Danielle Sarver Coombs, Simon Collister, Jacqueline Marino Debates For The Digital Age (2 Volumes) The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Our Online World

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2016 Danielle Sarver Coombs and Simon Collister

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Debates for the digital age : the good, the bad, and the ugly of our online world / Danielle Sarver Coombs and Simon Collister,
editors.
volumes cm
Includes index.
Contents: Volume 1. The Good
ISBN 978-1-4408-0123-5 (vol. 1 : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4408-0124-2 (ebook) 1. Information technologySocial
aspects. 2. Information technologyMoral and ethical aspects. I. Coombs, Danielle Sarver, editor. II. Collister, Simon, editor.
HM851.D4325 2016
303.4833dc23 2015013116
ISBN: 978-1-4408-0123-5
EISBN: 978-1-4408-0124-2
20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5
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Contents
Volume 1. The Good
Introducing the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Our Online World
Simon Collister
PART I ACCESSIBILITY
1. New Audiences, New Markets: Accessing Music, Movies, Art, and Writing at Your
Leisure
Evan Bailey
2. The Positive Side of Social Media: Encouraging Developments from Sport

Jimmy Sanderson and Kevin Hull
3. Reaching the World with One Song and a Few Mouse Clicks
Kathryn Coduto
4. Narcissism or Self-Actualization? An Evaluation of Selfies as a Communication Tool

Christina Best
5. Everyday Expertise: Instructional Videos on YouTube

Jrgen Skgeby and Lina Rahm
6. Online Education, Massive Open Online Courses, and the Accessibility of Higher
Education
Kristen Chorba and R. Benjamin Hollis
PART II DEMOCRATIZATION
7. Leaks, Whistle-Blowers, and Radical Transparency: Government Accountability in the

Internet Age
Rekha Sharma
8. Rethinking Digital Democracy in a Time of Crisis: The Case of Spain

Salom Sola-Morales
9. Will the Revolution Be Tweeted? Activism, Politics, and the Internet

Lzaro M. Bacallao-Pino
10. You Say You Want a Revolution? The Internets Impact on Political Discussion, Activism,
and Societal Transformation
James D. Ponder and Rekha Sharma
11. Ground-Up Expert: Everyday People and Blogs

Richard J. Batyko
12. Self-Promotion for All! Content Creation and Personal Branding in the Digital Age
Justin Lagore
13. The Rise of Journalism Accountability

Zac Gershberg
PART III COMMUNITY AND GLOBALIZATION
14. Social Media Mechanisms: A Change Agent

Kiran Samuel
15. Habermas in the African E-Village: Deliberative Practices of Diasporan Nigerians on the
Internet
Farooq Kperogi
16. When Bad Timing Is Actually Good: Reconceptualizing Response Delays

Stephanie A. Tikkanen and Andrew Frisbie
17. In Defense of Slacktivism: How KONY 2012 Got the Whole World to Watch
Christopher Boulton
18. Public Healths Courtship with the Internet: Slow but Steady
Samantha Lingenfelter
Index
About the Editors and Contributors

Introducing the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
of Our Online World
Simon Collister
One of the defining characteristics of contemporary societys metamorphosis from a

hierarchically led, industrial, and largely national concept to a fragmented, postindustrial, and
globalized space is the emergence and exponential growth of telecommunications networks and
the Internet.1
This has radically altered the communities, politics, and media of traditionally private,
localized sociocultural environmentstransforming them into highly public, international
networks of communication and mediation. Indeed, Livingstone goes as far as to assert that
networks are the archetypal form of contemporary social and technical organization.2
Scholars such as Manuel Castells and Yochai Benkler conceive of this phenomenon at a macro
level as the network society3 or networked information economy,4 respectively.
Without doubt, such developments have significantly impacted all aspects of our social and
cultural domains. Yet, at the same time, the emergence of such complex factors has equally
challenged the capability of scholarly research to adjust to the rapid pace of change.5
Such a challenge in part accounts for creation of this text. In setting out to capture
contemporary thinking on the Internet and its impact on society and culture, the authors sought
to identify and address a range of issues less susceptible to change as frequently as Facebooks
Terms and Conditions or be subject to the forces of changing consumer demand. Rather, the
two volumes plot, analyze, and make sense of slowly shifting macro-themes of the
sociocultural domain whichalthough not immediately evidentare likely to have long-term,
far-reaching, and deeply profound effects on the world around us.
In making sense of such a varied and potentially complex thematic landscape, this book
adapts an approach that echoes the work of other scholars who have developed typologies for
interpreting diverse literature on networked culture, media, and politics.6 In particular, we
have drawn on both Chadwicks and Chadwick and Howards distinction between
optimistic/positive and pessimistic/negative approaches to the Internets impact on society and
culture. In their typology, optimistic perspectives understand the Internet as redressing the
balance of power away from dominantoften elitegroups or spaces and returning it to
networked communities of informal or amateur individuals. Conversely, pessimistic
perspectives interpret the Internet as reinforcing traditional power structures, albeit in new
forms.
This typology underpins the way in which the two volumes of this text are positioned.
Optimistic perspectives are addressed in Volume 1, The Good, and pessimistic perspectives
are covered in Volume 2, The Bad and the Ugly. Each volume is further subdivided into a
series of thematic sections to enable contributors to undertake a detailed investigation into
specific areas of Internet culture. Before setting out the specific themes covered in each
volume, it is helpful to set the tone of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly by providing a
summary of some of the broader shifts presently occurring.
THE GOOD
Optimistic analyses of the contemporary environment created by the Internet have
conventionally articulated a vision of society and culture consistent with the idea of the public
sphere as identified by German philosopher and sociologist Jrgen Habermas. For Habermas,
the public sphere represents a space within society for people to freely meet, discuss, and act
on the important issues of the day.
For optimists, the Internet plays a vital role in empowering and connecting individuals in a
global public discourse that facilitates communicative links between citizens and the power
holders of society.7 Broadly speaking, an Internet-enabled networked public sphere8
operates as the 21st centurys public space and be seen as a force for goodthanks to the
expanded and accelerated flows of information and the increased interactivity between
participants it generates.9
Specifically, Yochai Benkler explains a networked public sphere has fundamentally
altered the capacity of individuals to be active participants as opposed to passive
readers, listeners or viewers in the pursuit of social, cultural, and political issues.10 Benkler
goes so far as to argue that such an account of the contemporary public sphere, although aligned
with Habermass model, is more capable of accounting for the social and cultural complexity
of modern democracies. By empowering all members of societynot just well-educated,
middle- or upper-class individualscontemporary online communities can act collectively to
perform a watchdog role and operate as a source of salient observations regarding matters
of public concern, and provide a platform for discussing the alternatives open to a polity.11
A further reason for optimistic analyses of a networked public sphere is the Internets
distributed communications architecture combined with the low costs for producing and
distributing information (all you need is a smartphone, tablet, or computer and an Internet
connection). Both Benkler and Castells believe these low barriers to entry enable anyone with
Internet access to shape (or reshape) the social, cultural, or political dimensions of everyday
life. This mass self-communication12 transforms the traditional power and influence of the
mass mediatypified as more centralized, homogeneous and less pluralistic13into a
decentralized, heterogeneous social communication process14 characterized by a diverse and
pluralistic range of participants.15 As a result, it offers avenues for citizen independence from
mainstream news media and larger social forces.16
In addition to the social, political, and cultural diversity offered by the Internet, some
scholars also argue that it provides a greater resilience to control by governments, states, or
corporations. For example, the Internet is a communication network technically organized
without any control or management by any central individual or organization. Thus, it crucially
lacks any single central point of control, making it difficult to censor contentious or sensitive
information.
This inevitably leads to the emergence of multiple axes of information [that] provide new
opportunities for citizens to challenge elite control of political issues17 and enhances the
potential for the media to exercise accountability over power.18 Tewksbury and Rittenberg
see this as a democratization of the creation, dissemination, and consumption of news and
information19 and Castells goes further by asserting that mass self-communication
empowers individuals to challenge and eventually change the power relations
institutionalized in society.20
Such individual and collective efforts to challenge and transform social and cultural
relations have been identified across a range of fields that use the Internet to share information
and organize protests,21 as well as in democratic politics for which networked communications
have been used to facilitate increased engagement with and participation in democratic
institutions.22
THE BAD AND THE UGLY

Although most scholars agree that the Internet is bringing together individual citizens and
informal networks through interconnected global webs of public communication,23 the idea of
the networked public sphere as a force for good is not without criticism.
One of the most persistent pessimistic analyses of the Internet draws attention to the issue
of access. For example, significant parts of global society are on the wrong side of what is
called the digital divide.24 As a result, the universal participation in political and cultural
discussion is likely to be significantly limited to those individuals who have Internet access.25
Conversely, some scholars argue that those members of global society who do have access
also are biased toward affluent elites.26
Scholars also have questioned whether the society, culture, and democracy being produced
by the Internet follow the same ideals imagined in Jrgen Habermass original model. They
argue that, in reality, rather than enabling civic and democratic discourse fulfilling the lofty
principle of improving society, the Internet merely is facilitating broader cultural trends
characterized by an increased focus on lifestyle or entertainment content.27
Despite its disruptive nature, for example, scholars have pointed out that the Internet
merely replicates traditional media consumption habits.28 Thus, although in theory the Internet
enables people to democratically select information that matters to them, the reality is that the
information consumed by the public usually excludes political information of democratic
interest29 or is limited to content that mirrors users personal beliefs.30
Pessimist perspectives of the Internets impact on society and culture also challenge the
view that it can overcome censorship. Hargittai, Mansell, and Dahlberg,31 for example, assert
that the traditional dominance of commercial elites is, in fact, replicated online. This process
termed by Dahlberg as the corporate colonization of cyberspace32weakens, rather than
strengthens, the Internets potential for free democratic, social, and cultural discussion. Despite
a perceived communicative abundance generated by the networked public spheres low
barriers to entry,33 corporations are outmaneuvering the publics adoption of the Internet and
are hijacking social communication toolssuch as blogs and social networksto continue
and expand economic dominance.34
For some scholars, the commercial adoption of the Internet represents an even more
troubling aspect of the transformation of the social, political, and cultural dimensions of
everyday life. Dean35 and Terranova36 argue that corporations and political elites co-opt
public and civic discussion online and use it to create the illusion of increased individual
empowerment which, in fact, instead conceals a complete removal of individual agency. For
Dean, the convergence of democratic idealssuch as participation and open accessand
capitalisms colonization of the networked public sphere gives rise to a communicative
capitalism37 which captures political power in an ever-increasing displacement of political
conflict to the terrain of networked media.38 Moreover, every click and interaction made in
the networked media environment can be traced, capitalized and sold39 as free labor
creating a blurred territory between production and consumption, work and cultural
expression.40
SUBTHEMES: ACCESSIBILITY, DEMOCRATIZATION, COMMUNITY,

AND GLOBALIZATION
To help categorize and interpret subthemes such as accessibility, democratization,
community, and globalization, the two volumes of this set are divided into three subthemes:
accessibility to information; the democratization of everyday life; and community and
globalization. Adopting these broad subthemes across the two volumes enables the contributing
authors to isolate and perform a detailed study intoand make greater sense ofindividual
elements of Internet-enabled cultural phenomena.
The first subtheme, accessibility, examines the opening of new markets and audiences
for cultural actors, such as musicians and sports players; the freeing up of teaching and learning
across informal, everyday spaces and not just in formal education settings; and the
opportunities which the Internet presents for increasingly self-directed identity-formation and
expression. This subtheme also challenges such constructive readings by pointing out how
greater information accessibility also can lead to greater intolerance and reactionary responses
by traditional elite groups, which simply undermine the Internets potential to open up society
and culture.
The next subtheme examineddemocratizationencompasses a wide range of topics,
including the political role of the Internet in empowering democratic engagement. The section
highlights the Internets increasingly important role in enabling and generating extra-democratic
activism, particularly in the context of post-crisis Europe and the events of the Arab Spring.
Crucially, it also raises important questions as to the real-world effects of such optimisticyet
largely theoreticalaccounts of the Internets democratizing power.
In the democratization section, the notion of democracy also is applied to broader, cultural
topics such as the ways in which anyone with an Internet connection can create an identity (or
identities) or build a commercially successful personal brand, and what this means for self-
management in an increasingly commercial space where traditional issues of privacy become
challenged. Lastly, this subtheme addresses the ways in which journalism and the media
increasingly are being held accountable for the ways in which they represent society and
whether the Internets democratization of news-making offers greater freedom or merely
reinforces the same old problems.
The last subthemecommunity and globalizationexplores ways in which the Internet
is used to transform communities at a local level as well as create globalized, participatory
communities where specific, localized events increasingly take on a national or international
significance. In doing so, the impact of these Internet-enabled transformations on community
members, structures, and relations are considered from both a beneficial and a detrimental
perspective. This subtheme also investigates specific features and concerns of traditional
communities, such as health, education, and social mobility, and offers positive as well as
problematic readings of how these phenomena are impacted by the rise of Internet-enabled
individuals and groups.
VOLUME 1 CHAPTER SYNOPSES

Volume 1 opens with a comprehensive survey by Bailey that confidently examines the
impact of the Internet on globalized audiences and cultural reception. Spanning the
transformation in music consumption by a mobile-first fan base, to streaming services and the
impact of wearable technology and virtual reality on art and the written word, Chapter 1
argues that despite some challenges, digitally connected audiences are capable of engaging
with and producing cultural works in ways that offer a positive future for the arts.
Such positive outcomes on key forms of cultural production similarly are addressed in
relation to the sports industry by Sanderson and Hull in Chapter 2. They argue that, despite the
high-profile media coverage of social media sporting failures, multiple stakeholders have
indeed benefitted from the development of digital technologies. They identify and discuss three
key factors, including the ability of sports stars to optimize their identity and self-presentation,
greater interaction with fans, and the opportunities for advocacy and activism. The chapter
concludes with suggestions as to scholarly directions for further research.
In Chapter 3, Coduto offers a compelling narrative of the evolution of fan engagement and
audience development in the music industry. Moving from the highly localized production of
zines in the 1980s and 1990s, through the emergence of Napster, the rise of MySpace, and on
to Radioheads pioneering pay what you want approach, Coduto draws on personal
experience from a transnational perspective to discuss the benefits of fan-band interaction and
music industry innovation in a digital age.
In Chapter 4, Best offers a detailed analysis of a seemingly recent phenomenon, the
selfie. She provides a useful historical context to selfies, situating them within the broader
theoretical framework of identity-as-performancea notion that has become increasingly
potent with the advent of social media. By plotting the origins and enduring motivations of self-
presentation, Best concludes that selfies can be best understood as contemporary instantiations
of a timeless human desire.
Skgeby and Rahm argue in Chapter 5 that online video-sharing sitesin this case
YouTubeempower the public to offer instructional guidance to others on a wide range of
topics, from video-gaming, to cookery, to kayaking. Skgeby and Rahm offer a succinct history
of this everyday expertise and argue that such guidance can be conceived beyond the specific
applications they cover and instead be seen as an increasingly seamless integration of the
material and virtual realities of everyday life.
Although Skgeby and Rahm tackle the issue of how the Internet has transformed informal
learning, in Chapter 6 Chorba and Hollis explore the Internets impact on formal education.
They explain emerging virtual online learning environments, such as massive open online
courses (MOOCs), and set out a comprehensive account of some of the ways people use
technology to learn. The chapter also maps the benefits the new tools offer.
Sharmas contribution in Chapter 7 undertakes a robust investigation of the ways in which
new communication technologies have challenged and exacerbated some of the complexities
facing the media regarding the protection of sources. Sharma argues that whistle-blowing to
protect civic society is a long-standing and important part of modern democracy. To help us
understand what this looks like in an Internet-enabled world, Sharma identifies some of the key
new actors in this digitally networked public sphere, such as bloggers and citizen journalists;
discusses legal and ethical issues in relation to digital whistle-blowing; and poses important
questions for the future of research in this area.
Picking up the theme of how the Internet might enrich and empower modern democratic
societies, in Chapter 8 Sola-Morales focuses attention on recent developments in Spain.
Drawing on examples of online activists, such as the 15 Million Movement and more formal
political parties, such as Podemos, Sola-Morales offers a theoretical framework for
understanding such phenomena. She explores whether the evidence suggests that the Internet is
making Spains democracy stronger or instead merely is reinforcing existing power structures.
Echoing Sola-Morales focus but from different geographic perspectives, Ponder and
Sharma explore similar topics from a U.S. perspective in Chapter 10. In Chapter 9, however,
Bacallao-Pino shifts the analytical lens to a much broader perspective by examining the role of
social media tools in enabling sociopolitical change at a global level.
Chapter 11 examines the issue of how the Internet, and what Manuel Castells terms mass
self-communication,41 has given rise to what Baytko calls the ground-up expert. Baytko
focuses his analysis on the rise of frustrated office worker, Julie Powell, and plots how the
emergence of blogging has created Hollywood stars from everyday people.
In Chapter 12, Lagore tackles a related issue: personal branding and how individuals can
make use of social media tools per se to plan, create, and build a personal brand. Lagore then
uses this framework for an investigation of what personal brands mean for the established,
incumbent media and entertainment industries.
The impact of social media on journalism and the news industry is something explored in
greater depth by Gershberg. In Chapter 13, Gershberg sets out how the growth of citizen
journalists combined with the exposure of unethical practices by traditional journalists have
caused a crisis of accountability in the news. But rather than seeing this as terminal shift,
Gershberg argues that Internet-enabled journalism can expose poor standards and provoke a
powerful public discourse about the state of the media.
In keeping with the theme of using the Internet to help highlight and broach social issues, in
Chapter 14 Samuel explores how social media can be used as a tool enabling minority voices
to enact change. By using the #CancelColbert hashtag campaign as a focal point, Samuel argues
that social media was used to empower online communities to build a movement, to speak up
without fear of censorship or gatekeeping by traditional media, and, moreover, to protect
themselves when conventional models of social justice fail.
This notion of Internet-enabled communication prefiguring a model of deliberative
democracy is more deeply explored by Kperogi in Chapter 15. In an analysis of a Nigerian
online community, Kperogi draws on Habermass theory of the public sphere to demonstrate
how the Internet acts as a powerful tool in fostering transnational, diasporic spheres of public
discourse.
Having been introduced to the concepts of the Internet acting as a transversal or
transnational platform, in Chapter 16 Tikkanen and Frisbie identify and undertake a
fascinating examination of the ways in which the notion of time structures globally networked
communication. Although previous chapters have looked at understanding the communicative
effects of an Internet-enabled global discourse, in this chapter the authors focus on the ways the
Internetor rather the way users use the Internet to communicatecan structure meaning and
influence interpretation of events. Specifically, they argue that although delays in asynchronous
online discourse can be perceived as inferior to face-to-face interactions, it actually can offer
opportunities for more creative and meaningful conversations.
One such criticism of online communication is that it fails to create strong ties between
individuals and, in the particular case of social change campaigning, it is responsible for
slacktivisma pejorative term used to denounce ineffective, online-only activism, which
often yields little or no tangible result. In Chapter 17, Boulton offers a rebuttal of such
accusations. He draws on a case study of the KONY 2012 online campaign, which sought to
highlight Joseph Konys Lord Resistance Army as being responsible for abducting children to
make them soldiers.
Finally, building on Boultons optimistic argument for the power of the Internet to enable
positive social change, Lingenfelter further explores the implications of how new technologies
havein broad termsenabled much more effective public health communication.
CONCLUSIONS
The two volumes forming the present work gather together a range of topics, authors, and
methodological approaches that the authors think will help move forward an understanding of
the ways in which the Internet is changing (or not changing) the sociocultural domain. The
assembled chapters have been selected to stimulate, provoke, and challenge, but also reassure
scholars interested in Internet culture. Despite the rapid but arguably superficial changes in our
networked society, at a macro level the transformations in the accessibility of information, the
concordant shift toward the democratization of everyday life, and the effects this has on notions
of local as well as globalized communities are evolving at a much more measured pace
albeit with much deeper and longer-term impacts on our sociocultural realm.
Lastly, although the authors believe that these volumes provide a good grounding for
students and scholars of Internet culture, it is important to recognize that even the material
contained within these two volumes eventually will be superseded by new and hitherto
unthinkable changes. Returning to Chadwick and Howards optimistic/pessimistic dichotomy,
the authors also introduce a third position into their typology which they term surprising.42
This term is used to account for events that introduce entirely new and unrecognized ideas into
the ways in which we understand society, politics, and culture in an Internet-enabled world.
This third-way offers a potent and constructive perspective on the ways the Internet is
reshaping the everyday world and, importantly, suggests a conceptual escape route from
attempts to lock scholarship into an alternatively revolutionary or evolutionary dichotomy43
that tends to treat media choice, source choice, and interactivity habits as distinct areas of
inquiry.44 Although this text focuses on arranging the contributors analyses from a
good/bad/ugly perspective, we are confident that new and surprising directions for future
study and research into the Internets impact on our society and culture can be glimpsed within
these two volumes. Moreover, we intend for the collection to act as a springboard for the next
round of enquiry into the ever-increasing and fertile domain of our online world.
NOTES
1. Castells, Manuel, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
2. Livingstone, Sonia, Critical Debates in Internet Studies: Reflections on an Emerging Field, chap. 1 in Mass Media and
Society, edited by James Curran and Michael Gurevitch, 929 (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005), 12.
3. Castells, Manuel, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
4. Benkler, Yochai, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2006).
5. Castells, Manuel, The Internet Galaxy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3.
6. Wellman, Barry, The Three Ages of Internet Studies: Ten, Five and Zero Years Ago, New Media & Society 6, no. 1
(2004), 12329; Howard, Philip N., and Andrew Chadwick, Political Omnivores and Wired States, in Routledge Handbook
of Internet Politics, edited by Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard (London: Routledge, 2009); Chadwick, Andrew, Web
2.0: New Challenges for the Study of E-Democracy in an Era of Informational Exuberance, I/S: A Journal of Law and
Policy 5, no. 1 (2009): 942. Livingstone, Sonia; Critical Debates in Internet Studies: Reflections on an Emerging Field, chap.
1 in Mass Media and Society, edited by James Curran and Michael Gurevitch, 929 (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005), 12.
7. Dahlgren, Peter, The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation, Political
Communication 22, no. 2 (2005): 148.
CT: Yale University Press, 2006): 17677.
9. McNair, Brian, Cultural Chaos: Journalism, News and Power in a Globalised World (London: Routledge, 2006):
22123.
CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 212.
11. Ibid., 271.
12. Castells, Manuel, Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6572.
13. Beckett, Charlie, and Robin Mansell, Crossing Boundaries: New Media and Networked Journalism, Communication,
Culture and Critique 1, no. 1 (2008): 4.
15. Bimber, Bruce, The Internet and Political Transformation: Populism, Community, and Accelerated Pluralism, Polity 31,
no. 1 (Autumn 1998), 13360.
16. Tewksbury, David, and Jason Rittenberg, Online News Creation and Consumption: Implications for Modern
Democracies, in Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics, edited by Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard (London:
Routledge, 2009), 197.
17. Williams, Bruce A., and Michael X. Delli Carpini, Monica and Bill All the Time and Everywhere: The Collapse of
Gatekeeping and Agenda Setting in the New Media Environment, American Behavioral Scientist 47, no. 9 (2004): 1209.
18. McNair, Brian, Cultural Chaos: Journalism, News and Power in a Globalised World (London: Routledge, 2006),
229.
20. Castells, Manuel, Communication, Power and Counter-Power in the Network Society, International Journal of
Communication 1 (2007): 248.
21. Bennett, W. Lance, New Media Power: The Internet and Global Activism, in Contesting Media Power: Alternative
Media in a Networked World, edited by Nick Couldry and James Curran (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 1737;
Castells, Manuel, Communication, Power and Counter-Power in the Network Society, International Journal of
Communication 1 (2007): 23866. Castells, Manuel, Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
22. Bimber, Bruce, Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Bimber, Bruce, The Internet and Political Transformation: Populism,
Community, and Accelerated Pluralism, Polity 31, no. 1 (Autumn 1998): 13360; Bimber, Bruce, The Study of Information
Technology and Civic Engagement, Political Communication 17 (2000): 32933; Tolbert, Caroline J., and Ramona S.
McNeal, Unraveling the Effects of the Internet on Political Participation? Political Research Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2003):
17585.
23. Curran, James, and Tamara Witschge, Liberal Dreams and the Internet, in New Media, Old News: Journalism &
Democracy in the Digital Age, edited by Natalie Fenton (London: Sage, 2010).
24. Van Dijk, Jan A. G. M., The Deepening Divide: Inequality in the Information Society (London: Sage, 2005).
25. Dahlgren, Peter, The Public Sphere and the Net: Structure, Space and Communication, in Mediated Politics:
Communication in the Future of Democracy, edited by W. Lance Bennett and Robert Entman (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), 3356; Sparks, Colin, The Internet and the Global Public Sphere, in Mediated Politics: Communication in
the Future of Democracy, edited by W. Lance Bennett and Robert Entman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
26. Sparks, Colin, The Internet and the Global Public Sphere, in Mediated Politics: Communication in the Future of
Democracy, edited by W. Lance Bennett and Robert Entman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001), 83.
27. Papacharissi, Zizi, A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 11225.
28. Schoenbach, Klaus, Ester de Waal, and Edmund Lauf, Research Note: Online and Print Newspapers : Their Impact on
the Extent of the Perceived Public Agenda, European Journal of Communication 20, no. 2 (2005): 24558; Hargittai, Eszter,
Content Diversity Online: Myth or Reality, in Media Diversity and Localism: Meaning and Metrics, edited by Philip M.
Napoli (London: Routledge, 2006).
30. Sunstein, Cass R., Republic.Com 2.0 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
31. Mansell, Robin, Political Economy, Power and New Media, New Media & Society 6, no. 1 (2004): 7483. Dahlberg,
Lincoln, The Corporate Colonization of Online Attention and the Marginalization of Critical Communication? Journal of
Communication Inquiry 29, no. 2 (2005): 16080.
32. Dahlberg, Lincoln, The Corporate Colonization of Online Attention and the Marginalization of Critical Communication?
Journal of Communication Inquiry 29, no. 2 (2005): 160.
33. Karppinen, Kari, Rethinking Media Pluralism and Communicative Abundance, Observatorio 11 (2009): 15169.
34. Castells, Manuel, Communication, Power and Counter-Power in the Network Society, International Journal of
Communication 1 (2007): 248; Castells, Manuel, Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6572;
Stanyer, James, Web 2.0 and the Transformation of News and Journalism, in Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics,
edited by Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard (London: Routledge, 2009).
35. Dean, Jodi, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Cambridge: Polity, 2010).
36. Terranova, Tiziana, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004).
37. Dean, Jodi, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 45.
38. Ibid., 124.
39. Ibid., 66.
40. Terranova, Tiziana, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 7394.
41. Castells, M., Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), xix.
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42426.
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Internet Politics, edited by Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard (London: Routledge, 2009), 431.
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ClintonLewinsky Scandal. Journalism 1 (1): 6185.
Part I
Accessibility
1
New Audiences, New Markets: Accessing

Music, Movies, Art, and Writing at Your
Leisure
Evan Bailey
NEW AUDIENCES AND MARKETS

Around the world, Internet users are moving toward a shared, global culture. A recent
Ericsson ConsumerLab1 survey of 23 countries found that more than three-quarters of
consumers browse the Internet and half use social media daily. With the help of new
technology, new opportunities are emerging for people to enjoy, engage, and share music,
movies, art, and the written word.
Media usage is globalizing and audiences are evolving. Todays viewers are shifting
toward inexpensive, on-demand services that allow multiplatform access to content.
Regardless of where or how you receive your favorite content, the content is increasingly
likely to be streamed, mobile, and wearable.
The advent of new Internet technologies and platforms also induces new debates on how
artists monetize their work, copyrights are protected, and companies price content. The
primary focus of this chapter, however, is the possibilities that the Internet and associated
technology afford consumers, advertisers, and brand partnersand what is likely for 2015 and
beyond. From nontraditional, new streaming players and content creators to the promise of new
networks, the entertainment space is in full upheaval.
The global interest in streaming content in 2014 was remarkable, especially in the music
sector. Although technology and Internet trends constantly evolve and are difficult to predict,
streamed content looks to play a major role in how we access content for leisure in coming
years.
MUSIC
According to Nielsen SoundScan,2 streamed music grew 54 percent in 2014from 106
billion songs streamed in 2013 to 164 billion songs streamed in 2014. The gains in streaming
were in stark contrast to the diminishing number of traditional downloads of songs, which
dropped off significantly from 2013 to 2014. Paid downloads for full music albums declined
nearly 10 percent in 2014, and individual song downloads dropped 12 percent.
As streaming services become more important to our global culture, fans of niche music
genres are sometimes overlooked. In some cases, larger streaming services can have trouble
keeping up to date with the frenzied creation of releases, bootlegs, and live sets, which often
leaves fans to seek music on their own.3
In turn, music fans have turned platforms such as SoundCloud, which has been troubled
with takedown issues brought about by copyright crackdowns initiated by major publishers
and labels. Unlike services such as Apples iTunes or Spotify, SoundCloud doesnt own a full
music catalog because whats available to consumers is limited to the content that people and
music companies upload. SoundCloud, like YouTube, also has copyright infringement tool,
which halts the upload of copyrighted songs, or removes them from site when copyright
concerns are raised; the current process, however, isnt perfect.
Some prominent artists, such as Kaskade, have mandated that their music be removed or
their profile pages be deleted from SoundCloud. This has prompted pressure from consumers
and artists for the involved parties to reach a solution. According to Bloomberg, SoundCloud
is negotiating with Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music
Group by offering the labels a stake in the private company in exchange for the right to continue
playing the labels catalogues without legal disputes over copyright violations.4
Besides copyright issues, even too large to fail music-focused social networkssuch as
Apples Pingwere met with challenges in the past. Apple introduced Ping in fall of 2010, but
began shutting down the service in 2012, and replaced it with iTunes Facebook and Twitter
integration.5 Streaming services such as Spotify, Pandora, and iTunes Radiowhich at one
point represented a new hope for an ailing music businesshavent been the financial
successes that the record labels expected.
NEW APPROACHES
New for 2015, some companies are creating new streaming services that attempt to address
some of the music industrys current challenges, including a revenue model. A few examples of
these new approaches are YouTubes Music Key, Google Chrome Cast, and Beatports new
consumer-facing strategy.
Beatport Takes Aim at Millennial Culture

Online electronic dance music retailer Beatport plans to relaunch in 2015 as a free
streaming service, to create a cultural hub for the largebut nichemillennial dance music
audience. Prior to the relaunch, Beatports 50 million users mostly were professional disc
jockeys that used the site as a paid download service.
In 2013, Beatport was acquired by SFX Entertainment, a company solely focused on
electronic dance music culture. The SFX portfolio also includes numerous large-scale dance
music festivals around the world, such as Tomorrowland, Life in Color, and Electric Zoo. The
new consumer-facing Beatport aims to link the real and digital world by offering a portal of
integrated live experiences, streaming, and perhaps eventually live event ticketing. SFX feels
the ad-supported service will provide advertisers an efficient way of connecting with an entire
audience and cultural movement.
Richard Ronstein, CFO of SFX, Beatports parent company, in a Q&A session stated,
Historically Beatport has been a music store for professional and pro-sumer DJs, which is
really a download service. However, the consumer interest in this goes beyond downloads,
and in fact, many of our consumers are not interested in downloads and paying for a song,
theyre interested in streaming.6
With a new focus on streaming and on the culture itself, Beatport is vying to position itself
to become the destination for the electronic music community of DJ/producers and fans alike.
The Beatport model also creates a new platform for advertisers and brand partnerships,
created to reach the notoriously hard-to-reach millennials.
Ronsteins point also seems to elaborate on an April 2014 release about an update to its
core technology, in which Beatport announced that it had developed an API (application
programming interface) to help integrate partners with Beatport and advance elements of
electronic music culture.7
The Beatport API provides access to the millions of electronic music tracks, licensed and
streaming mixes, and sounds available in the Beatport catalog, plus Beatports database of live
dance music events. The SFX database of live events also potentially holds promise to link
fans in the real world to fans online with the potential for user-submitted content and live event
ticketing. The API is intended to evolve to include upcoming Beatport consumer features as
well as music data and analytics, which provide a framework for developers to create new
web, mobile and other apps, services, and partnerships.8
Instead of only selling songs, the new site reportedly will feature a free, ad-supported
streaming service and include the ability for users to listen to Beatports catalog of on-demand
music.9 In 2015, Beatport is likely to seek select partners to explore and collaborate on this
open API. The API will extend the next-generation Beatport platform, allowing for
collaboration in line with the essence of electronic music culture.
YouTube Music Key

Google also has announced the launch of a streaming service called YouTube Music Key,
which offers ad-free music, audio-only playback, and offline playback. Millions of users
already listen to music on YouTube, but Music Key allows them to hear their favorite tunes
without advertisements. The awaited service will be available by invite only. At the time of
this writing, YouTube Music Key only was collecting the e-mail addresses of interested users
until the service becomes more widely available. According to CNN Money,10 those who
receive an invite will be granted a six-month free trial. After six months, the beta version will
cost $7.99 a month, and the future standard rate will be $9.99 a month. The service will give
users access to YouTubes vast catalogue of more than 20 million tracks, albums, remixes, and
live sets. The audio-only playback means that users wont use their cellular data allowance.
Users also will be able to play music without ads and offline via YouTubes current iPhone
and Android phone apps.
YouTube is entering the streaming market at a time when widespread disagreement exists
about whether streaming positively or negatively affects the music industry as a whole. The
debate was brought to the forefront when Taylor Swift pulled her entire catalog from the
popular music streaming service, Spotify, a week after the release of her highly anticipated
fifth album, 1989.
Other Streaming Contenders

Another potential contender in the streaming arena is Beats Music. Apple acquired Beats in
August 2014, and left some parties wondering about the fate of the service. Rumors have
circulated that a Beats service could be included in an iOS software update in the future. The
move would pit Apple in direct competition against Spotify which, although technically
profitable, has suffered setbacksincluding the spat with Taylor Swift and other artists who
remain skeptical about the economics of streaming. By preloading the service on its devices,
however, Apple potentially would gain an edge in promoting its own service over the
competitors such as Spotify and Rhapsody. Such a service also potentially would keep
consumers locked into the Apple environment.
Apples $3 billion purchase of Beats Music was the biggest acquisition in Apples history,
therefore a dedicated push to make Beats Music an integral part of Apples hardware would
come as no surprise, but such a move would mark an evident approval on the subscription-
streaming-music model.11 Apple historically has shied away from the streaming, butgiven
the state of slowing digital music downloads and a drop in iTunes Store salesApple needs to
retain its positioning in the music market. To some degree, the Beats purchase would appear to
be validation of the Spotify model. Apple also possesses inherent strengths to foster adoption
of Beats. For instance, it could use its TouchID fingerprint reader as an easy way to subscribe
to the service. The company already uses TouchID for mobile payments in stores and for in-
app purchases.
Although receiving a service preloaded onto a device potentially helps stimulate consumer
adoption, it doesnt guarantee success. Apple bundled iTunes Radio on its iTunes music app,
for example, but the service hasnt taken notable market share away from the Internet radio
giant Pandora. Integrating the service into iOS, however, could be a good entry point for first-
time subscribers.
Google Chrome Cast

At the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Google announced that it will
extend its Google Cast streaming-media technology to work in audio-only devices, including
speakers and home entertainment sound systems. Google Cast for Audio enables listeners to
wirelessly control and send the music playing on an iOS, Android device, or Chrome browser
right to new Google Castenabled audio gear.12 Instead of a phone, tablet, or computer being
source of the music or video, the Google Cast device pulls content from the cloud at the highest
quality possible.
Spotify and Music Economics

Launched in Stockholm in 2008, Spotify has a library of more than 20 million songs and
permits users to choose from millions of songs available over the Internet for free or by
subscription. Spotify increasingly is seen as representing the future of music consumption.
Users either pay for the premium service to stream music without interruption or they listen for
free but with advertisements between songs. Per Sundin, head of Universal Music in Sweden,
argues that Spotifya service in which Universal and other big record labels have minority
stakeshas saved the music industry, although not everyone agrees.
A decade after Apple revolutionized the music world with its iTunes store, the music
industry is undergoing anothereven more radicaldigital transformation as listeners begin
to move from CDs and downloads to using streaming services such as Spotify, Pandora, and
YouTube. What is certain is that streaming music services are changing the economics of
music.
Spotify serves its audiences legally licensed music, thus the company generally has been
embraced by an industry still affected by piracy. As digital music services grow into
multibillion-dollar companies, however, the proportionate trickle of money making its way to
artists is concerning to some. The way streaming services pay artist royalties is fundamentally
different from the way the industry has paid royalties in the past. Previously, record royalties
were typically a percentage of a sale. For example, for every dollar made, a typical artist
might have received $0.07 to $0.10, after paying the label, the distributor, and other fees.
Under the streaming model royalties are closer to a fraction of a cent. The royalties accrue
over time and leave some to wonder if the total can amount to anything substantial.13
TV, FILM, AND STREAMING

By 2020, the number of TV sets connected to the Internet is expected to reach 965 million,
nearly nine times the number connected in 2010, and 200 million homes are expected to
subscribe to a video on-demand service. The average person now spends five hours per week
watching TV, video clips, and films on the Internet. The surge partially has been driven by
increased use of smartphones and tablets. As screen sizes become bigger and mobile Internet
speeds get faster, mobile video viewing is only going to increase. YouTube revealed in 2014
that half of its video views now originate from a mobile device.14
For audiences, producers, and content, greater resolutions are preferred. A display device
for content using 3840 x 2160 resolution generally is referred to as 4K resolution. Several
4K resolution types exist in the fields of digital television and digital cinematography, but
YouTube and the television industry have adopted Ultra HD as the 4K standard. In coming
years, the 4K standard likely will have a strong influence on device construction, Internet
platforms, and mobile apps. For example, although Apple didnt clearly announce the
capability during its iPhone 6 release, the device actually can play 4K videos. Quality is
limited by the resolution of the screen, therefore the larger size and greater resolution iPhone 6
Plus technically is a better device for viewing 4K than is the iPhone 6. Although the iPhone 6
and 6 Plus cant record 4K video, rumors already circulating about the iPhone 7 suggest that it
will include a significant upgrade of the camera, which might enable it to shoot 4K video. In
turn, its possible that new versions of Apple TV might add the feature.
The emphasis on 4K in the mobile device and TV category is where new developments
such as the Netflix and Amazon 4K streams, increased use of encoding, and the propagation of
faster Internet connections are becoming a significant part of the Internet and home
entertainment picture. Netflix also is promising to add much 4K content in 2015. Regardless of
the costs, consumers are likely to be offered a much broader development of streaming
entertainment in 2015 and growth in 4K-related streaming technologies and services.
Consumers, broadcasters, and content creators could all potentially benefit from the
developments, but some exceptions do exist. The benefits, however, are clear. With that in
mind, the following are four trends in streaming 4K Ultra HD content that likely will emerge in
coming years.
EXPANSION OF 4K CONTENT
To date, Netflix has offered 4K streams of various TV shows and movies since April of
2014. In December 2014, Amazon also rose to the challenge and offered 4K streams via their
Amazon Prime Instant Video service. The two companies join a roster of other companies
offering 4K streams, including DirecTV, Comcast, and Sony Unlimited Instant Video. These
content broadcasters, and others, plan to extend their selection of 4K entertainment in 2015 and
DirecTV has even launched two satellites to deliver increased 4K delivery.15
Financial models involving 4K are mixed. In some cases, companies are charging a
premium for 4K content. New Netflix subscribers could pay $11.99 a month to access 4K TV.
The Action service enables audiences to access four shows simultaneously, which is ideal
for a family that owns multiple devices. Netflix has announced that it will use the fees to fund
the production of more 4K UHD content, because filming new TV shows in 4K is a relatively
expensive process. Increased costs are derived from the need for new cameras and production
facilities for 4K UHD content, including for handling, storing, and streaming the huge amounts
of data associated with the format.16
At the time of this writing, Amazons 4K Ultra HD streaming service made much of its 4K
content available to its Prime Instant subscribers in the United States at no cost. To use
Amazons 4K stream, however, viewers must have a compatible 4K TV built in 2014
(Samsung, LG, Sony, Vizio) or later and that can handle the app. Other brands almost certainly
will join the list of compatible devices in 2015 and beyond.
LIVE 4K STREAMS
Live 4K streams are another technology to watch on the Internet for 2015. Live 4K sports
broadcasts have already been conducted by several broadcasters in beta tests delivered to
small audiences. Sony, BBC, and several other companies delivered a handful of FIFA 2014
World Cup matches to small test audiences. These companies and others are working to make
live 4K feeds a reality, and in 2015 were likely to see some of the first widespread
commercial broadcasts of live sports events in 4K, especially given that DirecTVs two new
satellites are in orbitand live 4K broadcasting is one of their primary tasks.17
ULTRAHIGH SPEED BROADBAND INTERNET CONNECTIVITY

Because of the massive amounts of data that 4K streams use even when compressed or
encoded, truly fast high-speed Internet is crucial to wider adoption. Internet service providers
and broadcasters have accepted the challenge and a race to deliver faster connectivity to
consumers is under way in some larger metropolitan areas.18 The challenge entails an
expansion of the number of homes that have access to high-speed Internet, and even includes
introducing connectivity of 500 Mbps or more to subscribers in some areas. Currently, Google
Fiber is a leading high-speed broadband Internet provider in the United States, but the goal is
to increase speeds tenfold in order and blast the Internet into living rooms across the country.
Although Google Fiber offers a marked speed advantage, the number of homes it actually
reaches is small. The company set up a test network in Palo Alto in 2011 before rolling out its
first commercial installation in Kansas City, Missouri, after strong public demand. The cities
next on the list for deployment are Austin, Texas, and Provo, Utah.19
By 2020, it is estimated that billions of devices will be connected to the Internet. Ultra-fast
Internet could have a substantial effect on our lives in the future. New mobile networks such as
5G could be a reality by 2020, with holographic video meetings, driverless cars, and
automated homes being some of many applications of the technology. The 5G mobile networks
fundamentally have the potential to overhaul how we communicate using the radio spectrum. At
present, the radio spectrum humans use to communicate is mostly allocated. But 5G will
increase the number of available channels, thus allowing a greater number of channels to
operate simultaneously at higher bandwidths, with low latency and reduced power
consumption. In other words, the 5G capabilities enable significant numbers of low-power
objects to speak to other Internet-ready devices with decreased delay and extremely high
stability.
Although 5G still is being researched and developed, the creation of the first truly global
network could play a big role in a variety of fields, including health care, transportation, and
home construction.20 Additionally, such developments also raise entirely new privacy and
security concerns for consumers. What happens, for example, if hackers gain access to the
smart products in your house?
4K STREAMING ON MOBILE DEVICES
The first wave of mobile phones featuring 4K screen displays went on sale in 2015. The
capability to render UHD video will draw increased consumer interest for streaming 4K
content on mobile devices.21
For consumers with Wi-Fi connections that enable them to download larger 4K streams,
the first ultra-HD content from YouTube should be accessible for their 4K mobile phone
screens at some point in 2015.22 Additionally, 4K streams from a smartphone to an ultrahigh
definition TV also appear to be a possibility for 2015. In December of 2014, PC Magazine
reported that new devices with a USB Type-C connector might support the new mobile high-
definition link (MHL) 3 specification, which includes streaming 4K video. By the end of 2015,
manufacturers are slated to begin replacing current USB 3.0 ports with the next-generation
USB 3.1, to double the transfer rate from 4.8 Gbps to 9.6 Gbps.23
PERSONAL VIDEO DISTRIBUTION

With more user-submitted content being produced in 2014 than previously, 2015 will see
more experimentation with how it is distributed. Applications such Snapchat and WhatsApp
offer a more personal means of communication, and are ideal for reaching new and younger
audiences.
In 2014, the Snapchat mobile application raised a remarkable amount of cash, putting the
three-year-old companys valuation at more than $10 billion, according to Bloomberg.24
Investors are seemingly eager to hitch a ride on Snapchats incredible rise and continued
growth. At the time of this writing, the apps monthly active user total was nearing the 200
million mark.25 In 2014, Snapchat also announced the addition of Chat, a feature that enabled
users to text and video message in real time. As personalized applications like Snapchat
continue to grow and evolve, so does its user base of brands that are interested in using the
platform to reach millennial audiences.
THE INTERNET, POSTMODERNISM, AND ACCESSING ART

Over the past decade, advances in technology have greatly affected the production and
promotion of art. Electronic media techniques are incorporated by a majority of artists, and the
use of the Internet by artists has had a substantial effect on how audiences access, interact with,
and share art, as well as how artists promote and monetize their work. With advances in
website technology, blogging, and social media platforms, artists have new mediums for
exposing artwork. Gone are the days of traditional brick-and-mortar galleries being the
primary outlet for viewing and purchasing art. Todays artists can use the Internet to directly
market artworks internationally.26 The Internet is increasingly making its way into the museum
and galley space through mobile apps and interactive technologies.
Has the Internet impacted art in a positive or negative way? The answer depends partially
upon your vantage point. Of course, gallery owners might not like being cut out of the deal
when the public buys art online. But with these challenges come new opportunities for
museums and galleries in the areas of mobile applications and wearables. For artists, the
Internet has been mostly positive and has presented many opportunities, tools, and platforms
that previously did not exist.
Perhaps the use of the Internet and accessing art is most usefully analyzed through a lens of
ideas usually associated with postmodern theory. Postmodern theorists could argue, for
example, that the goal in any conversationincluding those conversations that characterize art
is not to find the truth but simply to further the conversation. The Internet can function as a
platform for these conversations. It is a place in which there rarely is a final answer, a
conclusion, a finished product, or a truth.
Before the days of the Internet, artists often would work in relative seclusion of their
studios primarily. Promotion of their work was a somewhat limited and often costly endeavor.
Artists typically would converse with the public by attending art shows or joining arts
organizations. With the advent of the Internet, artists easily could go online and show new
projects and involve themselves in a conversation with their audiences. Todays artists can
begin a blog, create a Facebook page, upload their work to an Etsy page to display, and engage
in conversation. In this manner the Internet opened up a major platform for discussionone
which had not existed previously. In some ways, the notion of discussion and deeper
exploration by the audience becomes central to the definition of Internet art itself.
INTERNET ART
Internet art historically has been defined as a form of digital artwork distributed via the
Internet, sidestepping the traditional nation of the gallery and museum system. Internet art
delivers an aesthetic experience from the use of the Internet itself. Often the audience becomes
part of the work of art through interacting with the artworks, and the artists who work in this
realm sometimes are referred to as Net artists.
Internet art can be created in a variety of forms and presentations. Websites, e-mail,
software projects, Internet installations, interactive pieces, streaming video, audio, networked
performances, and even games, are all mediums used by Net artists. Internet art often overlaps
with other computer-based art forms, such as new media art, electronic art, software art, and
digital art.
POST-INTERNET ART
Post-Internet art is a fairly recent term circulating in the art world, and attempts to
describe a growing development in the art worldone which could be one of the most
noteworthy trends to emerge in some time. Contrary to how the term might seem at first glance,
the key to understanding what post-Internet means is that the term doesnt suggest that
technological advancements associated with the Internet are behind us.27
Instead, in the same way that postmodern artists absorbed and adapted the strategies of
modernism for their aesthetics, post-Internet artists have moved beyond making work
dependent on the novelty of the Web to using its tools to tackle other subjects. And although
earlier Net artists often made works that existed exclusively online, the post-Internet
generationmany of which have grown up with the Internetfrequently uses digital strategies
to create objects that exist in the real world.
A handful of artists and galleries already are closely linked to post-Internet art, and
curators are aiming to find ways to help these artists reflect our new relationship to images that
are inspired by the culture of the Web.
DIGITAL MUSEUMS
For curators who wish to incorporate new technologies in museums today, the terms
online and even Web have largely been replaced with digital as a description of such
works. New technologies ranging from wearables to virtual reality are being used to enhance
the museum experiencewhich challenges the notion that the computer monitor is central to
digital experiences. Many museums have developed mobile applications, but apps can be
expensive to develop and difficult to market and often exist primarily inside the museum
itself. Some museums have developed less expensive alternativessuch as mobile tours
using WordPress and GPS technology to deliver customized experiences on a smaller budget.28
Along with mobile technologies, some museums are utilizing the quickly evolving field of
wearable technology to interact with audiences. Although privacy can be a concern for some,
the truth is that the next generation of museumgoers likely will rely upon some form of personal
technology and augmented reality in their daily lives. Some museums are making use of
wearables to provide personalized interpretation about art and potentially to create new types
of museums. Regardless, technology and the Internet offer audiences new methods for
experiencing the modern museum. These technologies also potentially offer new ways of
bringing art and museums into the home.29
GOOGLE ART PROJECT AND DIGITAL MUSEUM INITIATIVES

The Google Art Project was released to the public in 2011 as an online platform enabling
audiences to access high-resolution images of art from the comfort of their own homes. The
project was especially ambitious when it launched in 2011, as high-resolution zooming on the
Web was in its infancy. Seventeen museums collaborated on the project with the single goal
being to come together in a central platform that audiences could use to explore art in new and
dynamic ways. The project now contains tens of thousands of collections, artists, artworks, and
user galleries.
Along with high-resolution imagery, Google Art Project content also featured a cadre of
tools and metadata to enhance the audiences understanding and appreciation of the artwork.
For example, museumgoers could view a selected work, zoom in on it, compare it with another
work, and then take a virtual tour through the museum by using Googles street-view
technology.30
Since the release of the Google Art Project, other art institutions have followed suit. In
December of 2014, the Freer Gallery of Art, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, and the
Smithsonian Institutions national museums of Asian art in the United States released their
entire collections online. The artwork now is available for both viewing and downloading for
noncommercial use.31
The Freer and Sackler galleries are the first Smithsonian entities to release their entire
collections digitally, and join a small number of other U.S. museums that have undertaken
similar initiatives. Although Open F|S is the galleries largest digital initiative it is not the first;
the galleries participated in the launch of the Google Art Project.
The Smithsonian created the initiative with the goal of providing the public access to the
images for noncommercial educational, scholarly, artistic, and personal projects. Additionally,
the Smithsonian has made available a series of works in specific sharable formats such as
mobile backgrounds, desktop wallpapers, and social media headers. The general public also is
invited to participate in the initiative and offer beta tester feedback.
VIRTUAL REALITY AND THE VISUAL ARTS

In coming years, virtual reality and the Internet potentially could offer great opportunities
in the world of museums, visual arts, video games, and even marketing. One company ready for
that future is Oculus VR, an American virtual-reality technology company. The companys first
product was the Oculus Rift, a head-mounted display for immersive virtual reality (VR). In
March 2014, Facebook agreed to acquire Oculus VR for U.S. $2 billion (in cash and Facebook
stock). The Oculus Rift headset generated substantial media coverage and notable buzz in
2014, and is joined by a host of notable competitors. Google and Samsung plan to ship virtual
reality sets to market in 2015.32
For museums, the first step is to re-create existing museums online, thus enabling audiences
to visit, explore new environments, and share information and experiences. One such
exhibition occurred in November 2014, when the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center (part of the
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum) in Virginia hosted the world-exclusive
exhibition of the Ranger spacecraft from the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar. The
exhibition included an immersive Oculus Rift DK2 experience, which enabled visitors to
interactively explore the films Endurance spacecraft via virtual-reality technology;
experience weightlessness; and see views of the galaxy.
MOBILE AND STREAMING IN THE ARTS

Mobile technology has changed how the public experiences art. Anyone with a smartphone
can enjoy art, either on-demand or on the go. Mobile technology can tell the artists about the
participant, and vice versa.33 Live theatre is one such area where artists are harnessing the
power of Internet streaming.
In November 2014, The Globe Theater in Londonthe most famous Shakespeare venue in
the worldlaunched Globe Player, a paid service that allows users to stream or download its
productions onto their computers and mobile devices. Online audiences can watch more than
50 of the theaters past productions.
THE INTERNET AND THE WRITTEN WORD

