Participatory Media Part 2: Social Context Shift
Social Context Shift
Although participatory media is being adopted by Generation Y and by members of older generations who are more tuned-in to the pulse of times, many individuals and organizations remain resistant to the social context shift that it requires.
1. From a “Top-Down” Agenda to “Informal Group Conversations”
For example, a 2006 Economist survey on the impact of participatory media reports:
The mainstream media, says David Weinberger, a blogger, author and fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Centre, “don’t get how subversive it is to take institutions and turn them into conversations.” That is because institutions are closed, assume a hierarchy and have trouble admitting fallibility, he says, whereas conversations are open-ended, assume equality and eagerly concede fallibility.
http://www.economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?STORY_ID=6794156
What Weinberger describes is the democratizing force of participatory media, which tends to break up hierarchical structures by creating “informal group conversation” rather than the established “top down” approach of the few dictating a formal agenda to the many. Inside of an informal group conversation, rules and command structures become indistinct and uncertain. Those at the higher tiers of an established hierarchy may find this leveling effect threatening or simply perceive it as impractical and resist.
2. Discomfiting “Cognitive Collisions” as Public & Private Selves Meet
Perhaps more significantly, professionals pushing participatory media have largely been blind to the difference between computer-mediated social interactions and non-computer-mediated social interactions. They have been focusing on getting the technologies into the hands of the holdouts, as if access were the only blockade. Danah Boyd, a Social Media Researcher at Microsoft New England and Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, writes on this topic (August, 2009):
All too often, our conversations [as new media professionals] center on the need to get technology into the hands of learners, as though the gaps that we’re seeing can be explained away by issues of access. [Yet,] how people embrace technology has less to do with the technology itself than with the social setting in which they are embedded.
Boyd specializes in teens and technology. However, her description of the disruptive context shift that occurs in teens when social media is introduced in a school setting can easily be applied to adults in a work setting. Boyd says the unsettling shift occurs in students who use new media in their social (private) lives when their teachers ask them to integrate these technologies into classroom (public) use:
Putting Facebook or MySpace into the classroom can create a severe cognitive collision as teens try to work out the shift in contexts. Most problematically, when teens are forced to navigate Friending in an educational setting, painful dramas occur because who you’re polite to in school may be very different than who you socialize with at home. Using technology that ruptures social norms in the classroom can be socially and educationally harmful (ibid).
While this kind of social rupture may be demonstrated more dramatically in teens, its existence in adults cannot be ignored. Who one Friends in a social or private setting may be very different from who one Friends at work or in the public sphere. Further, managing one’s professional image through formal or public ways of behaving is very different from managing one’s professional image through informal or private ways of behaving. The “cognitive collisions” that occur when public and private identities intersect may bring resistance to participatory media adoption.
In the next section, the third in this four part series, I’ll address resistance to participatory media in relation to an unavoidable time and effort expenditure.