Digital Media and Culture Yearbook 2014/Printable version

Technological Determinism

Technological determinism in its most basic form is the idea that technology has a significant effect on society. The theory presents the idea that technology is the reason for developments in our society, influencing our lives at a number of levels. Determinists believe that technology influences society on different levels; industry, communication between individuals and even individuals themselves.

Overview

The definition of technological determinism can be regarded as the cultural implications of new media, by bringing into concern the history behind media theory and production and the way these frameworks develop social and cultural structures. With media technologies constantly developing and allowing for instant and convenient communication, theorists have argued that this has influenced social progressions. New media technologies have revolutionized everyday life to an extent where humans are able to create identity through social networking, consume media productions through television, computers and other means and also communicate from a local to a global scale.

By assessing theorists work such as Marshall McLuhan, who poses the idea that reforming media affects how humans distinguish and value the world around them and the differences between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ media, we can establish how technology is determined through the shaping and changes of cultural and social formations.

Technological determinism comes in two main variations, best described as hard and soft determinism.

• Hard or strong determinism argues that technology is the foremost or sole reason for the way society is structured and any development in our culture. Technology is seen as the “prime mover in history” (Chandler, 2000).
• Soft or weak determinism is a less extreme argument, more approved of by scholars. It sees technology as more of an enabler for societal change. Rather than viewing technology as the sole or primary reason for anything that happens in society, it takes into account other factors and argues that technology gives us opportunities for development but does not necessarily cause it.

Context and Origin

In history, technology is recognised as the ‘prime mover’ and according to technological determinists; it is the sole cause of change within society. With this, technology becomes seen as the most contributing factor when assessing the pattern of social organisation. Continuing from a technological determinist perspective, the argument remains that as technology has grown (from writing and print, to the television and the computer), society has changed alongside it. The most extremist technological determinists see the entire form of society as being determined by technology.

Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), an American sociologist and economist was believed to have originally coined the term Technical Determinism. His founding views led to a number of theorists expanding on the subject.

Karl Marx

The first elaboration on technological determinism came from Karl Marx, who believed that technology and its changes are the main influence on social relations and social order, and that technology forms the base of society (Chandler 2000). His association with determinism comes from statements such as "The Handmill gives you society with the feudal lord: the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist", although some argue that he was not, in fact, an advocate of technological determinism. Marx focusses on theories surrounding economic activity and its role as a productive force. The forces of production are 'technological processes once begun, require forms of organisation or commitments of political resources, regardless of their social desirability or previous social practices…Cultural and social change follows from technology’(Bimber, 1990:7).

Non Marxist Theorists

A number of Non-Marxist theorists have adopted a technological determinism stance including Sigfried Giedion, Lynn White Jr, Leslie White, Harold Innis and most notably, Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan (1911-1980) was the first theorist to recognise the changes related to technological determinism and how it would bring about a brand new society that was defined by networking and a greater connectivity.

Main Concepts

Technological Imperative

Technological imperative, also known as the inevitability thesis, is the assumption that technology cannot be stopped in its development, and that technological progress is irreversible, unavoidable, and inevitable. Essentially, this theory assumes that because we are able to do something because of a particular technology, we ought to, must, or will do it. It is the theory that what can be done, will be done, whether or not it is moral, good, or productive for mankind.

This is important to technological determinism as it recognizes the influence of technology on action. It drives society to act on not only what they are able to do, but also push the boundaries and test limits because, as John von Neumann observed, man cannot resist the technological possibilities as they arise (Mumford 1971: 186). Progress must continue wherever progress is possible. With this, the theory acknowledges the shift from technology as a means to technology as an end. Critics of the theory, including Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illich, argue that the theory of technological imperative cannot be fully accurate, as not all areas of available progress are being exploited. The main argument stems from the lack of drive to create renewable energy sources.

"Arnold Pacey suggests that the technological imperative is commonly taken to be 'the lure of always pushing toward the greatest feat of technical performance or complexity which is currently available' (Pacey 1983, p. 79). The mathematician John von Neumann wrote with some alarm that 'technological possibilities are irresistible to man.' (in Mumford 1971, p. 186). Jacques Soustelle declared of the atomic bomb that 'Since it was possible, it was necessary' (in Ellul 1964, p. 99). And fatalists might add that since we can now destroy the planet, in time we will. The technological imperative is a common assumption amongst commentators on 'new technologies'. They tell us, for instance, that the 'information technology revolution' is inevitably on its way and our task as users is to learn to cope with it" (Chandler 2000).

According to McLuhan, the media dictates the message - an argument that becomes extremely relevant when according to technological imperative, society is unable to resist the development of technology and so also the continual development of media platforms.

Social Media Influence

Always-On

The concept of Always-On stems from the idea that society is now "tethered" to technology, and that humans are always networked and connected in some way, even if they are not physically on any devices. This relates to technological determinism as the theory proposes that society and social relations are determined by technology, and thus also our on-line relationships and cultural tendencies.

Technological determinism underpins the theory of an ‘Always-on Culture’, arguing that social networking platforms have revolutionised the way society communicates. It creates a new platform of communication, exclusive of face to face interaction. It can be a means to strengthen real life relationships or make solely online ones. It allows for communication in different social circles at the same time and with people across the globe. This, according to technological determinism has shaped the way people communicate within society.

Chapter 3: Always-on Culture.

On-Line Identity

Technological determinists would also argue that technology has an impact on our on-line identity, as the specifications of the medium help to dictate what kind of identity we are able to create. In a sense, technology creates parameters into which we must fit our identity - be it through profile pictures, privacy settings, status updates and even friends lists. With the development and increased popularity of social networking platforms, 'online identity' has become an increasingly prevalent area of discussion. These social media sites have created a new online community with sometimes different cultural tendencies to the 'real world'. People are given the opportunity to present an image of themselves to society via the 'virtual world' which may or may not align with their 'real world' identity. According to technological determinism, social media has created a platform for society to create separate identities in the 'virtual world' and thus give people multiple personas who could not have without the aid of this technology.

Chapter 2: Online Identity.

Science, History and Technology

Technology has revolutionised throughout history with the adaptation of science. There is a distinct view that technology is applied to science; science creates new explanations, models and predictions about the world which is then applied to practice with technological innovation. Throughout history science has reflected its theories into technology thus forming an in sync correspondence between changes within technology and changes within the world.

New science comes from old science; new technology from old, from recent developments in media technologies such as mobile phones, the internet, wireless computers such as iPads and laptops and special effects these have resulted in the modification of older technology by improving electronic devices and battery power (Collins & Evans, 2006:10).

Gutenberg's Printing Press

According to McLuhan's theory, the printing press is an example of how technology can change society. The printing press increased the speed of production for the written word, which in turn allowed the reproduction of the written word. This lead to the standardisation of vernacular languages and universal literacy. Thus, the experience of the world is transformed by the standardization of a common language, through the development of a new technology.

Notable Determinists

Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan's work is often viewed as a founding part of the study of media theory, and is often seen as a key component in technological determinism.

Extensions of the Human Body

This is the assertion by McLuhan that technology are tools that extend the human body and more accurately, extend or amplify the abilities of the visual and aural senses. Examples of this would be the television extending the visual senses or the telephone extending the aural (Brey,2000). McLuhan goes on to say that technology in fact changes the way we act in society and that nowadays people “wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide” (McLuhan, 1966 p.64). Although at first this may seem an obscure and nonsensical view, it can be comprehended in that much of the technology we use for interacting and viewing the world start at our fingertips and with the technology that we consume.

McLuhan’s assertion that the medium is the message is perhaps now becoming a more likely theory than was first thought. He asserted that technology is like a bodily extension just like the “wheel is an extension of the foot” and “a hammer is an extension of the arm” (Lister et al, 2003: p.78) and the recent announcements by Google, Intel, and Facebook that they were all investing heavily in wearable technology is testimony to McLuhan’s theory (BBC, 2014a). Facebook recently bought virtual reality technology firm Oculus VR for £1.2bn and Mark Zuckerberg claimed that “virtual reality will be the next social communications platform” (The Guardian, 2014). Furthermore, his statement that this wearable technology could “change the way we work, play and communicate” (BBC, 2014b) directly supports McLuhan’s stance.

The Global Village

This is a term coined by McLuhan in reference to what he calls the Electronic culture that arises with the increased use of televisions and computers. A way of understanding this is that the improvement in technology has allowed for much quicker communication. In theory this allows for the entire world to be compressed into a Global Village where everyone can quickly communicate with each other, whereas in practice this has manifested itself through the internet allowing for an individual to have a much larger number of near constant social connections. A very recent example of this would be the case of popular social media site Facebook in which an average adult user is said to have 338 friends, which clearly shows the breaking down of distance and ease of communication that McLuhan conveys in his idea of the global village(Singha, 2014). This can be also be further established by looking at the number of people that use the most common social networking sites, 1.23 billion monthly active users on Facebook and over 1 billion unique YouTube user visits per month. This puts people in potential contact with more people than they could meet or speak to in their lifetime and again strengthens the idea of the global village. Another idea of this is that through the quick access and speed of response that comes with this type of technology we are able to react to global issues far faster than previously. Therefore, issues that may have once not have been of concern can be addressed by a much bigger crowd. This follows the same underlying concept of increasing technology reducing distances and effectively making the world a smaller more accessible place. McLuhan also suggests that the people who live in this electronic culture, or global village gain all the benefits and downfalls of new technologies and so whereas distances are no longer a problem for communication, technology barriers and development or lack of it can still provide issues (Smith,M and Marx,L. 1994).

Hot and Cool Media

A way in which Mcluhan categorises different forms of media is through a temperature type scale in which there are both hot and cool types of media. As with much of McLuhan's writings this is not an initially intuitive process. A media type is considered hot if it heavily utilises and immerses one sense in particular. An example of this may be the comparison of a photograph which gives a large and detailed amount of visual information and hence a hot media form, to a sketched cartoon which gives a minimal amount of information visually (Van Koten, 2009). Furthermore McLuhan suggests that it is cool media that involves a higher amount of interpretation from the consumer than hotter forms of media. This can again be thought of as a photo presenting visual information more clearly where as a drawing may need to be interpreted in terms of shapes and colours and a have a meaning which may be more contentious drawn less easily from this information. Below is a table which contrast various types of hot media with their cooler media counterparts (Van Koten, 2009). There is a large amount of contention about the usefulness of the hot and cool media scale due a number of issues that are described in the Criticism section below.

Hot Media	Cool Media
Low Participation	High Participation
Radio	Telephone
Cinema	Television
Written word	Spoken Word
Photo	Comic
Novel	Poetry

Similar to McLuhan’s idea of hot and cool media is the notion of 'light on' and 'light through' media. ‘Light on’ media is where the light source bounces off a surface or object before hitting the viewers’ eyes. Therefore the light is projected onto a screen (Van Koten, 2009). ‘Light through’ media is where the light source is positioned in front of audience; therefore making the audience the screen by projecting light onto them (Van Koten, 2009). In likeness to hot and cool media, ‘light on’ would be described as hot because it is “all revealing” where ‘light through’ is less revealing, more “mysterious” so therefore cool (Van Koten, 2009, p.91). An example of ‘light on’ media is cinema, where the light comes from behind the audience onto the screen, with no chance of participation; where an example of ‘light through’ media is television with the light projecting from the TV onto the viewers, giving more room for interpretation and interaction.

Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil, a futurist specified in speech recognition technology and the future of technology such as robotics and biotechnology, is notable as a technological determinist with his assessment of the history of technology and its rate of progress.

By establishing technology as a determinist force he states that ‘once life takes hold on a planet, we can consider the emergence of technology is inevitable' (Kurzweil, 1999:30). Kurzweil assumes that the rate of progress of technology is at such a high speed that technological intelligence will surpass human intelligence within a few decades (Kurzweil, 2004:382). He argues that the future holds technological change so fast human nature will take longer to adapt to these changes and the rapid pace of innovation.

Kurzweil explains that technology is a means of evolution, in that ‘technology picks right up with the exponentially quickening pace of evolution’(Kurzweil, 1999:30). Technology has a positive effect on human individuals and society as it allows them to change themselves by bettering their cognitive abilities and health by adapting to technological advancements. For Kurzweil, exponential growth is the leading factor in technology where Moore’s Law is of strong importance.

Criticism and Debate

Technology through significant media forces has reshaped the way in which humans behave, the structure of human societies and even language. Media even has the power to change governments (Collins & Evans, 2006:50). Theorists have formed contradictory ideas that raise debates over the development of technology as being a direct source of social change.

Cultural Determinism

Cultural determinism is the idea that the society and culture surrounding us helps determine who we are. Essentially, the environment has more of an influence on something than inherited traits. This opposes the idea of technological determinism as it then assumes that society is not influenced by technology, but rather that society influences technology to fulfill its needs and social tendencies that already exist. The main cultural determinist is Raymond Williams.

Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams ‘insists that the future of our media will depend on our capacity to make informed judgements and decisions about that future.’ Our world, society and history are continually altered by whatever new technology comes along: the steam engine, the automobile, the atomic bomb. (Williams, 2003:1). Technology such as television is often argued that it has effects on social behaviour and cultural and psychological conditions. However these effects are the result of the technology being the cause. The notions of a cause and effect between a technology and society, a technology and a culture and a technology and a psychology are quite complex to apply answers and theories to. Williams, however goes on to analyse specifically television as a technology that results in cultural pattern shifts. Williams states that television has altered our world. In this sense it has been created ‘as a result of scientific and technical research’ yet television has been used in many other forms, these are simply the effects of its creation:

• As a tool for social communication to construct social relationships.
• It provides us with certain perceptions of reality within the world
• It provides a strong mode of communication through news and entertainment
• Through television advertising is made possible to promote goods to society
• It follows a set of systems to what society wants from television by attending to opinions and styles of behaviour from what is produced.

Arguably the development of television and overall technology cannot be assumed to purposefully direct society into conforming to change. Technology should be considered as a typical invention of which is accidental in its proceedings (Williams, 2003:5). Television is therefore a technology which without it humans would still have been influenced or entertained by other means.

Technological Determinism is only one force among others; 'social forces shape technology and technology shapes society, and societies can, and frequently do, make rules that determine which technologies are used and what use can be made of them' (Collins & Evans, 2007:51).

There is an argument concerning whether determinism is in-fact too determined. This theory suggests that determinism that is seen to focus on technology to recognise how we act or think can ignore how we in-fact reach this point. Ong (1982) understands that writing has transformed us, however we are gradually holding less and less control over this. Ong (1982:77) presents ideas about writing and how writing has transformed human consciousness. Ong (1982) takes this further and states that as a result this gives this form of technology a sense of autonomy. This leads to the belief that it is difficult to understand the possible social changes that have to occur in technology as it acts on its own to decipher which caused or resulted in the other to occur.

Further criticism of Technological Determinism is found in the idea that the theory is written in a broad sense. McLuhan also fails to mention how technologies are constructed yet implicitly speaks of the way in which humans interact with technology. McLuhan also fails to acknowledge the idea of ‘technological innovation’ this is despite the fact that this technologies are created through the human interplay with various technologies that McLuhan holds in high regard (Cana 2003).

Problems with McLuhan's "the medium is the message"

It could be argued that it is more beneficial to state that "the medium is also the message" as opposed to "the medium is the message". This is believed because the nature of the medium in itself is informative and it is hard to claim that the content is independent of the medium. It is difficult to suggest that the content is not shaped by the medium. Also, content that is generated by technology such as language, print, TV and internet justify it's usability and this content can also work to fuel new technological innovations (Cana 2003).

Problems with Hot and Cool Media

As McLuhan has the tendency of doing in his writing, the Hot and Cool media temperature scale comes with a number of criticisms due to the somewhat vague nature in which it is described. Firstly, there is no actual way of measuring the temperature of a media form and so no way of being able to determine if one type of media is hotter or cooler than another. This means that it is a subjective scale and that any consensus comes down to the opinions of the people using it, therefore leaving it prone to bias and making it somewhat less useful. To add to this, the scale can only be used when comparing two media forms that have somewhat similar aims or place emphasis on the same senses such as the radio and telephone(Van Koten, 2009). As much of McLuhan's work is not particularly recent it also does not include or take into consideration many recent updates in technology. Examples of this would be the improvement of televisions with high definition capabilities and video calling technology available commonly on smart phones. Therefore it can in many cases be discarded as a flawed method of gauging media.

Glossary

Cool Media: is known to be of low definition, this is so because the level of information being given to the reader is small. In comparison to hot media, cool media requires greater levels of participation from audiences. Examples of cool media include: telephones, cartoons, television.

Culture: the totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought.

Hot Media: is described as something that is of ‘high definition’ and are low in participation as they do not require much assistance from audiences to be filled or completed. The idea of high definition photographs can be used to this extent. Other examples of hot media include: radio, print and movies.

non-Marxist: a non-Marxist can be defined as a socialist who disagrees with the idea of communism and works towards and wishes for a society to exist where the workers within society have the over-riding say in their lives.

Social Media: is the various websites and applications that allow for users to communicate and share experiences to the public and in private, allowing for them to participate in social networking.

Technology: in broad terms, technology is an entity used to solve real-world problems

Technological Innovation: has been described as the innovation of a new product that provides substanstial improvements on previous products. Technological innovation is crucial to the success of products and they can be protected by Intellectual Property.

The medium is in the message: this is an idea of Marshall McLuhan and he suggests that the medium form in a way embeds itself into the message. The result is that messages are influenced through the medium.

References

BBC. (2014a). Facebook buys virtual reality headset start-up for $2bn. Retrieved 03/26 2014, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26742625

BBC. (2014b). Intel buys wearable technology firm Basis Science. Retrieved 03/26 2014, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26743537

Bimber, B. (1990). Karl Marx and The Three Faces of Technological Determinism. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Brey, P. (2000). 'Technology as Extension of Human Faculties.' Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Technology. Research in Philosophy and Technology, vol 19. Ed. C. Mitcham. London: Elsevier/JAI Press.

Cana, M. (2003). Critique of McLuhan’s Technological determinism viewpoint or lack of one thereof. Available: http://www.kmentor.com/socio-tech-info/2003/10/critique-of-mcluhans-technolog.html. Last accessed 3/4/2014.

Chandler, D. (2000). Technological or Media Determinism. Available: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/tecdet/tdet01.html. Last accessed 1/4/2014.

Collins, R & Evans, J. (2007). Media Technologies, Markets and Regulation. The Open University.

The Guardian. (2014). Oculus: Facebook buys virtual reality gaming firm for $2bn Retrieved 25/03 2014 from, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/25/facebook-buys-virtual-reality-gaming-firm-oculus

Kurzweil, R. (1999). The Age of Spiritual Machines. New York: Penguin.

Kurzweil, R. (2004). The Law of Accelerating Returns. KurzweilAI.net.

Lister, M., Dovey, J., Giddings, S., Grant, I., and Kelly, K. (2003). New Media: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge

McLuhan, Marshall (1966/1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. p64.

Mumford, Lewis (1971): The Pentagon of Power. London: Secker & Warburg

Ong, W. (1982.) Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen.

Sedghi, A. (2014). Facebook: 10 years of social networking, in numbers. Available: http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/feb/04/facebook-in-numbers-statistics. Last accessed 3rd April 2014.

Smith,M and Marx,L (1994). Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism. Massachusetts: The MIT Press. p50-52.

Van Koten, H (2009). The digital image and the pleasure principle: the consumption of realism in the age of simulation IN Digital visual culture: theory and practice. Bristol: Intellect Books. p89-92.

Williams, R. (2003). Television: Technology and cultural form. Psychology Press.

Online Identity

Introduction

The internet was not originally built as a “personal communication medium, let alone a way for fans to connect around their objects of pleasure, for people to find potential romantic partners, for employers to find or investigate potential hires, or any such social process. It was developed to safeguard military knowledge."

The term online identity has obvious connotations of the profiles people hold on social networking sites such as Facebook. However, the realms of online identity are not isolated to and focused purely on social networking sites, and include a plethora of online sites that provide an outlet for expression and representation of identity online.

Thinking about online identity and how we use it, and how it consequently uses us, allows for thought on a range of topics including: how social media technologies help mobilize our identities; the way we communicate with each other; how the narratives we construct through our online identities relate to our culture; how we present ourselves to others in the social media world; and the nature of production and consumption of digital representations.

Online identity is argued by many theorists and critics as being another outlet for the expression of identity, and a fair amount of focus is granted to the modification process that accompanies it. It is a contentious issue as to whether our actual identities align with our online identities or whether it is more complicated than this, and this too is explored by theorists in order to try and obtain a greater understanding of the broad spectrum that is online identity.

Forms of Digital Representation

Narrative

Understanding narrative is vital in understanding the impact online identity can and does have on the individual and the 21st century. Narrative in this context needs to be described in a much more critical sense than just 'narrative has something to do with stories'. Whilst it does involve the process of storytelling and description, narrative is a very old form of communication that is powerful; it can work in simple forms or on a sophisticated level. It is not the same sort of storytelling found in literature as it is independent from fiction. It exists in the real world and is how we make sense of our lives and the world around us. Putting and displaying our narratives online preserves it, makes it more real and helps us feel more human by providing us with proof. Facebook statuses, pictures and albums are a prime example of this. Narrative is independent of ‘tellability’: you can tell a story, but narrative has a psychological component as it involves the listener’s or observer’s participation in ‘filling in the gaps’ of the story. These gaps can be the back story, intertextual references, characterisation and even generic familiarity. Narrative and realism are dominant in the production of digital representations.

Van Koten argues that narrative and realism are dominant forms of digital representation in terms of production. Online identity is so closely linked to (and in essence is) a form of self expression. Essentially, creating an identity for oneself online and presenting ones narrative to the world is one of the ways in which we create platforms for ourselves. This platform has allowed for self-expression of the identity we want to have and want to present to the world.

Behaviours and Narrative on Facebook

Facebook is something that might be used by almost the entire world, but how we use our individual page is a different matter. Facebook is a place where narrative exists as people post about their lives through photographs, status updates and events. In fact, Facebook has even evolved to give people their own timelines, and one can look back over their story to see how their existence has developed and how it has been documented and shared on Facebook.

A book my Gemini Adams looks at the idea of how people view Facebook posts in different ways Adams suggests that there are two forms of Facebook narrators; the ones who put everything on, and the ones who are more selective about their posts: For example some people use Facebook to talk about everything such as: What they eat What film they are watching If they’re happy or sad If they’re enjoying a lecture or falling asleep Who they are angry with The fact they are frustrated walking in the rain or waiting for a bus All the photos from nights out whether they are of quality or not This may not seem like an issue and Adams notes that these, “superficial,” details are not very harmful. However, it is believed that some people have a very different approach to Facebook and see it as an almost sacred space to be used only for important or useful updates such as: I’m getting married What is the best way to cook a chicken? I passed my exams Can anybody suggest the best taxi firm in the area? I’m buying a house I went on holiday, here are my pictures I’m getting a new job

Therefore, Adams shows that the subjects of narration on Facebook differ depending on the school or “sharing levels,” that a person belongs to.

However, the book also points out that the detail of the given narration is also dependent on how people view Facebook as a forum for publicising information. For example, some people may announce on Facebook that they are pregnant without telling friends or family first. Some argue that this is natural as Facebook is now a normal and common form of communication. However, others are concerned that Facebook has forced a loss in the intimacy of communication and eradicated the need for making the effort to contact people. It is also suggested that some events in a person’s life are personal and it is inappropriate to share it with the large group of, “random acquaintances,” that make up a large percentage of people’s Facebook friend group.

