What the Internet is Doing Part 3 of 3: Our Communities
Iâm haunted by the mis-information thatâs out there about what the internet is âdoingâ to us. Iâve made it my career as a social psychologist to look closely at the claims made in public and behind the walls of the ivory tower, examining research about what drives and influences us and how todayâs drivers and influencers might be different from those pre-web.
Iâve been doing this for 15 years. Last year, I published a book about it, and next week, the fifth series of The Digital Human, the BBC Radio 4 programme about who we are as human beings at the beginning of the 21st century.It starts next Monday 7 April.
But there are still so many questions! So Iâm publishing a primer on the good and the bad of what the internet is doing to us.
This is the third in a series of blogposts answering those questions. Read the first two, about our selves and our sex lives.
Todayâs topic - what the internet is âdoingâ to us.
In 1959, sociologist Erving Goffman published a seminal book that ushered in a new definition of community.The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life described a new, post-modern concept of togetherness, one that wasnât limited to groups of people who spent time in the same physical space. He explained that community can exist only in the minds of its members, and that the important thing was that it was a headspace where people felt they belonged.
Fast forward half a decade and the conceptual community is writ large online, and itâs more real than Goffman could have anticipated. In fact, we can actually see it in the connections and digital traces we leave behind. For the first time ever, we can see community behaviour in its natural state on a massive scale. People from around the globe may not be in the same room, but they still manage to create very real - to them - consensual hallucinations (to borrow a phrase from science fiction author William Gibson), and these play out in virtual proximity, where the address doesnât have a post code, but a dot com. It was this kind of community that the optimistic forefathers of the world wide web believed would eventually eradicate conflict and usher in a global group hug; the reality is something a little different.
The Bad
We have a natural tendency to gather into groups, and when we belong to something, we feel we can be ourselves. Itâs a nice, comfortable place to hang out with folks who think like we do, and to find out what people like us are doing that we might also like to do. Naturally, thatâs led to clusters of people with particular political persuasions, religious outlooks, personal philosophies and other things that shouldnât be discussed with an outsider over dinner, just in case he doesnât think like we do and we end up with indigestion.
This is why some people read The Guardian and some people read the Daily Mail, and why theyâre often theyâre not the same person, nor even in the same social group. Offline, weâre geographically bumped up against people of different views (unless you live in Brighton or Deep South, USA), which makes for some potential compassion, because itâs easy to see that a person who reads The Guardian might have features a Daily Mail reader might not find offensive, and vice versa.
One of the most unique things about the web is that people are able make connections between the bits of information that make sense to them, and then theyâre able to share these hyperlinked stories with anyone, including people who think in the same way. That means ordinary folks like you and me - not The Powerful or other gatekeepers - generate knowledge. It also means that the stories might have a particular agenda, and that we should read between the links to figure out why the connections were made, and by whom.
Online, says author Eli Pariser in his book The Filter Bubble, we are naturally able to filter out people who donât think like we do, and the vast amount of information that is contrary to our beliefs is simply invisible. There are even computer processes behind the scenes in our favourite online search engines and social networks that automatically promotes information that we want to see, and demotes information that we donât, which means our information landscape is increasingly skewed. Harvard Lawâs Cass Sunstein called this an echo chamber. And the more our beliefs are confirmed, the more we think weâre right, and anyone who doesnât hold our beliefs is wrong.
Weâve imported our natural inclination to gather into communities into the online world, but rather than encouraging a global group hug, we might be cyber-balkanising, drawing virtual lines in the sand.
--
There are clever technologists trying to create digital solutions for each of these areas of our social and psychological selves. Unfortunately, weâre encouraging them. The virtual equivalent of popping a pill when something goes wrong in our bodies is clicking a button when something goes wrong in our lives. We have become techno-fundamentalists, to use a phrase coined by Siva Vaidhyanathan. We have too much faith in the magic machine.
The good news is that this is a natural phase of our evolution with a new technology. It has, like other inventions before it, been seized upon as a panacea and dismissed as a destroyer. It is neither. It is a sin eater. Ultimately, it is a mirror of us all.
---
If you like this, youâll like the third section of Untangling the Web: What the Internet is Doing to You, Untangling Us.
