Abstract
As I write this (March 2016), Donald Trump is the leading candidate to be the Republican Nominee for President of the United States. My Facebook wall is obsessed with Trump, and with my political leanings, all of the posts that I see are strongly anti-Trump. Accompanying the stream of items from such lefty sites as The Daily Kos are viral videos with montage editing, techniques like slow motion, and added music scores that friends have shared or even created that ridicule Trump, often followed by insightful comments/dialogue from like-minded friends (or friends of friends). However, there is also the occasional ugly exchange, where a Trump or Republican supporter will respond angrily to such posts as examples of “the divisive hate that the Dems teach people”; others will respond in kind, and sometimes this leads to promises/threats of unfriending those with opposing beliefs. In this specific environment—that is, my Facebook—I see some friends’ posts about Trump but not others: when I go to an old college buddy’s page who does not share my politics, I notice a post quoting neocon comedian Dennis Miller that was not on my feed (and, thus, probably kept my blood pressure low). Nevertheless, sometimes his posts do appear on my feed. And, from my very privileged position as a White male US academic, there is not a lot of local organizing and activism on my feed (although there is some). The “news” section of my wall informs me of trending stories, including one day about Sasha Obama’s meeting of actor Ryan Reynolds, singer-actress Zendaya winning a Kids’ Choice Award, and Ben Carson’s endorsement of Trump, but no mention of two horrific acts of violence in which more than 50 people were killed that occurred in Turkey and Ivory Coast that same day. I do not know why exactly Facebook showed me the stories they did and why it marginalized the global events; those software-designed decisions are hidden from me (and from other users). Facebook, then, is a pretty mixed bag politically: infuriating, enlightening, creative, polarizing, visible, and invisible, all at once.
The three books reviewed for this essay recognize such contradictions and accordingly offer multiple takes on how media may contribute to democratic and egalitarian goals. Two of the books—Gehl’s Reverse Engineering and Webster’s Marketplace of Attention—focus on the US experience of newer media, while Padovani and Calabrese’s Communication Rights is very transnational. Gehl’s book is nearly entirely about social media, but Webster and Padovani/Calabrese discuss analog media as well, including cable television (for both volumes) and even older media such as community radio (in Padovani/Calabrese). From an axiology perspective, Gehl and Padovani/Calabrese are much closer to a recognizable ideological position, as both volumes explicitly privilege and advocate for progressive political interventions in media. Webster is more agnostic, reflecting a mainstream communication research approach. But, perhaps, the most significant commonality is that all three explore the issue of agency and structure with the political dimensions of media, again most conventionally in Webster (e.g. who highlights Giddens’ structuration), most technically in Gehl (who considers issues of software architecture), and most multi-contextual in Padovani/Calabrese (whose contributors examine how communication rights are enacted and constrained in a variety of nations and regions). Reading the three collectively offers different views—and swings of mood—about how sanguine we should feel about this structure/agency dynamic and the potential for media to enhance or repress socio-cultural equality and true political participation.
Likely, the most optimistic conclusions about the democratic potential of newer media—and the least obviously outraged about media injustices—are found in Webster’s book. Reviewing a range of social science theories and concepts—selective exposure, uses and gratifications, two-step flow—and data collected by himself and others, the author addresses the extent to which we can say that media audiences have true autonomy over their preferences. This includes not only the ability to express our media preferences among various options but also the ability to develop and maintain our preferences independently from the media. He certainly recognizes structural factors such as advertising, promotion, scheduling, and the hidden analytics of social media. But he also advocates for the role of audiences’ own agency in such media use choices.
This work is organized into seven chapters that explore a main category of influence for how media audiences form: three chapters highlight media users, the media themselves, and audience measurement systems, with later chapters focusing on the audience agency/structure dynamic. The Marketplace of Attention may be considered a fairly optimistic book about how newer media affect us politically/culturally for two reasons. One reason is that his range of concerns is more circumscribed compared to the other two works reviewed here. For Webster, a main political danger of digital media seems to be balkanization: the possibility that media will divide up the citizenship into severely rigid interest groups. Such polarizations include Fox News conservatives versus MSNBC liberals or news junkies versus no-news media users. He is not calling for a complete restructuring of media or larger systems of oppression nor for the media’s role in mitigating basic human rights abuses (as some in Padovani and Calabrese address). Webster posits that concerns about the balkanization effects of newer media may not be the cause for concern that scholars such as Cass Sunstein and Joseph Turow claim. Such authors argue that media seduce us into overly emphasizing selectivity in our media use (bookmarking all left-wing websites, for example) or decide for us what images/information we see based on big data and hidden marketing analytics. Rather than creating silos of specific political and cultural positions, Webster advances the idea of a “massively overlapping culture” (p. 118) where media audiences are exposed to many of the same channels and programming, at least at some points in time.