Overall the book raises the idea that Facebook is a site of narration, but users adopt it in different ways and choose to share their stories in a mixture of styles which raises controversial questions and theories on communicative behaviour.

Narratives and Online Chat Rooms

Online chat rooms are a place where people can open up and develop their true character due to the freedom of anonymity. However, because in a chat room one speaks to a stranger who one may never meet or come across again, there is an extreme temptation to create a false narrative for the sake of: fun, experiment, emotional liberation or exploitation.

A book by Dr Monica T. Whitty and Dr Adiran N. Carr which looks at romances online explains that people are restricted in real life by the baggage of reality that they find oppressing or problematic. Similarly, using teenage subjects in a chat room setting, Lynn Schofield Clark observed the way they acted towards strangers online and concluded that chat rooms are often used only for "fun" and not the pursuit of serious relationships; the attraction of this being the lack of consequences within their cyberspace narrative. Internet chat rooms offer an escape from this as users have the opportunity to invent new lives, new back stories and to rid themselves of unwelcome details which they wish they could remove in reality.

It is questionable as to whether this is a positive or negative ability as there are both advantages and disadvantages to it. One could say that having the freedom to have an invented narrative could allow one to express themselves and explore emotions or ideas that seem impossible in ordinary life. It may reduce the likelihood of mental illness as a person has a forum to be experimental and play out confusing issues. However, it is also arguable that this stops people living in reality and dealing with their lives in an active and healthy manner. False narratives encourage deception and also allow for people to exploit and harm vulnerable others through the use of abusive manipulation and emotive stories.

Regardless of the ethical arguments, it is evidential through exploring studies on online chat rooms, or even through personal use, that they do provide users with the chance to either voice their own genuine narratives without fear of being known. But chat rooms also let people invent new or fabricated narratives which can potentially be beneficial to their own development, or indeed harmful to themselves and to others.

Impression Management

Online presentation of the self is an expression of identity, but also a careful management process, through visual representation, that seeks to modify the impression that others have about our personalities

The World Wide Web gives users the ability to present various forms of the self to others at a distance. With the presence of an online identity that has the potential to be distributed and viewed across the globe, how you are presented and judged can become a major issue for many people. This can affect self-confidence and may lead to some people manipulating real-life events prior to making a record of them available online (through editing of photos, posts, etc), but also the ability to keep elements of your life separate; e.g. professional and social life, how you present yourself to family and how you present yourself to friends, and the expectations that come with the aforementioned. Thus, impression management could be said to be the act of selectively presenting and hiding sides of one’s own identity.

Due to the increasing likelihood of one's online identity affecting real-life events and circumstances, Impression Management is arguably more important now than it has ever been. The vast majority of executive companies have been using search engines to perform background checks on applicants and potential employees since 2006. Eight years later, not only has that percentage risen, but employers are twice as likely to eliminate a potential candidate for a position due to negative information found online. Additionally, over one quarter of executives placed into positions by search firms in 2012 were initially contacted or identified on a social network, meaning not only must potential applicants remain increasingly vigilant, for possible negative aspects of their online identity, but must also proactively work toward presenting oneself as being employable.

Anonymity

Disembodiment effect

The disembodiment effect regards the agency of online users, able to interact and communicate online, exceeding the limitations of their physical bodies. The digital environment seems to disregard the idea of a connection between one’s self and one’s body. Users are able to use make use of language, avatars, pictures, amongst other social cues, and use SNS’s to manipulate their various social cues and affordances to create disembodied online entities which can operate in ways perhaps different from how they would act socially in person. Where anonymity is an affordance of a particular SNS, users are capable of behaving either in accordance or against the norms of their social behaviour. Some can behave maliciously and deviate from their usual civilised, socialised behaviour under the allowance of anonymity.

Disinhibition Effect

The disinhibition effect, where online users shed their real time social inhibitions in their anonymous, invisible online identity, is thought to be broken down into 6 explanatory factors: dissociative anonymity, invisibility, asynchronicity, solipsistic introjection dissociative, and minimization of authority. Disinhibition is usually categorised as either Benign or Toxic, the former referring to the way in which people can often act nicer than they do in face-to-face situations and the latter describing the way in which people can rally against socially-accepted moral norms and explore darker domains.

Dissociative anonymity

Where usernames and email addresses are the main information we have of one another as users, people can remain relatively anonymous online: some having fake names, and others having no names. In representing such a limited amount of data about one’s self we are able to operate without accountability. By dissociating one’s online actions from one’s self and real identity, people are less hesitant to vocalize any thoughts or opinions they have, and self-disclose freely. One can avoid assuming ownership of their online actions, and can even convince themselves that such behavior is separate from them and “not me at all.”

Invisibility

Being not physically present or seen when interacting online can add to the disinhibition effect in that one has the ability, and capacity, to roam through and view data in various different online areas; chat rooms and online interactions. Although we can understand a lot about a user’s identity through our online interaction with them and their self-disclosure, we still cannot physically see them. By eradicating the physical social cues present in physical interaction, such as facial expressions and reactions to an unsettling statement, or how one looks when uttering a controversial aside, this ultimately can eradicate one’s regard for how such a statement makes them look or how it is received by others. Ultimately this invisibility can effect how we portray ourselves, and how we interact with others in such a disinhibited mode of behavior.

Asynchronicity

Interacting online, we do not have to communicate in real time – we can wait hours, days or even weeks before responding to one another – whereas in real time interactions we need to deal with others’ immediate reactions to what we say and do. Having to consider others in our real time actions inhibits us to conform to social norms and respond with social regard for the other person. When these social cues are lifted in the anonymous, invisible online realm, we can bide our time and allow ourselves to develop our thought processes and opinions, giving rise to structured and articulate responses benign and toxic disinhibition that avert social norms.

Solipsistic introjection

Through not interacting face to face, online interactivity between users can blur boundaries of the self. People can feel connected psychically with the thought processes and messages of the user they are speaking to, as they are devising a voice and image of that user speaking inside their own mind, and introducing the other’s thought process and ‘voice’ into their own psyche. The online user then becomes one’s companion inside one’s inner psychological world, where one can entertain continuations of online conversations and say things they perhaps would not say in person. In reading a companion’s messages online listening to the voice constructed for them inside one’s head, one may hear one’s own voice and take what their companion is saying as their own voice speaking to their self. In hearing one’s own voice when interacting with another user online, as if having a conversation with one’s self, one is likely to be disinhibited and say whatever comes to mind - as speaking to one’s self inside one’s own head feels perfectly safe.

Dissociative imagination

One may come to believe that the characters created for other online users inside their own head, along with their idea of their own online self, live in a different spatial dimension; an online dimension. In supposing that these online components live in a separate space, one may separate online activity and behavior from offline accountability. It can be argued that some treat the Internet and the online realm as a game in which the usual rules of social interaction do not apply, and another set of governing maxims of acceptable behavior reign. This has resulted in something of a legal grey area, evident in the fact that sentences and articles that would be considered libellous if published in a newspaper or magazine can be delivered to international readers through websites and blogs with little controversy most of the time. In South Korea forty per cent of the population play the game Lineage, and the city of Seoul even has its own ‘cyber crime unit’ which reports at least one hundred real life attacks a month that result from game world interactions alone.

Minimization of authority

One’s offline authority is coded and communicated through various social cues such as modes of dress, body language and position within society in everyday society. Without these social cues of the physical world, one’s authority can be dramatically diminished online in the realm where users feel equally capable and entitled to express their views. Anonymity enables a type of freedom, and this freedom can have obvious personal benefits if the material being generated, shown or shared is transgressive. Where fear of punishment may govern someone’s decision to speak their mind in person, these limitations can disappear online where people feel free to disclose the beliefs of their elevated, entitled online identity. As the online realm depends on articulation of text, not necessarily immediately in response to a user but whenever one feels to do so, those who can manipulate language in a sophisticated manner can elevate their own status and authority online by seeming of superior intellect. In this the lines of authority can be blurred online.

Cyberbullying

Since the beginning of Social Media, there have been issues with cyberbullying or ‘trolling’ as its also known. The severity of this form of bullying can range from flippant remarks to organised acts of violence and invasion of privacy. Whereas most bullying targets people based on gender, sexuality, race, or class, the ease with which comments can be sent has led to people of all types being subject to online intimidation. Most often, people create new online identities just for the purpose of cyberbullying. Cyberbullying means sending or posting harmful material or engaging in other forms of social aggression using the Internet or other digital technologies . This can be done by a single bully or multiple ones, and primarily takes place on social networking sites. It’s also common for people to create fake profiles on online dating sites and to pretend to be someone they’re not, which is referred to as ‘catfishing’.

Cyberbullying can sometimes be worse than real life bullying, since the bullies usually hide behind the mask of anonymity offered by false online identities. The ability for individuals to cover up their digital trail by using alternate accounts under different guises, often with other IP addresses or personal information other than their own, makes it hard to estimate exactly how much a person can be held accountable for. Furthermore, because of the lack of face-to-face contact, the bully might not know the effects their bullying might have on the victim and thus are unable to realise the gravity of their actions . Anonymous bulling might have serious consequences. There have been numerous cases in which the victim has even committed suicide as a result of the torment they have faced from an anonymous source. Especially with teenagers, cyberbullying is hard to prevent since the victims usually don’t alert family to the fact that they’re being bullied out of fear that their parents might take extreme precautions to prevent further incidents, such as confiscating their computers and mobile phones .

One of the most tragic examples of cyberbullying was the case of 13-year old Megan Meier from Missouri. In 2006, Megan started talking to a teenage boy who introduced himself as “Josh Evans“ on the social networking site MySpace. After a few weeks of being in an online relationship the nature of their communication abruptly changed with Josh starting to make insulting comments. Eventually, their correspondence resulted in Megan’s suicide. Months later the true identity of Josh was revealed as being set up by a friend of Megan’s as well as her mother Lori Drew and her colleague Ashley Grills. The federal district court convicting Drew of a misdemeanor violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The case of Megan Meier pushed forward legislation for the criminalization of cyberbullying. . The recording of conversations and comments made through social media has been deemed draconian, yet a positive aspect of it is that it can be utilised in cyberbullying investigations to find out the perpetrators of online harassment.

Online Presence of Catfish

The term Catfish has been used to describe someone who is not truthful about their real identity and acts behind an online masquerade, typically in a quest for romance or deception. Identity is hidden by concealing personal details such as appearance, for example through the use of photographs of a different person to represent the self. The popularity of the term was due to the success of "reality thriller" and documentary film Catfish, which charted the search for one man's online lover in reality. Fundamentally the show highlighted how easy it is to lie about your true identity via social networking sites, although Catfish mainly focused on the presence of Catfish on Facebook.

Multiplicity

Just as one has various roles and identities in everyday life – mother, employer, daughter, sister – so too, one has the flexibility to create multiple roles for themselves online. As social beings adapt their approach to suit whom and what they are interacting with in life, this is also true for the identities we construct of ourselves online, depending on the context in which we are interacting. We can take our overall self and extract various attributes of ourselves to exaggerate and base an entire identity around – and since we are all more than one attribute we can fashion various versions of ourselves across various outlets within the digital environment. One can create multiple identities online depending on the medium they are using i.e. a ‘fun loving, youthful and inspired’ blogger discussing music and travel, a sophisticated and insightful Twitter account posing political and moral questions, an informal and honest Facebook account tailoring to a specific, familiar audience of ‘real-life- friends whilst maintaining a perhaps academic website. Many people consciously alter their sentence syntax and way of typing depending on the website and the situation, much in the same way that we tend to speak formally or informally depending on who it is we’re conversing with. Separating these characteristics of one’s self, much like one does with the self and the body in the disembodiment effect, allows one to construct various identity out with the realm of the" one body one self" idea held by in real, mortal society. Multiplicity has serious implications for the responsibility of users online as some can use their fluid and multiple identities online to behave inappropriately without accountability.

Jonathan Vanasco expands on the idea of multiple identities in his work on "Meta-identites and identity facets". Vanasco asks the question that if we act differently around separate social circles within our life then shouldn't we be able to do so online? When people talk about internet activity, they generally think about their life online, - not their lives online. People tend to tailor their online identity to the given personality that each SNS tends to give off. As mentioned before Twitter is seen to be sophisticated, while blogs such as Tumbler/Instagram are seen to be more creative and youthful, whereas Facebook which started off with a more preppy personality has since evolved into a more casual all-round site for social media. So, in the end the world of our multiple identities becomes quite complicated, as we are:

• Sharing different facets of our lives with our friends, our family and our colleagues.
• Tailoring these facets to the personalities of certain networks.
• Experiencing overlap between the facets (And this is where multiple online identities encounters problems)

With the ever-evolving nature of SNS's they are becoming more and more linked with one another. Many social media companies now contain the option to update all of your online profiles all at once and allows people viewing your profile with links to your other social media accounts. This is making things harder than ever before to keep multiple online personalities separate from one another as social networks continue to push for realism in people's accounts.

The Ubiquity of Identity

Jonathan Vanasco believes that our online identity is becoming increasingly more omnipresent in everything that we do. Today people have multiple social networking accounts, emails, online gaming profiles, education sites, workplace profiles, music streaming profiles, social calendars like Renkoo and even retailers are now going social like Amazon, eBay etc. People continue to create and accumulate multiple identity facets again and again. It is synonymous with the idea of ubiquity that our online identity is part of our new found Always-On Culture. People stay constantly connected to social media in order to keep up their image and representation of themselves to the people they allow to see it. This has increased dramatically over the past few years with the integration of smart phones and wireless internet all over the world.

See Always-On Culture's section on Danah Boyd and Ubiquity for more on this.

Symbolic Interactionism

Goffman argues that performers can form their audience’s impression of them consciously, for instance by learning their speech or coordinating their movements in certain ways, however sometimes they might make unconscious moves, such as tripping or forgetting their lines, which are still part of the overall impression of the performer. Goffman’s theory about consciously and unconsciously given signs can be applied to the online representation of people. Facebook users, for example can manage their friend’s impression of them by selecting the images they upload or the personal data they share. However some information of them can be still given away unintentionally, for instance when they are tagged in pictures or statuses they did not wish to, and it also shapes their self-performance and therefore this is also part of their persona.

Chat Rooms and Anonymity

Statistics show that there are over 1,200 chat rooms on the internet that are easy to enter and are not regulated by a censoring body. As a result, people of all ages, genders, races and backgrounds can have access to chat rooms where they can potentially speak to anybody in the world. There are concerns about whether this is safe and healthy and Davidson’s book focuses on the harm and abuse that comes from unprotected communications. The film, “Trust,” by David Schwimmer looks into this idea as it focuses on the concern of many parents have that their child will become involved with a dangerous adult who emotionally manipulates them and abuses their trust.

However, writer Rolf McEwan argues that chat rooms actually allow people to be more confident and natural as they don't feel afraid of rejection from people they don't know. Amongst friend groups people can have concerns about rejection if they say or do anything that the others won’t approve of. This theme is explored in the recent television series, My Mad Fat Diary, which looks at how a girl with mental health issues struggles to be herself in a group of new friends who expect her to behave in a conventional manner.

McEwan’s argument is that although chat rooms might encourage anti-social behaviour or even false identities due to no accountability, it also gives people the freedom to explore their natural personalities through talking to another person whose opinion or reaction will not have such a problematic consequence to life, and therefore encourages self-conscious people to relax. Because users have the ability to engage in conversations without the other person having preconceptions about them or directly viewing them, they may feel as if there is none of the baggage that is tied to interaction elsewhere. For many, typing can be an easier way for them to get things off their chest, eliminating the unease of speech and giving an opportunity to thoroughly think through a statement or topic before bringing it up.

Social Networking Sites

Promotion of Identity

The digital domain is increasingly involved in the social dynamics of our lives. Emails, chat rooms and blogging all contribute to new ways of building social networks and provide creative platforms for self-expression. Social Networking Sites (SNSs) are platforms for socially orientated activity that allow for an introduction of the self via public displays of connection. These public displays of connection are used to authenticate identity and introduce the self through the process of association with social circles. Individual and collective identities are simultaneously presented and promoted. SNSs are sites of self-presentation and identity negotiation. Facebook is a prime example of how an SNS can help create and project an online identity. Each Facebook user has a profile page where they can describe themselves, their likes and their hobbies, and narrate their lives. Most users also have a profile picture to help identify themselves. SNSs are unique in combining multiple modes of communication and thus breadth of control over social cues.

Social media use within businesses is growing as a main focus of advertising campaigns. Around 80% of all businesses use, or are planning initiatives to use it . Businesses use social media as a marketing tool – not only is it inexpensive, but effective in communicating with your market. Recent studies have shown that one third of adults under 30 now use social media instead of traditional media outlets such as newspapers or television, which means that social media use within a business is important to keep up to date with how people find information. Social media, for a business, can create an identity which is similar to that of the demographic that uses them – with certain demographics generally tending towards a certain social network, a business can strengthen their existing market, or create relations with areas outside of it. Social networks also give a platform for businesses to stray away from professionalism – becoming more 'human like', and giving a company a personal feel to it's structure.

We consciously and unconsciously work to define the way we are perceived, hoping to engender a positive impression of ourselves. Impression management entails putting effort into emphasising certain characteristics whilst diminishing or hiding others, and we are able to post information which presents a desired image. It is about presenting a highly selective version of the self. Even the choice of name on your email is an important marker of who we are. As Papacharissi words it, “The process of self-presentation becomes an ever-evolving cycle through which individual identity is presented, compared, adjusted, or defended against a constellation of social, cultural, economic, or political realities.”

Flexibility of the Self

Many people create multiple SNS pages in order to aid their task of impression management. This multiplicity allows only select audiences to see a certain version of that person, or limits the wider world from being able to make the connection between the two as they wish to keep different parts of their lives and personalities separate. Creating multiple pages has a parallel to how we present different versions of ourselves in face-to-face contexts. Identity scholar Goffman argues that the self plays multiple roles in everyday life and cannot be understood adequately as a single unified entity. The self is flexible and multiple, taking different incarnations in different situations. Impression management is about the balance of sharing, withholding and distorting information.

Online identity through textual media additionally offers different ways to get noticed compared to the real world and its social constructs. Physically attractive people will get noticed at a party, but articulate, insightful and witty people who know how to spell will get noticed online. Many use their online identity to achieve and satisfy needs they find difficult in the real world. Online identities allow the opportunity to be yourself or to be whoever you want to be. Liu (2007) examined over 127,000 MySpace profiles and revealed that on average user tended to differentiate themselves from friends rather than identifying with friends.

Self-expression and self-promotion on SNSs

Looking at social networking sites it can be seen that they all work on a similar basis: they connect their users and let them present themselves to one an other in a way they wish. The number of SNS have increased and therefore various sites for various purposes can be found. José Van Dijck argues that users have a need to differentiate between their online personas, for most of them there is a significant difference between what they communicate to their friends and their professional persona that they share with their employers and colleagues. For instance while Facebook is used mostly for personal interactions, until LinkedIn is for professional networking. According to Jeff Weiner- CEO of LinkedIn- "The key distinction is that as a professional you want people to want to know who you are. People are searching for you or people like you whether you like it or not.” Comparing Facebook and LinkedIn it can be seen that impression management –even though in a different way, but- implies to both sites. The users try to develop an ideal image of themselves. However, while Facebook was primarily created for self-expression, rather than self-promotion, LinkedIn mainly concentrates on self-advertising and showing off one’s skills. It has been referred as "Facebook in a suit”. By having both Facebook and LinkedIn profiles users can present both their social and professional personas. According to Van Dijck "Many users will try to synchronize their profiles on both sites, even if the interfaces on Facebook and LinkedIn force them to perform different strategies.”

Professional Online Identity

Professional online identity refers to a persons ideals, experiences, attitudes and beliefs in their professional career when they present themselves on an internet platform. The management of professional online identity is taking on a bigger role at the workplace, as employees are increasingly interacting with their professional contacts in online social networks that are personal in nature, such as Twitter or Facebook. This can lead to the collision of professional and personal identities. "Online social networks present employees with boundary management and identity negotiation opportunities and challenges. Recent data point to a blurring of the professional and personal domains in online networks, which exacerbates the need for active boundary management." A key feature that differentiates the contact online is that the information available is much less tailored to a particular conversation. In face-to-face and other individualized interactions (e.g. phone calls, emails, text messages) employees can manage the boundary between their professional and personal identities by restricting what and how much of personal information they present to their work contacts over time. And by adapting this disclosure to their particular dyadic relationships in a constant manner. Although SMSs limit the flexibility of self-representational behavior, they also "create[s] new opportunity structures to display identity cues and select interaction partners"

Authenticity

The development of social networking sites changed the way online identities are formed and presented. The first online identities in social media were in the form of emails and instant messengers where only thing that was required was a nickname. In 2002 Friendster was launched, which pioneered the online connection of real-life friends and was followed by MySpace and other Social Networking Sites, like Facebook in 2004, which promoted Clay Shirky (2003) to come up with the term ‘YASNS’: Yet Another Social Networking Service. This meant that online identities had to be more authentic, which is why creating a totally new online identity is more difficult. Authentic online identities mean that it has to have the user’s real name, real connections and, increasingly, their actions across cyberspace e.g. posting a Facebook picture via Instagram.

Yet, with the emergence of Twitter in 2006 and Tumblr in 2007 it is easier to create an online identity that is not real. But most users seem to have their Twitter account in their real name, with the people they know in real life following them. This shows how the emergence of authentic online identities makes people want to keep their online identities connected with their real life ones. Furthermore, with the authentic identities available, users have become more untrusting to non-authentic online identities. Despite this, Social Media like Tinder are popular, which shows that the need for authenticity is not a big enough concern.

Complications

The process of self-presentation through SNSs is complicated however. With the combination of a variety of audiences, of variable publicity and privacy settings, the individual must engage in multiple mini performances in order to produce a presentation of the self that makes sense to multiple audiences. In day-to-day life many people have the opinion that others should ‘take them as they are’. However, impression management is very contradictory to this stance as it raises questions concerning whether we genuinely think people should accept us as who we are. If this were the case, then privacy settings and account management would not nearly be as popular as they are.

The internet holds a utopian potential for our relationships and our self expression as it has the potential to bridge divides and create meaningful new connections. However, more often than not, the internet and SNSs are accused of leading people to lie about themselves. Additionally, just how much of an individual we really are on SNSs is contentious as SNSs engineer self-presentation by providing predetermined sets of categories through which to build identities. It limits the extent to which anyone can call themselves an individual and fully express their identity.

Jaron Lanier said that the most important thing about a technology was how it changed people and warns of the restrictions of being ‘Locked-in’ to a particular technology. There is support for this concern in terms of online identity within social networks from Geert Lovink . He argues that there is little freedom to present yourself in different ways online and social networking sites only offer users a limited choice of presenting their personal and professional information to the world. He goes on to quote critic Zadie Smith who challenges this narrow choice forced on users by Facebook in saying, “What kind of living is this? Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: doesn’t it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format”. This seems to crystallise Lanier’s point about the problems with being Locked-in to a particular technology: our online identities, which are a presentation of our lives, are “force-fitted” into a format to enable social networking sites to neatly package users’ information to monetise the content.

Profile Pictures

In their book ‘A Networked Self’ Papcharissi and Mendelson investigate Facebook photo galleries and the connection this has with online identity. The study concludes that individuals knowingly and unknowingly seek to define a positive impression of themselves through the use of SNS, and in particular, using profile pictures. Profile pictures are important as it is the only picture that can be viewed by the majority of users online. It is chosen to covey something about themselves which is generally positive, to the rest of the world.

