, societies choose structures for
technologies that influence
how people are going to work, communicate, travel, consume,
and so forth over
a very long time. In the processes by which structuring
decisions are made,
different people are differently situated and possess unequal
degrees of power as
well as unequal levels of awareness. By far the greatest latitude
of choice exists
the very first time a particular instrument, system, or techni que
is introduced.
Because choices tend to become strongly fixed in material
equipment, economic
2016 15:58:19 UTC
128 LANGDON WINNER

investment, and social habit, the original flexibility vanishes
for all practical
purposes once the initial commitments are made. In that sense
technological
innovations are similar to legislative acts or political foundings
that establish a
framework for public order that will endure over many
generations. For that
reason, the same careful attention one would give to the rules,
roles, and rela
tionships of politics must also be given to such things as the
building of high
ways, the creation of television networks, and the tailoring of
seemingly
insignificant features on new machines. The issues that divide
or unite people in
society are settled not only in the institutions and practices of
politics proper,
but also, and less obviously, in tangible arrangements of steel
and concrete,
wires and transistors, nuts and bolts.
Inherently Political Technologies
None of the arguments and examples considered thus far
address a stronger,
more troubling claim often made in writings about technology
and society?the
belief that some technologies are by their very nature political
in a specific way.
According to this view, the adoption of a given technical
system unavoidably
brings with it conditions for human relationships that have a
distinctive political
cast?for example, centralized or decentralized, egalitarian or

inegalitarian, re
pressive or liberating. This is ultimately what is at stake in
assertions like those
of Lewis Mumford that two traditions of technology, one
authoritarian, the
other democratic, exist side by side in Western history. In all
the cases I cited
above the technologies are relatively flexible in design and
arrangement, and
variable in their effects. Although one can recognize a
particular result produced
in a particular setting, one can also easily imagine how a
roughly similar device
or system might have been built or situated with very much
different political
consequences. The idea we must now examine and evaluate is
that certain kinds
of technology do not allow such flexibility, and that to choose
them is to choose
a particular form of political life.
A remarkably forceful statement of one version of this
argument appears in
Friedrich Engels's little essay "On Authority" written in 1872.
Answering anar
chists who believed that authority is an evil that ought to be
abolished altogeth
er, Engels launches into a panegyric for authoritarianism,
maintaining, among
other things, that strong authority is a necessary condition in
modern industry.
To advance his case in the strongest possible way, he asks his
readers to imagine
that the revolution has already occurred. "Supposing a social
revolution de
throned the capitalists, who now exercise their authority over

the production
and …
Baym, Nancy K. (2015). Personal connections in the digital age
(2nd Ed.). Cambridge, UK: Polity.
-=--P_ersonal Connections in the Digital Age
influence is, at the very least, two-way. Rather than being
deterministic,
they see the consequences of technology for social life as
emergent.
Even if we knew all the factors that influence us at the start (an
impossible feat), we would not be able to precisely predict the
social
interactions, formations, and changes that result from their
ongoing
interplay as people use technologies in specific situations.
This book adheres to social shaping and domestication perspec -
tives, arguing that, to connect digital media to social
consequences,
we need to understand both features of technology and the
practices
that influence and emerge around technology, including the role
of technological rhetorics in those practices. If you turn the
page
expecting to find simple answers to the question of what
comput·
ers and mobile phones do to our personal connections, you will
be
disappointed. They do many things, and which ones they do to
which
people depends _on many forces, only some of which are

predictable.
As the chapters that follow will show, sometimes these media
are
used in ways that are given media affordances (people call
to say they are running
1
ate more because they have mobile phones
on hand through which Ito do it), surprising (the American
social
network site Orkut came quickly to be dominated by Brazilians
and
later Indians, Friendster became the dominant social network
site in
Southeast Asia), disruptive (people form close relationships
before
meeting in person), and affirming (people use the mobile phone
to
increase family cohesion). The complexity of the social shaping
and
domestication perspectives does not mean we should throw up
our
hands and despair of gaining any insight. We should, however,
always
be wary of simple explanations.
3
Communication in digital spaces
If asked to share general thoughts about communicating face-to-
face,
on the telephone, and on the internet, many people are likely to
say
something like this:

