Trust and American Democracy

This is the first of a series of blog posts written by the PhD students in my seminar, Public Intellectuals: Theory and Practice. Over the next few weeks, I, like a proud father, will display my student’s work.

Trust and American Democracy

by Jackson De Vight

Over the last three decades partisan polarization has steadily increased across every societal arena, including perception of news organizations, trust in political opponents’ good faith, and opinions of institutions like churches or media outletsassociated with the other side. As a society we used to have a certain level of trust in major institutions even if we knew they were somewhat flawed, and that common ground and experience provided a space for us understand and discuss issues. Today, such an ideal seems almost unreachable. Americans are increasingly suspicious of traditional news sources, such as network and cable news, national newspapers, or public radio, fearing that they are biased or ‘fake news.’ At the same time, on both the left and right, partisan sources – from Fox News to MSNBC – have further polarizedhow many Americans get their news. In a way, these partisan news sources are making those fears come true by the very act of giving consumers an ‘unbiased’ [read: they agree with me] news source.

We don’t have a set of common sources we can agree on for the facts, and that’s a problem because before we can have a worthwhile discussion about what should be done, it’s important that we have agreement on what’s happening in the first place. This trend has been on the uptick for some time, but at some point I think that gradual increases build up to a complete change, which is exactly what I think has happened with the current outrage over the impartiality of institutions like the post office and ballot counting. This ought to be of utmost importance across the political spectrum, and cannot be another space in which those vaguely sympathetic to Donald Trump’s policy positions or judicial appointments wave off criticism of his combativeness as an unfortunate but understandable element of his character. This attack is not limited to cultural institutions like the New York Times or NPR, but an assault on one of the core presumptions of the American system. This category difference matters. I’ll make my case here as if I were narrating how I think through these sorts of questions that contain both nerdy theoretical ideas and some more grounded and specific analysis.

To start I’ll try to justify why I think this issue matters, followed by some work to define some terms – how do I define undermining and how I define whether or not it’s occurring, and finish with some responses to the sorts of pushback I expect a reasonable, good faith opponent might levy against me. I need to be clear – I disagree profoundly with the sitting president and those who still support him, but that’s not what I want to talk about here. My study of the fractured news climate in our country and how it shapes people’s perception of reality has pushed me to genuine care and humility in how I approach these issues. The contemporary media landscape deals heavily in whole narratives rather than providing strictly factual accounts, and it is my hope in this blog piece to temporarily peel back the some assumptions surrounding this situation just long enough to plant seeds of thought on this critical issue.

Before I step into the nitty-gritty of how I think through electoral misconduct, I want to lay out my reasoning for why this question has even arisen during this most unusual of elections. There are two major reasons why the validity of this coming election have been cast into doubt. First, as noted previously, the sitting president and some of his supporters appear to be trying to castinto question the conditions under which they would ensure a peaceful transition of power. They have cited concerns about election fraud, and at times implied that a loss would mean that fraud had taken place! 

The persuasiveness of this approach is somewhat compounded by the second contributing factor: mail-in ballots. An unprecedented percentage of voters are expected to vote by mail this year due to changes caused by COVID-. This presents a number of potential strategic concerns for the GOP. Democratsare more likely to vote by mail than Republicans both nationwide and state-by-state. Older voters, a demographic which had until March firmly favored Trump in most relevant states, decidedly flipped due to his handling of the pandemic. 

Furthermore, the speed at which vote by mail has been expanded across the country has substantial consequences. Most polling and vote counting is done by dutiful but busy and often older volunteers, meaning that rapid changes in how voting is carried out can cause significant misunderstandings, delays, or errors. In states which have gone from either no or very limited general mail in ballots there may simply not be sufficient resources to process the vote counts as quickly as they did with the previous system. Most states prohibit pre-Election Day ballot counting to prevent leaks or influencing in-person voters, and the logistical challenge of both manning polls and counting mail-in ballots is likely to either make the former severely understaffed, or to make ballot counting from the latter stretch over the coming week. In the past, the overall result of races have rarely been changed by mail-in ballots. The percentage of votes cast in person and the skew one way or the other in mail-in ballots was insufficient to make a difference. In this case, however, it’s entirely possible that a number of important state and national elections, including the presidential race, could break that mold entirely due to these rapid reforms.

Like any good academic I have a strong, some might say annoying, tendency to fixate on definitions and categories. How and where we sort various ideas, issues, and people in our mental bookshelves is often an unconscious but nevertheless vital aspect of critical thought and belief. For instance, whether or not you consider gravity a law (so nearly always true it’s best just to live like it’s an iron-clad rule) or a theory (an interesting but unproven explanation or pattern) will have major implications for your life! In my mind there are two general ways of approaching the question of electoral legitimacy. First, one could say that in order to believe the results of the election they themselves, or one of their hand-picked representatives or trusted sources must personally observe enough of the election results to guarantee their legitimacy. Forgive what might sound like a sarcastic tone, I don’t mean it that way at all– this is an extreme but rational extension of a natural tendency to draw tight boundaries around ‘your people,’ particularly when wider, less personally connected sources are cast into doubt! There’s an important distinction to be drawn here, however. 

Sometimes we can be drawn into what social scientists call a ‘parasocial relationship’ with news organizations or pundits. These parasocial connections are essentially where aspects of a real, two-way relationship such as you might have with a friend or family member is transferred to a media figure. This tendency is very common! Teens develop emotional attachments not just to the music from their favorite artists but the artists themselves, any number of sports fans treat longtime coaches of home teams like heroes or traitors, and real, genuine senses of personal loss may accompany the death of a longtime favorite actor or activist. I don’t make this point to dismiss the validity of any of these feelings, but rather to note that the ‘one of us’ set of emotions which can so easily transfer to news figures who we agree with and enjoy the style of can cause real trouble. Unlike actors, athletes, or musicians who may depart their area of expertise and discuss politics and society, news outlets are conduits for facts themselves and granting an organization the benefit of the doubt out of loyalty to a shared ideological position may, over time, seriously skew your perception of reality. After all, a domestic news organization covering an American presidential election has much more bias in reporting than the same organization might have covering an election in Eastern Europe, Africa, South America, or Asia, where outside observation may indeed be the most trustworthy metric for electoral legitimacy in part because there’s less motivated reasoning at play. 

In short, I encourage you to think critically about who you sort into the absolutely trusted, generally trusted, trusted if corroborated, doubted, and patently untrustworthy buckets. If you’re anyone like me, almost every major news source should be right in the middle of that spectrum. Try to develop a robust background of each source’s history, the coverage from other sources, and a good nose for nonsense to test each story, especially the ones you want to believe.

The second approach to validating the legitimacy to the election is to trust the institutional mechanisms formally set out as the legal authorities for ensuring electoral legitimacy. There is crossover with the previous approach, of course. Instead of putting trust in news figures, individual politicians, or internet media groups trust is put in a formal system. I don’t want to seem dismissive that both notions involve trust, they most certainly do, nor imply that I think the electoral system is some unchanging bedrock in civic society. Quite the contrary! The system of elections has changed frequently across the United States, including reforms to how ballots are written and counted, how folks in various places and demographics are allowed to vote, and the weight of votes relative to votes in other precincts and states. Another important point is to remember that the federal government does not operate even federal elections! That work is entirely conducted from the state on downward, with federal regulation and engagement limited to issues of campaign finance and, in rare cases, judicial involvement in contested races. Mail-in ballots, precinct staffing, and all the other attending details are much more localized. This has, aside from atypical situations like the Hanging Chads in Florida during the 2000 election, rarely prompted much national-level outcry, much less serious accusations of electoral misconduct. 

With these two broad approaches of assessing electoral legitimacy in mind, I want to lay out how I think through the all-important question of whether or not an election is illegitimate. To my mind there are three components to whether an election’s resultis illegitimate. First, there must be sufficient evidence of misconduct to question the validity of some set of votes. This could include illegal acts like stealing or counterfeiting ballots, which take place prior to a ballot being entered, or as part of the counting of ballots through negligent or intentional exclusion of some particular set of ballots, but it must be provable to a wider public, not mere conspiracy. 

Second, the counts cast into doubt must be of sufficient magnitude to be consequential to the election’s results. While popular vote totals may be helpful perceptually, our system does not operate as a count of totality. For example, even if the long-publicized issue of ballots being sent in by deceased voters in Chicago (a totalof 229 votes from 119 ‘voters’ according to bipartisan commission) were a thousand times more severe it would not have changed which presidential candidate Illinois voted for in over thirty years. 

Finally, the counts in question must be cast in a state where the suspected misconduct would change the allocation of electors in sufficient quantities to change the election’s outcome. Now, before I am carted off to be burned for what may seem to be outrageously generous standards, let me be clear: these are not thresholds for whether election tampering has taken place, but rather thresholds for whether that tampering has made an entire race’s results untrustworthy. Concerns surrounding the detection and prosecution of ballot misconduct is entirely valid and should be pursued to the utmost extent of the law, which I must note is remarkably strict. 

The question here, the critical issue which threatens to undermine the core principals and practices of this nation, is whether the end result of the presidential election in 2020 can be trusted, and under what conditions those results are to be determined. So far I have tried my best to describe why I think this issue is pressing for our contemporary moment, provide general categories for how folks tend to put their trust in the results of elections, and to make as clear as possible my bright-lines for what would and would not cast the results into doubt. From here, all that remains is to discuss the probability of electoral illegitimacy and to briefly game out the most likely scenarios for the week of November 3rd.

I must begin my discussion of election-changing mishaps or misconduct with a warning. I do not trade in conspiracy theories, and as flawed or imbalanced as the various institutions, scholars, news organizations, partisan and bipartisan political commissions, authors, law enforcement agencies, and other such mainstream bodies may be, the notion that they, with all the checks and balances they are subject to, all cooperatively or coincidentally stand together against truth is preposterous. One ought to corroborate information from any of those sources, but anonymous leaks, internet diatribes, and discredited figureheads do not bear on this analysis. Fortunately, unless you are given to the notion that both political parties and every layer of the news, legal, and credible watchdog worlds are in on a plot to radically downplay massive voter fraud and ballot counting errors, we can trust that the study and investigations into these issues offer at least ballpark figures for what we can expect. 

The first set of ballot question marks likely to arise in November centers on criminal or negligent tampering with ballot distribution, alteration, or collection. FBI Director Christopher Wray noted in a congressional hearing on September 24ththat the FBI has been monitoring but has seen no evidence of coordinated voter fraud, either historically or in this election cycle, though both White House press secretary McEnany and Attorney General Barr argued that this analysis is irrelevant in such an unprecedented mail-in election. Further, the sum total of voter fraud cases documented by any credible news organization, including conservative sources, during the 2016 election was four, including Terri Lynn Rote, an Iowa woman who voted twice for Trump, Phillip Cook, a Texas man who voted twice for Trump and then claimed he was working for the Trump campaign when he was caught, Audrey Cook, a Republican election judge in Illinois who voted on behalf of her dead husband, and Gladys Coego, an election volunteer in Florida who filled in a mayoral bubble on a ballot she was counting. Rote, Mr. Cook, and Coego were arrested and charged, while Ms. Cook’s ballot was discarded. 