The digital age allows for the creation of virtual communities, where social groups interact with one another and observer individual profiles to gain a sense of their personality. Pictures on Facebook express particular values of the person portraying them. Wells argues , states that photography was previously known for capturing a moment in absolute accuracy, maintaining a faithful and true image of an event. However, as the digital age has intensified with SNS, the use of digital photography allows Impression Management. Therefore, profile pictures are not necessarily a true representation of that person. Individuals can communicate their values, relationships and sociability, in the way they wish the rest of SNS users to perceive them. This entails emphasising and diminishing characteristics of character through editing, creating a perceived persona that may not be accurate. Papacharissi and Mendelson have argued that the use of profile pictures allows for narcissism, creating a culture of self-absorbed individuals. Although profile pictures are understood as being a representation of individuals to the rest of the SNS community, the use of Impression Management risks people creating a persona of themselves, inferring qualities and perpetuating a deceptive performance to their online audience.

Security and Privacy in Social Media

With the reveals in 2013 of the NSA's vast monitoring of international internet traffic including social media, online privacy and security have been highlighted. Having said that, according to Cisco's 2012 Connected World Technology Report, 91% of all those aged 18-30 believe that "the age of privacy is over". Further more, they found that: "...one third of the respondents are[sic] not worried about all the data that is stored and captured about them."

These numbers are backed up by similar surveys done by CIFAS, the UK's Fraud Prevention Service, which state:

'88% of people who use social networking sites having shared information that could be used to commit identity fraud'

They further back CISCO's numbers by stating: "Furthermore, only 18% of those interviewed said they were concerned about sharing information on or the security risk of social networking sites, with 10% sharing information about others that could then be used to assume their identities."

It seems then that, especially with younger generations, we do not worry about our data online. There is almost an attitude of "Who cares? How can it affect me?" amongst those who do not believe that we have any real privacy online. On the one hand, this could be true. In the context of social media, and in this case Facebook, there are over 1 billion users and it could at least hypothetically be argued that with that many people's data floating around in that sphere, the chances of you particular data's security and privacy being broken are relatively small merely due to numbers alone. This, however, is only a very small part of the debate around data's privacy as it completely ignores the inherent value of said data - to both you its owner and to Facebook or any company that they may "share" your data with. The current situation regarding social media is akin to a mixture of the concerns raised in both Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984, as rather pessimistically it could be said that through social media while our attention is often driven away from pressing matters to leisure and unimportant banter we are having a considerable chunk of our online data observed and collated by it at the same time.

In his book 'Social Media a Critical Introduction' Christian Fuchs argues that Facebook is: "...a typical manifestation of a stage of capitalism in which the relation of public and private, and labour and play, collapses, and in which this collapse is exploited by capital.", exploitation being a very apt term for the current policies adopted by Facebook and similar networking sites. Social media agencies have stated that to advertisers, the monetary value of a Facebook member exhibiting loyalty to their brand has ranged from around $118 to $174. The issue of privacy aside, the practice of selling account information to others is arguably dehumanising, as rather than further an individual’s own unique identity it facilitates the ability of businesses to reduce people to mere statistics.

This idea is backed up by Hannah Arendt in her book The Human Condition, where she states that: "The distinction between the private and the public realms [...] equals the distinction between things that should be shown and things that should not be hidden." In the context of Facebook this can be taken multiple ways. Fuchs argues that the main issue of public vs private for Facebook lies in the fact that Facebook has access to and essentially owns all of its users data whereas the users do not have nearly as much access to Facebook's internal workings and its own data. In this context it becomes very much about the equality of privacy measures, where the passage of information from user to supplier is of a much higher volume than that of the supplier to the individual user. When looked at through the prism of Marxist theory, as stated before, it raises issues of exploitation as it is the very data that users are generating that companies like Facebook are making money from. Just as in a factory where the workers are selling their time to create commodities for the factory, the users' are creating data for the company. The major and very important difference lies in the reimbursement of the individual users for their "labour"; which is to say that there is effectively very little of it. The concept of "Free Labour" is one that has risen to the surface in recent years in discussions of online data mining and commodification of users to describe the idea that users are essentially creating the commodity that these companies make their money on (data and information) but are not being paid or reimbursed for it.

Indeed, the exploitation exhibited by social media providers and especially Facebook have drawn harsh criticism from those who are involved in studying social media. Rory O'Connor, author of "Friends, followers and the future." stated in an article for Huffington post: "[Social networking services] profit primarily by using heretofore private information it has collected about you to target advertising. And Zuckerberg has repeatedly made sudden, sometimes ill-conceived and often poorly communicated policy changes that resulted in once-private personal information becoming instantly and publicly accessible. As a result, once-latent concerns over privacy, power and profit have bubbled up and led both domestic and international regulatory agencies to scrutinize the company more closely ... The high-handed manner in which members' personal information has been treated, the lack of consultation or even communication with them beforehand, Facebook's growing domination of the entire social networking sphere, Zuckerberg's constant and very public declarations of the death of privacy and his seeming imposition of new social norms all feed growing fears that he and Facebook itself simply can not be trusted."

The problem, then, becomes one of trust. Not only in the media companies, but in your fellow Facebook or social network users. It is not uncommon to hear the phrase "If you didn't want anyone else to see it, you shouldn't have put it online." in relation to any data that users put online for what is their assumed own private use. The obvious implication being that on the internet, we cannot trust anyone enough to not "leak" our private data provided there is enough incentive. The most extreme example of this are the so called "Revenge porn" sites, but in more day-to-day matters it is all too common to have to ask friends to untag or delete a photo of you that is particularly unflattering on social media. It again raises questions over how much control we actually have over our own data, where it goes and who sees it. After all, a very common chain of events can be a friend posts a picture of you on their timeline, that picture and perhaps the location that it was taken becomes associated with all the other data about you currently held online by the social media provider and is used to target ads at you. All of this happens nearly instantaneously and the only way to really stop it is to stop your friend from posting the picture in the first place.

What this points to is the need for a more active user than the traditionally passive archetype that social media suppliers like Facebook have become used to exploiting for commercial gain - the so called "Prosumer" idea that was first posited by Alvin Toffler in 1980 in his book The Third Wave and then expanded by Bruns to be a "produser" in 2009. Clarke defines a prosumer or produser as: "A prosumer is a consumer who is proactive (e.g. is demanding, and expects interactivity with the producer) and/or a producer as well as a consumer (e.g. one who expects to be able to exploit digital content for mashups)." This proactive consumer is one who is much more likely to demand privacy and security for their data than a passive consumer and this, Clarke says, is likely to push forward a trend of distrust for social media sites and force them to change their privacy and data security policies.

Social Networks and advertising

The terms Social network advertising or Social media targeting refer to forms of online advertisement that specifically focus on their presence on social networking sites. Social network advertising involves adverts being tailored to user information gathered from social media profiles. Given the enormous audience size and amount of time regularly spent on social networking sites, companies are increasingly becoming aware of the vast potential lying in SNSs. Consequently, online advertising is experiencing a shift from simply being distributed through websites to efficiently tracking and gathering user behaviour and personal information on SNSs. This enables brands to identify and address their target audience and people that their product might appeal to based on their interests. The fact that this information originates from the customers themselves is very beneficial to companies as personal data can be analysed in detail without having to rely on their own statistical projections. Two strategies used in social network advertising are targeted advertising' and customised advertising.

With targeted advertising, brands aim to shape their product display according to website relevant content or their target group’s interests. While content-targeted advertising is adapted to the particular purpose and content of a website the advert banner is displayed on, targeted advertising tracks the users’ surfing behaviour on the internet. Several websites require users to register with their Facebook accounts in order to later display similar advertising content on the social network site. Through the use of cookies, people can be tracked back to recently visited websites and are therefore likely to be exposed to similar content on other websites. Companies are also able to track whether one of their adverts has been encountered by a particular customer before and are consequently able to avoid exposing the same user to the same advertising multiple times and thus display their advertising with appropriate intervals . A look-a-like function enables the detection of Facebook users with similar interests as the one recently accessing a particular website.

Moving away from simply tracking people’s surfing behaviour via cookies, online advertising has experienced an important shift to placing greater emphasis on using profile information on SNSs to create customised advertisements . Social network accounts sell valuable information about users’ location, interests and social circles to advertising agencies and companies themselves. Likes and links to external websites further give an idea of potential customers that might be targeted in future. Users receive pre-selected adverts that are believed to be most compatible with their demands and interests (as determined through their account details) and therefore should be more appealing to them.

However the massive amount of data generated by “real identities“ via social networks is also centre of the growing debate on the implications of the web 3.0. As Joseph Turow suggests “the new advertising industry is defining your identity and your world“ through displaying user customised advertisements on social networks. In this way commodification, capitalist social relations and market forces increasingly engage in and detemine people’s social life by exploiting the fact that to a large extent social interactions are taking place online . Consequently social networks have to be considered a double-edged sword . While on the one hand being intensely empowering for its users, the fact that their data is under constant surveillance by data mining and analytics companies such as Daily Me, Medicx Media and Rapleaf can also lead to consumers restisting . Thereby, the root of the problem is the fact that boundaries between advertising and content shaping the 20th-century media are being blurred through networking sites . However, the significance of personalised advertising does not only make user data a valuable criteria to shape brands after but goes even further. Through “social sorting“ social networks even impact structures of society in allocating people to “target“ or “waste“ groups based on information published on their profiles. Brands can explicitly filter out the users that are most valuable to them in terms of a responsiveness to their product based on their interests, income or other characteristics. In this way the advertisement that is presented to each individual user is indicating their social position in the eyes of companies, making advertisement become status signals . Nevertheless, companies have to consider the discrepancy between online and offline identity as so far social sorting processes are simply based on personal information generated on SNSs. Therefore customer profiles only limitedly reflect the “real“ person behind the profile, including their demands of a product. While social media’s functionality provide the tools for people to construct an online identity they are also heavily shaped after the economic purpose of the site. Cohen suggests that due to their design and the normalisation of the sharing culture SNSs can be considered part of an increasing commodification of identity through the influence of corporate interests .

Reputation Systems and SNS

Reputation systems rank the users of a website based on criteria such as number of posts or trustworthiness regarding online monetary transactions. They are often utilized on places of online commerce such as Amazon or eBay, however they are becoming an increased presence on social media where the more Facebook likes or re-tweets a post gets, the more people see it. This is a new communicative concept since human beings do not usually quantify popularity in their day to day lives and it establishes a sort of hierarchy of thought where originality, creativity, and wit are some of the more valuable traits. And while it's arguably a better use of cognitive surplus than mindless consumption, rarely do these reputation systems seem to carry any real purpose or meaning.

Location-based Real-time Dating

Other than the popular online social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter which can be used for dating interface, there are now a series of mobile applications that act as not only a social media platform but combine that with online dating. These apps are known as location-based real-time dating (LBRTD) apps and are massively popular within current society. An example of these is Grindr, a dating app that allows homosexuals to find other single people within a close proximity to themselves. However, Jeremy Birnholtz has described Grindr as being a virtual place for singles that "creates tension in users’ strategies for self-presentation as they craft positive identities in an environment where identifiability by outsiders may be perceived negatively." The two big players in this field are the popular mobile applications Grindr and Tinder.

Grindr

As previously mentioned, Grindr is a mobile LBRTD app which is aimed specifically at gay men. There is, like with most social media, a problem with identity theft. There is a limited number of photos that you can have on your profile and therefore, since it requires less information to look as legitimate as Facebook, for example. Due to this, it would seem easier to lie about you identity via the app. However, Grindr are aware of this and have set up a complaint policy with regards to imposters and fake profiles.

Users must follow these steps to lodge a complaint:

1. Report the impostor. Tap the gray flag in his profile to report him.

2. Send us your Grindr Account Email Address (or BlackBerry support code). This will help us find your profile.

3. Write your email address on a piece of paper. Send us a clear photo of yourself holding the piece of paper.

4. Send a random photo of yourself. We need to make sure you're the 'real' you.

Also, due to the fact that there is little room for users to expand their personality beyond their very limiting profile, many people argue that this limits identity. "The design of Grindr provides men little room in their profiles to elucidate upon their personality or interests. This tranching of their identities to just physicality has the effect of reducing them to objects, like the models in advertisements." This objectification is what has created the stereotype that Grindr is only for gay hook-ups. This lack of real identity within the app has transformed itself to being looked as being purely sexually charged and therefore, Grindr can be described as being an online social network that almost encourages online identities to be separate from offline ones.

Tinder

Tinder is much the same as Grindr, but is aimed at both homosexuals and heterosexuals. It's set up is very similar to that of Grindr, however there are some differences. Tinder's slogan is "Tinder is how people meet. It's like real life, but better." This slogan denotes a few things - firstly, it openly suggests that it is a completely online community as it overtly claims to not be real life, but that it is better. Therefore, this could be actively encouraging users to think of their online selves as being different to their offline selves, and to lose their inhibitions because Tinder and the real world are two separate locations and that the two may never collide. However, this would seem to completely contradict the idea of Tinder, in that it is a dating app that is fundamentally about people meeting and beginning a relationship. Another thing about Tinder is that it needs to have access to your Facebook account to allow you to become a user. Therefore it relies on previously available information to function. Using Tinder also means handing over large amounts of information about your identity to them, and although "Tinder says that they won’t share your private info or activity on Tinder with Facebook or other users, but they’re totally fine with selling it to third-parties and vendors they were work with. Just know they could be shipping off your sexual preference, desired age in a mate, and conversations had via Tinder’s chat feature, to advertisers and third-parties." Therefore Tinder is not as identity friendly as they would have you believe, and users' privacy is not completely contained to the owners of Tinder.

YouTube and Vlogging

YouTube is a public video sharing site created in 2005. People of all ages, races and genders use YouTube as a way of forming an online identity. Among entertaining home video clips, and amateur short films, Video Blogging (Vlogging) is one of YouTube’s most popular trends, as it provides a medium to create a publicly accessible performance of “the real me”. Hobsbawn sees the current age as defined by a “hunger for a secure identity” (Strangelove,2010). This then highlights the obvious attraction of Vlogging, as a way for any person with a video camera and an internet connection to document their identity and present it for the world to see. Vlogging is one of the rawest forms of media as it is simply people sharing their feelings and experiences with the world, and as Van Koten states while discussing McLuhan’s theories concerning hot and cold media “...when we peel away the layers of media we ultimately end up with human experience”. (Van Koten, 2009) This closeness to human experience and supposed honesty that people put across in Video Blogs (Vlogs) encourages others to use this medium and share their own feeling and experiences in order to feel like an individual within a community. Mendelson and Papacharissi discuss how Carey (1975) “emphasised a ritual view of communication which helps foster community integration through the sharing of common experiences and values” (Mendelson & Papacharissi, 2011). It is true that YouTube is seen as a community and safe place to share these feelings and experiences and the users of YouTube are regularly referred to as the “YouTube Community”. But why do people use this public video forum to share these inner most confessions rather than keeping a physical diary or having real life conversations. Sherry Turkle states in her TED Talks “Connected, but alone?” that “the feeling that ‘no one is listening to me’ makes us want to send time with machines that seem to care about us” (Turkle, 2012). YouTube provides an instant audience of listeners for any user, millions of people can access a Vlog at any one time, the community of an instant audience must surely play a key factor in why people choose to share their life experiences via Vlogs as opposed though real life social interaction. However, Turkle also states that through her research she has discovered that many feel that a feeling or experience is not valid until it is shared through the internet, usually via some form of SNS “I share therefore I am” (Turkle,2012). So, by sharing these personal/confessional videos on YouTube, not only do users receive and instant audience to listen to their feelings as they try to work out their own identity, but they also gain validations of those feelings through the process of sharing. The idea of being part of a community which also validates ones inner most feelings must surely be an appealing one for many, hence the popularity of Vlogs on YouTube. However, the identities presented on YouTube are not necessarily exact representations of how those users behave in their real world lives. Michael Strangelove in his book “Watching YouTube: extraordinary videos by ordinary people” discusses how “There are hundreds of videos online title ‘the real me’ that explore the difference between videographers on-screen persona and their ‘real’ self.” He goes on to give an example of a video made by college student Kevin Wu with the above title, Kevin explains how he is a different person from his videos, “You don’t know me…you don’t really know someone through the internet” (Strangelove, 2010). The construction of an ideal persona on SNS is seen across all mediums; YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr etc. When discussing the formulation of college students photos galleries on Facebook Mendelson and Papacharissi state that we “consciously and unconsciously transform ourselves before the camera, portraying a version of ourselves we wish to be” (Mendelson & Papacharissi,2011). So, while people wish to feel that their feeling are validated and they as themselves are accepted as part of a community, the common case is still that they present an ideal version of themselves and push that forward to be accepted as their true identity, whether is accurately reflects their real world persona or not.

The Self Discrepancy Theory

Edward Tory Higgins (1987) introduced the concept of 'Self-Discrepancy Theory', which can be linked to the idea of the development of and the need for online identities in general. The theory suggests that one's personality is constructed through several different domains. Other than one's actual personality there is a wide range of other 'selfs' that might influence the behavior of this individual, such as the ideal or ought self. "One domain of the self (actual; ideal; ought) and one standpoint on the self (own; significant other) constitute each type of self-state representation. " Any discrepancies between the actual self-concept and the ideal-self states (what the individual hopes to become or aspires to be like) may lead to negative outcomes, such as feelings of disappointment or dissatisfaction with the self and lead to a vulnerable state in which an individual's self-esteem is significantly lowered. On the other hand discrepancies between a self-concept and ought-self states (that is representations of an individual's beliefs about his or her own or a significant other's beliefs about the individual's duties, responsibilities, or obligations) may lead to agitation-related emotions, such as fear or feelings of threat. In order to avoid these discrepancies impression management may be used to control how one sees themselves and is seen by others. After all, online identities are manageable representations of the self that can in fact be manipulated to extents, that largely influence impressions. It does not only allow the impression of outsiders to be altered, but also can function in order to clarify one's ideal self image for themselves. Therefore if online identities are managed this way, not only discrepancies may be avoided that may lead to emotional discomfort or agitation-related feelings, however it may also improve one's idea of their ideal self and may encourage them to alter their behaviors in order to change accordingly.

Belonging

Many use the opportunity and possibility of an online identity in order to gain or experience a sense of belonging. Every year more people write blogs, participate in online discussions, share information, music and photos, and upload videos. Making things and sharing them online is a process that creates networks, emotional support and significant social bonds.

In an online community one can get a sense of a shared space, experience rituals of shared practices, exchange social support, and the shared identities all contribute to a feeling of community. Many join groups as already share a social identity such as race, ethnicity or profession.

Blogging

Blogging is one way in which a sense of belonging can be and is achieved. Blogging connects people with others who share similar ideas, feelings and topical associations. Research carried out by David Brake revealed that seventy per cent of all blogs are personal blogs. Writing a blog allows you to pursue desires to communicate.

Blogs are not just webpages in the traditional sense; blogging also covers the contemporary social network statuses seen on sites such as Facebook and Twitter. David Gauntlett asked and completed a survey in his book Making is Connecting on why people use Twitter. The main reasons were so that others can learn and be entertained; in a desire to share thoughts and creative endeavours; to chronicle their existence; self-promotion; contributing to and being part of a community; and for a sense of being heard. This research highlighted the importance of warm social connections, recognition and appreciation. These are aspects that are vital in a community and for a sense of belonging. On blogs where response is desired and encouraged, such as on SNSs, the importance in commenting and discussion is focused around warm social connections, recognition and appreciation for those who invest significant amounts of time in the creation of online content. A study was also carried out about why people use Facebook. This research revealed that the combination of low effort and social rewards and connections made it worthwhile. Facebook only requires simple and momentary inputs, and in return you get to be part of an active social network. This all can lead to a sense of mutual engagement and community, and importantly a sense of belonging via online identity.

The concept of wanting to share one’s ideas has been existent for a very long time. However, it is a difficult thing to get your thoughts and opinions published for the wider world to see. Whether it is a factual informative book or a fictional piece, it is challenging to find a publisher who is willing to accept your work amongst the thousands, if not millions of other submissions. However, the evolution of online blogging has changed this and now people are free to promote and publicise their own writing online and on a very big scale. The online space is so vast, endless and accessible that blogging has opened up the chance for endless publications, which do not require the grueling process of being accepted and selected.

Citizen Journalism

This is essentially a form of activity which has stemmed from blogging. The ability to participate in media, particularly news, brings a great sense of importance and belonging. There used to be a 'structured break' between news production and consumption and these lines are now becoming blurred. It has created a new variation of web user, the prosumer. If an individual feels they are contributing, it will undoubtedly confirm that their online presence is of value. The monumental shift from audience consumption to participation or even production means that there is a sense of community within the title of 'citizen journalist'.

Technology has contributed to the rising popularity of gathering and producing news online. Wireless internet and smartphones have allowed individuals in the 'right place at the right time' to become an active participant in journalism. By extension, social media has become a platform for news to travel. The content is read, shared, discussed and debated which would suggest users of networking sites can deliver their news on their own terms. As citizen journalism is not bound by conventional journalistic codes, therein lies opportunity for opinion and discussion. Comments are not only optional, they are encouraged by online news organisations to convey that public opinion is of any importance to issue at hand.

Joy Rosen describes the phenomenon as "the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another". This user generated content has influenced some historical political movements, such as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and many others. This is a form of power that people can seize and use as they see fit, to benefit what is important to the individual and society.

Performance and Ownership on Facebook

Our online identity as well as our online presence is a constant performance and battle for ownership. If one studies Facebook, then it is apparent that the content of a person’s profile is heavily manipulated and edited in order to create a certain persona.

Every Facebook page may seem like a boring repeated formula that has no individuality in comparison to the millions of others. However, Facebook does allow people to note what: music, films, t/v programmes, shops, books and concepts they like. A person can also share personal information about their lives, photographs and links to show that they are unique and different from everybody else.

But, because of technological manipulation, social networks allow people to not show their true, holistic, authentic self-warts and all. Facebook insists that people see a warped and superficial image of identities after they have been carefully manufactured and approved. This behaviour is a result of needing to feel that one’s performance is in line with social conventions and rules of character groups. As a result one’s Facebook page is not entirely owned by them as their submissions are psychologically stimulated by the wider community and what one posts is dictated by the socially accepted principles of one’s given social circle.

In a book by Richard Jenkins about social identities he mentions that social sites on the internet have created a new art of performance relationships and stages for social ideologies. He argues that people feel conditioned by those who view their online presence and participation and their interactions are based on a need to conform due to the pressures of being witnessed by a large and critical audience.

Welcome and Unwelcome Responses to Facebook Posts

Facebook is a forum where people can voice their individuality by posting on their own page and editing their profiles. Because each page belongs to a single person then in a sense the content belongs to them and they have a right to share it regardless of other people’s reactions. However, people on Facebook often get responses to their posts which challenge and cause controversy. This is done by Facebook friends being able to, “like,” a post, commenting on it or uploading entirely new material. Some feel that negative responses are unwelcome because the page is representative of them alone, rendering it a safe, respected and personal space for their online identity. On the other hand, others feel that if you post something on Facebook then you are allowing your Facebook friends to see and subsequently you are inviting their contributions and permitting debate.

Fan Culture

Online fan communities have grown rapidly with the development of digital technology and social media websites. Originating from the ‘real life’ social groups that congregated together to share in their common interest, fan groups have only developed a stronger presence online that ever before.

Cultural analyst Myc Wiatrowski, studied online fan communities and observed that; “Fandoms, in the information age, have become a well-connected global village capable of coordinated and immediate worldwide contact”. Highlighting how new technology and media has enabled these ‘fandoms’ to develop and also created a stronger sense of belonging.