The bookâs on sale at the Faber & Faber website, on UK Amazon or on US Amazon. Other territories are available too!
"Aleks Krotoski is a rare combination of academic (she has a PhD in psychology), geek, reporter and fluent essayist." - The Guardian
"Her combination of cautious academic rigour and geek-like enthusiasm makes a very valuable contribution to the debate" - Financial Times
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch âą No registration required âą HD streaming
What the Internet is Doing to Us Part 1 of 3: Our Selves
I'm haunted by the mis-information that's out there about what the internet is "doing" to us. I've made it my career as a social psychologist to look closely at the claims made in public and behind the walls of the ivory tower, examining research about what drives and influences us and how today's drivers and influencers might be different from those pre-web.
I've been doing this for 15 years. Last year, I published a book about it, and next week, the fifth series of The Digital Human, the BBC Radio 4 programme about who we are as human beings at the beginning of the 21st century. It starts next Monday 7 April.
But there are still so many questions! So over the next three days, I'm publishing a primer on the good and the bad of what the internet is doing to us.
Today's topic - what the internet is "doing" to our selves.
The good
Who do you think you are online? Itâs likely you only know the half of it. You are a collection of your name and everything you do under it - from status updates on social networking sites to blogposts to online shopping lists to comments at the bottom of newspaper articles to the photos you post and the videos you upload. Youâre also the things not associated with your public profile, like what you write on sites where you donât have to log in, or the paths you trace across the web as the invisible cookies for each site feed back where you were and where you went next. Most of that is jumbled into a single digital identity that can be traced back to you, offline. And thatâs usually where the privacy debates begin. But weâre not going there yet. Thatâs the bad bit. Weâre still talking about the good stuff.
Your psychological identity is the person you feel you are or could be. Itâs the lessons youâve learned, the mistakes youâve made, the things youâre proud of and the stuff that defines you. Itâs what you ate for breakfast and the pop song you played thirty times in a row. Itâs your first status updates from five years ago and the one you posted this morning. And putting these little pieces of you - warts and all - is going to change the world.
The printing press was responsible for the Enlightenment because it gave a platform for people outside the traditional power structures (the Church most notably) to record their lives and to reflect on how they changed as time passed. But the process was expensive and literacy and other basic skills were essential, not to mention access to a printing press. Now, everyone has access to a printing press, plus a place to play audio and show off videos, so itâs very likely that the web will give rise to new kinds of personal and social enlightenment. The narcissistic tendencies that people say weâre developing are actually important for the peopleâs evolving psychological self-awareness, and for our understanding of where we as a society are today.
Think about a teenager you know or the teenager you were. Teenagers decorate their walls with blatant signals of who they are. And the poster of the celebrity that was there yesterday may not be there today; weâre constantly changing creatures who try on and take off selves throughout our lives.
In the mid-1990s, when the web was mostly populated by freaks and geeks and academics, it was described by MIT professor Sherry Turkle as an identity laboratory: a place where âmeâs were formed, tried on like a pair of jeans, and then discarded if they didnât fit. Now, things are a little different.
The bad
We can all thank Facebook for the modern web. Seriously, if it wasnât for the worldâs most popular social network, neither your mother nor your uncle, nor your grandmother or your cat would have joined the online revolution. Facebook gave people who didnât trust their computers the confidence to log in, even if it was just to spy on their kids. And why? Because Facebook provides enough information the the person on the other side of the screen is actually who they say they are.
But this comes at a price, and not a particularly hidden one: everything you do on Facebook - and increasingly across the Web - is consolidated into the companyâs servers on a single digital identity.
This is nothing new; most web services do this, usually to personalise what you see online. Most people have ignored or put up with this, although there has been the occasional privacy furore when information uploaded in one context ends up in a recruiterâs in-tray, a journalistâs inbox or in a hotel room in Hong Kong. The amount of potential and actual surveillance is unprecedented; but the danger isnât only in the collection of the material, but what happens to it after. If, for example, an enthusiastic business analyst, social scientist, security officer or government employee assumes that the data thatâs online actually represents the whole person, theyâre missing out a rather large piece of pie: the stuff thatâs not recorded by a database. Human beings are made up of more than binary ones and zeros (read more on this in a new report I published last week fro The Nominet Trust, The Personal (Computer) Is Political.)