Face-to-face is much more personal; phone is personal as well,
but not as inti·
mate as face -to-face. The internet is the least personal but it' s
always available.
Face-to-face: I enjoy the best. I like to see facial reactions, etc.
Phone: nice to
hear their voice, but wish I could see their reactions. Internet:
like it, but can't
get a true sense of the person.
I am more apt to be more affectionate and personable face-to -
face. Over the
phone, I can try to convey them, but they don't work as well.
The internet is
much too impersonal to communicate feelings.
Internet would definitely be the least personal, followed by the
phone (which
at least has the vocal satisfaction) and the most personal would
be face-to-
face.
These responses to a survey I conducted in 2002 framed the
com·
parison in terms of the extent to which nonverbal social cues
("hear
their voice," "see their reactions," "vocal satisfaction") affected
the
perceived intimacy of each medium.
In the first chapter, we saw that a medium's ability to convey
social
cues about interactants and context is an essential component of
its

communicative possibilities and constraints. In chapter 2, we
saw
historical and contemporary visions, both hopeful and fearful,
of how
limited social cues may affect people, relationships, and social
hier·
archies. Media with fewer social cues often trigger hopes that
people
will become more equal and more valued for their minds than
their
social identities, but also raise fears that interactions, identities
, and
Personal Connrt.:tions in Lhe Dig)la] A.g
relationships will become increasingly shallow, untrustworthy,
and
inadequate.
This chapter asks what happens to communication itself - the
messages people exchange- when it's digitally mediated. We
begin
by examining the perspective seen in the quotes at the start of
this
chapter, that mediation is impoverishment. We'll look closely at
the
practice of "flaming ," or extremely argumentative
communication,
as a test case for considering the extent to which a lack of cues
can
be considered a cause of how people behave. Having established

that
there's more going on than can be explained by a mere shortage
of
nonverbal cues, we'll see how people inject sociability into
mediated
communication, showing emotion, expressing closeness and
avail-
ability, having fun , and building new social structures. I'll
argue that
mediated interaction should be seen as a new and eclectic mixed
modality that combines elements of face-to-face communication
with
elements of writi;g, and that increasingly uses images, rather
than as
a diminished form of embodied interaction. In the closing
section of
the chapter, we'll how messages online are influenced by and
potentially reshape social dentities that transcend media,
including
gender and culture.
Mediation as impoverishment
Reduced social cues
The quotes that opened this chapter demonstrate a formulaic
ten-
dency to think about media in ranked order and to position the
one
that seems to offer the widest range of verbal and nonverbal
social
cues on top and the one seeming to offer the least on the
bottom.
As we saw in chapter 2 , this is in keeping with popular
discourses
throughout history and may well resonate with your own

intuitions. It
is also in keeping with early research approaches that
conceptualized
face-to-face conversations as the norm against which other
kinds of
communication could be compared. From this point of view,
medi-
ated communication is seen as a diminished form of face-to-face
conversation. Taking embodied co-present communication as
the
norm, early research often saw the telephone and internet as
lesser
Communication in digital SQaces
versions of the real thing , inherently less intimate, and,
therefore, less
suited to personal connections.
The first research comparing mediated interaction to face-to-
face
communication began in the 1970s. At this time,
audioconferencing,
videoconferencing, and networked computer systems were being
installed in large organizational contexts. Research was driven
by
managerial concerns about when to choose each medium. Put
simply,
both managers and scholars wanted to know when they could
hold a
teleconference and when they would need to get employees
together
face-to-face. The first two theories of media choice, Social
Presence
Theory (Short, Williams , & Christie, 1976) and Media Richness
Theory (Daft & Lengel, 1984), both tried to match media

capabilities,
defined as their ability to transmit social cues, with task
demands .
Short and his collaborators (1976) were interested in how
different
degrees of social cues invoked differing senses of
communication
with an authentic person during synchronous interaction. They
defined social presence as "the degree of salience of the other
person
in the interaction and the consequent salience (and perceived
inti-
macy and immediacy) of the interpersonal relationships" (1976:
65).
Thurlow, Lengel, and Tomic (2004: 48) describe social presence
as
the "level of interpersonal contact and feelings of intimacy
experi-
enced in communication."
Social presence is a psychological phenomenon regarding how
interactants perceive one another, not a feature of a medium.
However, the perception of social presence was attributed to the
non-
verbal cues enabled or disabled by mediation. Important
nonverbal
cues include facial expression, direction of gaze, posture, dress,
physi-
cal appearance, proximity, and bodily orientation. In body-to-
body
communication, these nonverbal cues serve important functions
(e.g. Wiemann & Knapp, 1975). For example, looking at
someone,
turning your torso toward them, nodding your head, and using
fillers