That sense of belonging is a large factor in fan participation. Without the implications of face to face interactions users are able to freely interact and bond with other like-minded people and can develop an online identity that they choose. There are many different types of online fan communities; however the fastest growing have surrounded popular texts, films and celebrities. Popular young adult novels such at Twilight are excellent examples of online ‘fandom’, in which the texts are re-interpreted and re-written by fans. The monetisation incentives offered by video hosting sites like YouTube, in addition to ad revenue on fan sites, also appear to be actively encouraging the creation of new fan-made product, which in turn acts as free advertising for the media that are the focus of them. The protection of having an online identity and belonging to a large online group allows the fans to share dramatic adaptations they would not normally share in everyday life. Similarly celebrity fans such as ‘The Directioners’ fans of boy band One Direction use their online presence as a ‘protected’ way of contacting the band, with total disinhibition.

The Need for Online Evidence

With online culture there is a need to feel like one’s online existence sends a strong message of the self. Theorist Ainslie McDermott who specialises in the reasoning behind online behaviour suggests that in various arenas people choose to post certain material because they feel it will present a positive or specific image of their lives.

For example, when blogging, some people find it important to show that they are culturally aware whether that is through sharing their awareness of: the news, politics, celebrity culture, science, technology or indeed any subject. McDermott argues that the content of a blog is not just about sharing information, or doing an activity because one enjoys it, but more because there is a need to evidence a certain type of character. Likewise, with Facebook, McDermott notes that profile pictures and cover photos are chosen to make a statement about what type of person you are. Uploaded photos usually reveal a great deal. Pictures from a night out might suggest that you are fun and outgoing. Pictures of couples suggest that you are lovable and able to sustain a positive relationship. Pictures of somebody on holiday suggest that you are cultured and even possibly rich enough to spend time away. Also the chosen location often says a lot about the person and what they choose to take photos of. Pictures of somebody doing charity work suggests that they are giving and almost implies that they have no time for superficial fun but concentrate on, “what really matters in life,” as McDermott says.

Lastly, who a person follows on Twitter reflects the type of role model they admire or are interested in. People often feel a need to show a connection to the most socially conventional celebrities rather than those who suggest a more independent character that allows a person to branch out of a social clique. McDermott’s study deems that behind all the reasoning for online activity, the manner in which people participate and the content in which they link themselves with is an attempt to evidence a strong social belonging.

Online Gaming

The gaming world allows the creation of personas through the development of virtual identities. In a multitude of games, online avatars can be customised, from their looks, clothing to their personalities. Players can therefore surpass offline identities, such as gender race and political beliefs; they become someone else, in a virtual world where their real character is hidden. Cultural habits can be expressed online, such as class, as well as a sense of cultural community and belonging. Online gaming has been used by some youth as a means for relieving stress, and can be viewed as a positive outlet for pent-up frustration. Conversely, studies have shown that those with pre-existing conditions play more frequently than others, gaming itself does little to solve the existent problems which have led to the escapism, and these more frequent gamers may be inclined to devote their time to gaming rather than tackle any problems head-on. This can lead to further stress, even more attempts to evade stressful situations, and lead to a vicious circle.

Although the use on online identities is harmless to many users, there is the risk of addiction to online identities in the virtual, gaming world. The online identity of those in the gaming world is uniquely experimental , with people playing with their personas and personality to become someone they aspire to be, or lead the life they've always dreamed of within the realms of websites and gaming communities.

Online gaming can therefore become an addiction as a direct result of people maintaining the power to control the plot and story of their virtual life for themselves . People step inside a world where they can create situations that wouldn’t happen in the nature of real life. Therefore, one may feel a sense of disinhibition within their virtual life’s, contradicting their real life social being. One may adopt a life secondary to their reality, enabling them to roleplay as a virtual and highly idealised version of themselves. . This can be taken a step further, with users encompassing a dissociative imagination.

The rise of Player vs Player (PvP) gaming has led to many gamers, especially within the game itself, having their identity of playing the game above many offline identities, such as race, gender, political or economic viewpoints becoming irrelevant. This use of anonymity within PvP gaming can reduce or challenge the pre-existing concepts of certain offline identities.

Fashion Industry

Similarly, the concept of constant technology has further branched out into other major industries across the world influencing fashion as well as culture and social aspects of everyday living. Zeki (2014) describes - in an interview with designer Tuba Ergin - of how the fashion world and technological world are becoming forever more 'harmonised' with each other, as well as how each compliment one another. Designer Ergin, showcased his designs at the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in Istanbul in 2014, which all included the new addition of circuit cards into each of his fashion garments including dresses and tops, and furthermore onto shoes and bags. Ergin (2014) mentions how each and every one of us now, as members of society, are fully under the influence of the sheer absorption of technology and this then further allows us to create an online identity. He even goes as far to state that "I believe there is almost no difference between drug abuse and technology addiction" [93] Such a statement allows us to see how we have fully established an online identity with our devices and the extent to which can be compared to such a heavily addictive substance such as drugs due to our online presence. In his interview, Ergin then goes on to discuss the developments of our devices that we are forever always using in our everyday lives such as technological glasses as well as watches. Such advances will allow us to grow our identities online even further. However, he then states that technology in the future will lead into clothes that can react to body temperature and the human pulse, such advancements will allow fitness merchandise to rocket, presumably.

Marketing Industry

Technological identity has had a massive influence over the business-orientated world. With people constantly being visible and in-corporated in their online world allows large businesses to make thousands of pounds from these users. The more people make themselves aware of being on their phones and technology devices, the more money companies make. Such large organisations such as Facebook allow their adverts to become more expensive and make great amounts of money on their customers simply through their use online being forever dominant in their world. Cookies and other internet bugs allow marketers to track every move we make online and more importantly, how long we are on a certain webpage for and where our mouse is hovering. Most importantly, our traits and how our personalities can be translated onto our online web activity. Such details allow them to store great information on the everyday user and can show the extent to how intense the everyday person is identified and present online. Therefore, it is clear that marketers are cashing in on ourselves having a constant online visibility.

Blended Identities

Although the concept of blended identity has its roots in the field of social psychology, it has been appropriated by media theorists in recent years to describe a specific two-part process of identity creation which has been observed online everywhere from fan forums to dating websites . Firstly, a user will create an online persona which blends various elements of their offline identity together with aspects of the online group or environment they have chosen to join. Secondly, when the user meets a person they originally met online in an offline setting; aspects of their online persona will filter back into their offline identity.

For many people, there are both positive and negative implications of blending their online and offline identities. On the positive front, blended identities can provide certain people with opportunities to express themselves in ways which they could not do in the offline world. For example, Natilene Bowker and Keith Tuffin believe that the amount of control that an individual can exert over their online identity can allow people with disabilities to cultivate a sense of identity, free from the constraints of the social stigmas that they face in the offline world. So, by taking certain aspects of their offline identities and blending them with an online world which “removes the ocularcentrism governing the way people interpret and evaluate others”, they can be judged in terms of their character rather than in terms of their particular disability.

However, on the negative front, the temptation for people to create idealised personas online means that the blending of identities can cause delusional behaviour to spill back over into their offline identities. As a person becomes more absorbed in their online identity and accustomed to the control that they have over it in terms of impression management, it can become more preferable for them to believe that it more accurately reflects who they are than their offline identity does. This can potentially cause tension and distress when they are forced to interact with people – friends and family members, for example - in an offline environment who are unaware of their online identities.

Blended Identities In Fan Communities

Andrea J. Baker explores these ideas in relation to online fan culture her journal article: Mick or Keith: blended identity of online rock fans. Over a two year period, Baker studied members of various online fan forums for The Rolling Stones in both online and offline situations, in order to see how their online identities were constructed and how this influenced their offline identities. She found that the presentation of an online persona has three aspects: the username, the avatar and the manner in which the individual identifies with the object of their fandom.

Study Findings

Usernames typically reflected a users need to closely identify with the object of their fandom. Many users chose to name themselves after a song, a lyric or a nickname of one of the band members. Aside from this, users seemed to appreciate creativity in regards to username selection. While avatars can perform the same general purpose as a username, their primary function tended to be as pictorial indicators of status within the forum, as those who posted regularly often became identified by their avatar rather than the content of their usernames. Finally, all users were identified according to which member of the band they aligned themselves with. This was perhaps the most important factor, as it heavily influenced both username and avatar selection, as well as providing a limited insight into users’ character preferences. For example, users who identified with Mick Jagger tended to view him as being responsible and concerned. On the other hand, fans of Keith Richards saw Mick Jagger as being cold and controlling.

When Baker met the users she had been studying in an offline environment, she found that their online identities had profoundly influenced their offline identities; particularly in regards to behaviour. It was noted that both online and offline, men generally try to identify with the band members by showing a deep interest in the music. For example, many male fans obsessively collected obscure recordings from live shows or old demo tapes and spend a large amount of time discussing the guitar playing of Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood online. Conversely, women were generally more focused on trying to bond with the band members. Baker gives one example of a female fan who insisted that she was the wife of guitarist, Ronnie Wood, both online and offline.

Secondly, those with particularly memorable usernames were often referred to by their online username in offline environments. Additionally, the online forum of which a fan was a member appeared to influence the way they dressed. Members of the Shattered forum dressed in bright green t-shirts that they made themselves, whereas fans from other groups tried to avoid wearing any clothes that would obviously mark them as fans of the group. Interestingly, those who had actually met the band before tended to fall into the latter group rather than the former. However, the most divisive issue was the extent to which users chose to embrace their role as fans in an offline environment. While some users were happy to display overtly ‘fan-like’ behaviour in public, others were embarrassed to admit to people – especially family – that they were members of an online fan forum.

Concerns

Although Baker eventually concluded that more research into the effects of online identities on offline behaviour was needed, her study raises some interesting and concerning points about blended identities. It seems to be the case that the online aspects of a blended identity come to overshadow the offline ones. In the context of Baker’s study, this can be seen by the fact that forum users almost always came to be recognised by their usernames and avatars rather than by any particular aspect of their offline identities. Also, the forum community seemed more likely to judge a user’s character based upon the pre-existing stereotypes surrounding their favourite member of The Rolling Stones than by actually getting to know them. Consequently, many users - especially those who did not post frequently - could find themselves being characterised by mass generalisations and the superficial features of their online identities.

The impact of becoming immersed in this type environment was apparent in the behaviour that filtered back into users’ offline identities. Many seemed to feel that it was necessary for them to act out their online identities in the offline world in order to feel like they were still part of the fan community. People such as the woman who believed she was Ronnie Woods’ wife seemed to have had their offline identities subsumed by the sometimes bizarre online personas they had made for themselves. Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, some people felt the need to hide any trace of their online identities and emphasize their offline identities for fear of being ridiculed by those outside the fan community. Therefore, it seems that although blending identities is a seemingly necessary part of being in an online community, people run the risk of losing their sense of self as they struggle to find the right balance between online and offline identities.

Blended Identities in Online Dating

Online dating is a good example of blending identity as often it involves both online and offline interaction. The idea is that the online and offline identities are to be similarly constructed, if not appear the same. One user is effectively judging another based on their profile page (which usually includes at least one photograph of themselves plus listed personality traits) contained on the dating website they are both using. Should one person find that they admire another's page, they may wish to contact them via a messaging service within the website or through an e-mail address or phone number visible on their profile page.

The intention of online dating is to seek out a potential partner, so should two users think that each other has potential they may wish to meet in a different social context i.e. offline (in the 'real world'). What the user generally hopes for is that the offline identity of their 'date' matches that of the online; for example, not to turn out to be older than they had represented themselves online, or of a different gender. This differs from fan communities as it is often preferred on dating websites that users display their real name and use a photograph of themselves as their profile picture so as not to mislead potential 'dates'.

Multiple Identities

The concept of multiple identities started with the first internet generation itself, looking back as far as the Cold War. In early internet culture there was a great desire to create a new self, whether it was simply create a unique username or creating a whole new persona. Forums and bulletin boards were popular outlets for people choosing to adopt a new persona in the early years of cyber culture. Despite the adoption of nicknames and personas, there was still a strong personal connection and arguably a greater responsibility tied to the posts made. Services such as Usenet often had more in common with our modern SNSs, in the sense that many users went by their full name in addition to listing rather personal details such as their alma mater or even their home address (this being well before the advent of satnav and Google Maps, of course).

People began to see computers as an escape from “official reality” says Proffesor of Media Geert Lovink in his critique of social media. He observes people realised they could “design futures, enhance bodies and extend minds.” In the late 80s and early 90s, when what we know today as the internet was still in a relatively embryonic state, many theorists took this idea of bodily enhancement and extension of the mind rather literally; with some raising the possibility of Virtual Reality forming a useful tool in future online communications. Despite perhaps not taking place in the way they had anticipated, their central idea was prescient, namely that the internet would form a means with which to collectively share, compile, edit, expand, and distribute information.

In contrast to popular opinion that social media has only further enforced the notion of multiple identities Lovink suggest Facebook emphasizes a commitment to the “real self”. He observes that this may be due to the feeling of being among friends on Facebook, it seems that Lovink believes the real has prevailed over the fake but also acknowledges this may have restricted our freedom online.

Surrounding this subject founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, controversially said: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity”. This entirely contradicts the influential beliefs of sociologist Erving Goffman who introduced the idea Dramaturgy, which argues that the elements of human interactions are dependent upon time, place, and audience. This concept is still widely used in sociology and media studies today.

Online Identities and Personality Disorders

In 2002 Dr Adam Joinson put forward the theory that online participation allows people to pursue various forms of characterisation in order to gratify a range of audiences without causing conflict. For example, a person might have a Facebook page that is suitable for their family and shows them behaving in a responsible and mature way. By on the other hand they may have another closed and private page which reveals a more wild personality which can be accessed by friends. This is done so that the person can explore their multiple personas with freedom, far from the fear of complaint and question.

Dr Joinson also speaks (on page 147) about a blogger called Rae-Rae Darron who has seven different blog sites. The person uses these different blogs to write about: celebrity culture, the concept of popular actors and singers versus talented actors and singers, fashion trends, local politics, the environment, natural science and evolution theories versus religion. Rae-Rae Darron did an interview with the magazine, “Wired,” in 2001 and explained that she had tried to have a blog page which explored all her areas of interest but was told that viewers were bored and unhappy about seeing such a mix and would rather have a page that was dedicated to one subject. Rae-Rae Darron then explained that she felt she could no longer express her holistic and broad personality, but had to box her interests in order to appeal to viewers with different interests and ideals.

In 2010 the incident of Rae-Rae Darron was revisited by psychologist James. F Masterson in a follow on book from his 1990 edition on personality disorders. Masterson argues that people have become so intent on making separate zones of performance on the internet that there is a danger of losing the reality of self. If a person spends so much energy into wearing different social masks, then they begin to forget which one is sincere and which one is most dominant or important. By turning away from the right to hold a natural and genuine personality which is constant in its strengths, weaknesses and individuality, then realism no longer exists and honest identities are no longer known resulting in confused personality disorders transferring from the internet into real life.

Cultural Theories applied to Online Identity

Technological Determinism

Although much of Marshall McLuhan's pioneering research into the subject of media theory was conducted during the early 1960's - a media landscape vastly different from today's - his ideas surrounding Technological Determinism have shaped how we understand media and are still drawn upon by contemporary theorists, such as Hamid van Koten, who applies McLuhan's theoretical frameworks to the subject of Online Identity in his book 'Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice'. In ’Understanding the Media: The Extensions of a Man’ McLuhan highlights the unidentified and almost unnoticeable power of technologies to transform and manipulate how one identifies ’the self’. Applying this idea to the subject of Online Identity, one might say that the main issue raised by the idea of a person having a distinct online persona and its importance to how people interact with each other and reflect on themselves is that it isn't fully – or maybe at all – in one’s control. McLuhan raises the question of whether computers extend to the human nervous system, gaining a control over how people perceive and use media without their notice.

Cultural Determinism

At the opposite end of the cultural theory spectrum is Raymond Williams, whose ideas on ’Cultural Determinism’, outlined in his book Television, Technology and Cultural Form have been critical to the formulation of the theory that it is not the medium itself that directly influences the behaviour of individuals, but the pre-existing social and cultural phenomena that were the catalysts for the medium's production. With this in mind, the idea of Online Identities being an integral part of many people's everyday lives can be linked to a user's pre-existing desire for it to exist; perhaps to increase chances of social interactions with others or for individuals to be able to experience life in a way that would be impossible while using their offline identity.

Theorists

Hamid Van Koten

- ‘The Digital Image and the Pleasure Principle: The Consumption of Realism in the Age of Simulation’ 

Van Koten's main research questions illustrated in this paper come under:

· What are the forces at work in the production and consumption of digital representations? For example what makes digital gaming so popular?

· What are the narrative and representational issues involved, and what do these tell us about our culture and ourselves?

Specifically the paper seeks to uncover two themes: Narrative and Realism as the dominant form of digital representations in terms of production, and the Lacanian shift from the real to the imaginary as the dominant drive towards the consumption of these representations.

In his paper Von Koten argues that video games act as an outlet for forces within the collective subconscious, allowing what Jung called the animus and anima breathing space. Quite simply put, it provides an outlet for desires that we may be unable to realise or satisfy within the confines of “real life”. It could be said that the same is applicable to the internet and social media as a whole. In many cases this can be beneficial, as seen in the benevolence with which people help out or donate to causes that may be hundreds of miles away from them. On the other hand, some may use their online ability and the relative anonymity often comes with it for less-than-positive purposes, such as committing crimes or harassing other users.

Additionally, van Koten cites the work of George Gerbner.

George Gerbner

Van Koten refers to a longitudinal study of television conducted by George Gerbner over the space of almost 30 years. Through his research he found that people's perceptions of their world are affected by their television viewing habits. e.g. those who were found to watch a large amount to television each week tended to view the world as a more violent place than it really was.

Gerbner supports the theory that film and television representations of gender, ethnic minority and power relationships are important factors for the construction and maintenance of a social identity in real life, and the same could be said about our construction of online identity. Hence, to a certain extent people model their personal and online personae on what they see portrayed to them through the media. However the counter argument to this is that what is portrayed in the media is constructed from pre-existent social values, attitudes and beliefs.

Jonathan Vanasco

- 'Meta-Identities and Identity Facets'

Jonathan Vanasco delves into the idea of how within life people display different personas within separate social circles of their lives, whether it be with their friends, family or colleagues. Vanasco argues that this is then reflected through our multiple online identities that we create e.g. using separate email addresses for different content (private, work, education etc). The same can be applicable when people use different SMSs in different ways while conforming to the conventions of that particular site (Facebook - professional, Instagram - creative, Snapchat - quirky). A detailed explanation of Vanasco's work can be found here -Vanasco's Theory

Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier is important when looking at online identity. He was one of the original digital pioneers, however he is not a “leading-edge techno-enthusiast.” In his book You Are Not A Gadget he discusses his worry about the particular ways in which the Web, in particular focusing on Facebook, has developed and what this means for online creativity and self-expression.

He argues that the HTML messy homepages of the 1990s were better than the ‘improvement’ of Facebook (where the result is nice neat sets of boxes of pictures and information.) He puts individual creativity and self-expression above all else, and therefore concludes that the diverse, handcrafted personal pages were much more preferable than “formulaic, template-driven expressions of identity pushed by Facebook.” It did not matter that they were messy, had unexpected tones or lacked uniformity - it was their idiosyncratic nature that lent them a distinctly human touch, in strong contrast to the inflexible and sterile pages preferred by major modern SNSs.

Lanier argues that we should always be willing to spend a bit of time making personal representations of our identity and that we cannot allow ourselves to be reduced to a template. One of his key concerns is that digital systems reduce everything to simple bits of information so that they can be processed. He warns that when we reduce our humanity to fit the requirements of a machine we lose something of ourselves. He argues that whilst the uniform nature of Facebook profiles keep things simple and predictable, human beings are worth cherishing because of their distinctive and individual natures- not because they are simple and predictable. He further argues that Web 2.0 reduces individual creativity to general ‘mush’, causing a dilution and silence of individual voice in the name of collaboration.

Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan is a key theorist in the subject of digital media and his main ideas derive from technological determinism. He once said that “the medium is the message”, a phrase which epitomises his approach towards technologies and their influence on society. McLuhan believed that all media is an extension of the human body that cause deep and lasting changes to his environment, describing this extension as being an "amplification of an organ". This can be applied to online identity as our online selves can be seen as an extension of our current identities. Therefore, McLuhan's theory of technological determinism can be argued as being applicable to the concept of online identity. McLuhan also introduced the idea of Hot and Cold Media, with Hot media referring to that which involves a low level of participation (such as radio and cinema) and Cool media involving high participation (daily conversations, TV, phone services). However, due to continuous media convergence this becomes harder to apply to the internet and its related services.

Zizi Papacharissi

Zizi Papacharissi is an academic whose work on online identity covers areas including communication technology and communication theory. Papacharissi is currently a Professor and Head of the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on 'the social and political consequences of new media technologies'.

Her work on the book 'A Networked Self' saw an investigation into the comparititive links between Facebook photo galleries and the user's online identities. The findings show that participants both knowingly and unknowingly seek to define and refine a positive view of themselves through impression management, done through the constant updating of SNS and profile pictures. See Profile Pictures Below for more information.

JJ Wright

JJ Wright, interested in the effects that online activity can have on a person’s identity, asks whether “the field of cyberspace/online activity is complicating or simplifying identity and communications"? He of course answers “both” as online presence has both a complicating and simplifying effect on human identity. He argues that back in the day, before the global village, in a time without modern technology and without the web which holds our precious social networking sites, identity was easily defined via the physical traits that a person held. • Gender • Race • Ethnicity • Age • Weight. These traits which individuals had in common with one another collectively came together to create shared identities. Now however, people are more concentred with individual identity and with complete access to an online world, which offers an endless amount of possibilities when it comes to changing one’s self, it is much easier for people to control their individual identity’s and keep on top of them as they filter what others may see about them online.

While it is very common for individuals to often dabble a little in altering or changing ones online identity, like those of whom gender swap when using online realities such as Second Life or playing online games such World of Warcraft (WOW), on the whole it is thought that individuals tend to rather be more open about themselves, in a sense becoming public online, than they would be offline. The reason for this is that there is a lower risk of negative reaction when socialising or sharing things about yourself online. Individuals may also experience less judgment online of their real characteristics such as race, religion or age, and so in turn be more inclined to share things about their identity which have no relevance to their physical characteristics and thus improving or building on their “project of self”.

A persons “project of self” is essentially ones on going and changing identity. JJ Wright argues that we take our offline identities to online and our online ones to offline which of course all add to our "project of self". For JJ Wright, all the internet does is offers us the chance to break down the barriers which may prevent us from interaction in the real world and become the internet makes this possible it means that people can play with their identities in a way which may have no real negative impact on their offline life’s. The internet then offers a sphere for interaction without judgment of physical characteristics which may have prevented face to face communication.

Find his original article here.http://g.virbcdn.com/_f/files/46/FileItem-266593-EvolutionTrendsPresentPaper.pdf

Glossary

Catfishing: Pretending to be someone you're not online by posting false information, such as someone else's pictures, on social media sites. The term is inspired by the 2010 documentary Catfish directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman.

Cultural Determinism: A theory which instils importance in the circumstances within which technology emerges in addition to the way in which it is utilised. As championed by Raymond Williams.

Customised advertising: A form of online advertising that is shaped and displayed according to the target customer's personal information generated through social networking profiles.