Technology is constantly changing how people tell their stories. Before the invention of the
printing press, people told stories orally. The printing press introduced books to the masses.
Now technology has evolved into digital books. The invention of computers, tablets, and
smartphones has changed the way we access the written word, read for leisure, and learn.
Todays textbooks no longer are strictly limited to flat text on a page with a few helpful
images placed within the content. With the rise of technology comes a revolution in books,
which are now interactive with Web-based content. While reading, students can make
assessments with instant feedback, and readers can view animations that aid in understanding
the content, view additional material, watch videos, and experience other content that helps
with learning. eReaders enable audiences to experience content. In 2015, half of American
adults own an e-reading device, but research on how e-books affect learning is scarce.
The dialog over the merits of paper books and e-readers has been heated since the first
Kindle debuted in 2007. The discussion ranged from the sentimental to the practical. From how
well we comprehend the digital words found in e-books, to health concerns about how safe it
is to read the e-books before we go to sleep at night.
Amazonperhaps the leader in the e-reader movementhas been particularly disruptive
to these previously held notions, especially regarding the old methods of doing business. The
retailers well-documented fights with publisherssuch as the Hachette Book Grouphave
been played out in the media. Amazons 2014 all-you-can-read venture, Kindle Unlimited, was
a catalyst in the heated debate, both for and against the service, especially among self-
published writers. The subscription service gives users access to more than 600,000 e-books
and audiobooks for $10 per month.34
Both Amazon and Hachette had been seeking a deal once Hachettes contract with Amazon
expired in March 2014, only to be briefly extended by the online retailer into April. The
negotiations drew protests from authors on both sides of the dispute, including some who
called for Justice Department scrutiny of Amazons business practices, which often were
characterized in the media as being aggressive.
Hachette eventually won a victory against Amazon: The ability to set its own prices for e-
books, which the company sees as critical to its survival. The conflict, which played out in
increasingly public forums as the year progressed, caused damage on both sides. In the media
Amazon was cast as a bully, and a large group of authors called for it to be investigated on
antitrust grounds, although sales were hit by the dispute. Hachette showed its weakness and
consumers had difficulty buying certain titles. It seemed that neither party really won.
Amazons supporters publicly questioned the need for Hachette, a relatively large
publisher, to exist at a time when authors can publish on their own, digitally. Hachette never
seemed to fully respond to the accusation. Even if Amazon did receive less than it wanted, the
company still controls nearly half the market for books, a previously unheard-of portion of the
market captured by one retailer. Some argued that the dispute showed that Amazon was not
afraid to use its power.
KINDLE UNLIMITED PROGRAM

Controversy aside, the Kindle Unlimited program offers readers access to the written word
in new ways. The service grants readers the freedom to explore new genres and authors, with
unlimited access to a wide and varied selection of books. Some Kindle Unlimited books also
come with the free professionally narrated Audible audiobook. A related feature
Whispersync for Voiceenables users to switch seamlessly between reading and listening
without losing their place. Using headphones, readers can continue enjoying their books when
in the car, at the gym, or even in the kitchen. Readers can use the service on any device with the
Kindle app installed, thus Kindle Unlimited can be used with or without a Kindle, and
wherever readers might be located.
CONCLUSION
Whatever form content might take, the Internet and technology are enabling audiences to
access music, art, film, and the written word for leisure in new and exciting ways. The future
of this content is mobile, streamed, wearable, and increasingly connected to many facets of our
lives at home, at work, in our cars, and for leisure.
Technology trends are implications of what todays consumers are looking for as they
desire to work and live connected to each other via the Internet. Few aspects of our lives are
unconnected. Humans constantly are connecting new objects and smartening every device so
that it is informed of our choices and preferences. These technological advances have fostered
a shared, global Internet culture with an appetite for inexpensive, on-demand services that
allow multiplatform access to content.
This fundamental shift in our culture also has implications for content creators, advertisers,
and brand partners. From streaming players, to the promise of new networks, to the debate
over associated royalties, the entertainment space is in full upheaval. One thing is certain,
however: New opportunities have emerged for people to enjoy, engage, and share music,
movies, art, and the written word.
NOTES
1. ConsumerLab, 10 Hot Consumer Trends 2015, ericsson.com. (October 31, 2014),
http://www.ericsson.com/res/docs/2014/consumerlab/ericsson-consumerlab-10-hot-consumer-trends-2015.pdf, accessed
December 10, 2014.
2. Ethan Smith, Music Downloads Plummet in U.S., but Sales of Vinyl Records and Streaming Surge, Wall Street
Journal (January 1, 2015), http://www.wsj.com/articles/music-downloads-plummet-in-u-s-but-sales-of-vinyl-records-and-
streaming-surge-1420092579, accessed January 1, 2015.
3. Nick Jarvis, Get Excited, Dance Fans: Beatport and YouTube Tipped to Launch Streaming Services, In the Mix
(August 20, 2014),
http://www.inthemix.com.au/industry/58769/Get_excited_dance_fans_Beatport_and_YouTube_tipped_to_launch_streaming_services
accessed December 15, 2014.
4. Adam Satariano, SoundCloud Said to Near Deals with Record Labels, Bloomberg (July 10, 2014),
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-10/soundcloud-said-to-near-deals-with-record-labels.html, accessed December 2,
2014.
5. Christina Bonnington, So Long, Ping: Apple Shuttering Failed Social Network Sept. 30, Wired (September 13, 2012),
http://www.wired.com/2012/09/goodbye-ping/, accessed December 16, 2014.
6. Seekingalpha.com, SFX Entertainments (SFXE) CEO Bob Sillerman on Q2 2014 ResultsEarnings Call Transcript
(August 14, 2014), http://seekingalpha.com/article/2426255-sfx-entertainments-sfxe-ceo-bob-sillerman-on-q2-2014-results-
earnings-call-transcript?page=7&p=qanda&l=last, accessed December 20, 2014.
7. Megan Buerger, Beatport Aims to Be the One-Stop Streaming Shop for DJs with New Strategy (December 19, 2014),
http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-mobile/6413870/beatport-aims-to-be-the-one-stop-streaming-shop-for-djs,
8. BusinessWire, Beatport Announces Definitive API for Electronic Music Culture, BusinessWire (April 11, 2014),
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140411005642/en/Beatport-Announces-Definitive-API-Electronic-Music-
Culture#.VKbAw2TF9Vo, accessed December 6, 2014.
9. Aaron Berecz, SFX Entertainment to Re-Launch Beatport, Add Streaming Service in 2015, Dancing Astronaut
(December 14, 2014), http://www.dancingastronaut.com/2014/12/sfx-entertainment-re-launch-beatport-add-streaming-service-
2015/, accessed December 14, 2014.
10. Frank Pallotta, YouTube to Launch Premium Music Streaming Service, CNN Money (November 12, 2014,
http://money.cnn.com/2014/11/12/media/youtube-music-streaming-service/index.html?iid=EL, accessed December 14, 2014;
Frank Pallotta, Taylor Swift Pulls Her Music from Spotify, CNN Money (November 3, 2014),
http://money.cnn.com/2014/11/03/media/taylor-swift-spotify/?iid=EL, accessed December 16, 2014.
11. Roger Solsman and Joan E. Cheng, Apple Said to Be Embedding Beats Music Service into iOS, CNET (November 19,
2014), http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-to-embed-beats-music-service-into-ios-software-ft-says/, accessed December 17,
2014.
12. Joanna Stern, Consumer Electronics Show Roundup, Wall Street Journal (January 5, 2015),
http://www.wsj.com/articles/consumer-electronics-show-roundup-1420512446, accessed January 10, 2015.
13. Ben Sisario, As Music Streaming Grows, Royalties Slow to a Trickle, Media and Advertising: The New York Times
(January 28, 2013), http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/business/media/streaming-shakes-up-music-industrys-model-for-
royalties.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, accessed December 20, 2014.
14. Stephan Jukic, Streaming Video and 4K: Trends We Can Look Forward to in 2015, 4K (December 29, 2014),
http://4k.com/news/4k-streaming-trends-that-are-coming-in-2015-4853/, accessed December 29, 2014.
15. Ibid.
16. John Archer, Netflixs 4K/UHD Price Hike Is Its Second Huge Mistake, Tech: Forbes (October 17, 2014),
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnarcher/2014/10/17/netflix-4k-uhd-price-hike-is-second-huge-mistake/, accessed December 20,
2014.
17. Jukic, 4K; Stephanie Mlot, Get Ready for 4K Streams from Phone to HDTV, PC Magazine (November 17, 2014),
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2472292,00.asp, accessed December 20, 2014.
18. Jukic, 4K.
19. Iain Thomson, Google Promises 10Gps Fiber Network to blast 4K into Living Rooms, The Register (February 14,
2014), http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/14/google_will_upgrade_fiber_network_to_give_10gbps_home_broadband,
20. Dr. John-Paul Rooney, 5G Visionaries Make a Head Start on the Internet of Things, The Telegraph (December 20,
2014), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/mobile-phones/11303838/5G-visionaries-make-a-head-start-on-the-internet-of-
things.html, accessed January 10, 2015.
21. Jukic, 4K.
22. Ibid.
23. Mlot, Get Ready for 4K Streams.
24. Sarah Frier, Snapchat Raises $485.6 Million to Close Out Big Fundraising Year, Bloomberg (December 31, 2014),
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-01/snapchat-raises-485-6-million-to-close-out-big-fundraising-year.html, accessed
January 1, 2015.
25. Chris Welch, Snapchat Closes Out 2014 by Raising a Ton of Cash, The Verge (January 1, 2015),
http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/1/7477563/snapchat-closes-2014-by-raising-ton-of-cash, accessed January 2, 2015.
26. Artpromotivate, How Is the Internet Impacting the Life of Artists?, Artpromotivate (December 20, 2012),
http://www.artpromotivate.com/2012/12/how-is-internet-impacting-life-of.html, accessed December 18, 2014.
27. Ian Wallace, What Is Post-Internet Art? Understanding the Revolutionary New Art Movement, ArtSpace (March 18,
2014), http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/post_internet_art, accessed December 15, 2014.
28. Danny Birchall, and Mia Ridge, Post-Web Technology: What Comes Next for Museums?, Culture Professionals
Network: The Guardian (October 13, 2014), http://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-
blog/2014/oct/03/post-web-technology-museums-virtual-reality, accessed December 21, 2014.
29. Ibid.
30. Matthew Caines, Arts Head: Amit Sood, Director, Google Cultural Institute, Culture professionals network: The
Guardian (December 3, 2013), http://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-
blog/2013/dec/03/amit-sood-google-cultural-institute-art-project, accessed December 21, 2014.
31. Jackie Dove, Smithsonian Galleries Release Massive Asian Art Collection Online for Non-Commercial Use, The
Creativity Channel: Thenextweb.com (January 3, 2015), http://thenextweb.com/creativity/2015/01/04/smithsonian-galleries-
release-massive-asian-art-collection-online-for-non-commercial-use/, accessed January 3, 2015.
32. Christopher Heine, How Oculus Rift Is About to Reshape Marketing Creativity, CES 2015: AdWeek (January 5,
2015), http://www.adweek.com/news/techn ology/how-oculus-rift-about-reshape-marketing-creativity-162124, accessed
January 6, 2015.
33. Matt Trueman, How Mobile Tech Is Changing the Way We Make and Enjoy Art, The Guardian (November 11,
2014), http://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/2014/nov/11/-sp-mobile-tech-art-shakespeare-google-glass,
34. David Streitfeld, Amazon and Hachette Resolve Dispute, Technology: The New York Times (November 13, 2014),
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/technology/amazon-hachette-ebook-dispute.html, accessed December 15, 2014.
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2
The Positive Side of Social Media:

Encouraging Developments from Sport
Jimmy Sanderson and Kevin Hull
The emergence of Internet and social media technologies has introduced compelling outcomes
for multiple stakeholders in the sport industry.1 Indeed, it seems that hardly a day passes during
which the sport news cycle does not contain a story about an athlete or sport personality who
has committed a social media miscue. In fact, some of these missteps seemingly live in
perpetuity and can become standard talking points when discussing sport and social media.
In 2010, for example, University of North Carolina football player Marvin Austin began
tweeting about his travels and penchant for spending moneycharacteristics that apparently
piqued the interest of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) given their rules
regarding amateurism. The NCAA subsequently launched an investigation into the North
Carolina football program and Austin ultimately lost his eligibility.2 In another instance, former
National Football League (NFL) player Chad Johnson (nicknamed OchoCinco) gained
considerable notoriety for his Twitter activity and in 2010 was fined $25,000 for carrying his
phone onto the sidelines and tweeting during a preseason gamea violation of NFL rules.3
During the 2014 NFL season, Pittsburgh Steelers player Mike Mitchell responded to criticism
from fans tweeting at him about his perceived subpar performance by sending one fan the
following message, You on the other hand kill yourself.4
Although there are certainly issues arising from athletes adoption of social media
platforms, these incidents tend to overshadow the notion that the majority of athletes who use
social media do so in a positive manner. Focusing on only the negative side of athletes social
media use also ignores the benefits that athletes can derive from social media. Indeed, the
frequency with which social media issues are reported in the sport media seems likely to
influence the negative view that most sport organization management personnel tend to have
toward social media, particularly at the intercollegiate level.5
Accordingly, this chapter addresses some of the benefits that athletes obtain from using
social media. These include optimizing identity expression and self-presentation; benefiting
from fan advocacy; and engaging in advocacy and activism. As each of these areas is
discussed, the relevant research that has explored each of these areas is reviewed. The chapter
concludes by offering directions for researchers to traverse in future inquiry, along with a
discussion of how sport industry practitioners can utilize this research to work with athletes to
harness the power of social media and promote strategic and positive usage.
OPTIMIZING SELF-PRESENTATION
In 1959, Erving Goffman proposed that people acted differently based on the situation that
they were in and the people with whom they were interacting. Goffman proposed the theory of
self-presentation, in which he posited that people act in two distinct mannersone being a
desirable image that they want to present to the world and the other being a relaxed image that
they are more comfortable presenting only to those close to them.6 To better explain this theory,
Goffman used the idea of actors in the theater to demonstrate his propositions. Goffman posited
that when people are on the front stage, their goal is to perform in such a way that the audience
leaves satisfied. When those same actors are backstage with their friends and contemporaries,
however, they do not have to perform and instead are more relaxed and able to reveal their true
personality. Goffman suggested that people navigated between these two stages when
interacting with different types of people.
Although self-presentation traditionally is linked to face-to-face communication, computer-
mediated communication, including social media platforms, has enhanced peoples ability to
selectively self-present and to take more control over their public presentation.710 For
athletes, this capability is particularly important, as they are able to showcase aspects of their
personality that fans do not normally see in traditional media broadcasts.11 Previous to the
emergence of social media, athletes primarily communicated with the public through
traditional media channels. These interactions typically were moderated by public relations
officials and media professionals who often would allow an athlete to reveal only very basic,
front-stage aspects of his or her life. Social media, however, gives athletes the ability to speak
directly to their fans and enables an athlete to reveal more of his or her identity. For fans this
creates a scenario in which they perhaps feel as if they know the athlete better, because the fan
gets a more personal view of the life of the sports star.12 Navigating between front-stage and
backstage personas, however, can be a difficult task for athletes because of the large audiences
that follow the athletes social media postings. For instance, some athletes have millions of
Twitter users following their updates, and therefore tweeting messages that are of interest to all
followers can be challenging.13 Despite this struggle, as more athletes have embraced social
media, many have found these channels to be an ideal place to tell millions of fans about
personal events in their lives.14, 15
These messages can be as simple as demonstrating their support for other sport teams, their
shopping habits, or wishing family members a happy birthday.16, 17 Such disclosures can
cultivate identification and parasocial interaction among fans, who can utilize these messages
to find similarity with athletes that is difficult to obtain through the lens of athleticism.18
Sanderson, for instance, examined the self-presentation on Twitter by four rookie athletes in
Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Basketball Association (NBA), the National
Football League (NFL), and the National Hockey League (NHL).19 Sanderson discovered that
these athletes shared topics such as their popular culture preferences, family experiences, and
dedication to their sport (e.g., workout routines). One noteworthy manner in which these
athletes used Twitter was to solicit information from fans, such as asking for restaurant and
movie recommendations. Through sharing more of their identity with fans and going so far as to
request information from them, athletes were able to appear closer to fans, an outcome that
in addition to cultivating identification and parasocial interaction, could prompt fans to take
action to defend and support athletes. In another study, Hull examined Twitter usage by
professional golfers during the 2013 Masters tournament and found that golfers demonstrated
more front-stage tendencies, such as promoting their endorsements, yet still revealed many
behind-the-scenes stories as well.20
Whereas social media provide opportunities to optimize self-presentation, athletes could
conform to traditional gender roles, suggesting that this capability might be underutilized.
Lebel and Danylchuk investigated professional tennis players self-presentation on Twitter and
discovered that although image construction largely was similar between the two genders,
male players skewed more toward a sport fan self-presentation, whereas female players
tended to self-present more as brand managers.21 Similarly, Coche explored the self-
presentation of male and female professional tennis players and golfers on their Twitter
accounts.22 Coche discovered that women tended to predominantly present their femininity
followed by their athletic persona, whereas males primarily self-presented as athletes.
The ability to optimize self-presentation via social media also enables athletes to
counteract perceived negative media framing and to take more control over their public
presentation when they perceive that it is being misrepresented in the sport media. Sanderson
examined Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schillings self-presentation on his blog in response to
two incidentsone in which his athletic integrity was challenged by a broadcaster and another
in which he publicly apologized for criticizing fellow player Barry Bonds.23 Sanderson
discovered that Schilling employed three self-presentation strategies: (1) critic; (2) committed
individual; and (3) accountable person. Using the critic personality, Schilling turned the tables
and lambasted sport journalists in response to baseball broadcaster Gary Throne suggesting
that Schilling had staged an injury during the 2004 American League Championship Series
(ALCS). Through comments such as, Instead of using the forums they participate in to do
something truly different, change lives, inspire people, you have an entire subset of people
whose sole purpose in life is to actually be the news instead of report it, Schilling was able to
defend himself against this allegation.24 More specifically, he was able to assume the role of a
critican identity aspect that often is reserved for sport media members. Schillings blog also
enabled him to express these views without any filtering, which would have been difficult to
do when using traditional media channels.
Schilling utilized the committed individual self-presentation strategy to counter perceptions
that he was not a team player. One poignant reminder he offered included detailing the personal
sacrifices he had made to keep pitching during the Red Soxs 2004 run to a World Series title.
Remember this, the surgery was voluntary. If you have the nuts, or the guts, grab an
orthopedic surgeon, have them suture your ankle down to the tissue covering the bone
in your ankle joint, then walk around for 4 hours. After that, go find a mound, throw a
hundred or so pitches, run over, cover first a few times. When youre done check that
ankle and see if it bleeds. It will.25
Schilling used the accountable person strategy to take responsibility for his terse remarks
about Barry Bonds. Employing statements such as: Regardless of my opinions, thoughts, and
beliefs on anything Barry Bonds, it was absolutely irresponsible and wrong to say what I did. I
dont think its within anyones right to say the things I said yesterday and affect other peoples
lives in that way.26
As Schillings case demonstrates, via social media platforms athletes are endowed with
the capability to optimize their self-presentation, reveal more aspects of their identity, and
counteract what they perceive to be negative public portrayals. As athletes navigate between
front stage and backstage they also can create potential financial benefits. In their studies of
professional tennis players self-presentation on Twitter, Lebel and Danylcuck found that
female tennis players used Twitter primarily to create a positive personal brand through
interactions with fans and also by promoting their sponsors.27 Sanderson examined Florida
Marlins player Logan Morrisons identity expressions on Twitter and found that Morrisons
use of humor seemed to attract a large audience, which he capitalized on by promoting his
corporate appearances and philanthropic efforts.28 Thus, social media provides athletes with a
platform to build a brand that can be strategically constructed to appeal to their organization
as well as to corporate sponsors.
BENEFITING FROM FAN ADVOCACY

Whereas an athlete can directly advocate for himself or herself by countering perceived
negative media framing and by promoting aspects of identity that could be silenced in
traditional media, athletes indirectly receive these benefits from fans via social media. Indeed,
through social media, fans can express support for athletes, combat an athletes detractors, and
advocate for the positive characteristics and attributes that an athlete possesses. Sanderson
observed how Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling received social support from blog
readers in response to the aforementioned incidents about which he blogged.29 Schilling
discovered that blog readers mobilized and authenticated his role as a sport media critic and
proclaimed his legacy within Red Sox culture. Sanderson also noted that many fans posited that
those who criticized Schilling were masquerading as Red Sox fans, and that expressing support
for Schilling was an accurate indicator of whether one was a true Red Sox fan. Sanderson
suggested that these messages from fans functioned as a form of public relations that Schilling
received by merely posting his blog entries.
Athletes also could receive this benefit when they are experiencing personal adversity. For
instance, Kassing and Sanderson investigated comments posted to cyclist Floyd Landiss Web
site as he battled accusations that he had taken performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) during the
2006 Tour de France, which he won. Ultimately, Landis was disqualified and stripped of the
title.30 Kassing and Sanderson found that fans conveyed support to Landis by expressing
empathy and sympathy; confirming Landiss accomplishments and character; testifying about
their belief in Landis; sharing that they possessed a common enemy with Landis (e.g., the
United States Anti-Doping Agency, World Anti-Doping Agency); and by offering Landis
support and tangible assistance such as monetary donations to his legal defense fund. Kassing
and Sanderson contended that Landiss blog gave fans a mechanism to be more actively
involved in his affairs, which included very elaborate and specific forms of support beyond
general well-wishes.
In another study, Sanderson examined the differences in how fans framed professional
golfer Tiger Woodss marital infidelity via his Facebook page as compared to how these
events were framed in the mainstream media.31 Sanderson found that mainstream media reports
framed Woodss infidelity as a tragic flaw a characteristic that previously had been difficult
to find given Woodss performance on the golf course along with his previously tightly guarded
personal life. Mainstream media reports also centered on the lurid details that accompanied the
reports made by many of Woodss alleged mistresses. These examples were typified by
comments such as, two more blondes and a brunette were added to Tiger Woodss sultry
scorecard.32 In contrast, although a small minority of fans conveyed that they no longer would
support Woods, the overwhelming majority of participants advocated that Woods was entitled
to his privacy in handling these incidents, and that the infidelity merely functioned as evidence
that Woods was humanjust like his fans. Sanderson observed that social media enabled fans
to become more involved in Woodss media narratives and to feel as though they were
assisting him in dealing with his issues. Additionally, these messages also functioned as
alternative frames that ran counter to how Woods was being portrayed in the mainstream
media, and Sanderson suggested that athletes benefited from fans introducing these alternative
narratives.
Moreover, athletes who admit their missteps could be more likely to attain these benefits as
well. Sanderson and Emmons investigated responses on the Texas Rangers community
message forum after player Josh Hamilton held a press conference to address reports that he
been drinking in a Dallas-area bar.33 Hamilton had experienced a significant drug and alcohol
addiction that had resulted in major league baseball suspending him for several seasons.
Hamilton made a very dramatic comeback that included a public vow that he would no longer
consume alcohol. During the press conference, Hamilton acknowledged that he had indeed
consumed alcohol in response to some personal problems he was experiencing and apologized
for his behavior. Sanderson and Emmons found that although some fans indicated that they
were unwilling to forgive Hamilton for this offense, other fans expressed support and
commended Hamilton for being accountable for his actions. Still others found commonality in
Hamiltons addiction problems. These fans shared their own stories of addiction and conveyed
how they found strength in their own struggles by identifying with Hamiltons issues. Similar to
the findings in Sandersons study of Tiger Woods, some people suggested that Hamiltons
relapse merely was evidence of his human nature and still others justified Hamiltons behavior
and suggested that in a sport that had been plagued by performance-enhancing drug issues, his
alcohol consumption was a minor matter.34
Through social media, athletes become recipients of public relations work that is willingly
performed by fans. These efforts appear to stem from identification and parasocial interaction,
which in some cases can be cultivated by the manner in which an athlete engages in self-
presentation via social media. As fans become advocates they defend athletes against their
detractors, thereby removing athletes from what likely would be unwinnable battles if the
athletes instead directly combat their detractors. Indeed, Browning and Sanderson found that
one way that college athletes deal with the criticism received via Twitter is to simply retweet
the offending message and let supporters attack the detractor.35 Thus, social media becomes a
key platform where support can be cultivated and where the preferred representation that
athletes desire along with messages they want to promote can be widely circulated. Athletes
then can extend their influence beyond the athletic arena into the social media realm. In
addition to sharing their personal battles, this capability enables them to engender
reinforcement for political and social causes that they support.
ENGAGING IN ADVOCACY AND ACTIVISM

In addition to allowing athletes to showcase more of their personal life, social media also
provide a platform for them to engage in advocacy and activisma characteristic that some
suggest is lacking in modern athletes, particularly minority athletes.36 Whereas athletes might
be reticent to engage in advocacy via traditional media broadcasts, as illustrated by former
NBA player Michael Jordans famous quote, Republicans buy sneakers too,37 it could be the
case that social media presents a less threatening (although equally public) format for athletes
to advocate for social and political causes.
In November 2014, for example, after the grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, elected to not
indict police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old
African American male, NBA player Kobe Bryant tweeted, The system enables young black
men to be killed behind the mask of the law #Ferguson #tippingpoint #change.38 In another
noteworthy case, Schmittel and Sanderson investigated tweets from NFL players in response to
the Trayvon MartinGeorge Zimmerman case verdict.39 After Zimmerman was found not guilty,
several NFL players received significant media attention for tweets about the verdict,
including Roddy White who commented, all them jurors should go home tonight and kill
themselves for letting a grown man get away with killing a kid and Victor Cruz who stated,
Thoroughly confused. Zimmerman doesnt last a year before the hood catches up with him.40
In the studys sample, which included the 15 players from each team who possessed the
most Twitter followers in the 12-hour period following the verdicts announcement, the
researchers found that athletes expressed their anticipation for the verdict then conveyed their
disbelief when the verdict was announced. Additionally, they discovered that athletes also
provided critiques of the criminal justice system and offered social commentary, while
simultaneously defending themselves against fans who were displeased with their advocacy
efforts. Many of these athletes elaborated that they were entitled to their views and that there
were more important things than football games. Interestingly, the majority of athletes offering
commentary were African American and, with one exception, the few white players who
weighed in suggested that athletes needed to stay off Twitter regarding the verdict and that the
American justice system, although perhaps imperfect, was the best system available. Schmittel
and Sanderson observed that, via Twitter, athletes also could extend their influence into
political and social arenas and the propensity for them doing so was more likely, given the
convenient posting features offered by Twitter.41 Although pushback and resistance from fans
might prevent other athletes from engaging in activism via social media, they seem to be
willing to get involved on these platforms. Thus, athletes activism can become more
pronounced on social media, as opposed to traditional media; constraints often exist when
athletes attempt to weigh in on social and political issues via traditional media.
In addition to social justice issues, athletes also can engage in advocacy related to their
sport. This is particularly pertinent in the realm of intercollegiate athletics, because monetary
issues often jeopardize the sustainability of what often are considered non-revenue sports (at
most schools this generally means every sport except football and mens basketball). Hull
examined how athletes at the University of North CarolinaWilmington used Twitter to save
the mens and womens diving and swimming teams from being eliminated.42 Hull found that
these athletes used Twitter to alert as many people as possible about the planned cuts, thus
becoming opinion leaders and prompting their followers to rally behind their cause. These
efforts included engaging celebrities via Twitter to join them in their cause and retweeting
those messages of support when they were received (Olympic swimmers Ryan Lochte and
Ricky Berens were two notable celebrities who did tweet messages of support). Ultimately,
these athletes were successful and social media was a key resource in their advocacy efforts.
Indeed, one of the athletes noted,
Social media was a priority. In todays world, you can spread news like wildfire
online. We knew it would be the fastest and easiest way to get the word out. Ive never
been huge on tweeting, but this was more important to me than anything else. I just
wanted to make as much noise as possible and show how much it means to me.43
Another athlete commented,
I think if this had happened 15 years ago it would have taken over a month to get to the
level [of support] we did in just a week or so. I am so thankful we had social media to
use as a resource. We wouldnt have been able to stir up enough trouble in the time we
had without it.44
Via social media platforms athletes can engage in activism and advocacy andgiven the
public visibility of many athletescan dramatically circulate the reach of a message as their
followers and fans retransmit the message. Additionally, for cases in which advocacy causes
are time sensitive, social media platforms possess significant utility to mobilize supporters and
spur collective action expediently. To be sure, athletes are subject to criticism via social
media for these endeavors and could find themselves in conflict with head coaches, athletic
directors, general managers, and other organization personnel members. Nevertheless, this
issue remains an important one for scholars to monitor and investigate, as athletes broadly
might be more likely to weigh in on social and political issues via social media. Given the
interactive nature that underpins social media, social and political issues might provide
valuable opportunities to examine the interactions between athletes and fanswhich offers
unique avenues to extend the literature on this subject.
POSITIVE SOCIAL MEDIA USAGE: DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE

RESEARCH
This chapter discusses three benefits that social media provides to athletes, (1) optimizing
self-presentation; (2) benefiting from fan advocacy; and (3) engaging in advocacy. There
certainly are more benefits to using social media, however, and there are number of exciting
directions for researchers to explore. With respect to self-presentation, much of the work to
date has centered on Twitter, and although this is understandable given that Twitter appears to
be the platform of choice for athletes, it is important to examine other platforms as well,
particularly visual sharing platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat which seem to be
growing more popular.45 How might the self-presentation on these channels differ from the
self-presentation shared on Twitter? Are there gender differences that are similar to those in
the literature on self-presentation and Twitter?
Additionally, it is important to explore how amateur athletes are performing self-
presentation via social media. These athletes might be subjected to more intensive monitoring
than are professional athletes (at least at the intercollegiate level) and therefore they might be
more scripted or safe in their self-presentation.46, 47 Another area of self-presentation to
consider is the manner in which acclaimed high school athletes present themselves on social
media. Given the intensity that accompanies the collegiate football recruiting process, it would
be fruitful to analyze how these particular athletes present themselves, in addition to
determining whether certain presentations might affect player attractiveness to college
programs.
Another area for researchers to pursue is determining the motivations underpinning fans
engaging in supportive behaviors toward athletes via social media. Such behavior could be a
function of fan identification, attachment, or a parasocial connection with the athlete, but there
might be other factors that influence this behavior that also could be important to illuminate.
One potential variable to consider in such an examination is whether there has been a prior
interaction or acknowledgment (retweet, response) between the fan and athlete, as this could
contribute to a fans willingness to engage in advocacy on behalf of an athlete. Another area of
inquiry in this topic involves the labor that is willingly performed by fans on behalf of athletes.
Essentially, athletes receive this benefit at no cost. As a result, does this create implications
that should be considered? In other words, is it ethical for athletes to elicit this behavior from
fans, as it could be considered to be taking advantage of them? One final area to pursue in this
domain is whether fans advocating on behalf of an athlete possess the capability to change
dominant narratives about the athlete that are introduced by mainstream media outlets. Along
those lines, it is not uncommon for an athlete to tweet at a sport journalist if they feel that they
have been unfairly criticized or portrayed. How these interactions affect sport-reporting
practices would be a compelling line of inquiry.
With respect to athletes engaging in advocacy, future work could investigate the response
that athletes receive from fans for their advocacy and activism efforts. Are fans supportive? Do
they retaliate negatively? Illuminating these reactions might shed light on barriers to athletes
performing advocacy and activism via social media or could demonstrate ways that this
behavior is reinforced and authenticated by fans. Social network analysis also could be
utilized to examine how the messages that athletes disseminate spread across social media to
better understand if these messages are more temporary or permanent in nature.
PRACTITIONER IMPLICATIONS
As noted at the beginning of this chapter, social media missteps by athletes tend to be the
predominant way that athletes social media use is framed in the mass media. Consequently, it
is not surprising that many coaches and administrators possess negative attitudes regarding
social media. Nevertheless, as this chapter has demonstrated, social media possesses benefits
for athletes. Considering the prevalence of social media adoption and usageparticularly in
the younger demographicsit is unrealistic to expect that significant numbers of athletes will
abandon social media. It therefore is important that athletes receive education about the ways
that social media can be utilized. Ideally, this education would begin at a young age, informing
athletes that social media is a tool to optimize self-presentation and to build a personal brand
that can make one attractive to relevant stakeholders. With the widespread nature of social
media monitoring by employers, post-secondary admissions personnel, and internship program
coordinators, helping younger individuals take control of their social media profiles likely can
help to prevent negative future repercussions.
Additionally, when it comes to topics such as engaging in activism and advocacy, it could
be worthwhile for sport organizations to consider the boundaries with which they are
comfortable. This includes being mindful of freedom of speech elements, and potential
pushback that could come from outside parties (e.g., the media) for what is perceived to be
censuring an athletes right to expression. Setting the boundaries and providing guidelines for
social media usage (generally through the form of policy) might foster positive relations
between athletes and administrators and transform what often is a confrontational subject into a
harmonious one.
In conclusion, social media have rapidly proliferated across sport, creating a variety of
positive and negative outcomes for multiple sport stakeholders, including athletes. As athletes
often form the most visible stakeholder group and tend to be heavy users of social media
platforms, it is important that positive behaviors are identified and cultivated. Clearly, there
always will be missteps, as is the case with any new communication medium. Nevertheless,
helping athletes understand best practices can ease the strain on administrators, coaches,
parents, educators, and others. Indeed, it is important that when the social-media story is
presented to athletes they are provided the proverbial both sides.
NOTES
1. Jimmy Sanderson, Its a Whole New Ballgame: How Social Media Is Changing Sports (New York: Hampton Press,
2011).
2. Danah Boyd, Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics, PhD dissertation, University of
California, Berkeley, 2008.
3. Chad Ochocinco Fined $25K (August 25, 2010), http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/trainingcamp10/news/story?id=5493157,
4. Steelers Safety Mike Mitchell Tweets Kill Yourself to Fan, (November 18, 2014),
http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2014/11/18/steelers-safety-mike-mitchell-tweets-kill-yourself-to-fan/, accessed December 29,
2014.
5. Jimmy Sanderson, To Tweet or Not to Tweet Exploring Division I Athletic Departments Social Media Policies,
International Journal of Sport Communication (2011): 492513.
6. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959).
7. Joseph B. Walther, Computer-Mediated Communication: Impersonal, Interpersonal, and Hyperpersonal Interaction,
Communication Research 23 (1996): 343.
8. Liam Bullingham and Ana C. Vasconcelos, The Presentation of Self in the Online World: Goffman and the Study of
Online Identities, Journal of Information Science 39 (2013): 10112.
9. Michael Hvlid Jacobsen, Goffman through the Looking Glass: From Classical to Contemporary Goffman, in The
Contemporary Goffman, edited by Michael Hvlid Jacobsen (London: Routledge, 2010).
10. Jimmy Sanderson, The Blog Is Serving Its Purpose: Self-Presentation Strategies on 38pitches.com. Journal of
Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008): 91236.
11. Jimmy Sanderson, Stepping into the (Social Media) Game: Building Athlete Identity via Twitter, in Handbook of
Research on Technoself: Identity in a Technological Society, edited by Rocci Luppicini (New York: IGI Global, 2013).
12. Ibid.
13. Boyd, Taken Out of Context (2008).
14. Katie Lebel and Karen E. Danylchuk, Facing Off on Twitter: A Generation Y Interpretation of Professional Athlete
Profile Pictures, International Journal of Sport Communication 7 (2014): 31736.
15. Jimmy Sanderson, Just Warming Up: Logan Morrison, Twitter, Athlete Identity, and Building the Brand, in Sport and
Identity: New Agendas in Communication, edited by Barry Brummett and Andrew W. Ishak (New York: Routledge, 2014).
16. Kevin Hull, A Hole in One (Hundred and Forty Characters): A Case Study Examining PGA Tour Golfers Twitter
Usage during the Masters, International Journal of Sport Communication 7 (2014): 24560.
17. Lebel and Danylchuk, Facing Off on Twitter (2014).
19. Ibid.
20. Kevin Hull, A Hole in One (Hundred and Forty Characters) (2014).
22. Roxanne Coche, How Golfers and Tennis Players Frame Themselves: A Content Analysis of Twitter Profile Pictures,
Journal of Sports Media 9 (2014): 95121.
23. Sanderson, Stepping into the (Social Media) Game (2008).
24. Ibid., 921.
25. Ibid., 924.
26. Ibid., 926.
29. Jimmy Sanderson, The Nation Stands Behind You: Mobilizing Support on 38pitches.com, Communication
Quarterly 58 (2010a): 188206.
30. Jeffrey W. Kassing and Jimmy Sanderson, Is This a Church? Such a Big Bunch of Believers Around Here!: Fan
Expressions of Social Support on Floydlandis.com, Journal of Communication Studies 2 (2009): 30930.
31. Jimmy Sanderson, Framing Tigers Troubles: Comparing Traditional and Social Media, International Journal of
Sport Communication 3 (2010b): 43853.
32. Ibid., 445.
33. Jimmy Sanderson and Betsy Emmons, Extending and Withholding Forgiveness to Josh Hamilton: Exploring Forgiveness
within Parasocial Interaction, Communication and Sport 2 (2014): 2447.
34. Sanderson, Framing Tigers Troubles (2010b).
35. Blair Browning and Jimmy Sanderson, The Positives and Negatives of Twitter: Exploring How Student-Athletes Use
Twitter and Respond to Critical Tweets, International Journal of Sport Communication 5 (2012): 50321.
36. Kwame J. A. Agyemang, Black Male Athlete Activism and the Link to Michael Jordan: A Transformational
Leadership and Social Cognitive Theory Analysis, International Review for the Sociology of Sport 47 (2012): 43345.
37. L. Z. Granderson, The Political Michael Jordan, ESPN.com (August 14, 2012),
http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/8264956/michael-jordan-obama-fundraiser-22-years-harvey-gantt, accessed May 20, 2015.
38. Chris Littman, Kobe Bryant on Ferguson: System Enables Young Black Men to Be Killed, The SportingNews.Com
(Charlotte, NC), (November 25, 2014), http://www.sportingnews.com/nba/story/2014-11-25/kobe-bryant-ferguson-michael-
brown-darren-wilson-twitter, accessed May 20, 2015.
39. Annelie Schmittel and Jimmy Sanderson, Talking about Trayvon in 140 Characters: Exploring NFL Players Tweets
about the George Zimmerman Verdict, Journal of Sport & Social Issues (Forthcoming).
40. Rich Cimini, Victor Cruz: Tweet was Wrong, ESPNNewYork.com (New York) (July 15, 2013),
http://espn.go.com/new-york/nfl/story/_/id/9497415/victor-cruz-new-york-giants-says-zimmermantweet-wrong, accessed May
20, 2015.
41. Schmittel and Sanderson, Talking about Trayvon (Forthcoming).
42. Hull, Kevin, #Fight4UNCWSwimandDive: A Case Study of How College Athletes Used Social Media to Help Save
Their Team, International Journal of Sport Communication 7 (2014): 53352.
43. Ibid., 543.
44. Ibid., 544.
45. Browning and Sanderson, The Positives and Negatives of Twitter.
46. Sanderson, Jimmy, To Tweet or Not to Tweet Exploring Division I Athletic Departments Social Media Policies,
International Journal of Sport Communication 4 (2011): 492513.
47. Sanderson, Jimmy, and Blair Browning, Training versus Monitoring: A Qualitative Examination of Athletic Department
Practices Regarding Student-Athletes and Twitter, Qualitative Research Reports in Communication 14 (2013): 10511.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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and Social Cognitive Theory Analysis. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 47: 43345.
Austins Twitter Account Sheds Light on UNC Player. http://blogs.newsobserver.com/accnow/austins-twitter-account-
provides-clues-in-ncaa-probe-at-unc. Accessed on December 29, 2014.
Boyd, Danah. 2008. Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics. PhD dissertation, University of
California, Berkeley.
Browning, Blair, and Jimmy Sanderson. 2012. The Positives and Negatives of Twitter: Exploring How Student-Athletes Use
Twitter and Respond to Critical Tweets. International Journal of Sport Communication 5: 50321.
Bullingham, Liam, and Ana C. Vasconcelos. 2013. The Presentation of Self in the Online World: Goffman and the Study of
Online Identities. Journal of Information Science 39: 10112.
Chad Ochocinco Fined $25K. 2010 (August 25). http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/trainingcamp10/news/story?id=5493157.
Cimini, Rich. 2013 (July 15). Victor Cruz: Tweet Was Wrong. ESPNNewYork.com (New York). http://espn.go.com/new-
york/nfl/story/_/id/9497415/victor-cruz-new-york-giants-says-zimmermantweet-wrong. Accessed May 19, 2015.
Coche, Roxanne. 2014. How Golfers and Tennis Players Frame Themselves: A Content Analysis of Twitter Profile Pictures.
Journal of Sports Media 9: 95121.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books.
Granderson, L. Z. 2012 (August 14). The Political Michael Jordan. ESPN.com (Bristol, CT).
http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/8264956/michael-jordan-obama-fundraiser-22-years-harvey-gantt. Accessed May 19,
2015.
Hull, Kevin. 2014a. A Hole in One (Hundred and Forty Characters): A Case Study Examining PGA Tour Golfers Twitter
Usage during the Masters. International Journal of Sport Communication 7: 24560.
Hull, Kevin. 2014b. #Fight4UNCWSwimandDive: A Case Study of How College Athletes Used Social Media to Help Save
Their Team. International Journal of Sport Communication 7: 53352.
Jacobsen, Michael Hvlid. (2010). Goffman through the Looking Glass: From Classical to Contemporary Goffman. In The
Contemporary Goffman, edited by Michael Hvlid Jacobsen. London: Routledge.
Kassing, Jeffrey W., and Jimmy Sanderson. 2009. Is This a Church? Such a Big Bunch of Believers Around Here! Fan
Expressions of Social Support on Floydlandis.com. Journal of Communication Studies 2: 30930.
Lebel, Katie, and Karen Danylchuk. 2012. How Tweet It Is: A Gendered Analysis of Professional Tennis Players Self-
Presentation on Twitter. International Journal of Sport Communication 5: 46180.
Lebel, Katie, and Karen E. Danylchuk. 2014. Facing Off on Twitter: A Generation Y Interpretation of Professional Athlete
Profile Pictures. International Journal of Sport Communication 7: 31736.
Littman, Chris. Kobe Bryant on Ferguson: System Enables Young Black Men to Be Killed. The SportingNews.Com
(Charlotte, NC). 2014 (November 25). http://www.sportingnews.com/nba/story/2014-11-25/kobe-bryant-ferguson-michael-
brown-darren-wilson-twitter. Accessed May 19, 2015.
Sanderson, Jimmy. 2014. Just Warming Up: Logan Morrison, Twitter, Athlete Identity, and Building the Brand. In Sport and
Identity: New Agendas in Communication, edited by Barry Brummett and Andrew W. Ishak. New York: Routledge.
Sanderson, Jimmy. 2013. Stepping into the (Social Media) Game: Building Athlete Identity via Twitter. In Handbook of
Research on Technoself: Identity in a Technological Society, edited by Rocci Luppicini. New York: IGI Global.
Sanderson, Jimmy. 2011a. Its a Whole New Ballgame: How Social Media Is Changing Sports. New York: Hampton Press.
Sanderson, Jimmy, 2011b. To Tweet or Not to Tweet Exploring Division I Athletic Departments Social Media Policies.
International Journal of Sport Communication 4: 492513.
Sanderson, Jimmy. 2010a. The Nation Stands behind You: Mobilizing Support on 38pitches.com. Communication Quarterly
58: 188206.
Sanderson, Jimmy. 2010b. Framing Tigers Troubles: Comparing Traditional and Social Media. International Journal of
Sport Communication 3: 43853.
Sanderson, Jimmy. 2008. The Blog Is Serving Its Purpose: Self-Presentation Strategies on 38pitches.com. Journal of
Computer-Mediated Communication 13: 91236.
Sanderson, Jimmy, and Betsy Emmons. 2014. Extending and Withholding Forgiveness to Josh Hamilton: Exploring Forgiveness
within Parasocial Interaction. Communication and Sport 2: 2447.
Sanderson, Jimmy, and Blair Browning. 2013. Training versus Monitoring: A Qualitative Examination of Athletic Department
Practices Regarding Student-Athletes and Twitter. Qualitative Research Reports in Communication 14: 10511.
Schmittel, Annelie, and Jimmy Sanderson. Forthcoming. Talking about Trayvon in 140 Characters: Exploring NFL Players
Tweets about the George Zimmerman Verdict. Journal of Sport & Social Issues.
Steelers Safety Mike Mitchell Tweets Kill Yourself to Fan. http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2014/11/18/steelers-safety-mike-
mitchell-tweets-kill-yourself-to-fan/. Accessed December 29, 2014.
Walther, Joseph B. 1996. Computer-Mediated Communication: Impersonal, Interpersonal, and Hyperpersonal Interaction.
Communication Research 23: 343.
3
Reaching the World with One Song and a

Few Mouse Clicks
Kathryn Coduto
I found myself in the front row of Brixton Academy in London in May 2012. I was pressed
against the small fence that wrapped around the front of the venue, surrounded by girls dressed
in black, bouncing where they stood as they waited for the headlining act to take the stage.
We were waiting for London-based indie band the Horrors to take the stage. Previously,
4,000 miles had been between this small band I had grown to love and my hometown in Ohio.
Five years after first discovering them, I was mere feet from their lead singer.
My deep love for this band came from the Internet.
THE INTERNET AND THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

You are likely familiar with the birth of the Internet; its history is now a standard part of
high school and college courses. A tool that people around the world now use dailyand often
constantlybegan as a vague idea of electronic possibility in the early 1960s. Researchers
had a notion that computers could be connected and could communicate with each other from
different locations, but they had only nascent ideas as to how that interconnectedness would
come to life.1
Fifty years later, the Internet is one of the fastest growing and widely used technological
advancements in history.2 It has evolved from a niche interest for the tech-minded to a tool
necessary for a variety of jobs and endeavors. The Internet no longer is just for programmers
or specialists; now it is for everyone. This means that the Internet is not used just for work;
instead, the Internet now is a major source of entertainment.
In a typical day, you can log onto your computer and watch an episode of your favorite
television show. If you dont want to watch the show alone, you can chat with your friends in a
separate window in a social network of your choosing. Your conversation does not even have
to be restricted to one person; you can broadcast your thoughts to a network that you create and
cultivate. Not in the mood for television? You can check the news, read sports scores, play
games, and take quizzeswhatever your interest, the Internet provide it and can deliver it to
you instantly.
When talking about the Internet and the explosion of readily available entertainment, the
music industry must be discussed. The music industry arguably has changed the most due to the
birth of the Internet and the increasing availability of music on the Internet by artists both
established and fledgling. Your typical day might involve watching a show or reading an
article, but it also likely involves streaming music from one of a variety of platforms available
at your fingertips, and typically at no cost to you. The Internet is divisive in the music industry,
but it is revolutionary and it is here to stay.
If you are an artist, the Internet is breaking down boundaries that before would have
prevented you from reaching what could be your biggest fan base. If you are a music fan, the
Internet brings you music that before would have been out of your reach for months or years
if not forever. The Internet, although controversial, is important in connecting fans and
musicians from around the world.
THE SLOW SPREAD OF A MUSICAL MESSAGE

In 1990 in Olympia, Washington, young kids crowded into tiny venues to see a woman
scream at them. Hundreds of people jammed themselves into punk rock clubs to see Kathleen
Hanna and her band, Bikini Kill, performknowing little about the band except that their lead
singer was often ferocious and that their music was a powerful force. Hanna and her band
published a small magazine, also called Bikini Kill, and used that magazine to spread the word
about their band and the beliefs of the band. The fanzines, as they are called, were handed
out to people the band knew and to peopleespecially girlswho attended their shows.3 It
took considerable work for Bikini Kill to get their message out within their own city, much less
their own state.
The band worked from the ground up, making connections with other bands and artists who
could help spread their music and message. It took time, but the Riot Grrrl Movement that
Bikini Kill is credited with developing eventually found its true home in Washington, DC, all
the way across the country from its founders home of Olympia. The band was not only looking
to share its music but also the message behind it, specifically the idea of equality for women.
Hanna said in an interview with The AV Club that she knew touring was important in reaching
the appropriate audiences: I felt like going out on the road and mixing it with musicwhich is
something young people are always really interested inwould be a good way to
proselytize.4 Hanna and her group believed in what they were doing and put in the effort to
reach audiences across the country. Their journey from Olympia, Washington, to Washington,
DC, would take them nearly 3,000 miles to reach people with whom their music resonated.
Meanwhile, it took three more years before Hanna became fodder for the press, a woman
worthy of both praise and criticism, a figure that represented hope to some and angst to others,
all because of the message of her music and her performance.5 It took nearly five years from
Bikini Kills beginning before they had both an established fan base and a position within a
regular cultural discussion.
Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill didnt have the Internet to accelerate the spread of their
messagenot in their own country and definitely not internationally.
LOCAL SCENES GROW IN THE 1980s AND 1990s
Music throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s typically was scene oriented,
especially if it was music that was considered outside of the mainstream.6 Your Madonnas and
U2s and Janet Jacksons did not worry about having a local identity so much as creating
something much, much larger. Their label backing and strings of hits made the world their
playground after years of legwork to achieve breakthroughs. For these artists, conquering the
United States through radio play was all they needed to translate their success into something
greater and wider.7
For many independent musicians, though, the essential start came by honing a specific
sound within ones hometown. Independent music often is associated with a specific region,
regardless of genre. There are certain sounds ingrained within each artist or group.8 Cities
could be close physically, but ones given sound could be completely different from that of a
neighboring town.
The Seattle scene is a prime example of a local formation in the 1990s. Grunge music is
associated with Seattle, and the brand of rock music that Seattle bands including Nirvana,
Soundgarden, and Stone Temple Pilots produced was unlike anything else being released at the
time.9 The bands who were playing around Seattleincluding the aforementioned Bikini Kill,
who had a hand in naming Nirvanas signature song, Smells Like Teen Spiritwere feeding
off of each other and using each other as a check for what sounded good and interesting.10 It is
not to say that these bands existed completely in a bubble where they only heard each others
music. Instead, these Seattle musicians were aware of what the biggest movements in music
were nationallyhair metal and boy bands seeming to be the dominant two typesand
decided that that was not the sound they wanted to be associated with.11 The goal was to create
something that was distinctly their own.
Of course, radio play still mattered. It was the quickest, easiest way for a label to
guarantee exposure to a new group. Writer Greil Marcus likely put it best when describing his
thoughts to GQ magazine upon first hearing Smells Like Teen Spirit, which took the Seattle
scene from Seattle to the world: Ive experienced that with other records very few times,
where just suddenly something new on the radio makes everything around it seem false.12
Nirvana finally broke through, but only after connections were made through mutual friends
(specifically Sonic Youths Kim Gordon recommending Nirvana to the label) and a single
made it to the radio.13
Would Nirvana have had the lasting impact that it does if the Internet had been available to
spread their sound to more eager listeners at earlier stages of the groups career?
SOME PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