One absorbing set of data featured in the book is from Nielsen that shows patterns of network and program viewing by viewers of CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. Is there evidence of common networks and programs that overlapped with such viewers, normally constructed as mutually exclusive (especially in the case of Fox and MSNBC)? Certainly his data show some overlap: TV programming such as The Oscars, the Daytona 500, and NCIS ranked high for viewers of all three cable networks. Such data help indicate, Webster contends, that we have a relatively common culture. But I felt there is a figure/ground debate about these data. There was also fairly dramatic evidence of difference that the book acknowledges but perhaps underplays in its assessment. Fox viewers watched The O’Reilly Factor much more, and Modern Family much less, than the other two news-network viewers. Also, it is debatable how equally pure in political leanings Fox and MSNBC are: MSNBC has programming with conservative elements during the day (especially Morning Joe) which also may be promoted during primetime.
A second reason that Webster might be seen as optimistic is that he implies a pluralistic approach toward various structures that may operate in media’s influence. As an author who does not label himself as a critical–cultural scholar (unlike virtually everyone else discussed in this review), factors such as capitalism and patriarchy are not viewed as primarily oppressive (the book’s use of the word “marketplace” as neutral and benign is an indication of this). The book offers as fairly equivalent structural influences such as language and economics, and audience agency is hinted as one of the equivalencies, even privileged in the book as “the swing vote” when adjudicating the structure/agency dilemma (p. 146). He concludes in the last section that “the marketplace of attention should promote a reasonable balance between the forces that unite and divide us” (p. 163).
A more dire assessment (in my mind) is offered in Gehl’s Reverse Engineering Social Media. Gehl uses the “reverse engineering” metaphor as a framework for analysis, arguing that we can start with an established social media site and then work back with whatever tools are at one’s disposal to determine its logics, constraints, and incentives. This is especially tricky for corporate social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, where much if not all of the code is proprietary and therefore not accessible. Gehl applies a Marxist orientation and embraces critical political economy; the range of critical scholarship he engages is thus deeper than Webster, and the use of traditional social science is more limited (as is true for many chapters in Padovani/Calabrese). Gehl takes on central elements in the political economy of media, including ownership and advertising. The contradictions of social media—the dubious rhetoric of user control while in a corporate-controlled and monetized site—are deeply troubling for democracy and agency to Gehl.
Gehl’s book has strong empirical components. Early in the work he explores the dialectic of processing speed and archival storage, while also looking at early examples of e-crowdsourcing. On this issue, as with others discussed in the book, he concludes that there is a power imbalance, as users enact agency through content creation, but lose legal and logistical access to the record of what they produced on these sites given the conditions of user agreements.
Since critical advertising studies is my own area of research, for me especially valuable sections of the book focused on Gehl’s formidable insights about the commercialization of social media and its noxious effects. The author argues that a main influence of advertising upon social media culture is to standardize it. One chapter compares the failed site Myspace with the economically successful Facebook; he posits that the individualized and malleable nature of Myspace offered users more agency than Facebook, but the unpredictability, chaos, and even hostility of individual Myspace pages made it less attractive to corporate promotion. The standardized formatting of Facebook, on the other hand, offered a site that was much more advertising friendly. He follows this with a companion analysis of the efforts of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a trade association that similarly helped reign in non-commercial variance on the Internet. The IAB established standards for advertising formatting on the Internet, leading to a commercial template that Web 2.0 was able to exploit for commercial monetization much more than the earlier Dot Com surge. But social and cultural costs included both the advertising grip over the Internet and a decline in its stylistic variety. As a bonus for commercial interests, IAB as an ad-industry lobbying body was able to soften criticism of such medium-wide standardization by touting the new era of the “interactive sovereign consumer,” a continued trope in 2.0 discourse.
Although I consider Gehl’s assessment on the whole as less upbeat than Webster’s, this is not to say that Reverse Engineering Social Media does not embrace the potential for progressive intervention in social media. Chapter 5 focuses on a 2002 strike by mostly Spain-based “free laborers” of Wikipedia that successfully nixed a plan to add advertising to the site. The final chapter, “A Manifesto for Socialized Media,” calls for social media to be characterized by “true two-way communication, decentralization, free and open-source software, and encryption” (the latter for privacy protections) accompanied by a “radical pedagogy” that allows users to tailor sites to their needs (p. 142). Gehl also does not ignore the hardware side, arguing that old computers and digital technologies can be recycled and repurposed in ways that can advance both environmental and democratic goals.