such as "uh huh" are all ways in which we demonstrate
attentive-
ness (e.g. Goodwin, 1981). We rely on gestures to keep our
audience
tuned in and to illustrate our words. Nonverbal "emblems" such
as
the American thumbs-up gesture have direct verbal translations
(in
this case, "yes," "good job," or "can I have a ride?" although the
same
gesture might directly translate into something far more
provocative
• Personal Connections in the Digital Age
1 wb re). Facial expres sions including smiles , furrowed brows,
and clench ed teeth convey interpersonal attitudes of liking and
aver-
ion, as well as cognitive states such as confusion and
understanding
(e.g. Anders en & Guerrero, 1998) . Given the importance of
these
nonverbal cues in coordinating interaction and conveying
meaning ,
esp ecially emotional meaning, it makes sense that people
question
how well mediated communication can successfully serve social
functions.
Social Presence theorists argued that if you knew which social

cues
served which functions in conversation, and you knew which m
edia
transmitted which cues, you would be able to predict how much
social
presence people using a medium would experience. In
particular,
they expected that groups completing tasks that involved
maintaining
personal relationships would require media that conveyed more
social
cues than grouP-s performing tasks in which people were
primarily
acting out social roles . In experiments, they found that people
expe-
rienced more sense of social contact in face -to-face encounters
than
in videoconferences (SKort et al. , 1976). As Fulk and Collins -
Jarvis
(2001: 6 29) summarize, in several related studies people were
found
to perceive the least social presence of all in audio meetings
"which
are seen as less personal, less effective for getting to know
someone,
and communicate less affective content than face to face ."
Social Presence Theory focuses on the perception of others as
real
and present. Media Richness Theory, developed by Daft and
Lengel
(1984), is closely related, but focuses directly on the medium.
Daft
and Lengel (r984) defined a medium's richness as its
information-
carrying capacity, which they based on four criteria: the speed

of
feedback, the ability to communicate multiple cues, its use of
natural
language rather than numbers, and its ability to readily convey
feel-
ings and emotions (a factor I find conceptually difficult to tease
apart
from the conveyance of multiple cues). Media Richness scholars
compared rich and lean media for their suitability for solving
tasks dif-
fering in equivocality and uncertainty. In contrast to Social
Presence
researchers, most Media Richness research focused on
asynchronous
communication (Fulk & Collins-Jarvis, 2oor). The expectation
was
that tasks high in uncertainty with many possible answers , such
as
resolving personnel issues , would work better in rich media,
while
unequivocal tasks like telling someone you're running late
would be
best served by lean media (Daft & Lengel , 1984) .
These two theories - developed in a time when all online
interac-
tion was text-only - and related work from around that time can
be
considered "cues filtered out" approaches (Walther, Anderson,
&
Park, 1994). In their simplest forms, cues filtered out
approaches
as sume that, to varying degrees , mediated communication is
lean and
therefore impedes people's ability to handle interpersonal

dimensions
of interaction. Because computer-mediated interactants are
unable
to see, hear, and feel one another , they can't use the usual cues
con-
veyed by appearance, nonverbal signals, and features of the
physical
context. Mediated communication may be better than face-to -
face
interaction for some tasks, but for those involving personal
identities
and feelings , mediation was depicted as inherently inferior
(Fulk &
Collins- Jarvis , 2 o or).
Cues filtered out studies examining how reduced cues affected
social qualities of communication (e.g. Baron, 1984; Kiesler,
Siegel,
& McGuire, 1984) had several expectations, which resonate
with
much of the public discourse we saw in the previous chapter.
First,
mediation would make it more difficult to maintain
conversational
alignment and mutual understanding. Messages would be harder
to
coordinate. This would mean that communicators would have to
work
harder to achieve their desired impact and be understood.
Second, because social identity cues would not be apparent,
inter-
actants would gain greater anonymity. Their gender, race, rank,
physical appearance, and other features of public identity are
not
immediately evident. As a result, people would be