The sum total of suspected but documented cases for the 2016 election totals, at most number under a hundred out of over a hundred and thirty million ballots cast. Even if that number were a hundred times a hundred it wouldn’t have changed the results even in America’s least populated district, Rhode Island’s 1stwhich has around 500,000 residents and 200,000 active voters. This data certainly isn’t conclusive given the nature of a blog post, but I hope it’s illustrative for how unlikely election-changing fraud is in our system. 

The second, and far more likely, ballot issue for 2020 has to do with notcounting genuine votes rather than counting fraudulent ones, and not along any lines of political bias whatsoever. Each state has some combination of four or five methods for ensuring the legitimacy of ballots, and each year genuine ballots are thrown out due to issues like incorrectly mailed forms, subjective judgements about matching signatures, and machine errors. This is significantly more of an issue with mail-in ballots,  especially in states new to the practice, which due to the demographics who tend to vote remotely will hurt Biden more than Trump.

There are a number of feasible scenarios for how November 3rdand the ensuing week plays out. 

-      If we take present polling at face value and maintain the assumption regarding who will benefit more from mail-in voting, Biden will win the race on Election Day and his lead will continue to grow as more mail-in ballots are counted. 

-      The second most likely scenario is essentially a tie or narrow lead by Trump on Election day, perhaps again losing the popular vote, but Biden doesn’t concede given the unprecedented number of ballots which won’t have been counted yet. If those mail-in ballots flip some important states and Biden ends up winning the electoral vote, especially if it’s close or he loses the popular vote, the groundwork laid by the president and his campaign for claiming a stolen election will kick into gear. Based on the data we have, which is admittedly premised on extrapolations from prior to the COVID-19 complications, it is extremely unlikely that the president will fair better than his challenger in mail-in ballots. 

-      The least likely, but certainly possible way this election plays out, is that Trump wins sufficiently on election night for Biden to concede and no transition of power takes place, shifting attention to the various congressional and state-level elections. 

What exactly a crisis such as that mentioned in the second scenario would entail is beyond the scope of this piece or any precedent in American history, but do note two key facts. First, partisanship has become more rabid and violent over the last few decades – over a third of voters from both parties polled by YouGov and the Voter Study Group expressed openness to violence for advancing political goals, up from 8% in November of 2017. Second, the record of presidents peacefully and graciously leaving office and the public by and large avoiding violent protest could, potentially, be threatened if this election’s results are too contentious., The assumption of reasonable observers has been that that if Trump were in fact as insane and power hungry as his more extreme critics claim and refused to leave his office he’d be kicked out of the White House as a tresspasser, no longer president no matter what he claimedWhile the contingency of the election being in such doubt as to carry into 2021 is unlikely in the extreme, the very idea of a contested election could foment unrest leading to tragedy.

If you find yourself to be open to the idea that an election might be fraudulently decided this November, I encourage you to think through precisely what conditions would lead you to make that determination. Then, as much as you can, stick to them. I understand that if you’ve spent the last three years miserable with Trump as president, it could be remarkably attractive to undermine the legitimacy of the election if he were to win. The same is perhaps even more true if you are a Trump supporter and feel as though he’s the first chance you’ve had to fight back against institutions which are contrary to your beliefs and best interests. This country needs to be bigger than one election, and it is up to each and every one of us to put aside our biases to recognize that faith in our system must far transcend faith in one man, party, policy, or cultural belief.

Jackson De Vight is a doctoral student in Communication Studies in the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California where he researches political rhetoric, voter behavior, and security narratives in the media. His past work includes discussions of TSA checkpoints, the cultural location of the national anthem as seen through the Colin Kaepernick protests, and a rich history in speech and debate. As of 2020 he remains committed to a robust interdisciplinary approach, spending most of his free reading on topics ranging from cookery to economics and his free time fishing, working in the woodshop, and carrying on intellectually stimulating and utterly unimportant arguments with his friends.

Rewriting the History of Television: An Interview with Doron Galili (Part Three)

As you note, there were a proliferation of images of television in the cinema prior to the reality of television in the lives of the average consumer -- for example, in Metropolis, Modern Times, International House, Murder by Television and many more. What were the prevailing images that film constructed around television as a medium? Were these early representations caught up in the rivalry between media in the ways that 1950s vintage representation of television, such as in All that Heaven Allows? 

The cinema screen was another important source of information from which the public learned about television before regular broadcasting started. The films you mention, made between the late 1920s and the late 1930s, capitalized on the great interest in the always-just-around-the-corner new medium. Yet films have depicted television technologies starting very early on, in the period when cinema itself was a novelty. While I was doing the research for the book, film historian Richard Koszarski and I compiled a filmography of television in the cinema prior to 1939, which is published, alongside an article by Koszarski, inThe Journal of E Media Studies. 

We discovered over 100 films from all over the world – features, shorts, animation, serials (we excluded newsreels and documentaries in order to keep the volume manageable) – that in one way or another dealt with televisual media. And yet, we were not close to being done: since then we have found quite a few new entries and are now maintaining a webpage that regularly updates the filmography, now consisting of 127 titles (if you know of more films we should add, please get in touch!).The earliest item on the filmography is Georges Méliès trick film Photographie électrique à distance from 1908   which is unsurprising given that in the early cinema era, televisual devices were a fantasy and an attraction in and of themselves, and thereby a most appropriate subject matter for the kinds of films Méliès made at the time. 

When I attempted to synthesize and make sense of this large volume of cinematic depictions of television in my book, I frankly found that they were too anarchic and diverse to do justice to in a conclusive summary or an overarching theory. And here, I’d say, lies the difference between the intermedial relations at play in All that Heaven Allows and other films from its period and the films that dealt with television before 1939. 

In All that Heaven Allows, television signifies values such as domesticity, femininity, consumerism, while a film like A Face in the Crowd, to give an example of another notable 1950s film, critiques broadcast television for its potential for mass political influence and susceptibility to manipulation by economic powers. Both examples, in turn, invite comparison between the cultural and social institution of cinema and its televisual “other.” But as we discussed above, during the silent era and the 1930s, the very nature of television was still up for grabs. Film made in this period, therefore, don’t offer a critique of the new medium as such but rather explore its possibilities. The results are often magnificent: some movies showed television devices in realistic contexts of video-phone conversations or large screen live transmissions, whereas other opted for imaginary depictions, showing televisual devices that transmit images from Mars or from the future. In some movies, television sets are found in houses and movie theaters, while in others they are installed in spaceships, caves, or inside a wrist watch. Television are operated on screen by cowboys, spies, superheroes, tyrannical leaders, and mad professors. Not to mention cartoon puppies

What I found particularly interesting in this large body of varied imaginary depictions was that in many cases the engagement with future forms of moving image media compelled filmmakers to reflect about the nature of their own medium. Thus, several of the films that tell stories about television also raise questions about the ontology of the moving image, its evidential value, and its susceptibility to misinterpretation – all of which, remarkably, echo a very similar reflexive attitude to that we see in films from cinema’s first decades.

What did Dziga Vertov mean by the “Radio-Eye”? What window does his work offer us into utopian and avant garde conceptions of television that emerged in the Soviet Union shortly after the Bolshevik revolution? 

Vertov started using the term Radio Eye in the mid-1920s, when he was commenting on the prospects of television in his manifestoes and essays. Vertov observed the progress in television technology in the United States and Britain, and already at that early moment saw in the experimental medium a promise for new possibilities for revolutionary filmmaking. Radio Eye is a neologism that he coined, an intermedial combination of the Kino Eye (his term for newsreels edited with a montage technique that aims at “deciphering the visible world”)and Radio Ear (the montage of documentary sound recording). Much like he used the term Kino Eye to distance his work from “the movies” in the mainstream Hollywood sense, so does Radio Eye signify a unique political and aesthetic concept of television that departs from the broadcast medium that emerged in the West. 

Vertov’s speculative writings on the Radio-Eye provide us with a very rich case study for how television was imagined in an ideological and industrial context very different from those we typically associate with the emergence of the medium. When Vertov conceived of political deployment of television he did not just think of broadcasting revolutionary propaganda films; in true avant-garde spirit, he rather envisioned a radically different deployment of moving image transmission media altogether. Vertov saw in the coming of television an opportunity to realize something that the cinema in his view had failed to achieve, namely a way to connect the working people to one another.

Hence, the idea of the Radio Eye rejected the centralized one-to-many communication model of broadcasting, both technologically and in terms of the administration of the culture industry. Instead, Vertov envisioned the Radio Eye as a network configuration that anticipates Bertolt Brecht’s idea of “radio as anapparatus of communication” or even contemporary online grassroots media practices. He described a truly collectivist audiovisual apparatus that would enable proletariats to share audiovisual materials, so that they can document their lives and see the political realities of fellow workers. In this media configuration, every spectator is also an agitator, a producer, and a comrade. 

Vertov’s vision of the new medium was absolutely utopian, but he was hardly naïve about the prospects of television. He acknowledged the fact that cinema’s revolutionary potential had by then already been colonized by the capitalist West. His writings on television thus have an urgent tone to them. Vertov knew that within a decade the emergent medium would become a reality and so the Soviet Union had to beat the West in developing transmission technologies and shaping an aesthetic that would be appropriate for television.

And this leads me to believe that Vertov’s late-1920s filmmaking strategies – which we associate with high-modernist interest in medium specificity – were at least partly influenced by his anticipation of television. Like many other ideas about television, this one remained a “road not taken” in media history, but one that remained significant nonetheless. 

Doron Galili is Researcher in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. He is the author of Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939 (Duke University Press, 2020) and coeditor of Corporeality in Early Cinema: Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form (Indiana University Press, 2018). He holds a PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago andpreviously taught at the Cinema Studies Program at Oberlin College.

Covid-19, Participatory Culture, and the Challenges of Misinformation and Disinformation

This morning, I will be delivering some keynote remarks reflecting back on our white paper, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture, which was written more than 15 years ago. I was honored to be asked to deliver keynote remarks at the opening session of the Global Media and Information Literacy week co-hosted by UNESCO and the Government of South Korea. My remarks centered around the issue of mis/disinformation in a networked culture. In preparation for this talk, I was interviewed by a Korean journalist, Bon-kwon Koo, who has given me permission to reproduce the exchange here, having been able to use only excerpts in his reporting. I thought the work product from this exchange would be of interest to my readers — especially those involved in Media Literacy Education. When his article appears, I will provide a link here. I am also told a video of the opening event will be posted soon and I will embed it here when it is. I am going to be sharing some more reflections on that white paper and its legacy in the weeks ahead.

I will be posting the final segment of my interview with Doron Gailli on my blog on Wednesday. Sorry for the delay but I wanted to insure circulation of this time sensitive information.

UNESCO has been providing literacy education and emphasizing media literacy for a long time. This year, the theme of the MIL feature conference is ‘Resisting Disinfodemic’. UNESCO seems to be placing particular importance on combating the flood of disinformation during the current COVID-19 pandemic.

-Why do you think UNESCO decided to make the theme of the conference ‘Resisting Disinfodemic’?