And if an HR person looks at the photos of that ridiculous party you were at in college that you uploaded to Facebook and thinks youâre the same person now that you were then, weâve got a serious social problem.
Life is a series of graduations, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood and onwards. In each, we do things that are part of those life beats. If you were held accountable by someone offline for something you as a 30 year old did as a toddler, youâd be affronted. Yet as we continue to weave ourselves into the web and the digital versions of ourselves are delivered in a single lump by a search engine, then the distinctions between who we are now and the mistakes weâve survived will evaporate. If this continues to be the norm, as it is now, weâll be too afraid to try new things in case it comes back to bite us in a future version of ourselves.Â
---
If you like this, youâll like the first section of Untangling the Web: What the Internet is Doing to You, Untangling Me.
The bookâs on sale at the Faber & Faber website, on UK Amazon or on US Amazon. Other territories are available too!
"Aleks Krotoski is a rare combination of academic (she has a PhD in psychology), geek, reporter and fluent essayist." - The Guardian
"Her combination of cautious academic rigour and geek-like enthusiasm makes a very valuable contribution to the debate" - Financial Times
The Quantified Self movement searches for universal points and scores and payoffs, but doesnât acknowledge the systems behind how those are valued, who chooses them, what they mean, and who they leave out -- often the already overlooked and marginalized, like caregivers and other low-wage workers.
I've experimented with several QS systems for some time, but have recently found myself in different circumstances than those I was in when I began my relationship with those technologies.
I've become increasingly frustrated by QS devices and systems that assume that, for example, losing weight or exercising more is the holy grail to happiness. What if your situation is different? For example, you're underweight, injured or have another condition that means these parameters are not only incorrect but could be harmful? These services are inflexible and arguably perpetuate social assumptions.
So I was very pleased to discover this quote from this wonderful long-term analysis of what quantifying the self has meant in the context of gender politics and modern society.
From Amelia Abreu's 24 Feb 2014 article, Quantify Everything: A Dream of a Feminist Data Future.
our possessions become extensions of the self. We use them to signal to ourselves, and others, who we want to be and where we want to belong. And long after weâre gone, they become our legacy. Some might even say our essence lives on in what once we made or owned.
from Jarrett, C. (August 2013), The psychology of stuff and things. The Psychologist, Vol. 26(8).
An excellent article. There are some really fascinating insights about stuff and things and our sense of security in ourselves, individualism and collectivism and the evolution of attachment and meaning at different points in our lives.
I'm going to take it one step further (if I may): this psychological relationship with "stuff and things" is also applicable to virtual assets: identity markers as profiles, home pages etc. I wonder, though, how this will evolve throughout the lifespan, as Christian describes in his piece about our relationship with physical objects as we age.
I write about the relationship between identity and virtual object in Untangling the Web: What the Internet is Doing to You in two chapters. First, 'A Nation of Narcissists' (or, "the one about identity"):
This is something we all do when we go online. Even if youâve never ventured into an online game or been a signed-up member of a web community, youâve probably developed a profile for a social network, written a blog, commented on an article or contributed to the ongoing flood of updates on Twitter. You may have done more than one of these. Congratulations: you have created a virtual âyouâ.
I also write about it in 'Home is Where the Hub Is' (or, "the one about our relationship with our intimate surroundings):
Over the last 20 years, we have attuned ourselves to digital design. The architects of our physical worlds have always thought about how we navigate and consume their spaces, but now the designers of the cyber-spaces that we traipse and surf through are starting to integrate similar ideas into websites. We call bits of the web "home" â literally, home pages that we decorate like the walls of a teenagerâs bedroom, personalising them with displays of who we are. Even on ready-made sites like Facebook, we still surround ourselves with the things that are meaningful to us by personalising our profiles. In two decades of web research, countless studies have described the ways people build online identities using text and multimedia in the same way that DIY junkies use paintbrushes and plasterboard. And when virtual places are infiltrated by hackers or ex-partners, they are considered spoiled and compromised and lose their psychological value. The sanctum is invaded, and, as in the offline world, people move on, or they re-build a relationship with that place.