The pessimistic analysis of online structures paired with a more utopian vision, and grounded proposal found in the last chapter of Gehl’s book, complements the tone of Padovani and Calabrese’s Communication Rights and Social Justice. This work is the first book in a series, “Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research,” a series associated with the International Association of Mass Communication Research (IAMCR), an association notable not just for its international scope but also for its critical studies and activist emphasis. Containing an impressive collection of international scholars, chapters in this work place the issue of communication rights in both historical and culture-specific contexts. Many of the chapters overtly engage the definition of communication rights, critiquing and morphing its implications often in dialogue with other perspectives or even other chapters in this book. Communication rights are used by authors to critique a limited Western view of freedom of speech; to expand its definition to include the right to be heard and to be interactive (among other elements); to compare communication rights to similar concepts such as responsibility, the right to information, and media justice; to argue for the need of such rights to be local and fluid; and to warn against the cooptation of such communication rights in neoliberal-infused discourse of individual and market liberty.
An introduction by the two editors sets the stage of the book, addressing different elements of communication rights and how they have become globally salient. The three sections that follow each have brief previews by the editors. The first section offers general discussions of communication rights and how the concept has developed, including the role that transnational organizations, such as United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), have played. One chapter, by Roberto Savio, founder of the Global South–oriented Inter Press Service news agency, details the challenges of establishing alternative and non-Western news in the changing nature of journalistic funding, technology, and nation-state politics. The second section focuses on specific contexts, including a useful review of media activism in Latin America by Sally Burch, an eye-opening discussion of the realities of rights for the very poor in India by Pradip N. Thomas, an assessment of women’s communication rights in Iran by the esteemed Annabelle Sreberny, and a chapter on the development of community radio in Europe. The section ends with Calabrese’s discussion of the US context, emphasizing debates in political philosophy and the different forms of liberty that might influence US policy.
Given the book’s general embrace of historical perspectives, it is the last section which most centrally includes digital media, emphasizing new challenges and continuities in transnational progressive media initiatives. I found the chapters in this section to be among the most provocative in the book. Seeta Peña Gangadharan, using the example of US-based Center for Rural Strategies, argues that media justice should include both contestations of mainstream media representation of marginalized groups and infrastructure equality such as digital divide correctives. Margaret Gallagher persuasively argues that gender issues must be at the heart of efforts and philosophical assumptions for truly transformative communication rights and activism.
As someone whose work is not primarily internationalist, my eyes were opened to the range of views and praxis that happened and are happening globally. One of the book’s strengths is to document the many initiatives and transnational summits/conferences that have been influential in building communication rights communities within and across national borders and localized media activism in various contexts. Given my lack of background in this work, there were times that I was a bit overwhelmed with the many initiatives and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that chapters engage—a very handy list of acronyms at the beginning of the book was tremendously helpful in this regard.
In looking at the main theme of this review essay—optimism and pessimism with the democratic potential of media—this edited book, given its scope and complexity, predictably offers mixed views. Many chapters engage success stories of courageous and dedicated activists and visionaries, both working to refine in progressive ways what communication rights are and to enact them locally while also building transnational connections. Most chapters not only recognize the amazing accomplishments that have been done but also the challenges that are still to be faced. One chapter, a comparison of social justice media groups in South Korea and Honduras by Dorothy Kidd, illustrates how such activism works in those different contexts and the successes each had, and also documents the various retaliations from the political right—including violence and defunding—that these groups face. Paula Chakravartty discusses digital initiatives in India that embrace a rhetoric of empowerment and may in fact be of benefit to the disenfranchised, but also lead to greater inequities as these initiatives are maximally exploited by large private interests. The final chapter (the only chapter that I believe is not an original contribution to the book) complicates claims of the “Twitter Revolution” in regard to the Arab Spring by expanding notions of the Internet’s role in such movements—including coalitions formed by the tech community and other activists in such countries as Egypt years before. The chapter ends with a affirming, if still cautious, discussion of Syria that, in retrospect, may not be as hopeful now.
Taken as a group, then, all three works recognize the complexity of media as positive or progressive agents. In the US context, is there hope for audience autonomy and common culture? Webster thinks yes. With social media, does its hidden architecture and power imbalance work against political emancipation? Gehl argues we should be concerned, but lays out future strategies to make social media match its agentic rhetoric. Do we see success from scholars and activists in clarifying and enacting communication rights both transnationally and in specific local contexts? Yes, but they face significant challenges from neoliberal trends, gross inequities, and sometimes incommensurable needs or visions.