Misinformation/disinformation is one of the biggest problems facing the world today, having a corrosive effect on many democratic countries, both because of active efforts by the Russians and other state players to divide their enemies and rivals, but also because of locally produced conspiracy theories and polarizing claims. As someone who studies participatory culture, I am particularly concerned by the ways that everyday citizens become involved in circulating (and in some cases producing) such disinformation in a world where young people get much of their information about the world through social media. We want to see every citizen more conscious and more accountable about the information they put into circulation and we want them to develop stronger discernment skills for verifying the reliability of sources upon which they depend. In both ways, media literacy can play a key role.

 What will you be emphasizing in your keynote speech for 2020 Global Media and Information Literacy Week Feature Conference? 

As always, I stress the agency of everyday citizens to make a difference in the world. I will be reflecting back on my white paper, Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture, which was published by the MacArthur Foundation sixteen years ago, showing how the key media literacy skills identified there remain essential in our own times by looking at how youth activists around the world are deploying those skills to make a difference on issues that matter to them. In many ways, the new youth activists – ranging from Greta Thunberg to Alexandria Ocassio-Cortez to Emma Gonzales of the March for Our Lives movement , to cite a few examples—are shaped by their acquisition and deployment of core skills in accessing, interpreting, critiquing, and deploying media (including popular culture) as resources for social change. I also argue that the three problems my report identified – the participation gap, the transparency problem, and the ethical challenges associated with new media – have not been addressed and create the context for our current problems with dis/misinformation.

The WHO has also been warning about a disinfodemic regarding COVID-19, and in fact, it does seem that a huge amount of disinformation about COVID-19 has been circulated, which has caused significant damage. 

-More people are being educated now than at any time in human history, and they also have greater access to tools that let them easily verify the source of the information. But still, the negative influence that disinformation is having is greater than ever. Why do you think this is happening?

I would bring this straight back to the lack of core media literacy skills. The tools are there. The access is there. We have social mechanisms for collectively verifying information. BUT the average citizen around the world has a limited grasp of how to use those tools effectively. I had a family member describe the conspiracy theory site, QAnon, as their prefered “fact checker,” showing a deep lack of understanding of the concept of media bias.  Young people get most of their information through social media: they act as each other’s filter, forwarding things to each other that they think are significant. Most of that news comes from traditional news agencies; some of it comes from websites which are deeply biased in their perspective; some come from people actively producing and circulating “fake news” (a term which has lost its impact through misuse by our political leaders). And the problem is they are all coming at us through the same social media platforms and consumed without much awareness of the original sources. We are seeing national political leaders forward misinformation without even asking their staff to verify the information – just because they thought it was interesting or shared with them by a supporter. So how do we expect young people to sort out the nature of this rapidly flowing content? Short answer – through acquiring and deploying core media literacy skills to filter content and by developing a sense of responsibility to their peers to insure the quality of information they put into circulation.

-Currently, many countries and companies are devising legal and technical solutions to cope with fake news and disinformation. Do you think they will work?

All of the experts agree – these solutions will help but they will not solve the problem. There is no substitute for an informed, engaged, and responsible public to hold each other and especially to hold themslves accountable for the quality of information they share with each other.

- What do you think is the most important media literacy skill in this age of post-truth so full of disinformation?

Judgement, which my white paper defined as “the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources..”  In a networked and participatory era, judgement is closely linked to several other skills: Collective intelligence, “the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal,”; Networking, “The ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information’ and Negotiation, “the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives.” In other words, judgement is not a skill that can be practiced by individuals in isolation from others. In a networked culture, we are mutually dependent on each other to insure the quality of our information environment and that includes engaging with people who bring different perspectives to bear on that information. The notion of  Negotiation, say, seems more and more urgent as we discover the very different realities that people of different races or living in different countries experience on a daily basis. If we are to weigh the caliber of information, we need to do so with eyes that question our own priviledge and our cultural isolation, listening to others whose perspectives and experiences differ radically from our own.

 Some have said that we have become excessively dependent on digital media, particularly with the decrease in in-person contact during the pandemic. There are also widening gaps between individuals' digital media usage capabilities.

- What do you think is the wisest attitude to take towards using the media during the current pandemic, which doesn’t look as if it is ending any time soon?

The lockdown has revealed the flaws in arguments based on the concept of “screen time.” Our concern should not be ultimately about the screen and what it is doing to us. Our focus should be about what activities we are performing through those screens. Right now, most of our day is screen time, but we are using screens for a broad range of purposes, from work and education to socializing and recreation. And this has always been the case. Similarly, the old argument was that the screen was isolating and to blame for our lack of interaction with others in our community. Today, we are socially distanced and many of us turn to the digital as the only means of maintaining social contact with the most important people in our lives. Covid-19 has turned many myths about digital media on their head. So, the wisest attitude comes back to the idea that what we do with and through media is far more important in shaping our lives than suspicions about what media is doing to us (the tired old media effects arguments). We need to think through our choices and use media responsibily. But right now, for the short term at least, we have no choice but to rely on screen media for many of the core functions of our society. Beyond that, as you note, we should be concerned with questions of equality of access and participation, which are impacting who has access to education, who can apply for jobs, who is isolated from their communities, etc. The impact of what I call the Participation Gap has never been clearer than it is at this moment and the question there is what we as a society are going to do about it.

-Classes in a lot of schools are being replaced with online education. This, in some ways, increases educational gaps between students. As online education spreads across the world, what do you think is the new media literacy capability? 

Many of us anticipated this situation two decades ago. We urged the development of rich educational resources and activities that took advantage of the affordances of the new media environment. We called for professional development to prepare teachers to teach under these conditions. We supported research to better understanding how learning might most effectively occur online. For the most part, none of these things were supported by key decision-makers effecting education. They were blindsided by a problem some of us saw coming twenty years before. A key element in our vision for online education was the importance of media literacy. This is what we called the transparency problem. Just because you are using media does not mean you automatically understand how it works or the role it plays in your life or how to use It effectively to serve your ends. Most young people lack mentorship in how to deal with the complex social and ethical issues they encounter with online communities. We have already discussed the impact of limited skills and personal responsibility over processing news and other information which flows through our social media platforms. So, to create online education without developing robust media literacy training is criminal (or at least should be).

 As someone who created the term Convergence Culture, you have been speaking up about the use of today’s convergent media for a long time. 

-You have emphasized the importance of users’ capability to participate independently and actively rather than the technology for convergent media itself. What do you think is required in order to have this kind of capability?

I would question the use of the term, “independently,” in the above. My work stresses collective rather than individual agency. I describe the new media literacies as social skills and cultural competencies because they refer to things which are best achieved through networks. The modern world is too complex for us to go it alone. None of us know everything, most of us know somethings, and what we need to learn is to share knowledge, debate the quality of information, and teach each other the skills we need to survive. We see something like that occuring in the most robust participatory culture communities – whether it is the norms and practices that have grown up around Wikipedia, the multiple forms of literacy involved in participating in a fan fiction site like Archive of Our Own, or the sharing of technical skills and resources in an affinity space like those surrounding Minecraft. These are places where people learn from each other and at the same time hold each other accountable. 

-How can gaps between users in an interactive media environment be reduced?

First, we need to recognize that the problem goes beyond technical skills and access, as important as these are in the contemporary world. Governments often feel they have solved the problem by insuring access through schools and libraries, but this creates a different kind of gap since those who have access at home have different relationships to these platforms and practices than those who only have limited access through schools. And the problem is not simply technical. The participation gap is concerned with social and cultural obstacles. Do you have the skills you need to participate? Do you know how to find the most meaningful communities to help you learn and grow? Do people listen to you when you post things or are you facing systemic forms of descrimination? Do you feel entitled to create and share media with others? Do you have the mentorship you need to help guide you to make the right choices when you go online? And so forth. These are, again, not questions of technical skill development but of media literacy. 

 The concept of the media audience is changing from consumers to “prosumers”, and the idea of participatory media that you have been emphasizing for a long time is now widely recognized.

- You have emphasized the role of the user's participatory culture and collective intelligence in media use. Is the ability to participate sensibly something that can be acquired naturally through the use of new media, or is it something to be nurtured through new literacy education?

The idea that young people acquire the skills they need on their own through axccess to digital media is a myth. The result is that there is a generation of feral children of the internet who have been raised by the wolves of Web 2.0 and toxic game culture. This myth lets the adults off the hook: how could we help if our children are digital natives and we are simply digital immigrants? Children still need guidance, adults helping them acquire needed skills, competencies, and literacies and providing help in confronting complex problems as they arise. We do not give them the support we need through either a laissez-faire (emphasis on lazy) response or through one which involves spying on children. Our young people do not need us snooping over their shoulders; they need us watching their back. And yes, this requires media literacy education whether formalized through schools or informal through parental advice or the kinds of participatory culture communities I discussed above.

- Participatory culture has been spreading widely, with users who used to be audience members are now acting as content producers. Previously, education has been conducted mainly on the premise of embracing the media as trusted sources, but now there are arguments that media education that is appropriate in terms of “prosumers” is required. What do you think should be new in media education regarding this matter?

We would not consider someone as literate if they can read but not write. We should not consider them as media literate if they can not produce as well as consume media. But in a network culture, this consumption/production frame doesn’t go far enough. They need the skills required to meaningfully participate in this media environment, which include skills around negotiating differenes as they move across communities, processing information collectively, taking ownership over the quality of information they circulate, and using networks to effectively mobilize others to help confront social problems.  These are some of the core literacy needs for people who are going to live and work in a networked culture.

You have emphasized users' agency rather than media technology in Convergence Culture, but in today's social media and the media environment, which is so highly focused on customized algorithms, I think algorithms created by tech companies have greater influence than individuals. 

- In a situation where we are surrounded by 'invisible algorithms', which have a huge impact on users' content consumption, what are the greatest needs in terms of media literacy at both the individual and societal levels?

For sure, alogrithmic manipulation represents a serious challenge to the capacity of individuals and communities to exercise agency in a digital environment. One challenge here is that so few of us understand how these algorithms work, what roles they play in shaping the choices available to us and channeling us in certain directions. It is not that we can not take collective action to restrict or resist the use of algorithims but it is that they are so little understood by most people around the world. We can not take collective action against an enemy we can not see, whose actions remain hidden as trade secrets, and whose core assumptions often start from racist and sexist foundations. So, as with so many problems, the first step has to be a more robust media literacy program – not just for youth but for the society at large. Media literacy here is not enough, though. We can’t simply read our way past these algorithims. We are going to need to take collective action to shift governmental and corporate policies that are adversely effecting our lives. We are probably not going to get rid of algorithimns but we do need to build in safeguards that protect our privacy, allow for meaningful overrides, and insure greater transparency, among other things. But these goals can only be pursued by an educated citizenry.

I found your discussion with Sonia Livingstone very interesting.

-What do you think is the most significant thing about 'digital natives' that many adults misunderstand?