I joined MySpace during my freshman year of high school in August 2006. At the time,
MySpace (which made its online debut in 2004) was an exciting propositionit was one of
the first ways I could stay in touch with my friends outside of school that didnt involve sitting
on the phone with them and rehashing the days events. It was a good way to combine blogging,
messaging, and quick comments. MySpace helped with the earliest versions of personal brands
online.14
One of the biggest benefits of MySpace came from its integrated music service, which even
in its fledgling days was a powerful tool for new bands to reach audiences previously unheard
of. It wasnt just that you could discover bands on MySpacewhich was clearly hugebut
MySpace users could endorse bands by including one of their songs as a profile song. For
me, at age 14, including a bands song on the page was one of the most appealing aspects. I
loved associating myself with different musicians and what they represented.
When I discovered the Horrorsa post-punk band based in London and originally from
Essex, Englandon MySpace later in 2007, it was important not just because I could listen to
them but because I could show my small world who this band was. A casual MySpace search
through punk music brought me to the Horrors, but my unyielding interest exposed them to
even more people in a short amount of time. MySpace created a bridge that spanned nearly
4,000 miles to London, and then I expanded that bridge by incorporating songs from the groups
debut album into my MySpace page in the coming months. If I had not joined MySpace, then I
never would have heard of the Horrors in 2007 while I was a freshman in a U.S. high school.
The Internet evolved from MySpace into other social platforms, however, especially for music,
so there is a chance that the Horrors and I still wouldve been brought together.
THE IMPORTANCE OF MUSIC BEFORE THE ADVENT OF THE

INTERNET
So why does this history lesson matter? What difference does it make that Bikini Kill had
to travel thousands of miles just to spread a single message within their own country? Why
does the formation of a local music scene matter at allespecially if the birth of one scene
ultimately led to success for both the band behind the hit and for those musicians around them?
These events happened without the Internet. Music fans had to work just as hard to hear
their choice of music as the musicians worked to expose their music to audiences.
Additionally, if a band had a message it wanted to shareas in the case of Bikini Killthen it
needed an audience to receive that message. For music fans at that time, it also was much
harder to find a band whose message mattered. The value in knowing how things were in the
past is that it enables todays listeners to fully appreciate what they have before thema world
full of music that can be played almost completely uninterrupted if a listener so desires, and the
ability to access music that the listener specifically wants to hear. Before music was a regular
commodity online there existed a strong physical limitation to finding it. Whether physically
attending a show to hear a group, or going to a record store and searching through piles of
records to find one that looked like it might sound good, music fans had to be much more
involvedfar beyond keystrokes and mouse clicks.
The Internet has been good to both musicians and fans, especially in connecting fans around
the world with musicians that they can truly invest in. In doing so, the Internet has opened fans
to new cultures, new ideas, and new messagesmuch like Kathleen Hanna envisioned in her
travels in the early 1990s.
DOWNLOADS READILY AVAILABLEFOR BETTER OR FOR

WORSE
A large part of the online music revolution came with the invention of Napster, a product
that frightened labels and enticed music fans equally. Napster came online in 199915just a
few years after the dissolution of both Bikini Kill and Nirvana. Napster was the pinnacle of
peer-to-peer software; as such, it also became the target of the wrath of label heads and the
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).16 Napster and its ilk were different from
Apples iTunes Store, which offered the first legally available downloads in 2003.17 Peer-to-
peer downloading not only provided listeners with a free option for music to come to them, but
it put the power in the hands of those doing the sharing. Music came from users and was
delivered to usersall free of charge. Peer-to-peer sharing had even stronger selling point:
Users could download entire discographies, not just albums or songs. If a user liked one song,
it was easy to safely acquire everything the artist had done without having to purchase any of
it.18
As the RIAA fretted over what peer-to-peer downloading would do to the industry and
brought numerous lawsuits against specific users who were caught engaged with the
technology, consumers had been given a taste of what the future could be for avid music
listeners. Suddenly, listeners did not have to rifle through import albums in a store or wonder
what their counterparts in Australia were listening to. Napster made everything readily
availableright at the users fingertips. There was no turning back; consumers now could
connect with new artists and with each other.
THE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL FOR LISTENERS

The availability of digital files eradicated two roadblocks to buying and experiencing
music: Sampling and importing.
Sampling
For centuries people have loved music. But it takes trial and error to figure out which
music makes a listener the happiest, to decipher which rhythms and words will have the
longest lasting effect. Listeners grow up hearing the music that their parents, siblings, older
friends, and relatives hand down through time; they are exposed to musicians and albums by
people who hope that the sharing will bring something exciting to the life of the new listener.
The listenersand consumersearliest experiences with music come from other people and
their musical tastes.
There comes a time, however, when a listener discovers music on his or her own, and
begins defining a new taste outside of what he or she grew up hearing. Instead of rifling
through racks of records or bins of compact discs, though, such discovery now takes place on
the Internet. When a listener is ready for a new sound, all he or she must do is go online and
search for whatever it is he or she is trying to experience.
The idea of sampling a song or album before buying it is enticing to listeners. It is a safety
net; it makes consumers feel that they are making an educated and, ultimately, safe choice.
Instead of buying an album at random because of the artwork or name recognition from a
chance listen to the radio, a consumer can buy music that already feels familiar.19 Peitz and
Waelbroeck conducted research on the idea of consumer sampling in 2006 and found that
sampling did not just benefit consumers; it could, in fact, lead to greater profits for the music
industry. This is because fans are operating in a multiproduct setting that provides greater
product diversity and therefore more options that are likely to fit with what a fan wants to
hear.20
In 2006, research also was conducted on digital rights management (DRM), a technology
that could be embedded into songs that were legally purchased online to prevent them from
being reproduced. Digital rights management is defined as the technical systems and
technologies that digital publishers and copyright holders use to exert control over how
consumers may use digital works.21 A song that was embedded with DRM could be played
using specified products and operating systemsfor example, early iTunes store purchases
were embedded with DRM and could be played on an iPod. Purchases from iTunes would not
work with other hardware or operating systems, however, and it was illegal to try to save the
purchases if a listener wanted them to work with a new operating system. From 2006 through
2009, DRM was a regular discussion in the music industry, as it hardly battled piracy and only
made it more difficult for those who legally wanted to share music with others.22 If a listeners
friend used Zune and the listener had purchased an iTunes song, the legally purchased track
still only could be loaded on the purchasers iPod. The research in 2006 showed that files that
were easier to download could still help legally sell musicin part because listeners might
illegally download some tracks but, once familiar with the music, would purchase an entire
album because it was familiar and usage was unlimited.
However, the discussion around DRM-free music went beyond the ease of download for
listeners who were looking to sample music before adding it to their collection. DRM-free
music also brought awareness to the social-networking effects music could have on people,
just as the earliest versions of social networks were being unveiled and adopted by the general
public.23 With DRM-free music widely available and songs easier than ever to download and
share, conversations about that music were happening across platforms. The discussion was
not limited to a record store or coffee shop with the usual suspects; instead, a user on MySpace
based in Connecticut could connect with a user in Brazil over shared love of a given song that
both users could access easily and equally. Digital rights management enabled easier
interactions and discussions about music that inevitably bridged cultural gaps.
Imports
Beyond sampling, digital music encourages adoption of imported music. With the
distribution of vinyl records and then compact discs, imported music had to be pressed in a
given country of origin and then shipped worldwidemeaning that, in many cases, demand
determined what product was sent where. For a store to carry specific albums, people had to
be asking for those albums. This meant that lesser-known bands from around the world often
were relegated to their city to sell their records and spread the word.24
Research conducted at the University of New Orleans in 2006 showed that digital file
sharing did, in fact, impact sales of compact discs, determining that digital downloads could
decrease physical sales over time.25 As digital recordings became more prevalent in the early
to mid-2000s, physical sales of compact discs dropped. The increase in digital downloads,
however, means that consumers were finding the songs and albums they wanted with greater
easeit also means that more artists were gaining more exposure to new fans. Risk-taking
music consumers were gone, with more assured consumers taking their place.
What this meant for imports, though, is that albums that originated overseas no longer were
risky purchases. Instead of having to spend more money for an album that was unfamiliar to the
listener, imports became equal with music that was made in the consumers home country. An
artist in India could release an album to a peer-to-peer network, the iTunes Store, or another
online entity and garner the same exposure as artists in Japan and the United Kingdom. All the
artist need do is upload a song and let fans find the music.
Two of the most impactful benefits of digitalization in the music industry are sampling and
the normalization of imported music. These two benefits go hand in hand; sampling enables
listeners to know what they are buying before spending any money, and the normalization of
imports means that international artists have a fair chance at exposure in countries that they
previously never would have been able to traverse. Digitalization is a win for fans and
musicians.
OVERCOMING GEOGRAPHY
Knowing the history of bands and the music industry before the Internet became a factor,
and understanding two key benefits of digital music and some of the story of music going
online, we can draw this conclusion: The greatest achievement of the Internets marriage with
music is how it overcomes geographical boundaries that previously never would have been
broken down. This is how cultures come together and people can find similarities instead of
differences; as borders melt away, greater connectivity occurs. Fans have more options of what
music to listen to than ever beforeand they can exercise their options on the same technology
that they use to call their friends and take pictures. At the same time, musicians can gain
exposure to new audiences, determine early on where they should tour, and know where their
best chances are for the greatest exposure.
Before the Internet provided such ease of accessibility, bands such as Sonic Youththe
same band that referred Nirvana to their record labelhad to travel the world to raise
awareness of their music. When the band formed in the 1980s, it began traveling the United
States with like-minded bands to show people who they were.26 The group of bands struggled
as it traveled throughout the Midwest, however, rarely finding receptive crowds and often met
with confusion. Performance attendees knew only what little they might have read in (small)
magazines, and the musicians were rarely paid for their performances.27
After touring the United States, the Sonic Youth finally went to Europe. The band found that
it had to do much of the same work it had done in the United States: Jump in a van, play tiny
venues to unsuspecting audiences, and hope to be paid for the performance.28 As the band
toured Europe, what Sonic Youth eventually found was that audiences were growing to enjoy
them. It took rounds of touring, but it the music started to click with tastemakers and college
kids alike.
In their time touring, Sonic Youth easily covered more than 3,000 miles across the United
States; 3,500 miles across the Atlantic Ocean; and more than 1,000 miles around Europe. In
just a few years, Sonic Youth traveled nearly 8,000 miles to make people aware of their music.
In time, Sonic Youth became one of the most successful bands of their ilk, honing their sound
and releasing the genre-defining Daydream Nation. But it took years of legwork and travel to
reach that goal.
Not every band has the support and the ability that Sonic Youth had. Sonic Youth was
backed by small records labels and savvy business friends that believed in what the band was
doing, plus a network of bands with similar interests and goals.29 Even today, touring
musicians are not guaranteed easy access to certain locations. Artists have their visas revoked,
and flight cancellations frequently leave musicians stranded and unable to make it to their
shows. The difference today is thatbecause of the growth of the Internet and digitalization
artists do not have to rely solely on travels or tours to raise awareness. Instead, a show is just
one component strongly complemented by what is happening in the digital space; thus fans still
have something to interact with, and the promise of the show does not die if an artist cannot
make it on schedule or waits to put on a performance.
The digitalization of music allows musicians to flourish in ways they simply could not
before. Applications such as Pandora and Spotify do the legwork that bands previously had to
do on tour. Music videos on YouTube can deliver an experience that formerly could be had
only by being in the same country as a particular artist. Times have changed, and it is good to
be a musician and a fan now. A fan can travel around the world with the right search terms and
just a few clicks of a mouse button.
GENRES AND SOUNDS EXTEND BEYOND THEIR HOME

With geographic barriers broken down, listeners able to sample whatever music they
choose, and imports now being an affordable and viable option, new sounds can be heard
anywhere a listener desires. The possibilities are endless as to what can be experienced and
what will resonate with listeners around the world.
Remember the Madonnas and U2s from earlier times? Artists who found success with
some airplay in the United States and then traversed the world on massive tours and were
guaranteed sell-out crowds of thousands no matter where they went? Well, they are not the only
ones who can experience that now. Granted, many performers will not sell out arenas on their
first trek around the world. But it is becoming more and more likelyand much, much easier
for artists with massive success on the Internet to translate that success into bodies in stands,
stalls, and seats. What is beautiful with the growth of the Internet and musics ability to reach
more people than ever before is that genres and sounds that previously would have had
difficulty selling even a few tickets now can sell to massive crowds.
A perfect example of an artist who first found success on the Internet and translated it into
international acclaim and fandom is Harlem rapper A$AP Rocky (born Rakim Mayers).30
A$AP Rocky first earned attention by posting a video of his song Peso on YouTube. In just a
few months the video had more than three million views and Rocky was destined for
international recognitionaided by considerable hype from those in raps innermost circles.31
Rocky followed Peso with a highly acclaimed mixtape that was distributed online and made
easily accessible to a public growing more and more interested in the young rapper. Over the
course of two years Rocky built a following through videos and free releases that guaranteed
him an excited and engaged fan base when his official debut album, Long.Live.A$AP, finally
was released in 2013.32
Rocky embracing the Internet did not just help his debut album sales or the skyrocketing
success of his early singles. He, along with his A$AP Mob cohorts, were able to go on tour
and play sold-out shows around the world. Rocky and his crew brought the sounds of their
Harlem to kids in places as distant as London and Sydney. His first tour in support of
Long.Live.A$AP went to 47 cities, with an average of 3,000 tickets sold per venue.33
As of 2013, Peter Schwartz is Rockys tour manager as well as the vice president and head
of Urban Music at The Agency Group in New York. In an interview about Rockys rapid and
Internet-based success, Schwartz spoke about a number of factors that make Rocky so
appealing as a performer and why he resonates with his audiences. In his discussion, Schwartz
spoke candidly about Rockys international success. We are definitely impressed to see how
well he is selling tickets internationally. 4,000 capacity venues blowing out in a matter of days
in Australia and Rocky has never been there before. [Thats] definitely impressive.34 The
excitement around Rocky that started on the Internet translated into actual ticket sales for him in
places he previously never had visited.
Schwartz also gives credit to social media for how awareness of Rockys music was
raised by his fans around the world. As a musician, it was easy for Rocky to put his songs
online and make them available for anyone who was interested. But for fans, it is easy for them
to discover and share Rocky just as quickly. Social media did a lot of the early talking for
Rocky, and as Schwartz said, Word of web is far stronger than word of mouth.35
The rap music that A$AP Rocky makes evokes Harlem specifically. His sound is one of
many within the realm of rap and hip-hop, and with just one song he brought that specific sound
to millions of people. Without the Internet, people in London likely would not know or care
about a Harlem rappers thoughts, much less why they matter. Instead, listeners with thousands
of miles between themwith oceans and mountains and other physical barriers blocking them
from each othercan hear A$AP Rocky and his distinct sound, and then find a meaning within
the music that matters to them. These listeners certainly would hear rap music but it would not
evoke Harlem as a place and an experience, as life in Harlem is likely unknown to listeners in
the United Kingdom.
Bikini Kill had to travel throughout the United States to spread the message of female
equality. It took radio play for Nirvanas biggest single to take off first in the United States and
then around the world. Sonic Youth drove a van through the entirety of the United States, and
then they drove another van through Europe in the hopes of having even 20 people come to a
performance. A$AP Rocky had three million listeners, a record deal, and almost 50 sold-out
shows just by building his image on the Internet. A$AP Rocky brought the sound of his
neighborhood to listeners internationally with one video. A$AP Rocky covered the world with
the release of one video.
Music on the Internet goes everywhere, and in doing so it makes the world a little smaller
and brings people a little closer. And it is only going to continue growing, evolving, changing,
exploding.
RADIOHEAD AND THE RECORD LABELS

Thom Yorke is a crazy man.
As the front man of Radiohead for nearly 30 years, Tom Yorke has had a consistent
platform to offer his take on the world. Radiohead formed in 1986 in Oxfordshire, England36;
the group was able to witness both the success of major pop stars and the explosion of various
independent music scenes in the United States.
Radiohead first found massive success with Creep, the bands breakthrough single from
the 1993 album Pablo Honey. Following the release of that album, Yorke and crew continued
churning out albumsmany critically acclaimedthrough a six-album record deal with
Columbia.37
Radioheads Capitol/EMI deal ended with the release of 2003s Hail to the Thief. When
the time came to renew with Capitol or find another label, Radiohead chose neither option.38
Instead, the group went to work on a seventh album for the next four years, never committing to
a label and never promising a release date for whatever the next album would be.
Then, in October 2007, Radiohead announced via blog post that the bands next album, In
Rainbows, would be released later that month. The plot twist, though, was that Radiohead had
not committed to a new label. Instead, the group recorded and produced the album on its own,
and then planned to release it onlineand let consumers determine the price. As Time
magazine explained, Its the first major album whose price is determined by what individual
consumers want to pay for it. And its perfectly acceptable to pay nothing at all.39 When In
Rainbows was officially released, interested listeners could log on to the designated Web site
and fill in their chosen payment amount. For many, this meant putting 0.00 in the box.
Radiohead did not care, and Thom Yorke made his point: He did not need a label to share the
music he was creating for his fans.
Of course, the story is even better because In Rainbows ended up being massively
successful both online and on CD. Industry reports a year later, in October 2008, showed that
the album sold 3 million copies online, as well as 1.75 million physical copies worldwide.40
Special edition discboxes were available as well, and more than 100,000 of those special
editions also were sold. For Radiohead, the online-first, pay-what-you-want release translated
into some of the groups biggest sales. Previously, Radiohead usually sold hundreds of
thousands of albums. With In Rainbows, millions became the standard.41
Radioheads experiment is just one way that the digital space is going to continue growing
and improving for musicians and their fans worldwide. All a listener needs is an Internet
connection to hear new music; and now, backed by innovative artists such as Radiohead, music
is available in exciting and affordable forms. A user does not just have to log in to a designated
store or account to buy music; instead, artists understand just how important it is to make their
music accessible to anyone who might be interested. The implications of the Radiohead
experiment in 2007 are crucial, as it paves the way for further experimentation from artists
who, prior to the In Rainbows album release, might have been uncertain just what the Internet
and an affordable albumcould do for them.
MY STORY, CONTINUED
When the Horrors released Strange House in 2007,42 I did almost all of my listening via
MySpace and the tracks that were available on the social network. Four years later, when the
Horrors released their third album, Skying, I found out about it not through MySpace, but
through Pitchfork.com. By 2011, I was a sophomore in college and I shed my MySpace habits
and instead immersed myself in two worlds, new social networks (Facebook, Twitter) and the
music blogosphere, which for me hinged on Pitchforks coverage of new music and releases.
When the Horrors released Skying, I followed the coverage on Pitchfork. Again, the
Internet brought me news of a band thateven 20 years agoit wouldve taken me years to
hear about. Instead, though, I already knew the bands whole backstory and learned about their
previous releases from other Web sources. I never had to buy import copies of their albums at
high costs; I didnt have to rely on domestic radio to play a few of their songs for me to be
interested. Instead, when Skying was released, I found out about the album through Pitchfork,
and then listened to it on Spotify. I never even had to leave my dorm room to listen to a band
producing music across the ocean. Equally important for me in my college years, I didnt have
to spend a dime to experience any of it.
My journey with the Horrors is just one of many experiences with musicians that began
online. The Internets power to connect people around the world with new music is
unbelievable. The connections happen, and happen rapidly. As those connections are made
around the world, a physical component comes into play. When a listener knows he or she is
invested in an artist, buying physical copies of the artists music becomes an exercise in more
than consumerism. It becomes a way to show how much the artist is a part of the listeners life;
the artist earns a physical spot.
That same trip to London found me conducting research in record shops throughout the city.
While doing some observational research at one of the Rough Trade record shops, I had the
opportunity to pick up Skying on vinyl. I already had played the album compulsively on
Spotify, so I knew exactly what I was gettingand I was even willing to spend a little more to
buy a special version of it. Without the Internet, I never would have been able to explore
Londons indie rock scene so easily, and I definitely would not have known when I arrived in
London the exact bands that I would support financially.
This experience is common today. With access to albums, mixtapes, songs, remixes, and
EPs, listeners can experience any artist they want at any time they choose. Music brings us
together. Throughout time people have fought each other; strife is common. As people, we find
reasons to be divided and to be argumentativeespecially in the preservation and exultation
of our own cultures and heritages. But music can break those boundaries. For as long as we
have fought, we have also sung. Music can break barriers that have been built over centuries
one note and one brick at a time. If music can break boundaries established for centuries
between people and their cultures, then why would music be stopped by physical geographical
boundaries? We become stronger as people when we learn about other cultures and embrace
them; we better understand our own histories when we have the context of others. By letting
new music into our daily lives with the help of the Internet and the ease with which we can
access the new and unusual, we can become that much closer, our world can become that much
smallerand our artists, the ones who bring us the relief from the everyday, can thrive in
previously unheard of ways.
NOTES
1. Internet Society, Brief History of the Internet, http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-
internet/brief-history-internet (January 1, 2014), accessed January 2, 2015.
2. Ibid.
3. Kathleen Hanna Biography, Bio.com (January 1, 2014), accessed January 3, 2015.
http://www.biography.com/people/kathleen-hanna-17178854.
4. Marah Eakin (November 20, 2012), Kathleen Hanna on Bikini Kill, Growing Up, and Being a Feminist Icon, The A.V.
Club.
5. Ibid.
6. Holly Kruse, Local Identity and Independent Music Scenes, Online and Off, Popular Music and Society 33 (5)
(2010): 62539.
7. Larry King, Interview with Bono, CNN.com (January 1, 2002), accessed January 2, 2015.
8. Holly Kruse, Local Identity and Independent Music Scenes, Online and Off, Popular Music and Society 33, no. 5
(2010): 62539.
9. Nathaniel Penn, Nirvana and Kurt Cobain: An Oral History, GQ (June 1, 2011).
10. Ibid.
11. Holly Kruse, Local Identity and Independent Music Scenes, Online and Off, Popular Music and Society 33, no. 5
(2010): 62539.
12. Nathaniel Penn, Nirvana and Kurt Cobain.
13. Ibid.
14. Timothy Stenovec, 2011 (June 29), Myspace History: A Timeline of the Social Networks Biggest Moments, The
Huffington Post.
15. Norbert Michel, The Impact of Digital File Sharing on the Music Industry: An Empirical Analysis, Topics in
Economic Analysis & Policy 6 (1) (2006).
16. M. William Krasilovsky and Sidney Shemel, This Business of Music: The Definitive Guide to the Music Industry,
10th ed. (New York: Watson-Guptill Books, 2007).
17. Franois Moreau, The Disruptive Nature of Digitization: The Case of the Recorded Music Industry, International
Journal of Arts Management 15, no. 2 (2013).
18. Krasilovsky and Shemel, This Business of Music.
19. Martin Peitz and Patrick Waelbroeck, Why the Music Industry May Gain from Free Downloading: The Role of
Sampling, International Journal of Industrial Organization 24, no. 5 (2006): 90713.
20. Ibid.
21. Rajiv Sinha, Fernando S. Machado, and Colin Sellman, Dont Think Twice, Its All Right: Music Piracy and Pricing in a
DRM-Free Environment, Journal of Marketing 74 (2010): 4054.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Browne, David, Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth. 1st ed. (Da Capo Press ed.) (New York: Da
Capo, 2008).
25. Michel, Norbert, The Impact of Digital File Sharing on the Music Industry: An Empirical Analysis. Topics in
Economic Analysis & Policy 6(1) (New Orleans: University of New Orleans, 2006).
26. David Browne, Goodbye 20th Century.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Joe La Puma, A$AP Rocky: Rocky Road, Complex (January 2013).
31. Ibid.
32. Chris Franco, A$AP Rockys Transformation from YouTube Rap Star to International Touring Artist, Hypebot (April
5, 2013): 1.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Radiohead: A Brief History, NME News (2007).
37. Ibid.
38. Josh Tyrangiel, Radiohead Says: Pay What You Want, Time (October 1, 2007): 1.
39. Ibid.
40. Paul Thompson, Radioheads In Rainbows Successes Revealed, Pitchfork (October 15, 2008):1.
41. Ibid.
42. The Horrors Reveal Debut Album Title, ClickMusic (January 11, 2007).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Browne, David. 2008. Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth. 1st ed. (Da Capo Press ed.) New York: Da
Capo.
Eakin, Marah. 2012 (November 20). Kathleen Hanna on Bikini Kill, Growing Up, and Being a Feminist Icon. The A.V. Club.
Franco, Chris. 2013 (April 5). ASAP Rockys Transformation from YouTube Rap Star to International Touring Artist.
Hypebot, 1.
The Horrors Reveal Debut Album Title. 2007 (January 11). ClickMusic.
Internet Society. 2014 (January 1). Brief History of the Internet. http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-
internet/brief-history-internet. Accessed January 2, 2015.
Kathleen Hanna. Biography.com. http://www.biography.com/people/kathleen-hanna-17178854. Accessed January 3, 2015.
Krasilovsky, M. William, and Sidney Shemel. 2007. This Business of Music: The Definitive Guide to the Music Industry.
10th ed. New York: Watson-Guptill Books.
Kruse, Holly. 2010. Local Identity and Independent Music Scenes, Online and Off. Popular Music and Society 33 (5): 625
39.
La Puma, Joe. 2013 (January). A$AP Rocky: Rocky Road. Complex.
Michel, Norbert. 2006. The Impact of Digital File Sharing on the Music Industry: An Empirical Analysis. In Topics in
Economic Analysis & Policy. 1st ed. Vol. 6. New Orleans: University of New Orleans.
Moreau, Franois. 2013. The Disruptive Nature of Digitization: The Case of the Recorded Music Industry. International
Journal of Arts Management 15 (2).
Peitz, Martin, and Patrick Waelbroeck. 2006. Why the Music Industry May Gain from Free Downloading: The Role of
Sampling. International Journal of Industrial Organization 24 (5): 90713.
Penn, Nathaniel. 2011 (June 1). Nirvana and Kurt Cobain: An Oral History. GQ.
Radiohead: A Brief History. 2007. NME News.
Sinha, Rajiv, Fernando S. Machado, and Colin Sellman. 2010. Dont Think Twice, Its All Right: Music Piracy and Pricing in a
DRM-Free Environment. Journal of Marketing 74: 4054.
Stenovec, Timothy. 2011 (June 29). Myspace History: A Timeline of the Social Networks Biggest Moments. The Huffington
Post.
Thompson, Paul. 2008 (October 15). Radioheads in Rainbows Successes Revealed. Pitchfork 1.
Tyrangiel, Josh. 2007 (October 1). Radiohead Says: Pay What You Want. Time 1.
4
Narcissism or Self-Actualization? An
Evaluation of Selfies as a Communication
Tool
Christina Best
INTRODUCTION
A selfie is a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically taken with a smartphone
or webcam and often uploaded to a social media website.1 Selfies have found a permanent
home on social media, especially on image-dependent sites such as Facebook and Instagram. It
seems that everyone is taking selfies, including the Pope,2 President Barack Obama,3 and even
our pets.4 In 2013, Oxford Dictionaries named selfie its word of the year.5 The selfie
revolution undoubtedly hit its saturation point when Ellen DeGeneres posted to Twitter photos
of herself and numerous high-profile celebrities during the 2014 Oscars.6
Pew Research Center found that 46% of all Internet users polled post original photos and
videos online [that] they have created.7 Furthermore, 55% of Millennials (18 to 33 year
olds) have shared a selfie on a photo sharing or social networking site such as Facebook,
Instagram or Snapchat.8 Not surprisingly, Millennials also comprise the greatest percentage of
users on Facebook and Instagram, with 83% of 18- to 29-year-olds polled using Facebook and
27% using Instagram.9 Although vital for understanding social media use demographically,
these figures do not explain what motivates individuals to post selfies.
This research explores how selfies can be interpreted as self-actualizing and empowering
as well as narcissistic and inauthentic, in addition to revealing the universality of seeing
ourselves as others do. The author concludes that selfies transcend the concepts of the good,
the bad, and the ugly becausedespite being displayed as JPEGS and in pixelsselfies
represent a timeless human desire: to capture ones essence despite lifes impermanence.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE SELFIE

Its easy to write off the selfie as a product of a technological revolution, but the selfie is
a smartphone-produced version of the self-portrait, which has been a staple of art and
photography history since artists first began examining their own images in the mirror.10 Both
painters and photographers have recreated images of themselves using their artistic mediums.
This section briefly explores the history of self-portraiture to provide context for its current
iteration: the selfie.
Self-Portraiture before the Camera Phone

People have been the subject of artistic works for centuries, and self-portraits have been
created by many well-known artists, including Rembrandt van Rijn11 and Frida Kahlo.12
Although vanity cannot be discounted as a motive for creating a self-portrait, artists often paint
themselves because they are a readily available13 and inexpensive model14 who will not
complain about the results when a painting session [is] over.15 Self-portraits also allow an
artist to develop his or her technique while stimulating self-discovery.16
Art historians hypothesize that Rembrandt experimented with self-portraiture to study and
practice [the] depiction of specific emotions17 by examining his face in a mirror.18 Not only
was Rembrandt sought after for his portraiture, but throughout his life he produced an
unprecedented number of drawn, etched, and painted self-portraits.19 It is estimated that he
painted more than 80 self-portraits,20 with some historians placing that figure at 98,21 making
Rembrandt the most prolific self-portrait artist of any major painter in history.22 In his self-
portraits, Rembrandt frequently portrayed himself in period and other types of costumes23
with corresponding hats. Self-portraiture enabled Rembrandt to express unique versions of
himself.24 Each portrait conveys distinct and universally human emotions; Rembrandt is the
instrument through which the meaning of the painting is created.25
Kahlo produced 143 paintings in her lifetime, 55 of which are self-portraits.26 After
contracting polio early in her childhood and nearly [dying] in a bus accident as a teenager,27
Kahlo suffered from chronic pain.28 She used art as a reprieve from her physical pain during
her recovery after the bus accident, which initially confined her to a body cast.29 In Kahlos
piece titled The Broken Column, she is depicted nearly naked, split down the middle, with
her spine presented as a broken decorative column30 with nails piercing her skin.31 Unlike
Rembrandts focus on portraying himself as various characters portraying specific emotions,
Kahlos self-portraits capture her spiritual and physical suffering in anatomical, surgical
detail.32
Kahlo and Rembrandt are only two of a myriad of artists who used (and continue to use)
self-portraiture as a creative outlet to convey their life experiences. What makes Kahlo
particularly of note is her obsession with visual auto-biography, with defining her own image
through the objects and items she accumulated around her, [which] connects her to this
heavily accessorized decade.33 What Stephen Marche is referring to is the tendency for social
media users to overshare various aspects of their lives, and it is his opinion that the urge to
share with the world a photo of your most recent meal, your sexy new handbag, or the
sonogram of your unborn baby is an expression of the same fundamental desires that motivated
Kahlo. She was an oversharer.34 The desire to reveal to others fragments of our lifes story,
no matter how excessive or mundane, is what links Kahlo and her self-portrait predecessors to
the selfie phenomenon.
The Rise of the Modern Selfie
The selfie would not be possible without the invention of the camera. Photography can be
traced back as early as the fifth century bce.35 Although the camera obscura, a dark space into
which light is admitted through a tiny opening in one of the walls or windows,36 had existed
for centuries prior, it remained undefined until it was most famously used by Leonardo da
Vinci in the 13th century. In the centuries that followed, artists used this tool as a
compositional aid,37 sketching the projected images onto paper.38 What this historical
snapshot reveals is that by 1800 the camera had long since been invented, but no one had
created film for it.39
The first film was invented in the 1930s in France by chemist Joseph Nicphore
Nipce40 with the assistance of inventor Louis Daguerre.41 Nipce and Daguerre discovered a
way to transfer images onto a copper plate.42 This process, named the daguerreotype,43
became a popular novelty among the middle class during the Industrial Revolution.44 Just as
artists of centuries past used self-portraiture to perfect their craft and explore, so, too, have
photographers. One of the oldest daguerreotype self-portrait photographs in existence was
taken in the 1830s by chemist Robert Cornelius in Philadelphia.45 In the photo, Cornelius is
described as looking intently at a camera, making sure its working.46 Less about self-
expression, Cornelius photo represents a time when photography was focused on the process
and not the outcome. But, by 1889, George Eastman created roll film,47 shifting the focus to the
outcomethe photoof the photographic process. Roll film made photography more
portable48 which encouraged people to adopt photography as a hobby.49
Lee Friedlander, a prominent self-portrait and street photographer active from the 1950s
through the 1980s,50 focused his work on conceptualizing the self as just another object in the
world.51 Friedlander deliberately broke standard photography practices, experimenting with
getting [his] own shadow in the picture, lining up a head with a tree.52 He attempted to
photograph himself and the world around him exactly as it appeared, including the use of
normal, reasonably well-shaped women marked by acne [and] bruises as subjects in his
nude photographs.53
In the 1970s, Cindy Sherman redefined the boundaries of self-portraiture.54 Unlike
Friedlanders meticulous attempts to convey life as realistically as possible,55 Sherman used
self-portraiture to create theatrical narratives.56 She turned the still photograph into a piece of
performance art. In 1976, she released a series titled Bus Riders, in which she pretends to
be passengers on a bus by wearing different outfits and using various props.57 Contemporary
self-portraiture combines Shermans performance-art style and Friedlanders realism in ways
that depict the essence of a sitters presence and describe a narrative scene.58
It was during the lives of Sherman and Friedlander that cameras became lighter and
smaller,59 eventually leading to the creation of the digital camera in 1969,60 though it was not
until 1991 that the digital camera was introduced as a commercial product.61 Digital
photography has allowed the meaning of the photographed subject become more fluid.62
Instead of film cameras, which create static, fixed image[s],63 digital cameras make
capturing moments a more fluid process. Various settings can be manipulated in the field and
further changes can be made afterward. Because digital images can be uploaded and shared in
innumerable settings, images meanings morph, move, and can exist in multiple places and
meanings at one time.64 The advent of the built-in cell phone camera further expanded self-
perception in the digital age.
With no way to easily document the birth of his first child, Philippe Kahn, a technology
developer, saw an opportunity to combine digital photography with cell phone technology
together.65 The first adaptors of Kahns technology were J-Phone, a Japanese company, that
introduced a mobile phone called the J-SH04, the first to have a built-in camera in 2000.66
By 2002, American and European consumers67 could purchase camera phones. Cameras,
along with Internet access, are a ubiquitous part of the modern cell phone. A 2013 report
conducted by Pew found that 63% of cell phone owners now use their phone to go online.68
Additionally, more than 90% of American adults own a cell phone,69 and 56% of cell phone
users own a smartphone.70
Shawn DuBravacs summary of recent technological trends can be applied to how
photography has adjusted to the digital age: The first digital era began when analog devices
were replaced by their superior digital equivalents, but this second digital era is driven by the
broader digitization of our physical space.71 In photographys case, film cameras were
replaced by digital cameras by consumers as a whole, only to become a camera phone
substitute. Unlike physical digital cameras, people can quickly capture a moment without the
need for separate equipment and without the need to plan ahead.72 As a result, visual
communication rules our technocentric lifestyles, and the selfie is a natural outgrowth of how
we communicate and connect in a hyper-social-networked world.73 Digital photography has
created new ways for people to relate to one another and, perhaps more noticeably, it has
allowed people to explore their identities in more detailed and immediate ways than ever
before.
SELFIES AS COMMUNICATION TOOLS

From the camera obscura to the digital camera, documenting ones life has become easier
to the point of being instantaneous, particularly with the addition of cameras to cell phones.
Combined with the pervasiveness of social media sites, humans have redefined communication
norms in the 21st century. In an interview with Wired, author and photographer Marvin
Heiferman describes how photographs evolved from being static mementos to communication
devices.
In the past, it was more conventional; we had to have reason to make a picture and it
was usually to document something specific. Whereas now people take pictures
because the camera is there [in their hand]. It has got to the point where sometimes if
you ask people why they take pictures they cant even say. I think people are using
images in a completely different way and as a communicative tool.74
Stephen Mayes, also interviewed for Wired, affirms Heifermans observation, suggesting
that the way we relate to imagery is changing. Our new relationship is less about witness,
evidence and document and much more about experience, sharing and streaming.75 Or, as
Sherry Turkle puts it: I share, therefore I am.76 Sharing experiences through photos, no matter
how mundane77 they appear to an observer, provides people with a sense of importance.78
Furthermore, the rapid accessibility of social media has fundamentally changed the way we
read and watch: we think about how well share something, and whom well share it with, as
we consume it.79 Selfies often are taken with the intention of being shared via social media.
Selfies have become a form of self-announcement80a way for us to let others know through
electronic means81 that mark our short existence and hold it up to others as proof that we
were here.82
The increasing capabilities of camera phones to take higher-resolution images mak[e] it
easy to take and share self-made pictures online. It is also safe to say that the rise of social
media, especially YouTube and newer services like Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr, has made
curating activities easier because they are organized for easy image and videosharing.83
Sharing remains the reason why we use social media, but now our first focus is to have, to
possess, a photograph of our experience. 84 Although photos of friends enjoying a party, a
newborn baby85 and selfies are taken for the express purpose of sharing,86 the motivation to
post these comes from a universal human need to to stand outside of ourselves and look at
ourselves.87 Even President Obama showed us how he, too, lives in our culture of
documentation when he took a selfie at [Nelson] Mandelas memorial service.88
Selfies are ultimately a very personal extension of the person sharing them, which makes
them reminiscent of the self-portraits in art and photography that came before them. Even
though these self-portraits are worldsand decadesapart they are threaded together by
a timeless delight in our ability to document our lives and leave behind a trace for others to
discover.89 What differentiates selfies from earlier self-portraiture is their level of self-
conscious authenticity that is different from even a candid photograph[selfies] are more raw
and less perfect.90 Selfies are also more about sharing an experience at that moment91 than
portraying a Kahlo-like allegory of the human condition.
In sum, selfies are a modern communication tool ushered in by the digital age, and they are
a form of immediate self-expression shared with others as a way to justify our lifes
experiences. As a communication device, selfies are more complex than an individual simply
snapping a photo of himself or herself. Selfies also can be seen as an extension of our ongoing
adolescence92 and an exercise in self-discovery.93
Much like performance-art self-portrait photographer Cindy Shermans deliberate use of
props and scene-setting discussed above, people use selfies to both explore their individuality
and to create a narrative for their friends and followers.94 This is defined as identity as
performance,95 a concept developed by sociologist Erving Goffman in the mid-20th century. It
suggests that we assume various identities any time we exchange information with others.96
Social networks enable a user to deliberately construct his or her self-identity using tools and
technologies to project, renegotiate, and continuously revise their consensual social
hallucination. Users manipulate these communicative codes to create not only online selves,
but also to create the staging and setting in which these selves exist.97 Alicia Eler affirms this
point, stating that we are ourselves, but we are also meta-selves and performances of our own
perception of identities online.98 What this means is that social networking sites enable us to
create countless versions of ourselves, if we so choose. We are the curators of modern culture
and with each of us creating a world that is increasingly the fruit of our own experiences: our
own videos, books, blogs, and images made from the materials of our own lives. Increasingly,
we own our own worlds.99 In our global social networked age100 truth is a more fluid
concept, defined by what information we choose to share online.
Identity as performance101 also can be described, in more technical terms, as self-
presentation,102 which is the process thorough which [social media] users attempt to control
the impressions others may form of them.103 In a study of Facebook users, researchers found
that online users take special care to construct message expressions by revising or abandoning
their ideas until they create satisfactory impressions.104 People manage their online selves
through the following information control105 categories: expressive information control,
privacy information control, and image information control.106 Expressive information refers
to the users opportunity to post, comment, and like,107 others content, privacy
information is controlled using the privacy settings built into the social media site, and image
information includes all information displayed visually, including profile pictures and banner
images.108 Social networking sites have continued to give users greater control over these
categories,109 which means that most information about the virtual self and its place in the
network is given through deliberate construction of signs.110 We carefully construct and
maintain our online identities using the features and tools of each social media site and join the
struggle to be recognized as a unique individual or as a member of a social group.111
Thus far, this chapter has focused on how selfies represent the shift of the photograph
[from] memorial function to a communication device,112 and has considered how selfies are
used as a performance, allowing the individuals posting the images to explore and define his or
her self-identity. Although selfies have become part of an ongoing virtual documentary of
modern life,113 they have simultaneously come to represent a phenomenon BuzzFeed
columnist Amanda Petrusich defines as the nostalgia of now.114 Certain social media
applications, such as Instagram, enable users to apply colored overlays, called filters, to
make images taken using their cell phones look old. In a time when a digital photo is just one
share button away from being posted online, people are left feeling nostalgic for a time
[they] never actually knew,115 a time when a physical copy of a photo was itself a precious
object.116 This contemporary phenomenon117 is reflected in the use of Instagram filters and
the resurgence of vinyl records.
Instagram filters become a part of an individuals online performance; it is not just a filter,
its a meta-commentarya deliberate aesthetic and narrative choice.118 Instagram has given
people greater control over the life stories they construct online. Although filters are not
required for posting a photo on Instagram, people can use filters to slightly alter reality,
thereby visually communicating to their friends and followers a certain tone or a feeling that is,
in itself, a reflection of who they are.
WHY PEOPLE POST SELFIES

