#nm3205

In this week’s reading of the Social World as Communicative Construction, Couldry and Hepp mentioned that the social world is constructed through communication. These communicative practices have been moulded by long-term processes of institutionalization and materialization, otherwise known as media.  As such, since communicative practices are inherently social, our everyday reality is deeply interwoven with media, and thus being ‘mediatized’. In this reading, it was also pointed out that the world is experiencing an increasing mediation of our communicative streams. There has been a shift from direct communication to mediated communication as the common and normal means of sustaining social relations. As such, with media, face to face communication is no longer the only channel for social interactions to take place. Overall, with mediatization and the increasing reliance on media, the social world that we live in is now constantly being shaped and constructed by media.

The way Couldry and Hepp explained how media and communication construct the social world that we live in made me reflect about my everyday life and how much media has shaped the reality that we currently live in. It is indeed true that our lives now revolve around media and that we heavily rely on media. This is especially evident in the past year when the Covid-19 pandemic hit and many countries had to go into lockdown, rendering social activities not physically possible. As such, our social activities and interactions have all been shifted online and we have all adapted quickly to this shift.

For instance, due to travel restrictions, we no longer can visit friends and family who are overseas, or even visit friends and family who are in Singapore as well due to the circuit breaker measures. As such, we rely a lot on Facetime, Skype and Zoom, to maintain relationships and keep in contact with our loved ones. Besides restricting interaction amongst people, this pandemic has also put a stop to many large-scale events such as concerts and sporting events. However, utilising media, we have been able to still bring these experiences to people online. For instance, during the lockdown in the world as well as circuit breaker in Singapore, many music artists held livestreams of concerts to still bring people the experience of attending music concerts, albeit online. Additionally, these livestream concerts held on online platforms such as Facebook and YouTube are usually accompanied with a live chat box, allowing participants who are online to interact and chat with each other. A more relevant example to me of how media has constructed the social world would be the live-streaming of Inter-Hall Games (IHG) matches in NUS. Due to the Covid-19 restrictions, spectators are not allowed to physically go down to watch and support their halls in the various matches. However, with media, we do not miss out on catching the matches as each hall will livestream the match via Instagram as well as provide real-time updates on Telegram channels. Additionally, supporter who tune into the livestream can interact with each other through the live chat.

As established by Couldry and Hepp (2017), we must understand “the social world as fundamentally interwoven with media”. When we consider the role of the media in our lives, the context of the digital age must be taken into account.

When we consider the role of the media in our lives, the context of the digital age must be taken into account. Through the proliferation of media, mediated communication practices are highly prevalent and have set the norm of interaction between parties. As communication becomes increasingly entwined with technology, technology has adapted likewise to include more features imitating in-person communication. These advances contribute to the social construction of reality.

Unlike the idea of social constructivism by Berger and Luckmann (1966) depicting social reality as what individuals perceive to be real and practices taken for granted, Couldry and Hepp deferred from such. Individuals play a main role in the construction of their own reality, embedded in daily processes and historical changes. By institutionalisation and materialisation, we develop our reality through these systemic mechanisms. As such, the mediatisation of reality has occurred. Considered to be a form of intersection between the differentiated domains of our social world, the media emphasises and sustains human communication. To reconcile the intersubjective nature of our social reality, the media has facilitated communication across time and space, creating a shared understanding and prompting reflection and action.

In my opinion, I resonate strongly with the notion of differentiated yet interlinked social spheres, where the media provides an outlet to cross the blurred barriers between them. This highly correlates with the communities and culture that Tumblr has created. The features of Tumblr reveal the inherently social nature of humans in the established anonymity of users. Uninhibited by social norms and pressures with identity, users interact freely and enthusiastically with each other, crossing into different social domains. Tumblr promotes diversity and the creation of a range of niche communities to fit any individual’s interests. Using its tagging and replies features, the social media platform provides a convenient method to communicate with others regardless of distance or time differences. The difference between Tumblr and other social media platforms can be attributed to its unique culture that has stood the test of time. Hence, it facilitates the shared understanding of its users who use the media.

An example of the tags and topics that can be displayed on the platform. 

In the reading, Couldry and Hepp mainly argue that the social world (an intersubjective world produced by everyday realities and differentiates into domains) is mediatized— changed in its dynamic and structure by the role that media continuously plays in its construction, and therefore posits that mediation of the communication practices at every level contributes to the construction of the social world.

In our time, the assimilation of technology in our lives over time builds an internet culture that is infused with our everyday social realities. The idea of an 'etiquette' or certain rules that govern how we should act on social media can be extrapolated from Durkheim's idea of 'social facts', which was described to be "any way of acting ... which is general over the whole of a given society whilst having an existence of its own, independent of its individual manifestations"— in other words, certain ideas or forces that influence the ways individuals act and the kinds of attitudes people hold. One such unspoken 'rule' would be that it is unacceptable to like a person's post if it is a rather dated one — liking someone's picture posted a long time ago is almost always an excruciatingly painful mistake, and brings about the awareness that you are intentionally looking through the person's old photos. This 'rule' was never explicitly discussed, but is often universally felt and agreed on— articles have even been written about the 'SOP' when such unfortunate incidents happen! Some instructions include unliking the picture immediately, liking one of their latest pictures etc— funnily enough, I have actually done these exact steps before, in a desperate attempt to conceal my 'stalking', and I am rather amused to find out that a stranger possibly from across the other end of the world would react in the same way. (check out this article for reference) More importantly, such examples emphasise how social media creates new norms and conventions that have become a part of our social reality, and materialized into new 'procedures' or 'routines' — thus continuing to reinforce and reproduce mediatized norms.

source: https://en.dopl3r.com/memes/dank/when-stalking-someones-instagram-and-you-accidentally-like-a-pic-from-140-weeks-ago/436654

Couldry and Hepp suggest that media is not merely a tool that society adopted for use in daily life and communication, that it has become an integral part of our social worlds and deeply woven into its fabric. Media is not only defined by its utility or affordances, in fact, it defines, to varying degrees in different regions, our own reality. They claim that since communication is essential for us to construct our institutions, practices, and coordinate behaviour, anything that involves communication, namely media, will play a major role in moulding our reality. Reality in this sense does not mean the physical world as it is, separate from human perception. It refers to the social worlds that for all intents and purposes, are our reality, through shared experiences and beliefs.