Let’s start with the offensive assumptions about “natives” and “immigrants” that shape how these terms are understood. Digital Natives is in effect a theory of the noble savage straight out of 19th century settler mythology. Digital Immigrant starts from the premise that immigrants know nothing and bring nothing of value to the new world – in short, a kind of digital nativism, Hopefully, few of us would accept those premises about actual indigeneous peoples or immigrants, so why should we accept them in response to the digital world. Beyond that, the myth assumes that all youth have equal access to digital networks, that they acquire skills directly from their use of those technologies with any reflection or guidance, and that the skills they acquire are adequate to dealing with the complex problems they are confronting. None of these things are true. And these myths let adults off the hook from any responsibility to provide assistance and guidance, to learn enough themselves so they can help their children. And given how long we have lived in the digital era at this point, do people automatically lose everything they acquired as “digital natives” when they become adults or have we crossed the point where many adults can not longer be meaningfully discussed in those terms. The best participatory culture communities are those where youth and adults learn from each other without strong enforcement of assumptions based on age. 

-What do you think the adult generation, who are digital immigrants, have to teach the digital native generation, and what should they learn from them?

Well, for starters, the generation of parents today grew up playing Super Mario Brothers, hanging out in chatrooms, and engaging with fan discussion lists. They have plenty of practical experience with many of the social issues their children encounter online even if they do not know specific platforms, like Twitch or TicToc. If there ever was a generation of digital immigrants who were as clueless as they are often described, that generation is now the grandparents, not the parents. Beyond that, there is great wisdom in the elders about human relations, about traditional literacies and research skills, which can help guide youth’s online choices. The anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote in the 1950s that grandparents will have experienced an enormous amount of dramatic change in their lifetime and we should rely on them more to think through how we adjust to change. We also find something powerful takes places when adults and youth interact with each other online around shared interests and passions, such as within fandom or gaming, without a fixed relationship (like parent-child or Teacher-Student) but rather a fluidity where expertise and skill is transferred back and forth across generations. Our fears about stranger often gets in the way of such interactions. But if it takes a village to raise a child off-line, the same is true online, and many youth are finding their mentors or wide elders through such relations.

Although active participation among users has increased greatly in the current interactive media environment, social polarization is becoming more severe and communication between groups with different views is becoming more difficult. It seems that the active participation culture alone is not enough. What media capabilities are newly required in this interactive media environment?

This brings us to what I call the ethical challenge. The technology enables our participation, but it does so without regard to whether we adopt forms of participation that are socially constructive or destructive. The rapid growth of the internet population meant that there was not any system for enculcating shared ethical values. We have put massive communication capacity into the hands of people who have never used it before, who have not been encouraged to reflect on their obligations to each other or to be accountable to the information they put into circulation. And not surprisingly, some of them are using that capacity in very irresponsible ways. The dark side of the web is very real and having bad effects on our culture. The solution is to focus more attention on how we build up ethical norms within these communities and how the community holds its members accountable for those violations. The idea of self-regulation through norms and social contracts is much more acceptable among digital paticipants than legal regulation and thus apt to be more effective in the long run. Here, again, all roads lead back to media literacy education as a space where people can have such discussions and internalize a different set of values for their online lives.

Rewriting the History of Television: An Interview with Doron Galili (Part Two)

You write, “Significantly, they [“the electricians, physicists, telegraph technicians, and engineers” invested in developing television] worked in almost complete isolation from the lanternists, photographers, opticians, mechanics, chemists and showmen who were to become the pioneers of cinema.” Why? What were the consequences of this isolation? 

One of the main things that I was curious about as I started this project was the simultaneous emergence of cinema and television. As technological histories show us, the origins of both animated photography and moving image transmission can be traced back to the 1870s and 1880s, and I was fascinated by the fact that although we typically think of television as a twentieth-century post-cinematic cultural phenomenon, it shares the same historical origins as cinema. Hence, early on in my research, I was looking for historical materials that could give an idea about how the projects of developing cinematic and transmission technologies had intersected in their very first years. To my surprise, what I found in popular and scientific magazines suggested rather that the professional circles that mobilized the respective two projects hardly overlapped at all and had very limited exchanges. 

On the most basic level, the distinction is simply on a professional basis. On the one hand, the challenge of realizing image transmission devices was primarily an electrical engineering enterprise; on the other, the pioneers of projected animated pictures, fromEadweard Muybridge and Émile Reynaud to the Lumière brothers, came from the fields of photography, optics, projection, and experimentations with vision.

In terms of media practices, too, the conception of television as a visual variant of the telephone placed it in a different realm from the popular spectacle context of early cinema. Yet this separated manner in which the two moving image media were originally conceived seems to me to hold a deeper significance to media historiography. It requires us to revise the old story about the origins of the moving image and acknowledge that parallel to the lineage of the so-called pre-cinematic toys and lantern shows ran a completely different historical trajectory of developing moving image media within the context of electrical telecommunications.

You suggest the two media give us an opportunity to revise older distinctions between storage and transmission media. How so?

The distinction between the fundamental technological affordances of recording and transmission is quintessential in media theory. Versions of it may be found in canonical texts such as Harold Innin's work on forms of writing, James Carey’s famous article on the telegraph, or McLuhan’s media metaphors of the nervous system. William Uricchio has demonstrated how this distinction is key in defining the ontological difference between film and television, which he influentially described as technologies of storage and simultaneity, respectively. However, the more I read into the early history of television and its relation to cinema, I felt that this distinction risks distracting us from crucial overlaps and cross-influences in the history of the moving image.

To be clear, I am not trying to suggest the distinction is wrong – but I find that in several important historical moments in their development the two media were not necessarily thought of as distinct. It is easy for us today to think of technological amalgamations in the form of VCR or TiVo, two technological forms that certainly trouble the binary opposition or recording/transmission. Likewise, it has become clear that today’s digital media operations such as buffering make it hard to draw a line between recording and transmission. But looking at the early history of moving image media, we see that recording and transmission were not taken to be mutually exclusive long before existing media technologies were combined into single multimedia systems. 

Overlaps and amalgamations were actually fundamental in thinking about the prospects of both film and television from their very beginning. Let us recall that hybrids of recording and transmission media existed before the first experiments with moving image transmission. Most important among those is probably Morse’s contribution to communication media, which was fundamentally a combination of telegraphic transmission with a writing mechanism. In similar fashion, some technicians speculated as early as the 1890s about combining televisual technologies with photographic devices, suggesting that they could produce records of transmitted moving images. During the same period, many commentators wrote about innovations in the field of moving image transmission not necessarily as marking the emergence of a new medium but simply as an inevitable future formation of film.

Furthermore, when the first prototypes of television were in place in the 1920s, film proved to be a crucial component in transmission systems. The earliest broadcasts carried by American experimental television stations consisted of filmed footage, that better suited the slow speed of the scanning devices

Thus, even if the differences between storage and transmission were self-evident from the start, the boundaries appeared quite flexible. This is important to note not only because it allows us to sketch a richer historical narrative of media configurations and transformations but also because it throws in question some of our most basic definitions of medium-specific traits.

Television became associated with liveness, largely contra the filmic mummification of time, not because of essential attributes of the medium, but because of discursive, intermedial, and institutional conditions that actually came into being at a fairly late state in the history of moving image transmission. 

Science fiction was taking shape alongside these fantasies (utopian and dystopian) of communication across distance. No wonder that Hugo Gernsback, considered the father of American science fiction, was also associated with the amateur radio movement and popular technoculture more generally. What might you tell us about the relationship between emerging technology and emerging genres in this instance? 

Indeed, the first ideas about the electrical transmission of moving images coincided with the rise of the science fiction genre in the late nineteenth century. Numerous sci-fi stories from the period my book covers speculated on future worlds and new formations of technologized environments and social realities in whic htelevisual devices are ubiquitous. Over the years, the genre came to play an important role in popularizing the idea of television, and I suspect that by the beginning of the twentieth century the reading public considered moving image transmission not as a fantasy but as an inevitable and imminent development in modern media technology.

I am interested in the early fictional depictions, therefore, not as prophecies that got the future of media correctly or incorrectly, but rather as commentaries on their own time. Imaginary scenarios about telectroscopes and telephonoscopes – whether they allow for long distance communication, the viewing of operas from afar, or tyrannical panopticon-like surveillance – reveal something about the period’s attitudes towards modernization and technology’s increasing impact on all aspects of everyday life. It is fascinating in particular to see how the early science fiction writers anticipatedby several decades of theoretical discourses on the power of technologically-mediated gaze, the globalization of cultural production, and surveillance and political control. 

            There are, to be sure, fundamental similarities between how fiction writers and inventors approach media technologies. Much like how science fiction authors speculate on the traits of future technologies, the engineers and technicians who develop new media forms also work with an imaginary configuration in mind (sociologists of technology call it “technological imaginary”). In some cases, we can trace direct lines of influence between fictional depictions and technical developments, as imaginary depictions may very well become one of the sources for ideas that inspire technicians’ experimentations. For example, when John Perry and W. E. Ayrton published their design for a system of “seeing by telegraphy” in 1880 they noted that the inspiration came from the now classic 1878 cartoon of the “telephonoscope” from Punch magazine. 

            Hugo Gernsback is a wonderful example for how imaginary forms of television coexisted in the realms of technology and of fictional writings. His radio station WRNY started operating experimental television broadcasts as early as 1928.

But Gernsback had been interested in television – both as a technology and a fictional trope –for two decades by that point. The various magazines that he published offered information about electrical technologies as well as science fiction stories – sometimes in the very same volume. As early as in December 1909, he published a survey of the state of the art in television development in Modern Electric In 1911, his science fiction serial (that was eventually published as a novel) Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660, depicted several different moving image transmission devices including ones for point to point communication and for theatrical display.

Gernsback continued to write on the topic and to revise his views on the future of the medium way into the 1930s, amassing an oeuvre that uniquely chronicles the dynamic changes in concepts of television. (The Perversity of Things, a volume of Gernsback’s works edited by Grant Wythoff, includes a lot of his fascinating works on television).

Reading this book at the current moment, how might we understand the increased popularity of Zoom to these older fantasies about point-to-point audiovisual connection across geographic distances?

This is a very good question, because the book came out in February 2020, the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic, which meant that the backdrop of current conversations about transmitted images abruptly shifted. When I thought about current changes in television as I was finishing the book, what mostly came to mind was the increasingly important place that streaming services have been occupying in our mediascape. Soon afterwards, though, for many of us the predominant form of moving image experience has become video-conferencing platforms like Zoom. This certainly brings to mind the earliest ideas about televisual communication when, long before the idea of broadcasting came up, the medium was conceived as a visual variant of point-to-point telephony. It might be tempting, therefore, to see our present as a return to the “original” or “true” essence of the medium

But we ought to be careful about making such broad historiographic claims, and so I find myself rather thinking of today’s shifts in media uses in the context of the dialectical relationship between physical distance and media. Simply put, even if the function of telecommunications media remains more or less the same – that is, enabling virtually instantaneous communication at a distance – the cultural meanings of distance and the social functions of audiovisual transmission keep changing. 

As I show in the book, the initial conceptions of seeing at a distance in the late nineteenth century were intimately linked to colonialism, the formation of global capitalist markets, massive migration, and new forms of transportation. Think, for example, of the common statement about “the annihilation of space and time.” This trope was not coined in order to describe telecommunications (it referred earlier on to God as well as to capital), but the coming of telegraphy and its offshoots certainly appeared to fulfill the desires for total speed and unlimited territorial expansion.