In the age of nonstop digital communication, billions of people all over the world send and
receive messages every second of every day. Because selfies have become an online
communication tool they have assumed multiple meanings, depending on who receives and
interprets them. Taken as a symbol of the social-networking era, selfies largely are seen as
either narcissistic or self-actualizing. This section explores both opinions on this subject, to
help in understanding how selfies represent both the good and the bad and the ugly of
digital communication.
Shameless self-promotion is a behavior commonly cited as evidence of the selfies
narcissistic nature. For those who hold this opinion, seeing a selfie can trigger perceptions of
self-indulgence or attention-seeking social dependence that119 indicate either narcissism or
low self-esteem.120 Because selfies are used as a performance device, they can be interpreted
as a less authentic view of reality; they are a way to polish public-facing images of who we
are, or who wed like to appear to be.121 They also inevitably veer into scandalous or
shameless territory and, at their most egregious, raise all sorts of questions about vanity
and our obsession with beauty and body image.122 Therefore, as a communication device,
selfies have a selfish motivation: To seek approval of ones physical appearance from his or
her peers in the form of likes and comments.123
Selfies also can be used to brag about our lives and achievements, a type of human
behavior that is practically coded into social medias DNA.124 These messages of self-
enhancementthe human tendency to oversell ourselves,125 cause people to engage in social
comparison126a social-psychology phenomenon127 that occurs when people compare
themselves to like-minded peers.128 We engage in self-enhancement when we reflect on the
interestingness of our companions, the solidity of our relationships, [or] the fabulousness of
our meals129 on social media. As a result, others could become envious of the lives we
appear to live,130 and although we want to learn about other people and have others learn
about us131 we could come to resent both others lives and the image of ourselves that we
feel we need to continuously maintain.132 In a study of Facebook use, researchers found that
jealousy is more likely to occur in people who spend more time browsing others content as
opposed to actively creating content and engaging with it.133 For some people it can be
difficult to resist the temptation to compare themselves to the achievements they read about or
see on friends social media pages.134
Oversharing personal information also is cited as a reason that selfies and the exchanging
of information on social media are self-centered behaviors. The urge to overshare is likely a
result of social medias pervasiveness, but it also is a reflection of how capitalism functions at
an individual and personal level.135 Images are created and curated by peopleeach with
distinct personal brands136and these images are mass-consumed.137 It is Stephen Marches
opinion that social media users tend to spend an inordinate amount of time photographing
themselves with their stuff, defining themselves through things and share these visual
timelines in excess, thus supply[ing] the world with constant images of themselves wearing
designer shoes and clothes and bags and anything else they might be consuming or wanting to
consume.138
Social networking sites are owned by capitalist enterprises,139 and the content uploaded
and shared is a reflection of the capitalist system. As a result, personal identity has been
commodified140; identity has become a product we visually consume.141 Roger Cohen,
writing for The New York Times, likens social media to a global high-school reunion at
which142 people share their numb faces at the dentist, their waffles and sausage, their
appointments with their therapists, their personal hygiene, their pimples and pets, their late
babysitters, their grumpy starts to the day and all the rest.143 This ooze of status
updates,144 Cohen says, is a result of peoples compulsion to share,145 no matter how
mundane or off-putting the content might be.
Although there is validity to the perspective that selfies are a reflection of our propensity
for narcissism, it is overly simplistic146 and fails to acknowledge that we are, above all things,
social beings and visual communicators.147 Communication and interconnectedness148 are
essential parts of the human condition.149 So it is not surprising that visual communication
tools are often more effective at conveying a feeling or reaction than text150 because seeing
the face of the person youre talking to brings back the human element of the interaction.151
Additionally, although selfies seem to emphasize the importance of a persons physical
appearance, humans are hard-wired to pay attention to looks and continually make both
upward and downward comparisons. Social comparison is not a moral failing or an indication
of misplaced values.152 There are people who are insecure who post selfies to get attention
and social validation,153 but selfies are not the root cause of this type of behavior.154
Sharing our experiences with others through digital communication can have positive
effects on a persons well-being. Psychologist Matthew D. Lieberman, in an article about
Facebook use published in The New Yorker, concludes that the experience of successful
sharing comes with a psychological and physiological rush that is often self-reinforcing.
The mere thought of successful sharing activates our reward-processing centers, even before
weve actually shared a single thing.155 A study conducted in 2010 about social well-being
and social networking use156 affirms the positive impact of sharing on social media,
determining that, when people engaged in direct interaction with othersthat is, posting on
walls, messaging, or liking somethingtheir feelings of bonding and general social capital
increased, while their sense of loneliness decreased.157 So although some people might either
overshare or develop an unhealthy obsession with validation from their peers, selfies generally
are a positive form of communication.
Selfies also can be empowering and even normalizing and reaffirm the drive for
authenticity that is the hallmark of social media. Social media affords people the freedom of
representation,158 making self-expression and self-truth more flexible concepts. In our
increasingly digital world, expressing ourselves through selfies is an important exercise in a
modern world that bombards us with reasons to feel bad about ourselves. Online, were
safe to note our achievements, our loves, our tiny daily triumphs in a bid for a little positive
feedback. According to the selfie king,159 James Franco, attention seems to be the name of
the game when it comes to social networking.160 Franco states that attention is power161 in
the struggle to be recognized as a unique individual162 in our information economy. Which
begs the question: Is that so wrongto want to be noticed, to ask people to see us the way we
see ourselves?163
CONCLUSION
The following quote is credited to Frida Kahlo, I paint myself because I am often alone
and I am the subject I know best.164 Much like Kahlo, we selfie ourselves because our
own lives are the subject that we know best. As much as we come to understand about
ourselves over time, we never can physically see ourselves as others do. Selfies are the
closest we can get to actually seeing ourselves. We also use selfies to document a passing
moment and provide an instant visual communication of where we are, what were doing,
who we think we are, and who we think is watching.165 As with any social phenomenon, there
always will be multiple viewpointsboth positive and negative. It is the conclusion of this
author, however, that selfiesdespite, at times, oversaturating the social media landscape
are a positive form of self-expression.
Ultimately, vanity and a preoccupation with our outward appearances are part of what
makes us human. Taken at face value, selfiesand social media as a wholeseem to
discourage face-to-face communication. The rapid development of digital technology has made
humans adapt the way we communicate and, for better and for worse, a lot of conversation
happens online. Although taking a selfie appears to be an act of solitude, it actually is a smaller
part of the larger picture of how we project ourselves and connect with our friends and others
online. Alicia Elers summary of the selfie phenomenon encapsulates this concept quite well.
If the selfie is the ultimate mirror in our internet house of mirrors, and we can frame our
photos and curate ourselves as we want others to see us, then surely the selfie is an act
of taking back the gaze. We look through the reversed mirror of the iPhone, into an
actual mirror (camera flash reflection optional), or gaze longingly into a computer
webcam. We self-consciously perform these moments from inside our private, domestic
spaces, for ourselves and for our internet friends and friends, who are also voyeurs.
They are our voyeurs, and we willingly welcome them into our curated worlds.166
NOTES
1. Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2013, Oxford Dictionaries, last modified November 19, 2013,
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/press-releases/oxford-dictionaries-word-of-the-year-2013/ (accessed January 20, 2015).
2. Sam Frizell, Pope Francis Takes Selfies with Crowd after Palm Sunday Homily, Time, last modified April 13, 2014,
http://time.com/60699/pope-francis-palm-sunday-selfie/ (accessed January 13, 2015).
3. Alyssa Newcomb, President Obama Poses for Selfie at Nelson Mandelas Memorial Service, ABC News, last modified
December 10, 2013, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-obama-poses-selfie-nelson-mandelas-memorial-service/story?
id=21162957 (accessed January 13, 2015).
4. The These Animal Selfies Prove that Cats, Dogs and Sloths Take the Best Self-Portraits, The Huffington Post, last
modified July 29, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/20/animal-selfies-pet-selfie-photos_n_3624985.html (accessed
January 13, 2015).
5. Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2013 (supra note 1).
6. Kirthana Ramisetti, The Most Headline-Making Celebrity Tweets of 2014: From Grumpy Kanye to Ellens Selfie, NY
Daily News, last modified December 31, 2014, http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/kanye-west-ellen-
degeneres-top-celebrity-tweets-2014-article-1.2062122 (accessed January 13, 2015).
7. Lee Rainie, Joanna Brenner, and Kristen Purcell, Photos and Videos as Social Currency Online, Pew Research Center,
last modified September 13, 2012, http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-media//Files/Reports/2012/
PIP_OnlineLifeinPictures_PDF.pdf (accessed January 13, 2015).
8. Pew Research Center, Millennials in Adulthood: Detached from Institutions, Networked with Friends, Numbers, Facts
and Trends Shaping the World, last modified March 7, 2014, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2014/03/2014-03-
07_generations-report-version-for-web.pdf (accessed January 13, 2015).
9. Lee Rainie, Joanna Brenner, and Kristen Purcell, Photos and Videos As Social Currency Online, Pew Research
Center, last modified September 13, 2012, http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-
media//Files/Reports/2012/PIP_OnlineLifeinPictures_PDF.pdf (accessed January 13, 2015).
10. Alicia Eler, Before the Selfie, the Self-Portrait, Hyperallergic, last modified August 5, 2013,
http://hyperallergic.com/76218/before-the-selfie-the-self-portrait/ (accessed January 10, 2015).
11. Albert Rothenberg, Rembrandts Creation of the Pictorial Metaphor of Self, Metaphor & Symbol 23, no. 2 (2008):
10829, accessed January 19, 2015, doi: 10.1080/10926480801944269.
12. Stephen Marche, The Argument: Why Frida Kahlo Is the Patron Saint of Internet-Enabled Narcissism, Toronto Life,
last modified November 12, 2012, http://www.torontolife.com/informer/features/2012/11/12/frida-kahlo-online-narcissism/
(accessed January 19, 2015).
14. Ibid.
15. Marion Boddy-Evans, Painting Self Portraits, About.com, accessed January 21, 2015,
http://painting.about.com/cs/figurepainting/a/selfportraits.htm.
16. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ann Jensen Adams (2004). Rembrandt van Rijn, Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern
World, Vol. 5, 17477. Gale Virtual Reference Library, Web.
20. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Frida Kahlo and Her Paintings, Frida Kahlo, accessed January 21, 2015, http://www.fridakahlo.org/.
27. Ibid.
28. Frida Kahlo Biography, Frida Kahlo, accessed January 21, 2015, http://www.fridakahlo.org/frida-kahlo-biography.jsp.
29. Frida Kahlo and Her Paintings, Frida Kahlo, accessed January 21, 2015, http://www.fridakahlo.org/.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Mary Kay Vaughan, Kahlo, Frida (19071954), Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture 2, vol. 4
(2008): 7273, Gale Virtual Reference Library.
34. Ibid.
35. Cameras, Encyclopedia of Products & IndustriesManufacturing (2008): 14956. Gale Virtual Reference
Library, Web.
36. Janice L. Neri, Camera Obscura, Europe, 14501789, Vol. 1 (2004): 37274. Gale Virtual Reference Library, Web.
37. Ibid.
Library, Web.
39. Photography, Gale Encyclopedia of Science, Vol. 4, edited by K. Lee Lerner and Brenda Wilmoth Lerner (2008):
330813. Gale Virtual Reference Library, Web.
Library.
41. Photography (supra note 39).
42. Ibid.
Library.
330813. Gale Virtual Reference Library.
45. Tim Davis, Portrait of the Artist, Print 67(4) (2013): 5055. Academic Search Premier.
46. Ibid.
47. Gillian S. Holmes, Camera, How Products Are Made: An Illustrated Guide to Product Manufacturing, Vol. 3
(1998): 6771. Gale Virtual Reference Library.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Stewart Kampel, Friedlander, Lee, Encyclopedia Judaica, Vol. 7 (2007): 27778. Gale Virtual Reference Library.
51. Tim Davis, Portrait of the Artist, Print 67 (4) (2013): 5055. Academic Search Premier.
52. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
330813. Gale Virtual Reference Library.
Library.
61. Ibid.
62. Pete Brook, Photographs Are No Longer Things, Theyre Experiences, Wired, last modified November 15, 2012,
http://www.wired.com/2012/11/stephen-mayes-vii-photography/all/ (accessed January 7, 2015).
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.
65. Andrew A. Kling, Cameras, Video, and the Web, Cell Phones (2010): 6479. Gale Virtual Reference Library.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. Maeve Duggan and Aaron Smith, Cell Internet Use 2013, Pew Research Center, last modified September 16, 2013,
http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-media//Files/Reports/2013/PIP_CellInternetUse2013.pdf (accessed January 22, 2015).
69. Lee Rainie, Cell Phone Ownership Hits 91% of Adults, Pew Research Center, last modified June 6, 2013,
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/06/cell-phone-ownership-hits-91-of-adults/ (accessed January 22, 2015).
70. Aaron Smith, Smartphone Ownership2013 Update, Pew Research Center, last modified June 5, 2013,
http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-media//Files/Reports/2013/ PIP_Smartphone_adoption_2013_PDF.pdf (accessed January
22, 2015).
71. Shawn DuBravac, Business Models in the Innovation Economy, Consumer Electronics Association, (2015): 2528,
http://content.ce.org/PDF/2014_5Tech_web.pdf (accessed January 29, 2015).
72. Andrew A. Kling, Cameras, Video, and the Web, Cell Phones (2010): 6479. Gale Virtual Reference Library, Web.
73. Alicia Eler, All the Pretty Selfies Are Here to Stay, Hyperallergic, last modified December 23, 2013,
http://hyperallergic.com/97441/all-the-pretty-selfies-are-here-to-stay/ (accessed January 10, 2015).
74. Pete Brook, Photography Is the New Universal Language, and Its Changing Everything, Wired, last modified August
20, 2013, http://www.wired.com/2013/08/raw-meet-marvin-heiferman/ (accessed January 13, 2015).
75. Pete Brook, Photographs Are No Longer Things, Theyre Experiences, Wired, last modified November 15, 2012,
http://www.wired.com/2012/11/stephen-mayes-vii-photography/all/ (accessed January 7, 2015).
76. Sherry Turkle, The Documented Life, New York Times, last modified December 15, 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/16/opinion/the-documented-life.html (accessed January 10, 2015).
78. Ken Eisold, Why Selfies? Psychology Today, last modified December 21, 2013,
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hidden-motives/201312/why-selfies (accessed January 11, 2015).
79. Maria Konnikova, How Facebook Makes Us Unhappy, New Yorker, last modified September 10, 2013,
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-facebook-makes-us-unhappy (accessed January 9, 2015).
80. Ben Agger, Hegels Internet, disClosure (2014): 4764. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost.
81. Ibid.
82. Jenna Wortham, My Selfie, Myself, New York Times, last modified October 19, 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/sunday-review/my-selfie-myself.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1& (accessed January 12,
2015).
83. Lee Rainie, Joanna Brenner, and Kristen Purcell, Photos and Videos as Social Currency Online, Pew Research
Center, last modified September 13, 2012, http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-media/
/Files/Reports/2012/PIP_OnlineLifeinPictures_PDF.pdf (accessed January 13, 2015).
84. Ibid.
86. Pamela B. Rutledge, Making Sense of Selfies, Psychology Today, last modified July 6, 2013,
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/positively-media/201307/making-sense-selfies (accessed January 10, 2015).
2015).
88. Sherry Turkle, The Documented Life, New York Times, last modified December 15, 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/16/opinion/the-documented-life.html (accessed January 10, 2015).
2015).
91. Chris Ziegler and Dieter Bohn, Instagram Is the Best, Instagram Is the Worst, The Verge, last modified April 9, 2012,
http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/9/2928975/instagram-filters-ping-counterping/ (accessed January 7, 2015).
92. Alicia Eler, I, Selfie: Saying Yes to Selfies, Hyperallergic, last modified June 24, 2013,
http://hyperallergic.com/73362/saying-yes-to-selfies/ (accessed January 10, 2015).
93. Ibid.
94. Tim Davis, Portrait of the Artist, Print 67, No.4 (2013): 5055. Academic Search Premier, Web.
95. Erika Pearson, All the World Wide Webs a Stage: The Performance of Identity in Online Social Networks, First
Monday, last modified March 2, 2009, http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/ fm/article/view/2162/2127 (accessed January 7,
2015).
96. Ibid.
97. Ibid.
98. Alicia Eler, On the Origin of Selfies, Hyperallergic, last modified August 26, 2013, http://hyperallergic.com/79448/the-
origin-of-selfies/ (accessed January 10, 2015).
99. Maria Bustillos, Everyone Shoots First: Reality in the Age of Instagram, The Verge, last modified September 18, 2013,
http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/18/3317324/hall-of-mirrors-remaking-reality-camera-obsessed-world (accessed January 13,
2015).
100. Alicia Eler, On the Origin of Selfies, Hyperallergic, last modified August 26, 2013,
http://hyperallergic.com/79448/the-origin-of-selfies/ (accessed January 10, 2015).
Monday, last modified March 2, 2009, http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2162/2127 (accessed January 7,
2015).
102. Feng-Yang Kuo, Chih-Yi Tseng, Fan-Chuan Tseng, and Cathy S. Lin, A Study of Social Information Control
Affordances and Gender Difference in Facebook Self-Presentation, Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 9,
Vol. 16 (2013): 635644. Academia.edu, Web.
103. Ibid.
104. Ibid.
105. Ibid.
106. Ibid.
107. Ibid.
108. Ibid.
109. Ibid.
Monday, last modified March 2, 2009, http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2162/2127 (accessed January 7,
2015).
111. Gina Schlesselman-Tarango, Searchable Signatures: Context and the Struggle for Recognition, Information
Technology & Libraries 32, no. 3 (2013): 519, Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost.
112. Jerry Saltz, Art at Arms Length: A History of the Selfie, Vulture, last modified January 26, 2014,
http://www.vulture.com/2014/01/history-of-the-selfie.html (accessed January 10, 2015).
113. Richard Brody, Status Update, New Yorker, last modified December 12, 2012,
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/status-update (accessed January 19, 2015).
114. Amanda Petrusich, Instagram, The Nostalgia of Now and Reckoning the Future, Buzzfeed, last modified April 24,
2012, http://www.buzzfeed.com/petrusich/instagram-the-nostalgia-of-now-and-reckoning-the#.hfLX8Qg3La (accessed January
9, 2015).
115. Ibid.
116. Christopher Bonanos, Instantly Old, New York Magazine, last modified April 13, 2012,
http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/instagram-2012-4/ (accessed January 10, 2015).
117. Amanda Petrusich, Instagram, The Nostalgia of Now and Reckoning the Future, Buzzfeed, last modified April 24,
2012, http://www.buzzfeed.com/petrusich/instagram-the-nostalgia-of-now-and-reckoning-the#.hfLX8Qg3La (accessed January
9, 2015).
118. Ibid.
120. Ibid.
2015).
122. Ibid.
123. Feng-Yang Kuo, Chih-Yi Tseng, Fan-Chuan Tseng, and Cathy S. Lin, A Study of Social Information Control
Affordances and Gender Difference in Facebook Self-Presentation, Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 9,
vol. 16 (2013): 63544. Academia.edu, Web.
124. Evan Ratliff, Self-Service: The Delicate Dance of Online Bragging, Wired, last modified June 22, 2010,
http://www.wired.com/2010/06/st_essay_tweet/ (accessed January 7, 2015).
125. Ibid.
127. Ibid.
128. Ibid.
129. Evan Ratliff, Self-Service: The Delicate Dance of Online Bragging, Wired, last modified June 22, 2010,
http://www.wired.com/2010/06/st_essay_tweet/ (accessed January 7, 2015).
131. Ibid.
132. Ibid.
133. Ibid.
134. Ibid.
Technology & Libraries 32, no. 3 (2013): 519, Academic Search Premier, EBSCO host.
137. Pete Brook, Photography Is the New Universal Language, and Its Changing Everything, Wired, last modified
August 20, 2013, http://www.wired.com/2013/08/raw-meet-marvin-heiferman/ (accessed January 13, 2015).
Technology & Libraries 32, no. 3 (2013): 519. Academic Search Premier, EBSCO host.
140. Ibid.
141. Pete Brook, Photography Is the New Universal Language, and Its Changing Everything, Wired, last modified
August 20, 2013, http://www.wired.com/2013/08/raw-meet-marvin-heiferman/ (accessed January 13, 2015).
142. Roger Cohen, Thanks for Not Sharing, New York Times, last modified December 6, 2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/07/opinion/roger-cohen-thanks-for-not-sharing.html?_r=2& (accessed January 10, 2015).
143. Ibid.
144. Ibid.
145. Ibid.
2015).
147. Alicia Eler, On the Origin of Selfies, Hyperallergic, last modified August 26, 2013,
http://hyperallergic.com/79448/the-origin-of-selfies/ (accessed January 10, 2015).
148. Richard Brody, Status Update, New Yorker, last modified December 12, 2012,
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/status-update (accessed January 19, 2015).
149. Ibid.
151. Ibid.
152. Pamela Rutledge, Selfie Use: Abuse or Balance?, Psychology Today, last modified July 8, 2013,
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/positively-media/201307/selfie-use-abuse-or-balancese-or-balance (accessed January 10,
2015).
153. Ibid.
154. Ibid.
156. Moira Burke, Cameron Marlow, and Thomas Lento, Social Network Activity and Social Well-Being, Association for
Computing Machinery (2010): 19091912. ACM Digital Library, Web, doi: 10.1145/1753326.1753613.
157. Konnikova, How Facebook Makes Us Unhappy (see footnote 155).
158. Pamela Rutledge, Selfie Use: Abuse or Balance? Psychology Today, last modified July 8, 2013,
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/positively-media/201307/selfie-use-abuse-or-balancese-or-balance (accessed January 10,
2015).
159. James Franco, The Meanings of Selfies, New York Times, last modified December 26, 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/arts/the-meanings-of-the-selfie.html?_r=0 (accessed January 26, 2015).
160. Ibid.
161. Ibid.
Technology & Libraries 32, no. 3 (2013): 519. Academic Search Premier, EBSCO host.
163. Alicia Eler, Validating Me and My Selfie, Hyperallergic, last modified July 22, 2013,
http://hyperallergic.com/74996/validating-me-and-myselfie/ (accessed January 10, 2015).
164. Frida Kahlo Biography, Frida Kahlo, accessed January 21, 2015, http://www.fridakahlo.org/frida-kahlo-
biography.jsp.
165. Jerry Saltz, Art at Arms Length: A History of the Selfie, Vulture, last modified January 26, 2014,
http://www.vulture.com/2014/01/history-of-the-selfie.html (accessed January 10, 2015).
166. Alicia Eler, I, Selfie: Saying Yes to Selfies, Hyperallergic, last modified June 24, 2013,
http://hyperallergic.com/73362/saying-yes-to-selfies/ (accessed January 10, 2015).
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5
Everyday Expertise: Instructional Videos on

YouTube
Jrgen Skgeby and Lina Rahm
This chapter explores how videos on YouTube have become an everyday form of producing
and consuming instructions, how-to guides, and tutorials. Consider, for example, the
following everyday use scenarios.
Dan is a tween (preteen) interested in Asian (visual) culture. He is particularly

fascinated by a variety of K-pop (Korean pop music) bandsto the extent that he wants
to learn the Korean language. His immediate thought is to consult YouTube and he
swiftly finds a series of videos providing him with the first basic steps of
conversational Korean. He watches the first installment in the series approximately 20
times over the following days and quickly demonstrates new language skills.
Angie just bought a digital drum kit. Although the sales representative gave her
some basic tips, Angie immediately consults YouTube for additional guidance through
the complexities of drumming (and setting up the kit properly). She finds continuous
challenges and inspiration through online videos, and a drumming session soon
becomes part of her daily routine.
Helen plays a game on her console. She is an accomplished player and so she
suspects that there are hidden levels and bonus items to be unlocked. To explore the
full reality of the game, Helen goes on YouTube to find a visual walkthrough.
The use cases provided above illustrate how YouTube has become the primary go-to
source for those who desire to learn about something unfamiliar. This isof course
remarkable, but also is not very surprising. Easily accessible instructional videos have a clear
attractionthey are visual, they are relevant, and they are up to date. Many videos also are
very detailed and often are well edited. This reminds us that YouTube is not only a platform to
consume knowledge, but also is a platform for sharing tips, tricks, and skills. Although the
examples provided here might seem diverse, that is the point. All of the cases represent
everyday situations in which a desire to learn something can be immediately met by a
preceding desire to share knowledge. As such, YouTube has become a primary outlet for what
can be called everyday expertise.
This chapter presents of a number of use scenarios as examples for readers to think about.
These scenarios are grounded partly in interviews with young adults as well as in more
anecdotal empirical experiences drawn from the authors everyday lives. What the scenarios
have in common is that YouTube always was discussed as an arena for the sharing of everyday
expertise. The chapter begins by presenting a brief genealogy of the instructional video. The
chapter then argues for a developed analysis of the instructional video on YouTube that is not
restricted to efficiency. The instructional video then is discussed in terms of YouTube as an all-
purpose archive of everyday expertise; YouTube as a non-neutral platform; and the political
economy of expertise on YouTube. Drawing on contemporary media theory, the chapter
concludes that instructional videos might work as both a risk and an opportunity.
BACKGROUND: FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS AND

WALKTHROUGHS
The sharing of everyday expertise through various media is not, of course, something that
emerged with the advent of YouTube. The history of everyday expertise sharing can be traced
through many genres and spanning far back in history. This chapter, however, focuses on two
significant and fairly recent instancesfrequently asked questions (FAQ) and the
walkthrough.
The FAQ (frequently asked questions) forms a genre of everyday instruction widely
adopted across forums, e-mail lists, and Web communities in the early days of the Internet. Put
simply, an FAQ is a file or Web page that compiles common questions (and the answers)
relating to a particular topic or activity. In practice, it often has been used as a way to separate
those new to a particular forum (newbies or n00bs) from the users who are more
experienced with the culture of that same forum. Newbies often are referred to the FAQ as an
initial starting point upon joining a forum or when posting a novice question. As such, the FAQ
became part of an emerging netiquettea continuously developing set of rules that facilitate
social interaction in online contexts. Although certain netiquette rules can be applied more
widely across digital cultures (e.g., avoiding typing in all caps) there also are rules specific to
certain communities and genres.
The FAQ (and netiquette in general) primarily is a way to explicate rules that have
emerged over time with the underpinning reason being to save individual, social, and technical
resources. As such, an FAQ also became a way to effectively share everyday expertise and
skills. Another interesting method for sharing everyday expertise relates more specifically to
gamingthe walkthrough.
Today, for popular games, official strategy guides published in print by game producers
themselves are quite common, and presumably also are a viable source of income. Before
official strategy guides were produced, however, there emerged a genre of user-generated
guides, termed walkthroughs. Walkthroughs are similar to strategy guides in that they provide
instructions for most efficiently playing a particular gamewith the distinction being that
they often are user generated, in text form, and published online.
Once inside, run around a bit to encounter enemy troops, and make use of this
opportunity to heal your characters as well as to stock up on curative items and spells.
Take note of the Blind Draw Point to the left. Once youre ready, step onto the
elevator and take it to the top (1st option).
<!> Tip: Be sure to have saved [your game] first, and ensure that one of your party
members has the Draw command; youll need to draw a G.F. [Guardian Force] in
an upcoming battle.
The scene switches to Wedge (the blue guy) and Biggs (the guy in red). Biggs is
trying to repair the satellite when Wedge comments about [a monster in the vicinity].
The former pays no attention, much to the chagrin of Wedge, who decides to look
around first.
Before long, Squall arrives, and in the commotion, Biggs starts the satellite up. He
is elated, but not after the party engages him in battle.
(http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps/197343-final-fantasy-viii/faqs/4718)
SUB-BOSSES:
Biggs HP: 610 Weak: Poison; Draw List: Fire, Thunder, Blizzard, Esuna
Wedge HP: 608 Weak: Poison; Draw List: Fire, Thunder, Blizzard, Cure
Total AP: 81
As shown, a walkthrough basically is a step-by-step guide to exploring as many aspects of

a game as is possible. Taking the FAQ and the walkthrough as two example genres of how
sharing of everyday expertise has been performed previously (and continues to be), it could be
argued that today the FAQ has expanded from a specific online context to a more general
situation called, life hacking. Life hacking refers to the general application of smart solutions
to everyday problems. Having begun as a term specific to computer programmers, the life
hacking now refers to any trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method that increases productivity
and efficiency, in all walks of life.2 This can in itself be seen as a sign of how digital
information is now effectively interlaced with everyday situations of every kind.
The walkthrough, in turn, also has developed through the use of screen-recording software
such as Fraps (derived from frames per second), which is a benchmarking, screen capture,
and screen-recording utility for Windowsto the video walkthrough, through which the
audience can visually follow gameplay. Looking at these developments in parallel, they
illustrate how the sharing of everyday expertise today has very much become a use of
instructional videos. As mentioned, such instructional videosreusing elements from both
FAQs and walkthroughsnow pertain to virtually all aspects of life, from kayaking techniques
to cutting a pomegranate properly to applying for Canadian citizenship.
ANALYZING THE INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEO ON YOUTUBE

It can be argued that YouTube is a source of everyday expertise simply by referring to its
popularity. Combined, users of YouTube watch approximately 4 billion hours of video each
month.3 As YouTube becomes more popular, so do user-generated instructional videos.4 One
underpinning reason for this growth seems to be the perceived lack of efficiency in text-based
manuals in delivering instruction.5 In a recent study of usability and perceived usefulness of
instruction videos on YouTube,6 the authors conclude that users regard instructional videos as
helpful if they are relevant, timely, and sufficient for the users needs. Likewise, to assess the
effectiveness of instructional videos, Morain and Swarts7 provide an analytical model
consisting of nine points of analysis relating to physical, cognitive, and affective design.
Table 1 Assessment Model for Instructional Videos

Design Objective Goal
Physical Accessibility Focus on areas relevant to instruction
Viewability High production quality
Timing Appropriate pacing of instruction
Cognitive Accuracy Error-free
Completeness Well-structured and detailed enough
Pertinence Content is relevant for instructional goal
Affective Confidence Establish trust
Self-Efficacy Persuade viewers they can complete task on their own
Engagement Spur interest and motivation
Source: M. Morain and J. Swarts (2012). YouTutorial: A Framework for Assessing Instructional Online Video. Technical
Communication Quarterly 21 (1), 624.
Although this model and similar efforts used to assess effectiveness of learning certainly
are practical and helpful, they also focus exclusively on the efficiency of instruction. This
chapter instead acknowledges that efficiency (and its underlying definition of expertise) can be
seen as a wider concept built on a more complexand politicalinterplay between humans
and technologies.
YOUTUBE AS AN FAQ FOR LIFE

As this chapter argues, YouTube has become the primary go-to source when desiring to
learn (about) new things. Drawing upon interviews with YouTube users, the researchers
identified that the important difference from the FAQ genreas it was instantiated in early
Internet cultureis that it now emerges from an everyday situation, which is mobile in space
and time and can be pertaining to virtually any activity.
It is Friday night and Ben and his partner are having friends over for dinner. Ben is
preparing a sauce and consults YouTube for the proper way to cook it.
Aini bought a race bike last summer. When preparing for the upcoming season, she
notices that the bikes gears act a bit quirky. Fortunately, YouTube provides a range of
videos for how to fine-tune the specific brand of gears her bike uses.
Bingwen saw a documentary on beekeeping and searches YouTube to find out more.
Bingwen is presented with approximately 94,000 results on various aspects of
beekeeping and, after some viewing, decides to pursue this interest. While working at
the hives in the subsequent months, Bingwen frequently returns to YouTube for topical
tips.
Having never tiled a shower wall, but looking to save some money (and learn a thing or
two), Naeva looks on YouTube and quickly finds many tips on the specific procedure.
Drawing from these scenarios (and the scenarios introduced in the beginning of this
chapter), it seems that instructional videos on YouTube effectively blur the boundaries between
formerly separated notions. This chapter focuses on two dimensions for which the immediate
access to instructional videos makes strict separations more difficultnamely between digital
and material realities, and between formal and informal learning.
First, instructional videos on YouTube are a clear example of how digital and material
realities are woven together. The idea that the virtual, digital, and material represent separated
worlds is increasingly being challenged through ubiquitous computational devices.8 Andy
Clark, for example, states that learning can no longer be separated from the tools we use (if it
ever could)going so far as to say that, even at societal level, we have adopted what can be
called post-digital values. Clark states, As we move towards an era of wearable computing
and ubiquitous information access, the robust, reliable information fields to which our brains
delicately adapt their routines will become increasingly dense and powerful, further blurring
the distinction between the cognitive agent and her best tools, props, and artifacts.9
The term post-digital does not mean something that will succeed or replace the digital.
Rather, post-digital refers to the gradual acceptance of ubiquitous technologies that now are
completely embedded in almost all everyday situations. This process of normalization and
pervasiveness of the digital has been going on for decades, but it is only now that we can see
how certain parts of cultures are accomplishing the full potential of this transformation. As
such, the post-digital is also a phase where the lingering newness of digital media begins to
evaporate. The disruptive qualities of digitization become mundane and other paradigms take
their places as objects of futuristic desires. Another important aspect of the post-digital is that
it acknowledges that information always comes with a physical counterpart. For long, the
digital was conceptually closer to the virtual rather than to the material. Digitization was seen
as a process where something was de-materialized and made into intangible information.
Screens, wires, and chips, however, all are material necessities that are anything but ethereal
when our information needs increase.
Returning to the instructional video, it includesin production and consumptionboth
material handling as well as discursive (written or verbal) instruction. When producing an
instructional video, material handling must be performed to be captured by video. At the same
time, the material procedure is many times accompanied by a verbal instruction, making it an
interesting multimodal combination of materiality and discourse. Similarly, in consumption
contexts, the viewer often is engaged in the physical activity while consulting the video,
making it an interesting form of consumption where instruction becomes highly situated and
mobileinstruction can be delivered and consumed at any place and at any time. This
interweaving of the material and the digital also works to challenge the distinctions between
formal learning, informal learning, and nonformal learning; the production and consumption of
instructional videos contain elements of all three types.
Formal learning typically is described as being a systematic and intentional delivery of
learning conducted within the framework of an institution of some type (e.g., school, academy,
college, institute) by trained teachers and instructors. Formal learning is thereby structured
according to, for example, learning objectives, specific scheduling, and various measurements
of learning outcomes.
Formalization as the constitutive variable of the continuum manifests itself in a variety

of ways. As mentioned, the number of possibilities of a learning process for its
enactment is its defining characteristic. The manifestations of formalization are, among
others, reduction of complexity, linearization, trivialization, standardization, and in
special cases abstraction and quantification/mathematization.10
Informal learning commonly is described as the learning that is a part of everyday

activities related to work, family, or recreation. These activities often are learner-initiated, but
nonintentional improvements of skills and knowledge ensue. As such, these usually take place
in more or less organized forms outside of the formal education systems. Nonformal learning
can be said to be located in between formal and informal learning,11 meaning that it is not as
structured as typical formal learning (in terms of regulated curricula, syllabi, accreditations, or
certifications), but also is more coordinated (as a learning context) than informal learning.
Nonformal learning can include, for example, sports activities, organized hobbies, workshops,
and study circles provided by voluntary or commercial adult educational associations and non-
governmental organizations (NGOs).
So, how do instructional videos on YouTube fit into this classification? As mentioned they
touch upon aspects of all three types. For example, there are certainly formal aspects, in the
shape of segmenting and linearization of content. There are also informal aspects, where much
of it is user generated and intended to be consumed in situations where the use of an
instructional video may only be a small part of a larger endeavor (which is clearly outside any
formal educational institution). Likewise, it has nonformal aspects to it, as emerging cultural
norms and networks, adding a clear element of organization to their, otherwise informal,
utilization. The question is, could we go as far as to say that YouTube is a new institution for
learning? According to the depth and width of instructional videos available, as well as the
many situations where viewers call upon instruction from these, it is clearly emerging as a new
learning practice. But, as people continue to learn all kinds of skills and understandings from
YouTube videos, the more pressing question becomes what kind of platform is YouTube and
how does its design implicate the delivery of instruction videos?
THE NON-NEUTRALITY OF YOUTUBE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF

CRITICAL AMBIVALENCE
When it comes to the Internet, public debate unfortunately seems to end up in entrenched
positions where extreme drawbacks are put up against extreme benefits. In this polemic debate
some argue that the Internet creates a form of pedagogical anarchy where traditional processes
such as selection, authority, truth, and consensus are refuted. Others claim that the very same
Internet supports tremendous possibilities for pedagogical self-actualization, collaborative
learning, and democratization of education. The tension between these positions is interesting,
but instead of taking a definitive stance this chapter argues that researchers should examine
how various groups in fact reason about quality, selection, authority, and truth online in order
to develop a critical ambivalence toward the media used by these groups.
Researchers must ask themselves (or the groups they want to study) about what criteria for
quality guide choices online. Are users really experiencing a lack of authority in this context?
What is users view of truth online? What is self-realization to them? A developed
understanding of such questions will make us better equipped to understand the digital world.
At the same time, we must remain critical toward the preconditions under which everyday
expertise is shared.
YouTube is not a neutral technology. It is by and large a commercial platform, which
thereby also becomes a channel for advertisements and targeted commercials. Continuing this
argument, we can also question the ways in which social activities are exploited in a type of
voluntary production of commercials (many of the activities are concerned with the
consumption of products). The learning conveyed through instructional videos many times has
clear commercial aspects to it. In practically all the scenarios discussed in this chapter (and
grounded in empirical data) there are commercial products lingering in the background. There
is research that suggests that K-pop, for example, as a profit-making industry, is made possible
through the sharing of user-generated material in social media.12 Although learning to speak
and read Korean is not a commercial endeavor per se, taken together with the traceable
consumption and sharing of K-pop videos, further targeting and segmenting of users is made
possible. In the gaming example discussed in this chapter, learning is built on the fact that a
viewer or reader must have a copy of the game, and details subsequently are shared with
friends, acquaintances, and others in a form of advertisement for the game itself. Race bikes,
shower walls, and beekeeping all revolve around Western middle-class hobbies that are as
much a question of everyday expertise as everyday consumption.
Of course, there are cases where everyday expertise is shared to subvert or to show up
DIY (do-it-yourself) alternatives to market mechanisms; but, as always, there are ambivalent
outcomes. Arguably, one risk is that the border between genres such as the instructional video
and the commercial becomes blurred. Drawing on research that emphasizes the
commodification of social relations, production and consumption of instructional videos could
be seen as a form of voluntary labor.13 These double-edged consequences of our increasingly
media-saturated society are typical. Public debates, however, too often are entrenched in
polemics. The most interesting issue is not whether these activities in fact are free labor, but
that there always is a tension between creative outlets online and the exploitation of the very
same. Our everyday media ecology lacks alternatives that take personal integrity, anonymity,
and net neutrality seriously (and not only as marketing terms for half-baked substitutes). As
such, we need to develop a critical ambivalence for the media that saturate our routine day.
Scholars of communication technology need to begin attending critically to questions of

ownership, a topic we have generally avoided. While once we socialized online
through public sites such as newsgroups, increasingly people are conducting their
online social activities within proprietary systems such as social networking sites,
virtual worlds, and massively multiplayer games in which the users have few rights and
limited, if any, ownership of their contributions.14
YouTube is a sociotechnical platform that carries certain affordances (i.e., revealing

certain agency, and at the same time obscuring other); therefore we must take an increasingly
political view of how instructional videos are being prosumed (a term that is the fusion of
producer and consumerand means that consumers, through digital media, increasingly
act as producers of various culturally circulated media objects) and appropriated.
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF EXPERTISE AND PEER-LEARNING

[T]echnologies are empathetically marked by their histories, which is to say that a series
of processes carryin bodies and in code, in hardware and in software, in machine archives
and in social memoryvarious kinds of legacies and are conditioned by them. 15
The political economy of expertise on YouTube contains both social and technical
elements. On the social end, it is interesting to note how the range of available expertise on
YouTube spans from someone who knows just a little bit more than me to the leading
authority in the world. Such a hierarchy not only is a result of the representation that YouTube
displays (though this certainly plays a role), but many times also is imported from various
other media sources. That is, YouTube is not an isolated arena removed from other social
arenas, but co-performs expertise in an intricate mesh of humans, policies, and technologies.
For example, Kruse and Veblen researching instructional videos pertaining to folk music
teaching, found that the instructors of this subgenre tended to be white middle-aged males.16
Although there is a lack of research on other areas of instruction, it seems likely that there also
would be specific sociocultural biases present in performing expertise in other topics. At the
same time, YouTube can be used to present alternative perspectives and give voice to
marginalized groups.17, 18 Again, this illustrates how a critical ambivalence toward digital
culture is necessary to shed light upon all of its aspects.
On a larger scale, and as has been hinted at previously, instructional videos on YouTube
are dependent on a specific technical infrastructurea technical infrastructure that is not
distributed equally across the globe. In the ITU report on ICT facts and figures it states that in
developed countries, mobile-broadband penetration will reach 84 percent, a level four times
as high as in developing countries (21 percent).19 This raises the question of how and where
instructional videos find their users.
It also is important to remember that those who access YouTube regularly receive a
designed form of decision support. It enhances decision making by making certain options
more explicit, but it also obscures other choices (or even makes them for users). For a person
who uses YouTube as a source of everyday expertise the results are already sortedbut the
sorting mechanism is at the same time hidden from the user. It thereby could be argued that the
political economy of choices is displaced from the actual context to a premade matrix in which
potential options become presented facts and results. YouTube presents a seemingly diverse
range of options, but they are at the same time shaped by computational operations, which in
turn are designed with certain intentions.
CONCLUSION
Having demonstrated and discussed the emergence of the instructional video, the question
now becomes how we should understand and interpret this phenomenon as a cultural
expression. At a surface level, the idea of accessible and democratized learning in the shape of
technology-mediated sharing of everyday expertise is tantalizing. A more critical analysis,
however, could nuance the often self-explanatory and taken-for-granted notions of learning,
expertise, and (neutral) technology. Technologies always will retain a certain degree of
opacity, and their operations will carry both foreseen and unforeseen consequences.20 It is
within these conditions that we must develop a critical ambivalence toward media
technologiesconcurrently as stabs in the back as well as great gifts.21 Thus, thinking
politics with technology becomes part of the process of the reinvention of the political in our
technicized globalized world.22
On a final note, YouTube is just one platform to which the arguments put forth here are
applicable. An increasing part of our everyday media are today digital, computational, or
coded assemblages.23 In fact, it could be argued that they can be reduced to codecode that
is increasingly superimposed on more and more things (i.e., a combination of informational
and physical spaces). As such, our interaction with media is changing shape. Instructional
videos emphasize how consumption and productionand thereby learningincreasingly are a
question of produsage,24 where people, fairly effortlessly, can combine informational
elements from various sources to form a new object. These sources can be other prodused
objects, but also the outputs of traditional media houses as well as established and emerging
tech companies (most notably Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook). As such, studies of
digital culture should focus more directly on how media technologies in themselves are
capable of shaping information, skills, and knowledge. This requires a variety of frameworks
that take informational, political, and material aspects into consideration so that we can pursue
to develop the critical ambivalence that is necessary for dealing with the incongruity of
contemporary digital culture.
NOTES
1. Caroline Bassett, Feminism, Expertise and the Computational Turn, in Renewing Feminisms: Radical Narratives,
Fantasies and Futures in Media Studies, edited by Helen Thornham and Elke Weissmann (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 199
214.
2. Cephiroth, An Unofficial Final Fantasy VIII Walkthrough, http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps/197343-final-fantasy-
viii/faqs/4897, accessed May 31, 2015.
3. Wikipedia, Life Hacking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_hacking, accessed May 25, 2015.
4. Alias Norlidah, Siti Hajar Abd Razak, Ghada elHadad, Nurul Rabihah Mat Noh Kokila Kunjambu, and Parimaladevi
Muniandy, A Content Analysis in the Studies of Youtube in Selected Journals, ProcediaSocial and Behavioral Sciences
103, no. 26 (2013): 1018.
5. J. Swarts, New Modes of Help: Best Practices for Instructional Video, Technical Communication 59, no. 3 (2012):
195206.
6. E. Eiriksdottir and R. Catrambone, Procedural Instructions, Principles, and Examples: How to Structure Instructions for
Procedural Tasks to Enhance Performance, Learning and Transfer, Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors
and Ergonomics Society 53, no. 6 (2011): 74970.
7. D. Y. Lee and M. R. Lehto, User Acceptance of Youtube for Procedural Learning: An Extension of the Technology
Acceptance Model, Computers & Education 61 (2013): 193208.
8. M. Morain and J. Swarts, Yoututorial: A Framework for Assessing Instructional Online Video, Technical
Communication Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2012): 624.
9. Sue Thomas, The End of Cyberspace and Other Surprises, Convergence 12, no. 4 (2006): 38391.
10. Andy Clark, Re-Inventing Ourselves. The Plasticy of Embodiment, Sensing, and Mind, The Journal of Medicine and
Philosophy 32, no. 3 (2007): 26389.
11. Reinhard Zrcher, A Sociomaterial Model of the Teaching-Learning Continuum, European Journal for Research on
the Education and Learning of Adults 6, no. 1 (2015): 7390.
12. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Recognition of Non-Formal and Informal
Learning, http://www.oecd.org/education/skills-beyond-school/recognitionofnon-formalandinformallearning-home.htm, accessed
May 31, 2015.
13. Sun Jung, K-Pop, Indonesian Fandom, and Social Media, Transformative Works and Cultures 8 (2011).
14. Tiziana Terranova, Free Labor, in Digital Labor: Internet as Playground and Factory, edited by Trebor Scholz
(New York: Routledge), 2013.
15. Nancy K. Baym, A Call for Grounding in the Face of Blurred Boundaries, Journal of Computer-Mediated
16. Nathan Kruse and Kari K. Veblen, Music Teaching and Learning Online: Considering Youtube Instructional Videos,
Journal of Music, Technology & Education 5, no. 1 (2012): 7787.
17. Gooyong Kim, Online Videos, Everyday Pedagogy, and Female Political Agency: Learning from Youtube Revisited,
Global Media Journal 11, no. 18 (2011).
18. Kathy Nakagawa and Angela E. Arzubiaga, The Use of Social Media in Teaching Race, Adult Learning 25, no. 3
(2014): 10310.
19. International Telecommunication Union, The World in 2014: ICT Facts and Figures (Geneva: United Nations, 2014).
20. Don Ihde, The Designer Fallacy and Technological Imagination, Chapter 4 in Philosophy and Design (Netherlands:
Springer, 2008), 5159.
21. Jrgen Skgeby, The Performative Gift: A Feminist Materialist Conceptual Model, Communication +1 2, no. 1
(2013).
22. Federica Frabetti, Software Theory: A Cultural and Philosophical Study (London: Rowman & Littlefield 2015).
23. Rob Kitchin and Matthew Dodge, Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
24. Axel Bruns, Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production, Paper presented at the Cultural Attitudes
towards Communication and Technology, Tartu, Estonia (2006).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alias, Norlidah, Siti Hajar Abd Razak, Ghada elHadad, Nurul Rabihah Mat Noh Kokila Kunjambu, and Parimaladevi Muniandy.
A Content Analysis in the Studies of YouTube in Selected Journals. ProcediaSocial and Behavioral Sciences 103, no.
26 (2013): 1018.
Bassett, Caroline. Feminism, Expertise and the Computational Turn. In Renewing Feminisms: Radical Narratives,
Fantasies and Futures in Media Studies. Edited by Helen Thornham and Elke Weissmann, 199214. London: I. B. Tauris,
2013.
Baym, Nancy K. A Call for Grounding in the Face of Blurred Boundaries. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
14 (3) (2009): 72023.
Bruns, Axel (2006). Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production. In Fay Sudweeks, Herbert Hrachovec,
& Charles Ess (eds.), Cultural Attitudes Towards Communication and Technology 2006, 28 June 1 July, Tartu,
Estonia.
Cephiroth. An Unofficial Final Fantasy VIII Walkthrough. http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps/197343-final-fantasy-viii/faqs/4897.
Accessed May 31, 2015.
Clark, Andy. Re-Inventing Ourselves. The Plasticy of Embodiment, Sensing, and Mind. The Journal of Medicine and
Philosophy 32, no. 3 (2007): 26389.
Eiriksdottir, E., and R. Catrambone. Procedural Instructions, Principles, and Examples: How to Structure Instructions for
Procedural Tasks to Enhance Performance, Learning and Transfer. Human Factors: The Journal of the Human
Factors and Ergonomics Society 53, no. 6 (2011): 74970.
Frabetti, Federica. Software Theory: A Cultural and Philosophical Study (Media Philosophy Series). London: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2015.
Ihde, Don. The Designer Fallacy and Technological Imagination. In Philosophy and Design, Peter Kroes, Pieter E.
Vermaas, Andrew Light, Steven A. Moore, Chapter 4, 5159. Springer Netherlands, 2008.
International Telecommunication Union. The World in 2014: ICT Facts and Figures. Geneva: United Nations, 2014.
Jung, Sun. K-Pop, Indonesian Fandom, and Social Media. Transformative Works and Cultures 8 (2011).
Kim, Gooyong. Online Videos, Everyday Pedagogy, and Female Political Agency: Learning from Youtube Revisited. Global
Media Journal 11, no. 18 (2011).
Kitchin, Rob, and Matthew Dodge. Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.
Kruse, Nathan, and Kari K. Veblen. Music Teaching and Learning Online: Considering Youtube Instructional Videos. Journal
of Music, Technology & Education 5, no. 1 (2012): 7787.
Lee, D. Y., and M. R. Lehto. User Acceptance of Youtube for Procedural Learning: An Extension of the Technology
Acceptance Model. Computers & Education 61 (2013): 193208.
Morain, M., and J. Swarts. Yoututorial: A Framework for Assessing Instructional Online Video. Technical Communication
Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2012): 624.
Nakagawa, Kathy, and Angela E. Arzubiaga. The Use of Social Media in Teaching Race. Adult Learning 25, no. 3 (2014):
10310.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Recognition of Non-Formal and Informal Learning.
http://www.oecd.org/education/skills-beyond-school/recognitionofnon-formalandinformallearning-home.htm. Accessed May
31, 2015.
Skgeby, Jrgen. The Performative Gift: A Feminist Materialist Conceptual Model. Communication +1 2, no. 1 (2013).
Swarts, J. New Modes of Help: Best Practices for Instructional Video. Technical Communication 59, no. 3 (2012): 195206.
Terranova, Tiziana. Free Labor. In Digital Labor: Internet as Playground and Factory. Edited by Trebor Scholz. New
York: Routledge, 2013.
Thomas, Sue. The End of Cyberspace and Other Surprises. Convergence 12, no. 4 (2006): 38391.
Wikipedia. Life Hacking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_hacking. Accessed May 25, 2015.
Zrcher, Reinhard. A Sociomaterial Model of the Teaching-Learning Continuum. European Journal for Research on the
Education and Learning of Adults 6, no. 1 (2015): 7390.
6
Online Education, Massive Open Online

Courses, and the Accessibility of Higher
Education
Kristen Chorba and R. Benjamin Hollis
INTRODUCTION
Take a minute right now to think about your access to this book. Youre reading this text
either in print or onlinewhich means that you either had access to purchase this book from a
bookstore (brick and mortar or online) or borrow it from a person or a library or a school. If
you are reading it online, you have access to a computer, tablet, or phone; the Internet; and a
database or some other type of search engine that enables you to access this information. You
also have the knowledge and skills to use these tools in a way that will accomplish this goal. If
you are able to read and understand this text, then you have access to a version of this book that
is in a language that you can read, as well as to the resources that have enabled you to learn
how to interpret this language into words and phrases that makes sense.
What type of information do you have access to? Why or how do you have that access?
What is access? Or, even, what is information? These all are questions that are vitally
important to educationfrom very informal learning about topics such as basic home repairs,
to an Ivy League college education. Such issues, however, seldom are considered in the course
of daily life. This chapter discusses how online educationin numerous formshas
transformed the ways in which we access and use information, as well as how it has
transformed those who are able to access and use information.
Technology is everywhere. We see it in our cars, in our homes, at work, and in our
entertainment. Arguably, one of the most exciting places that we can see the impact of
technology is in education. Our classrooms, our schools, our homes, and our communities have
numerous resources and tools that provide us with access to information of all kinds. We can
learn anything we choose! Or, at least, almost anything we want if we have the skills, the
knowledge, and a way to access technology that lets us do so.
Distance education has been around for a long time. In fact, [d]istance education in
various formswritten correspondence, radio, television, computer, Internethas existed for
well over a century in this country.1 Online education in all of its current forms, however, has
opened the doors for many people to access information and knowledge that just a couple of
decades ago was not possible obtain. An almost infinite number of resources, fueled by the
power of the Internet, now can be used as learning tools. Platforms such as YouTube host
videos that range from very short to very long; amateur to professionally filmed and edited; and
from basic how-to guides on various topics (crocheting, fixing a garbage disposal, using
word-processing software) to elaborate educational presentations and lectures that feature
experts in various fields (e.g., psychology, astronomy, anatomy, physiology). Videos on
YouTube are free to access: All that is needed is a computer or smart device and an Internet
connection. Companies such as Coursera provide actual classessimilar to those taught at a
universityfree of charge and delivered fully online. These classes can be accessed at any
time, from any place that has offers Internet connection. Colleges and universities more and
more commonly are offering fully online courses. Although these are not free services, the
ability to participate in these courses completely online enables individuals who normally
might not be able to take a face-to-face course (for a variety of reasons) to now do so.
Online education, in all its forms, has provided a level of access to information that is
more attainable now than ever before. In the following pages, we will take an in-depth look at
some of the ways that people are using technology to learn and explore some of the benefits of
this type of accessible education.
SO WHAT IS EDUCATION AND WHERE CAN I GET SOME?

What does accessibility really mean in terms of education? According to the United
Nations, education is a right, like the right to have proper food or a roof over your head.2
This right extends to all people, of all ages, from all societies, with all ability levels, from
around the globe. It includes those seeking specialized training as well as those seeking basic
education on a specific topic. This is the foundation of the U.N. Education for All program.
Education, then, is broadly defined and can range from more traditional, formalized learning,
housed inside of academic institutions, to self-paced, informal, task- or skill-based training.
Although education for all is a goal to strive for, it does not mean that this is currently the
situation; there is, for some, a digital divide.
The term digital divide refers to inequities between those who have regular, reliable
access to the Internet and digital technologies and those who do not.3 There has been
substantial research asserting that a digital divide indeed does persist, even though steps have
been taken to help alleviate barriers to access. Libraries are one example of organizations that
seek to bridge this gap. Libraries do so by providing free access to computers for education,
job searching, and creating and maintaining social connections.4 According to a report by the
U.S. Department of Commerce, however, although more households used broadband Internet
services (68 percent in 2011), the
demographic and geographic disparities demonstrate a persistent digital divide among

certain groups. [L]ower income families, people with less education, those with
disabilities, Blacks, Hispanics, and rural residents generally lagged the national
average in both broadband adoption and computer use [which] stands in sharp contrast
to the digital access enjoyed by well-educated middle- and upper-class White
households.5
These types of statistics are not new, nor are they surprising: access often requires money
or the ability to find someone who can provide you with free equipment and Internet
connection and always requires at least some base level of understanding. These issues,
however, although important, are beyond the scope of this chapter and have been written about
and debated extensively.6 Instead, this chapter explores the current situation of online
education for what it has to offer, examines how various organizations are working to increase
access and online educational opportunities, and discusses some of the tools that are available
to help create successful online learning experiences.
In summary, the good news is that there are many positive things happening. Education of
all types is becoming more accessible, even if it presently is not always and completely such.
Individuals are finding more and more ways to access information. In fact, in 2014, research
by the Pew Center found that the vast majority of Americans believe their use of the web
helps them learn new things, stay better informed on topics that matter to them, and increases
their capacity to share ideas and creations with others.7 And access itself is becoming easier.
The widespread use and availability of the Internet, a variety of ways to connect, and
organizations dedicated to helping bridge the gap between what people know about technology
and what they need to know about technology to be successful, is making education more
accessible than ever.
WHOS ONLINE, ANYWAY?

So, how many people, broadly speaking, have access to some form of online education?
And who are these people? Although this chapter does not specifically address all areas or all
populations, the following statistics from the Pew Research Center provide a broad idea of
how much access people have and what type of access is available to various populations.
First, its important to talk about some general statistics. These are based on adults (i.e.,
age 18 or older) in the United States. These numbers are also in aggregate and address overall
population trends: due to space limitations and the focus of this chapter, we do not specifically
break down populations further by ethnicity, sex, income, education, household size, or other
demographic factors, with the exception of general age ranges. Much of that information,
however, can be found using the sources we have cited here.
Generally speaking, according to data about adult users in the United States, collected and
published in 2014:
87 percent use the Internet8;

68 percent use smartphones and/or tablets to get online9;
58 percent use a smartphone10; and
42 percent own a tablet.11
According to 2013 statistics, the following groups have either high-speed Internet (e.g.,
broadband) or a smartphone at home:
95 percent of adults aged 18 to 29;

89 percent of adults aged 30 to 49;
77 percent of adults aged 50 to 64; and
46 percent of adults aged 65 and older.12
The use of cell phones and smartphones has become far more prominent in the past several
years. Cell phones are basic mobile phones, which might or might not have a full QWERTY
keyboard (similar to a typical computer keyboard), and can make calls; send and receive text
messages; and take, send, and receive pictures.13 Smartphones are cell phones that have built-
in applications and Internet access, such as an iPhone or an Android.14 According to data
collected and published in 2014:
90 percent of adults own cell phones, up from 53 percent in 2000; and

58 percent of adults own smartphones, as compared to only 35 percent in 2011.15
The most recent data available (May 2013) state that 34% of cell Internet users go online
mostly using their phones, and not using some other device, such as a desktop or laptop
computer.16 The Pew Center also notes that smartphones help to increase online accesseven
if it is not always full access to all Web sites and all browser functionsby offering a way to
connect from home without having to own a computer or pay for a subscription to an Internet
service.17 Additionally, the Pew Center points out that, among certain groups, cell phone and
smartphone access to the Internet lessens the gap in online access for many populations.
According to Pew Centers statistics, while blacks [sic] and Latinos are less likely to have
access to home broadband than Whites, their use of smartphones nearly eliminates the
difference.18 That said, the opposite is true of older adult populations: The gap in access
actually widens when Internet access is considered as both broadband connection and
smartphone access.19
To be sure, many people access the Internet from home or via their smartphones. Although
phones do not always provide full access to all sites or all applications on the Web (they have
smaller screens and can be more difficult to fully access or operate certain sites) the way that a
computer does, for some users phones can be a cheaper more accessible way to get online.
Specifically, considerations about cost of one technology versus the other include the cost of
the computer itself; the cost of Internet access (often a monthly subscription); the cost of the
phone and service (often a monthly fee); and the cost of a home or landline, which might not be
necessary for those with a cell phone or smartphone, but which often still is needed for a
computer to be used to access the Internet. Additionally, although landlines only can be used to
make standard voice calls, cell phones and smartphones can be used to send text messages as
well as to make regular calls, and often can be used to take and send pictures and videos. Cell
phones and smartphones are absolutely key access points, however, which can help people
find and use information and provide a way to access online education.
Teen Users
Teens (individuals who are between the ages of 12 and 17 years of age) also account for a
large proportion of those who access the Internet. This population is particularly important to
note, as they fall outside of the age range of studies that target adults (again, those people
older than age 18). According to 2013 statistics from the Pew Research Center:
93 percent of teens have at home access to a computer, whether it is their own or

shared (71 percent) with others in their home;
78 percent of teens have access to their own cellphone; 47 percent of those phones are
smartphones;
74 percent of teens use their cell or smartphones to go online; of the teens that use their
cell or smartphones to go online, about 25 percent use the phone for most of their
Internet access; and
23 percent of teens have a tablet.20
Older Adult Users

Older adults (that is, those aged 65 and older) also have become a group of Internet users.
Data from a 2014 study by the Pew Research Center found that 59 percent of seniors use the
Internet. Additionally, about 77 percent of seniors own a cell phone; however, only about 18
percent of these cell phones are smartphones. Finally, about 18 percent of this population owns
a tablet. The data also indicate that this older generation of adults falls into two categories,
each with differing attitudes toward and use of the Internet. Whereas younger seniors with
more education and wealth are associated with a positive attitude toward computing and
technology use, older seniors with health issues or disabilities are more likely to disconnect
from technologies altogether. Seniors older than age 75 demonstrate a steep decline in
technology and Internet adoption and use.21
THEN WHO IS NOT ONLINE?