It is precisely this enmeshed relationship of media, communication and social constructs that Couldry and Hepp puts forward the term mediatization – where the layers of mediated communicative practices all contribute to constructing our social worlds.

Mediatization is a new concept to me, but upon reflection, it becomes obvious how mediatization accurately describes how the world has been shaped and framed by the increasing variety and ubiquity of media channels. Media pervades every aspect of my life – Facebook provides the latest on trending news, Instagram to keep up with my friends’ lives, Telegram and Whatsapp to organise gatherings with friends and family respectively, and my laptop for e-learning.

A great portion of my reality now is framed mainly within my phone and my laptop, without which I would be, in some sense, crippled, as most other Singaporeans would be. There is no equivalent alternative if I want to keep up with the social lives of my friends or to get fast headlines from the comfort of my bed. This dependency on media devices has already become an almost inextricable part of my life. The lack of a choice in my personal life is a microcosm of society in today’s new media age. Singapore itself is declaring that it will become a Smart Nation, which essentially means a hyper-connected city where being plugged-in one way or another becomes the norm.

This is a salient example of how media is tied to so many layers of our lives, and of how much mediatization has taken place. As much as we think we have control over media, by going on a digital detox or coming up with little rules to separate ourselves from our devices, it eventually becomes only a matter of degree about how much and how often we are plugged-in. The inseparability of media and day-to-day life, not of habit but of necessity, is evidence of how everything has become mediatized, and the myriad of media will (or in fact, has already become) a mainstay in our personal and professional lives.

The humorous image attached is tangential, but I hope still appropriate.

The Big Mac is often held up as the emblem of globalisation, the archetypal symbol of economic progress and heightened connectivities between countries with the rise of powerful Transnational corporations (TNCs) that is McDonald’s. The Big Mac Index, clean and simple as it is, has thus become a powerful tool to scrutinise the health and wealth or rather, the general state of living between countries.

Intrinsically, though, the Big Mac is but an aggregation of many different elements; ingredients sourced all around the world - a complex operation involving cargo ships, trucks, local delivery companies and a synergy between vital stakeholders down to the cashier behind the counter that has curiously enough, been translated into a simple visual image of beef patties between buns juxtaposed against a clean background. Subsequently, this simple image continues to broadcast power all around the world in the 119 countries that Mcdonald’s operates in.

In “Our metrics, ourselves: A hundred years of self-tracking from the weight scale to the wrist wearable device”, Crawford, Lingel and Karppi (2015) introduce two cases of self-tracking - wearables and the weight scale - to show the intersections between the person experience of self-measurement and big data. They argue that the production and use of big data of the body has epistemological, legal and physiological implications. Their line of argument begins with a historical account of the weight scale and its evolving roles and locations, followed by an analysis of the emergence of wearable self-tracking devices, then expand their understanding of said devices by inspecting advertising campaigns of both these devices as well as its role in legal settings. By considering various perspectives, they can better understand the evolving relationships between data, bodies, and power.

In their analysis of the wearable self-tracking device, they raise the Quantified Self movement, defined as: “Any individual engaged in the self-tracking of any kind of biological, physical, behavioral or environmental information. There is a proactive stance toward obtaining information and acting on it.” (Swan, 2013, p. 85). Crawford et al specifically place their focus on the group of wearables users who do not self-identify with this movement or build relationships with other users. These users are typically more focused on individual betterment, or betterment as they perceive it, of their physical, mental, or behavioral self.

These observations are applicable to users of the Apple watch. The Apple watch is unique, as compared to other wearable self-tracking device, as self-tracking is but one of the many functions of the watch. It acts as an even more portable version of a personal device, such as a phone, while also able to track a person’s heart rate, breathing rate, speed of walking, number of steps walked, and more. Focusing on the group of users who do not self-identify with the Quantified Self movement, I would argue for the increasing integration of this movement with the daily practices of wearables users, to the extent they no longer need to identify with the movement. For instance, for Apple watch users, a bulk of them are already Apple users to begin with. A significant portion of them already own iPhones or MacBooks. Hence, instead of identifying themselves as part of the Quantified Self movement, they are more likely to simply identify as Apple users. This means that self-tracking is slowly growing to become an essential facet to the experience of Apple (and other smartphone) users worldwide.

Self-tracking, and by extension, perceived self-knowledge, is slowly becoming more and more of a common phenomenon, without the need for users to even recognise that they are partaking in a defined movement of any sort. With respect to Crawford et al’s analysis, the latter group of wearables users are expanding and becoming the predominant group. As a result, self-tracking is becoming an integrated part of users’ daily lives. Henceforth, it is efficiently acting the role of a self-extension, thereby implicating its use in formal settings, such as in the court of law. It is inevitable that in the near future, wearables are likely to be seen as a legitimate piece of evidence or witness in any legal battle.