Frequently, nineteenth-century fictional depictions of television illustrated how the technology could link the European imperial centers with distant colonies and allow the middle classes to take full advantage of market and entertainment opportunities worldwide. This notion has been somewhat revised in the twentieth century. I found a brilliant magazine article from 1912, where the author complains about the crowded streets and jammed roads of modern metropolitans, suggesting that electrical technology can resolve such annoyances by allowing most work to be done from home without requiring excessive commute and face to face interactions. Isn’t this kind of thinking neatly applicable to today’s experience?

Today, given the pandemic, closeness rather than distance has become a problem, and as our societies seek technological solutions, the media forms that were famed for annihilating space are now used to literally give us some space. So whereas there are striking similarities between how we today conduct faculty meetings via zoom and how, for example, journalists in the 1892 novel The Twentieth Century report the news to their editors via portable telectroscopes, I am tempted to say that these similarities actually highlight the changes in the very conceptual framework in which we use media. Media can both cancel the distance between people and allow to expand it, and distance itself can be either a problem or a solution. 

Rewriting the History of Television: An Interview with Doron Galili (Part One)

What is television? Where does it come from? When does television begin? These are questions which are addressed by Doron Galili’s compelling new book, Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939. The answers may surprise many readers whose casual assumptions about the nature of this medium are disrupted by this deep historical dive into how television took shape as a concept in the late 19th century and the complex ways that television intercepts other communication systems, not just radio or cinema but also the telegraph and the telephone.

Right now, what we mean by television is in radical flux as more cord-cutters and streaming services alter how we access television content and what technologies we use to engage with it. This book suggests television (as a concept and a reality) has always been more unstable than we might have imagined and that there have always been multiple and conflicting ideas about what television is.

In this interview, Doron Galili gives us a glimpse into the rich content of this significant new contribution to media history. We even consider Zoom as a platform which comes close to the original conception of television.

Many American histories of television start with the public demonstrations at the 1939 New York World’s Fair but your subtitle, “The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939,” suggests your book ends where those books start. How would you sum up this earlier period? What does television mean in this context?

The 1939 World’s Fair has become an effective starting point for American television histories because as part of the event, NBC inaugurated their regular television broadcast services, introducing it for the first time to the general public.  To be sure, what people saw in 1939 was still not quite television broadcasting as we know it today – for example, the broadcasts were not yet commercial (that is, ad supported) and in the early years only viewers in the New York area could receive the transmissions. But that moment arguably marks the beginning of television as a mass medium in America.

What I explore in the book is rather the history of television prior to its deployment as a mass medium. I looked into the earliest stages of the history of television, starting in the late nineteenth century with the first ideas regarding electrical technologies of “seeing by electricity,” through the period of technological experimentation with television, and ending with the beginning of the first television broadcast services in the 1930s. In so doing, the book concerns a large variety of televisual media that existed – in speculative or experimental fashion – before the coming of what we typically identify as television.

Therefore, to answer your question, I would say that the initial meaning of television was in the broadest sense the electrical transmission of moving images at a distance. During the six decades the book covers, this idea of moving image transmission – an idea that predated electronic screens, network broadcasting, and even wireless transmission – acquired a myriad of meanings, which continuously altered between different historical moments and cultural contexts, until eventually the 1930s saw the formation of the medium-specific attributes that we came to recognize as television. 

Yet I do not consider the book to be a pre-history of television. I think it is vital to understand the speculative and experimental periods as integral parts of the history of television. Our present moment actually makes a strong case for this: in the recent decade, media scholars have been addressing yet another set of transformations in the medium-specific identity of television as we find ourselves in a post-broadcast / post-network era. These current media changes compel us to come to terms with what television means now – textually, culturally, technologically, ideologically – and it is crucial to recall that the stable meaning of broadcast-era television was not a natural state of things but itself a product of a of long period of transformations and negotiations.  

Marshall McLuhan has said “media are often put out before they are thought out.” Might we say the opposite is true in the case of television?

There was most certainly a lot of thought given to television before any TV program aired. 

In my research I found that not only did inventors, electrical engineers and broadcasters think through challenges of realizing the technology and planning programs, but also critics, filmmakers, novelists, and eventually academics and regulators engaged in speculations about possible uses of the medium and its social effects. For example, Edward Bellamy describes in his 1897 novel Equality (the sequel to his famed Looking Backwards) a medium for seeing at a distance dubbed the “electroscope.” In Bellamy’s utopia, the electroscope is not used for entertainment or for surveillance but rather for taking virtual trips around the world and for attending at a distance a lecture about life in socialist economy (yes, there was a time when distant learning was part of utopian thought…).

In a very different context, RCA’s David Sarnoff dedicated many popular articles during the 1930s to laying out his vision about the part broadcasting would play in America’s future. As Sarnoff saw it, television would promote the democratization of culture and allow societies to evolve, since it would make it possible for people of all classes to enjoy the finest operas.

During the same decade, in the United States and elsewhere, government regulation got into the picture. Regulators defined how broadcasting services should function and set formal protocols for transmission stations. Thus, by the time television services began, all the details about the operation of the medium were already in place, including the number of channels approved to air programs, their frequencies, picture resolution, technical specs for receiver sets, and of course rules regarding commercializing television services. 

            Hence the case of early television history fascinatingly problematizes the very idea of “putting out” a medium. It is easy for us (as I suspect it was for McLuhan back in the day, too) to think of new media inventions that took us by storm. Take for example the World Wide Web, which became part of so many aspects of our lives within just a few years, or the cinema, which one century beforehand became a global success within less than a decade from its invention.

The emergence of television is a much slower-moving narrative: almost half a century passed between the publication of the initial ideas about the electric transmission of images and the first demonstrations of working prototypes of television systems; even after that, it took more than a decade before the appropriate infrastructure, mass marketing of sets, and regulatory approval enabled the launch of broadcasting services. 

In what ways is the public anticipation of television linked to the telephone and the telegraph, with which it shares the same prefix?

The very idea of transmitting moving images by electricity can be traced back to responses to Bell’s invention of the telephone in 1876. Once Bell demonstrated that it is possible to send sound virtually instantaneously by wires, numerous commentators, authors, illustrators, and technicians began speculating on the prospects of doing the same with images. This is, by the way, not a historiographical interpretation or speculation (even if I’d have loved to own it as such) – we actually have quite a few documents from the nineteenth century where writers explicitly make this connection.

The telephone, thus, provided a model for both the first imaginary uses of televisual media and its technological design. Early depictions of moving image transmission devices were themselves multimedia constructs, as they often took the form of a visual supplement to point-to-point telephone communication (this way, they anticipated something more similar to facetime than to broadcast television). 

As early as the late 1870s, technicians attempted to create schemes for visual communication devices that emulated the manner in which the telephone captures sound and converts it to electrical signals that could be relayed and reconstituted on the other end of the line. This, of course, introduced a host of new problems, including finding a light-sensitive substance and dissecting images to pixels that could be sent linearly, but the technologies that eventually materialized do follow this model. Many of the early names given to the still-inexistent medium were based on the “tele-״prefix, and so before 1900 one could encounter accounts of the telectroscope, telephonoscope, telephote etc.

            But the telephone analogy is important for the history of television for another reason. While television was conceived as a visual extension of telephony, the telephone itself was invented as an extension of yet another “tele” medium, the telegraph network, to which Bell added the ability to carry audible communications. What we see, then, is a trajectory that starts way back in the 1830s with the invention of the electric telegraph, continues in the 1870s with the telephone, and soon after points towards the introduction of televisual transmission of images. That is not to say that we should be simplistic in tracing the emergence of television and imagine a linear trajectory of improvement that moves towards multimedia perfection; but this notion is definitely valuable for shedding light on the terms in which the emergent medium was understood in real time. That is, the telegraph network was viewed in the nineteenth century as allowing the “annihilation of space and time” and creating what McLuhan later termed “the global village” and these notions to a great extent also informed the popular anticipation of television. 

 Doron Galili is Researcher in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. He is the author of Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939 (Duke University Press, 2020) and coeditor of Corporeality in Early Cinema: Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form (Indiana University Press, 2018). He holds a PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago andpreviously taught at the Cinema Studies Program at Oberlin College.

Making Meaning of the Meanings We Make Online: An Interview with Robert Kozinets (Part Four)

We’ve had some very generative conversations through the years about the similarities and differences between fandom studies and consumer research (specifically in its cultural/qualitative forms). How would you characterize the relations between the two? 

I think people in marketing are fascinated by the work you do, they know it, and they know fandom studies mainly through you and your works. We’ve both been chipping away over the years in slightly different ways at the differences between consumer research and cultural studies. For instance, you put more pragmatic work and examples into material like Convergence Culture as you engaged more with people like Grant McCracken and me, and I started a career in marketing with cultural studies types investigations, in part thanks to your mentorship and works. I think you helped open up a part of media studies that was not reactively hostile to business and business school scholars. In my experience, surprising numbers of the business school academics (especially postmodern accountants) are as critical and even Marxist as any academic. 

Marketing has a drift towards economics and psychology. A part of cultural studies maybe hasn’t quite escaped critical theory and the Frankfurt School’s gravity field, I don’t know, I could be wrong about that. So, I’d say the two fields are sort of strange attractors in terms of topic matter like popular culture, but they also have philosophies at their cores that push them away from each other. Nonetheless, they get closer at times, such as when people publish work that crosses over, using brands or cultural studies ideas, like you sometimes see in consumer culture theory work, and more frequently see in journals like the Journal of Consumer Culture, or Consumption, Markets, and Culture. We don’t yet have much of a formal crossover. Words like brand fans get thrown around a bit, without rigor. A notable exception was the article by Matthew Guschwan (2013) that we used in our co-taught class, and there are a number of others. I like to think that, as the word “brand” and its study no longer carry quite the same stigma in the field of communication and media studies as they once may have, and that as marketing and consumer researchers continue to embrace critical, positional, and transformative perspectives, that we can see these fields meeting more, and maybe even a coherent subfield start to form. Wouldn’t that be a nice thing?

You end the book with a quote from William Gibson about the relationship between terrorism and the media. It’s a provocative end point. How do you see the relationship between netnography and terrorism? Whose interests does the netnographer serve? To what degree is the goal to be a “troublemaker,” to point towards another key word that crops up near the end of the book? 

This is the most important question, isn’t it? Whose interests does the netnographer serve? The netnographer, or the team of netnographers, should serve a moral interest, I think, and they should speak the truth to power, publicly, as best and as much as they can. I developed netnography first in order to understand fans, to be able to get closer to the worlds that they experience and to empathize with them. At the time I was doing my dissertation on Star Trek fans, there was a researcher who was getting a lot of press with a study showing that Star Trek fans were pathological, that they had some kind of social deficiencies. That research, which was terrible for so many reasons, including methodologically, infuriated me. With my netnography collecting data using email conversations, I was able to openly explore topics relating to stigma in the Star Trek and fan community in a way that would have been much more awkward to handle in person. In person, I was seeing things, like debates over the Star Trek uniform, that were very revealing. Online, I was able to get very detailed confessional type tales that unpacked what I had seen in person, many of which I found heart-breaking and inspirational at the same time. So, from the beginning, for me, netnography was, like ethnography, about serving the interests of social and individual betterment, in particular, about finding empathy with groups that might be treated by mainstream thinkers or groups from a distance as pathological or wrong. A recent netnography I did with Ulrike Gretzel and Anja Dinhopl looked at how art museum consumers used selfies of themselves with art in order to elevate and play with their identities. That work, which was published in a psychology journal, contradicted a raft of work on selfies that looked at as a narcissistic pursuit, a pathology. Again, the goal of much academic netnography is to humanize, to promote understanding and empathy, to enlarge our viewpoints. I think that’s why netnography has been used to study some difficult to reach groups like illegal drug users and  people on the dark web, teen drinkers, and challenging topics like sexting or online violence and extremism. 