A discussion about who is online is incomplete without briefly mentioning who is not
online. According to 2013 statistics gathered by the Pew Research Center, 15 percent of adults
are not online; additionally, 9 percent more do go online, but not from home.22 For these users,
the data indicate that:
19 percent do not use the Internet because of the cost;

7 percent do not use the Internet because they do not have access to it;
33 percent said that the Internet was too difficult for them to use, for a variety of
reasons (including age, fear of hackers and viruses, and physical abilities);
34 percent said that they were simply not interested in using the Internet (i.e., they did
not have time, were too busy, or thought it was a waste of time); and
Only 8 percent of those adults who stated they were offline expressed a desire to be
online; the other 92 percent reported that they did not care to access the Internet.23
Generally speaking, lots of people have access to the Internet and, as such, to online
education in its various forms. Whether people access it from home, work, the library, or
school; via a phone, tablet, or computer, users across a wide range of ages are interacting with
tools and resources online. The next section explores some of the ways in which this online
education is happening.
HOW WERE LEARNING ONLINE

Higher Education
Online education in colleges and universities (i.e., education after high school or after
grade 12) has grown significantly over the last several years. Online courses in this realm
typically are for credit, with a fee structure similar to that of traditional face-to-face classes,
and require admission to a program of study at the specific school.
According to the Allen and Seamans Babson Survey Research Group, 7.1 million higher
education students (33.5 percent of all higher education students) are taking at least one online
course.24 Some argue that the numbers associated with Babson Survey Research Groups
report are possibly inflated due to the reporting scope (e.g., only counting degree-granting
institutions)25 and difficulties collecting consistent enrollment data from universities (e.g. U.S.
Department of Education only started asking universities to report distance learning
enrollments in 2012, and possible inconsistencies reporting and quantifying online student
enrollment).26 The number of students taking online courses for college credit somewhere,
however, estimates from 5.5 million27 to the most recent estimate of 7.1 million28 students
taking at least one online course, thus the quantity of students turning to online learning in
higher education is significant.
As institutions consider ways to make learning more accessible, relevant, and far-reaching,
online course options have taken two main forms: fully online and hybrid. In addition, many
teaching traditional, face-to-face courses use some kind of online platformsuch as
Blackboard or Moodleto help supplement and organize their course. This sort of online
course supplementation can take the form of posting notes, outlines, slides, or syllabi online, or
allowing students to submit certain assignments online. Hybrid courses are more of a mix of
face-to-face and online components. Hybrid courses could meet face to face some or most of
the sessions, but also can meet online for some sessions, either synchronously or
asynchronously. Another application of a hybrid course is a flipped classroom29 approach,
in which lectures and other typically in-class, direct instruction approaches instead are
completed outside of the classroom, usually via an online platform. Class time then is reserved
for group work, collaboration, discussion, and deep thought about the content, guided by the
instructor. Lastly, fully online courses are just that, courses that are held only online, often
asynchronously. All course content, assignments, and activities, including lectures, quizzes and
tests, discussions, grading, and feedback, are accessed from and submitted to an online
learning management system. This fully online format allows students who otherwise might not
be able to attend that school (for example, due to full-time work requirements, location, or time
constraints; distance; or myriad other reasons), to have the opportunity to complete classes and
work toward degree completion.
Kindergarten through Twelfth Grade

Schools teaching kindergarten through twelfth grade (K12) across the United States are
also taking advantage of the Internet in various ways, to provide an online alternative to the
traditional classroom grade-school experience. Just like the colleges and universities
described above, grade schools are utilizing fully online, hybrid, and face-to-face classes plus
online resources models to help students achieve. Depending on the state and the program,
some of these are public and some are private. Some have tuition fees associated with them
and others do not. Some also provide books, access to instructors, and online chat sessions for
asking questions. Although it is not the authors goal to describe these or nationwide trends in
detail, they highlight a few initiatives that are happening within one specific area: Los Angeles
County (United States).30
Some high schools also are partnering with local colleges to help students gain access to
experiences and information that will help them in seriously considering or enrolling in
college. Through some programs, students can register for free at a partner higher education
institution and take classes online, if they cannot go to the school in person. Another way that
some teachers are helping their student access higher education is through a classroom
account to an online, college or college-level class (such as a specific college class that has
an agreement with a particular high school, or even a MOOC, which is discussed elsewhere in
this chapter). Although individual users typically must have a minimum grade point average to
sign up for such classes, high school teachers can sign up for an account and then use it in their
classes as a tool for learning. This also is a good strategy when there are not enough computers
or laptops available in a high school classroom, and students individually cannot be expected
to access the supplemental college course online.
Lastly, having these types of activities available to high school students allows them to
have actual experience, in varying forms, with a college-level class, as well as with the types
of technology they will encounter. This gives students the opportunity to see what a college
course is really made up of, including what it is like and how difficult it is. For high-
achieving students this can reassure them that college is a possibility. It also can serve as a
wake-up call, however, for those students who might not know other people who have attended
college, and can open these students eyes to the level of difficulty of college classes and
college-level work. In either case, this experience provides a way for students to contextualize
the reasons behind why teachers push them to work hard to be prepared for college.
High school teachers also are using online courses and resources as a way to support
students who need additional help with some aspect of their academic lives. Remediation is
one way in which the Internet is being used for this purpose. If a student has fallen behind, or is
struggling in a specific course or discipline, schools can use online learning to help the student
master that content before moving on. This is beneficial because it does not require a full
classroom or constant supervision; allows flexibility in scheduling, for the student and the
school; and enables users to access the content from places outside of the school.
Online education can also help to provide alternative routes to schooling for students
experiencing difficulties related to face-to-face education settings, including situations such as
bullying, Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), anxiety, and varying types and
degrees of disabilities. Large class sizes, for example, which can be necessary due to budget
restrictions, school closings, or the need for specialized courses that serve large populations of
students, can make some students feel anxious about having to interact within and adapt to that
setting. In such cases, online courses that students can take from the comfort and safety of their
own homes could create a more positive learning environment than a face-to-face environment
provides. These types of challenges are a reality for many students, and online education is one
way to help them deal with such challenges and alleviate some of the setbacks to having a
quality learning environment and experience.
Finally, online education gives schools a way to help large numbers of students without
having to find the physical space to hold students and accommodate class schedules. Using
online learning tools is one way to support students who need help meeting graduation
requirements and those who are interested in or need help with college preparation.
MASSIVE ONLINE OPEN COURSES

What Is a Massive Online Open Course?
A massive online open course or MOOC (mook) can take different forms (see xMOOCs
and cMOOCs, explained below), but at its core, a MOOC is an online course made available
to high student enrollments, scalable to serve tens of thousands of students in a single
offering.31 MOOC providers (e.g., edX, Coursera, Udacity) partner with the best universities
in the country and abroad (e.g., Princeton, MIT, Harvard, National Taiwan University, Peking
University) to deliver courses on topics ranging from biology to statistics to literature. MOOCs
typically are free and offer certificates of course completion; in some cases, a nominal fee is
required. MOOC completion certificates have a varying range of value. The American Council
on Education (ACE) approved five MOOCs for university credit; however, individual
institutions determine whether they will allow the transfer of MOOC completion credits for
university credits.32 Only a small handful of universities currently recognize MOOCs for
university credits. Duke and UC Irvineinstitutions with ACE-approved MOOCsdo not
allow those ACE-approved MOOCs for credit. Recently, Udacity, Georgia Tech, and AT&T
collaborated to offer an online masters degree in computer science on the Udacity-MOOC
platform with a total tuition of less than $7,000far less than the cost of competing online
degree programs.33
Massive online open courses typically are divided into two categories of construction and
philosophies: xMOOCs and cMOOCs. The xMOOCs closely resemble a traditional
instructional paradigm, one where a professor disseminates content in the form of readings and
recorded lectures and students demonstrate understanding by completing quizzes/tests and
participating in online discussion forums34; these xMOOCs are commonly associated with
university-partnered or for-profit platforms such as Coursera.35 The x in xMOOC stands for
eXtended and was intended to identify these MOOCs as extensions of core offering, just as
MITx is the MOOC extension of the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).36
The xMOOC instructors typically can be contacted by e-mail or during virtual office hours,
and their role is more traditional in the sense of being the subject-matter expert and tutor for
learners.37
The cMOOCs are driven by a connectivism theory of learning, hence the c for
connectivism, and the participants explore a topic with other co-learners;38 in a cMOOC
environment, each attendee act(s) as both a participant learning and expert.39 The cMOOC
facilitators provide an outline or framework of the course, and the learners make decisions on
which ideas and materials to pursue with the goal of developing a deeper understanding of the
subject matter collectively.40 Just as the role of learners changes, so does the role of the
instructor/facilitator. Instead of assuming the traditional role of instructor/tutor for learners, the
cMOOC facilitator shares information, challenges ideas, amplifies concepts, curates to arrange
helpful readings and resources, filters useful versus nonuseful, models behaviors, and
supervises course activities.41 Fundamentally, for learners the difference between xMOOCs
and cMOOCs is that in one, they will be part of a process (cMOOC); in the other they will be
part of a product (xMOOC).42 Rodriguez (2012) noted the conceptual differences in
openness, that xMOOCs are open in terms of public access and cMOOCs have an open
curriculum.43 Further research is needed to highlight the differences between xMOOCs and
cMOOCs in terms of popularity, completion rates, and student achievement across formats, as
most reports generalize MOOCs as a single identity.
Why Make a Massive Online Open Course?

Ferdig (2013) noted three important factors that led to the creation of MOOCs that speak
directly to the theme of this chapter. First, MOOCs began with an effort to make access to
content open to the public. Second, MOOCs operate alongside the movement of social media
and technological advances in creating and sharing information; a single point of expertise is
replaced by multiple sources of expertise. The third factor is the emergence of blended (online
and in-person) learning in K12 schools that can utilize these free education resources made
available to the public in multiple formats.44 Yan and Powell (2013) noted that MOOCs were
designed with the ideals of openness in education in mind, that knowledge should be shared
freely, and the desire to learn should be met without demographic, economic, and geographical
constraints.45 MOOC advocacy increases university philanthropy and marketing to students,
faculty, alumni, and donors; it also permits faculty to experiment with teaching and learning in
online environments with high student enrollments.46
MOOC enrollments typically consist of advanced high school students, college students,
faculty (for peer-based professional development), and hobbyists.47 Both Harvardx and MITx
provide access to data on the more than 1.5 million users in their combined 17 MOOC
offerings. Across both institutions, approximately 67 percent of all users have at least a
bachelors degree or greater: 33 percent have a bachelors degree; 23 percent have a masters
degree; and 5 percent have a doctoral degree.48 Due to the digital literacy skills needed to
register and navigate MOOCs,49 some argue that MOOCs are not uniformly equitable among
all potential participants.50
2012, the Year of the Massive Online Open Course

As the first wave of MOOCs and this radical concept of open access to university content
surfaced, most articles covering MOOCs or massive online open courses noted that 2012 was
the year of the MOOC.51 The movement to provide free online courses from prestigious
universities was a revolutionary change at higher education. Some people believed this
revolution would become a disruptive innovationone that changed the landscape of higher
education and pressured institutions to restructure the traditional online learning and tuition-
based frameworks to consider open access.52
2013, the Year of the AntiMassive Online Open Course

One year later, others deemed 2013 the year of the anti-MOOC.53 Criticisms of MOOCs
centered on the pedagogical challenges of delivering and assessing an authentic learning
experience among thousands of other students and low completion rates with only 2 percent to
10 percent of students typically completing a MOOC.54 Students drop MOOCs for a variety of
reasons, including lack of incentive; insufficient prior knowledge; unfocused discussion
forums; unclear assignments; difficultly with learning the materials and receiving instructor
support; lack of time due to other commitments and priorities; personal interests; wanting to
complete specific modules of interest versus an entire course55; and a feeling of isolation with
a lack of interactivity in the MOOC environment.56
Additionally, MOOC considerations at universities are modest with 53 percent of
institutions undecided about MOOCs, 33 percent with no plans for MOOC development, and 5
percent of universities currently delivering a MOOC. Although not expressly correlated, the
modest consideration for MOOC planning and development is likely linked to the lack of
perceived sustainability and long-term future of MOOCs by university administrators, with
only 23 percent viewing MOOCs as sustainable and 22 percent believing in the long-term
future of MOOCs. Both of these values declined from percentages in 2012. Greater enrollment
(more than 15,000 students) doctoral/research institutions with resources for development are
more likely to offer and plan MOOCs than are smaller institutions (those having fewer than
3,000 students) with a baccalaureate-degree focus. Leaders at institutions with existing online
programs noted that a primary objective for offering a MOOC was marketing to increase
institutional visibility; whereas universities without online programs planned to offer MOOCs
for student recruitment. Institutions were less motivated by other MOOC-related objectives,
such as reducing costs and generating income.57
IF LESS THAN 10 PERCENT COMPLETE A MOOC, AND

UNIVERSITIES ARENt SO SURE ABOUT DEVELOPING MOOCS,
THEN WHY BOTHER?
With 2013 being the year of the anti-MOOC and such low MOOC completion rates, why
then are MOOCs still in the conversation of online learning in the year 2015? In a summary of
MOOC literature, Hew and Cheung (2014) reported four categories motivating learners to
enroll in MOOCs.
Category OneFree, timely learning: To increase or refresh knowledge about a topic

at no cost or to learn something in a timely fashion that could help with work without
seeking course credit or completion;
Category TwoCuriosity: To experience a MOOC and engage in a learning
experience with thousands of other learners;
Category ThreePersonal Challenge: To see whether the student can complete a
course from a prestigious university; and
Category FourHobby: To earn as many certificates or badges as possible.58
Note that badges are achievements recognized in a digital badge-style format. The term
and concept are derived from the merit-badge achievement system commonly associated with
the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Learners earn badges for achievements in online courses and
often display them on Web sites or digital backpacks.59 In his article, MOOCsCompletion Is
Not Important, Matthew LeBar (2014) noted that a majority of students taking a MOOC
already held a college degree and were using the MOOC to bolster job-market readiness or
professional development; therefore, the ability to gain or supplement knowledge was not
dependent on completing a MOOC.60
Fredig (2013) noted the practical and conceptual values of MOOCs that also have little to
do with MOOC completion rates. From a practical standpoint, MOOCs can serve as
supplemental instruction for K12 schools, where students can get a start on college-level
coursework, potentially meet state graduation requirements for online learning experiences,
and explore content areas outside of the scope of school funding or faculty expertise. Given the
diversity of MOOC enrollments, learners can experience multiple perspectives from other
learners with similar or dissimilar perspectives61; motivated learners who are willing to
capitalize on this opportunity can begin to see the content in new ways.62 MOOCs also can be
used for continuing professional development and strengthening communities of practice.
Fredig (2013) also considered the conceptual benefits of MOOCs, such as furthering
advancements in connected learning; utilizing digital badge assessment for student engagement
and motivation; reusing, revising, remixing, and redistributing open content; promoting learner
artifact creation in an open-access environment, not limited to the standard instructor-student
viewership.63 As evidence of these practical and conceptual values in practice, Vivian Falkner
and Nickolas Falkner (2014) reported success at applying a MOOC to solve an instructional
need at a national scale. A MOOC was used to deploy new computing curriculum training to
in-service teachers across Australia.64 In this case, the scalability of the MOOC helped reach
uses across the nation to deliver a flexible learning framework with ad hoc interactions that
promoted a successful community of practice and professional development.
WHAT WILL THE FUTURE HOLD FOR MOOCS?

The year 2015 might not be the resurgent year of the MOOC. Due to the low adoption
and development rates, MOOCs might not be the disruptive innovation that pressures reform in
higher education costs and course delivery. Pro-MOOC arguments presented in this chapter,
however, urge us to look beyond the numbers of completion rates and pedagogical challenges
to at least move us beyond the years of the anti-MOOC and acknowledge that the anti-MOOC
is so 2013.65 In a recent interview, MOOC pioneer and innovator, George Siemens stated:
I think we are starting to see a maturing of our understanding of what MOOCs are.
The hype is finally starting to die. Were now starting to realize that MOOCs dont do
everything. But they do serve a particular need, and they are an important research
opportunity for universities to help transition their activities and offerings in those
spaces. Im hoping that we will start to talk more about digital and online learning
and blended learning, because I think thats what MOOCs really reflect. MOOC is still
a term that allows us to encapsulate a movement. Im reminded of what happened with
Web 2.0. In 2004 and 2005 we were inundated with Web 2.0 nonsense. Web 2.0 was
supposed to do everything, make our coffee, raise our kids, change society. We all
hated the term by the time it was done. MOOCs, I think, will do exactly the same thing.
Going forward, I hope we will be able to do away with the MOOC acronym. If you
overhype something, you eventually learn to hate it. The legacy of MOOCs in the higher
education system, I think, will be valuable. The acronym, though, not so much.66
Given the opportunities for supplemental instruction, professional development, and

communities of inquiry, MOOCs still stand to contribute value to K12 classrooms, higher
education, professional development, and hobbyists alike seeking to broaden existing
perspectives on content, others, and self.
INTERESTED IN EXPLORING A MOOC?
The following is a list of the top MOOC providers.
edX | edX.org
Harvard and MIT created the nonprofit platform, edX. Global university schools and
partners from UC Berkley to Seoul National University have authored 408 courses (including
44 high school courses), covering topics ranging from biology to literature. Students using edX
have earned more than 100,000 course certificates.
CourseraCoursera.org
Coursera is a for-profit platform but offers free student enrollments. It has a catalog of
nearly 2,000 courses, ranging from the arts to teacher professional development, and includes
specializations (sequences of courses) in various topics, including data mining and systems
biologyauthored by faculty representing universities located around the world.
UDACITYUdacity.com
Udacity is a for-profit platform that offers programming and technology courses and
currently features four nanodegree programs: Front-end web developer; full stack web
developer; data analyst; and iOS developer. The nanodegrees cost $200 per month and
typically take 6 to 12 months to complete.
NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS
Nonprofit organizations also are major players in the online education world. Some
organizations, such as the Fulfillment Fund, have a specific mission and work with high
schoolaged students to make higher education a reality for them. Organizations such as this
work hard to help students get the access and knowledge that they need. This includes things
such as using e-mail and obtaining access to or learning how to use a computer. These types of
taskswhich sometimes are basic computer and computing functionsoften are unfamiliar to
students who are under-resourced. Students who are under-resourced are not necessarily
poor. Many students and their families who are in this situation have enough money; they just
do not have enough access. Nonprofit organizations often work hard to bridge gaps in
accessibility, and could be working with a relatively small staff to try to prepare a growing
number of students for the realities of higher education, including the technical skills they will
need to be successful. Preparing students in this way is essential: If you are preparing students
for college, youre only doing half your job if you are not also preparing them for the
technology part.67
Other nonprofit organizations are online education providers, such as Wikipedia,
CODE.org, and the Khan Academy. Each of these sites provides information on a specific
topic or range of topics and makes them freely available to anyone who can access the Internet.
For example, CODE.org is a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to expanding
participation in computer science by making it available in more schools, and increasing
participation by women and underrepresented students of color.68 They provide free tutorials
and lesson plans on a variety of topics and for a variety of age groups. Some programs are
short (one hour) and some are long (up to 20 hours) and can be used by individual students at
home, or by teachers to integrate into their classes. Depending on the program of interest,
options for accessing the interactive tutorials from a browser, a tablet, a smartphone, and even
without using an Internet connection.
Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED), is a nonprofit organization that produces
short videos (usually 10 to 60 minutes long) on a range of topics. These TED Talks often focus
on important, powerful, and provocative topics, and help users of all types have access to
some of the worlds most inspired thinkers to make great ideas accessible and spark
conversation.69 TED also conducts face-to-face events that frequently are filmed.
Wikipedia is an open-access online encyclopedia. Anyone can edit it and it is monitored
regularly. At the time of this writing, Wikipedia contains almost five million entries and is
accessed by more than a half billion people from around the globe. Although critics do not see
Wikipedia as a sound educational toolas it is not peer-reviewed and any topic can be edited
by anyone (including laypersons)it is a prominent tool for looking up information quickly.
The amount of freely accessible information it contains is enormous. The user-centered,
collaborative nature ensures that entries can be updated as information changes and becomes
available. The ability for experts and nonexperts alike to interact with the content helps to keep
entries and updates in perspective: If information is biased or is not backed up with evidence,
users can include those notes, as well. Regardless of the scholarly nature of Wikipedia, it can
be a good learning tool and starting pointespecially for those who do not have easy access to
more traditional forms of education.
Nonprofit organizations, such as the ones discussed above as well as many others not
discussed here, have much that they can contribute to online education. Providing access to
learning materials, as well as helping users to learn how to use these materials and powerful
learning tools are important functions of nonprofit organizations.
NONPROFIT RESOURCES
TEDTed.com
TED is a nonprofit, global community of speakers who share ideas and expertise in a
series of 18-minute (or shorter) talks on various topics, such as, Why you should care about
whale poo and The art of stillness.
Khan AcademyKhanacademy.org
The Khan Academy is a nonprofit that offers free access to instructional videos and
exercises for curriculums from kindergarten to higher education, along with test prep and
coaching resources to help anyone, anywhere.
WikipediaWikipedia.org
Wikipedia is the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Articles are user created,
monitored, and published. Worldwide usage is so prominent and synonymous with Internet
information that Wikipedia currently contains nearly five million articles.
Additionally, there are many free, online resources that are run by for-profit companies.
The following are some examples of free online learning resources that are home to a vast
amount of content.
OTHER FREE AND FOR-PROFIT RESOURCES

iTunesUiTunes.apple.com
iTunesU is an Apple application (app) that is designed to distribute more than 750,000
pieces of free educational media (lectures, videos, books) from universities all over the world
to mobile devices. iTunesU interacts with other mobile device apps to help students take notes
and contribute content. Instructors can author, distribute, and conduct full courses in iTunesU.
YouTube EduYoutube.com/edu
YouTube is ubiquitous with Internet video. The exponential growth in contributors,
subscribers, and video content available define this generation of authoring and sharing videos
on the Web. The YouTube Edu channel is a space dedicated to topics ranging from business to
social sciences.
NONTRADITIONAL ONLINE LEARNING: NEWSFEEDS, EXPERTS,

AND AMAZON.COM
This chapter discussed systems dedicated to providing education to the masses, such as
MOOCs and the Khan Academy. But often the interactions in settings without a direct
educational focus can provide additional outlets for learning that influence our information
intake and decision making on a daily basis. Facebook and Twitter gather popular topics
tagged or referenced by other users of the platform. Trends provide instant access to top stories
in the media. Social media users can also follow experts and organizations to customize this
stream of information (newsfeed). Expert-finding also takes place in online discussion forums,
in videos, in game environments, and when shopping.
Online forums, such as Stack Overflow (stackoverflow.com), utilize a community-driven,
question-and-answer system to vote-up useful responses to questions until a correct or suitable
response is identified. YouTube videos are ranked and ordered by viewership and a simple
count of thumbs-up or thumbs-down votes. Such rankings help users easily gauge the popularity
or usefulness of a resource and identify expertise in the subject matter. Expert gamers often are
associated with higher-level rankings within the gaming environmentset apart from
beginners and novices with lower-level indicators. Shoppers on Amazon.com can aggregate
searches and inform decisions based on a star-based ranking system and comments generated
by other shoppers.
The platforms and scenarios mentioned are certainly different than traditionally structured
learning environments. The undeniable influence of social media and user-driven data,
however, informs learning and decision making in daily interactions with the online world.
ONLINE EDUCATION: WHATS GOOD ABOUT IT?

This chapter highlights a number of exciting initiatives for and avenues to online education,
in its many forms. We maintain that the landscape of higher educationincluding online
educationis very positive. Although there are disparities in access for some populations, the
authors believe that the number of people who do have access, as well as the decreasing
divide in that access, shows promise. Additionally, people do not always realize that they have
the potential and opportunity to be able to access all of this information or that these avenues to
online education exist. Through the work of nonprofit organizations, educational institutions,
and others, however, the gap in access is beginning to be addressed.
Online education brings a vast amount of information within reach of peoples fingertips:
What can be found, learned, explored, and studied is limitless. In a recent interview, Google
executive chairman, Eric Schmidt said,
The Internet will disappear. It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine
you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of
that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room. A highly personalized,
highly interactive and very, very interesting world emerges.70
Learners no longer are limited to what they can find at the public library or through the
card catalog, or from the daily newspaper or television news. Technology can be challenging,
can be stimulating, and can promote better learning. Technology also fills a gap when brick-
and-mortar schools cannot accommodate students (i.e., college prep, graduation requirements,
physical space, classrooms, teachers, remediation, special needs). Ultimately, technology and
online education are a necessity. You have to see it as that and you have to want to learn about
it, because it is not going away. It is only growing. There is a huge potential for what is to
come and for what students can learn.71
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors thank Elizabeth Kalfas for her insights and contributions to parts of this
chapter.
NOTES
1. Campaign for the Future of Higher Education, 2013, The Promises of Online Higher Education: AccessCampaign for
the Future of Higher Education, 44.
2. UN.org, 2015, United Nations Resources for Speakers on Global IssuesEducation for All (EFA),
http://www.un.org/en/globalissues/briefingpapers/efa/index.shtml, accessed June 1, 2015.
3. The Promises of Online Higher Education, 20.
4. Samantha Becker, Michael D. Crandall, Karen E. Fisher, Bo Kinney, Carol Landry, and Anita Rocha, 2010, Opportunity
for All: How the American Public Benefits from Internet Access at U.S. Libraries. Washington, DC: Institute of Museum
and Library Services. http://www.imls.gov/assets/1/assetmanager/opportunityforall.pdf, accessed June 1, 2015.
5. The Promises of Online Higher Education, 21.
6. Sharon Strover, 2014, The US Digital Divide: A Call for a New Philosophy. Critical Studies in Media Communication
31 (2): 11422. doi:10.1080/15295036.2014.922207.
7. Kristen Purcell and Lee Rainie, 2014, Americans Feel Better Informed Thanks to the Internet. Pew Research
Centers Internet & American Life Project, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/12/08/better-informed/, accessed June 1, 2015.
8. Susannah Fox and Lee Rainie, 2014, The Web at 25 in the U.S., Pew Research Centers Internet & American Life
Project, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/02/27/the-web-at-25-in-the-u-s/, accessed June 1, 2015.
9. Ibid.
10. Pew Research Centers Internet & American Life Project, 2013, Mobile Technology Fact Sheet.
http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/mobile-technology-fact-sheet/, accessed June 1, 2015.
11. Ibid.
12. Kathryn Zickuhr and Aaron Smith, 2013, Home Broadband 2013, Pew Research Centers Internet & American Life
Project, http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/08/26/home-broadband-2013/, accessed June 1, 2015.
13. Adam Fendelman, How Are Cell Phones Different From Smartphones?, About Tech,
http://cellphones.about.com/od/coveringthebasics/qt/cellphonesvssmartphones.htm, accessed June 1, 2015.
14. Bruce Drake, 2014, Americans with Just Basic Cell Phones Are a Dwindling Breed, Pew Research Center.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/09/americans-with-just-basic-cell-phones-are-a-dwindling-breed/, accessed June
1, 2015.
15. Fox and Rainie, The Web at 25 In the U.S.
16. Pew, Mobile Technology Fact Sheet.
17. Zickuhr and Smith, Home Broadband 2013.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Mary Madden, Amanda Lenhart, Maeve Duggan, Sandra Cortesi, and Urs Gasser, 2013, Teens and Technology 2013,
Pew Research Centers Internet & American Life Project, http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/03/13/teens-and-technology-
2013/, accessed June 1, 2015.
21. Aaron Smith, 2014, Older Adults and Technology Use, Pew Research Centers Internet & American Life Project,
http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/04/03/older-adults-and-technology-use/, accessed June 1, 2015.
22. Kathryn Zickuhr, 2013, Whos Not Online and Why, Pew Research Centers Internet & American Life Project,
http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/09/25/whos-not-online-and-why/, accessed June 1, 2015.
23. Ibid.
24. Elaine I. Allen and Jeff Seaman, 2014, Grade Change: Tracking Online Education in the United States. Babson
Survey Research Group and Quahog Research Group, LLC. http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/gradechange.pdf,
accessed June 1, 2015.
25. Phil Hill, 2014, Clarification: No, There Arent 7.1 Million Students In US Taking at Least One Online Class, E-
Literate, http://mfeldstein.com/clarification-arent-7-1-million-students-us-taking-least-one-online-class/, accessed June 1, 2015.
26. Steve Kolowich, 2014, Exactly How Many Students Take Online Courses? The Chronicle of Higher Education,
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/exactly-how-many-students-take-online-courses/49455, accessed June 1, 2015.
27. Hill, Clarification.
28. Allen and Seaman, Grade Change.
29. Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams, 2012, Flip Your Classroom. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in
Education.
30. Elizabeth Kalfas, telephone conversation, November 20, 2014.
31. Rick E. Ferdig, 2013, What Massive Open Online Courses Have to Offer K-12 Teachers and Students, Lansing:
Michigan Virtual Learning Research Institute, http://media.mivu.org/institute/pdf/mooc_report.pdf, accessed June 1, 2015.
32. Steve Kolowich, 2013, The Professors Who Make the MOOCs, The Chronicle of Higher Education,
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-MOOC/137905/=overview, accessed June 1, 2015.
33. Audrey Watters, 2012, Top Ed-Tech Trends Of 2012, Insidehighered.Com.
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/hack-higher-education/top-ed-tech-trends-2012-moocs, accessed June 1, 2015.
34. Khe Hew and Wing Sum Cheung, 2014, Students and Instructors Use of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs):
Motivations and Challenges, Educational Research Review 12: 4558, doi:10.1016/j.edurev.2014.05.001.
35. Ferdig, What Massive Open Online Courses Have to Offer.
36. Stephen Downes, 2013, What the x in xMOOC Stands for. Google+,
https://plus.google.com/+StephenDownes/posts/LEwaKxL2MaM, accessed June 1, 2015.
37. Hew and Cheung, Students and Instructors Use.
38. George Siemens. 2005. Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, International Journal of
Instructional Technology And Distance Learning 2 (1): 310.
39. Ferdig, What Massive Open Online Courses Have to Offer, 4.
41. Dave Cormier and George Siemens, 2010, Through the Open Door: Open Courses as Research, Learning, and
Engagement, Educause Review 45 (4): 3138, https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM1042.pdf, accessed June 1, 2015.
43. Osvaldo C. Rodriguez, 2012, MOOCs and the AI-Stanford Like Courses: Two Successful and Distinct Course Formats
for Massive Open Online Courses, European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning, 11, http://www.eurodl.org/?
p=archives&year=2012&halfyear=2&article=516, accessed June 1, 2015.
45. Li Yuan and Stephen Powell, 2013, MOOCs and Open Education: Implications for Higher Education, Centre for
Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards, http://publications.cetis.ac.uk/2013/667, accessed June 1, 2015.
46. Yvonne Belanger and Jessica Thornton, 2013, Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach Duke Universitys First
MOOC, Hdl.Handle.Net. http://hdl.handle.net/10161/6216. Accessed June 1, 2015.
47. Ry Rivard. 2013. Measuring the MOOC Dropout Rate, Inside Higher Ed,
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/03/08/researchers-explore-who-taking-moocs-and-why-so-many-drop-out, accessed
June 1, 2015.
48. Jimmy Daily, 2014, HarvardXs and MITxs MOOC Data Visualized and Mapped, EdTech Magazine,
http://www.edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2014/02/harvardxs-and-mitxs-mooc-data-visualized-and-mapped, accessed June
1, 2015.
49. Li and Powell, MOOCs and Open Education.
50. Katy Jordan, 2014, Initial Trends in Enrolment and Completion of Massive Open Online Courses, The International
Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning 15:1,
http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/rt/printerFriendly/1651/2774, accessed June 1, 2015. See also Yuan and Powell, MOOCs
and Open Education.
51. Laura Pappano, 2012, Massive Open Online Courses are Multiplying at a Rapid Pace, Nytimes.Com,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/massive-open-online-courses-are-multiplying-at-a-rapid-pace.html?
pagewanted=all&_r=2&, accessed June 1, 2015.
53. Audrey Watters, 2013, Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2013: MOOCs and Anti-MOOCs, Hack Education,
http://hackeducation.com/2013/11/29/top-ed-tech-trends-2013-moocs/, accessed June 1, 2015.
56. Hanan Khalil and Martin Ebner, 2014, MOOCs Completion Rates and Possible Methods to Improve RetentionA
Literature Review, In Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and
Telecommunications 123644. Chesapeake, VA: AACE.
57. Allen and Seaman, Grade Change.
59. Mozilla, Open Badges, http://openbadges.org/, accessed June 1, 2015.
60. Matthew LeBar, 2014, MOOCsCompletion Is Not Important, Forbes,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ccap/2014/09/16/moocs-finishing-is-not-the-important-part/, accessed June 1, 2015.
62. Ibid., at 8.
63. Ibid.
64. Rebecca Vivian, Katrina Falkner, and Nickolas Falkner, 2014, Addressing the Challenges of a New Digital
Technologies Curriculum: MOOCs As a Scalable Solution for Teacher Professional Development, Research in Learning
Technology 22 (0). doi:10.3402/rlt.v22.24691.
65. Jonathan Ress, 2014, I Am No Longer Anti-MOOC, https://moreorlessbunk.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/i-am-no-
longer-anti-mooc/, accessed June 1, 2015.
66. Rosanna Tamburri, 2014, An Interview with Canadian MOOC Pioneer George Siemens, University Affairs,
http://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/an-interview-with-canadian-mooc-pioneer-george-siemens/, accessed
June 1, 2015.
67. Kalfas, telephone conversation.
68. Code.org, 2014, About Us, http://code.org/about, accessed December 14.
69. Ted.com, 2014, Our Organization | About | TED, http://www.ted.com/about/our-organization, accessed December 14.
70. Georg Szalai, 2015, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt: The Internet Will Disappear, The Hollywood Reporter,
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/google-chairman-eric-schmidt-internet-765989, accessed June 1, 2015.
71. Kalfas, telephone conversation.
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Part II
Democratization
7
Leaks, Whistle-Blowers, and Radical

Transparency: Government Accountability
in the Internet Age
Rekha Sharma
The idea of privileged information is recognized under the law in a variety of contexts.
Spousal relationships are protected, as are doctor-patient, attorney-client, and clergy-penitent
information exchanges.1 The philosophy underlying these bonds is trust, and forcing one party
to testify against the other would be a critical violation of that intimacy. Under the Fifth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, one does not have to provide incriminating testimony
about oneselfa measure meant to ensure due process and a fair trial. The common thread in
all these forms of privileged information is that some speech must be protected to promote
meaningful communication within a society.
Individuals shape their societies via dialogues in which information, ideas, and meaning
can be shared. The ideals of free speech and a free press are keystones of American
democracy because they catalyze and enrich the debates necessary for effective
communication. To bring issues of public interest to light and to foster discussion about the
actions of government, journalists sometimes use information from confidential sources who
provide information on background, off the record, or in some other form of agreement that
guarantees anonymity. Attribution of sources and, by extension, accountability of news
organizations are important for readers to be able to judge the credibility of the news they
receive. A promise of anonymity, however, sometimes is necessary to protect whistle-blowers,
witnesses, and others who divulge information to the mediathus endangering their careers,
safety, or reputations. Without individuals taking such risks, it often would be difficult for
media to serve their role as the fourth estate of government, a check on the powers of the
executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government at local, state, and national levels.
Journalists continue to wrestle with inconsistent legal protections for those who grant
anonymity, however, as well as the ethical quandaries of reporting information provided by
confidential sources. New communication technologies have exacerbated these dilemmas in a
variety of ways, prompting news organizations to reexamine their policies and principles on
this topic. Nuances exist when it comes to protecting sources when much that is available
online already is anonymous (e.g., pseudonyms for bloggers, unidentified commenters, dubious
or unauthorized links, source authenticity).
Compounding credibility issues is the notion of a fifth estate that serves as a watchdog
over both government officials and the media. Bloggers and citizen journalists have been
responsible for propagating dubious information, but they also have unearthed major stories
and have used technology to expose the machinations of the powerful in unprecedented ways.
Controversies such as the WikiLeaks disclosures have raised questions about the legal and
ethical parameters of content creators unfettered by technological limitations. In turn,
government officials have employed legislation such as the Patriot Act and the Espionage Act
to prosecute people who have disclosed confidential information. Advances in technology
continue to upset the status quo of who has access to the means of production and
dissemination of news and opinion. Internet users should understand the level of anonymity that
the virtual world truly offers, and people should understand and influence the mechanisms in
place for maintaining transparency of government and the allocation of power in society.
This chapter addresses legal, ethical, and practical issues associated with anonymous
sourcing in journalism, and how technological advances have complicated these issues
including the protection of whistle-blowers as well as the strategic leaking of information by
anonymous government sources. Additionally, it explores the fifth estate of journalism (i.e.,
bloggers, citizen journalists), which serves as watchdog both of the government and of
traditional media. Finally, it bridges prevalent cases from the past with contemporary
controversies, providing possible direction for future research regarding anonymity,
transparency, and news in a digital environment.
ANONYMITY VERSUS TRANSPARENCY IN THE NEWSGATHERING

PROCESS
In the 1960s, many journalists began to doubt their ability to serve merely as objective
gatekeepers and instead adopted the professional model of journalistic advocacy.2 Under this
framework, the journalists guarantee of confidentiality to a source was of prime importance
because it was a necessary condition of being able to collect and reveal information whenever
it would serve the public or give voice to marginalized or suppressed groups.3, 4 Since then,
the practice of pledging confidentiality to sources has been utilized in newsrooms, sometimes
with discretion and sometimes gratuitously.5
When former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee tried to ban unnamed sources, his
reporting staff believed they were so disadvantaged that the policy only lasted two days.6, 7 Of
course, Bradlees experiment was more than 40 years ago and was implemented just before the
Watergate scandal, in which FBI deputy director Mark Felt provided confidential leads that
enabled Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to unravel the conspiracy within the Nixon
administration.8, 9, 10
Known for decades only by the pseudonym Deep Throat, Felt has become one of
journalisms most famous examples of the necessity of anonymous sources. Ironically, the
Watergate scandal stemmed from Nixons attempts to smear the reputation of another whistle-
blower, Daniel Ellsberg, who gave the infamous Pentagon Papers to The New York Times
and The Washington Post to protest the Vietnam War.11 For a separate account of the final days
of Nixons presidency, Woodward and Bernstein along with their research assistants
interviewed 394 people on background, with the understanding that the information would
be used only if the sources identity remained confidential.12 A promise of anonymity was
essential to obtaining the depth of information required for Woodward and Bernsteins book,
therefore no footnotes were included.13
Aside from the need to guarantee anonymity to gather information, journalists also must
consider ethical responsibilities of granting confidentiality and the legal consequences of
failing to protect anonymous sources. If promises of confidentiality are broken, then victims of
disclosure may sue to collect damages. In Cohen v. Cowles Media Co. (1991), the Supreme
Court ruled in favor of Dan Cohen, a public relations executive and political spokesperson
who was fired after two newspapers revealed him as the source of information about a
gubernatorial candidates shoplifting conviction.14 The newspapers editors decided that
readers needed to know that the disclosure came from the opposing candidates camp. But in a
54 decision, the Court decided that Minnesotas law was constitutional. This meant that the
First Amendment would not preclude the state from remedying injustices created by broken
promises.15
As Christians, Fackler, Rotzoll, and McKee (2001) pointed out, reporters must be able to
approach sources with skepticism and cooperation, becoming adversarial or friendly when the
situation calls for it, stating: [i]f newspeople become too intimate with important men and
women, they lose their professional distance or develop unhealthy biases protecting them.
However, to the degree that powerful sources are not cultivated and reporters establish no
personal connections, the inside nuance and perspective may be lost.16 Berry (2009) argued
that although the use of anonymous sources can be valuable, it also can undermine a storys
credibility.17 Berry advised that investigative journalists verify information provided by
anonymous sources against multiple on-the-record sources or documents and also employ
probing interviewing techniques to determine how anonymous sources might have obtained the
information they shared with the media. Most journalism industry codes of ethics also address
anonymity, cautioning reporters to identify sources fully and completely whenever possible but
at the same time to honor all promises of confidentiality.
Although some news organizations allow reporters to keep the identities of confidential
sources completely secret, most require editors to be involved to help judge the credibility of
the information being provided.18 Editorial oversight of reporters use of anonymous sources
was deemed especially important after a scandal involving former Washington Post reporter
Janet Cooke. In what would become a cautionary tale for future generations of journalists,
Cooke won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for a story about an eight-year-old heroin addict named
Jimmy. After 11 hours of interrogation by her editors, Cooke admitted that she had fabricated
the entire account.19 Financial journalist Dan Dorfman was fired from Money magazine in
1996 after he refused to reveal his confidential sources to his editors, who stated that they
could not continue to employ him if they could not evaluate the quality of his reporting.20
Other problems at major newspapers have caused editors to reevaluate newsroom policies
on the use of anonymous sources. For instance, the standards editor of The New York Times
randomly checks stories containing information provided by anonymous sources each week to
make sure another editor knows the name of the source.21 This practice went into effect after a
Times investigation revealed that reporter Jayson Blair had fabricated or plagiarized his
coverage of several news events.22 USA Today reporter Jack Kelley resigned after an
investigation showed that he had fabricated and plagiarized stories for more than a decade.
Investigators concluded that Kelley had exploited close relationships with editors, who did not
inspect his work. Although rules limiting the use of anonymous sources were in place at the
newspaper, editorial scrutiny of Kelleys stories was found to be lax.23 Moreover, the papers
rules on anonymous sources contained a loophole stating that reporters did not always have to
divulge their sources to an editor.24
Not only have some reporters abused the practice of anonymous sourcing, but sources
themselves sometimes have employed strategic leaks to spin a story favorably or to damage an
opponent.25 Sources in government sometimes leak information anonymously to journalists to
gauge public support for ideas without committing to them as set policies.26, 27 This can occur
because journalists must cover the story in a way that removes identifying information about
the source, omitting the context of events, comments, or issues as well as failing to disclose the
sources possible motive for speaking to the press.28 Sometimes unwillingness to go on the
record can make a source seem more provocative and his or her information seem more
newsworthy. According to Bennett (2001), At times, the political message is not important
enough to be guaranteed coverage if released through normal press channels or presented as a
pseudo-event. If the right reporter is given a scoop based on the information, however, the
chances are pretty good that the story will receive special attention.29 In this manner, sources
can orchestrate news coverage and events insidiously, with reporters playing the patsy. This
practice of shifting culpability onto the media might be one motivating factor for journalists to
reveal sources identities.
An example of a possible planned leak involved the identification of Valerie Plame as a
CIA operative in a column by Robert Novak of the Chicago Sun-Times.30 Novak revealed this
information in the context of writing about Plames husband, Joseph C. Wilson, who was a
retired diplomat sent by the Central Intelligence Agency to Africa to investigate rumors that
Iraq was attempting to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger. The veracity of this claim would
become important in evaluating the decision of U.S. president George W. Bush to launch a
military incursion into Iraq to topple Saddam Husseins regime. In discussing Wilsons
involvement, Novak said that Plamewho worked for the CIArecommended her husband
for the mission. Her name was given to Novak by two senior administration officials, but
Novak refused to divulge the sources identities.31 Novak defended his decision to reveal
Plames identity by saying that although he was asked to withhold her name he never was told
that naming her could endanger anyone. In an interview with CNN, Novak explained,
According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a
covert operative and not in charge of undercover operators.32
McCann (2004) argued that, along with the Novak case, a multitude of other recent
lawsuits indicated that the Justice Department had been exploiting weaknesses in media law to
put pressure on reporters having confidential sources. McCann cited the U.S. attorney generals
Guidelines for Subpoenaing Members of the News Media as a measure of protection for
journalists. Although the guidelines do not carry the force of law, [they] require that the news
media subpoenas identify particular relevant information that cannot be obtained in any other
way and require that negotiations occur between the Justice Department and the journalist
before a subpoena is issued against a media outlet.33
I. Lewis Scooter Libby, a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, was later
convicted of perjury, making false statements, and obstruction of justice for concealing his role
in leaking Plames identity to the media.34 In a separate lawsuit against Libby as well as other
government officials, Plame alleged that the disclosure occurred as retaliation against her
husband, Joe Wilson, a former U. S. ambassador to Iraq who criticized the Bush
administrations prewar intelligence.35 During the trial, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald
issued grand jury subpoenas to reporters from Time The Washington Post, and NBC News to
compel them to reveal the source of the leak.36 New York Times reporter Judith Miller served
85 days in jail in 2005 because she chose not to divulge the name of the person who exposed
Plames affiliation with the CIA.37, 38
In addition to ethical codes in the industry, journalists should be aware of the ongoing legal
debate over how much protection reporters can extend to sources. Section 403 of the Federal
Rules of Evidence allows judges to quash subpoenas if information sought from reporters
would duplicate information already available.39 In this way, the legal system attempts to
protect journalists and their sources and maintain the fairness of trial procedure delineated in
the Sixth Amendment. As a matter of law, First and Sixth Amendment freedoms are equally
essential. However, reporters from mainstream media outlets often are sued for refusing to
testify about the identities of anonymous sources, whereas bloggers rarely are held accountable
for unattributed information.40
The landmark case for journalists protection of sources is Branzburg v. Hayes.41 The 54
majority ruled against reporters who refused to testify in front of grand juries. The opinions in
the case, however, have been interpreted in divergent waysboth as a protection for
journalists and as a rationale for requiring them to divulge their sources.42 Justice Byron White
wrote the plurality opinion that placed the public interest in law enforcement as paramount to
an uncertain burden on news organizations. He said there was no reason to believe that many
sources would disappear into silence if reporters did not guarantee anonymity. Rather, White
argued that sources would always seek mass media attention to reach larger audiences. White
did not want to saddle courts with the responsibility of having to decide on qualified privilege
claims in case after case or to define who was eligible to be called a journalist.43, 44
Justice Potter Stewart wrote an influential dissenting opinion favoring First Amendment
protection for journalists, and created a three-part test for justifying the infringement of their
rights by officials.45 Stewart said that to override the rights of journalists to guard their
sources, the government would have to demonstrate (1) a probable cause to believe that a
reporter has information clearly relevant to a specific violation of law; (2) evidence that the
information sought cannot be obtained by alternative means less destructive of First
Amendment values; [and] (3) a compelling and overriding interest in the information.46
Given the possibility that journalists could be summoned to testify about their confidential
sources or to provide evidence in such cases, news organizations need to rearticulate their
policies about the proper conditions for granting anonymity. In a digital environment, even
records of communication such as archived e-mails, cell phone records, video outtakes, and
instant messages could be stored electronically by a news organization. Carter, Franklin, and
Wright (2001) prompted journalists to consider whether they could be compelled to provide
information to law enforcement. Reporters and editors should understand the length of time
such information could be retrieved and the level of computer security their newsrooms
possess. Such considerations could prove vital for making decisions as technology spawns
ethical and legal ambiguities.47
THE ASCENDANCE OF THE FIFTH ESTATE: CHALLENGES OF NEW

TECHNOLOGY
Inevitably, news organization policies must adapt to changing social, legal, and
technological influences. These forces undoubtedly will impact the relationships between
journalists and their sources on a practical level, and journalists must be able to anticipate
potential challenges and defend their decisions to grant or withhold promises of
confidentiality.
Most news organizations require verification of information by two or three sources before
printing a story, as well as including specific attribution whenever possible.48 Attribution often
serves as an important media literacy tool for critical readers to determine the sources
motives for supplying the information and possible outcomes of providing the information.49, 50
Although media scholars, practitioners, and legal experts have dealt with situations in which a
reporter might know the source but refuse to divulge it, they must also confront situations in
which users contribute content anonymously to media outlets or in which journalists gather
information from unnamed sources online. For instance, the addition of multimedia features on
cellular telephones has created an army of self-proclaimed stringers who gather content as
firsthand witnesses for mainstream media outlets.
Camera phones were first launched in 2000. Since then, sales have risen sharply and the
quality of images has been greatly enhanced.51 Because of the portability and often
inconspicuous nature of camera phones, amateur photojournalists can use them to capture
everyday events, celebrity sightings, and breaking news.52 Aside from posting these images
including videoto personal blogs that are accessible from their cell phones,53 cell phone
users contribute footage and photos to mainstream media outlets. For example, citizen
reporters equipped with cell phones provided pictures of the July 7, 2005, subway and bus
bombings in the United Kingdom within minutes to ITV, the BBC, Sky News, and national
newspapers when transporting journalists to the scene would have been physically
impossible.54
The ubiquity of cell phones and the usefulness of tech-savvy eyewitnesses at breaking news
events should prompt mainstream news organizations to consider their editorial policies to
ensure credibility, accuracy, and consistency.55, 56 Perhaps more importantly, though,
mainstream journalists must look within their organizations to determine whether their policies
and information-gathering routines remain adequate in the age of citizen journalists wielding
cell phones. As Stephens (2007) explained, with the proliferation of raw images, accounts, and
reports available on the Internet, journalists must provide insight and interpretation rather than
a regurgitation of sound bites and information to remain viable in the coming years.
We are still very early in the evolution of the form, but surely industrious bloggers
wont always need reporters to package such materials before they commence picking
them apart. Mainstream journalists are making a mistake if they believe their ability to
collect and organize facts will continue to make them indispensable.57
News organizations also should consider the credibility of information gathered from
online sources such as bulletin boards, chat rooms, and blogs. Because users can post
information under one or many pseudonyms, it could be difficult to identify users, let alone
hold them accountable for comments, inaccuracies, or misinformation.58 Crain (2008) raised
concerns that an anonymous blogger on a media outlets site could make disparaging comments
about individuals or companies simply because he or she had an axe to grind.59 The editorial
staff of some sites moderates the electronic responses to news stories because users are able to
post comments without providing their names or affiliations.60 Also, journalists who post
messages, criticisms, or questions in virtual forums must understand their news organizations
policies about making their identities known to other users. A blogger from the Los Angeles
Times and a senior editor at the New Republic magazine were suspended for violating their
publications ethical guidelines about identifying themselves when dealing with the public after
they invented online identitiescalled sock puppets or sock-puppet accounts in the
Internet vernacularto spar with critics and attack other media outlets in their own blogs and
on other Web sites.61, 62 Journalists sometimes act as individuals, but they sometimes represent
their organization or the media industry.63 The protection journalists can expect to enjoy for
their online communication could vary depending on the writers role and the context of the
writing.
Anonymity in the computer world has exacerbated the challenges journalists face with
regard to attribution of sources and verification of information. The sophistication of
technological features enables users to cloak their identities more thoroughly, thus increasing
the complexity of the social, legal, and ethical landscapes as they relate to news. This is
compounded by technology such as anonymous remailer programs, which forward e-mail
messages to different users after removing the information about the origin of the message.
Remailers could preserve the anonymity of political dissidents, activists, and informers who
fear retribution yet feel compelled to expose wrongdoings or injustices in the media. The same
technology, however, can be used to perpetrate cybercrimes.64 Cowan (2008) worried that
technology has allowed people to wield power without consequence or accountability.65
There is no guarantee of absolute anonymity thanks to expanding and ever-evolving
technologies. Reporters therefore have an ethical obligation to clarify the limits of protection
they can provide to a source. Nissenbaum (1999) cautioned that stripping the name from a
person would not necessarily mean that he or she would be anonymous on the Internet.66
Rather, a person could be identified through a constellation of personal data, information-
gathering habits, and official records from a myriad of sources. The profits to be gained from
collecting and selling such information already have caused some companies to violate
individuals privacy and some individuals to relinquish details about their personal lives
willingly.67
Even the best-intentioned of policies might not be able to keep up with and address new
technologies that provide access to information considered confidential. Given the uncertainty
about how users interact with technology, Allen (1999) argued that global anonymity
regulations on the Internet would not be feasible, and that policies should be based on the
context of engagement between users.68 That is, whereas a corporate whistle-blower or human
rights activist might be able to justify their need for anonymity when communicating with
journalists, terrorist organizations or child pornographers would not deserve the same level of
protection. Anonymity decentralizes authority on the Internet, but it also limits the ability of
law enforcement to regulate unprotected forms of speech, such as fraud and threats.69
Likewise, electronic communication as a form of intellectual property can range from diary
entries to purchase orders, and therefore would be afforded different levels of legal
protection.70
Clearly, creating context-based policies is easier said than done. Allens (1999)
suggestionswhich included regulating online contexts in accordance with analogous offline
scenarios, developing mechanisms for policy enforcement, and determining conditions for
surveillanceappeared logical on paper, but would do little to resolve actual impasses.71
After all, law enforcement officials, journalists, and individuals have been struggling to find a
balance between privacy and open communication using these very steps. Likewise, the
American Association for the Advancement of Science offered suggestions such as allowing
online communities to determine their own rules about anonymity.72 Online communities often
are vaguely defined, however, and allowing them to police themselves would not really help
officials to stop unlawful activity. These examples highlight the need for more thoughtful
recommendations. The process of policy building would be better served by more detailed
proposals.
Of particular note, news organizations must understand the ethical responsibilities and
legal obligations of providing content as compared to providing venues for interaction with
audiences. The Good Samaritan provisions of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, also known
as the Communications Decency Act, might offer some protection to news organizations that
allow users to post messages in electronic forums such as bulletin boards, as the courts seem
to have recognized that multimedia capabilities have altered the traditional dissemination
functions of news outlets.73 Even Internet service providers (ISPs) that typically were treated
as common carriers not to be held responsible for the content of messages they transmitted,
however, have begun to reevaluate their roles.74 Internet service providers have had to protect
the privacy of their customers while cooperating with law enforcement officials to unmask the
identities of criminals.75 Thus, even if news organizations are not required to provide
identifying information about users posting anonymously on their Web sites, the editors and
publishers would do well to consider whether reactions to legal challenges will serve to foster
conditions for transparency and dialogue or create a chilling effect on free speech.
OPEN SECRETS: DEBATING THE MORALITY AND LEGALITY OF

