Abstract
The turn of the millennium will certainly be characterized by future historians as one in which the different means of communications have come together and formed a new system that has not only increased the speed of communication to a pace that was unthinkable before but also connected humans in modes and modalities that present novel and even unpredictable social challenges.
Mary Chayko’s recent book Superconnected, The Internet, Digital Media, & Techno-Social life is the last work in which is explored the role of the Internet and digital social and mobile media in people’s lives. It is indeed a quite fascinating (if not the most fascinating) field of study available today; scholars from different disciplines – sociology, psychology, media studies, information science, philosophy and even theology – have conducted research or developed theories that offered an explanation of the relation between communication technology and society. This quite trendy research field has generated many disparate fields of study ranging from surveillance to hacking, from cyberbullying to globalization, from techno dependency to Ecommerce, and so forth.
May Chayko, along the 10 chapters that structured her book, is more interested to provide a social analysis than focusing on the social-economical (there is very few about the social impacts of The Internet of Things or the modes of productions emerging from what Tapscott and Williams called Wikinomics 2.0) or philosophical ones (e.g. there is nothing about the social impacts of Floridi’s Infosphere). On the contrary, Mary Chayko is intellectually relying on that American tradition that goes back to the work of Sherry Turkle, Donna Haraway and William Gibson, and, generally speaking, to the cyberculture studies, while the author seems not comfortable with the ‘cyber’ suffix (p. 43 and following) as it is too linked with a sort of technological-driven determinism that Mary Chayko rightly believes to be not a good fit with the very nature of social phenomena technology related.
Chayko’s book spanned indeed over some of the most controversial topics about the Internet and digital media with a historical look too: after an introduction that sets the scene in which the book is immersed, it introduces to the core notions of ‘superconnection’, ‘the Internet’ ‘digital media’ and ‘techno-social life’. The book then starts with a very short survey on the creation of the Internet and the birth of the digital communication. Chayko claims that the merging of mobile communication, wireless technology and social media networking ignited a triple revolution in 2000 that begins to generate and spread information in abundance and massively accessible and consumable potentially by any human. On the other hand, big data (complex and large data sets collected in extensive databases) started to be analysed for extracting value from data in order to find new correlations to spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. The triple revolution was a global revolution and information thus became a primary good in tech-intensive societies leading to superconnected, networked societies.
Basically, Mary Chayko’s Superconnected provides a very comprehensive survey on the nature of techno-social phenomena exploded since the birth of the Internet and how they have evolved today. As Bertrand Russell has claimed in his History of Western Philosophy (1945), men who founded modern science had two merits which are not necessarily found together: immense patience in data analysis, and great boldness in framing hypotheses (pp. 527–528); Internet and media studies, as well as Chayko’s book, have their strength in data analysis, but most books are quite weak in providing a depth theoretical framework. Chayko’s book is a precise and huge reservoir of media studies tools, including the way in which the major social theorists have analysed the digital media phenomenon. Chayko scarcely provides any critical analysis of these findings; when Chayko (in Chapter 4) puts forth an analogy between prosumers and exploited labour (such as nurses or housewives) by using a Marxist approach, she does not appear very persuasive likely because the Marxist analytical framework has been not very developed and applied. As pioneer Internet critic Howard Rheingold (2002, cited in Chayko, pp. 73–74) argued, ‘Media cartels and government agencies are seeking to reimpose the regime of the broadcast era’; but there is a peculiar difference between the functioning of open source models – taken seriously – and the logic of prosuming that Chayko, following American legal scholar Yochai Benkler, seems to merge (see p. 70). As soon as the network model will develop towards sharing, peering and openness, and also becoming more central for the future economy, it will likely work in a quite different way than the broadcasting model.
The book goes along in the same fashion as the first chapter: a precise survey of all the forms of social media and their significance through the discussion of the major experts in the field without any critical assessment. The book ends with a chapter about the future of superconnectedness and, in particular, on new and emerging technologies. In this final chapter, Chayko seems to be reasoning about political and, especially, ethical issues regarding social media. In particular, she focuses on privacy issues involving the pervasiveness of computer technology in almost any sphere of human life (famously called the Internet of things) and special interest on the intrusion of technology in our bodies. Another hot topic Chayko raises is about the replacement of humans with robots in high-risk jobs such as military or repetitive work: ‘the question – Chayko claims – as to the extent to which human workers might be replaced remains’ (p. 203).
However too often, and even in this final chapter, Chayko raises ethical and political issues without any effective discussions. Along the final chapter (and along the whole book) indeed, the author seems content to offer the reader just a sketch of all social media ethical and political problems. These questions were deeply analysed by different authors, and many very close to Chayko’s own standpoint. French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty (1958) has offered a phenomenological reflection on the relation of perceptions and the body by showing us that perceptions cannot be disentangled from each other (see Chayko’s Chapters 3 and 4); American media studies pioneer Poster (2008), on the contrary, suggests a metanarrative of the relation between ethics and media; Poster, indeed, explains, The problem … would not be to determine a means to apply ethics to a recalcitrant and strange domain of the virtual (we would call that social media) but to invent new systems of valuation that adhere effectively to mediated life.
Chayko – if we take Poster’s assumption seriously – seems to apply, along the book, old-fashioned ethical and political categories to analyse social media. South African born British phenomenologist Introna (2014) and French philosopher Latour (2002) wonder about the role of morality where there are no pure ‘ends’ and no pure ‘means’ but always a complex entanglement of both. For Latour (2002), ‘Morality … appears thus [to be] a concern which ceaselessly works upon being-as-another to prevent ends from becoming means, mediators from being transformed into simple intermediaries’. Thus, according to Latour, morality is a continual and collective task of working against the slipping (and black-boxing) into ‘means’, that is of humans and nonhumans alike (Introna, 2014). This is precisely an approach that would have helped Chayko to refine her final reflections in Chapter 10. The most challenging problems that social media raises are indeed those regarding policies and ethics that as many authors (from opposite points of view, Moor (2005) argues for better ethics; Marturano, (2002) suggests that while applied ethics is still valid, we need to bypass traditional normative theories) have pointed out we need to rethink the role of ethical reasoning to understand the ethics of social media and, in general, of our techno-social life.
Chayko’s book is not really – as the book back cover would persuade – a groundbreaking study of the field, but rather a quite informative introduction to the field. The author seems to be concerned to offer an overview in a true Weberian style, as much value-free as possible; the strength claimed in the book – that is a perspective covering communication, sociology, psychology and technology studies – turns into a weakness when exploring foundational, ethical and political issues. Many digital media problems can be indeed better explored, analysed and explained just through instruments offered by philosophy, history and economics.