            Of course, netnography is an effective tool. It works for building a deeper human understanding than you get with many other methods. So, it is employed and has been developing in relation to the needs of industry to understand its consumers and potential customers. A lot of my work in marketing has been to hone it and demonstrate its effective use as a deeper and more effective tool for uncovering business insights. My early work showed how valuable that could be in understanding what consumers wanted and how you could innovative new product and services by applying it.

            And yes, I think that the use of netnography can be and often should be to disrupt. This world we live in is in desperate need of the right kinds of trouble, as John Lewis liked to say. I think a lot of modes of understanding that we use in science and business, the quantification and modeling used for prediction, the manipulation and control are having terrible effects on our society and our ways of relating with each other and the wider world around us. We need empathy. We need more questioning of fundamental assumptions. We need more connection with each other and with our own raw, difficult to handle feelings of fear and anger. We need more critical thinking and reflectivity that cuts to the root of many of our social problems and helps to envision collective solutions we can live with. I like to think that netnography can help to bring some of this mentality into the act of research, that we can keep the rigor of computer science, communication, and marketing modes, but add the empathy, troublemaking, and humanizing of ethnography. That’s not always the goal, but it is definitely one important goal.

We’ve just co-taught a class together on fan communities and brand communities, where we spoke to key fan representatives from different media industries. What were some of your take-aways from this process? What do you see as some of the common mistakes brands and media industries make in dealing with their fans/enthusiasts?

Oh, that is a fun thing to revisit after these several months have passed. It was interesting to see presenters do their normal things in front of the class until Spring break, and then after March, we were seeing people Zoom into class from their homes. We got a different, more intimate conversation with them because they were in their homes, with their pets and kids and stuff around them. I thought Britt Shotts, who manages the He-Man brand for Mattel, and recently managed the Jurassic Park brand, was a terrific guest (we had many). Her pet actually attacked the camera during the presentation, which was one of those perfect moments I will remember from our COVID semester.

What I got from Britt’s presentation and discussion was a sense of how canny she is, and Mattel is, in the way they have been listening to consumers. I don’t think this is typical. I think that many brands still use more traditional ways of keeping customers and their voices at a controllable level. They use social monitoring devices to look at mass conversations in word clouds and pie chart, they use focus groups and surveys to direct, tabulate, and process information before they see it. But I think they usually come to customers and fans with the attitude that they, as the producers, are the authorities and the experts. But it actually turns out that fan-consumers understand the brand and they care about it and its products. A lot. That’s where Britt was really refreshing, because her presentation captured this idea that the fans are the experts, and that her learning is sort of learning at their knees. She might pitch them, and then they might school her on the brand, what it means, what has been done in the past. She was a big Jurassic Park fan, so her fandom translated very naturally into her fan relations activities managing that brand for Mattel. But she had to gear up a lot when she was assigned to the He-Man brand, a very masculine and Anglo brand, and that’s where she had to really assume an attitude of listen and learn. And what she found, when she really listened, was that the He-Man was meaningful because he conveyed a sense of moral certitude to people. The brand relationship turned out to be a complex exchange.  Not simply a one-way relationship, where consumers give their money and companies toss them new stuff. She emphasized working with positive voices in the fan communities online, empowering them. She was very conscious of influencing the public conversation on social media, building these champions and influencers and empowering them, but also listening to criticism very carefully, which she recognized as a fine line. Real relationships are hard. Enduring brand relationships? Those are also hard.

In most businesses, the brand managers come and go every year or two, so it’s a revolving door for any particular brand. But the fans and devotees—they stay. When someone has been using a brand like Pepsi or Nike for a lifetime, it is like it is a part of their family. It isn’t just a drink or detergent, an economic resource or a trademark—it means something special and the people who are devoted to it use it because of that meaning. I think that there’s a very different way of seeing a brand when you sit at this managerial distance, where idiosyncratic brand meaning is something a manager is extrinsically motivated to cope with. They have to listen and try very hard to get out of that instrumentalist mind frame, not just with the products and brand, but with customers, too. It’s about empathy, again. What Britt said was that she tried to take fans on the manager’s journey, to let them into the production process, and that this was something they wanted to experience. She saw social media as a huge gift that managers have only very lightly begun to touch upon—and remember, this is for Mattel, a pretty big outfit. One of the great things she noted was that now, as people who are stuck at home with their toy collections are creating huge amounts of content online today, during COVID, managers are mostly stuck at home and can’t do photoshoots. And that “user-generated content” becomes incredibly valuable to the company under those circumstances. But all of it, she emphasized, was about partaking, with respect and empathy, in a cultural conversation. Not dictating it.

You and others in the Strategic Communication program have recently turned your attention to young activists, a topic we discuss often here. What were some of your core findings? How do you see brands connecting with activists in meaningful ways at the moment? Or is such an alliance possible?

I think that there’s currently a fascination throughout the social sciences and in industry with young activists because this seems to be where the cultural momentum is. I turn to your research on this, Henry, and point to what you have been telling us for a while in your books like By Any Media Necessary, and your work on the Harry Potter Alliance goes back a number of years before that. 

In my research, I see technology as an integrated part of this process. The current activist moment and the role of hashtags and online organization only emphasizes the power of the platforms and their algorithms again. I think the challenge for society is going to be how we manage to balance the desires of people for social change with the desires of managers and executives, including the large technology platform companies and their advertising and data driven business models and executives, to keep the economic and social systems stable. They want them stable so that they can continue to profit from them. If we take as a founding principle that things like racial justice and social justice are tied to environmental justice, then companies which are extensively using plastics, rare metals, and fossil fuels, companies that are extensively involved in wasting energy, companies that are founded on cheap, desperate, fungible, precarious labor domestically and abroad, might be in trouble. And there are a lot of those companies--it is just about all of them. It’s all of us, too. We are consumers hooked on and into an unjust system that is killing everything around us. Almost 70% percent of the living things that were around in 1970 are gone today. That is unthinkable, and should be unbearable, but human beings have increased their numbers and their footprints massively. Today, wildfires are destroying the wilderness of the entire West Coast. Tomorrow, it will be some new devastation. Eventually, our species pays the piper.

We aren’t really having a conversation about actually addressing the system changes that are required, that have been required for fifty years now. Environmental justice is currently being sold in America as a way to promote jobs and more economic growth and that is not going to solve the underlying problem. This isn’t a job creation crisis. Consumers and companies are institutionally very far along a path with a dark and fiery end. And, for their part, corporations, brands, and their governments and regulatory bodies base their responses to protest on lessons developed in propaganda wars. They have crisis communications set up to handle things like the George Floyd protests or the challenges of COVID lockdowns. They greenwash and release statements, lobby and hire influencers, or engage in cynical and sinister corporate social responsibility initiatives. They scan, detect, message, virtue signal, tamp down, and then carry on with business as usual. 

If people are seeking real change, fundamental change that encompasses social and environmental justice, they are not going to find it with the business or government institutions of today. A lot of young people today, globally, whatever their political inclinations or interests, realize this, and that’s why we are seeing this uptick in activism. And in response, institutions are doing what institutions are built to do, which is that they do everything they can to keep things from changing in a substantial way. Companies and brands cast change in terms of new energy projects, new plastic product innovations, new clear cuts of old growth forest, or new mining projects. I think we are going to see a toughening and a hardening of business and government institutions against activism, probably worldwide, as they continue to try to keep things in human society from changing radically away from rampant consumerism. As they have in the past, over the next few decades they will keep steering people towards solutions that involve the exact same systems that got us into this mess and that are now accelerating it. Whether accompanied by political sideshows and clowning, or war, or new health crises, the solution we will be sold will be to buy more stuff, double down on the stock market, deregulate business further so that the magical mystery market can perform its miracles, but all of it will keep stoking the capitalist industrial machines, burning and tearing up the natural world, and making the ultra-rich a whole lot richer. It isn’t going to be a smooth ride and, so far, I unfortunately don’t see the big brands of today doing anything other than rapaciously protecting the interests of their wealthy owners. The people who make decisions in business and government are, for the most part, terrified of a change that might reverse the “progress” that is devastating the environment and leading to new massive wealth increases among the already abominably wealthy. And as for the activism we see, I think it only feeds into ideological narratives of political suppression and ever-increasing consumerism. The way companies and government are managing the current unrest is working well for them, and it’s likely that the same tools of distraction, diversion, fear, and outrage will help them manage future unrest and keep on profiting from it. That seems like a rather sour note to end on, but maybe it is the most appropriate one of all.

Making Meaning of the Meanings We Make Online: An Interview with Robert Kozinets (Part Three)

A key concern in ethnographic research over the past few decades has been with positionality. In what ways does it matter if an ethnographer (or here, netnographer) is a part of, a participant in, the culture they study. How would you address this in your work, especially as you try to bridge between qualitative and quantitative approaches to consumer research?

Well, I had my postmodern stage, my panicky crisis of representation phase, and got it out of my system pretty early. But I kept the hermeneutics of it close to heart. I think most everything I do now from a methodological perspective, and everything you now see in the most recent edition of the netnography book depicted as interpretive data operations, all of that comes from a place of hermeneutic and introspective practice that is fundamentality based on a phenomenological appreciation for researcher positionality. I think netnography is shot through now, especially since my second book, with genuine attempts at rhetorical reflectivity. The whole emphasis on “auto-netnography”, which people like Liz Howard, the education nursing scholar who been developing the method in her dissertation and subsequent work, is based in this, and it is growing. This is about netnographers not just being reflexive in some methodological sense, but taking that to the level of being reflective, being seriously and deeply contemplative an axiological, a moral, and an intellectual sense. 

            As I write in the third edition (Kozinets 2020, 44-5), I was influenced by your early online ethnographies, in which you describe online discussions “that occur without direct control or intervention by the researcher” (Jenkins 1995, 53). So, it was not necessary to get in the fray, as it were, with every discussion, in order to hear these conversations and appreciate them, perhaps even to fully understand them. Even in person, we weren’t necessarily participating in every conversation we heard, or leading every discussion we recorded in our fieldnotes. At a Star Trek convention, for instance, I was often more comfortable sitting back, observing, and recording what I heard others say rather than socializing or asking questions (although I did plenty of both). 