Disinhibition: Lack of restraint manifested in several ways, including disregard for social conventions, impulsivity, and poor risk assessment. In this case lack of restrain due to 'protect' of being online.

Dissociative: Detached, whether from identity or surroundings. In the context of Online Identity, this is often used to refer to behaviour exhibited by an individual online which may differ (moderately or drastically) from what they do in their lives offline.

Offline Identity: A form of personal identity which has been formed in the physical world for the purpose of conducting social, informational and commercial interactions in an offline environment.

Persona: A character or a role that a person assumes through a performance.

Public displays of connection: The showing (off) of friends though Social Networking Sites.

Targeted advertisement: A form of online advertising with companies aiming to shape their product display according to website relevant content or their target group’s interests. This is often done by tracking people's surfing behaviour.

Technological Determinism: The theory that it is technology which shapes sociocultural values and structures society. A somewhat idealistic approach, it was adopted by pioneering digital media theorist Marshall McLuhan.

Transgressive: Breaking a law or moral rule

Prosumer: A combination of producer (in some instances professional) and consumer

Realism: Inclination or attachment to what is real; (hence) the attitude or practice of accepting a situation as it is and being prepared to deal with it accordingly; any view or system contrasted with idealism

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Always-on Culture

"[...]those little devices in our pockets are so psychologically-powerful, that they don’t only change what we do – they change who we are."

The basis of an 'always-on' culture is that we are constantly connected and networked, even when we are not physically using our phones or computers. We are "tethered" to the technology we consume; technology has become a part of us that we cannot escape from.

In an 'always-on' culture, we think of the implied blurring of the lines between our public and private lives. There can be an inability to escape the need to check social media platforms or the internet in general, even in situations when it could be considered rude or inappropriate. Some people have developed a need to incessantly, and compulsively, be contactable due to this culture. Snapping that connection can result in anxiety among other negative side effects consistent with an addict going through withdrawal. Other negative effects can come from our growing connection including online dis-inhibition, reduced social context cues, privacy issues, and other factors. However, we can't always turn ourselves 'off'. Everyday life is saturated with technology and media and the benefits it brings. The value of instant communication and the wealth of information are just two of many reasons that our culture's direction isn't necessarily a wrong one.

Voices from theorists including danah boyd, Sherry Turkle, Leslie Perlow, and Naomi Baron become significant when discussing 'always-on' culture. Their ideas provide a foundation for analysing technology and media's place in our culture and how our daily lives have changed living in an 'always-on' culture.

Main Concepts

'Always-On'

The term 'always-on' is used to refer to the way modern technology (mobile phones, computers, etc.) continuously keeps people connected to each other through the Internet, and therefore always accessible. Sherry Turkle, a prominent theorist who's work analyzes our relationship with technology, suggests that people have become so tethered with their 'always-on' communication devices that the self has become attached to the devices so much that life can be represented by the digital screens we keep in our pockets.

Others theorists, such as danah boyd, have a more positive perspective. They claim that the online world is always just around the corner, and that the online world does not necessarily have to be a bad thing. boyd says that most people are 'always-on' without technology being the center of the activity and that "there is no longer about on or off. It's about living in a world where being networked to people and information wherever and whenever you need it is just assumed". If people in some way are connected to the network, through a mobile phone, a computer, gaming console etc., they are considered to be 'always-on.' However, this constant connection does not mean that users must always pay attention to that connection.

While boyd makes a valid point to say that our online lives are as ‘real’ as our offline lives, more could be said about the significant difference between these two aspects of our lives, in particular how we behave online versus how we behave offline. Suler makes the point that when we communicate online, our input comes after some delay, perhaps minutes, hours or even days, and this affects what we say, in text form, and how we say it. Importantly, he asserts that when we communicate face-to-face with others, “moment-by-moment responses between people powerfully shapes the ongoing flow of self-disclosure, usually in the direction of conforming to social norms”. If this is the case and an increasing amount of our time is spent online, this could perhaps leave some people struggling with the face-to-face social skills necessary to fit in to a particular environment. Such as that of an organisation with a clear expectation of cultural behaviour, or to succeed in particular roles where face-to-face interaction with people is necessary.

'Always-On': The Different Means of Getting Connected

Being ‘always-on’, according to danah boyd, means taking into account both technical networks and social networks. When we cannot connect to the technical network we can often feel frustrated, angry, or worried that we can’t get access to a particular piece of information, or that our productivity will fall, or we can’t make a particular social connection at that precise point in time . This section looks briefly at the how the internet developed and the legacy issues from that development, the technical network today and how each part has advantages and disadvantages.

The Mobile Device

Recent advancements in general technology have affronted media in such a way that it is now more accessible to people than ever. The developments in the mobile phone as a device have been testament to this, as within the past 10 years more and more technology has been added to the mobile device itself allowing more functions to be used. The mobile phone is no longer just a phone - cameras to film and photograph, games, app storage, social media, email, GPS capabilities, information storage etc, and quite importantly, mobile internet access - creating a handheld computer. The concept of being able to connect to the Internet wirelessly on such a portable level is an important and pivotal factor in regards to this 'always-on' culture.

The Smart Phone

The invention of the smartphone has been quite possibly the most important development in terms of thinking about this 'always-on' culture. It is these devices to which theorists refer to when discussing how we are connected and 'tethered' and are responsible for the ability to stay connected to various medias as mobile phones have been developed to do more than just facilitate calls.

The Tablet

Recently, tablet devices have been growing in popularity, combining the portability of the smartphone and the larger screen of a laptop.

Origins of the Internet and its Legacy

The Internet’s origin began in the 1960s with a network created by Advanced Research Projects Agency which was part of the US Defense department. It was called ARPANET and was originally designed to connect universities and laboratories . Many other networks were subsequently created in different organizations and countries, but the networks themselves could not effectively interconnect (BBC, 2012). In 1974 Vint Cerfand Robert Kahnwrote communication protocols to enable information to be easily sent from one network to another, and this was published in May 1974. The protocols they wrote were called TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and IP (Internet Protocol) and now form the protocols that run the internet . Despite the clear benefits at the time of allowing the internet to flourish, TCP/IP might now be categorized as a ‘Lock-in’ as described by Jaron Lanier , and we are now somewhat constrained by a major tool we use to understand the world.

Future Direction

The advance towards true 'always-on' connectivity globally, and in particular wireless connectivity, has recently been the subject of intent from two of the world's largest technology companies: Google and Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, announced that he has plans to expand the boundaries of the Internet to ensure every person in the globe has affordable, basic access to internet services. He expects to do so through the use of wireless drones, satellites, and lasers, thus creating a fully 'always-on' world . Zuckerberg provides competition for Google who intends to do the same with balloons and radio signals rather than drones and satellites .

Participants in an 'Always-On' Culture

Youth: Unplugged

Japanese teenager with her mobile phone

One of the most obvious and commonly considered victims of an 'always-on' culture are the younger generations, always on their phone or with multiple social media profiles online that need constant attention. This links back to the idea of their Online Identity. Young people today are so constantly connected that if they happen to not post a picture or a status for more than two days, there is genuine concern between their friends about their safety and well being. Ten years ago, a twelve-year-old would never have had a mobile phone, let alone using several social media platforms such as Facebook or YouTube. Now, twelve-year-olds have the latest mobile phone and can likely work it better than their parents. Unplugging a young adult evokes feelings similar to an addict going through withdrawal and depression. Unplugging oneself is not as easy as turning off a phone. Teens have so many technological outlets and "are growing up in a world that offers them instant access nearly everywhere to nearly the entirety of human knowledge." Thus is it understandable, and frankly unavoidable, that young people are a major part of the growing 'always-on' culture.

Unplugged: The Study

A 2010 study had 200 University of Maryland (USA) students go without all forms of media, including non-technological media, for 24 hours. After 24 hours, students logged onto class blogs and reported their successes, or, in many cases, failures. The results of the study were definitive: mobile technology not only changed students' relationships with the news and access to information but also had a profound impact on their relationships with friends and family. The study concludes that constant connection to media has caused students to make different social and moral decisions with their 24 hours than if they had spent the day surrounded by their average collection of media outlets (withoutmedia, 2010).

Severing the students' tether to technology created feelings similar to those of an addict going through depression and separation anxiety. Some students claimed that they had feelings similar to "phantom limb pain" experienced often by disabled war veterans. Students found themselves twitching towards their iPods or feeling their back pockets for their phone before realizing they were doing it. After physically removing themselves from technology and media, they found that they couldn't mentally separate from it. Media dependency had become a habit. A student participant from the study said the following:

“A few hours later, I brushed my teeth, came back to my room, opened my laptop, and got on Facebook. I was on the computer for a good ten minutes before I realized what I was doing.

“With full knowledge that my phone was off and tucked away, I reached into my pocket at least 30 times to pull out a vibrating phone that wasn’t there.”

A question remains - do those in an 'always-on' culture live a richer life or those who remain disconnected? A few voices from the study say that "I believe that those who are not tied to this system are missing something... they are missing information.” (withoutmedia, 2010). Information itself is a commodity that people collect, trade, and put value in. Those who have a constant connection to media possess more information than others and therefore become "richer". Without certain information or internet access the world becomes much smaller. It could take several weeks to learn about the 8.2 magnitude earthquake that struck Chile April 2nd, 2014. Then again, how would that information even get to the end user? Internet is out, as is television and newspapers. Face-to-face would remain the most reliable transfer of information but the earthquake news would be dated and limited to those who physically heard it from the source. One student commented that, “Those who aren't connected through media probably have no idea about certain things going on in the world,” (withoutmedia, 2010).

"I find it difficult to fathom someone not being connected through media, because I know no other way..."

—Student Participant

Part of 'The Network'

boyd talks of 'the network'; the particular platform (out of thousands available) online users utilize to connect with people who have similar interests and aspirations, in order to achieve a common goal/objective. Instead of 'tethering' being an addiction, it is instead a practical evolutionary step building upon humanity's natural social requirements and curiosity. Most of our networks are personalized, and we only interact with those we wish to interact with (the exceptions being trolls and hackers). This means that people wish to be 'always-on' in order to continuously develop and progress - as interaction with like-minded individuals can further our own ends and development:

"Many who blog and tweet are not writing for the world at large; they are writing for the small group who might find it relevant and meaningful. And, realistically, the world at large is not reading the details of their lives. Instead, they are taking advantage of the affordances of these technologies to connect with others in a way that they feel is appropriate".

Jaron Lanier calls the 'network' the 'tribe':

"The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. [...] The members of the tribe are my lifelong friends, my mentors, my students, my colleagues and my fellow travelers.".

Lanier talks here about the different groups of people that participate in this 'always-on' culture. A common thought is that the majority of this network are teenagers:

"So immersed were these young people in their social networks that the idea of being unavailable, even for an instant, was unimaginable."

This idea of teens being totally involved in the network is a popular one, however, as Lanier stated above, they are not the only people. More and more workplaces expect their employees to be 'always-on', to be part of the network with their other colleagues in order to work to their full potential. In order for them to achieve this, they have to be networked to each other, it will get their work done in a much more timely and efficient manner.

It is with these opinions that being 'always-on' is viewed as a positive measure, as realistically humans do not have the capacity to be 'always-on' to everything the internet has to offer. Thus we restrict what we are 'always-on' to - to things that solely benefit us. Despite this perceived restriction on the 'network', Fowler & Christakis note that increased involvement within a network (particularly one based around social media) yields positive benefits to the individual through situational inequality and positional inequality. Using the example of loneliness, on average people are lonely for 48 days of the year, but for every extra friend within an individual's 'network' the number of lonely days per year is judged to decrease by almost two days. This is an example of positional inequality positively effecting an individual in the form of situational inequality, demonstrating boyd's notion that being 'always-on' to the 'network' yields positive results.

However, views on the concept differ, with even initial supporters highlighting negative issues resulting from being 'always-on'. It can be argued that Fowler & Christakis' view shows that instead of willingly being 'always-on' to the 'network', individuals are coerced into participation out of fear of the adverse consequences associated with being disconnected - "loneliness [...] a cause and a consequence of becoming disconnected". Furthermore, in a study by Eastin and LaRose , it was observed that there was a spike in levels of depression among individuals who experience 'Internet Stress', such as being unable to establish a a solid connection. The impact is decidedly negative, and could raise the argument that the 'always-on' culture has caused an overall increase in anxiety and depression by its ability to give more chances for people to experience this form of 'Internet Stress'. It has also been noted that 'always-on' culture could eventually develop into a component of the 'locked in' theory, forcing humans to rely even more greatly on technology, even for simple social contact. In addition to these theories, because individual's are forced to utilize the 'network' during their free time (due to job and family commitments), it has also been noted that being 'always-on' increases anxiety levels and is a large contributor to disrupted sleeping patterns. From this it has been identified that 'always-on' culture, at this point, has been neither fully researched nor fully understood.

'Tethering'

One of the main concepts focused on within 'always-on' discussion is the idea that we are tethered to our technological devices. Academic Sherry Turkle coins the term in her discussion of the growing 'always-on' culture. She describes the concept of a 'Tethered self' as the idea of people being consistently accessible through technology and our expectations for them to always be contactable. She explores how even when not physically using our phones or social networking we are still contactable through them, therefore we are forever linked to our communication outlets. . In her piece "Always-On/Always-On-You: The Tethered Self," Turkle looks at how technology has changed the social acceptability of being disengaged with the people in your physical space and more connected with people miles away. The idea of being tethered to a device raises issues on our increasing reliance on the technology we use . We expect our technology to always work and for others to be immediately responsive, however if the technology breaks or people do not responded we panic. Throughout the working world, staff are expected to be constantly accessible, to the extent that if they are not "on" there is potential for them losing their job. Academic danah boyd comments that "It's no longer about on or off, really. It's about living in a world where being networked to people and information wherever and whenever you need is just assumed" .

According to Turkle, the idea of the 'Tethered Self' brings up the issue of boundaries; "a parent, partner, or child can be lost for a few seconds or a few minutes to an alternative reality" . People are having to draw clear lines as to when they are present in the physical space around them and when they are 'on' or connected to other people and spaces. Instead of being a natural act, turning of has to be a conscious decision made by the user.

Acknowledging our tethered state raises the question of to whom or to what we are connected With the ever-growing state of convergence in technological advancements we are starting to see a change in the way we interact with humans. We are tethered to a completely different community in the 21st century. We are not restricted to being tied to only family and friends via local telephone, the Internet has enabled a broader array of contacting. With the growth of technology the 'always-on' culture has grown, we are always connected to the Internet, we can phone people all around the world; we are always tethered.

Tethering is not simply about one's own choice to be connected through the 'main' social media (text, email, Facebook, Twitter). It has been suggested by researcher Slavoj Žižek in his work "Big Brother, or The triumph of the Gaze Over the Eye" that in our modern society, anxiety is more likely to arise through not being accessible or existing in this online sense. This has resulted in it becoming something of an oddity for someone to be outside of these online platforms, and socially surreal.

As Žižek points out, the culture of 'always-on' has made some people act in bizarrely voyeuristic ways - almost as if they were broadcasting their entire lives as a reality show. He compares aspects of the use of social media to the presentation of the film The Truman Show and the reality television series Big Brother, in terms of the manner in which people are almost utilizing themselves as actors, casting forth an image of themselves to formulate an impression of themselves for others to digest . This includes occasionally detailing processes of life that would be usually deemed unworthy of note, simply because it seems to be expected of oneself to do so.

'Always-on' culture and tethering can be seen as causing crucial problems for businesses. In correlation with people having expectations of their own technology always working we have the same expectation for the technologies of companies. This causes companies who suffer from unexpected technological failures to lose money and reputation as a result. For example in February last year a crash of the Bank of America's online banking system caused disruptions for numerous customers wanting to check their finances at the start of the month. The customers were seen to later vent their frustrations to social media sites. . Hence the company's reputation was hurt due to unavoidable technological failures due to their customers reliance on being 'always-on'. On the other hand if businesses were to reject the use of social media they would inevitably lose out in publicity to other more vocal companies, or be seen as outdated for not utilizing new technology.

Besides tethering affecting businesses, it is also contributing to an ever-growing issue of internet addiction disorder, giving ease of use to to people to connect to the Internet, anywhere and anytime. "IAD was originally proposed as a disorder in a satirical hoax by Ivan Goldberg, M.D., in 1995, though some later researchers have taken his essay seriously." This is the results of the 'always-on' culture, addiction, a severe mental disorder. As Sherry Turkle mentions in 'Connected but alone?' ‘[...]those little devices in our pockets are so psychologically-powerful, that they don’t only change what we do – they change who we are.’ Evidently showing you the power of technological convergence, tethering and the internet's effect on the 21st century.

Tethered to the Workplace

Just as the younger generations have an inescapable tie to technology, adults in the workplace are finding it just as hard to tear themselves away from their work once 5'o'clock rolls around. Meeting memos, online calendar appointment books, stock market app live updates, and the constant flurry of work emails make it impossible for workers to leave work at the office. Everyone is expected to be 'always-on' as a next-day meeting could be announced via email that was sent out during dinnertime. Expectations have changed. Workers are often required to always be connected to media to learn the latest news or even just to stay updated with company happening. A recent study done by the American Psychological Association (APA) discovered that more than half of employed adults said they check work messages at least once a day over the weekend and outside week work hours. More than 4 in 10 workers reported doing the same while on vacation. In the same study, adults reported that being 'always-on' increased their workload by a third as more work could be done faster and from anywhere. Stepping out of the office doesn't include the mobile phone in the jacket pocket or the work laptop in the briefcase in hand.

The APA suggests a few tips for unplugging for the day from the office, but it's the case of easier said than done. A few tips include managing expectations, setting boundaries, limiting multitasking, and turning work media off after work hours. For many companies out there, this isn't possible. Workers are hired with the knowledge that a 40-hour, 8-to-5 work week is a dream. Employees may not be strictly required to be "on call" 24/7 but the expectation might be set by employers.

Small business owners also struggle with the demands to remain 'always-on'. In this age, many store owners need an online presence to attract business, even Facebook profiles to send out updates or even to post store hours. A recent LinkedIn study found that 81% of sampling of small businesses use social media to drive growth. YellowPages have moved online and businesses follow. Often, resources and time are thin when it comes to maintaining, or even creating, an online presence. Websites are difficult to set up and look appealing so many people opt to make social media profiles as a marketing tool in addition to an online presence itself, (Forbes, 2013). An online presence can connect business with a large number of potential consumers with very little effort.

'Online Dis-inhibition'

Another main concept within 'always-on' is online dis-inhibition. The process of online dis-inhibition is described as the phenomenon of online users posting comments or discussions which they would be unlikely to say in real life. Users are seen to lose sense of some of their real world inhibitions that would dictate what to say in their offline conversations. John Suler, a Psychology Professor based at Rider University specialises in online dis-inhibition. He explains that they can be split between 'Benign dis-inhibition' and 'Toxic dis-inhibition' .

Benign Dis-inhibition

Often, benign dis-inhibition can be seen as an extension of online dis-inhibition where the online user can express emotions of sincerity and affection. Benign dis-inhibition was described by Suler in its simplest terms as an attempt to better understand and develop oneself. Behaviours can include sharing secrets and revealing more of themselves online than they would confide in a friend. Often online blog sites and chatrooms, such as Tumblr, keep users relatively anonymous and, as such, users feel more open to sharing pieces of themselves or acting kindly towards others. However, the same anonymity that allows users the privacy to share such thoughts also can lead to more destructive behaviors and actions.

Toxic Dis-inhibition

Similar to benign dis-inhibition, toxic dis-inhibition can be viewed as an extension to the idea of online dis-inhibitions. However, in contrast to benign dis-inhibition, toxic dis-inhibition is the act of users spreading negative views and expressions online including social platforms and blogs. Such acts have recently been taken very seriously and as a result, many online laws and legislations have had to be changed. Toxic dis-inhibition can be linked to social media, particularly Tumblr, Twitter and ask.fm. These sites have been in the media a lot recently as stories relating to toxic dis-inhibition have brought the serious consequences of the issue - such as cyber-bullying - into public consciousness. Cyberbullying has become a recent trend in middle and high schools with the explosion of the internet and an addiction to technology. Children and teens don't have as much supervision on the internet and feel more anonymous. The only requirement for many social media sites is an email address which can be faked easily. Cyberbulling has been shown to have disastrous effects, making kids become depressed and withdraw, and in some extreme circumstances, driven students to suicide. Similar to benign dis-inhibition, Suler has simplified the idea to its base meaning of "a blind catharsis, a fruitless repetition compulsion or acting out of pathological needs without any beneficial psychology change. "

Popular Examples of Online Dis-inhibition

One oft-acknowledged example of dis-inhibition affecting a large online populace is with the community surrounding Chatroulette. Chatroulette is a webcam-based chat service that connects the user randomly to another user, often from a pool of several million potential users who are online at any one time, anywhere in the world. The website receives little to no moderation, so if one connects to others on Chatroulette, there is no possible way to identify who they are about to connect with. Furthermore, the website utilises anonymous connections for all of its users, and as such, extreme or otherwise hurtful things are displayed on Chatroulette with some degree of frequency. This would point to the dis-inhibition of Chatroulette being easily categorised as toxic. Since the user is anonymous and randomly connected to another person anywhere in the world, often times people using the service will act in bizarre or lewd ways (including expressing themselves violently with with a great degree of explicitly sexual content).

A well known example of toxic dis-inhibition was the volatile reception Rebecca Black's 2011 song "Friday". After her music video went viral, Black started to receive death threats from members of the public. Black had to be taken out of school to be taught at home by her mother due to the extent of her bullying. Of course, threatening the life of an innocent 13 year old girl is unacceptable and the California Police Department had to make investigations. However they never discovered who was behind it, thus re-iterating the idea that people believe that they can say whatever they want online and they will not get caught.

Another example of online dis-inhibition was the "Twitter joke trial" of Paul Chambers in 2010. After discovering that his local airport was closed a week before he had to fly, he posted this tweet: "Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your s*** together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!" He was arrested and fined for threatening the airport and consequently lost his job. He was granted an appeal in 2012

'Reduced Social Context Cues'

Sproull and Kesler (1986) and reduced social context cues. Sproull and Kesler argue that email and social networking, two main means of communication in 'always-on' culture, are of a low fidelity CMC. A low fidelity CMC meaning a low number of social context cues. With email, texts or social networks we are limited to text based communication where we lose out on people's expressions and immediate responses to information. They argue this mode of communication will lead to people becoming more self absorbed in communications since they don't have the other person physically present. Particularly with 'always-on' culture, people online can be seen to get annoyed at slow responses to communication despite the recipient potentially being too busy to respond, since there is no way to know why they recipient isn't responding. Communication such as jokes or sarcasm will also be comparatively more difficult to read leading to potentially misread situations. However with the increasing use of communication in the form of video chatting we are seeing higher fidelity means of communication, therefore this issue can be seen as becoming less of a concern. That being said taking reduced social cues on a larger scale not seeing people's reactions can lead users to post rude or hurtful posts to celebrities or on YouTube comments, because they see no obvious repercussion of doing so. This phenomenon is unlikely to change due to higher fidelity video chatting as this tends to only occur between people who already know each other. As opposed to between audiences and you tubers, celebrities etc.

Determinism

Technological Determinism

Technological determinism, also known as hard determinism, is the idea that technology has important effects on our lives. The term was first coined by the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen, who theorised that technology was the driving force behind social change and influences how cultures develop and grow in response to technology and its constant development. This theory argues that technology drives history and becomes determinant at a certain stage in its own history. It refers to how technology is responsible for the formation of new social and cultural conventions, establishing how we live our lives as we adapt and change around these technologies. For example, the development of mobile technology has increased many peoples accessibility to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, because of this increased accessibility through these advancements, online interaction between people has increased considerably and new conventions regarding society and social media have been formed. It has been argued by Dovey and Giddlings (2008) that the idea of technological determinism figures prominently in the popular imagination and political rhetoric.