"depersonalized,"
losing their sense of self and other. This impersonal
environment
would make these m edia inherently less sociable and
inappropriate
for affective bonds. On the other hand, anonymity was also
expected
to result in a redistribution of social power , echoing the visions
of
blurred social status seen in chapter 2. With the cues to
hierarchy
(e.g. age, attire, seating arrangement) missing , participation
would
become more evenly distributed across group members. This
egalitar-
ian balance would make it difficult for people to dominate and
impose
their views on others (Baron, 1984; Walther, 1992). For those
seeking
speedy task resolution, the plurality of voices could mean tasks
would
___ P_er_s_onal Connt'l'lion:-; in tlw Digita l Ag ·
take longer to accomplish. When everyone voices opinions, it
often
takes longer to reach a decision, complete a task, or achieve
consensus
(Sproull & Kiesler, 1991).
Cues filtered out researchers also expected that the lack of

social
cues would result in contexts without social norms to guide
behavior
(Kiesler et al., 1984; Rice, 1984, 1989; Sproull & Kiesler,
1991). Where
face-to-face communication is regulated by implicit norms made
apparent in the social context (for example, that this is a formal
situ-
ation and it would not be appropriate to stand up enraged and
start
swearing), computer-mediated discourse was seen as a social
vacuum
in which anything went. Among other predictions, this was
expected
to lead to less social and emotional (socioemotional)
communica-
tion and, somewhat paradoxically, more negatively loaded
emotional
communication. Instead of following the social norms
mandating
politeness and civility, rendered anonymous by the absence of
social
cues we would be meaner to one another than we would ever be
in
person.
These theories made ynduring contributions to our
understandings
of communication media. The concepts of social presence and
media
richness continue to inflt_{ence the ways scholars think about
the con-
sequences of mediation for interaction, and have become
important
pieces of later analytic frameworks. Social Presence continues
to be

an important thread in internet research (e.g. Cortese and Seo, 2
o12J.
Furthermore, cues filtered out predictions about task
accomplish-
ment have held up well in research and in practice. However,
their
expectations about social interaction turned out to be
problematic
at best and sometimes downright wrong. Certainly, some people
do
become aggressive sometimes under some circumstances, a
phenom-
enon to which we'll return below, but people also build warm
loving
relationships and provide one another with all kinds of social
support,
phenomena for which these approaches failed to account.
Despite
their contributions, they fall short as ways to describe and
explain
mediated communication's social consequences.
One reason for this is that scholars tended to use experimental
research strategies that were unrealistic , usually involving
small
groups in short-term one-shot interactions in which they were
sup-
posed to accomplish an assigned task (Rafaeli & Sudweeks,
1997;
Walther et al., 1994). Furthermore, their research findings, and
findings from other lines of research, provide grounds for
empirical
criticisms. Lab studies did find statistically significant
differences
between face-to-face and computer-mediated communication,

but the
differences were very small (Walther et al., 1994).
More importantly, the few field studies in which researchers
spent
time in naturally occurring contexts in which computer systems
were
already being used demonstrated tlut socioemotional
communication
not only existed, but was more likely to be prosocial than
antisocial
(Hiltz & Turoff, 1978). The social cues reported in early field
studies
included typographical art, salutations, the degree of formality
of
language, paralanguage, communication styles, and message
headers
(Hiltz & Turoff, 1978; Lea, O'Shea, Fung, & Spears, 1992). In a
content
analysis of transcripts from a professionally oriented
CompuServe
forum, Rice and Love (1987) found that socioemotional content
(defined as showing solidarity, tension relief, agreement,
antagonism,
tension, and disagreement) constituted around 30 percent of
mes-
sages, and was mostly positive.
Cues filtered out approaches can also be criticized for how they
conceptualize the forces at play. The very definition of media
richness
distinguishes the conveyance of emotion from the ability to
convey
social cues, though they are profoundly interrelated. Many
studies
counted all emotional expression as evidence of disinhibition

(Lea et
al., 1992), with the result that friendly asides were seen as
evidence of
a norm-free medium. In fact, as we'll discuss in the next
chapter, over
time , mediated groups develop strong communicative norms
that
guide behavior. Furthermore, positive consequences of
disinhibition,
·uch as increased honesty and self-disclosure, of the sort we
will see in
chapter 5, were also overlooked or assumed to be negative.
The perspective that mediated communication is a diminished
form of face-to-face communication ignores many other factors
that
affect mediated communication, such as people's familiarity
with the
technology, whether they know one another already and what
sort
of relationship they have, whether they anticipate meeting or
seeing
one another again, their expectations and motivations for
interact-
ing, and the social contexts in which interactions are embedded.
But,
more significantly, it sells people short, failing to recognize the
extent
Personal Connections in the Digital Age