When you boil it down, the idea of participation as it lives in ethnographic representation is based upon having a vantage point and making it rhetorically apparent. In netnography, that means having a point of view on these communicative events that involve you in the social, in the wider social experience, rather than necessarily being physically or even discursively active in some particular social field as you are in a typical in-person ethnography. So, when you read a recent netnography of mine, like the Networks of Desire netnography about food porn and food image sharing generally that I wrote with Rachel Ashman and Tony Patterson, you see that we try to blend together a lot of different perspectives through the research, but our own food and food image sharing habits aren’t included in the study. Being deeply engaged in a netnography means you keep some sort of record, some kind of creation, some notes about what you did, why you did it, what you found, what it made you think about, and so on. Engagement with the social can happen in many ways—intellectual, emotional, in your dreams, through conversations with people in your family and social group, as you scribble your notes and play with ideas. Record it, call it an immersion journal, and you have the raw material to engage with your positionality. Your online data gathering becomes able to handle the structuring of an intersectional case study interpretation that we commonly link to high quality netnography. 

In describing the terminological shifts between ethnography and netnography, you suggest a shift from “participation” to “engagement.” What’s at stake for you in this terminological shift? I would have argued that part of what the online world allows are deeper forms of participation within the culture rather than the relatively superficial forms of engagement historically discussed in audience research. But you seem to put different valiances of these two terms. 

What is at stake for me is exhaustion. I am flat out tired of trying to extend in person metaphors for in-person social gatherings to the massive array of digital possibilities we have to socialize and be a part of the social. Technologically mediated forms of sociality are blooming, like a massive gender reveal party explosion that has burned up a lot of prior intellectual investment, including the word “participation”. In an in-person ethnography, we know what it means to participate. At Burning Man, they have a rule: no spectators. So, you have to wear or not wear or do or share, do something outlandish, something active at least, don’t just lean back and watch at a consumers’ social distance from others and at a pathological distance from your own creative empathy. I had to be careful in my interviews and observations to be a part of the festival, because of the no spectators rule. If I wasn’t doing something overtly participative, people would have confronted me as a “lookie loo”, a tourist who is just there to gape, to take: a typical consumer, rather than an active creator of my own and others’ experiences.

But there is no analog like this that is practical in the online world of social media. Not everyone can be posting on every site, conversing with a particular crowd in public, because most people who go to those platforms or sites do not converse at all. What do you do when conversation is not allowed, or when it’s a blog dominated by the voice of the blogger? We aren’t in the socially flatter world of the bulletin board or forum any more. So, what is participation in this context? I prefer simple words native to the online realm, like engagement. What is at stake with that move is that people might confuse this new notion of engagement with the social media influencers’ engagement and reach. That’s not it. Engagement is about contextually appropriate types of participation, of course. I don’t mean to disrespect the word, or certainly leave out the ideas of participatory culture. But I do want to defamiliarize the term a bit in terms as we move the process of netnography further and further away from the old travelogue view of ethnography. It’s moving away from anthropology, towards computer science, towards communication, toward social psychology, it has been for years. 

            Certainly, hanging out online with a particular group, whether they are coffee aficionados, Lower Decks fans, or Pilipino European immigrants, learning their language, posting messages, participating with them regularly, is a very useful type of netnography. But, I don’t think that is the only way to do a netnography. There are plenty of great netnographies, like your own online work, where the authors describe it as “observational”. It’s a big tent, netnography. There’s room for lots of stuff, as long as it builds on prior methodological work, learns from it, extends it in specific and useful ways, and maintains the focus on empathy. I think the absolute key is to emphasize positionality, researcher reflectivity, this interpretation of your own involvement and how it shapes your work. You can even engage spread out among the social nodes online. You can engage emotionally only, in your own body, and reflect on that, like Annette Markham does in Life Online when she describes her wrist and neck adjusting to the supposed disembodiment of the online world, and the physicality of cybersex. It’s about the quality of the qualitative inquiry, not just one particular technique or set of them that you use to get there.

You write in the book, “I must make a request. If you want to follow guidelines that revisit netnography’s ethical rules and empathetic stance on the study of sensitive research topics, then please do not call your work a netnography. Because netnography is defined by its adherence to general and agreed-upon procedures., a netnography revisited in this matter is definitely not a netnography. It is something else entirely. Ethical procedures are at the very heart of what a netnography is and what it does.” (185) So, how would you characterize the ethical stance that guides netnography. Are current IRB standards adequate for promoting those ethical commitments?

That statement was a reaction to some damaging research that tried to dial back ethical procedures on netnography by claiming it was just the same as any other content analysis. As for your question, I mean, it completely depends upon the IRB. A particular IRB is only as good as its members and its guiding institution and sometimes the researcher, who might just be a PhD student asking for approval of their first piece of research or their dissertation, needs to engage with them and educate them. There’s a lot of diversity out there, but in general, if you are asking whether a typical IRB can handle a typical netnography It think the answer is absolutely, they are doing it around the world at a very regular rate now. We do it here at USC all the time and they have made it a pretty seamless process almost from the very beginning. And my books are there to help all of the stakeholders navigate the complexities of the process. The first edition of the netnography text by SAGE included a lengthy guide to informed consent, a sample form, and advice for IRB approval. The second developed a very detailed ethical research section with even more detail about representational choices. The current edition goes much further and puts it all into an easy-to-follow flowchart that helps the researcher navigate the procedures needed to be compliant. It covers ethical challenges and how to respond to them in detailed tables of terms, linked to definitions, intermixed with the research procedures, from site selection through to research publication, and the ethics flow is now a part of the procedures from start to finish. Any of this is available for researchers to use, and for IRB and Human Subjects Ethics Review Committees to consult and interpret. It’s intended to make the rule of qualitative social media research ethics comprehensible and straightforward to follow. It shouldn’t be a philosophical minefield to conduct humane human subjects research. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to clarify what the standards are and how even beginners to this kind of research can follow them. So, yes, if someone chooses to go their own way on ethics, say by revealing sensitive person data or deceiving people, then please do not call it a netnography. Following the book’s ethics guidelines, along with the other things I have spoken about in this interview, is a big part of what I think makes a particular piece of research a netnography and not something else.

Making Meaning of the Meanings We Make Online: An Interview with Robert Kozinets (Part Two)

You take us step by step through different media platforms, from Reddit to Tumblr, and discuss the different traditions for writing about them. How important is platform specificity to doing Netnographic work? What are the implications of platform specificity for the ability to compare “online traces” across multiple online locations?

It’s incredibly important. In the same way you can’t really understand a particular human culture without understanding the constraints and influence of things like geography, climate, and technical skills, you need to understand the techno-social situation that surrounds online socialities. I think we are at a very early stage of conceptualizing this kind of comprehension. We’ve had quite a few Facebook and Twitter netnographies already, and it would be enormously interesting to me if someone were to look back at them as a group and track how the development of the particular affordances of the sites helped to create the types of cultural experiences and behaviors that were noted over time. I touch on it a little in the book, leaning on José van Dijck’s (2013) very useful Culture of Connectivitybook. But there’s much more that could be done. Peter Lugosi and Sarah Quinton coined the nice term “more-than-human netnography” to capture the idea that algorithms, platform affordances, AI, and other non-human actors and agencies should be included into netnographies. This work is also at a very early, but promising and exciting, stage. 

The second part of your question asks about whether and how we can compare traces about related topic and peoples across different platforms. It’s potentially very valuable to think about how context creates content online, or how medium influences message. Most netnographic research still rather unproblematically scoops up online traces from multiple platforms and then analyzes their content and meaning without much attention to the various contexts that created those traces—platform-specific, but also cultural, subcultural, socio-economic, historical. Those comparisons of circulations between what Mirca Madianou and Danny Miller call polymedia, the confederated bricolaged conglomerations of various platforms that people use in their panoply of communications and socialities with one another, are another very rich area for future investigation. Like many things, we are still beginning to ask the right questions and build our own understanding of the substantive and methodological implications of things like platform specificity and its impacts. 

So much industry work on the consumers of products or media properties assumes individual and autonomous decision-makers. Yet, you stress your borrowings from Cultural Studies which has historically concerned itself with collective behavoir. So, how do you explain to the industry why the social and cultural relations amongst consumers matter?

Look at the research I was involved with at both ESPN Zone and at The American Girl Place, both on the Magnificent Mile in Chicago, a few blocks from where I was teaching in the Kellogg School of Management’s Marketing program at the time. When John Sherry, Nina Diamond, Mary Ann McGrath, Adam Duhachek, Diana Storm, Benét DeBerry-Spence, Stefania Borghini, Al Muniz, and Krittinee Nuttavuthisit and I conducted that ethnographic retail research over several years, we were emphasizing the role of people’s imaginations, their fantasy lives, and the role that Disney branded cable channel celebrity, and sport cultures, and female perspective historical fiction and Mattel doll culture, played. Men might be ostensibly sitting in gigantic armchairs eating burgers and trying to watch 21 screens of sports at once, but they also were consuming sports narratives of history and heroism in which they were very active imaginative players. The same thing was true of young girls, their moms and grandmothers dining in the American Girl Store’s restaurants with their dolls. They were consuming notions of civility, of morality, of being grounded in history and traditions that meant something and in which they, themselves, were actively imagining and building that history.

My chosen field is consumer research, which is dominated by psychologists and economists and their paradigms and methodologies, but somewhat open to new approaches if they can deliver insights that business people find valuable. So we had a pioneers in our fields of consumer cultural research like Sidney Levy who were way ahead of the crowd in explaining brands, perhaps even inventing the word in its modern usage, according to Philip Kotler. They argued and still argue against the idea that consumers were somehow rational or autonomous in their decisions, rather than the super-social cultural critters we mostly know ourselves to be. 

After the internet become mainstream, it became a lot easier for me to explain to MBA students and business people what the meso level of analysis is and why it matters to them. The notion of brand communities identified a real feeling in the world of brand managers, that there was a chance to fully insert brands into people’s socialities. This expanded imaginative real estate really opened a lot of managers eyes and got them salivating. The business research world knew about it as soon as there were social monitoring services and software to automate the data as it became more voluminous and towards big data handling capacities.

What all that data said to managers was—here is an opportunity to study your consumers, to model their behavior in order to predict and nudge, test, experiment, predict and nudge again. The goal was the same thing it always has been for companies, to manage the customer experience. Industries and governance institutions, regulatory bodies, they were all about regulating human experience by placing it into the context of consumers, their needs, and consumption. What happened is that these was an assumption that the behaviors of unruly consumer tribes could be managed by invoking the C-word: community. So at the same time things were seeming a bit out of control with the internet, there were countervailing discourses in business academe which were saying that people were being brought together by brands, that they loved brands, that their mutual adoration and devotion to brands was bringing society itself together. If you are a brand manager who has been taught in your business school that building the sociocultural and motivational architecture of consumers’ demand-based mentalities is part of what marketers do, then this is music to your ears. 

So much of today’s social media assumes and facilitates transnational communication, yet markets have historically been understood within national boundaries. What can you tell us about the tension between global media circulation and national specificities in doing netnographic research?

Almost from the start, people started doing netnography wherever they were. The technologies were well in place around 2005 when a few academics in a few fields mostly from the North America, Western Europe, and Oceania began to get their netnographies published in good journals. Pretty quickly, there were people doing netnography as consumer culture research type projects in tourism, then game studies, then sociology, then nursing, in a variety of countries and regions. It grew throughout marketing and consumer research scholarship worldwide, in a bunch of different languages and in many different online contexts. The netnographic record is like global digital archaeology. And its global nature reflects a whole bunch of complex flows of energy, messages, ideologies, identities and sanctioned actions. 