Cultural Determinism

Cultural determinism, also known as soft determinism, is the idea that technology itself does not have an important effect in peoples lives, but rather people make technology important. This means that human agents intend to make technology an important part of their life. In addition to these ideas, being raised in a technology-saturate environment will have a significant fact on the current generations and amplified effects for generations to come as technology develops. By 1990, a large number of adults had mobile phones. In 2005, most teenagers had the same technology, but with more features in a smaller package. In 2014, many children have listed the latest smartphone on their Christmas lists. Technology and media play a role in a developing mind's emotional maturity, interpersonal communication skills, and other behaviors that will change as technology plays an even bigger role in our lives than it does now.

Low Fidelity/High Fidelity

Examples of "Low fidelity" communications are ones which are solely text-based or voice-based. Low fidelity is characterised by the lack of interpersonal and social context cues which determine how an individual feels or expresses their opinion. For example, text-based communications can lose the intended meaning depending on how the receiver interprets it. Different emphasis on certain words can change the importance significantly. Voice-based communications are of a slightly higher fidelity, but they lack facial expressions which are a clear indicator of one's position on a matter.

Video call between Sweden and Singapore

Communicating with strangers without face-to-face cues also may lead to the reader subconsciously creating a voice and/or visual image for the other person conducted from their own imagination. This, in turn, will create a different version of the person which the user is communicating with based on his/hers individual desires and needs. Thus, the "reality" of these types of conversations may be distorted and develop into a fantasy face-to-face conversation, imagined by the reader, where the stranger fits into a specific role which the reader requires.

Video based communications give you both voice and facial recognition aspects but they provide a different atmosphere than from when you are in the same room as another human being. For example, content and micro facial expressions can be lost through a drop in signal or a low quality webcam. Eye contact can provide a lot of information and be a strong non-verbal cue in a conversation, and it can never be achieved with the use of webcams.

Locked In

Locked in is the idea that some software and ideas are used so much that they become industry standard, and are accepted by most people to the extent that they are nearly impossible to change. Lanier often uses the example of MIDI, a system which was created in the early 1980's. This system concerns musical notes and it transfers them from electronic instruments to computers. Lanier argues that this system is not the best and has limitations; however, as many new and different programmes have been created and adapted to be able to use it, it means that MIDI is still currently used. Another example is the QWERTY keyboard. This layout of keyboard became popular and frequently used in type writers. As most people know how to type using this sort of keyboard and are familiar with this layout, using another one would most likely not be successful with people, meaning that the QWERTY keyboard remains used.

Key Theorists

danah boyd

danah boyd

"It's no longer about on or off really. It's about living in a world where being networked to people and information wherever and whenever you need it is just assumed. I may not be always-on the Internet as we think of it colloquially, but I am always connected to the network. And that's what it means to be always-on." -danah boyd

danah boyd is an academic researcher, focusing primarily on social media and how society interacts with it. Her work in The Social Media Reader highlights the problems that arise when defining the 'always-on' lifestyle, especially looking at when being online begins and ends. In this boyd argues that different social contexts create different relationships with being 'always-on', meaning that how society uses technology is not defined by space, but by the contexts we create. Continuing with this idea, boyd reasons that 'always-on-ers' are characterised by their values and lifestyle rather than generation. Therefore raising questions of who is involved in this 'always-on' lifestyle according to their professional life and social activities, widely varying the spectrum. Technological literacy is no longer limited to the younger generations as we see a rise in more and more user friendly technology that can be used by the majority. Furthermore, boyd supports the notion that technology provides a new area for understanding, curiosity, and interaction allowing users to gain knowledge about people and information, with 'always-on-ers' taking full advantage of the possibilities available.

boyd summarises the effects of the 'always-on' culture by using the example of Snapchat. In this blog post she points out how technology users automatically scroll through information without taking the time to engage with it. A result of being 'always-on' is mindlessly accessing information without any need or desire to. However, Snapchat offers a solution to mindless media consumption by limiting the amount time the information is available for, portraying the message of "You’ve got 7 seconds. PAY ATTENTION". This type of technology forces people to engage with media again rather than only being semi-consciously aware of their 'always-on' lifestyle.

The Blurring of Virtual and Reality

This is an idea that boyd argues is applying more and more to our everyday lives. This exist because technology is gradually replacing tasks that would otherwise be carried out manually. Examples of this lie in the writing of essays, communicating with others, applying for jobs, entertainment, and gaining knowledge. Due to this different spheres of life are infiltrating others, such as work and leisure, meaning that since users can be communicated at all times through technology. Therefore, new information related to work can be read at home, and the same for personal news can be found out whilst at work. It could be argued that this blurring of leisure and work is the consequential result of the blurring of virtual and reality.

Ubiquity

One of boyd's main ideas is that technology and connectivity has become ubiquitous. This means that the technologies are being used as part of everyday life, and no longer thought of as simply technology. boyd refers to ubiquity in terms of how technology is becoming part of the social infrastructure, and supporting people in what they do. Furthermore, boyd is referring to the connectivity of technology and how it is a service for everyday people, not just technologists. This relates to 'always-on' culture because as technology becomes more ubiquitous it is being used for more reasons in everyday life, and thus is a key component in being 'always-on'.

The 'Network'

Being surrounded by technology also links in with boyd's idea of what the 'network' truly means. boyd believes that the 'network' does not refer to the technology available, but rather to the idea that it offers a new platform to express pre-existing cultural ideas. Interaction and engagement are the driving forces behind information access and communication within the "networked public". boyd argues that this formation of networks is primarily visible on social networking sites(SNSs) and media-sharing websites. The purposes of these networks, according to boyd, are socialisation, consumption, and civic engagement. This links to 'always-on' culture because socialising is being greatly influenced by technology and ease it offers in everyday life.

Addiction to Technology

According to boyd being always-on is like being a part of the online community where people are connected to each other through layers of information. She calls it an ‘ecosystem in which people can stay connected to one another through a variety of microdata’. That’s where she made interesting point about online addiction. Some people see being always-on as an obsession; a virtual sickness which destroys lives. Boyd argues that always-on has nothing to do with technological addiction but more to do with the passion that people have for information and the lives of others.

Online and Offline Lives

Whilst boyd seems to make a relevant point that our online lives are as ‘real’ as our offline lives, more could be said about the significant difference between these two aspects of our lives, in particular how we behave online versus how we behave offline. Suler (2005) makes the point that when we communicate online, our input comes after some delay, perhaps minutes or hours or days, and this affects what we say, in text form, and how we say it. Importantly, he asserts that when we communicate face-to-face with others, “moment-by-moment responses between people powerfully shapes the ongoing flow of self-disclosure, usually in the direction of conforming to social norms” (p. 185). If this is the case, if an increasing amount of our time is spent online this could perhaps leave some people struggling with face-to-face social skills necessary to fit into a particular environment, such as that of an organisation with a clear expectations of cultural behaviour, or to succeed in particular roles where face-to-face interaction with people is necessary.

Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle is another key theorist associated with 'always-on' culture and, specifically related to 'the tethered self'. Sherry Turkle is an American professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the area of social studies. Turkle is a hugely influential theorist in this field and is incredibly important when talking in terms of Social Media and this 'always-on' culture. She has contributed to many academic papers and research journals, with much of her work focusing on the psychology of human relationships and technology where she discusses and develops further this notion of the 'tethered self' stating that:

"Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we can feel utterly alone. And there is the risk that we come to see others as objects to be accessed - and only for the parts we find useful, comforting or amusing."

"We are tethered to our 'always-on/always-on-us' communications devices and the people and things we reach through them: people, Webpages, voice mail, games, artificial intelligences... they live for us through our tethering devices, always ready-to-mind and hand."

The Tethered Self

The "Tethered Self" is a prominent part of her 'always-on' study. This idea concerns the way in which people are connected and have access to it a communication device, such as a smart phone. She often discusses how people can always be reached through mobiles or emails and if the person cannot contact the users, then machines often represent them, such as voicemail. Also, how a growing number of people are connected to some sort of network, such as Facebook, and rarely disconnect from it. From interviews she has conducted, she concludes that people, especially teenagers, feel at a loss without their mobile and without being connected. She argues that people have become more reliant on their technologies and this has led to users checking their networks more for any notifications. For example, users checking their smart phones for notifications.

Life on The Screen

Another book published by Turkle in 1995 'Life on The Screen: Identity in The age of the Internet' which is part of her work based around computers and the effect they have on us. She developed ideas of 'cyberspace' - a place where we can, every day, go to interact and connect with people anywhere- and develop relationships with them online. In writing she said human beings were changing and adapting due being unable to distinguish between computers and real life.

The concept of being able to go on at any time to speak to someone any where gives the idea of being 'always-on' and in this sense, with a computer. Always having access to these online worlds and being able to be reached from people even when we are not there, we are still 'always-on'.

The Second Self

The “Second Self” is Sherry Turkle's second published book. Throughout, she refers to ideas of computers being more than a device and how it is an important part of the user’s life, physiologically and socially. Her book is based upon opinions and attitudes of people who use computers and how that effects on their lives. Written in 1984, before today's technology was invented and before most people owned a smart phone, Turkle expresses ideas that could lead to today's 'always-on' culture such as the fear people initially had about becoming "addicted" to technology. Turkle also mentions ideas, similar to theorist Marshall McLuhan, of technology extending the self but she also adds how it extends the “external” world for the user. She states in the book, the idea that technology “changes not only in what we do but how we think” which is similar to her ideas in “Alone Together.” This idea is emphasised in her later work as by then more technology had been developed and consumed.

Alone Together

Her book "Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other" (2011) mentions the idea of 'always-on' culture and the relationship between people and technology and the consequences that can have. This is where she drew on the main ideas of 'tethering' and the 'always-on' culture. She made points about how we are more connected now than what we have ever been before but with that we are still alone. We are replacing our social interactions- conversations and intimacy with texting and communicating through computer use.

Turkle gave a talk through the website TED called "Connected, but still alone?" here she discussed some of the main points from the book. She talked about the ideas of communication and how it changed who we are and what we do and so we are developing social problems when it comes to being offline. We are now expecting less from each other and more from our technologies altering our relationships and friendships in the outside world and we are also losing valuable skills in conversation and social behaviour do to our new forms of connection and technology.

Leslie Perlow

About

Leslie Perlow is a professor of Leadership in the Organizational Behaviour area at Harvard Business School. Most of her research focuses on being 'always-on' in the work place. In her latest publication, “Sleeping With Your Smartphone” she focuses on employees of businesses who feel the need to be always online and always be connected and she discusses how disconnecting can be the most powerful tool for them.

Sleeping With Your Smartphone

In her latest publication, “Sleeping With your Smartphone,” she surveys thousands of different businesspeople in different professions over how much they work and their smartphone habits. Some of her questions included how often they check their phone and how often they can disconnect from it. She argues that professionals feel pressure to be 'always-on' and they often feel that if they disconnect, others may still stay on and become more successful than them. Due to different time zones and needing to be contactable for clients and fellow colleagues, Perlow has argued that it leads to employees to change their timetable and reschedule their time to make sure that they are always connected and remain to be perceived as a good employee as constantly being on is often expected from high pressure jobs.

Disconnecting

Perlow experimented with a company, Boston Consulting Company, to see if their employees would be able to disconnect and if that could be achieved. At 6:00pm each night, a different employee would be able to disconnect from their work network and other employees were able to deal with clients if need be. Most employees felt many benefits such as finding their work more satisfying. They also felt that they regained more control over their work life. Perlow argues that when this approach is applied correctly, not being 'always-on' can benefit not just the employee but the organisation as well.

Thriving in an Overconnected World In 2013, Perlow gave a TEDTalk on what she perceived as a detrimental effect that the 'always-on' culture of smartphones was having on businesses and organizations, as well as family life and relationships. She asserted that because of 'always-on' culture existing, people are constantly checking their smartphones for updates on career-related issues, e-mails from colleagues, or for information about their current duties at work - all the while squandering the time they spend outside of work doing this. Perlow describes this as a common attitude - stating that it is easy for one to think it's the best thing to do for their career. She further asserts that these behaviors have lead to a significant deterioration in the relationships and skills people use to deal with situations and issues outside of the workplace. Perlow concludes by asserting that this "overconnected world" does not have to lead to negative effects - if proper changes are made to the workplace structure and certain criteria are established for what is and what is not good use of one's connected devices, work and life can be improved, avoiding the downfalls of an "overconnected" society.

Naomi Baron

About

Naomi Baron is a linguist and professor of linguistics at American University in Washington D.C. She researches topics such as language in social context, language acquisition and computer medicated-communication. Her book, Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World, which was published in 2008, won the English-Speaking Union’s HRH The Duke of Edinburgh ESU English Language Book Award for 2008.

Domestication of technology

In her book, 'Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World' she talks about the idea of domestication of technology, a theory with comes from Rodger Silverstone and Leslie Haddon. This is the idea that we use technology as an everyday essential without giving it a second thought. She explains that such communication technologies has gradually changed our social norms and an example of this is that it is so much easier for us to go online and find out what the weather is going to be rather than turn on our televisions, go to the weather channel and await our local report. As domestication of communication technologies spreads through the populace, people are increasingly “on” networks that extend beyond the landline. Her theory that the domestication of such technologies like email, IM, blogging and facebook can have some dangers. The first is that once you become “on” it is hard to come “off” and it is increasingly easy to being 'always-on'. Once you have got past the first fees of buying a computer or a phone it becomes less and less expensive to keep connected through them. Secondly is that anyone can be an author or a publisher and can surpass legal authorities. And the third one and probably the most dangerous is the compromising of our safety and privacy. This is potentially the worst but can be put simply from accidentally sending an email to the wrong person or before you are finished to some of our banking information being hacked or stolen.

Effects of Being "Always-On"

Advantages

Instant Information

A main advantage of being 'always-on' is being able to receive information and news as soon as it becomes available. Prior to the advancement we have seen in technology today, people would have to log on to a PC, buy a newspaper or wait for a letter to arrive at their door to receive information. Nowadays, however, they can receive these kind of communications instantly through their mobile device and, in some cases, be notified exactly when they become available. The time taken to communicate has been significantly shortened and made much more convenient for the user. As the world becomes more and more online everything we need becomes more readily available to us. We can get information in a matter of seconds and everything that we need to know we are able to find out. According to filmmaker Tiffany Shlain director of 'Connected: An Autoblogography About Love, Death & Technology', "something happens in one place and we can see it, feel it, and do something about it which has such huge potential" .

Information is no longer something that takes an exertion to locate, we have it right at our finger tips. “Work will be dominated by fast-moving, geographically diverse, free-agent teams of workers connected via socially mediating technologies.” (Fred Stutzman, Carnegie Mellon) This theory explains the influence that being “always-on” has on us and the idea of what its effect on our society has been. It is thought that because the spread of information is so quick, diverse and free moving, that our society will become quick, diverse and free moving, and as a result of this, our culture will benefit greatly. All of these factors make for a much more efficient way of communicating and working. According to Royston Martin (2009) the notion of media being “everywhere and always on” does not have to be viewed negatively. “The spread of free, easily accessible instant information – be it on, for example, health care or democratic election processes – are small examples of the potential the digital media has to help raise living standards.”

Development of Different Skills

There are a lot of theories that say the 'always-on' culture is having a negative effect on children and teens with side effects as lower attention span and inability to work through problems. This may be true however there are a lot of other benefits that our weigh these. Studies show that 55 percent of those surveyed say that the brains of young people in 2020 will be wired differently from those of their parents. What’s more, they say, is the ability of always-connected young people to nimbly get information from an array of online sources and then share it seamlessly among a broad network of people is a positive trend. (Laura B. Weiss, 2012) It is shown that the younger generation may not be able to do the same things their parents can do however they will have skills that are above their parents head. With these on-going technological advances it may not be as necessary for the younger generation to have really long attention spans as information is so available however it may be more beneficial for them to have the skills to hunt down information and share it to a mass audience. Young people born around the year 2000 “have grown up in a world that has come to offer them instant access to nearly the entirety of human knowledge, and incredible opportunities to connect, create, and collaborate,” says Janna Anderson (Laura B. Weiss, 2012) Therefore these are the way their brains have developed and grown to adapt to these circumstances therefore will be affluent in this particular set of skills unlike their parents who have had to adapt to their generational technologies and grew up with a set of skills that would help them in their world.

Making Plans and Meeting Up

Now that the majority of Westernised society has a mobile phone, meeting up with individuals or groups has become much easier. Before the popularization of the mobile phone, people would have most likely contacted one another via land-line. A simple plan would be made to meet up, and the persons involved would not talk to one another again until they saw each other in person at the time and place agreed. Now, thanks to mobile technology, plans can be altered with ease, depending on the situation. For example, if a person on a train which is running late, they can contact their 'always-on' friend from their mobile to let them know what is going on and to rearrange plans.

Communication with Others and Synchronisation of Media

A major upside of 'always-on' culture is the ease of communication that it has brought to people - particularly technologically engaged youths. If one desires to communicate with another electronically, there are nearly infinite ways of accomplishing this - all depending on the type of communication desired. One can use microblogs (sites like Twitter), blogs (like Tumblr, Wordpress, or Blogspot), social media sites like Facebook, or they could even use various multimedia forms of communication like e-mail, text messaging, or Skype in order to communicate easily with other individuals. On top of the ease of communication that 'always-on' culture affords, it also supports a fantastic level of synchronisation for most forms of social media. For instance, one can easily link their Instagram account to their Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr accounts (as well as many other social networking sites), allowing posts on any or all of those sites to be visible across platforms, and also allowing the user to keep their communications and musings synchronised across multiple platforms of social media and keeping things orderly at the same time.

Disadvantages

"Disconnectivity Anxiety" (DA)

DA is, as defined by Dr. Jim Taylor, "a persistent and unpleasant condition characterized by worry and unease caused by periods of technological disconnection from others" . This anxiety can come from anything, such as, not being able to connect to the Internet or someone not responding quickly enough to a message. From Taylor's perspective, the constant need to be connected is a problem in society and people should make an effort to detach themselves when the technology is not necessary.

“Continuous Partial Attention” (CPA)

CPA is: “to pay partial attention — CONTINUOUSLY” . The term was coined by writer Linda Stone in 1998. When we use our attention in this way, we are dividing it between multiple things but at a superficial level. CPA is motivated “by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network”. Continuous partial attention is different from multitasking, we multitask to be more efficient and we use CPA because we don’t want to miss anything. In large doses, it can play a part in creating a very stressful lifestyle through "operating in crisis management mode".

Reduced Personal Privacy

It has been noted that always being connected can disrupt and interfere with an individual's privacy, as they simply cannot disconnect themselves. Jan van Dijk talks of, particularly in relation to the use of GPS technology in social media, an inability for an individual to detach themselves from their 'network' for personal reasons - simply because society as a whole now functions in an 'always-on' fashion:

"There is pressure in all communications technology to be within reach at any time and place [...] it causes the individual to be traceable to the deepest crevices of the social fabric and in all environments. Almost every place becomes a social place. And even if one tries and succeeds using blocking options, the chances of having to justify oneself are increasing".

It is argued that being 'always-on' is an increasing danger to personal autonomy, as our "natural space to withdraw" is shrinking as a direct result. Being 'always-on' and open to so many social outlets takes away an individual's personal time, whilst reducing their ability to switch off, which would eventually result in an overload of data to process; as no individual has the capacity to take in all that the internet has to offer.

Inability to Focus

As discussed in Nicholas Carr's book 'The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains',' always being connected to the Internet or mobile network can create difficulty to focus on any single thing for more than a few minutes . The Internet gives you short bursts of information and then leads you to something else not giving a lot of time to focus on one thing.

Changing Attitudes

Turkle expresses how she feels that attitudes of users of the technology is changing. She often mentions how communication is breaking down due to the increasing use of technology to communicate. Turkle also argues that the way technology is now being used is not just changing the way the users communicate with each other, but it is also changing the user as a person. The need for attention is able to fulfilled by social media and the ability to message people from a device but this can also lead to users feeling more bored or alone in real life situations. In a 2012 Ted Talk, she expresses how face-to-face communication is suffering due to the rise of online conversation and how even when people are in them presence of others they often want to be somewhere else, so they communicate online while in the company of others. She gives the example of people texting and emailing from boardrooms and during meetings. Overall, she expresses that the popularity of communicating online and the decline of communicating in person hence creating a feeling of isolation for the user.

Psychological Damage by Being 'Always-On'

There are some psychological issues related to being ‘always-on'. 'Being drop into a mode of permanent online activity’ can create lots of stress and anxiety. Constantly checking messages on the smartphones can lead to the point that there is no break whatsoever. This situation can create a feeling of being overwhelmed, depressed and in some cases makes people even to commit suicide.The pressure of being ‘always-on’ is huge, especially in the work place. There is confusion where the media demands stop and where the life starts. "Work and life are blended into a stressful soup of endless demands. In many workplaces, switching off is seen as uncommitted, even unprofessional". Many people are place in the situation that the demands from the work place take over their personal life.

Changing Media Industries and Convergence

Newspapers

Newspapers fall under the heading of “old media” whilst the Internet is considered “new media”. It could be argued that newspapers are becoming a thing of the past. They were once the only means for people to be informed of current events around the globe and could typically be found in every household. However, now the need to buy a newspaper is waning due to free websites providing up-to-date information, sharing news the instant it occurs. In the age of Twitter and trending topics, there is far less need to track down newsworthy events when they will come to you whether you seek them or not. Many online news providers let users customize their news feed so only topics their interested come to them, such as RSS Feeds. Older generations might still purchase newspapers; however, newspaper readership in the younger generations is declining as they have all the information they could need at their fingertips.

Many traditional print newspapers are putting more money and resources into the digital side of news. “At present, the major British newspapers are edging sideways towards the digital tipping point. Print staffs and print supplements and people and resources shifted into digital.” As well as regularly updated websites, many newspapers have launched smartphone apps allowing people to access news on the move and provide notifications for breaking news. Some newspapers have made the complete digital transition as physical readership couldn't maintain profit; instead, newspapers find it more cost beneficial to "print" online, thereby reaching more users and cutting costs.

Television

As Marshall McLuhan said: "There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV... A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition".

Television was once a cool medium - meaning something that could be consumed passively, unlike a movie at the cinema or a lecture for example. However, the more we use social media and the internet, the more interactive television is becoming.

Although TV had become interactive before smartphone technology, with the popularisation of voting reality shows like Big Brother (Channel 4/Five) to magazine programmes with debating segments such as This Morning (ITV), the boom in social media and 'always-on' culture has meant that audiences now expect TV shows to have a presence online and want to have their say more than ever.

For example, it is now possible to download apps for specific TV shows to a smartphone which allow the user to interact with the shows producers and with other viewers. This year, the BBC launched an app for their talent show The Voice which allows users to play along with the blind audition element of the show and voice their opinion, as well as vote in the later stages of the programme.

Another example of this is the frequent reminders during a television show to "Like" Facebook pages and to "Tweet" using certain hashtags which essentially encourage the viewer to join in discussions about the programme and receive the latest news on it. This both helps the shows producers understand the audience they have and make sure that they draw in as big an audience as possible as reminders can be sent out.