HACKING AND LEAKING
In response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. Congress passed a law
to expand the intelligence-gathering powers of government officials investigating suspected
terrorists.76 The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools
Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism law came to be known more popularly as the
Patriot Act.77 This lawalong with the establishment of closed deportation hearings and
military tribunals, expansion of executive privilege, reclassification of public information, and
refusal to detail the governments increased surveillance activitiesmarked a distinct effort by
the George W. Bush administration to withhold information from the public, ostensibly to
protect homeland security.78 For example, the president, the attorney general, and the
presidents chief of staff encouraged government agencies to interpret exemptions of the
Freedom of Information Act to withhold classified, sensitive, or even previously public
information.79 Although the executive branch spearheaded these efforts, the administration
received considerable support from the legislative and judicial branches of government.80
Since 9/11, whistle-blowers working in the defense and intelligence areas of government
have weighed in on the morality of government actions, bringing to light issues such as flawed
military equipment, abuse of prisoners, and domestic surveillance programs.81 Government
workers who attempt to point out problems to their supervisors, however, often are disciplined
or penalized. According to Taylor (2014), [M]ore than 8,700 defense and intelligence
employees and contractors have filed retaliation claims with the Pentagon inspector general
since the 9/11 attacks, with the number increasing virtually every year.82 Rather than facing
lengthy legal battles, professional demotion, or character assassinations, some whistle-
blowers opt to take their stories to the news media rather than voice their concerns via
government channels.83
According to David Carr (2012) and other journalists, President Barack Obama promised
that his administration would enhance legal protections for federal government whistle-
blowers, but it actually has been investigating and prosecuting the sources of leaks of
classified information more aggressively than all prior presidential administrations.84 These
prosecutions have taken place under the aegis of the Espionage Act, which was passed by the
U.S. Congress in 1917 with the aim of protecting military secrets and preventing sabotage.85
Carr (2012) noted that John Kiriakou was charged with leaking information about Central
Intelligence Agency officers, some of whom had been involved with the agencys enhanced
interrogation program.86 Carr criticized the government for prosecuting Kiriakoua former
CIA officer and a staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committeemerely for talking
to the press, when the government had not taken any legal action against people who had
authorized or engaged in waterboarding suspected terrorists.
Carr also pointed out the administrations prosecution of Thomas A. Drake, who worked
for the National Security Agency and told a reporter that a software program developed in-
house would be more effective, less expensive, and less intrusive than a private-sector
vendors data-monitoring program. Carr questioned whether the charges had less to do with
national security concerns and more to do with preventing scrutiny of government actions and
mitigating public embarrassment. Conversely, Carr said that the administration has changed its
attitude about government secrecy whenever releasing information was deemed advantageous,
stating, Reporters were immediately and endlessly briefed on the secret operation that
successfully found and killed Osama bin Laden. And the drone program in Pakistan and
Afghanistan comes to light in a very organized and systematic way every time there is a
successful mission.87
In 2010, the nonprofit, online whistle-blowing organization WikiLeaks posted a video of a
U.S. helicopter gunship in Iraq killing civilians and journalists and then published 90,000
classified documents about U.S. military action in Afghanistan.88, 89 The site also released
40,000 documents related to the Iraq War and 250,000 U.S. State Department files concerning
correspondence with diplomats.90 WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, vociferously
advocate for government transparency; users can upload documents to the site anonymously,
making the site a haven for whistle-blowers.91 The U.S. government investigated the leaks,
determining the source to be Private First Class Bradley Manning, a U.S. Army intelligence
analyst.92 Manning was convicted on multiple countsincluding violating the Espionage Act
and was sentenced to 35 years in prison.93 As the government worked to establish a
definitive connection between Manning and Assange, the WikiLeaks founder was confronted
with an arrest warrant for sexual assault and has attempted to avoid extradition to Sweden for
years. Some people suspect that the assault charges actually were a retaliation measure for the
leaks.94, 95
The government has paid private-sector whistle-blowers substantial rewards for
information about corporate malfeasance, but blowing the whistle on the clandestine activities
of government officials and agencies often is regarded less favorably.96 Although some
whistle-blowers are lauded for their motives and actions, other whistle-blowers are labeled as
traitors or snitches and are harshly criticized.97 Linda Trippwho revealed President Bill
Clintons affair with White House intern Monica Lewinskyconsidered herself to be a
whistle-blower,98 as did Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor who disclosed classified
information about the agencys extensive electronic surveillance activities.99 Snowden
explained that he was motivated by principle rather than profit, seeking to preserve privacy
and opportunities for creativity and intellectual exploration. He added that he evaluated each
document he released to refrain from harming people and only shared them with journalists
who would use discretion in assessing each disclosures contribution to the public interest.100
Because Snowden expected to be demonized by the media and punished by the government for
his actions, however, he fled the United States.101
News organizations, legislators, and the courts have taken steps to protect source
anonymity in selected journalistic contexts. For example, 49 states and the District of
Columbia have some form of common law, statutory, or rule-based protections for journalists
to keep them from having to divulge the names of confidential sources.102 To provide some
legal continuity at the national level for journalists, the U.S. House of Representatives
approved the Free Flow of Information Act of 2009.103 The bill addressed the conditions under
which federal courts could compel journalists to testify about anonymous sources. U.S.
attorney general Michael B. Mukasey (2008) voiced concern that the bill would encourage
leaks that would damage national security and hinder law enforcement.104 Eventually, that bill
was stalled after being assigned to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary.105, 106, 107 The
Senate Judiciary Committee approved it in 2009, but it never received a floor vote because of
controversy over the WikiLeaks disclosures.108
The idea of implementing a federal shield law was resurrected, however, after federal
investigators secretly subpoenaed phone and fax records from Associated Press reporters and
bureaus to investigate who might have leaked information to the press about a CIA operation
that thwarted a bombing plot by Al-Qaeda in Yemen.109 In 2013, President Obamas Senate
liaison asked Democratic Senator Charles Schumer to reintroduce a version of the Free Flow
of Information Act, perhaps to mitigate negative news coverage about the Justice Departments
failure to notify the Associated Press of the seizure of its phone records.110 The White House
request came hours before Attorney General Eric Holder was to go before a House Judiciary
Committee hearing concerning the matter.111 Holder voiced support for a shield law that would
protect journalists, but not for individuals who leaked classified information. Holder said in
his testimony that [t]he focus should be on those people who break their oath and put the
American people at risk, not reporters who gather this information.112
President Obama, along with U.K. prime minister David Cameron, announced their
intentions to create a cybersecurity unit, allowing law enforcement and intelligence agencies to
collaborate to combat threats from hackers.113 The government initiative arose from a growing
recognition of the vulnerability of technological information systems, pointedly publicized
after the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment.114 The effort also buttressed the governments
arguments that intelligence agencies required access to encrypted communication on the
Internet and in social media to be able to detect and avert terrorist plots as well as to secure
economic infrastructures.115 Intensifying cybersecurity efforts, however, must be weighed
against civil liberties, privacy rights, and the potential value of anonymity for dissenting voices
in a democratic society.
CONCLUSION
The practice of granting anonymity to sources never has been a simple endeavor for
journalists because it creates tensions between competing professional and personal values.
Conferring anonymity to a source often has meant the sacrifice of transparency for the sake of
gaining information. Therefore, the decision to withhold a sources identity must be considered
carefully. New communication technologies have added a more challenging dimension to this
assessment in that computer-mediated communication has altered the social, legal, and ethical
environment as well as the roles of news organizations and audiences.
This chapter serves as an introduction to some broad and complex topics. Only some of the
issues regarding the use of anonymous sources in news organizations are covered, and as
users, providers, and newsgatherers develop new uses for new technologies, more questions
and puzzles will emerge as worthy areas of study. Future research should include analysis of
journalistic organizations, including policies specific to individual media outlets as well as
codifications of professional subfields such as print journalism, broadcast journalism, public
relations, and advertising. As industry associations revise their ethical guidelines, they must
address the ways that technological convergence impacts their stances on anonymity,
transparency, and other professional norms.
Practitioners should collaborate with researchers to develop more detailed, cogent
recommendations for legislation. More distinct protections are needed to balance the right of
the public to access information with the right of individuals to retain their personal privacy
without tying the hands of law enforcement officials. Civil liberties and social order can be
preserved equitably and consistently, perhaps through the passage of a national shield law that
would supersede state-by-state regulations. By bridging the divides between journalism,
political science, law, computer technology, sociology, and psychology, scholars can lead the
way toward a new understanding of an information society. The ever-changing nature of the
Internet and ever-expanding access to interactive communication technologies require
vigilance on the part of ethicists and continued inquiry from communication researchers.
NOTES
1. T. Barton Carter, Mark A. Franklin, and Jay B. Wright (2001), The First Amendment and the Fourth Estate: The Law
of Mass Media (8th ed.), New York: Foundation Press.
2. Morris Janowitz (1975), Professional Models in Journalism: The Gatekeeper and the Advocate, Journalism Quarterly
52, 61826.
3. Ibid.
4. Joseph Straubhaar and Robert LaRose (1997), Communications Media in the Information Society, Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth.
5. Margaret Sullivan (2013, October 12), The Disconnect on Anonymous Sources, New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/opinion/sunday/the-public-editor-the-disconnect-on-anonymous-sources.html?_r=0.
6. Ben Bagdikian (2005, August/September), When the Post Banned Anonymous Sources, American Journalism Review
27, 33.
7. R. J. Haiman (1999), Best Practices for Newspaper Journalists, Arlington, VA: The Freedom Forum.
8. Ben Bagdikian (2005, August/September), When the Post Banned Anonymous Sources, American Journalism Review
27, 33.
9. Matt Carlson (2010), Embodying Deep Throat: Mark Felt and the Collective Memory of Watergate, Critical Studies in
Media Communication 27, 23550. doi: 10.1080/15295030903583564
10. Bob Woodward (2006), The Secret Man: The Story of Watergates Deep Throat, New York: Simon & Schuster.
11. Thomas L. Tedford and Dale A. Herbeck (2009), Freedom of Speech in the United States (6th ed.), State College,
PA: Strata Publishing.
12. James W. Davidson and M. H. Lytle (1986), After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection (2nd ed.), New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
13. Ibid.
14. Cohen v. Cowles Media Company, 501 U.S. 663 (1991).
15. Kent R. Middleton, Robert Trager, and Bill F. Chamberlin (2000), The Law of Public Communication (5th ed.), New
York: Addison Wesley Longman.
16. Clifford G. Christians, Mark Fackler, Kim B. Rotzoll, and K. B. McKee (2001), Media Ethics: Cases and Moral
Reasoning (6th ed.), New York: Addison Wesley Longman.
17. Stephen J. Berry (2009), Watchdog Journalism: The Art of Investigative Reporting, New York: Oxford University
Press.
18. Christians, Fackler, Rotzoll, and McKee (2001), Media Ethics.
19. Howard Kurtz (1997b), Janet Cookes Untold Story: 15 Years after Her Famous Hoax the Disgraced Reporter
Speaks, in Messages 4: The Washington Post Media Companion, edited by T. Beell, 2046, Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
20. Howard Kurtz (1997a), Ethics and the Mass Media: A Tipster Takes a Tumble; Dan Dorfman, Embroiled in a
Controversy over Sources, Is Fired by Money Magazine, in Messages 4: The Washington Post Media Companion, edited
by T. Beell, 2046, Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
21. Ibid.
22. Byron Calame (2006, June 18), Preventing a Second Jayson Blair, New York Times, 12.
23. Kevin McCoy (2004, April 24), Report: Newsroom Culture Enabled Kelley, USA Today, 10A.
24. Ibid.
25. James Cowan (2008, December 31), The Orwellian Power of Anonymity; the Web Has Changed the Rules of Politics
and Journalism, National Post, A6.
26. Haiman, Best Practices.
27. Straubhaar and LaRose, Communications Media.
28. W. Lance Bennett (2001), News: The Politics of Illusion (4th ed.), New York: Addison Wesley.
29. Ibid., 131.
30. Robert Novak (2003, July 14), The Mission to Niger [Editorial]. Chicago Sun-Times, 31.
31. Ibid.
32. David Ensor (2003, October 1), Novak: No Great Crime with Leak, CNN.com. http://www.cnn.com
33. Tom McCann (2004, October), Journalist Groups See Surge in Legal Attacks on Privilege, Chicago Lawyer 90.
34. Carol D. Leonnig and Michael D. Shear (2007, March 8), Prison May Be Long Way Off for Libby; Appeals Could
Keep Former Cheney Aide Free Until after 2008 Election, Washington Post, A4.
35. Eric M. Weiss and Charles Lane (2006, July 14), Vice President Sued by Plame and Husband; Ex-CIA Officer Alleges
Leak of Her Name Was Retaliatory, Washington Post, A3.
36. McCann, Journalist Groups.
37. Carlson, Embodying Deep Throat.
38. Jennifer Harper (2009, September 10), Journalist Shield Law Gains Steam in Senate, Washington Times.
http://www.washingtontimes.com
39. Middleton, Trager, and Chamberlin, The Law of Public Communication.
40. Andrew Keen (2007), The Cult of the Amateur: How Todays Internet Is Killing Our Culture, New York:
Doubleday.
41. Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665 (1972).
43. Carter, Franklin, and Wright, The First Amendment and the Fourth Estate.
44. Middleton, Trager and Chamberlin, The Law of Public Communication.
45. Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665 (1972).
47. Carter, Franklin, and Wright, The First Amendment and the Fourth Estate.
48. Christians, Fackler, Rotzoll, and McKee, Media Ethics.
49. Rance Crain (2008, March 10), Im Going on the Record When It Comes to Anonymous Bloggers, Advertising Age,
14.
50. Art Silverblatt (1995), Media Literacy: Keys to Interpreting Media Messages, Westport, CT: Praeger.
51. L. Srivastava (2005), Mobile Phones and the Evolution of Social Behaviour, Behaviour & Information Technology
24, 111129, doi: 10.1080/01449290512331321910.
52. Ibid.
53. Angelo Fernando (2006, May-June), That Third ScreenIn Your Pocket!, Communication World 23, 1112.
54. Emma Hall (2005), Technology Makes Storytellers of Citizens, Advertising Age 76 (6). Communication & Mass
Media Complete database, February 18, 2007.
55. Ken Kerschbaumer (2005, January 24), Dialing for News, Broadcasting & Cable 135, 4344.
56. Barb Palser (2001, September), I Want My Breaking News, American Journalism Review 23, 66.
57. Mitchell Stephens (2007, January/February), Beyond News, Columbia Journalism Review 45, 3439.
58. Jane B. Singer (1996), Virtual Anonymity: Online Accountability and the Virtuous Virtual Journalist, Journal of Mass
Media Ethics 11, 95106.
59. Crain, Im Going on the Record.
60. Ibid.
61. New York Times Editorial. (2006, September 13), Sock Puppet Bites Man, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com
62. Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur.
63. Jane B. Singer, Virtual Anonymity.
64. Yaman Akdeniz (2002), Anonymity, Democracy, and Cyberspace, Social Research 69, 22337.
65. James Cowan, The Orwellian Power of Anonymity.
66. Helen Nissenbaum (1999), The Meaning of Anonymity in an Information Age, The Information Society 15, 14144.
doi: 10.1080/019722499128592
67. Michael Bugeja (2005), Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age, New York:
Oxford University Press.
68. Christina Allen (1999), Internet Anonymity in Contexts, The Information Society 15, 14546, doi:
10.1080/019722499128600.
69. Peter Wayner (1999), Technology for Anonymity: Names by Other Nyms, The Information Society 15, 9197, doi:
10.1080/019722499128556.
70. A. Michael Froomkin (1999), Legal Issues in Anonymity and Pseudonymity. The Information Society 15, 11327, doi:
10.1080/019722499128574
71. Christina Allen, Internet Anonymity in Contexts.
72. Al Teich, Mark S. Frankel, Rob Kling, and Ya-Ching Lee (1999), Anonymous Communication Policies for the Internet:
Results and Recommendations of the AAAS Conference, The Information Society 15, 7177, doi:
10.1080/019722499128538.
73. Madeline Johnson and Betsy D. Gelb (2002), Cyber-Libel: Policy Trade-Offs, Journal of Public Policy and
Marketing 21, 15259.
74. Victoria S. Ekstrand (2003), Unmasking Jane and John Doe: Online Anonymity and the First Amendment,
Communication Law and Policy 8, 40527, doi: 10.1207/S15326926CLP0804_02
75. Kara Swisher and John Schwartz (1997), Walking the Beat in Cyberspace: On-Line Services Struggle with How to
Combat Smut and Protect Privacy, in Messages 4: The Washington Post Media Companion, edited by T. Beell, 31517,
Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
76. Tedford and Herbeck, Freedom of Speech in the United States.
77. Ibid.
78. Paul Haridakis (2006), Citizen Access and Government Secrecy, Saint Louis University Public Law Review 25, 3
32.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid.
81. Marisa Taylor (2014, December 30), Intelligence, Defense Whistleblowers Remain Mired in Broken System,
McClatchy DC, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/static/features/Whistleblowers/Whistleblowers-remain-mired-in-broken-
system.html, accessed January 18, 2015.
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid.
84. David Carr (2012, February 7), Blurred Line between Espionage and Truth, New York Times, B1, B7.
85. Tedford and Herbeck, Freedom of Speech in the United States.
86. David Carr, Blurred Line between Espionage and Truth.
87. Ibid.
88. Christian Fuchs (2011), WikiLeaks: Power 2.0? Surveillance 2.0? Criticism 2.0? Alternative Media 2.0? A Political-
Economic Analysis, Global Media JournalAustralian Edition 5, 117.
89. Dawn L. Rothe and Kevin F. Steinmetz (2013), The Case of Bradley Manning: State Victimization, Realpolitik, and
WikiLeaks, Contemporary Justice Review 16, 28092. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10282580.2013.798694.
90. Fuchs, WikiLeaks: Power 2.0?
91. Ibid.
92. Rothe and Steinmetz, The Case of Bradley Manning.
93. Julie Tate (2013, August 21), Bradley Manning Sentenced to 35 Years in WikiLeaks case, Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/judge-to-sentence-bradley-manning-today/2013/08/20/85bee184-09d0-
11e3-b87c-476db8ac34cd_story.html. Accessed January 19, 2015.
94. Alan Cowell (2014, November 20), Swedish Court Upholds Order for Arrest of Julian Assange, New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/21/world/europe/swedish-court-rejects-appeal-by-julian-assange.html. Accessed January 19,
2015.
95. Fuchs, WikiLeaks: Power 2.0?
96. Steven D. Solomon (2014, December 30), Whistle-Blower Awards Lure Wrongdoers Looking to Score, New York
Times. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/12/30/whistle-blower-awards-lure-wrongdoers-looking-to-score/?_r=0. January 18,
2015.
97. Ibid.
98. Ibid.
99. Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Laura Poitras (2013, June 11), Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower Behind
the NSA Surveillance Revelations, The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-
whistleblower-surveillance, accessed January 18, 2015.
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid.
102. Harper, Journalist Shield Law.
103. Protecting Sources; A Federal Shield Law Is within Reach (2009, April 6), Washington Post, A14.
104. Michael B. Mukasey (2008, June 28), A Legislative Shield for the Press?, Washington Times, M12.
105. Protecting Sources, 2009.
106. Charles Schumer (2008, July 2), Defending Free Speech; a Vital Interest for All Americans, Washington Times,
A25.
107. U.S. Library of Congress (2009, December 11), Bill Summary and Status 111th Congress (20092010) S. 448,
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:SN00448:@@@X, accessed March 29, 2011.
108. Charlie Savage (2013, May 15), Criticized on Seizure of Records, White House Pushes News Media Shield Law,
New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/16/us/politics/under-fire-white-house-pushes-to-revive-media-shield-
bill.html?_r=3&%20-%20h&, accessed January 18, 2015.
109. Erik Wemple (2013, May 13), AP: Government Subpoenaed Journalists Phone Records, Washington Post,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2013/05/13/ap-government-subpoenaed-journalists-phone-records/,
accessed January 18, 2015.
110. Savage, Criticized on Seizure of Records.
111. Ibid.
112. Ibid.
113. Chris Strohm, Angela G. Keane, and Robert Hutton (2015, January 16), Obama, Cameron Vow to Bolster
Cybersecurity after Sony hack, Bloomberg. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-16/obama-cameron-cybersecurity-
agenda-shaped-by-paris-sony-attacks.html, accessed January 18, 2015.
114. Ibid.
115. Ibid.
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8
Rethinking Digital Democracy in a Time of

Crisis: The Case of Spain
Salom Sola-Morales
INTRODUCTION
In recent decades, various political parties, associations, and social movements around the
world have developed their political action online. In fact, it is not possible to speak about
political actions outside of the Internet today, because social networks are ubiquitous1 and
cyberspace is established as the new public agora2 or the global agora.3 In this new
paradigm, Internet use is key in the creation of collective debates, and fundamental in the
dissemination of political ideas or the spread of community organizing. Moreover, the Internet
is creating an alternative space of communication to the hegemonic order, in which citizens are
beginning to acquire new roles and gradually becoming the real protagonists of political
communication.
In recent years, Spain has witnessed many initiatives that promote a direct digital
democracy. Different politicians, citizen associations, or movements such as the X Party,
Podemos,4 15-M Movement, and the Platform Affected by Mortgage (PAH) have begun using
online tools to transcend traditional boundaries of time and space and to promote transnational
or massive participatory debates. In a climate of political disaffection and distrust of
institutions that seems to have a worldwide scope,5 the main objective of these new initiatives
is to encourage a horizontal relationship among citizens and to communicate with greater
transparency. In this context, significant changeswhich certainly go far beyond voting in an
electionare affecting the classical concept of political participation. As the role of citizens
evolves in politics, it is essential to inquire about their new ways of participating in the
political process.
Yet, there are still many pending questions about Internets reliability, as it regards the
internal and external decision-making process of an organization, and the advantages and
disadvantages of virtual voting and virtual decision making. Can the Internet be used to create
a truly integrating, inclusive participatory democracy? Or, conversely, will the Internet end up
creating a more exclusive system? Currently, Internet access is taken to be one of the basic
principles of a democratic system. But how does one account for the growing digital divide
among citizens, in which many citizens still lack Internet access or the economic or symbolic
resources to use these new tools with assurance or guaranteed security? Are we witnessing the
beginning of a revolution or is it only an appearance?
To tackle these questions, the main objective of this chapter is to reflect upon and discuss
whether the Internet and the new media can generate a more participatory democracy. Further,
the specific objectives of this research include describing the Spanish political party
Podemoss use of social networks and online tools, and providing an analysis of how these
tools and networks are used in politics.
The starting premise is that the Internet has increased the role of citizenship by
democratizing the media and political systems.6 The present research tries to find evidence of
how Podemos makes use of online tools to generate new forms of participation. More
precisely, this research tries to identify how the instruments of techno-politics (as Rodot
would say) structure the role of citizen participation in Spain in the context of the current
crisis.7
As for the structure of this chapter, it first presents a theoretical consideration on
cyberactivism and new forms of online participation. Next the concept of digital democracy
and its growing development in Spain is explored, especially since the emergence of the
political party Podemos. Next is an explanation of what online tools and type of political
outreach and participation are promoted by Podemos. Finally, the political functions of
Facebook within the organization are analyzed.
CYBER AND NETWORK PARTICIPATION, BETWEEN LIGHT AND

SHADOW
The Internet has a great ability to transform political life8 and it has a major impact on
democracy today.9 Cyberspace is not only promoting deliberation or modifying the
organizational structure of institutions, but also transfiguring and redefining political
mobilization, outreach, and participation;10 the meaning of the assemblies; political parties;
and even citizenship itself.11
Many researchers have argued that the development of democracy 2.0 has increased and
enhanced citizen participation12 due to its fledgling potential. In fact, in the words of Colombo
Villarrasa, the Internet will raise the political participation of citizens both qualitatively and
quantitatively.13
In the current contextwhere the digital surrounds any social or communicative process
the domain of the public no longer corresponds to an elite, but rather to a vast majority of
people.14 Theoretically, participants are no longer an elite, but rather multitudes15capable
of establishing dialogues, self-organizing, and making decisions independently.16 At first
glance, online participation has many advantages, as it allows an organized group of
people17 to communicate instantly through free and user-friendly applications.18 Additionally,
all participants end up being players in the process and interact in a horizontal relationship on
a massive participatory level.19 At the same time, the participants do not only discuss issues
of common interest, but also form action groups, subscribe to causes, sign petitions, fund
proposals and support reforms,20 so that participation increases qualitatively. In this sense, it
could be argued that the Internet primarily provides a more open and accessible space, and
less prior control than traditional media.21 The Internet also provides a space in which
political outreach can be more transparent, direct, and democratic;22 and new venues for
deliberation can emerge.23
Yet, other researchers have warned of the limitations and contradictions that the use of the
Internet involves,24 and have demonstrated the processes of exclusion and marginalization that
derive from Internet access.25 In fact, some scholars have pointed out that this is not just a
question of access in its triple perspectivetechnology infrastructure, skills for effective use,
and access to network services26but instead is a question of the quality of Internet use.27
Moreover, assuming that no digital divide existed, that all people could browse the Internet
at no cost, and all had the cognitive and symbolic resources to use the Web, it also would be
necessary to have civic involvement by individuals, a collective commitment, and most
importantly an interest or motivation to participate, which many passive or marginalized
citizens lack.28 Precisely for these reasons, some researchers have firmly declared that the
Internet widens the gap of inequality,29 and that the possible increase in online participation
does not imply a higher quality of participation30 because the Internet does not increase the
share capital of a community.31
From this same perspective, other researchers think that the type of participation taking
place in virtual environments is pseudo-participation, as it only generates weak ties.32 This
type of participation ends up being rather passive and it has no significant impact.33 Recent
empirical research also has shown that those who participate in political discussions online
remain a minority.34
It is clear that there are many people who are marginalized or excluded and that their
virtual participation is minor or nonexistent today. Thus, what truly is at stake are the power
relations, that is to say, the basis of politics. This idea should be the focus of the debate on the
democratic quality of any system, regardless of whether it takes place online or offline.
Therefore, and with an awareness of the limitations and risks that Internet use involves, this
chapter emphasizes the positive changes that cyberspace is causing or could cause on the way
that policies are made and on how to participate in policy making. The current political context
finds more and more people outside of the decision-making process, and apathy and
discouragement seem to be a shared leitmotif. This is evident, for example, in the high rates of
absenteeism worldwide.35 This context is where the Internet has a great potentialeven if it is
underdevelopedto increase confidence, enrich democracy, and revitalize civic life; therefore
it should be reconsidered.36
It is worth noting that for years the Internet has been bringing about a transformation in
political systems. Regardless of the size or scope, these changesmore than structural or
essentialrather are proving to be historic and are subjected to different contexts, media, and
formats. Although political participation and communication might change or take various
forms, some continuity with previous practice remains. Thus, one would prefer to admit
contradictory possibilities and move away from the classic confrontations between
apocalyptic and integrated visions (to quote Umberto Eco), or from cyber-optimists and
cyber-skeptics.37 Instead, this chapter aims to show how the Internet can increase and
improve the democratic system. To explore this assumption and illustrate it with a current
example, the focus is on Spain and the use of digital democracy by the political party
Podemos.
DIGITAL DEMOCRACY UNDER SUSPICION

Talking about digital democracy today is not a utopia. New technologies have opened an
opportunity for direct or participatory democracy,38 which now is physically and
technologically possible.39 In fact, currently in Spain citizens canand increasingly douse
technology to communicate with the administration and with politicians, to express their views
by voting, and to vote on referendums online. As shown in the latest news summary published
by the October 2014 Centro de Investigaciones Sociolgicas (CIS)40 Barometer (Study No.
3041), Spaniards increasingly used technologies to communicate in political activities, such as
contacting or communicating with a politician or a political party (6.8 percent); subscribed to
an electronic mailing list on current issues to receive documents, requests, and campaigns (15
percent); posted comments on current affairs and social or political topics in a forum, blog, or
social network (19.1 percent); made a donation to an association or organization (10.8
percent); signed a petition or joined a campaign or manifesto (20.1 percent); or participated in
the call for a demonstration or protest act (10.8 percent). Although the percentages still might
seem small, they show that todays political participation occurs partly onlinea fact that was
completely unthinkable a few years ago.
As Josep M. Llaurad mentioned, regardless of the name used to refer to it (e.g., digital
democracy, hyperdemocracy, teledemocracy, computercracy, direct democracy, e-democracy,
cyberdemocracy, wired democracy) and the discussions centered on it, what matters is that
digital democracy poses a desire to deepen the democratic system.41 Hence, it is evident that
the implementation of online participatory mechanisms does not aspire to completely replace
the existing representative system structures inherited from the nineteenth century, but to
supplement and enrich them with a major source of legitimacy.42
These online tools therefore should not be wasted,43 especially when Spanish society in
general is in a climate of mounting disaffection, and politicians lack legitimacy and trust in the
eyes of Spanish citizens. This was evidenced in the news summary published by the CIS
Barometer (October 2104, Study No. 3041), which stated that only 2.1 percent of respondents
expressed high confidence for the prime minister, Mariano Rajoy; 9.6 percent was fairly
confident; 25.5 percent expressed little confidence; and 61.1 percent showed no confidence.
When asked about the general political situation, 60.9 percent of respondents considered the
current political situation to be very bad, 26.9 percent considered it bad, and 9.4 percent
considered it regular, according news summary of the November CIS Barometer (Study No.
3045).
It therefore is not constructive to adopt a negative academic viewpoint that only sees the
limits or risks that the Internet brings about. In the authors view, the implementation of new
online technologies gives the possibility of opening a direct dialogue between the
administrative structures and a larger population, increases the openness of power, and makes
it easier for citizens to access information.44 In short, this is an opportunity to encourage a
population that is discouraged and disgusted by the institutional, political, and economic crisis
currently ravaging Spain.
PODEMOS AND THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION

It is in this current climate that the Spanish political party Podemos has seized its
opportunity. Born as a citizens initiative, Podemos lays its foundation on participation,
transparency, and cyberactivism. This party has used a very powerful and comprehensive
political marketing strategy, as it has combined a large presence of their leaders in traditional
mass media communication, and provides innovative online tools for citizens and supporters.
Born just five months before the European elections of May 2014, Podemos won
1,245,948 votes and five members of the European Parliament (MEPs). It is evident that the
party utilized political communication strategically, combining the advantages of mediation
with ePolicy. Although the use of mass mediaespecially televisionhas been the key to
publicizing its political ideas and leaders, Podemos simultaneously has been able to create a
space for a massive transnational dialogue online, through Facebook, Twitter, and other online
tools. This seems to have increased the quantity and the quality of digital participation and,
undoubtedly, has shown a large group of online supporters.45
SOCIAL MEDIA AND DIGITAL TOOLS USED BY PODEMOS

The political party Podemos has made a clear commitment to digital democracy because it
uses different user-generated social networking sites and online tools as part of its political
strategy. The following is a discussion of these tools and how each one is used politically.
The party has an official Web site (www.podemos.info), which shares information
concerning the party and its program, policy documents, financial accounts, various news, links
to e-mail contacts, links to the citizens assembly or constituent body, and links to official
social network accounts (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Demoblog). The Web site also offers the
opportunity to join a portal for online voting (there are more than 269,584 individuals
presently registered) and to take sides in internal voting (such as voting for their program
components and lists of candidates). The online voting portal is powered by Agora voting
(https://agoravoting.com/) and uses software that allows users to vote online safely. In short,
the official Web site can work mainly as the partys online headquarters, a matrix, or as a letter
of presentation, and the sites components mainly are descriptive and informative. As noted,
however, this Web site enables users to participate and to be a part of the constituent processes
and internal organization if they are registered and have become what traditionally are known
as members or supporters of the party.
The party also has a Facebook page (Podemos/Facebook) with nearly one million likes.
On the profile page, political ideas are disseminated, events and activities are advertised, and
relevant information about the party is provided. This Facebook page works primarily as
informational media, as most of its posts link to news from traditional media (i.e., television,
radio, press). Yet, its main function is to spread the partys ideology by defending the values
and ideology of the party, focusing and denouncing the governments or other parties errors,
and linking to relevant news and discussing it. Additionally, its Facebook page includes
information about upcoming interviews and discussions, and where and when leaders will be
featured in traditional media. Thus, the page works as informational media, as a reminder, and
as an agenda of activities for supporters.
The party also has a Twitter account (@ahorapodemos), with more than 450,000
followers. Its main strategy for this account is to redistribute information and create a
collective conversation. Looking at Podemos time line, shows that the main Twitter account
basically re-tweets:
Messages from the partys top leaders (@ Pablo-Iglesias_; LolaPodemos; @pnique;

@TeresaRodr_; @rierrejon),
Messages linking to Podemos circles (@EuroPodemos; @PodemosCarabLat;
@PodemosSa; @BrasilPodemos; @PodemosLeganes; @PodemosCMadrid;
@PodemosLinares; @PodemosVilaseca; @PodemosLeganes; @PodemosSanidad;
@PodemosARG, to name just a few),
Messages linking to party leaders TV appearances (@publico_es; @SextaNocheTv),
and
Messages on news from alternative media, or from related organizations
(democraciareal or @la_tuerka), or even from anonymous people who send messages
of encouragement to leaders or who share similar views.
In this regard, this tool also works as an information provider in the same way that
Facebook does, in that it establishes links with other information. At the same time, it is
complemented by all the party leaders personal pages, which also establish a dialogue with
@ahorapodemos and re-tweet what is posted there. This tool not only facilitates
communication with the common citizen, regardless of whether they are Podemoss members
or supporters, but also favors internal communication and creates continuity.
The party also has a YouTube channel that includes information on the constitutional
process of the party, the structure of the organization, political proposals, speeches made by
party leaders, and interviews from traditional media. The site also has videos relating to the
use of online tools for citizen participation proposed by the party, and information on
democratic models and political issues of other countries. The main purpose of the YouTube
channel is informational and educational.
Another online tool is Plaza Podemos (http://plaza.podemos.info). Unlike the other tools,
its purpose is not to disseminate information or to expose information from other media outlets.
Plaza Podemosa community and forum (on the same page)is defined as Podemos
official meeting and discussion place, where people can share materials, opinions, ideas, and
projects. Through the online tool redditwhich works as informational mediausers can
perform activities including making comments, providing input, sharing information, initiating
threads in the community, participating in real-time open discussions, and moderating
discussions.
This tool also allows for group interviews (#RuedaDeMasas) with the party leaders in real
time, during which people can pose questions, get answers, vote on questions and answers, and
make comments. The purpose of this tool is to create a space for a live debate online in which
all users can register and participate, so long as they meet certain ethical standards so as not to
disturb or harass other participants.
The party also uses an online tool called titanpad (https://titanpad.com) to hold virtual
meetings with followers and supporters. Because there is no mandatory personal presence in a
specific time or space, these assemblies can take place transnationally and thus can include
party members who are in other countries or elsewhere at the time of the meeting. Using
titanpad, everything written on it can be read and modified in real time. There is no need to
register and all participants can participate at the same level. Meetings also can be
coordinated by a moderator who could establish a procedure regarding the topics covered, the
time to be invested, and how to carry out voting or the collective decision making.
Podemos uses Loomioan online tool for collaborative decision making
(https://www.loomio.org)to create clear, intuitive, and effective discussions. Loomio
enables consensus to be reached faster and pluralistically.
Lastly, with Appgree (http://www.appgree.com/), another free user-friendly application,
one can create polls quickly via cellphone or on the Web. Appgree enables thousands of users
to participate. Thus, an administrator of a group could pose a question and an unlimited number
of people could express a response. It is noteworthy that each user can propose different
answers and, in just a few minutes, the applications smart algorithm can create a ranking of the
proposals most widely accepted and yield results that tend to have a 90% consensus.
NEW FORMS TO PARTICIPATE IN POLITICS

One of the most unique features of this new political party is its community-organizing
system of circles, or spaces for citizen participation. These circles are groups of people
and have no leaders, are free and spontaneously created, and the protagonists are the citizens.
Under the banner of the party, these open public assemblies have a flexible organization; they
are open to all who wish to participate and only require from participants to be considered
circles of the party that they have a minimum of participants and not duplicate other existing
circles.
Currently there are more than 600 circles or groups of persons networked with different
themes and scopes, but all under the label Podemos. There are 42 sectorial circles on
diverse topics such as disability, feminism, education, self-employment, culture, Animalista
(animal protection), Unionists, sports, unemployed, information and communications
technologies (ICTs), senior citizens, officials, health, transport, and journalismto name a few
and territorial circles that cover not only the Spanish territory, but the entire globe. There
are more than 500 circles nationwide, currently constituted and supported by Podemos, and
more than 30 foreign circles throughout the world, in Europe, Africa, the United States, and
Asia.
Each of these circles in turn relies on online social networking tools for their internal and
external operation. In principle, each user has a Facebook page, and some also have a Twitter
account, Web page, or blog linked to the circle. The purpose of these tools is also informative
in nature. These tools utilize almost the same strategies used by Podemos Central, which
publishes links to news from other media or other Podemos circles, disseminates political
ideas, conducts activities, and shares information on face-to-face or virtual meetings, including
their dates and times. It is worth noting, however, that these are not fan pages created by the
party or its leaders, as one would find in other traditional political parties or even in Podemos
Central. On the contrary, the pages are not created by Podemos professionals or
communication officers, but by anonymous citizens who voluntarily decided to create them, so
that they come into existence as autonomous initiatives, like many other virtual communities.46
Therefore, one of the most promising aspects of these circles is that they are citizen
initiatives; that is, they are created by groups of individuals altruistically and voluntarily.
These multitudes of anonymous citizens connected through circles carry out all sorts of
outreach strategies typical of political marketing, but without expecting anything in return. In
the process, they become virtual communities of content creators,47 which, as is evident, is
very beneficial for the party. Namely, this virtual troop, independent and free, distributes
content and political messages without motivation other than being a part of the collective and
expressing their discontent with the current political system in the country.
In this regard, it is curious to note how Podemos has motivatedperhaps unintentionally,
perhaps strategicallythe creation of a huge international network of people that is constantly
debating ideas. This network aims to change the social and political foundations of discontent
by taking the charge of political action, that is to say, by participating online and offline. In this
respect, it could be said that the logic of cyberactivismwhich above all has tried to spread a
message making use of new technologies and leveraging its advantages in speed, virality,
horizontalityhas been reversed. Now the citizens form an organized multitude and are
managing online participation.
The circles also use tools such as e-mail or Whatsapp for instant communication among
members. For internal functioning, circles use tools such as Google groups and Google drive,
and others apps such as Loomio or Doodle. Depending on need, different tools are used to
facilitate decision making, to distribute public announcements, and to publish relevant
information for members. It should be reiterated that the party does not control any of these
internal and external procedures; they are performed by anonymous citizens, and carried out
independently within each circle. In this respect, it is a totally new phenomenon for
thousands of people to be involved in political activism, motivated to a great extent by other
citizens messages posted on social networks.
Although it might seem that the majority of political activism or the participation promoted
by Podemos and by the citizens at the service of the political party takes place in the virtual
world, it must be remembered that the circles have a commitment to meet regularly in face-
to-face meetings. Thus, all members can learn and discuss their topics of interest in person. In
this sense it seems that the Internet reinforces the political practices of previously mobilized
citizens48 whoonce gatheredselect which online tools might be more useful and interesting
for their communicative purposes.
FACEBOOK AT THE SERVICE OF THE CIRCLES AND PODEMOS

Given the interest in exploring how the Internet and social networks enrich democratic
participation, a qualitative methodology was designed to tackle this question. Moreover,
because the political party under study is based on citizen participation through circles or
assemblies, the activity of three of these circles on Facebook was analyzed. In this sense, the
study explored how average citizens connect and participate in democracy through networks
and via the Internet. For this study, three circles of different scope were selected for
examination: a sectorial circle, Podemos Education, having 13,102 fans; a national circle,
Podemos Lavapies in Madrid, having 1,443 fans; and a foreign circle, Podemos Chile, in
Santiago de Chile, having 793 fans. The study examined all of the publications of Podemos
Education (135) dating from February 12, 2014, to December 17, 2014; all Podemos
Lavapies posts (103), from its inception on January 26, 2014, through December 12, 2014;
and all of Podemos Chiles entries (100), since its inception on January 25, 2014, to December
17, 2014.
To understand political action online through Facebook a number of categories were
established to measure the activities and political functions of the three circles fan pages. The
categories of political action defined for content analysis were:
Appeal to direct participation;

Link to the news media, Web sites, or other Podemos circles;
Publication of records and internal documents of the organization;
Information about constituent process, organizational chart, and topics of interest to
participants;
Dissemination of political ideas by creating slogans, messages, and images;
Requests of information for users; and
Other functions.
POLITICAL FUNCTIONS OF FAN PAGES

In light of the analysis, significant differences were found in the political use of the three
Facebook pages under analysis. These differences show that Facebook is a tool for the citizens
who use them, and not a mere extension of the political party or its leaders. Moreover, as
stated, these are citizen initiatives, pages that have been created by individuals or groups of
individuals, pages that have increasingly added more participants. As for the differences found
in the use of the three circles, it is clear that the main objective of the Podemos Lavapies fan
page is to make a clear and direct appeal to participation (61), and Podemos Educations fan
page focuses on the dissemination of political ideas through posts and messages created by its
administrators or users (44). In a different vein, Chiles fan page simply posts links to news
from different media, Web sites, and other sources (59), functioning more as an informational
medium.
The Podemos Lavapies Facebook wall calls for clear and straightforward participation
using simple slogans such as Join or Participating is in our hands, accompanied by
activities. These calls are made by posting news, creating events, or by merely changing the
profile picture, which gives the site users the opportunity to include the event information next
to the picture. Most announcements and notices were for on-site activities, such as calls for
regular assemblies, calls for special assemblies, meetings with the circle coordinator,
committee meetings, campaign events, meetings of the city council, calls to collect food, group
events, seminars, workshops, neighborhood meetings, gatherings, lectures, putting up posters,
demonstrations, bicycle rides, searches for representatives for elections, and searches for
volunteers for different causes. Although the vast majority of posts called for face-to-face
meetings, two calls for virtual meetings were also madea conference with party leaders (via
reddit) and an invitation to download the application @appgree to be able to vote virtually.
The direct call for participation is much less evident in Podemos Education, which focuses
on the dissemination of political ideas and encourages debate and reflection more than face-to-
face political action. Posts include ideas and quotes from thinkers, politicians, and ordinary
citizens, synthesized in clear, direct statements. It is also common to find pictures or drawings
illustrating a slogan or a policy proposal. In these posts, Podemos is very explicit about what
it wants as a political party and what the citizensas members of the partydemand. It is a
circle dedicated mainly to education and entries reflect upon and concentrate on this topic.
Unlike the other two circlesPodemos Lavapies and Podemos Chilewhich do not include
ideological debate, Podemos Education posts slogans, quotes, or messages to encourage
discussion, debate, and reflection.
Unlike the other two circles discussed here, Podemos Chile focuses on the dissemination
of information. In fact, few messages (11) that encouraged participation were calls to convene
on regular assemblies. There were very few posts (2) in which a proposed slogan or a clear
political message from the public was promoted. Undoubtedly, this is due to geography.
Although the Lavapies circle has a strategic connection with the country geographically and
with other local community associations in Madrid, the Chilean circle is like an island of
involvement abroad, with little chance of connecting with national activism. At the same time,
being a circle with lower levels of participation, and many less active members, it is
difficult for it to embark on more creative ventures, such as designing posters with slogans or
finding discussion threads developed by the users.
The main function of the Podemos Chile fan page has been to publish and disseminate party
or political information. It mainly includes links to videos, songs, and interviews with leaders,
or links to other traditional news media or organizations (59). This information has also been
supplemented with the publication of information about the grassroots constituent process, the
organizational structure of the party, or information from other circles (16).
To a lesser extent, the Podemos Education fan page shares links on initiatives, monitoring
of court cases, and news on current topics (42); or the Podemos Lavapies fan page might
publish links to news from digital media, disseminate information through documentaries, or
explore the social networking apps and tools used by the circle or party (10). In all three
cases, the information published by the fan page site administrators focused on the party and its
representatives, retrospectives on face-to-face activities, or real-time reports on activities that
were taking place. Very few of the publications dealt with different issues, and the only
connection to international conflicts were expressions of solidarity, such as regarding the Gaza
conflict. Messages of support for the circle and the party also were found in the Assemblies
minutes for both Podemos Lavapies and Podemos Chile.
IS IT POSSIBLE TO HAVE A WORLDWIDE DEBATE?

At first glance, it is overwhelming to think that in the virtual space there are hundreds of
political debates taking place in the more than 600 pages of Facebooks circles, in
assemblies on reddit, through Appgree #RuedaDeMasas, or via Loomio. It also is hard to
imagine how it is possible that all these virtual conversations converge on a common
integrated space, or can be transformed into a true shared dialogue. This unstoppable network,
which continues to expand, and these Facebook walls, which continue growing every second,
precisely show some of the limitations or challenges that cyberactivism must solve. Thus, the
question is how can all these micro-debatestaking place simultaneously in different parts of
the world from and towards Podemosbe combined?
In fact, it is nearlyif not completelyimpossible for all the people involved to actually
be connected. As the Hong Kong circle proposes alternatives to vote from abroad on its
Facebook page, the Beirut circle recaps how the Lebanese press deals with the recent cases
of political corruption in Spain. In Isla Cristina, Huelva (Spain), the circle calls for the
affiliation of new supporters. The Lugo, Galicia, circle shares news about a group of workers
in a hotel who are going through a difficult employment situation. Thus, the circle in
Lavapies is concerned about the neighbors, and Podemos Education proposes a deep reflection
on public education, and Podemos in Chile debates the rights of expatriates returning to Spain
or the difficulties of voting from abroad.
In this sense, it is difficult to find unity among the citizens or create a global dialogue, as it
is evident that circles end up becoming islands of participation at the local level, which
work only for members immediate interests. Yet, participation dynamics of exclusion play out
between those involved and those who cannot get involved (because they lack economic
resources, Internet access, or cognitive resources to use the proposed social networking tools);
and, for example, among those who are members of some circles but not of others. These
islands of participation occur because the citizens who are grouped together or who engage in
dialogue end up focusing on their individual or local issues and lose sight of the universal
problems. Thus, it seems that participation is more individualistic than it appears at first
glance.
Despite the limitations posed, the changes in democratic participationin the context of
this case studyshow that activism and citizen mobilization generated through the Internet
bring more information, greater transparency, and an increase in new forms of citizen
participation. Ultimately, at a qualitative and a quantitative level, it should be evaluated as a
positive trend, which contrasts with the alleged disaffection, disinterest, and apathy of citizens
in relation to politics, often denounced or criticized by academics and governments, or
evidenced in surveys or in percentages of electoral abstention.
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE CHALLENGES

First, in light of the analysis presented here one could conclude that, indeed, as it was
suggested initially, the Internet and new online tools can enhance citizen participation. The use
of Facebook is key to being part of a circle, because all the information regarding online and
offline participation is published there. Answers are still needed about how such participation
increases, however, and whether there is a direct connection with the use of Facebook and
face-to-face participation. In this regard, there is a need for further case studies and further
empirical research that might offer suggestions about broader trends.
Secondly, after analyzing how the circles operate, and how participants use social
networks, it is clear that using Facebook encourages communication among its members. This
is especially evident in the case of the circles analyzed, which function as alternative media
in which political ideas can be formed, and information on activities or details about the
programmatic basic structure or the partys operation are provided.
Lastly, rather than being a debate on fan pages of the circles analyzed, the proposed
publications allow citizens to form a critical opinion; reflect on political ideas; share with
others relevant information to actively participate in various activities, such as assemblies,
workshops, and demonstrations; and to question much of the content appearing in traditional
media. In this sense the participation, which occurs in the virtual space, has a direct connection
to the participation that takes place offline. The Facebook pages of the three circles under
study, more than creating discussions that were irrelevant to reality, consolidated as circles,
as they organized assemblies and face-to-face meetings.
It is too early to know the real extent of social networks and online tools on Podemoss
electoral results in the general elections of 2015 but, certainly, new forms of participation
motivated by the party and developed precipitously by anonymous citizens invite a
reassessment of traditional concepts of participation and citizenship. Taking into account that
these dynamics show that citizens are increasingly aware and interested in politics, one can no
longer speak of political passivity.
NOTES
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18. Cotarelo and Crespo, Comunicacin poltica.
19. Philippe J. Maarek, Politics 2.0: New Forms of Digital Political Marketing and Political Communication, Trpodos 34
(2014): 1322; Mayo Fuster and Joan Subirats, Crisis de representacin y de participacin. Son las comunidades virtuales
nuevas formas de agregacin y participacin ciudadana?, Arbor. Ciencia, Pensamiento y Cultura 188 (756) (2012): 64156.
20. Cotarelo, Dialctica, 19.
21. Mario Tascn and Yolanda Quintana, Ciberactivismo. Las nuevas revoluciones de las multitudes conectadas
(Madrid: Catarata, 2012), 64.
22. Linda Harasim, Global Networks, an Introduction, in Global Networks, Computers and International
Communication, edited by Linda Harasim (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 314; Mara Elena Martnez Torres, The
Internet: Post-Modern Struggle by the Dispossessed of Modernity (paper presented at Congreso LASA, Guadalajara, Mxico,
1997).
23. Rosa Borge and Ana Cardenal, Surfing the Net: A Pathway to Participation for the Politically Uninterested? Policy &
Internet 3(1) (2011): 129.
24. Geoffrey Scott Aikens, Deweyan Systems in the Information Age, in Digital Democracy. Discourse and Decision
Making in the Information Age, edited by Barry N. Hague and Brian D. Loader (London: Routledge, 1999), 17994; Malcolm
Gladwell, Small Changes: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted, New Yorker, December 8, 2014.
25. Josep Maria Llaurad, Democrcia digital: informacin, participacin, transparencia (Illes Balears: Ediciones UIB,
2006), 78; Evgeny Moroz, El desengao de Internet (Barcelona: Destino, 2010).
26. Manuel Martnez Nicols, De la brecha digital a la brecha cvica. Acceso a las tecnologas de la comunicacin y
participacin ciudadana en la vida pblica, Telos. Cuadernos de Comunicacin e Innovacin 86 (2011): 2436.
27. Eszter Hargittai and Amanda Hinnant, Digital Inequality Differences in Young Adults Use of the Internet,
Communication Research 35(5) 2008, doi: 10.1177/0093650208321782, accessed December 2, 2014.
28. Russell Neuman, Bruce Bimber, and Matthew Hindman, Internet and Four Dimensions of Citizenship, in The Oxford
Handbook of American Public Opinion and the Media, edited by Robert Y. Shapiro and Lawrence R. Jacobs (Oxford:
Oxford Handbooks, 2010), 2242.
29. Jennifer Oser, Marc Hooghe, and Sofie Marien, Is Online Participation Distinct from Offline Participation? A Latent
Class Analysis of Participation Types and Their Stratification, Political Research Quarterly 66(1) (2013): 91101.
30. Jennifer Earl and Alan Schussman, The New Site of Activism: Online Organizations, Movement Entrepreneurs, and the
Changing Location of Social Movement Decision-Making, in Consensus Decision Making, Northern Ireland and
Indigenous Movements, edited by Patrick Coy (London: JAI Press, 2003), 15588; Jeroen Van Laer and Peter Van Aelst,
Internet and Social Movement Action Repertorios, Information, Communication & Society 13 (8) (2010): 114671.
31. Luis Arroyo, The Cyber Utopia Was This? The Side Effects of the Internet. Sofactivism, Tribalism, Trivialization and
New Censorship, Seminar, Public Communication in the Evolving Media Landscape: Adapt or Resist? Brussels, March 22,
2013, http://consilium.europa.eu/publicom, accessed November 2, 2014.
32. Mario Diani, Social Movement Networks Virtual and Real, Information, Communication & Society 3(3) (2000):
386401.
33. Morozov, Desengao.
34. Eva Anduiza, The Internet, Election Campaigns and Citizens: State of Affairs, Quaderns del Cac 33 (2009): 512;
Carlos Cunha, Irene Martin, James Newell, and Luis Ramiro, Southern European Parties and Party Systems, and the New
ICTs, in Political Parties and the Internet: Net Gain?, edited by Rachel Gibson, Paul Nixon, and Stephen Ward (London and
New York: Routledge, 2003); Wainer Lusoli, A Second-Order Medium? The Internet as a Source of Electoral Information in
25 European Countries, Information Polity 10 (2005): 24765; Vctor Sampedro, Celia Muoz, Jos Luis Dader, and Eva
Campos Domnguez, Spains Cyber-Campaign: Only for a Dissatisfied, Yet Very Active, Minority, Following the Trend of
Other Southern European Countries, Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies 3 (1) (2011): 320.
35. Richard Kimberlee, Why Dont British Young People Vote at General Elections?, Journal of Youth Studies 5 (1)
(2002): 8598; Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine, Political Participation, Political Action and Political Identities: Young D/Deaf
Peoples Perspectives, Space and Polity 7(2) (2003): 11734; Ryan E. Carlin, The Decline of Citizen Participation in
Electoral Politics in Post-Authoritarian Chile, Democratization 13(4) (2006): 63251; Therese OToole et al., Tuning Out or
Left Out? Participation and Non-Participation among Young People, Contemporary Politics 9(1) (2003): 4561; Edward
Phelps, Young Citizens and Declining Electoral Turnout: Trends and Explanations (paper presented at the annual conference
The Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, EPOP, Nottingham University, 2006); Nelson Wiselman, Get Out the VoteNot:
Increasing Effort, Declining Turnout, Option Politiques, February (2006): 1823.
36. Lance Bennet, New Media Power: The Internet and Global Activism, in Contesting Media Power, edited by Nick
Couldry and James Curran (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 1738; Andrew Chadwick, Internet Politics (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Peter Dahlgren, The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication: Dispersion
and Deliberation, Political Communication 22 (2005): 14762; Pippa Norris, The Impact of the Internet on Political
Activism: Evidence from Europe, International Journal of Electronic Government Research 1(1) (2005): 2039; Pippa
Norris, Stefaan Walgrave, and Peter Van Aelst, Who Demonstrates? Anti-State Rebels, Conventional Participants, or
Everyone?, Comparative Politics 37(2) (2005): 189205; Clay Shirky, The Political Power of Social Media: Technology, the
Public Sphere, and Political Change, Political Affairs 28 (2011), http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67038/clay-shirky/the-
political-power-of-social-media, accessed June 3, 2015.
37. Jorge Resina de la Fuente, Ciberpoltica, redes sociales y nuevas movilizaciones en Espaa: el impacto digital en los
procesos de deliberacin y participacin ciudadana, Mediaciones Sociales. Revista de Ciencias Sociales y de la
Comunicacin 7 (2010): 14364.
38. Stefano Rodot, La democracia y las nuevas tecnologas de la comunicacin (Buenos Aires: Losada, 2000), 9.
39. Mart, Jos Luis. Alguna precisin sobre las nuevas tecnologas y la democracia deliberativa y participativa, IDP.
Revista de Internet, Derecho y Poltica 6 (2008), 6, http://www.uoc.edu/idp/6/dt/esp/marti.pdf, accessed February 2014.
40. Center for Sociological Research.
41. Llaurad, Democracia, 86.
42. Jos Luis Mart, Alguna precisin sobre las nuevas tecnologas y la democracia deliberativa y participativa, IDP.
Revista de Internet, Derecho y Poltica 6 (2008), 5, http://www.uoc.edu/idp/6/dt/esp/marti.pdf, accessed February 2014.
43. Martnez Nicols, Brecha digital, 5.
44. Rudenko, Ciberrepblica, 174.
45. For example, Pablo_Iglesias_ has 718K compared to 644K of marianorajoy. The Twitter account of Ahorapodemos
Party has 466K versus 185K of the Popular Party (data retrieved December 17, 2014).
46. Ismael Pea-Lpez, Quin impacte tenen les xarxes socials en la participaci?, Coop. Revista de la Federaci de
Cooperatives de Treball 3 (2014): 5657.
47. Fuster and Subirats, Crisis.
48. Borge and Cardenal, Surfing the Net; Zizi Papacharissi, The Virtual Sphere 2.0: The Internet, the Public Sphere and
Beyond, in Handbook of Internet Politics, edited by Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard (London: Routledge
International Handbooks, 2009); Dahlgren, Internet; Shelley Boulianne, Does Internet Use Affect Engagement? A Meta-
Analysis of Research, Political Communication 26 (2009): 193211; Bruce Bimber, Information and Political Engagement in
America: The Search for Effects of Information Technology at the Individual Level, Political Research Quarterly 54(1)
(2001): 5367.
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9
Will the Revolution Be Tweeted? Activism,