which we are driven to maximize our communication satisfac-
tion and interaction. This "communication imperative"
(Walther,
r994) pushes us to use new media for interpersonal purposes and
to co ·th up Wl creative ways to work around barriers, rather
than
subm.rtting ourselves to a context- and emotion-free
communication
expenence.
The example of antagonism
Despite its problems, as the comments with which I opened this
chapter and some of the technological rhetorics seen in chapter
2
demonstrate, the cues filtered out approach still rings true for
many.
I be the first to insist that nothing can replace a warm hug. But
rf we that face-to-face communication provides a kind of
socral connectror: that simply cannot be attained with
mediation, it
does follow that mediated communication, even in lean media,
is
or socially impoverished, or that social context cannot be
achreved. J'
In chapter 2 , I our best shot at understanding the social
of medrated communication is a social shaping stance
recogmzes both technological and social influences on behav-
IOrs .. Research on flaming helps to illustrate how both
qualities of the
and emergent group norms influence online group behav-

IOr. et al. (1994) defined flaming as messages that include
sweanng, name calling, negative affect, and typographic
energy. Flammg IS exactly the kind of behavior that cues
filtered out
approaches predict and it is widely perceived as both common
and
online. !f cues filtered out theory were going to be able to
fully explam one thmg about social interaction this should be r·t
Th" fl ' .
Is arne from the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts .startrek.current
1993 remains one of my favorites for its ability to illustrate how
vrrulent, petty, mean, and yet entertaining flames can be:
» fine by me. Personally I'd like to involve Lursa and her sister
(the
>> Klmgons) too. Now THAT would be a fun date.
>>
» -Jim Hyde
> Will you stupid jerks get a real life. Everyone with half a
brain or more
> know that a human and a Kligon can not mate. The Klingon
mating
> procedure would kill any human (except one with a brain like
you).
> Stay of the net stoopid!
Oh really. Hmmmm. And I suppose Alexander and his mom are
just
clones or something? If you recall, she is half human , and
Alexander is I/4 ·
Romulans don't seem any more sturdy than humans , and we saw
hybrids

there as well.
Looks like I'm not the one with half a brain. Check your facts
before you
become the net.nazi next time pal. This isn't just a forum for us
to all bow
down and worship your opinion you know. You might also do
well for yourself
to learn how to spell, stooopid.
-Jim Hyde
These messages occur predictably in online group interactions
and often lead to "flame wars" in which flames are met with
hostile
retorts. The hostilities escalate, drawing in more participants.
Other
participants chime in urging the original participants to move
the dis -
cussion off-list or ignore the hostilities. Eventually people lose
interest
and the discussion dies out. Many sources on the internet can be
found describing this pattern and offering "netiquette" tips to
prevent
flame wars (e .g. Shea, n.d.).
But flaming is not always as laughable as this example,
especially
when it merges with trolling (Hardaker, 2oro). Hate speech
against
both individuals and ethnic groups is common online and raises
significant policy issues around regulation (Citron & Norton,
2orr).
YouTube comments are famous for their aggression- as a
musician
J interviewed told me , "I think there's something about

YouTube.
The people that comment on there, I think, if you put them
together
and gave them weapons and put them in uniform, they could
take
over the world, 'cause they are the nastiest people I've ever
come
across." Twitter has come under fire for the virulently
misogynistic
attacks on women that take place there, such as the case of
Caroline
Criado-Perez whose (successful) campaign to get a woman who
was
not royalty (the author Jane Austen) on the British £ro bank
note
unleashed a torrent of rape and murder threats, ultimately
leading to
Personal Connt'dions in the Di gital Age
at .l aston arrest and a campaign urging Twitter to be more
active in
r ining in abusive tweets. When the female Asian-American
chancel-
lor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign did not
cancel
classes on a particularly cold day in 2014, she was attacked by
both
men and women on Twitter in the crudest of sexist and racist
terms.
Many n ews sites have begun requiring commenters to log in