Online things are as much identifiers of ourselves as the stuff we see in our surroundings, and this article brings that home even more. Christian says,Â
Our relationship with our stuff is in the midst of great change. Dusty music and literary collections are being rehoused in the digital cloud. Where once we expressed our identity through fashion preferences and props, today we can cultivate an online identity with a carefully constructed homepage. We no longer have to purchase an item to associate ourselves with it, we can simply tell the world via Twitter or Facebook about our preferences. The self has become extended, almost literally, into technology, with Google acting like a memory prosthetic. In short, our relationship with our things, possessions and brands remains as important as ever, itâs just the nature of the relationship is changing.
A fantastic read!
Buy Untangling the Web at the Guardian bookshop (get 50% off with code UTW07FG), on the Faber & Faber website, on UK Amazon or on US Amazon. Other territories are available too!
Think of the children. Actually, don't bother. They'll be ok.
I spoke with The Guardian's Rob Booth for an article that predicts life in Britain 20 years hence (a dangerous preoccupation...), an offshoot of the paper's coverage of the royal baby. How will the future deal with social media and information technology, he asked:
Rather than living through a new revolution in computer technology, the next generation is poised to master it. They will, according to Aleks Krotoski, an academic and writer, become more sophisticated and critical in their consumption of the web and develop a subtle etiquette around social networks. For example, they will respect that embarrassing things people posted years ago should be treated with a sense of fade that human memory allows but software does not. "It will be instinctive, because they have grown up with it," she said.
Read more.
And in similar news, the LSE released the latest in their EU Kids Online research programme, a report titled Country Classification: Opportunities, Risks, Harm and Parental Mediation. The first author was Dr Ellen Helsper.
Here's the kicker (from the press release):
Children in the UK are protected by restrictions, with parents tending to overprotect their children, significantly reducing their online opportunities
In other words, they observe that the UK (and several other countries in the EU) rely on restrictive regulations, and kids would be better able to experience the great opportunities of the online world if parents and others actively mediated their kids' access, rather than assumed the "problem" is being "solved" by others. Get involved with your kids' surfing, the report seems to say.
I previously covered the EU Kids Online project on this blog and in the 'Where have all the kids gone?' chapter of Untangling the Web: What the internet is Doing to You.
If you want to know what the internet is actually "doing" to kids, I recommend reading this and other reports from this group; theirs is the most comprehensive, global study of effects. Their rigorous and longitudinal work in this area offers real evidence that should put your mind at ease.
As a reminder:
Six years on from a first report about how kids in the UK  use the web (some harrowing accounts about their not-so-critical consumption of content - intel on this is covered here by a long-time-ago-self: notes from the project directorâs keynote address at the Association of Internet Researcherâs conference in Chicago in 2005), this is a cross-national study based out of the London School of Economics. Itâs not just Europe: also includes comparisons w USA, Russia, Australia & Brazil.
You can also listen to the LSE's Sonia Livingstone giving more detail on the content of the project and her team's ongoing research in this area here.
Buy Untangling the Web at the Guardian bookshop (get 50% off with code UTW07FG), on the Faber & Faber website, on UK Amazon or on US Amazon. Other territories are available too!
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch âą No registration required âą HD streaming
I don't want to get rid of technology completely, but somehow something's happening, outside our control.
A special episode of the award winning Download This Show in which ABC Radio National's Marc Fennell turns the table on me, the psychologist, by digging around my mind.Â
We recorded this conversation about Untangling the Web: What the Internet is Doing to You in front of a live audience at the Sydney Writer's Festival in May.
Buy Untangling the Web at the Guardian bookshop (get 50% off with code UTW07FG), on the Faber & Faber website, on UK Amazon or on US Amazon. Other territories are available too!
Most governments have focused on technical solutions, believing
that removing or blocking radicalising material on the internet will
solve the problem. Yet, this report shows that any strategy that relies
on reducing the availability of content alone is bound to be crude,
expensive and counterproductive. Radicalisation is largely a real-world
phenomenon that cannot be dealt with simply by âpulling the plugâ.
Stevens, T. and Neumann, P.R. (2009). Countering Online Radicalisation: A Strategy for Action. The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, Kings College: London.
(full text pdf)
I spoke with the report's author Tim Stevens for The Guardian's Tech Weekly about how things have and have not changed since this report was written in 2009. Results up shortly.