Politics, and the Internet
Lzaro M. Bacallao-Pino
INTRODUCTION
Newspapers announce the Twitter Revolution: a singular social phenomenon
characterized by a spirit of liberty and mass demonstrationsprotests, rioting, and any other
popular expression of discontentthat are brought to the world in real time through social-
media networks and online video.1 Although some publications underscore the importance of
a collective action that is coordinated using Twitter to plan the manifestations, mobilize the
participants, and update the news about it to all around the world, other media outlets have
speculated about the real impact of social media. These other outlets mentioned certain
examples of what has happened in some of the countries where social mediabased collective
actions took place, such as the electoral victory of prime minister Recep Erdogan in Turkey, or
the chaos and civil war in Libya.2
The debates on the interrelationships between the Internet and collective action began 20
years ago by the Zapatista movement, originating in the remote mountains of the Mexican
Southeast. The Zapatista Army has been called the first informational guerrilla movement3
and the first social netwar.4 Since 1994, there have been many examples of the uses of the
information and communication technologies (ICTs) as part of collective action. A brief time
line of these examples includes the Battle of Seattle, in November 1999 and the creation of the
Indymedia network; the first edition of the World Social Forum (WSF), in 2001; the Arab
Spring; the England riots, in 2011; the Spanish 15M Movement; Occupy Wall Street; the
Mexican #YoSoy132 (English: #Iam132); and the protests in Brazil in 2013 and 2014.
Consequently, the increasing role of the ICTs in social movements has become a relevant
topic of research. The analyses on the issue have underlined, on the one hand, the contribution
of the ICTs for enabling participatory processes and improving democracy this way.
Conversely, other approaches have criticized certain tendencies as leading to an ICTs-based
technological neo-determinism and a new digital utopianism. Those discussions have
increased in the case of the analyses of social media, because these technological platforms
provide a greater openness and horizontality, and a richer user experience and participation.
A number of questions surround these debates. A transversal question is: Does the Internet
provide a source for citizen participation or mobilization? Other questions refer to the
interrelationships between online and offline dimensions, or ask how social movements deal
with the tension among articulation and visualizationtwo of the possible uses of these
technological resources as part of collective action. This chapter aims to discuss some ideas
about the uses of the Internet by social mobilizations and the enabling conditions for the
development of sustained processes of sociopolitical change as a result of this social media
based collective action.
INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES AND

COLLECTIVE ACTION: DEBATES AND CHALLENGES
Social movements and mobilizations, as part of their collective action, put into practice
certain repertoires of contention5 that cannot be seen as simply a public display of disruptive
action or be limited to a set of various protest-related tools and actions available in a given
period, but rather as certain performances and claims that make routines within a cultural
frame of performance for collective action.6 Over the last two decades, as part of the process
of change of the repertoires of collective action, ICTs have become a particularly relevant
resource of protests and public dissent.
At the early stages, ICTs were considered tools for the cyber-diffusion of contention,7 from
a perspective that regarded these technologies as a channel for making visible the actions that
take place offline. Subsequent approaches moved toward a more complex perspective,
underscoring the emergence of certain specific cyber-repertoires of action, understood as
Internet-based actions that only exist in the cyberspace. This repertoire includes online sit-ins,
signing online petitions, hacking, defacing Web pages, e-mail floods, releasing viruses and
worms, and performing data theft or destructionconfiguring what has been defined as
cyber-protests or cyberactivism.8 In this new scenario for collective actionthe digital
scenariothe configuration of an electronic repertoire of contention becomes an intricate
process, given the complexity of how its development, innovation, and diffusion take place.
This all occurs in a context characterized by the rapid dynamics of cyber-diffusion, the impact
of digital innovation even outside the realm of an online protest, and the use of the new tactics
even by nonactivists.9
The rise of social media and of online social networks in particular, seems to give an
added twist to this communicational context, increasing the enabling conditions for democratic
dynamics through these Web 2.0 platforms. This is significant for debates on the articulation
between ICTs and democracya topic that has been a relevant aspect in the analyses of the
social impact of ICT from its very beginning. In that regard, discussions have ranged from
analyses of the consequences of the Internet on traditional forms and structures of
representative democracysuch as electoral campaigns, for example10to the contribution of
the ICTs to a new kind of participatory democracy through the revitalization of the public
sphere,11 and the enabling conditions for the configuration of an online scenario for democracy
and, consequently, the emergence of what has been called cyberdemocracy.12
The Internet has been considered as a resource of community building and as particularly
important in the scenario of an increasing lack of political engagement.13 Different authors
have emphasized the articulations between radical democracy and Internet practice, arguing
how the latter could contribute to advancing democratic dynamics beyond its
conceptualizations and practices within the liberal-capitalist political context,14 and
considering the extension and pluralization of the public sphere as a consequence of the online
practices.15 According to these approaches there is a close interrelationship among some
characteristics of the ICTs and certain dimensions of the democratic dynamics and the
processes of configuration of the public sphere, such as their shared interactive, deliberative,
and decentralized natures.16
In the view of other authors, however, there also is an obscure side of the Interneta
technological neo-determinism that mediates the understanding of ICTs by arguing that the
development of certain technologies determines social progress.17 Two tendencies resulting
from this neo-determinism are cyber-utopianismreferring to the inability to see the
negative consequences of the Internet for social relationships, assuming only the emancipatory
nature of the uses of the ICTs; and Internet-centrismthe trend to identify ICTs as the main
cause of all political and social changes in present societies.18 In the specific case of the uses
of the Internet for collective action, this perspective is present in some analyses that consider
the role played by social media in social protests. It is cited as evidence of a new
technological fetishism, through which the focus on the ICTs becomes a distraction from the
most important conflicts of contemporary capitalist societies.19
Although some studies argue that social media has produced singular communicational
dynamicscreating innovative forms of interaction and expression that stimulate civic
participation, bringing new dynamism to public mobilization, and consequently bringing about
processes of sociopolitical transformation.20 Conversely, previous research on recent social
mobilizations has identified a certain tendency toward a hierarchical structure in the
appropriation of social media by its participants, as indicated by trends of information
centralization and patterns of popularity growth.21
These debates lead to a complex issue: The interrelationships between the uses of the
Internetand, in particular, the new technological platforms associated to the Web 2.0by the
participants in social mobilizations and the processes of sociopolitical change that are
configured as part of the collective action. In general, the interrelationships among social
mobilizations and social change can seem too obvious to need explanation. Rather than
questioning whether there is a connection between protest and change, it is far more likely that
it will be presumed that social change and social movements are simultaneously occurring.22
Social movements have been defined in terms of social change, as agents that try to carry it out,
nullify it, or avoid it;23 and although it has been recognized that certain social movements focus
on individual change, it has been emphasized the social dimension of this process of
transformation.24
The definition of social movements as a set of non-institutionalized collective actions
consciously oriented towards social change (or resisting such changes) and possessing a
minimum of organization25 highlights another particularly relevant issue: the interrelationships
between social change and the organizational dimension of social movements. There has been
an important trend to propose a relationship between social movements and social change that
is based on their purpose of transforming the world without taking power, moving away from
the traditional two-step revolutionary strategy that has dominated the anticapitalist projects
during the 19th and 20th centuries (first, take the powerthe stateand second, change the
world).26 From this perspective, social change takes place within social movements as part of
their internal practices and far from the eyes of the state, configuring new practices and social
relations through which a new social organization it is collectively built.27
Given the importance of studying these collective actors as agents of social change,
discussion concerning what determines the outcomes they achieved has been central to the
debate on social movements.28 Their effects are part of an integral analysis of their actions,
focused on dimensions such as the relationships between the level of radicalism of their
proposals of social change and their successfulness, the comparison between radical social
movements and moderate movements, the pros and cons of using violence to achieve social
transformation, and the positive or negative consequences of a centralized and bureaucratic
organization for social movements and their projects of social transformation.
In this regard, communication is considered one of the dimensions in which social change
takes place within social movements. The impact of social movements is not limited to the
enactment of politics through protests and cultural contestation, but also to the generation of a
diverse knowledgecalled knowledge-practices,29an approach that leads to a point of
view of social movements as processes through which knowledge is generated, modified, and
mobilized. From this point of view, social movements are more than collectively organized
action: they also consist of collectively constructed and share meanings, interpretations,
rituals, and identities, in a perspective that reinforces an idea of collective and individual
transformation in social movements that is much closer to a greater recognition of diffuse
expressions of social activism than to a programmatic and conventionally political agendas
for social change.30
SOCIAL NETWORKS AND COLLECTIVE ACTION: PARTICIPATORY

ARTICULATION VERSUS MOBILIZING VISIBILITY
Recent social mobilizations throughout the worldsuch as the Arab Spring, the
BlackBerry riots in the United Kingdom, the Chilean Winter, the 15-M Spanish Movement,
the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Mexican #YoSoy132, and the occupation of the Taksim
Square in Turkeyare relevant for discussing the articulation between social movements,
social mobilizations, and the Internet (particularly social media), in the light of the
interrelationships among social mobilizations and social change. All of these mobilizations
have made a wide use of social media, to the extent of being able to be defined in terms of
social mediabased mobilizations. The notions of Twitter and Facebook revolutions have
been coined as a result of such episodes of collective action, for naming and underscoring the
potential of a popular mobilization emerged throughor based upononline social networks
for framing processes of deep sociopolitical change.
The particularities of the appropriations of these Web 2.0 platforms during these
mobilizations, however, as well as their long-term development, provide a significant
analytical scenario for understanding the complexities of this potential. There are two main
tensions mediating the appropriations of ICTs by protesters: (1) the tension between an
articulating or a visibility-centered appropriation and (2) the tension between online and
offline collective action. This chapter examines how these tensions mediate the
interrelationships between politics, activism, and the Internet, particularly in the case of social
mediabased mobilizations. It also provides a relevant perspective for overcoming two
opposite extreme points of view on the communicative dimension of social movements: an
instrumental approach that considers communication merely as a tool for other purposes, and a
perspective that overestimates the role of the communication by placing it at the core of social
movements practices.
Particularly in the context of highly concentrated media systems, online social media
provide new possibilities for the development of an autonomous communication. In that regard,
previous studies have examined how the use and appropriation of ICTsparticularly online
social networksby certain groups can be considered the basis for a process of
democratization of mainstream media, fostering pluralism and triggering important processes
related to a given political culture.31 Coherently, social mediabased mobilizations have been
considered influential actors in politics that have shown how collective action can emerge and
evolvethrough the use of these technological resourcesto communicate certain concerns
and organize protests. According to some authors, social media, particularly Twitterhave
had an increasing importance for sociopolitical activism, to the extent of influencing
governmental decision making and shaping the interrelationships between governments,
politicians, citizens, and other stakeholders.32
The Web 2.0 is considered a significant technological resource that has produced relevant
changes in political communication, its structures, and dynamics33 by providing certain
technological resources to citizens that enable them not only to consume but also to produce
their own communicative products and spaces.34 It empowers people, who then can find new
spaces of autonomy on the Internet35 by opening the information environment to multiple groups
that can create or incorporate new issues or topics into the public debate.36 This fosters
transparency, facilitates many-to-many communication processes, and promotes citizens
interactivity.
Sometimes, however, this positive perspective does not take into account the complexities
of the interrelationships between social media, social mobilizations, and processes of
sociopolitical change. The tension among two possible main goals in the use of these
technological resources as part of collective actionvisualization of dissent or articulation of
participatory processesis a central tenant for how social mediabased mobilizations can
becomeor fail to becomesustainable processes of sociopolitical change.
Participants in these episodes of collective action underscore their criticism of traditional
dynamics and structures of representative democracyquestioning its legitimacy, making
visible the opposition to it, and demanding a real democracy. This trend is summarized, for
instance, by the slogans Real Democracy NOW! or They call it democracy, but it is not,
by the Spanish 15M Movement. It is recognized that social media play a core role in
visualizing the opposition and mobilizing people by encouraging them to participate in
protests, occupations, and all collective actions. Some specific communicative contextsfor
instance, the Mexican or the Turkish media systems, in the case of the #YoSoy132 and the
protests in Taksim Square, respectivelyreinforce certain uses of social media as resources
for overcoming mainstream medias censorship of news about collective actionstrengthening
the tendency toward a use of social media that is focused on the visualization of protests and
occupations.
At the same time, however, among the participants there is frequent and explicit concern
about the limits of a collective action focused on this visualization through social media.
Protesters are aware of the impossibility of a maintained high level of collective action over a
prolonged periodwe must reach a point where we stop. We cannot be marching every day,
said a participant in the #YoSoy132.37 In their discourses are frequent calls to advance toward
long-term strategies by creating spaces for the development of organizational dynamics, and
the proposal of a future agenda on their specific demands regarding public policies, so we
will be capable of organizing ourselves very well and consolidate us as a movement.38 These
concerns point to the long-term tension between protest and proposal in social movements, a
tension that has been at the center of some of the most important debates about these collective
agents.
Prioritizing a visualization-centered use of social media instead of an articulation-focused
use becomes a handicap in advancing toward the configuration of sustained spaces of social
participation. Although visualization through social media is a core enabling condition for the
spreading of collective action from below, at the same time this emphasis can produce an
outside-oriented perspective on the uses of social media. Although Web 2.0 platforms enable
users to create private spaces of interactionfor instance, sending private messages on
Twitter or Facebook, and to create private groups in the latterthe inherently open and
bidirectional nature of social media makes social media mobilizations face the
visualization/articulation tension in a way unlike that in any other case. The open bidirectional
articulation processes based on social media frequently are visible to general audiences, and
not just individuals participating in the collective action.
Given this particular nature of social media, the challenge for the participants in collective
action is to develop a communicative repertoire of action that joins articulating visualizations
and visible articulations, instead of assuming a perspective that emphasizes participatory
articulation or mobilizing visibility. Although both goalsvisualization and articulationare
equally important, any trend favoring one over the other will have negative consequences for
social mediabased collective action. In the case of a visibility-type use of social media,
social mobilizations might not succeed in becoming sustained dynamics of social participation
(i.e., a social movement). Conversely, if focused on articulation, then these episodes of social
action can be criminalized more easily by mainstream media.
To avoid using social media that focuses on mobilizing visibility against censorship by
mainstream media, and to achieve a dual and complex point of view that tries to join
articulation and visualization, participants in collective action emphasize the necessity of
overcoming the online dimension by creating offline spaces that are associated not only with
mobilizations and protests, but also with organizational processes. Participants highlighted, for
instance, that there is a need to develop assemblies, meetings, conventions and other face-to-
face collective spaces for discussing issues of internal organization and long-term demands.39
This idea leads to another tension in the analysis of social mediabased mobilizations as
sources of social change: online/offline dualism.
ONLINE AND OFFLINE COLLECTIVE ACTION: MEDIATIONS FOR

SOCIAL CHANGE
The online/offline tension traditionally has been a core point at issue in the analysis on the
uses of the ICTs, but recent social mobilizations have added some complexities to this debate.
Some of these episodes of collective action have emerged from social media and, in all cases,
these technological resources are significant in the resistance of participants and the spreading
of collective action. The importance of social media for collective action is explicitly
recognized by participants in their public discourses. It is recognized that social media is a
fabulous way of fostering social mobilizations and also a particularly emotional resource that
has led me to mobilization and solidarity.40
The importance of the digital dimension, however, is not limited to providing certain
technological resources for visualizing collective action. As noted, the Internet also has
become an important scenario for collective action in current societies. An increasing number
of cyberactionsactions that specifically and solely take place in cyberspacehave been
included in the repertoires of collective action. But ICTs are not only resources for collective
action, the digital experiences also are considered by the participants in social mobilizations
to be a preview of the alternative sociopolitical order they want to achieve, mainly by
highlighting the horizontality and participatory nature of the interactions within social media:
In social networks no one is more important than anyone else; we all are 140 characters,
stated a protester of the #YoSoy132.41
Online experiences are regarded as a prefiguration of this alternative sociopolitical order.
I see this park as the incarnation of Twitter. People retweet the information they receive,
respond to it and save what they like most in their list of favorites, stated one of the
participants in the occupation of Taksim Square.42 In some cases, this sense is reinforced,
because some protesters only participated in the online collective action, so their experience
of the mobilizations are focused on the digital context: I did not have time to participate in
assemblies and demonstrations, so my activism was completely on the digital social
networks, explained a participant in the #YoSoy132.43
Despite the importance given to the online repertoire of collective action as well as to the
digital spaces generated thanks to these technological resources, however, there also is a
critical position regarding the limits of the online action. Participants declared that they know
that hashtags are ephemeral and that it would be very good if people moved into the streets
instead of protesting only on social networks.44 This ephemerality is seen as being opposite to
the need of a long-term action to bring about a sustainable process of sociopolitical
transformation and to face the challenge of taking the opportunity to promote profound
changes in the relationship between citizens, the media, politicians and governments,
according to a member of the #YoSoy132.45
The tension between online and offline collective action is another significant mediation in
the transition from social mediabased mobilizations toward social movements. Conversely,
participants assume there is continuity of certain characteristics of social media and the
sustainability of collective action; for instance by considering that a decentralized movement
is impossible to be cancelled or infiltrated.46 On the other hand, participants also agree that it
is not enough to put pressure on corporations or governments with collective actions through
social media, but it is also needs a mass of people in the street telling a unified story.47 The
importance given to the online collective action in the case of social mediabased
mobilizations, however, has consequences in this transition from digital to offline scenarios. It
finds expression in the particular communicative and symbolical nature of the repertoires of
offline collective actions (occupations, manifestations); for instance, participants in the
#YoSoy132 held a symbolic funeral march to symbolically bury Mexicos democracy.
Besides this general communicative contamination of the practices of collective action
as a result of its original communicational nature, there is another important risk for social
mediabased mobilizations. By seeing the online experiences as a foreshadowing of the
sociopolitical change they want to achieve, participants can focus their action on the digital
spaces, configuring what has been called communicational happy islands48 and
underestimating the offline dimension of the action. At the same time, this focus on the online
dimension can lead to a perspective of the long-term actions that prioritize the communicative
dimension in the strategies for becoming sustained sources of sociopolitical participation.
Consequently, once the period of most intense collective action has passed, one of the most
important dimensions through which action continues is through the creation of alternative
communication spaces. Participants in the Taksim protests, for instance, created the Web site
Taksim Dayanmas (Taksim Solidarity);49 the members of #YoSoy132 created a digital space
for communication (Colectivo Msde131);50 and the participants in the protests of Occupy
Wall Street also founded a Web site.51
How such online/offline tension is resolved by those participating in episodes of collective
action mediatesin a central waythe enabling conditions for social mobilizations to become
social movements and thus be agents of sustained processes of sociopolitical change. At the
same time, it also mediates the sense of success within participants and regarding their
emotional involvement with the collective action. In that regard, in some cases there exist clear
feelings of disappointment about the long-term outcomes of the social mediabased
mobilizations.
I was [a member of the #YoSoy] 132. I witnessed how it emerged on a Thursday night
from a trending topic on Twitter. I lived the collective feeling of a march for the first
time, I embraced a political banner. I participated in internal meetings at my school, I
even was a spokeswoman and I gave interviews. I organized, I tweeted, I voted and
wrote but the genesis of energy change was not constant.52
In some cases, the illusion remains even when individuals assume that what they
demand will not happen, but think here we are, enjoying the moment; we know that
this is a good thing, we are all together, but then what? We do not know. Opposite this
positive view of the collective action as it takes place, however, after the mobilizations
have ended, the participants consider contradictions that can arise and everything
becomes very ambiguous.53 There are expulsions and fighting between different
factions, thus participants quit the collective action as a response to the attempt to
impose a single point of view, arguing that they are disappointed. I did not join the
movement for this. I am not here to fight with peers. It is profoundly absurd [after]
this entire effort to fight each other, instead of dedicating ourselves to change the
situation, declared an individual who has been expelled from the 15M Movement.54
CONCLUSIONS
The appropriations of ICTs for collective action do not stand in stark contrast, but rather
are in a gray area; it is here that the tensions reside. On the one side is articulation and
visualization, and on the other are the online and offline dimensions. The way that participants
deal with these tensions will mediate the development of social mediabased mobilizations
and the configuration of certain enabling conditions for them to become social movements
this is, sustained spaces for processes of sociopolitical change. Although the traditional idea of
revolutionthe so-called two-step revolutionary theoryimplies a moment of particular
energy in a collective action, a moment that leads to the taking of power, the sense of what
being revolutionary means for current social movements implies a permanent, step-by-step
process through which individuals try to configure the transformation from the bottom up.
Some recent episodes of collective action that have been centrally associated to a widened
use of social media show the complexities of the process. These mobilizations demonstrate
that there is a clear sense among participants that, although social media is an important
resource for visualizing their actions as well as for spreading the protests, these Web 2.0
platforms alone are not enough for achieving success and guaranteeing the continuity of the
collective action after the demonstrations have ended. Online social networks are considered
fabulous tools for both organization and diffusion, but these two uses seem to be somewhat
contradictory or, at minimum, difficult to make complement each other within collective action.
Particularly in contexts that lack spaces for expressing social dissent, focusing the use of
social media on visualization could have negative consequences. It could, for instance, lead to
a collective action focused on the online dimension, creating digital happy islands even though
the offline experiences remain unchanged. It could also produce a tendency to overestimate the
communicative dimension in the long-term strategies of collective action, taking the form of the
creation of spaces of alternative communication as the main action of continuity of social
participation.
Although protesters usually are aware of the possible negative consequences and try to
avoid them, many participants note the importance given to a visibility-centered use of social
media as compared with an articulating use. Paradoxically, this use of social media as part of
collective action seems to be closer to the traditional idea of what a revolution is. The highly
emotional nature of a visibility-centered use of these Web 2.0 platforms during the most active
moment of the social mobilization is in line with an approach to social change that is focused
on a momentthe seizure of powerinstead of on a process for building a new sociopolitical
order, step by step, in a long-term configuration. The immediacy of these technological
resources seems to contradict the long-term nature of a process of social change from here and
now and from below. Perhaps, after all, such a deep transformationa revolutioncannot be
tweeted.
The author wishes to thank the CONICYT/FONDECYT, Postdoctoral Program, Project
#3150063.
NOTES
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4. David Ronfeldt, John Arquilla, Graham Fuller, and Melissa Fuller, The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico (Santa
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5. Sydney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
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35. Manuel Castells, Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
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37. Israel Carren, quoted in Susana Moraga, #YoSoy132 busca ser la sombra del poder en Mexico [#YoSoy132 Aims to
be the Shadow of the Power in Mexico], ADN Poltico, July 24, 2012, http://www.adnpolitico.com/2012/2012/07/21/el-
yosoy132-busca-ser-la-sombra-del-poder-en-mexico.
38. Alina Rosa Duarte, quoted in Susana Moraga, #YoSoy132 busca ser la sombra del poder en Mexico [#YoSoy132 Aims
to be the Shadow of the Power in Mexico], ADN Poltico, July 24, 2012, http://www.adnpolitico.com/2012/2012/07/21/el-
39. Antonio Attolini, Por una democracia autntica, #YoSoy132 [For a Real Democracy, #YoSoy132], ADN Poltico,
September 19, 2012, http://www.adnpolitico.com/opinion/2012/09/19/antonio-attolini-por-una-democracia-autentica-yosoy132.
40. Diego Dante, quoted in Flor Goche, Yo Soy 132, movimiento del siglo XXI [I am 132, a 21st century movement],
Contralnea, September 11, 2012, http://contralinea.info/archivo-revista/index.php/2012/09/11/yo-soy-132-movimiento-del-siglo-
xxi/.
41. Rodrigo Serrano, quoted in Flor Goche, Yo Soy 132, movimiento del siglo XXI [I am 132, a 21st century movement],
Contralnea, September 11, 2012, http://contralinea.info/archivo-revista/index.php/2012/09/11/yo-soy-132-movimiento-del-siglo-
xxi/.
42. Engin Onder, quoted in Jos M. Calatayud, Los jvenes del Parque Gezi [Youth in Gezi Park], El Pas, June 9, 2013,
http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/06/09/actualidad/1370781813_691701.html.
43. Tania, quoted in Hctor de Maulen, De la red a las calles [From the Web to the Streets], Nexos Online, September
1, 2012, http://elecciones2012mx.wordpress.com/2012/09/01/de-la-red-a-las-calles-hector-de-mauleon-blog-nexos-en-linea/.
44. Ibid.
45. Regina Santiago, quoted in De Maulen, De la red a las calles [From the Web to the Streets], Nexos Online,
September 1, 2012, http://elecciones2012mx.wordpress.com/2012/09/01/de-la-red-a-las-calles-hector-de-mauleon-blog-nexos-
en-linea/.
46. Member of the Spanish 15M Movement, quoted in Eva Cavero, Esto est lleno de infiltrados [This is full of
infiltrators], El Pas, June 5, 2011, http://elpais.com/diario/2011/06/05/madrid/1307273054_850215.html.
47. About Us, Occupy Wall Street, http://occupywallst.org/about/, accessed November 20, 2014.
48. Rosa M. Alfaro, Culturas populares y comunicacin participativa [Popular Cultures and Participatory
Communication], Revista Caminos, no. 20 (2000): 1320.
49. See http://taksimdayanisma.org/.
50. See http://www.colectivo131.com.mx/.
51. See http://occupywallst.org/.
52. Gisela Prez de Acha, La democracia de #YoSoy132 [The Democracy of the #YoSoy132], Animal Poltico,
September 19, 2012, http://www.animalpolitico.com/blogueros-blog-invitado/2012/09/19/la-democracia-de-
yosoy132/#ixzz33PD7zyBc.
53. Gokce Gunac, quoted in Jos M. Calatayud, Los jvenes del Parque Gezi [Youth in Gezi Park], El Pas, June 9, 2013,
http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/06/09/actualidad/1370781813_691701.html
54. Carlos Paredes, quoted in Mara J. Hernndez, Cuando asoma el desencanto [When Disenchantment Peeps out], El
Mundo, May 15, 2012, http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2012/05/10/espana/1336646985.html.
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10
You Say You Want a Revolution? The

Internets Impact on Political Discussion,
Activism, and Societal Transformation
James D. Ponder and Rekha Sharma
INTRODUCTION
There are two primary positions when it comes to perceptions of the Internet: utopian and
dystopian. Indeed, at the dawn of the Internet age many thought that the instantaneous
information opportunities afforded by this new mass media platform would shepherd in a new
utopian age in politics. Journalists no longer would be limited by the traditional constraints of
the information-gathering process (e.g., finding stories, seeking out information) and could seek
out new areas for inquiry, as the Internet would provide both content and opportunities for
identifying sources. Citizens no longer would be constrained by the limitations of their own
regions newsgatherers. Citizens would freely seek out unbiased information from various
sources, or use a variety of sources to ensure that the information they retrieved was credible.
Additionally, the numerous opportunities for interaction provided by the Internet would allow
people to thoroughly vet their ideas and expose themselves to differing views.
Conversely, the dystopian view suggests that the rise of the Internet would lead to the
downfall of society. People would become more insular in terms of their interactions with
other people and with the information they would seek. Journalists would rely on unreliable
sources for information and could more easily fabricate information, resulting in numerous
false but salacious stories. Further, arguments from the dystopian side state that advances in the
Internet would allow for more monitoring of the populace by the government and additional
governmental control over the types of information available to the public.
Although this polarization has been used to frame the present anthology, the chapters herein
provide more nuanced perspectives on the influence of the Internet. This is because the truth
lies somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. Rather than restricting arguments to one side of
that binary (i.e., whether the Internet is good or bad), scholars or anyone interested in the
role of the Internet in politics instead should focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the
medium. What does the Internet do well? What does it not do well? Answers to these questions
will help determine whether, how, or to what extent the Internet impacts political change.
Further, for the sake of this particular chapter, the focus is on the effects of the Internet on
politics that have led to positive social outcomes.
Scholars have long lamented the decline of American democracy, particularly citing low
voter turnout, increased apathy, increased cynicism, and decreased knowledge.1 Some scholars
have indicated that the Internet could play an important role in revitalizing democracy and
enhancing civic engagement.2 Further, the Internet serves as a catalyst for political activism,
including acts of insurgency, revolution, and regime change. This chapter traces the history of
political candidates use of the Internet, and covers current research on how political
candidates and groups use the Web to inform, persuade, and mobilize the populace.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS ONLINE

The Internet first crept its way into the U.S. political scene in 1992, when Bill Clintons
presidential campaign used the medium as a sort of online brochure. Those who went to the
Web site could see the candidates biographies, read an explanation of stance on particular
policies, and read the full text of candidate speeches.3 Not surprisingly, Clintons Internet
strategy largely was overlooked by the public, journalists, and even his opponent because
many U.S. households were not online. In fact, less than 20 percent of the overall U.S.
population had a computer in the household.4
Clinton, however, apparently realized the potential of the Internet, as it played a key role in
his presidency. He even called his terms as president the first Administration of the Internet
Age, whereby Clinton and Gore worked together to unveil the first White House Internet page
in 1994, something that was quickly replicated throughout different branches of the
government. Clintons stated goal was to expand citizen access to government information and
services online.
In 1996, the Internet began to further make its way into presidential campaigning as it
became more well known and was used more; the overall U.S. Internet user population grew to
around 20 million subscribers.5 Further, as a result of Clintons focus on online activities, his
campaign began to use its online portal as more than just a brochure, offering a few donors the
opportunity to make donations that resulted in $10,000 being raised for the campaign.6
Interestingly, Bob Dole was the candidate who first brought the Internet into the limelight when
referencing his Web site (dolekemp96org) in his closing statements of the presidential
debate. As a sign of the inherent unfamiliarity of the system, Dole accidentally misdirected
viewers to a different site when he forgot to include the period before the .org part of the
URL. Most users were able to recognize this error; however, the Dole Web site soon crashed
after the announcement because it was unprepared for the increased traffic that his closing
statement generated.7
In the 2000 presidential election, candidate Web sites included position papers, rebuttals
against opponents statements, and appeals for donations.8 Major news organizations (i.e.,
CNN, C-SPAN) streamed live audio and images from the 2000 party conventions to interested
individuals.9 John McCain was one of the pioneers in the use of the Internet as a campaign
tool. In his 2000 presidential primary campaign, McCain raised more than $5.6 million and
recruited more than 18,000 volunteers from the two battleground states of Michigan and
California.10
HOWARD DEANS INTERNET SUCCESS

In 2004, Democratic hopeful Howard Dean used a diverse network of bloggers and donors
to rise from a relative unknown to a frontrunner for the nomination in only a few months.11 In
fact, the Dean campaign was hailed by political and media scholars as the first digital
campaign.12, 13, 14 It was Deans willingness to relinquish control over his campaign that
empowered Internet opinion leaders to support and strengthen it. Still, the Dean campaign
presented an enigma to political scholars because his vast success in the early stages of the
Democratic primary failed to result in the Democratic nomination.
Deans story can really be understood by closely examining the changing demographics of
Internet users; more specifically, those who use the Internet for political purposes. From the
onset of the Internet revolution, Web access and usage closely adhered to social demographics.
The rich and educated used the Internet more than those with less money and education; women
lagged behind men; and Hispanics and African Americans trailed in overall use and
knowledge about the Internet.15 Though most of these usage gaps had narrowed, large
inequalities remained.
Liberals dominated the audience for politics online across a wide range of politically
relevant activities; from gathering news online to visiting government Web sites, liberals
outpaced conservatives by a wide margin.16 Among self-identified Democrats, frequent
visitors to political Web sites were dramatically more liberal than the party as a whole, were
more educated, and were disproportionately young. Although some of these characteristics
included ideal demographics, the Dean campaigns reliance on young voterswho did not turn
out to voteended up being one of the campaigns biggest oversights.
Dean additionally attributed most of his success in the presidential primary to his ability to
empower bloggers to serve as virtual opinion leaders. Dean believed that the best way to
empower the disenchanted voters was to do so via the Internet. He acknowledged listening and
paying attention to bloggers, reactions to his speeches and stances on certain issues, and
changed those aspects that bloggers did not like. Dean also used the Internet to raise money and
organize his ground game. Through the Internet, Dean organized thousands of volunteers who
would go door to door, write personal letters to likely voters, host meetings, and distribute
flyers to the voting public. As successful as Dean was in organizing voters and supporters
alike through the Internet, he could not win his partys nomination for president.
BARACK OBAMAS 2008 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN

Barack Obamas presidential run can be attributed to a multitude of different factors: a
stagnant economy, a vastly unpopular president, an unorganized campaign by his general
election challenger, and many other factors. Obamas road to the White House was helped by a
diverse constituency that included many young voters, people of different ethnic backgrounds,
and disgruntled votersmost of whom were reached through a computer-mediated network.
Obama used the many different features of the Internet, along with its vast social networking
capabilities, to organize and grow his campaign. He was registered on a multitude of social
networking sites (i.e., Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Digg, Twitter, Eventful, LinkedIn,
BlackPlanet, FaithBase, Eons, Glee, MiGente, MyBatanga, AsianAve, DNC, PartyBuilder) and
used those sites as virtual meeting rooms where he could provide strategies to his many
friends. Obamas campaign staff constantly updated his profile as well and kept adding
friends; at the end of his campaign, Obama had more than 120,000 followers on Twitter
alone, a site where his profile was updated daily.17
Obama also used the Internet for fundraising purposes. Obama raised more than $640
million for his campaign using the Internet. In comparison, his opponent, John McCain, raised
slightly more than $200 million with the help of federal funding. Obama achieved this large
number by taking smaller contributions from his constituency and giving his supporters an easy
online process for donating money. To his credit, more than 3 million people donated to his
campaign online.18
Obama also was unafraid to use the Internet Web site YouTube to post all of his speeches
and messages for anyone to view. He also encouraged his supporters to post videos as well,
including individuals such as the Obama Girl and Will.i.am (of the musical group The Black
Eyed Peas). Obamas focus on using the Internet to reach out to young voters was evident, as
more than 70 percent of young and first-time voters reported voting for Barack Obama.19
THE YOUTUBE DEBATES

One feature of the 2008 election campaign that was unique was the CNN-YouTube debates.
Originally the brainchild of CNN Washington Bureau chief David Bohrman, the CNN YouTube
debates originated from a desire to reach more people.20 Building from the fact that YouTube
videos had played a significant role in airing videos of candidates behaving badly, YouTube
also sought to position itself as a major player in the political arena by teaming with CNN to
host a debate with questions asked by the subscribers. In July (for Democrats) and November
(for Republicans), candidates participated in two-hour-long debates, moderated by CNNs
Anderson Cooper, and which featured citizens asking the candidates questions via 30-second
videos posted online. In all, more than 8,000 people participated, with 60 percent of the
videos coming from people less than 30 years old.21
Questions in the debate seemed to be selected as much for the entertainment value as for
their potential to educate voters. For example, some questions featured a talking snowman
asking the candidates views on global warming, and others came from a lifetime member of
the NRA asking candidates their position on gun control after firing a round from his AK-47.
McKinney and Rill,22 however, found that viewers of both the Democratic and Republican
CNN-YouTube debates experienced a significant reduction in overall political cynicism; but it
was not a significant difference as compared with traditional forms of viewing debates.
McKinney and Rill concluded by saying that this particular type of strategyaimed at younger
citizensdid seem to engage the younger citizens in the political process.
THE 2012 U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Each political race gave candidates, strategists, journalists, and voters a better
understanding of the increasing role of the Internet, as well as the enhanced possibilities of
social media and mobile technologies for informing, persuading, and mobilizing people.
During the 2012 presidential election, Obamas campaign raised $690 million online, often
through from donors contributing small amounts of money repeatedly.23 Many of those
donations were the direct result of personalized fundraising e-mails with intriguing taglines.24
A team of approximately 20 writers tested 18 versions of donation solicitation messages to
predict which messages would be most likely to get people to donate to the campaign.25 The
subject line deemed to be most effective, I will be outspent, exceeded strategists
expectations, as it raked in $2,673,278 for the Obama campaign.26 Due to the rapid pace of
electronic communication, however, every message has a shelf life, and political campaigns
must adapt once a message loses its persuasive power. To that end, strategists recognized the
need to keep messages fresh and to communicate to potential donors and voters via the myriad
social media channels online.
Compared to the $52 million that the Obama-Biden campaign spent on Web ads, the
Romney-Ryan campaign spent only $26 million.27 According to Moffatt,28 the Romney-Ryan
campaign raised $182 million online between May and November of 2012, and 96 percent of
donations were for less than $250. The campaign also reported that 38 million people visited
MittRomney.com, and more than 900,000 campaign-related items were purchased via the
online store.29 Romney gained 10,433,367 Facebook likes, 1,302,785 Twitter followers, and
25,363,122 YouTube views; Ryans Facebook page totaled 5,183,712 likes, and he gained
546,738 Twitter followers.30
THE INTERNET AND ITS IMPACT ON POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE

This section discusses the role of the Internet and its impact on political knowledge in four
specific areas: Overall information available, navigating the available information,
determining where people turn to for political information, and examining how people use
information available through the Internet in conversations (either online or offline).
In terms of the overall amount of information available to voters, there is no debate that
voters today have access to the most information about politicians, political movements,
legislation, and even issues than was available ever before. Additionally, the contemporary
Internet enables users to choose from far more political news sources than anyone ever had
imagined. Recently, scholars have sought to identify how people navigate this vast terrain
through the use of online filter systems. 31, 32, 33 In this vein of research, scholars have worried
that the vastly expanded information environment would lead to a more polarized public
sphere. Even in the face of communication theories such as selective exposure theory or even
cognitive dissonance, however, researchers have been unable to confirm that people routinely
seek out information that supports their own opinions and avoid information that is
contradictory to their views. Instead, scholars have mixed opinions as to whether people today
routinely expose themselves to more information supportive or contradictory to their own
political views34 or seek out information that is free from some sort of obvious political bias.35
Garrett,36 however, found that when people do select news stories that challenge their
views, they are more likely to spend more time reading such news articles. This lends support
to the argument that many posited at the onset of the Internet age: People might spend more time
exposing themselves to differing views. Thus, one of the outcomes of having more information
available is that people are willing to expose themselves to a variety of differing opinions.
Researchers have yet to determine whether this exposure leads to changes in knowledge or if
people are merely exposing themselves to counterarguments in an effort to identify potential
weaknesses in the arguments of those holding opposing views.
Another key component in the learning process is how users evaluate particular sources
credibility and how that evaluation influences later recall of information. Although television
still is the dominant information source for much of the electorate, the Internet has risen to a
level that challenges televisions place as main source for political information for people in
the United States.37 A recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and
the Press38 found that 67 percent of those surveyed reported the television as a main source of
political information, whereas 47 percent reported the Internet as a main source of political
information. Additionally, although television is the most widely preferred source across age
groups, the Internet is the second most popular choice in all age groups except for people aged
65 years or older.
In assessing potential voters learning from TV news, newspapers, and online news
sources during the 2000 election, Eveland, Seo, and Marton39 found that recall for news stories
from television and print sources was greater than that for online newspapers, but that election
knowledge (mentally grouping election stories) was greater in the online newspaper condition
than it was for traditional media. Increased attention was more significant in the television
news condition than in the online or print newspaper conditions. The researchers concluded
that print and television news was associated with greater levels for overall news recall as
compared to Web exposure, but online exposure helped participants structure election-related
knowledge better than the other two types of media in the study did. As compared to television,
Internet use also was associated with more accurate recall of election-based information.
In addition to mere exposure to information, scholars also have determined that the reasons
people use the Internet have a significant impact on the knowledge gained. For instance,
Althaus and Tewksbury40 found that although people did use the Internet regularly for
surveillanceand passing time was another popular reasonpolitical knowledge was
positively correlated with using the Internet for surveillance purposes. Further, political
knowledge and desire for control were more strongly related to Web use than to traditional
news media use. Finally, people who were heavier users of the Internet found the medium to be
a superior news source than traditional media.
Additionally, Internet users have more mediated avenues for seeking political information
to use to discuss politics with others and to mobilize toward other efforts. Social media sites,
along with other media, provide countless channels for people to access information and
discuss politics. Much of contemporary political communication scholarship has focused on
this fact. Communication mediation models41 position communication with other people as an
important mediator in the acquisition of political knowledge, suggesting that people seek others
to help them make sense of the complex political information presented through the media. This
social dimension of mediated communication warrants investigation as Delli Carpini and
Keeter42 argued.
Political learning is affected not only by individual factors, such as ones interest in
politics, but alsoand often profoundlyby forces external to the individual: the
information environment and, more generally, the political context in which learning
occurs. The distinctive patterns observed with knowledge of local, state, and national
politics suggest that differences in the availability of political information at the three
levels of politics interact with variations in individual interest and motivation.
Thus, one of the benefits of the Internet is that it has allowed interested users to obtain
political information from a variety of sources in a timely and convenient fashion. Users also
can navigate the wealth of information more easily and convert it into support for online and
offline argumentation, as well as actionable knowledge for making decisions and engaging in
the political process. The Internet provides tools and opportunities for people to locate,
amalgamate, and verify a wealth of data, but it also affords people the freedom to incorporate
that information into their preexisting knowledge structures selectively or expand their minds
to entertain a diversity of viewpoints.
THE INTERNET AND PERSUASION

In its brief history in the political realm, the Internet has made a powerful and lasting
impact.43 This section highlights the research and popular press information that have
positioned the Internet as a key component in the political persuasion process. Specifically, it
focuses on the role of the Internet in lobbying and the role the Internet has on crafting
legislation.
The Internet and social media have also enabled special interest groups to hire public
relations firms to mine data on the behaviors, characteristics, preferences, and social networks
of people who communicate online. More specific than demographic research typically
employed by advertisers and public relations practitioners, the construction of more detailed
psychographic profiles grew out of the hypermedia campaign style that emerged in the
1990s, alongside the Internet and mobile technologies. This new style of campaigning allowed
advertisers to target ads to niche audiences on the Internet at far less expense than a television
or print ad published for a larger market.44
The possibility of communicating anonymously online also has meant that journalists must
be especially careful to verify information and source attribution, because the Internet
complicates ethical, social, and legal issues in a news environment. The potential obfuscation
of the sources of some political messages requires online news outlets to take precautions in
their information-gathering practices, their editorial practices, and their reader-feedback
policies. On the Internet, individuals can post comments under pseudonyms, so it can be
difficult to identify particular users or to hold them accountable for inaccurate or disparaging
comments. News outlets must also articulate policies about the transparency of journalists
identities when they choose to share their opinions online. In violation of their publications
ethics policies, a senior editor at New Republic magazine as well as a blogger from the Los
Angeles Times invented sock puppetsfabricated identities to confront critics and attack
other media outlets.45 Although journalists have the right to express individual opinions, they
also must remember that their actions represent their media organization, so it is imperative
that they understand the ethical limits of anonymity in online contexts.
The Internet enables users to cloak their identities using a variety of technological features.
For instance, anonymous remailer programs remove information about the origins of an
electronic message before forwarding the message to different users. Chains of remailers could
protect political activists or dissidents by helping them to expose injustices perpetrated by
corporations, government, or media without the threat of retribution. That same technology,
however, could enable criminals to operate in cyberspace with impunity. The anonymity the
Internet often provides could let people exert profound influence with no fear of backlash or
recrimination.46
CRAFTING LEGISLATION
People have recently also sought to give more power to average citizens by developing
programs that allow Internet users to work together along with interested parties, lawmakers
staff, and others to draft legislation and to write a report explaining how the legislation came to
be. The goal of this approach is to reconnect citizens with their government. This phenomenon
has started to gain traction across the globe.47,48 Although these are the initial steps in this
direction, it does offer citizens an entirely new opportunity to become even more invested in
local, regional, and even national politics.
THE INTERNET AND CIVIC MOBILIZATION

Recent history repeatedly has demonstrated the power of the Internet to unite protestors and
activists toward a common purpose, enable grassroots movements to amplify their voices in
the marketplace of ideas, and advocate for political change. Kahn and Kellner49 noted some
prominent moments in online oppositional politics, including the EZLN Zapatista movement in
Mexico in the early 1990s as well as protests against neoliberalism and multinational
corporations (e.g., the Carnival Against Capital! demonstrations and the Battle for Seattle
protests against the World Trade Organization). In the early 2000s, several groups established
an online presence to oppose the war in Iraq and related policies and actions implemented by
U.S. president George W. Bush.50
Tech-savvy activists have armed themselves with mobile devices including pagers,
personal digital assistants, notebook and tablet computers, and cell phones equipped with
access to global positioning systems and the Internet, and have used these devices to do
everything from sharing information to organizing flash mobs.51 Today, activists also use blogs
and wikis to spread awareness of political ideas, manipulate search engines to display links
related to their agendas, and even influence mainstream media coverage of political events and
viewpoints.52
West53 stated that just as telephones, postal letters, Citizens Band radio, and other forms of
communication did in previous decades, the Internet could facilitate social protest. But he
worried that commercial forces had dominated most of the important societal conversations
online, rendering the Internet a mere faade for democratic discourse and action rather than a
true incubator for the goals of the masses. Hacktivist groups, however, have exposed
governments attempts at electronic surveillance, developed open-source software, and
consolidated lists of free wireless Internet access points to allow the public to skirt
government and corporate attempts to control cyberspace.54 If tracing the history of computer-
mediated communication provides insight into the evolution of online politics, then it is equally
vital to consider emerging channels that undoubtedly will shape politics offline as well.
Protestors have connected with one another and with mainstream media outlets when the
regimes they opposed limited communication via other channels to silence any dissent and to
disrupt coordinated movements of people. As people and candidates in the United States learn
to communicate with these new forms of technology to achieve specific political ends,
researchers should examine the potential for emerging information networks to provide insight
into the way people use the Internet to achieve a variety of political outcomes.
The Internet also has been an instrumental tool in mobilizing people abroad. Its continued
growth in usecoupled with globalizationhas highlighted the potential for the Internet to
serve as a means for social change. At the same time, some governments around the world
have sought to limit citizen access to the Internet in efforts to curb such broader political
participation and inhibit change. Myanmar, for example, in 2007 blocked access to the Internet
to curb demonstrations. China has blocked access to YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, and in
2009 even shut down access to the Internet in one region during fighting between Uighurs and
Han.55 To operate in China, Google succumbed to the Chinese governments demands and have
censored content. China also has blocked content from mobile phone text messaging.
More recently, many of the movements that made up the Arab Spring relied on the
Internet as a way to connect with protestors, organize demonstrations, and disseminate the
word to outside press organizations. Although a number of factors led to the protests and
events that toppled authoritarian regimes and forced others to institute significant political
reforms, social media such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter provided a vehicle for large
numbers of people to communicate before, during, and after the protests and uprisings.56 Even
today, a variety of ICTs and social networking sites (such as Facebook and Twitter) are used to
spread political ideas, foster and advance social and political movements, and institute change.
It therefore is difficult to argue that the revolutions during the Arab Spring would have been
successful without the Internet.
In the United States, political third partiessuch as the Tea Party movement
underscored the importance of the Internet and social media to empower the individual and
spread ideas of counterrevolution. OHara57 offered practical advice for Americans who
wished to organize their own Tea Party chapters, saying that
the power of social networking cannot be underestimated. Only with tools like Twitter,
Facebook, and e-mail were the tea parties as wildly successful as they were. There
simply is no better way to get information to more people more efficiently than through
these tools on the Internet. I had 40- and 50-year-olds telling me that they barely
navigated e-mail but made themselves open Facebook accounts to be plugged into the
tea parties. Counterradicals of every age group must embrace this technology and make
it their own.
Despite such declarations, the mobilization potential of the Internet sometimes is met with
skepticism. Although West58 acknowledged the Internets ability to mobilize groups of
individuals efficiently, citing the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movements as an example, he
argued that the ability of the new electronic media to transform those movements into lasting
social change, or to use the new media as a public sphere whose discourse must be reckoned
with, is not yet evident.
Social media enables the acquisition of information such as the location and timing of
events, the number of people expected to participate, and the potential for danger (e.g., fires,
tear gas, violence).59 Social media, however, also can trigger emotions such as anger, or
feelings of injustice, or a group identity that could motivate people to participate in protests, as
was the case in the demonstrations centering on allegations of racial bias of law enforcement
in Ferguson, Missouri, and in several other American cities.60
For instance, following a grand jurys decision not to indict a police officer for the death of
a black man in New York City in 2014, demonstrators used Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr to
organize protests in Times Square, to stage a die-in in Grand Central Terminal, and to
coordinate similar activities nationwide.61 The Internet allowed for another form of protest
when the group Anonymous claimed responsibility for hacking the Web site of the city of
Cleveland, purportedly because the city did not train its police officers sufficiently.62 The
hacking came after Cleveland police responded with lethal force to a call that someone was
waving a gun at a playground, though the individual in question turned out to be a 12-year-old
African American boy who had been playing with a toy gun.63
Tucker64 noted that people could receive the same types of information and emotional
motivation from traditional media sources, but pointed out five features of social media that
are unique in political protest contexts:
Social media can cover multiple developments in a political situation simultaneously

and rapidly.
Social media let individuals plan events, which they cannot do via traditional media.
Social media are easier to filter, letting people search for information tailored to their
own concerns.
The information selected has been vetted by social networks with which the individual
has affiliated, so the information is shared among friends.
Social media provide a forum for political issues and protests that have been ignored
by mainstream media.
THE FUTURE OF POLITICS IN THE INTERNET ERA