University of Chicago anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s notion of scapes captures the kind of complex and underdetermined interrelationship of these complex cultural flows that many of us observe in online world today. I think Appadurai kind of nails it for the ages, for me at least, with mediascapes, technoscapes, ethnoscapes, idioscapes, finanscapes, and the rest of them. So, if you wanted to talk about media circulation, I’d point to those two things. That Appadurai draws our attention to the varieties of flows among and within those nations. There are probably more similarities to people living in big cities today around the world than there are with people in big cities and small towns or remote regions within the countries they live in today, and that is because they get similar flows of media, finance, technologies, and because of the directionality of some of these flows. That we can both maintain the complexity in rich description, but also abstract to important guiding elements and tendencies—this is what Appadurai’s work suggests, at least for me. 

And the last thing I would point out is the global nature of netnography and its research, almost from the beginning. The very early work of people like Eileen Fischer, Hope Schau, Cele Othnes, Michelle Neilson, Pauline Maclaran, Andrea Hemetsberger, Kristine de Valck, Ingeborg Kleppe, Marylouise Caldwell, Rachel Ashman, Mina Askit, Daiane Scaraboto, Richard Kedzior, Jonnas Rokka and the massive involvement of other Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Brazilians, Australians, Turkish people, British, and Europeans of many stripes and feathers. Netnography has only recently spread to The New World of medical research and the Far East. Many of those applications are partnerships, teamwork between people doing netnographic kinds of interpretation in their own countries, on local data, and building it into projects, presentations, and articles. 

From my vantage point, the medium of research, the medium of netnography, is bringing people together. I still believe that some forms of technology unite us, and when we collectively cohabitate the many forms of storyworld we do, then we form alliances. When I do netnographic research, when I detect “real people” are talking on social media, there is lots of sincere public communication out there than seems authentic. And I often see them doing good things for each other, and mostly acting as good humans. We all have our faults, and there are huge massive problems with the infrastructure itself, the systems of manipulation around them, all of the stuff that communication and cultural studies tells us is locked into the system. But most people, that I see in my netnography research still have some of that sociality we saw in different kinds of fan communities. There are gifts of different kinds being exchanged almost constantly. And for me, this says a lot about the current state of the world—on the whole, people are good, but the systems built up to manage them are unfair, unwieldy, and often retrogressive in their intent. 

Making Meaning of the Meanings We Make Online: An Interview with Robert Kozinets (Part One)

Imagine a time when the Earth (or at least the Web) was young, when academic research on things digital was almost nonexistent, and when I had just published my first book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. A young Canadian researcher reached out to me about work he was doing on Star Trek fandom, we developed a friendship online, and ultimately I was flown in to serve as an advisor on his dissertation, probably the first dissertation I ever served on. Through his work, I discovered this whole parallel universe of folks who were applying techniques I associated with cultural studies to the understanding of consumer culture within the business school realm.

Robert Kozinets and I have maintained a friendship which now spans three decades. He has become an intellectual leader, modeling the methods and applications of what he calls “netnography,”" and we have ended up together at the University of Southern California where we co-taught a course in the spring focused on brand communities and fan communities. We were able to tap both of our networks to bring in a fascinating array of industry people who work with fans across diverse media sectors from sports to popular music, from action figures to religion.

I recently was interviewed by him for a podcast and so I asked him to return the favor. He had no idea what he was getting himself into Across this epic interview, Kozinets explains some of the methodological and ethical issues he negotiates as he applies netnographic approaches to understanding consumer culture.

Let’s start with a core definition. What do you mean by netnography? How do you situate it in the larger traditions of ethnography? What changes when we bring the Net into the equation?

The definition and the situation of netnography are both moving targets. They’ve been evolving since day one. Currently, there are four elements that distinguish netnography. First, it shares the cultural and contextualized focus of ethnography. Next, it uses social media data, which can mean data that come from, or are produced about, social media. Third, it requires an immersive engagement, an ethnographic reflective type of personal involvement in the social media phenomenon. Finally, I find it important to emphasize that netnography is a procedural approach to performing qualitative social media research. It encompasses a set of general instructions that relate specific ways to conduct qualitative social media research using a combination of different research practices, grouped into six overlapping movements. As you can tell from these four elements, the cultural and contextualized approach and the reflective type of immersion are both directly related to ethnographic traditions that stretch back to Malinowski and probably well before him. But the exact procedures change. Knowing the ethical practice of ethnography, for example, tells you very little about how to handle data ethics and GDPR regulations in netnography today. Knowing how to handle cultural entrée in an ethnography doesn’t help you much as you try to find good places where you can find relevant cultural data online. And, in the long run, it seems that some ethnographic notions for judging quality, such as duration and intensity, don’t apply or don’t apply the same way when you are sitting at home on your phone or computer to do cultural research, rather than being out in a physically embodied site meeting people eye-to-eye. So, when we bring the Net into the cultural research equation, a lot of things change: access to data becomes much simpler, amounts of data magnify like crazy, the type of data and the modes of transcript and analysis change, and many of the rules of embodied ethnography either need to be adapted or set aside for ones that make more sense. 

Early in the book, you spend some time discussing the ways that netnography engages with “online traces.” How does the concept of a “trace” differ from other words often used in this context, from “data” to “case studies” to “artifacts”? What does this suggest about the temporality of netnography? A traditional ethnographer might provide a thick description of a meaningful moment or talk about a culturally resonant narrative, but for the most part, they are discussing things they observed in real time as opposed to something they can recover after the fact.

I struggled with the meaning of data. I’d been using it somewhat unreflectively and I thought that it required a bit of philosophizing to really understand what it meant in the context of online research. The conclusion I came to was that it might be important to recognize that data happen when some sort of informational raw material come into contact with someone who is selecting and collecting them for a particular purpose, a particular project. So, when people do things like post messages or videos, like or reply to comments, those are traces, online traces. Those things don’t become data until someone collects them for a purpose, some objective or goal that someone has. Data implies purpose.

Online traces are a kind of digital artifact, in a socio-archaeological sense. But something like pressing a like button can leave a pretty low-commitment artifact, right? All of them are interesting. The footprints in an archaeological site probably tell you more about what happened to the everyday people there than what the scribes chose to carve in stone.

A case study I would think about as a very different and much more macro concept. It is related to the completeness of the entire site of investigation. But an online trace is something left behind that a researcher can scoop up, save, and study. Think about animal behaviorists out in the wild, taking casts of paw prints, samples of spoor, and photos of clawed trees and trying to reconstruct what animal was here, what they did, and where they went. The online traces are snapshots and, in that way, they are like artifacts left behind. They allow us to glimpse into the past, see the pathways of the masses who stopped to scoop or squat or whatever. That can be a very fresh past, as with comments and posts that were left today, or it can go back in time, sometimes years or decades. But tracing long-ago traces is certainly not the only tool the netnographer has. The researcher can also elicit data in live interaction with people, either online or off, synchronously or asynchronously, individually or in groups, as part of their study. In that way, the netnography can have those same meaningful moments, can relate those online conversations or exchanges that were observed in real time as well. And the immersion notes of the netnographer can capture those moments right after they occur, just as an ethnographer’s trusty fieldnotes would do. Downloading online traces is just one aspect of doing a netnography, although often it is viewed as the most emblematic one.  

You were there quite early on in terms of the applications of ethnographic methods for understanding online social interactions. What were some of the biggest challenges we faced early on? And to what degree does netnography provide a more fully developed set of protocols for addressing those challenges?

I like that you are asking me by saying “we faced”, since you were a trailblazer in whose footsteps I followed. I guess the biggest challenge early on was just the open space and blue sky. These worlds were opening up in front of us and there were very few maps or guides to what we should do in order to be rigorous. I found a few anthropologists who were considering that online work might be interesting, but there was very little methodological description or advice out there (Luciano Paccagnella’s Journal of Computer-Mediated Communicationarticle was a very helpful and notable exception).  I think we all fell into a bit of a trap in thinking that because an aspect of ethnography worked well and meant something in the in-person context, it would work well and mean the same thing in the online context. There are numerous aspects, but two big ones I’m thinking of are fieldsites and participation. What does it mean to participate in an ethnography when the cultural action is happening, partially or even wholly, online? What does it mean to engage with an ethnographic field when the field is behind your screen? As a field, this emerging sense of social media studies or Internet studies was grappling with what was going on in ways that, looking back, may not have been so productive. We were using the term community to refer to online discourse, and often that term wasn’t particularly reflexive or accurate. We were using terms like cyberspace, and other spatial and place-based metaphors that hung onto past conceptions and clouded the way we saw how these communications and systems were developing at the early points. Many of us were naïve about the commercialization and commodification potentials of these new communication forms as they developed. So, we were hobbled a bit by our own preconceptions, language use, and lack of guidance. And added to that, starting in the early 2000s as blogs started to develop and then social networking sites like Friendster began growing, there was this incredible explosion of user growth and diversity, and a lack of conceptual and methodological agreements about what to call things and how to study them. So, add this incredibly dynamism, which continues on steroids today, into the mix. 

Netnography is still reeling, still adapting, still evolving. It will never be “fully developed”. It will always be under development, like a piece of software that needs regular updating. And the short answer to your question about providing protocols to address these challenges is that people doing netnography publish and share their adaptations, and use each other’s work. The approach is open source and crowdsourced, as a scientific technique should always be. It has to be as dynamic and flexible as the rapidly changing phenomena it tries to understand, but it builds from a base of agree upon, proven, operations and steps. That base-setting task happens when researchers across many fields, including but absolutely not limited to me, write about the method and the way it has been used, looking back at what others have done, consolidating and trying to organize it, and provide specific foundations for others to breach and build upon again. That is the topic of my next book, Netnography Unlimited, which is a volume that Rossella Gambetti and I have edited. It features work by 32 different researchers and scholars, including several in industry, in 19 different chapters examining how they have adapted and altered netnography to the investigative task at hand.

 Robert V. Kozinets is the Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public Relations at USC Annenberg, a position he shares with the USC Marshall School of Business. Previously, he has been a marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin School of Business, and York University’s Schulich School of Business.

His mission at USC is to build academic and popular understanding about the social and economic impacts of our new digital communications systems. In particular, his most recent research investigates the cultural effects of new technologies of personal and corporate branding. Rob is a globally recognized expert on social media, marketing, branding and innovation. In 1995, during his dissertation work on media fan communities, he invented the method of netnography, which adapts the anthropological approach of ethnography to work with the many types of social experience and interaction that emerge through networked digital communications. In the two decades since he first created and shared this new method, netnography has been adopted by academic researchers working in computer science, sociology, geography, library sciences, nursing, health sciences, psychology, addiction research, anthropology, marketing and consumer research. His research examines topics such as social branding, word-of-mouth marketing, themed retail spectacle, media consumption, technology ideologies, brand archetypes, utopian consumer culture, capitalist emancipation, and consumer activism through investigating sites such as Star Trek and Star Wars fandom, ESPN Zone, the American Girl brand, Wal-Mart, Volkswagen, mobile device use, digital social networks, and the Burning Man project.