Video Games

Many popular video games have recently begun to utilise social media as a way to report the player's progress through the game as they play it. For instance, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves features an option for players to link their Twitter account to the game, and as they play the game, whenever they reach a milestone of progression across the game's many chapters, Twitter will post snapshots or small updates of the player's progress. Another notable example of this is with the recent title Grand Theft Auto V. In Grand Theft Auto V, the player is presented with the option to link their game account to their Facebook account, allowing the game to post status updates and small bits of information about the player's behavior in the game (such as number of in-game kills, recently completed missions, or recently-won multiplayer games). As well as this Rockstar games has also created an online game profile category which enables players from all over the world to link together and share player profiles of your in game progress, evidently video game producers are admirably trying to converge and synergies social media and online gaming as much as possible to keep an Always-On culture active to keep the success and 'Buzz' surrounding the game.

Additionally, in a more aggregate sense, there is a popular system of measuring progress on the Xbox and Playstation consoles (referred to as Achievements and Trophies, respectively). These systems of measurement track a player's progress as they complete goals set by the game's designers. Many third-party websites allow players of games on these consoles to automatically update their social networks (such as Twitter or Facebook) with notifications of their progress. Additionally, the Playstation supports native Twitter integration support for players to cross-post their Trophies to their feeds.

With the introduction of the current generation of gaming consoles, the Playstation 4 and Xbox One both feature the capacity to share video feeds of any one player's gameplay in real-time via popular video game streaming site Twitch.tv. Less than a month after the release of the Playstation 4, Twitch reported that Playstation 4 users had generated over 10% of the streams on their website, with over 20 million minutes of footage streamed from gamers to the popular site in under one month's time.

Fashion Industry

Similarly, the concept of constant technology has further branched out into other major industries across the world influencing fashion as well as culture and social aspects of everyday living. Zeki (2014) describes - in an interview with designer Tuba Ergin - how the fashion world and technological world are becoming forever more 'harmonised' with each other, as well as how each compliment one another. Designer Ergin, showcased his designs at the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in Istanbul in 2012, which included the new addition of circuit cards into each of his fashion garments including dresses and tops, and furthermore onto shoes and bags. Ergin (2014) mentions how each and every one of us now as members of society are now fully under the influence of the sheer absorption of technology. He evens goes as far to state that "I believe there is almost no difference between drug abuse and technology addiction" Such a statement allows us to see how we are now fully 'Always On' with our devices and the extent to which can be compared to such a heavily addictive substance such as drugs. In his interview, Ergin then goes on to discuss the developments of our devices that we are forever always using in our everyday lives such as technological glasses as well as watches. However, he then states that technology in the future will lead into clothes that can react to body temperature and the human pulse, such advancements will allow fitness merchandise to rocket, presumably.

Marketing Industry

Technology addiction has had a massive influence over the business-orientated world. With people constantly being visible and incorporated in their online world allows large businesses to make thousands of pounds from these users. The more people are on their phones and technology devices, the more money companies make. Such large organisations such as Facebook allow their adverts to become more expensive and make great amounts of money on their customers simply through their use online being forever constant. Cookies and other internet bugs allow marketers to track every move we make online and more importantly, how long we are on a certain webpage for and where our mouse is hovering. Such details allow them to store great information on the everyday user and can show the great extent to how intense the everyday person is 'always on' on their devices. Therefore, it is clear that marketers are cashing in on us ourselves being constantly addicted to our devices.

Social Media, Celebrity and Fan Culture

Social media - in particular, Twitter - now allows us to keep up to date with what is going on in the lives of people we admire and the fan communities surrounding them. It is now very rare to find a significant individual in the public eye who does not own a Twitter account as developing an online presence within this 'always-on' culture helps to create and keep up interest in what you are promoting - even if what you are promoting is simply yourself as an online personality.

There is a law of attraction which states that people develop a greater preference for something that they are exposed to often which, when applied to social media, may help us to understand how online fan communities work. The greater the presence that the social media user has online - particularly if they are already famous offline - will help create fans or increase interest among casual fans. Once we are enticed by a user through their social media account, it can become very addictive and very often people will feel that they need to know what is happening in that persons life - no matter how trivial. Fan communities and sites can also help to increase interest in a subject. Therefore, as they are 'always-on", we are 'always-on'.

Always-On and the Growing Effect on Society

The rise of the 'always-on' culture is having drastic effects on society as we know it today, the rise in technology is allowing everyone worldwide to be able to connect to the internet using personal devices such as smartphones and laptops 24/7 365 days a year. Studies into the effects of always being online are starting to develop more and more stories day by day, for example the effects of the 'always-on' culture in the workplace; Carsten Schloter, the 49-year-old chief executive of the Swiss telecoms group, Swisscom, was found dead at his home in July 2013, according to the Telegraph “The always-on culture: smartphones, stress and suicide” were main links to his death. Such links are tied in with the norms and traditions of working in an environment in the 21st century, one always has to be ‘always-on’ to read those important emails. “Though the culture of being instantly available for emails and calls is often a product of unspoken pressure, sometimes it’s official policy.”

The 'always-on' culture in education, is this culture changing education, how we learn and how our brains behave? Being always on can have it’s advantages and disadvantages, people who disconnect often get withdrawal feelings, ostracism and difficulty connecting, many professionals compare the withdrawal symptoms of disconnecting to that of drugs. Ignoring or creating a negative perception of technology in education that students willingly and actively use in every other aspect of their lives is not a winning educational strategy, research by Brian Chen demonstrated how top performers in school and in further education were more likely to be those best at distinguishing high quality data. Whether technological devices make students smarter is neither here nor there, technology is only getting more advanced and therefor the always on culture in education is likely to grow more and more.

Relating Always-On to Other Digital Media and Culture Topics

Cognitive Surplus

See also: Cognitive Surplus

Technology has developed to allow the user to create and share their thoughts and ideas. 'Always-on' culture means individuals can partake in cognitive surplus when they so wish. 'Always-on' culture also allows the user to view collective work online at the touch of a button. For example, Wikipedia is free of data charges in Middle-East and Africa: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero

Thus, the development of an always-on society has created a new means of collaboration and communication. An example of this can be seen in Peter Chroust's research on far-right political movements' use of the internet, in relation to the concept of 'smart mobs'. Chroust uses the example of the Taliban, although it is debatable whether this organisation can be referred to as a 'smart mob', the organisation must remain 'always-on' in order to act out and respond efficiently to 'spontaneous' action - and gather more support:

"To right-wing groups the internet not only serves as an electronic mail-box. It also enables the distribution of ideologies for political training of the cadres - and for reaching interested people outside the real network".

Chroust does however note that the internet, alongside the act of being 'always-on', is most likely seldom utilized aside from through internal communication within the Taliban. Despite this, "opponents of modernisation and globalisation" are present throughout the world, with organisations such as Al Qaeda operating in numerous countries across different time zones. It is with this in mind that being 'always-on' is an essential component of a 'smart mob' working quickly, efficiently and spontaneously:

"That explains why the Taliban invest financial resources and manpower in their presence on the internet. That most of the Afghan population have no electric light and even are illiterate, let alone have access to the world wide web, is not such a paradox as it first seems".

Technological Determinism

See also: Technological Determinism

'Always-on' culture may bring about a big cultural shift relating to communication which has been determined by innovations in media technology where the user has the ability to be connected to the internet at all times. Technology has the power to transform culture, society and way people look at the world. Due to the advance in technology, people have developed a greater need to be connected to other people via mobiles/computers/tablets and are more likely to share experiences through these forms of communication than face-to-face.

Online Identity

See also: Online Identity

Being 'always-on' leads to the constant overlapping of the user's real life identity and online one. It could be argued that the user's online identity is just as 'real' as their 'real life' identity - that an online identity is carefully thought out regarding what the user displays about themselves, but in face-to-face encounters it is much more 'real time' and people are perhaps a bit more vulnerable to show themselves in a less-than-ideal way - albeit showing a more 'natural' self. Online identity is about portraying of self as a living-out of states of being, becoming, belonging and behaving through the range of everyday social and discursive practices that are connected with the body. Yet it is also a close editing of self: ‘it’s me, but minus the things I don’t like about me’ – those aspects of self chosen to be shared with the public .

'Always-on' may mean that some users of technology feel the need to “check-in”, update their internet status or upload pictures from their real life to portray a specific online identity . These activities may take up a lot of time and be of great importance to individuals in order to determine an online identity which is always-on and available to access (i.e. Impression Management). Always-on with regard to texting, Facebook, email etc. will all contribute to your online identity as they are managed by you and reflect you as a person whether it is informally with friends (text, Facebook) or for a more professional purpose (email, LinkedIn). José van Dijck differentiates between Facebook and LinkedIn, the former existing for users’ personal presentation of online identity and the latter for promotion of their professional identity with both organisations using similar means of connectivity. However, he also asserts that both platforms have a “vested interest in pushing the need for a uniform online identity” (p. 200) which may not be in the best interests of users who may want, for example, one identity for friends and another for employers.

McLuhan's view that the "medium is the message” links to your 'always-on' identity: The medium in which you use to communicate affects the message originally intended. For example, text speak is informal, thus leading to a cultural change where acronyms, such as “LOL” (laugh out loud) are used in real conversation and bad punctuation is more frequent.

Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan’s assertion that the 'medium is the message' seems to be becoming more evident as the technology we use is tied in with our identity and what it says about us. Three of the world’s largest technology companies, Google, Intel, and Facebook all announced, almost on the same day, that they were investing heavily in wearable technology. Google announced that it was partnering with Italy's Luxottica, the makers of Ray-Ban sunglasses and Oakley sports glasses to ensure their new smart glasses, Google Glass, were at the cutting edge of fashion . Google Glass is a small screen attached to a pair of glasses which can record video, access email, and retrieve information from the web by connecting wirelessly to a user's mobile phone. Intel, the world’s largest computer chip maker, increased its investment in wearable technology by buying Basis Science, a company that has devices and services for tracking a person’s health, and wanted to accelerate its position in wearable technology . Facebook also made a big investment in wearable technology by buying the virtual reality technology firm Oculus VR for £1.2bn and Mark Zuckerberg going as far as saying that “virtual reality will be the next social communications platform” and will “change the way we work, play and communicate” . If these investments by the world’s largest technology companies produce a proliferation of new, fashionable, technology, the reliance on wireless technology and greater bandwidth within that technology, will undoubtedly increase.

Hamid Van Koten

Van Koten’s work is of significant relevance to this development in wearable technology, particularly Facebook’s recent acquisition of Oculus VR. In the context of technology providing an extension of our social networks, Van Koten wants to uncover the “shift from the real to the imaginary as the dominant drive towards the consumption of these representations” . He says from a Jungian perspective, ”games provide an outlet for the archetypal forces within the collective unconscious. Onscreen we can safely place ourselves in the role of the Hero […] alternatively, in a Freudian sense, games are a means of enacting the Oedipus complex” . Van Koten’s work build’s on that of McLuhan and it would seem with the three investments made by Google, Intel, and Facebook, the merging of games technology, which allows us to act in an imaginary world in much the same way as described in the disinhibition argument, with social media, his observation of the shift from the real to the imaginary will increase significantly.

Glossary

'Always-on' = Constantly accessible for communication through internet on different communication devices. E.g. "Checking-in”, update internet status, upload pictures to portray a specific online identity etc.

'Benign Disinhibition' = Unusual acts of generosity or kindness online or when people show fear, reveal secret emotions, wishes and other personal things about themselves online rather than offline.

'Determinism' = The idea that technology has important effects on peoples lives.

'Facebook' = Online social networking service. Founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004.

'Google' = Corporation that specializes in Internet-related services and products. This include search, software and online advertising technologies.

'Google-Glass' = Small screen attached to a pair of glasses which can record video, access email, and retrieve information from the web by connecting to a user's mobile phone through wireless internet.

'High and Low Fidelity CMC' = The level of social context cues available in differing forms of communication.

'LinkedIn' = Business oriented social networking site.

'Locked-in Theory' = The notion that a component of technology becomes so intertwined in an individual's daily routine, it becomes natural and almost impossible to stop using. It is also the idea that some software and ideas are used so much that they become industry standard and are accepted by most people to the extent that they are nearly impossible to change.

'Online Disinhibition' = Loss of real world inhibitions when communicating online.

'Online Identity' Portraying of self as a living-out of states of being, becoming, belonging and behaving through the range of everyday social and discursive practices that are connected with the body.

'Positional Inequality' = The idea that some are better off in terms of where they are located in the network.

'Situational Inequality' = The idea that some are better off than others, socio-economically.

'Tethered Self' = The idea we are always contactable through our devices and expect others to be as well.

'Tethering' = Performed by connecting one device to another, this may be through mobile phones, tablets, laptops, TVs or any other similar electronic device that has access to a Wireless LAN (WI-FI), Bluetooth, or a physical connection such as a USB cable.

'Toxic Disinhibition' = Increased aggression, rudeness or inflammatory behaviors from users while online as opposed to offline behavior.

'Technological Convergence' = The act of different technological systems evolving towards performing similar operations.

'Twitter' = Online social networking and miniblogging service. Users write and read 140-character messages known as "tweets".

'Ubiquitous Technology' = The idea that technology is present everywhere and is infiltrating everyday life.

'Wi-Fi' = A wireless technology that uses microwave radiation to transmit and receive signals between devices and because of its method of transmitting and receiving it is thus vulnerable to interference.

'3G' = Third Generation of Mobile Telecommunications Technology.

'4G' = Fourth generation of Mobile Telecommunications Technology succeeding 3G.

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Cognitive Surplus

Introduction

Cognitive Surplus, a term coined by Clay Shirky, is the concept of people using their mindpower to create and share content through various media platforms, particularly the internet and mobile phones, as opposed to merely being consumers of media. For example, watching television has now become so much part of our 21st century culture that over one trillion hours of free time a year is devoted to this act. However, with the presence of Web 2.0 and the increasing accessibility to and range of digital media platforms, in increasing number of people are spending this time creating and sharing content. We are motivated to do this in two different ways - intrinsically and extrinsically -and each contribution we make has a different value: personal, communal, civic or public.

Main Concepts

Value

Shirky discusses that all forms of creative acts have value, regardless of how mediocre they appear. He claims that there is a spectrum between mediocre work and good work, and claims that even mediocre creations have value because they have at least bridged the gap between “doing anything and doing nothing” Shirky splits this value into four groups; Personal, communal, public and civic.

• Personal - this is the basic kind of satisfaction we get from being active rather than passive. In personal value, both the participants and beneficiaries act individually, but get some kind of value our of one another’s presence. Shirky gives the example of 'lolcats' being a creative act with personal value - it has no other purpose or value other than for personal enjoyment and amusement.
• Communal - this is something which benefits a small community of people. Shirky uses Meetup.com as an example. This is a website in which like-minded individuals can arrange a “meetup” – anything from groups of hillwalkers, to book enthusiasts, to coffee drinkers. Obviously this only benefits those who are members of the site, giving it communal value.
• Public - Public value benefits any member of the public. It is fully interactive and is open to anyone, regardless of whether they are participants or not. Examples of this include blogs or news websites such as Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post and the BBC News.
• Civic - this could be seen as a cross between public value and communal value, as it is available to anyone, but is has more of an agenda – typically improving society in some way. Examples of this include charities or awareness websites, such as womenkind.org which aims to improve the lives of women across the globe.

Shirky points out that although creative acts all have some kind of value, we should be more interested in those which have public and civic value because they benefit society, and are also harder to create. He points out that things with personal or communal value, such as lolcats, are never likely to go away or be under-provisioned.

Motives - Intrinsic & Extrinsic

There are two types of motivation in terms of cognitive surplus. Intrinsic motivation is when the satisfaction of doing an activity is reward enough for a person. Extrinsic motivation is when there is an external reward for an activity, such as money. This concept is linked to value, because acts with personal value can be seen to be generated by intrinsic motivation, whereas acts with public or civic value can be seen to have been generated through extrinsic motivation, since the creator can gain a number of things through this - improved society, fame, or in some cases, money.

In 1970 psychologist, Edward Deci ran an experiment testing the motivations for why people do certain things. The experiment was on students who were asked to build shapes with seven uniquely shaped blocks. After the test Deci would leave the room for eight minutes and observe the subjects through a one way mirror. In the first instance Deci saw that the students would on average continue playing with the blocks for four minutes into the break, this will have been to satisfy their own needs to fulfil a task or because they enjoyed doing it. Deci then ran the same experiment, only this time half of the students were being paid one dollar for every complete shape that they built using the blocks. While on the break the students continued to play with the blocks for a minute more than the original test. The test was run for a third time with no reward being offered and the students on this occasion played with the block for just three minutes, so less than the original time and less than when there was money involved. This showed Deci that being offered a reward for something depressed the free choice factor of an activity and therefore showing extrinsic motivation can directly affect a person’s enjoyment of an activity.

A second experiment was run by Deci to test these findings, and was again done using students. Four journalism students were the subjects and were not aware that they were being observed. They were told that for every headline they wrote for the bi-weekly student newspaper, they would receive 50cents. Another four journalism students who worked on a different day and also unaware they were being tested were offered no money for their headlines, they were the control group. The group that were being paid per headline were told after four weeks that the newspaper could no longer afford to pay them, and after this the speed of their writing was used an indicator for motivation. The final results showed that a monetary reward decreased a person’s intrinsic motivation, as the headline writing speed decreased when the extrinsic motivation was taken away from the subjects. This backed up Deci’s initial findings from the previous example that one’s enjoyment can be affected by an extrinsic motivation.

Generosity

Shirky believes that acting in a generous manner is the basis of allowing us and encouraging others to be innovators in creating valued content. In the past, limited opportunities in the world dictated human’s role as media consumers or ‘couch potatoes.’ With opportunities remaining few, human behaviour changed little, and as a result the status of the population as couch potatoes remained.

New media brought about a change in this behaviour however. The introduction of new technology such as the internet, mobile phones and laptops allowed humans the opportunity to harness their cognitive surplus. They could utilise their generosity by making content, particularly online, which would stand to help or influence others in the online spectrum or otherwise. In the past, many believed behaviour to be a stable category – one that changed very little over time. However, with new media bringing a drastic change of behaviour this theory has been proved wrong. Shirky summed up this new found realisation: “In a world where opportunity changes little, behaviour will change little, but when opportunity changes a lot, behaviour will as well, so long as the opportunities appeal to real human motivations.”

Despite this change in behaviour, Shirky believes that these new tools haven't caused this generous behaviour, but instead given humans a platform in which to express their generosity. Yochai Benkler, a legal scholar at Harvard, backs up this theory. He, along with Helen Nissenbaum - a philosopher at NYU - wrote a paper in 2006 called “commons-Based Peer Production and Virtue.” The title is Benkler’s term for systems that rely on voluntary contributors to operate. They conducted a study into group participation, participation which takes place in order to make these contributions, largely voluntarily, to different outlets such as Slashdot or Kuro5hin. They explored what the social motivations were for people who voluntarily worked as part of a group on different types of tasks. They concluded that our new communications networks encourage membership and sharing and they also provide support for autonomy and competence. The sense of being actively part of something propels us to contribute with the tasks that needs to be achieved. This basic human emotion existed long before the introduction of new technology.

With this new media providing a platform for people to express their generosity, there was a rapid surge in people using their generosity in order to help others and achieve their own motivations. One example of this is the work done by fans of singer Josh Groban, or ‘Grobanites’ as they are referred as. The story began when a group of hard-core fans gathered together to discuss what to get Groban for his twenty-first birthday. After rejecting several ideas they decided to make a charitable donation in his name. They raised over $1,000 dollars at a fundraiser and donated it to the David Foster Foundation. After seeing the success of their first fundraiser, they decided to continue their work. They decided to aim bigger, and attempted to attract other Grobanites to meet and donate through Josh Groban’s website JoshGroban.com. The plan worked, and from his next birthday and over the course of the year raised over $100,000. The success of the fundraising led to the founders creating their own non-profit organisation, Grobanites for Charity. This organisations has spanned sister organisations such as Grobanites for Charity and Grobanites for Africa. To date, Grobanites for Africa has generated over $150,000 to help fight poverty and the effects of HIV/AIDS, with 100% of the funds raised spent to help these causes. Through this example, Shirky demonstrates how generosity is key to creating something which others will see the benefits of. Without this generosity, we would notice a steady decline in civic content and other factors would dominate people’s motivations for making content such as economical.

Collective intelligence

Collective intelligence is a term coined by French social theorist Pierre Lévy in his book “Collective Intelligence: mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace” (1999). Collective intelligence is defined by Lévy as a “form of universally distributed intelligence”. Simply put, collective intelligence is based on the fact that not one person knows everything. As a group (or collective) humans must use their individual knowledge to enhance and mobilise the skills and intelligence of both themselves and others. We do this through creating systems of networked intelligence, which is made possible through computers. Through the advance of technology in society, Lévy believes that the internet and the world wide web “will serve to filter and help us navigate knowledge and enable us to think collectively rather than simply haul masses of information around with us” . Our understanding of collective intelligence is core to the concept of cognitive surplus.

Copyright

A fundamental aspect of modern democracies is the recognition that products are created through creative labour, such as ideas and concepts. Therefore the copyright law came into existence in the UK in 1710 to:

• Protect the interests of authors and creators
• Ensure creators are credited for their work
• Regulate adaption, copy and fair use
• Regulate financial benefit

Copyright is a particular issue for cognitive surplus, because with so much original content being created and shared freely through digital media, problems can arise over who owns that material and who has a right to use it and distribute it, and how they are allowed to use it.

Main Theorists

Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky is a social theorist who studies the effect of the internet on society . He popularised the concept of Cognitive Surplus through the publication of his book, "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age". In this book he argues that humans use their free time constructively to create value. He has written, talked about and studied Cognitive Surplus and has presented these ideas in different formats.

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (2010)

In Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, Shirky presents the concept of Cognitive Surplus, mostly through the use of case studies. He writes about the Cognitive Surplus created by the rise of television and how the internet has influenced this.

TED Talk: Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world

In June 2010, Clay Shirky presented a TED Talk on Cognitive Surplus entitled ‘How Cognitive Surplus Will Change the World’.

Shirky divides his notion of Cognitive Surplus in to two halves; the first half regards the abundance of free time that we have in the twenty-first century as consumers of media and how we may appropriate our individual talents for the purpose of production and sharing, and the second half being the media landscape as it stands today with modern technology such as mobile phones and computers which allow us to create and share that which we create.

Once Shirky explains how we can embrace our cognitive surplus, he goes on to note the two distinct values of that which is created. He terms these as that which has ‘communal’ value and that which has ‘civic’ value. Media with communal value is that which is created to entertain and encourage discourse within a community of media consumers and contributors. Examples of media produced with 'communal' value includes ‘LOLcats’, memes and music, video, picture and text content uploaded to sites such as Soundcloud, Youtube, Flickr and WordPress. Media with 'civic' value is that which is created as an outlet for information and data sharing. Shirky gives the example of Ushahidi, a website set up by two programmers who had read the blog of Ori Okolloh, a lawyer from Nairobi, who collated information regarding the 2007 election in Kenya and the consequent outbreak of violence caused by said election. Ushahidi was used as a service which collates reports from the field, such as those posted online or shared via mobile phones and similar devices, and displays useful information on a map. The purpose of this was to collate the necessary information and display what is happening and where it is happening live.