through
platforms with an expectation of real names such as Facebook
and
Google+ in hopes that people posting under real names will
behave
better. (As a glance at many Facebook groups will show, there
is little
evidence that they do).
There's no question that flaming and abusive online behavior
are
real. To some extent, this is surely facilitated by what cues
filtered out
scholars describe. The lack of social presence and
accountability in a
reduced-cues medium is seen by some as a platform for
launching
attacks. However, if flaming were caused by reduced social
cues, it
ought to be very c ommon online. Yet it is perceived as more
common
than it actually is . In Rice and Love 's (1987) study, only 0 .2
percent
of the messages were alftagonistic. We may overestimate the
amount
of flaming because single1messages may be seen by so many
people
and because hostile messages are so memorable (Lea et al.,
1992).
The fact is that most people in online groups are far more likely
to be
nice than to flame (e.g. Preece & Ghozati, 1998; Rice & Love,
1987) .
Even those who have been the targets of abuse such as Criado-
Perez
report experiencing more supportive messages than abusive

once
their abuse became known.
If reduced cues cause flaming, we should also see equal
amounts of
flaming in all interactions in a medium. But the amount and
tolerance
of hostility varies tremendously across online groups . Martin
Lea and
his collaborators (1992) argued that, contrary to the cues
filtered out
explanation that flaming occurs because of a lack of norms,
flaming
occurs because of norms. Groups with argumentative
communication
styles encourage people to conform to the group's style, while
those with
more civil styles invoke more courteous behavior. The
predominantly
female soap opera discussion group I studied had almost no
flaming;
what little there was came from outsiders (Baym, 1996, 2ooo).
Furthermore, rather than occurring in the absence of social
norms ,
people often flame in ways that demonstrate their awareness
that
Communication in digital s2aces
they are violating norms (Lea et al., 1992). They may substitute
punc-
tuation marks for letters in swear words or use the htrnl inspired
"<flame on>" and "</flame off>" designations to bracket the
abrasive
message. Flames are also used to discipline people for behaving

inappropriately, thus maintaining group norms. Norms are also
negotiated through flaming, as participants in discussion forums
work out what kinds of activities they are taking part in. For
example,
people in a cancer support group flamed as a means of
determining
whether or not venting was appropriate (Aakhus & Rumsey,
2010).
In some groups , flaming is a form of playful sport. Although
women
flame too (Savicki , Lingenfelter, & Kelley, 1996), flaming has
been
linked to masculinity, or "the chest-thumping display of online
egos"
(Myers, 1987a: 241). The misogynistic trolls of Twitter come
there
from communities on sites like Reddit that support and foster
their
abusive behavior.
Putting social cues into digital communication
Instead of asking what mediation does to communication, we
can also
ask what people do with mediated communication. People
appropri-
ate media characteristics as resources to pursue social and
relational
goals (O ' Sullivan, 2000) . People show feeling and immediacy,
have
fun, and build and reinforce social structures even in the leanest
of text-only media. As a consequence of people's enthusiasm for
digital social interaction, developers have created ever -richer
means
for us to communicate. Facebook is the world's largest photo
reposi-

tory, Tumblr is overwhelmingly image-based, Instagram (owned
by
Facebook) is entirely image-based, and image-based memes
have
become pervasive throughout online communication. "Selfie"
was
the Oxford English Dictionary's 2013 Word of the Year.
YouTube has
enabled people to communicate via video, and Skype has
become a
common means of communication for people in long-distance
rela-
tionships , including romantic partners but also immigrants,
around
the world (e.g. Lingel, 2013; Madianou & Miller, 2012a,
2012b).
However, even text-only interaction, on which we'll focus here
given
how much more research is about text-based communication,
can
be used to accomplish relational and social connection, leaving
no
Personal Connections in the Digital Age
question that we can do it with additional cues such as video,
images,
and voice.
In 1972, just three years into ARPANET's existence, Carnegie
Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman proposed that

punctua-
tion marks could be combined like this :-) to mark jokes
(Anderson,
2005). Fahlman's innovation responded to the now-familiar
problem
that emotional information can be difficult to convey without
facial
expression and vocal intonation. Sarcasm can be particularly
tricky.
Conflict often results . The smiley face, used by many and
reviled by
some, has spread into elaborate lexicons of emoticons, most of
which
show feelings, but some of which are simply playful. Emoticons
have
now been built into new media to the extent that when I first
typed
that punctuation combination, my word processor automatically
translated it into this graphical representation: © . Emojis (a
Japanese
term combining _"picture" and "letter") now extend far beyond
facial
expressions and are standardized in smartphone keyboards.
Most
emoticons and emojis originated in novel uses of punctuation to
illus-
trate feeling or to convey b ow the words were meant to be
interpreted
(Dresner & H erring, 2010). Emoticons and emojis have not
entirely
solved the confusion about what words mean and the emotions
behind them, but …

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