Shirky believes that we are entering an "age of generosity" as both "civic" and "communal" values are both intrinsically good and not motivated by outside factors , such as economic factors. We create and consume both, not because we are forced to but because we enjoy it. In an experiment done by professors Gneezy and Rustichini concerning the change in late pick ups at an Israeli daycare centre where one remains the same and the other is given a fine when the child is picked up late. The study showed that when the daycare centre implemented the fine late pick ups rose substantially, whereas the control group remained the same. Shirky argues that the control group, which remained the same, should have been operating without constraints. However, it dealt with social constraints instead of contractual ones. These social constraints in turn created a more generous culture. It is this social obligation that Shirky brings into his argument for Cognitive Surplus as he believes we should should be driven by social constraints and not economic ones to produce more "civic" content.

Shirky ends his talk by stating that although media created with the intent of civic value is obviously more useful than that which is created with the intent of communal value, each are equally valid as they both address our surplus of free time and encourage us to engage with one another and contribute to the wider media landscape.

James Surowiecki

James Surowiecki is a journalist and a staff writer at "The New Yorker". Much like Lévy his work involving "Collective Intelligence" focuses on; opinions in a group being diverse, these opinions being independent of others within said group and that these opinions and information are specialised.

"Wisdom of Crowds"

Not quite the idealist that Rheingold comes across as with his "smart mobs", Surowiecki too recognises that "groups are remarkably intelligent" (2004)and that even with a disparity in intelligence and knowledge progress can still be made. Shirky's idea of Cognitive Surplus can be seen to flow in tandem with Surowiecki's thoughts due to the fact that society as a group has no linear intelligence and knowledge. Societies knowledge is diverse and independent but much of it specialised. It is this diversity and independence that allows society to produce both "civic" and "communal" values at the same time. Surowiecki puts this down to the fact that "human beings are not perfectly designed decision makers"(2004). Therefore, producing two forms of values.

David Gauntlett

Gauntlett relates cognitive surplus to the concept of collective intelligence. Gauntlett acknowledges that the invention of the World Wide Web has made it easier for people to share and connect with each other. However, he also attributes this to “Web 2.0”.

Web 2.0

WEB 2.0 “describes a particular kind of ethos and approach”. Web 2.0 pages are used for connecting with others and sharing content For example, the content that users created before was personal websites, with a focus on searching and reading. Now, instead of creating a personal site, users start a blog which is widely connected and shared. According to Gauntlett, Web 2.0 can be used as a metaphor for any sort of collective activity in which individuals contribute their ideas to create something “bigger than the sum of its parts”. This concept relates to cognitive surplus because the creation and sharing of content creates both civic and political value, as previously described. In fact, Wikipedia itself is often cited as a prime example of cognitive surplus and indeed Web 2.0. Wikipedia exists solely on the basis of voluntary contributions from both experts and others to create the worlds’ largest encyclopaedia. Although it is simply searched and read by many, there are volumes of contributors creating new content every day in their spare time.

Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier studies digital media and online culture and has written several books on these topics: You Are Not a Gadget (2010) and Who Own the Future? (2013). His theories and writings have become influential in the study of digital media.

DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism

In the article DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism (2006), Lanier presents certain concepts on online collectivism and the collective intelligence.

Collective Intelligence

Lanier takes a different view to Gauntlett over what he calls the new online collectivism. He acknowledges that “in some special cases the collective can be brilliant”, yet “the collective can be stupid too”. He notes that there is a problem with the growth of collaborative sites. He exemplifies Wikipedia – it has rapidly gained importance through aggregating the content of other sites, and the knowledge of individuals. It seems that for anything to be verified as credible information, it must exist on Wikipedia. For Lanier, he has a problem with this idea, as more and more websites compete to become, what he calls, “the Meta” – “subsuming the identity of all other sites” (Lanier, 2006).

Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold is a critic, writer and teacher in the field of Digital Media. He discusses the concept and work of Smart Mobs in ‘Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution’ (2002).

Smart Mobs

Smart mobs are defined as a group of people who “use mobile media and computer networks to organize collective actions.” The notion of a community coming together to produce and share content for one another ties in with the example of Ushahidi which Clay Shirky mentions in his TED Talk on Cognitive Surplus. Indeed, Rheingold goes on to note the potential of smart mobs when he states, “Communication and computing technologies capable of amplifying human cooperation already appear to be both beneficial and destructive, used by some to support democracy and by others to coordinate terrorist attacks. Already, governments have fallen, subcultures have blossomed, new industries have been born and older industries have launched counterattacks.” Although many argue that his views are utopian and may never be realized entirely, the rise of ownership of personal media devices such as mobile phones, tablets and personal computers make it more accessible than ever before for smart mobs to gather information and assemble, either online or in person, for their chosen cause. A further example of this is the ‘Occupy’ movement; a smart mob who convened in agreed places across the globe to protest against government secrecy and capitalism.

Abigail De Kosnik

Abigail De Kosnik has studied the concept of "Free" Fan Labor within online cultures. These ideas were presented in the essays Interrogating "Free" Fan Labor (2013) and Fandom as Free Labor (2013).

Free Digital Labour

The way in which we put our collective talents to work is a social issue and not entirely a personal one, but should this hard work be paid? Abigail De Kosnik presents the term 'Fandom as Free Labour. “Free” fan labor means “free” fan labor which is not paid. These fans may revise, rework, remake, and otherwise remix mass-culture texts without dreading legal action or other interference from copyright holders. Fan production is regarded as poor and of little importance or value. (Digital Labor, 2013)

However, Kosnik suggests that fandom is already monetized as the internet is not free space. Many websites that fans work on are driven by fan activity. Fans must produce for these sites and then share and consume what other fans have produced in order for these websites to be successful. Therefore, free digital labour works by fans increasing the worth of mass-media productions without receiving any pay at all. (Digital Labour, 2013)

Tiziana Terrinova

Tiziana Terranova also argues the internet depends on free labour. For Terranova examples of free labour that produces value for the internet can be anything from reviews to opinions to songs and images, that people produce everyday on the web. Terranova suggests that “the Internet is about the extraction of value out of continuous, updateable work, and it is extremely labor-intensive. It is not enough to produce a good Web site, you need to update it continuously to maintain interest in it and fight off obsolescence.” At the moment the majority of internet users are continually updating their online content therefore keeping their websites fresh and interesting, even though they are unpaid. (Network Culture, 2004)

Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig (Free Culture, 2004) is a law expert based at Stanford who specialises in copyright legal history and creative commons. Lessig claims that a free culture supports and protects creators and innovators.

Current law in relation to the growth of the web controls not just commercial creativity but of everyone. Its role is less to support creativity and a civic value and more to protect industries against competition therefore an economic value. Lessig states, ‘The technology that preserved the balance of our history – between the uses of our culture that were free and the uses of our culture that were only upon permission – has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, and more and more a permission culture.’ (2004: 8)

David M. Berry

David M. Berry is a Reader in Media and Communication at the University of Sussex. His work focuses on the methodological and theoretical challenges of studying digital media.

Creative Commons

Berry has a pessimistic view of Lessig's idea that there should be a "free culture". He feels that it only labels culture as a "resource", and it can be easily controlled and owned at the expense of finding the ethical motives behind ownership. Berry argues that the Creative Commons may allow the sharing of culture resources but none of it is "shared in common, nor owned in common, nor accountable to the common itself". Therefore, it is down to private individuals to pick and choose when to reuse the commons when they so wish. In turn, blockages in creativity become a problem in the cases of lawyers due to the fact that they become mandatory passing points. This means that the "ethical implications" of the sharing of culture is now being restricted by legal barriers.

How Cognitive Surplus has Changed the World

As Clay Shirky focuses on in his TED talk, civic value or civic engagement is one of the most relevant aspects of Cognitive Surplus. Nowadays, with the internet never being more accessible, people are able to communicate faster and more often. The idea of sitting on a couch and watching TV in our spare time is less appealing. More often than not, people are coming round to the idea of using their free time in a positive way, like raising awareness on social networking sites.

Using the internet as a prime example, it is an ideal tool to harness Cognitive Surplus. The recent Malaysian Airlines MH370 aircraft that went missing on the 8th of March 2014 caused major controversy all over the world. Mail online posted the article"Student posts ‘satellite’ image showing a jet over the jungle as thousands join online search for plane” written by Sam Webb and Richard Shears 10 days after the airliner went missing and it highlights Shirky’s idea that Cognitive Surplus can be used in a productive way. The article describes how thousands joined an online search for the missing flight via analysing satellite images provided by Tomnod - the official map search website set up in the hunt for the Malaysian aircraft. Volunteers joined online communities on message boards such as Reddit to discuss potential sightings of the plane. Webb and Shears also explain that celebrities have taken to joining in the search, “offering up their suggestions” which received extensive media coverage and in turn informing more of the online search taking place.

This online search for MH370 is proof that when given the opportunity, people are willing to use their cognitive abilities to work towards a common goal. The problem facing cognitive surplus at this time is the lack of infrastructure to enable it. Additionally, the extensive media coverage and global mystery caused by the disappearance may be an explanation for the surge in motivation for a collaborative effort. However moving forward, the lack of incentive for people to spend their time in this way is a critical issue that will need to be addressed. As Clay Shirky originally stated: “Once you’ve figured out how to tap the surplus in a way that people care about, others can replicate your technique, over and over, around the world.” (Shirky, 2010)

Glossary

Civic Value - Work that benefits some aspect of society; it is not solely for personal purposes or the good of the entire public.

Cognitive Surplus - The concept of people creating and sharing content as opposed to merely being consumers of media.

Collective Intelligence - The intelligence that is created by and emerges through collective thought, work and collaboration by a group of people.

Communal Value - Work that is created for the benefit of a small group of people rather than a large majority.

Creative Commons - A non profit organisation with the purpose of enlarging the range of creative ideas available for others to have the ability to share and to expand upon in a legal manner.

Extrinsic Motivation - Motivation that stems from outside factors such as money or good grades. To be extrinsically motivated means you are motivated by the rewards you may gain from completing a task.

Hive Mind - The collective consciousness or group mentality that is created when a large group of people is working on or thinking about a similar topic.

Intrinsic Motivation - Motivation that stems from the pleasure experienced from completing a task. To be intrinsically motivated means you are motivated by the internal desires to finish a task.

Personal Value - Work that is solely for the benefit of the producer.

Public Value - Work that is created to benefit anyone; it is not limited to certain groups or areas.

Smart Mobs - A group of people working together with new technology, such as social media, in order to complete tasks that they feel, as a collective, are important.

Web 2.0 A second generation of the World Wide Web that features more dynamic and interactive pages than the previous generation of the web. It allows for more user-generated content and collaboration.

Crowdsourcing

Introduction

Crowdsourcing can be described as "the use of mobile media to incite and organize collective action" or obtaining useful information for a large and generally varied group of people, the most popular venue being the online community. This use of crowdsourcing is helpful in the modern digital age because it is able to generate large amounts of feedback or services with minimal effort. Crowdsourcing is effective in generating a wider knowledge of an event such as a natural disaster or a need for funding as well as compiling small bits of knowledge or labour into a larger pool. For example, Wikipedia is a crowdsourced database itself.

History of Crowdsourcing

The earliest recorded use of Crowdsourcing

In the mid-19th century the creators of the 'Oxford English Dictionary' began an open search for volunteers to help identify all words in the English language and to provide quotations that exemplify their usage. Over six million volunteers responded over the course of seventy years.

Early uses of Crowdsourcing in Business

Minh Le, a Computer Science student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver demonstrated how customers could be used to create innovations around existing products. In 1999 Le modified a video game called Half-Life and turned it into the instantly successful Counter-Strike. Instead of filing a law suit against him for stealing intellectual property, the owners of Half-Life instead realised that there was profit to be made off the back of it. In 2000 the company officially released Counter-Strike and by 2003 it had quickly become the most popular game on the Internet with an estimated 2.5 Million players. This success story meant that Crowdsourcing would become a recognised strategy for many more companies in years to come.

Jeff Howe, a popular academic on the subject of Crowdsourcing said in an article named 'The Rise of Crowdsourcing': "Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D."

Main concepts

The term "crowdsourcing" was first used in 2005 by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson, editors at Wired Magazine and a later blog post by Howe published in June 2006 gave the term a proper definition. Howe describes crowdsourcing in the following manner:

Thus the term crowdsourcing (a term, for the record, coined jointly by Mark and myself that day, in a fit of back-and-forth wordplay). Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers.

The key ingredients of crowdsourcing according to a few dozen scholars who have published on the topic, are:

• An organisation that has a task it needs performed.
• A community (crowd) that is willing to perform voluntarily.
• An online environment that allows the work to take place and the community to interact with the organisation.
• Mutual benefit for the organisation and the community.

Crowdsourcing as a method of compiling information has been gradually becoming more commonplace over the course of the 21st century to the extent that there now exists a multitude of organisations which use crowdsourcing to their advantage.

Examples and Applications

Wikipedia itself is one of the most relevant examples of crowdsourcing in modern society. Before crowdsourcing was established as a method of collating information, to construct the contents of an encyclopaedia one would have to consult an enormous variety of experts on a large number of different fields and areas of research. With the emergence of crowdsourcing, however, this task has been greatly simplified. Wikipedia can be accessed and edited by any expert on any subject from almost anywhere on the planet. Thus, information can be contributed to a resource such as Wikipedia with greater ease and hopefully with more accuracy than in the past, through the use of crowdsourcing. This use of cognitive surplus enables many people to project their ideas for the use of a greater group, making information much more available to the general public.

Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is a branch of crowdsourcing and uses the same basic principles but instead of the participants’ time, it requires their finance. There are multiple types of crowdfunding, such as for a nonprofit campaign or charity- many charities rely on regular payments of small sums of money from thousands of people. Crowdfunding for people in need or those who have done noble things can be particularly effective as it tends to trigger an emotional response from the backer. Such campaigns have a tendency to go viral and may accumulate thousands of backers in a short amount of time. 2012 London Marathon fun runner Claire Squires' Justgiving donation page has thus far raised in excess of £940,000 from over 80,000 backers. Participating in the marathon to raise money for Samaritans charity, she collapsed and died during the race. Commercial crowdfunding campaigns, usually advertised on websites such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo or RocketHub, allow for a number of projects to become commercial success stories. Projects advertised on crowdfunding services rely on the generosity and curiosity of project backers. To entice the public to fund projects, incentives ranging from a tour of company labs to being one of the first to own the finished product are sold to backers. The more appealing the incentive, the larger the sum of money a backer is asked to donate. Many of the projects advertised on these websites would likely never have received any publicity because of how difficult they would be to fund using conventional means. Without crowdsourcing, these services would be ineffective, lacking the large-group activity that it takes to provide the projects with their funding. Pebble Technology successfully funded their project using Kickstarter and broke the record for the most money raised using the website. The company is now able to mass produce the Pebble smartwatch thanks to the project’s backers and their product is now on the market in its second iteration.

Crowdfunding can lead to startup companies becoming so attractive that the owners are tempted to sell to make a large financial gain, potentially upsetting early backers. This was the case recently when Facebook bought virtual reality technology firm Oculus VR for £1.2bn and Mark Zuckerberg claimed that “virtual reality will be the next social communications platform”. Reaction from the early backers were mixed with some against and some in favour. This example further demonstrates how crowdfunding can clearly set in motion the development of products that begin with an idea and can become part of a global means of communication, as evidenced by the acquisition of such a product by Facebook, one of the world’s largest technology companies.

Uses in Science

Asking large groups of people on the Internet to contribute to scientific research is still somewhat of a novel idea. In recent years however, citizen science projects have taken off as crowdsourcing is used in innovative ways to excel the rate of various scientific research. Galaxy Zoo 2 was one example of a citizen science project, nearly 84,000 volunteers organised over 300,000 galaxies by answering questions about their visual forms. Each galaxy was classified roughly 44 times resulting in accurate classifications. Stanford University is currently running a project, Folding@home, where users are able to donate their computers’ unused processing power to analyse data collected by the university. The researchers send small packets of data with problems that need solving to users’ computers. Once the problem is solved the data is sent away and swapped for another problem. Samsung too is actively engaging with crowdsourcing; collaborating with the University of Vienna in a similar way, the electronics company has created an Android app called Samsung Power Sleep. The app donates users’ smartphones’ unused processing power whilst they sleep to decrypt protein sequences. Cleverly, the app is actually also a fully functional alarm. The ultimate goal of the two aforementioned examples is to find cures for diseases the researcher are investigating.

Internet Gaming

Steam's Greenlight system offers another example of modern day crowdsourcing. Through Greenlight, Steam users are allowed to upload their own games and game-related content for other users to access and use. As a result of this, the most popular Greenlight projects will be approved and given further exposure to the Steam community. Thus, Greenlight acts as a sort of filter which determines what kind of games and features of Steam are positively received by its users. Simultaneously, Steam developers are able to see what is unpopular, and alter the software in order to best suit its users' needs and demands.

Disaster Relief

Crowdsourcing does not necessarily require an online community. However, it would be accurate to assume that in many cases consulting a large group of people is most efficiently achieved using the Internet. One recent large-scale crowdsourcing effort- the search for a missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 recruited in excess of 150,000 volunteers who combed thorough satellite imagery provided by DigitalGlobe. Volunteers visited Tomnod, a crowdsourcing website provided by DigitalGlobe dedicated to identifying physical objects from satellite imagery to aid in search and rescue efforts. The volunteers were able to tag objects of interest, such as rafts and oil slicks, from computers around the world. Tagged objects would be examined further and potentially forwarded to the Department of Civil Aviation. Similarly, after hurricane Sandy, a large-scale damage assessment had to be carried out to direct response agencies. The Civil Air Patrol and The Federal Emergency Management Agency made 35,000 images of the affected areas public for assessment. 6,717 public volunteers rated damages on a scale of little/no damage; medium damage; or heavy damage. Interestingly, the report notes that conventionally the data would have been analysed in the same way, (also using crowdsourcing) but the analysers would have been paid. $3,000 was saved thanks to the goodwill of the general public. Crowdsourcing thus knows no boundaries in the digital age and can be legitimately called upon to help save lives. These examples explain the practice of crowdsourcing particularly well, without the combined efforts of thousands of willing volunteers, experts would likely take months to analyse the hundreds of kilometres worth of satellite imagery.

Criticism

Though crowdsourcing may be an easier and more accessible way to gain the opinion of many, it also presents problems. As computer scientist Jaron Lanier writes, "I have attempted to retire from directing films in the alternative universe that is the Wikipedia a number of times, but somebody always overrules me. Every time my Wikipedia entry is corrected, within a day I'm turned into a film director again." The fact that Lanier himself attempted to correct his own Wikipedia page and failed is a testament to the potential hazards of crowdsourcing. Incorrect information can be spread quickly and over large masses of people, causing a rumour to be believed and therefore effecting the quality of information used in various ways. Another related idea of crowdsourcing or using mass media negatively is that "they can be used to stifle, misdirect, and demoralize those who would otherwise be involved in these activities" (Rheingold, p. 17) meaning that any useful participants in certain situations can be diffused with the same ease that they can be rallied.

Junction

Junction is a film investment company which has been described as "Kickstarter for the rich." According to media news website The Wrap, Junction is only available to people with an annual income of over $200,000 or a net worth of at least $1 million. While this approach will certainly allow Junction to pursue their projects more successfully, it can be criticised for not following the usual crowdsourcing pattern because of its exclusivity. One of the most important attributes of crowdsourcing is that it is open to everyone, a universal method of achieving goals. However Junction's method limits its members, allowing only wealthy donors. It can be argued that this is not only a flawed crowdsourcing technique, but also discriminatory towards people who may not have a high enough income.

Going commercial

The acquisition of Oculus VR by Facebook was aforementioned in relation to crowdfunding leading to the development of products which could have considerable impacts on society. Success stories such as these, however, raise questions of ownership and recognition. The Oculus Rift Kickstarter page as an example had 9,522 backers who collectively financed the project with $2,437,429. Just over a year a half after the project was successfully funded, Facebook is to acquire Oculus VR in a $2 billion valuation of the virtual reality technology company. I question the ethicality of this deal; selling out is unlikely to be seen in a positive light by the backers of the Kickstarter project. Backers of these projects support the projects financially but often may not get any real value from doing so- except the satisfaction of helping a startup and the promise of an eventual product. In the case of Oculus VR, many backers are left with T-shirts and posters; comparatively underwhelming merchandise from a company which would likely not have succeeded without the backers' initial support. Crowdfunding therefore can be a fickle undertaking with backers not having any controlling interest (thus influence) in the projects they choose to fund. It is understandable how backers can feel left high and dry while the owners of the projects become wealthy and successful.

Endorsement

Overwhelmingly, crowdsourcing has a great value in the modern society and is used nearly every day. Technology has allowed humankind to advance greatly, joining us in previously unknown ways. The ability to have real-time conversations with others across the world is an innovation that has evolved rapidly over the last decade. It's easy to see how technology has "the power to persuade and communicate, joined with the power to organise and coordinate, multiplied by the three billion mobile telephones in the world today poses a disruptive political potential that could equal or surpass that of the printing press, landline telephone, television or the Internet." (Rheingold, pp. 225-226). In recent elections, the ability to crowdsource has dramatically changed the results of a nation. In Ghana, cell phones were used to report fraud and illegal actions taken by the politicians themselves, or voters who wished to rig the results. Authorities can quickly become involved in matters where crowdsourcing is used because the more people that report an incident, the higher the chance that actions will be taken to remedy the situation, helping to keep governments and authorities honest by being unable to deny that events have taken place. Large companies can also use crowdsourcing to their advantage. Lush , a company devoted to quality handmade cosmetic products is involved in many charities such as The Fox Project, which aims to reintroduce foxes into the UK wilds. By buying a specific product by Lush, the charity benefits. More people know about the companies than the charities, therefore crowdsourcing can be a bolster to funds by raising awareness through the purchase of popular products.

Future of Crowdsourcing

In 2012 reports showed that there was an estimated 2,405,518,376 people worldwide with access to the Internet. This data indicates that there was a 556.4% increase in the number of Internet users in just two years. Mark Prensky coined the term "digital native" to describe the 'cohorts that are coming of age in the Internet era'. It is a popular belief amongst academics that we are fast approaching "the crowdsourcing generation, a demographic that is perfectly adapted to a future in which online communication will supplant the conventional corporation."

Jeff Howe expands on the idea of the ‘digital native’ by describing what he believes will happen in the future: “Crowdsourcing has already wreaked upheaval in a few select fields… this is because the crowd has made a once scarce resource abundant. As digital natives continue to acquire the skills it takes to build, design, and create, the scarcity of other commodities will also decline, posing great challenges to the companies that traffic in them.” He uses the example of stock photography as where the crowd has caused a decline in scarcity to occur. Graphic designers found it cheaper to share images with each other, which allowed those who took photos or designed images as a hobby to also share their work– hence the need for specialists to provide stock photography declined, and the work of the hobbyists (the crowd) became an abundant resource. According to Howe, companies could face challenges such as picking the right crowd to target– he says that over a billion people are using the Internet so to attract the right people, companies need to be very selective; making sure they don’t see the crowd as a cheap workforce. Howe argues that people’s busy lives mean they would not want to spend a long time doing something unpaid for a business; having to trawl through bad contributions to get to the good ones –not all the thousands of contributions will work; and others. He ends his argument about what could happen in the future by citing a quote from Thomas Malone: “Obsolescence isn’t a new phenomenon. Kids who grew up with running water wouldn’t know how to work a hand pump, and in this new world we’re entering, a lot of what’s familiar will go the way of the hand-pump.” Basically, we could be moving into a future where the crowd is the norm for business and contemporary methods will cease to exist.

References

Contributors

KylieMott (discuss • contribs) CiaranBC (discuss) • contribs) Rkmraf (discuss • contribs)George Berrie (discuss • contribs) JamieS TA (discuss • contribs) AlexandraChanner (discuss • contribs)