The Internet is not positive or negative per se; it is an amalgamation of tools. Thus, the
focus of this chapter is to investigate what is uniquely effective about the Internet in political
contexts. The various tools and channels for communication on the Internetespecially when
combining social media with mobile technologymake it useful for disseminating information,
connecting people with each other, and enabling people to avoid government surveillance.
Technology evolves, however, making it important to revisit the issues and questions raised in
this chapter as new methods of informing, persuading, and mobilizing emerge.
For instance, protestors typically must stay ahead of the technology curve and utilize the
most innovative forms of communication to avoid attempts by government to control the flow
of information via mainstream channels. If government entities try to silence voices of dissent
or block access to certain media outlets, then protestors must be able to come up with new
ways to retrieve and share information. If those in power use technology to track, identify, and
punish opponents, then it is important to investigate the promise of anonymity via technology.
Users sometimes operate under the illusion of invisibility, believing that communicative acts
on social media remain private. Failure to understand the limits of privacy online, coupled
with the development of increasingly sophisticated data-mining techniques, might render even
the most advanced encryption protocols moot, given enough time. The tug-of-war between
those in power and those trying to assert their opposition will play out in zero-sum fashion as
technology changes and the people and groups using it adapt to its strengths and weaknesses.
This is an important point to underscore becauselike the Internet itselfregime change
might not be positive or negative. As a political endgame, revolution might be considered
victorious only if the uprising does not replace one form of tyranny with another. Therefore, it
is imperative to recognize that the Internet is a neutral conduit for human communication.
Among many other uses, people can employ the tools of the Internet to share information,
advocate for beliefs, and mobilize toward political action. The effects of those communicative
acts, however, only can be characterized as positive or negative as people continue to
deliberate, discuss, and debate the ideas being disseminated.
NOTES
1. Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1996).
2. Bruce Bimber, Information and Political Engagement in America: The Search for Effects of Information Technology at
the Individual Level, Political Research Quarterly 54 (2001).
3. John A. Hendricks and Lynda L. Kaid, Techno Politics in Presidential Campaigning: New Voices, New Technologies,
and New Voters (New York: Routledge, 2011).
4. National Telecommunications and Information Administration, A Nation Online: How Americans Are Expanding Their
Use of the Internet, http://www.ntia.doc.gov/legacy/ntiahome/dn/anationonline2.pdf, accessed January 4, 2015.
5. Farhad Manjoo, Jurassic Web: The Internet of 1996 Is Almost Unrecognizable Compard with What We Have Today,
Slate (February 24, 2009), http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2009/02/jurassic_web.html, accessed January 2,
2015.
6. Hendricks and Kaid, Techno Politics.
7. Robert J. Klotz, The Politics of Internet Communication (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
8. Caroline J. Tolbert and Ramona S. McNeal, Unraveling the Effects of the Internet on Political Participation, Political
Research Quarterly 56 (2003).
9. Ibid.
10. Stephen. J. Farnsworth and Diana Owen, Internet Use and the 2000 Presidential Election, Electoral Studies 23
(2004).
11. Matthew Hindman, The Real Lessons of Howard Dean: Reflections of the First Digital Campaign, Perspectives 3
(2005).
12. Ibid.
13. Matthew R. Kerbel and Joel David Bloom, Blog for America and Civic Involvement, Press/Politics 10 (2005).
14. Andrew Paul Williams, Kaye D. Trammell, Monica Postelnicu, Kristen D. Landreville, and Justin D. Martin, Blogging
and Hyperlinking: Use of the Web to Enhance Viability during the 2004 US Campaign, Journalism Studies 6 (2005).
15. Hindman, Howard Dean.
16. Ibid.
17. Barack Obama Wins Online Campaign, www.kabissa.org, accessed November 6, 2008.
18. Colgan, One Way Obama Has Changed the World, http://blogs.news.com.au/starsnsnipes/index.php/
news/comments/the_one_change_obama_has_already_achieved/44108, accessed November 6, 2008.
19. Barack Obama Wins.
20. Scott Leith, YouTube, CNN to Quiz Hopefuls for President; Network to Host Debates, Use Questions Submitted on
Web, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, June 15, 2007: 1A.
21. Mitchell S. McKinney and Leslie A Rill, Not Your Parents Presidential Debates: Examining the Effects of the
CNN/YouTube Debates on Young Citizens Civic Engagement, Communication Studies 60 (2009).
22. Ibid.
23. Political Strategists Praise Power of Online Fundraising: Obama, Rubio, Paul Cited As Politicians Already Seeing
Benefits, The Center for Public Integrity, http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/04/10/ 12478/political-strategists-praise-power-
online-fundraising, accessed March 10, 2014.
24. Joshua Green, The Science behind Those Obama Campaign E-Mails. Bloomberg Businessweek (November 29,
2012), http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-29/the-science-behind-those-obama-campaign-e-mails, accessed March
10, 2014.
25. Green, Obama E-mails.
26. Ibid.
27. B. J. Lutz, Obama Nearly Doubles Romney in Online Ad Spending. NBC Chicago (November 5, 2012),
http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/obama-romney-2012-election-online-advertising-money-spent-177306601.html,
accessed January 2, 2014.
28. Zac Moffatt, Successes of the Romney and Republican Digital Efforts in 2012, Targeted Victory (December 11,
2012), http://www.targetedvictory.com/2012/12/11/success-of-the-romney-republican-digital-efforts-2012/, accessed March 10,
2014.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Michael Beam and Gerald M. Kosicki, Personalized News Portals: Filtering Systems and Increased News Exposure,
Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 91 (2014).
32. Ivan Dylko, Michael A. Beam, Kristen D. Landreville, and Nicholas G. Geidner, Filtering 2008 Presidential Election
News on YouTube by Elites and Nonelites: An Examination of the Democratizing Potential of the Internet, New Media and
Society 14 (2012).
33. R. Kelly Garrett, Politically Motivated Reinforcement Seeking: Reframing the Selective Exposure Debate, Journal of
Communication 59 (2009).
34. Ibid.
35. Beam and Kosicki, Personalized News Portals.
36. R. Kelly Garrett, Echo Chambers Online? Politically Motivated Selective Exposure Among Internet News Users,
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14 (2009).
37. Low Marks for the 2012 Election, http://www.people-press.org/2012/11/15/section-4-news-sources-election-night-and-
views-of-press-coverage/, accessed December 31, 2014.
38. Ibid.
39. William P. Eveland, Mihye Seo, and Krisztina Martin, Learning from the News in Campaign 2000: An Experimental
Comparison of TV News, Newspapers, and Online News, Media Psychology 4 (2002).
40. Scott L. Althaus and David Tewksbury, Patterns of Internet AND Traditional News Media Use in a Networked
Community, Political Communication 17 (2000).
41. William P. Eveland Jr., Andrew F. Hayes, Dhavan Shah, and Nojin Kwak, Understanding the Relationship between
Communication and Political Knowledge: A Model Comparison Approach Using Panel Data, Political Communication 22
(2005).
42. Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know, 176.
43. Andrew Paul Williams, Kaye D. Trammell, Monica Postelnicu, Kristen D. Landreville, and Justin D. Martin, Blogging
and hyperlinking: Use of the Web to Enhance Viability during the 2004 US Campaign, Journalism Studies 6 (2005).
44. Phillip N. Howard, Digitizing the Social Contract: Producing American Political Culture in the Age of New Media,
The Communication Review 6 (2003).
45. Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Todays Internet Is Killing Our Culture (New York: Doubleday,
2007).
46. James Cowan, The Orwellian Power of Anonymity; the Web Has Changed the Rules of Politics and Journalism,
National Post, December 31, 2008, A6.
47. Jennifer McKenzie, Crowdsourced Internet Freedom Bill a First for Filipino Lawmakers, July 31, 2013,
http://techpresident.com/news/wegov/24226/crowdsourced-internet-freedom-bill-first-philippine-lawmakers, accessed January 1,
2015.
48. Andy, Finland Wants to Kill Crowdsourced Copyright Law, https://torrentfreak.com/finland-wants-to-kill-
crowdsourced-copyright-law-141009/, last modified October 9, 2014.
49. Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner, New Media and Internet Activism: From the Battle of Seattle to Blogging, New
Media & Society 6 (2004).
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Mark D. West, Is the Internet an Emergent Public Sphere? Journal of Mass Media Ethics 28 (2013).
54. Kahn and Kellner, Internet Activism.
55. Garth Jowett and Victoria ODonnell, Propaganda and Persuasion (5th ed.) (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2012).
56. James D. Ponder, Paul Haridakis, and Gary Hanson, Social Networking in Political Campaigns, in Encyclopedia of
Social Network Analysis and Mining, edited by Reda Alhajj and Jon Rokne (New York: Springer, 2014).
57. John M. OHara, A New American Tea Party: The Counterrevolution Against Bailouts, Handouts, Reckless
Spending, and More Taxes (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010), 249.
58. West, Emergent Public Sphere, 158.
59. Joshua Tucker, Tweeting Ferguson: How Social Media Can (and Cannot) Facilitate Protest, Washington Post
(November 25, 2014), http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/11/25/tweeting-ferguson-how-social-media-
can-and-can-not-facilitate-protest/, accessed January 2, 2015.
60. Ibid.
61. Jennifer Smith and Andrew Tange, Social Media Help Fuel Protests after New York Officer Not Indicted over Death
of Eric Garner, Wall Street Journal (December 4, 2014), http://www.wsj.com/articles/social-media-help-fuel-protests-after-
new-york-officer-not-indicted-over-death-of-eric-garner-1417662999, accessed January 3, 2015.
62. Nikki Ferrell and Homa Bash. Anonymous Claims Responsibility for Taking Down Clevelands Website after Tamir
Rice Shooting, NewsNet5 Cleveland (November 24, 2014), http://www.newsnet5.com/news/local-news/cleveland-
metro/anonymous-claims-responsibility-for-taking-down-clevelands-website-after-tamir-rice-shooting, accessed January 3, 2015.
63. Ibid.
64. Tucker, Tweeting Ferguson.
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11
Ground-Up Expert: Everyday People and

Blogs
Richard J. Batyko
In August 2002, Julie Powell, a frustrated office worker who also was an aspiring gourmet
cook, decided to prepare all 524 of Julia Childs recipes found in Childs book Mastering the
Art of French Cooking1 in 365 days. Powell also chose to document her journey in a blog.
Over the course of that year, the blog attracted increasing amounts of attention, culminating in a
2005 Little, Brown and Company book, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny
Apartment Kitchen2 and in the 2009 Sony Pictures movie adaptation of the book, directed by
Nora Ephron, titled Julie & Julia.3 In 2009, Powell was awarded an honorary diploma from
Le Cordon Bleu, the same cooking school from which Child graduated in 1951.4
Although the trajectory of this individualfrom an unknown person, to book author, to the
subject of a major motion picturemight be an extreme case of blogging ones way to fame, it
is an example of how individuals have used the tool to promote their passions and to find an
audience. Such an accession into the limelight was difficult prior to the advent of the Internet,
blogging, and social media. The barrier to finding an audience no longer is an affordable
communications channel accessible to nearly all.
This chapter considers how some bloggers rose to fame from their keyboards. It also
examines the ongoing debate about whether blogging is still a valid method of finding ones
audience. Is the term blogger becoming pass? Additionally, it evaluates the impact that
ever-changing technology has on the art of blogging.
BLOGGING TO FAME
It takes time, ability, and sometimes a little luck to go from an unknown to a must-read
blogger on an international stage. One thing bloggers have going for them is that Internet users
always are looking for content on the topics that interest them. According to Social Media
Today, in 2013, 23 percent of Internet users time was spent reading blogs and 77 percent of
Internet users read blogs. Of course, there is a lot of noise in the blogosphere. In 2013, 6.7
million people blogged on blogging sites and 12 million used a social media channels to blog.5
To put those numbers in context, the worldwide population as of January 2014 was 7.09
billion. Of that, 2.43 million use the Internet (35 percent penetration), 1.85 million are active
on social networks (26 percent penetration), and 6.57 million are mobile subscribers (93
percent penetration).6
Some people not only have blogged their way to fame; they also have created their own
income streams. Fourteen percent of bloggers earn their salaries by blogging, with an average
salary of $24,086.7 A few have parlayed their passion into multimillion-dollar operations. The
following sections provide a sampling of the people who have found their audiences and then
blogged their way to success.
Lisa Leake
Lisa Leake thought she was a conscientious mom providing healthy food choices for her
family. But after she and her husband Jason saw an Oprah show in 2010 featuring author
Michael Pollanwho wrote the book In Defense of Food8Leake had an awakening. After
reading Pollans book, Leake decided to make changes in her familys diet. She, her husband,
and their two small girls pledged to go 100 days without eating highly processed or refined
foodsa challenge she opened to readers on her blog.
So soon after we started making changes, I launched a blog called The Food Illusion
and began to build an audience. After a few months of blogging I decided it was time to
do something big, something bold, and something that would get as many other people
as we can to not only read about eating real foods, but to also make a commitment to
this important change.9
The blogs audience grew to 4 million readers. Next came Leakes Web site,
www.100daysofrealfood.com, followed by a book by the same name published by William
Morrow Cookbooks.10
Michelle Mismas
Michelle Mismas has a thing for nail polish. She took her passion to the Web in 2007 as a
nail-focused beauty blogger. Her blog caught the attention of the popular makeup blog,
Blogdorf Goodman, and Andrea Lustig, a beauty editor at Glamour. It now gets 250,000 unique
visitors each month. In 2009, Mismas was making enough money from ads and sponsorships to
leave her job as an accountant and blog full-time.11 In 2013, among fierce competition,
Mismas AllLacqueredUp.com site beat out 248 other nominees to take top honors in a contest
conducted by Marie Claire.12
Brianne Manz
Brianne Manz is a mommy blogger focused on all things related to children. Her blog,
Stroller in the City, is about city living, kids fashion, and all things related to raising kids
especially in an urban environment. As Manz told What a Brand,
Little did I know that this little blog I decided to start almost 5 years ago would turn
into this space of influence, creativity, and tons of opportunity. I originally started my
blog to reference the fun places and cool brands I was discovering being a mom. Back
when my son was born, boys fashion was very hard to come by. Now, it has been a
wonder[ful] outlet for me to share what its like raising three kids in NYC.13
Manz frequently is cited in blogs and the press on mommy topicsincluding in a 2014
feature on back-to-school trends for Extra TV.14
Mark Sission
Mark Sission is a former elite endurance athlete who set a lofty goal in 2006: to change the
lives of 10 million people. When he first published MarksDailyApple.com, Sissions
followers numbered in the hundreds. His next goal was to build his Web site into one of the
leading health resources on the Internet. Today, 150,000 unique visitors view his site every day
and it ranked as the No. 1 blog for men by The Modest Man.15
Stephanie Le
Stephanie Le used to claim she could make most dishes she tried at restaurants. Her
husband challenged her to do it. And thus, the beginning of I Am a Food blog, wrote Food &
Wine magazine about this blogger.16 Stephanie calls Vancouver home, but at this writing is
living in Tokyo. Her blog, which is just two years old, was named best food blog of 2014 by
Saveur.17 How did this happen so fast? Here is how Le answered that question in a reply
comment on her site, Im not too sure how I got a followingin my eyes, Im still a baby blog
next to the giants of the food blog world. The followers did not come right away at all.18 Only
in the Internet world can someone go from being an unknown to one of the best known in a two-
year periodin a noisy environment such as foodbe considered slow! Stephanies draw
allowed her to publish her first book, Easy Gourmet, from Page Street Publishing.19
Alborz Fallah
Alborz Fallahs Car Advice blog (CarAdvice.com.au) is this entrepreneurs eighth blog
and fourth business. Fallahs foray into commerce began with selling advertising space on
Geocities at age 14. The Australian-based Car Advice site, which began as a blog in 2006 as a
result of Fallahs passion for cars, has been ranked ninth in the world among Google Adsense
earners.20 Today it has grown into much more than a blog. In 2014, Car Advice had a staff of
20, a board of directors, revenues estimated at U.S. $5 million a year, and has been valued at
approximately U.S. $20 million.21
THE FUTURE OF BLOGGING

When discussing individuals who have turned their blogs into a business from the ground
up, it is worth considering how businesses are using blogs. The top-down view can be
instructive when considering the future of blogging.
If current research is any indication, companies seem to be losing interest in hosting blogs
on their sites, despite research that shows blogs can be helpful in driving traffic. According to
Social Media Today, small businesses with blogs generate 126 percent more leads. Googles
Hummingbird finds Web sites with blogs have 434 percent more indexed pages. In the United
States, 61 percent of consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post and 81 percent of
consumers trust advice and information from blogs.22 With such compelling data, why would
companies reconsider bloggings value?
The fact is that after years of adding blogs to their external Web sites, companies are
slowing down. A 2014 study conducted by Nora Ganim Barnes, PhD, at The Center for
Marketing Research, found 157 companies on the Fortune 500 list (31 percent) have public-
facing corporate blogs, a decrease of 3 percent in the number of blogging companies from
2013 numbers.23
As the study explains, it is premature to try to determine whether this is the beginning of a
Fortune 500 movement away from this iconic tool, toward replacing it with newer
communications tools. At present, there is no indication that blogging in other business sectors
is waning.24
One company that is in the business of content, The New York Times, is pulling back
significantly on its blogs. In July 2014, The New York Times assistant managing editor Ian
Fisher told The Poynter Institute, Were going to continue to provide bloggy content with a
more conversational tone. Were just not going to do them as much in standard reverse-
chronological blogs. The Times has been moving away from blogs over the past year and a
half, stated spokesperson Eileen Murphy. Of the papers current blogs, [a]lmost half of them
will be gone as a blog or will have merged into something else.25
Some New York Times blogs are quite popular, but others got very, very little traffic, and
they required an enormous amount of resources, because a blog is an animal that is always
famished. Fisher said he thinks that the quality of our items will go up now, now that readers
dont expect us to be filling the artificial container of a blog. Another issue is that [v]ery few
people went to the blog landing pages, said Fisher. Most enter sideways, through a shared
link or a link on the Times homepage.26
In the same interview, Fisher credited blogging with training a generation of reporters to
write for the Web, but the Web they trained for is not the same any longer. Freelance journalist
and cultural critic Mel Campbell agrees. In a post on The Guardian Web site, she wrote,
[B]logging has indelibly influenced mainstream news reporting, which is now much more
immediate, informal, link-rich and inclusive of reader comments. When I taught online
journalism at Monash University from 200911, students published their assignments on
WordPress blogs.27
It is clear that The New York Times has determined blogging is so similar to their regular
feature and news reporting that they do not need as many blogs. Such a move makes sense for a
content company, but what about companies in other industries?
NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND BLOGGING

The Fortune 500 consistently has shown a preference for Twitter over Facebook, and the
Inc. 500 prefers Facebook. This continued in 2014 with 80 percent of the Fortune 500 on
Facebook and 83 percent using Twitter, although the gap is narrowing. Last year, 70 percent of
the Fortune 500 used Facebook and 77 percent had Twitter accounts.28
Of the Fortune 500, 413 companies (83 percent) have corporate Twitter accounts and have
tweeted in the past 30 days. This represents a 6 percent increase from last year. Seven of the
top 10 companies (Wal-Mart Stores, Exxon, Chevron, Phillips 66, General Motors, General
Electric, and Ford Motors) consistently post on their Twitter accounts. Berkshire Hathaway,
Apple, and Valero Energy do not tweet.29
Of the Fortune 500, 401 (80 percent) now are on Facebook. This represents a 10 percent
increase from last year. All of the top 10 companies (Wal-Mart Stores, Exxon Mobil, Chevron,
Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Phillips 66, General Motors, Ford Motors, General Electric, and
Valero Energy) have corporate Facebook pages.30
From the ground up to the top down, social media is making an impact on blogging.
Harvards Nieman Lab noted that
[i]nstead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning things to their
board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and
publishing on Medium. In 1997, wired teens created online diaries, and in 2004, the
blog was king. Today, teens are about as likely to start a blog (over Instagramming or
Snapchatting) as they are to buy a music CD. Blogs are for 40-somethings with kids.31
Another telltale sign of a change of behaviors in the blogosphere is that many bloggers
are reporting that fewer comments are left by readers within the blogs. Comments are
an important component of many blogs because it is the way readers engage with the
author. The readers comments also add to the visibility of the blog, which helps to
build an audience. Why are readers leaving fewer well-thought-out comments? Benjie
Moss, an editor at Webdesigner Depot, explains,
There was a time when email was fun; back when you set up your first Hotmail
account, and received your first mail. Then, about two minutes later, our inboxes were
flooded with spam. What happened when sorting through the dross in our inboxes
became too time-consuming? We turned to social networks for our messaging, and the
same process is now being applied to blog comments; where once we posted a
thoughtful response, now we tweet a short quip.32
Not everyone is excited about the decline in readers comments at the expense of social
media access. As Moss states:
[O]ne thought keeps returning to me: That is, that an article with no comments is one
individuals ideas; when comments are introduced the ideas become truly public
domain. When comments are attached to an article, it creates a repository for the
ideas to be recorded and to grow. If social media commoditizes individuals, then
comments commoditize ideas. If we value the community over individuals, we wont
make the leap to social media just yet.33
THE IMPACT OF STREAMING AND SOCIAL MEDIA ON BLOGGING

Clearly, the blogosphere is changing. What seismic shift happened in the Internet world to
cause the next generation to use new approaches to convey their thoughts and opinions? Two
factors account for much of the shiftstreaming and social media.
First, consider streaming. Many are familiar with streaming as it applies to music and
movies. For those not familiar with the technology, streaming is real-time access to content.
Consider music as an example. A person can purchase digital music from services such as
iTunes and download a song. That is not streaming. A person also can connect to a streaming
service such as Spotify and receive a steady stream of music that is not downloaded to a
computer or device. That is streaming.
So what does streaming have to do with the way we share content through blogging?
Betaworks John Borthwick provides a good explanation.
In the initial design of the web, reading and writing (editing) were given equal
considerationyet for 15 years the primary metaphor of the web has been pages and
reading. The metaphors we used to circumscribe this possibility set were mostly drawn
from books and architecture (pages, browser, sites etc.). Most of these metaphors were
static and one-way. The stream metaphor is fundamentally different. Its dynamic, it
doesnt live very well within a page and still [is] very much evolving. A stream. A
real-time, flowing, dynamic stream of informationthat we as users and participants
can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are a
part of this flow.34
Now imagine what this real-time, always moving environment does to blogs that are
traditionally static, existing permanently in one place. In this world, a blog posted on a
webpage is swept away in the stream in a microsecond. Add to this scenario the referenced
reduction in the number of comments left by readers who viewed the blogwhich is a key way
the existence of a blog is shared through user networks. How does a blog find a larger
audience? After all, many of the bloggers who went from unknown to famous made the
transition by garnering a bigger audience.
Aspiring bloggers need not be concerned. Coming into play in the blogosphere is social
media, as well as other technologies designed to embrace the stream. Erick Schonfeld of The
Atlantic explains the interaction of the stream and the Web.
Information is increasingly being distributed and presented in real-time streams instead
of dedicated Web pages. The shift is palpable, even if it is only in its early stages. Web
companies large and small are embracing this stream. It is not just Twitter. It is
Facebook and Friendfeed and AOL and Digg and Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop and
Techmeme and Tweetmeme and Ustream and Qik and Kyte and blogs and Google
Reader. The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by
nowness.35
Today, a blog that might see a hundred hits a day on average suddenly could see a swarm of
readersperhaps thousandsarrive one day and then be gone the next. How? A blog covering
a particularly hot topic could become visible to a well-connected reader who passes it on
through a social media site and then, almost instantaneously, the link is spread virally and
draws a substantial number of readers. Although blogs of old built readership in a slow, linear
fashion, today a blog could find an enormous audience in seconds.
Bloggers must consider this new environment when planning and executing blog content. In
the past, readers who left comments under a blog post helped build the credibility of the
blogger. Today, readers are less interested in the bloggers credibility and more focused on
their own. Instead of leaving a comment under someones blog, they will post a brief comment
about it on their own social media networks and add a link to the blog, thereby building the
readers value to his or her own network and to a lesser extent also showcasing the blog.
Bloggers also must address a more fundamental question: What is a blog? Is it a 1,500-
word essay posted on the authors or a third-partys Web site or is it a short social media post?
If the intent is to draw readers to ones content, then perhaps a short social media push is
enough of a blog to get readers to ones source. As Borthwick explains,
Today context is provided mostly via social interactions and gestures. People send out
a messagewith some context in the message itself and then the network picks up from
there. The message is often retweeted, favorited, liked or re-blogged, its appropriated
usually with attribution to creator or the source messagesometimes its categorized
with a tag of some form and then curation occurs around that tagand all this time,
around it spins picking up velocity and more context as it swirls.36
RUMORS OF BLOGGINGS DEATH COULD BE GREATLY

EXAGGERATED
What does all this mean? Is blogging dead, dying, or simply evolving? The answer seems
to be the latter. In 1996an eon ago in Internet yearsWilliam Henry Bill Gates III, of
Microsoft, popularized the phrase content is king in an essay.37 However it is defined,
packaged, or distributed, readers seek meaningful, thoughtful, and original content. Streaming
and social media are paradigm-changing technologies that cut across many communication and
distribution channels, but they are not a replacement for content. Regardless of whether the
content is labeled blog seems irrelevant, and some even might say it is pass to use the term
blogging.
Harvards Kottke says it well.
So, R.I.P. The Blog, 19972013. But this isnt cause for lament. All media on the
web and in mobile apps has blog DNA in it and will continue to for a long while. Over
the past 16 years, the blog format has evolved, had social grafted onto it, and mutated
into Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest and those new species have now taken over. No
biggie, thats how technology and culture work.38
Campbell has a slightly different point of view, and states:
Blogging persists, of course. But its mostly for adultsprofessionalized to the point
where the old bloggers vs journalists debates now seem hopelessly quaint.
Maintaining a personal blog has become entrepreneurial: a job that earns an income
through display advertising, network marketing, e-books and blog-to-book deals.39
The fact is that the stream and social media have opened up vast new channels for
individuals to find an audience and build an income stream, if not a business. For that reason
blogging is alive and well, even its name has changed. No matter the terminology or
technology, finding an audience remains a key function of marketing, so there is an insight into
marketers plans for blogging. A 2014 study Michael Stelzner published in the Social Media
Examiner found, a significant 68 percent of marketers plan on increasing their use of
blogging, making it the top area marketers will invest in for 2014.40
The lesson this chapter provides is that bloggers must be more savvy today than theyve
been in years past if they want to leverage the stream and social media. In doing so, bloggers
are entering a world that is rather demanding. As Madrigal states,
The great irony is that we got what we wanted from the stream: a way to read and
watch outside the editorial control of editors, old Yahoo-style cataloging, and Google
bots. But when the order of the media cosmos was annihilated, freedom did not rush
into the vacuum, but an emergent order with its own logic. We discovered that the
stream introduced its own kinds of compulsions and controls. Faster! More! Faster!
More! Faster! More! And now, who can keep up? There is a melancholy to the infinite
scroll. Wouldnt it be better if we just said Lets do something else? Lets have the
web be a museum or a curio box or an important information filter or an organizing
platform. Or maybe lets just let the web be the web again, a network of many times,
not just now.41
Technology is a treadmill that never stops, so we must adapt to its current state and not
wait for it to slow or stop so we can more comfortably jump on. With that in mind, here are
some tips from a social media professional on how everyday people can take advantage of
streaming and social media to bring visibility to their blogs.
HOW EVERYDAY PEOPLE CAN LEVERAGE NEW TECHNOLOGIES

TO FIND AN AUDIENCE
Jessa Hochman, a social media, content marketing, and inbound marketing consultant offers
her suggestions for getting your blog noticed.
When beginning your blogging/content marketing journey, it may be beneficial to master

one or two social networks rather than diving into them all at once. No two social
networks function the same way, so try not to copy and paste from one site to another.
Id suggest starting small depending on your industry. Once youve mastered a few
networks, move onto another. Ive prepared a list below with tips about how to use
each social network successfully.
Turn your blog into multiple tweets.
The thing about Twitter is that less than half of its users visit the site daily. So, when
you tweet about a blog, dont just tweet about it once. Two of the worlds fastest-
growing Web sites, Upworthy and Buzzfeed, do something on Twitter thats proven to
work. Check out these numbers: Buzzfeed receives over 150 million monthly unique
visitors; Upworthy (the fastest-growing media company in history) entertains 28
million.42 How do they do it? They Repurpose. The average blog is 500 words and
[T]witter limits users to only 140 characters (minus 23 for images and an additional 23
for outside links). Instead of trying to sum up your entire blog in 94 characters
separate it, and write several tweets about all the different topics your blog discusses,
turn the topics into hashtags and write multiple, timeless tweets.
Things to try:
Mentioned someone in your blog? Tweet it to them. They might retweet it.
Dont bombard followers with tweets about one blog all at once. Schedule tweets
into the future using scheduling tools. I use Sprout Social.
Dont give too much awayleave readers wanting more so they click on that link.
Boost posts on Facebook to reach your target audience.
Can you simply describe your ideal customer? This is something I ask all of my clients
and normally they quickly describe a person based on interests, age, location, etc.
Similarly, Facebook provides a tool for delivering your content to that ideal reader.
Boosting your posts on Facebook is not buying likes, its targeting content. Imagine
you write a blog about home decorating; using Facebook, you can target people based
on everything from age and gender to which magazines they read and the HGTV TV
shows they most enjoy. Its a powerful tool and its relatively inexpensive (today) to
useso take advantage!
Things to try:
Include an image in your boosted post but remember the 20-percent rule: Images in
your ad on Facebook may not include more than 20 percent text in the image to
ensure people only see high-quality content.43
Have some fun: Facebook is for entertainment. Dont just ask the audience to
weigh-in, make it easy and amusing for them to do so. Post two different images
and ask which the audience prefers. Is your blog structured as a list? Ask the
audience what theyd like to add to the listand then add it and give them credit.
Content marketing is a community effort.
Remember that Facebook is algorithm-driven. Facebook qualifies posts based on
how many users interact with themso be interactive!
Allow users to find you on Pinterest.
If your content is focused on creative topics or project-driven concepts, I recommend

using Pinterest. Pinterest functions in two ways: It allows users to visually bookmark
content on the Web by pulling images from a site, and it allows content creators and
bloggers to pin their own content to reach a wider audience. Fortunately, Pinterest is
highly searchable. It accepts both hashtags like social networks and search terms like
Google to allow users to find the content theyre looking for.
Things to try:
Use specific keywords and hashtags when describing your pins so that users can
find you.
Create infographicsits easy! Adding some design elements and text to your pins
can encourage users to click and repin. Create infographics easily and
inexpensively with programs like Canva and PicMonkey.
Post teasers on Instagram.
Instagram was derived from a mobile app and then later (in 2011) became a true
social network. It still doesnt function like other networks; it has never allowed the
user to add clickable links to posts. Unlike Pinterest, its impossible to post an image
from your blog and get clicks via Instagram. This doesnt mean you should rule it out
entirely. Be creative.
Things to try:
Post a sneak peek to an upcoming blog.

Post a #TBT (throw-back Thursday), to a timeless blog that may be relevant to
what people are posting about today. Seeing lots of #snowday posts? Why not
#TBT to an image from the blog you wrote about winter styling trends?
Always use lots of topical hashtags. This is a great way to accumulate like-minded
followers.44
One more tip, this one not related to streaming or social media: manage your time
wisely. As Steven wrote in The New York Times, A tricky thing to avoid as a full-time
blogger, considering that the Internet never sleeps, readers want fresh content daily and
new social media platforms must be mastered and added to the already demanding
workload the economic challenges of blogging full time.45
Emily Schuman, who writes the Cupcakes and Cashmere blog (and wrote a book by the
same name), addressed this issue in a post on her blog:
Ultimately, its normal to feel worn down from time to time. For me, even admitting that
Im going through a slump has proven to be effective, since Im then able to take the
necessary steps to fix it. And as my blog has evolved, it [has] forced me to realize that I
cant do everything on my own, which is why I brought on some key people to help the
business continue to grow.46
CONCLUSION
Everyday people have and will continue to find an audience when they produce content that
others seek. Today there is an increasing number of channels to use to find that audience. To
capitalize on these channels bloggers must understand the available technology. As J. D.
Rucker writes on Soshable, Great content. Great promotion. Thats it. If your content is strong
and youre able to promote your site properly and gain credibility on social media and search,
your blog will grow and be successful.47
This chapter touched the tip of the iceberg of blogging, social media, and streaming, and as
for any point-in-time writing on technology, things have changed since this books publication.
One thing will not change: Content really is king. Technology simply enables bloggers to travel
from the ground up to international visibility.
NOTES
1. Julie Child and Simone Beck, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, new rev. ed. (New York: Knopf, 1983).
2. Julie Powell, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen (New York: Little, Brown and Co.)
2005.
3. Julie & Julia (film), 2009, directed by Nora Ephron (New York: Columbia Pictures).
4. Le Cordon Bleu Welcomed Julie Powell, Le Cordon Bleu, http://www.cordonbleu.edu/index.cfm?
fa=NewsEventFrontMod.DisplayNewsPage&ElementID=282&SetLangID=1, accessed December 3, 2014.
5. Mike McGrail, The Blogocomony: Blogging Stats, Social Media Today,
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/blogconomy-blogging-stats-infographic, last modified August 28, 2013.
6. Arden Hepburn, Global Digital Statistics 2014, Digital Buzz, http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/slideshare-global-digital-
statistics-2014-stats-facts-study-presentation/, last modified January 8, 2014.
7. Mike McGrail, The Blogocomony: Blogging Stats.
8. Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food (New York: Penguin Books, 2009).
9. Lisa Leak, About, 100 Days of Real Food, http://www.100daysofrealfood.com/about/, accessed December 12, 2014.
10. Lisa Leak, 100 Days of Real Food (New York: Harper Collins, 2014).
11. Alanna Okun, Meet the Lacqueristas Who Rule Nail Art on the Internet, BuzzFeed,
http://www.buzzfeed.com/alannaokun/meet-the-lacqueristas-who-rule-nail-art-on-the-i#.gy7k18kly, last modified November 28,
2012.
12. Jennifer Goldstein, Our First Annual Most Wanted Beauty Awards, Marie Claire,
http://www.marieclaire.com/beauty/g1917/most-wanted-beauty-awards/?slide=2, last modified 2013.
13. Blogging from New YorkInterview with Stroller in the City, What a Brand,
http://whatabrand.blogspot.com/2014/01/blogging-from-new-york-interview-with.html, last modified January 25, 2014.
14. Extra TV, Go Back to School with H&M Fashion!, Extra TV, video, 1:00. August 6, 2014,
http://extratv.com/2014/08/06/go-back-to-school-with-h-and-m-fashion/.
15. Brock McGoff, Top 50 Blogs Every Man Should Know About, Modest Man, http://www.themodestman.com/top-50-
blogs-every-man-should-know-about/, last modified June 25, 2012.
16. Kristin Donnelly, How to Make Your Food Cute: Tips from I Am a Food Blog, Food & Wine,
http://www.foodandwine.com/blogs/2014/2/25/i-am-a-food-blog-on-cute-overload-in-japan, last modified February 25, 2014.
17. Fifth Annual Saveur Best Food Blog Awards, Saveur, http://www.saveur.com/content/best-food-blog-awards-2014-
winners, last modified 2014.
18. Stephanie Le, May 22, 2014 (10:44 a.m.), reply comment to reader Hannah, I Am a Food Blog (blog),
http://iamafoodblog.com/faq/.
19. Stephanie Le. Easy Gourmet: Awesome Recipes Anyone Can Cook (Salem, MA Page Street Publishing, 2014).
20. Top Google Adsense Earners in the World, Daily Dock, http://www.dailydock.com/top-google-adsense-earners-
world/, last modified December 23, 2014.
21. Yaro Starak, Alborz Fallah: The Million Dollar Car Blogger, Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, http://www.entrepreneurs-
journey.com/external-videos/alborz-fallah-the-million-dollar-car-blogger/, last modified May 24, 2014.
22. Laura Donovan, Why Your Blog May Be a Waste of Time, Business 2 Community,
http://www.business2community.com/blogging/blog-may-waste-time-0822891#Fsy7hrbPCHlrYu5R.99, last modified March 25,
2014.
23. Nora Ganim Barnes and Ava M. Lescault, The 2014 Fortune 500 and Social Media: LinkedIn Dominates as Use of
Newer Tools Explodes, http://www.umassd.edu/cmr/socialmediaresearch/2014fortune500andsocialmedia/, last modified August
24, 2014.
24. Ibid.
25. Andrew Beaujon, Almost Half of the NYTs Blogs Will Close or Merge, Poynter,
http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/256936/almost-half-of-the-nyts-blogs-will-close-or-merge/#.U6sq-Ul43bc.twitter, last
modified June 25, 2014.
26. Ibid.
27. Mel Campbell, Should We Mourn the End of Blogs?, The Guardian,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/17/should-we-mourn-the-end-of-blogs, last modified July 16, 2014.
28. Nora Ganim Barnes, The 2014 Fortune 500 and Social Media: LinkedIn Dominates As Use of Newer Tools Explodes.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Jason Kotetke, The Blog Is Dead, Long Live the Blog, Nieman Lab, http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/12/the-blog-is-
dead/, last modified December 19, 2013.
32. Benjie Moss, Nothing Left to Say? The Decline and Fall of Blog Comments, Web Designer Depot,
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2014/02/nothing-left-to-say-the-decline-and-fall-of-blog-comments/, last modified February
21, 2014.
33. Ibid.
34. John Borthwick, Distribution Now, Think/Musing, http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2009/05/13/699/, last
modified May 13, 2009.
35. Alexis Madrigal, 2013: The Year the Stream Crested, The Atlantic,
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/2013-the-year-the-stream-crested/282202/, last modified December 12,
2013.
36. John Borthwick, Distribution Now.
37. Craig Bailey, Content Is King, Craig Bailey (blog), http://www.craigbailey.net/content-is-king-by-bill-gates/, last
modified May 31, 2010.
38. Jason Kotetke, The Blog Is Dead, Long Live the Blog.
39. Mel Campbell, Should We Mourn the End of Blogs?
40. Michael Stelzner, Social Media Marketing Industry Report, Social Media Examiner (2014): 5.
41. Alexis Madrigal, 2013: The Year the Stream Crested.
42. Jeff Bullas, 10 Content Marketing Lessons from the Worlds Fastest Growing Websites, Jeffbullass (blog RSS),
September 29, 2014, accessed January 6, 2015.
43. How Much Text Can I Include in My Ad? Facebook (Facebook Help Center),
https://www.facebook.com/help/468870969814641, accessed January 6, 2015.
44. Jessa Hochman, e-mail message to author, January 7, 2014.
45. Steven Kurutz, When Blogging Becomes a Slog, New York Times, September 9, 2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/garden/when-blogging-becomes-a-slog.html?_r=1. Last modified September 24, 2014.
46. Emily Schuman. Blogging Burnout, Cupcakes and Cashmere (blog), 2014, http://cupcakesandcashmere.com/series-
stories/thoughts-on-blogging-burnout, last modified October 28.
47. J. D. Rucker, Building Up a Blog with Social Promotion, Soshable, http://soshable.com/building-up-a-blog-with-social-
promotion/, last modified January 2, 2015.
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12
Self-Promotion for All! Content Creation

and Personal Branding in the Digital Age
Justin Lagore
Decades before MySpace became the place for friends, Facebook expanded beyond
Harvards campus, and Twitter enabled effortless stream-of-consciousness sharing, a
cornerstone of the Internets development was its potential for social interactivity. The global
village phenomenon stemming from the evolution of social media shrank the world. Every
voice became amplified, and geographic barriers melted away, making it easier than ever to
connect with like-minded individuals and bond over mutual interests.
As communication evolved, personal connections online grew stronger, and social media
assumed an intimate role in our lives. Facebook is the modern journal, allowing us to share our
adventures, feelings, successes, and struggles. Twitters rapid-fire nature encourages us to
share our thoughts at a rate limited only by how quickly we can type. Instagram and its filters
breathe new life into visual storytelling for the connected generation.
Perhaps one of the social Webs most profound effects on society, however, has been its
role in the evolution of the personal brand. Living in such a connected age presents countless
opportunities for virtually anyone to become known for their passions, and for many, creating
content around what they love has become a lucrative career opportunity.
This chapter examines applications of social media for self-expression and self-promotion,
the benefits of establishing an authentic personal brand, and how an evolving online social
ecosystem has impacted entertainment and changed the role of third-party media institutions in
the digital age.
THE SELFIE: FROM CLASSIC PORTRAITURE TO CAMERA

PHONES
Centuries before the Internet existed, self-promotion was alive and well in media and the
arts. Storytelling is arguably as old as humanity, and self-expression has always been a motive
behind paintings, music, and literature. Life experiences, human emotion, and triumphs or
failures of society were the inspiration for the poems, songs, and legends passed down both
orally and in writing from generation to generation, and from continent to continent. Artists
painted the likenesses of their muses to preserve the beauty and wonder of their human forms.
Writers crafted novels and plays professing the realities of love and loss, and actors performed
them for eager crowds entranced by the stories of others. These works were shared for a vast
number of reasonsgaining adoration from others, reveling in successes of the past, coping
with grief, and finding an ability to relate with one another despite vastly differing life stories.
One of the best-known works of late Italian Renaissance artist Parmigianino is his Self
Portrait in a Convex Mirror (c. 1524 BCE). His recreation of his own reflection was rendered
as viewed in a convex mirror on a custom-prepared panel, emphasizing the distortion of the
image reflected in the unique shape of the mirror. Its said Parmigianino produced this piece to
showcase his talents to potential customers and ideally gain an audience with the Pope.
Parmigianino hoped demonstrating his impressive technical skills and creativity would earn
him commissions from the church.1
Parmigianinos flashy display of technical finesse and his intentions behind it arent far off
from modern motivations of self-promotion. Its easy to label Parmigianino and other early
artists as pioneers of the selfie and some of the first to work at establishing a personal brand
through their expression in media.
The earliest use of the term selfie as weve come to know it reportedly dates back to
2002. After tripping down a set of stairs at a friends party, a commenter from Australia posted
to the ABC Online Forum a picture showing his bloody lip and other damages done to his face.
He blamed the photo being a selfie for its poor quality and lack of focus.2
Adoption of the word was slow, gaining traction over several years. It wasnt until 2012
when the words constant use in mainstream media popularized it and ignited a massive spike
in its appearance as hashtags on Flickr, Instagram, and Twitter. Oxford Dictionaries named
selfie 2013s Word of the Year after data scraped from the Web revealed a booming 17,000
percent increase in use over just 12 months,3 quite recently after the words acceptance into the
dictionary:4 selfie, selfie, self (noun): a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically
one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media.5
Katie Warfield of Kwantlen Polytechnic University reported on a study she led in which
young women were surveyed regarding the circumstances surrounding and process of taking
selfies.
Most young women said that apart from seeking an image that looked good, they also
sought good lighting, good background, and images that were not blurry or out of
focus. Apart from lighting some young women used technical terminology like looking
for the correct ISO and exposure of the picture and using specific filters to
highlight and increase contrast to correct qualities that werentaccording to them
right.6
Warfields report continues with one respondent commenting, with friends, no [I dont
pose]. By myself absolutely, I imitate models and try out artsy poses. The respondents also
stressed the importance of making sure that in addition to looking attractive that their selfies
also conveyed authenticity.7
The focus on aesthetics during the process of taking a good selfie manifests not simply as a
symptom of vanity, but as a consorted effort to enhance what that selfie contributes to ones
personal brand and the impression made online. The editing processadjusting a photos
white balance, boosting the contrast, applying filters or even deciding which imperfections to
leave untouchedrepresent the artistic liberties new technology affords as a channel of self-
expression. Parmigianino exercised his artistic freedom when he painted his Self Portrait,
opting for the convex mirror and its distortion effect to create visual interest. Just as the mirror
guided Parmigianinos work, the front-facing cameras of smart phones aid with the
composition of selfies. Parmigianinos distortion effect foreshadowed the numerous filters and
photo effects available today. The choices we make as we pose for, edit, and post selfies all
contribute in part to what we communicate to our audiences, and they play into our own
motivations just as Parmigianinos Self Portrait did for him. Today, selfies are just one
example of content used to build a personal brand and bolster visibility and individual
presence online.
CONTENT CREATION: A HOME FOR ALL THINGS

In her book, Seeing Ourselves through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and
Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves, Jill Walker Rettberg of the University of
Bergen, Norway, writes:
Digital self-presentation and self-reflection is cumulative rather than presented as a

definitive whole. A weblog or social media feed consists of a continuously expanded
collection of posts, each of which may express a micro-narrative, a comment that
expresses an aspect of the writer or an image showing a version of themselves. This
cumulative logic is built into the software and into our habits of reading and sharing
online, and it acts as a technological filter that lets certain kinds of content seep through
while others are held back, either never being expressed or finding other outlets.8
The diversity of social media available today means that its easier than ever for creative
content of all forms to find a home online. Instagram allows seasoned photographers and
amateurs alike to tell stories visually. Sound Cloud has grown as an online hub for budding
musicians and podcasters to share their work. Wordpress powers more than 74 million sites
across the Internet and dominates as the worlds largest blogging platform, making it easy for
even the least Internet-savvy users to write about and share their passions with a community of
millions.
Despite the array of channels available and their differing functionalities, however, the
social Web remains highly connected across platforms. Blogs feature buttons enabling readers
to quickly share content on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and more. With just a few taps,
Instagram photos can be effortlessly posted to other networks; Tweets can be shared
automatically as updates on Facebook, and virtually anythingeven rich media such as audio
hosted on Sound Cloudcan be embedded easily.
RISE OF THE YOUTUBERS: EXPRESSING PASSIONS THROUGH

VIDEO
Of all creative content on the Web, however, video has risen to the top as a powerhouse
format for users to showcase their creativity. Since its launch in 2005, YouTube has enabled
individuals with vastly varying interests to express themselves and share their passions.9 The
platform boasts more than 1 billion unique visitors watching more than 6 million hours of
video every month. On average, 100 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute.
Millions of YouTube users subscribe to new channels every day,10 and social medias
interconnectivity gives users limitless options to build their brands online, cross-promote their
content, and spark discussions around their work.
Some of the earliest YouTubers got their start by producing sketch-like comedy clips.
Anthony Padilla began posting content in 2002 to Smosh.com, a site he created to share content
with his friends in school.11 His first projects included flash animations and lip-sync videos
created in collaboration with Ian Hecox, the second half of the Smosh duo. Padilla and Hecox
eventually started posting their content to YouTube in 2005 during the sites infancy.12 From
2006 on, Smosh began to expand its horizons, launching new channels with dubs of their
videos in other languages, behind-the-scenes clips, question-and-answer videos, and more. In
2006, Smosh was recognized by Time magazine when the publication bestowed its accolade
for Person of the Year on the millions of Internet content creators expressing themselves
through digital media.13
Smosh has branched out beyond YouTube, leveraging other digital media to promote its
original content. Smoshs mobile and Xbox One applications optimize access to everything
available on Smosh.com and in its community forums. Smosh also boasts an original game for
iOS and Android devices and, in September 2014, Lionsgate Media announced a Smosh movie
in the works.14 With more than 19 million subscribers and 3.9 billion video views, Smosh has
found massive success on YouTube, and its enormous following has enabled the brand to grow
into what is known as one of the most popular channels on YouTube.
Alternatively, several other users have gone on to achieve YouTube stardom without
expanding into as many genres as Smosh. To date, Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, better known
online as PewDiePie, is a YouTube celebrity known for his lets play video-game
commentary channel. With more than 33 million subscribers, PewDiePie is the most
subscribed channel on YouTube (as of January 2015). Despite the size of his following,
however, Kjellbergs commitment since the beginning has been to fan engagement. YouTubes
biggest personality has a reputation for interacting with his fans as much as possible through
every social network manageable and also recognizing what channels arent conducive to such
commitment. In August of 2014, Kjellberg released a post-vacation video discussing his
frustration with YouTubes comments feature and the high volume of spam making it difficult
for him to read relevant posts from his viewers. Kjellberg announced he would be disabling
the comments feature on his videos, opting to communicate with fans via hashtags on Twitter
and threads on Reddit as he had done in the past.15
In 2013, his channel won a Social Star Award for best social media show thanks to the
support of the channels fiercely loyal fan base, which Kjellberg refers to as his bro army.16
Kjellberg has received mainstream media attention as well, appearing on South Park17 and
making headlines for leveraging his online following to benefit charities such as Save the
Children,18 for which Kjellberg and his subscribers raised more than $630,000.19
For some YouTube stars, achieving popularity online has proven a valuable marketing
asset as they make the jump to success across other media. Comedian Grace Helbigs YouTube
fame started with Grace N Michelle, a channel she created with her roommate. Helbigs
work landed her a job making videos for DailyGrace, a comedy Web series that she created in
conjunction with the multichannel network MyDamnChannel. Helbig now posts to her own
channel, Its Grace, and has made her mark as one of the Internets most versatile and well-
known new celebrities.
Helbigs platform has given her the opportunity to plug her numerous projects, including
the travel series HeyUSA she and fellow YouTuber Mamrie Hart produced with Astronauts
Wanted. Her Internet success also has afforded Helbig the opportunity to leap into more
traditional media endeavors, including the feature-length film Camp Takota, which she co-
produced; and her New York Times bestselling book, Graces Guide: The Art of Pretending to
Be a Grown-Up. Helbig also partnered with E! Entertainment Television on The Grace Helbig
Project, a hybrid comedy and talk show that premiered in April 2015.20
Helbig has used other social mediaincluding Tumblr and Facebookto source fan
questions for Q&A-style videos and to interact with her audience. Twitter also has proven
useful for Helbig as a means of reacting alongside and engaging with her excited fans when
announcements about a new project surface on days that she isnt scheduled to post a video.
In a manner similar to the way Helbig segued into acting and comedy projects, South
African YouTube personality Troye Sivan has been able to leverage his YouTube following to
advance his music career. Sivan actually started singing before he began making videos in
2012, but on July 25, 2014, Sivan released his single, Happy Little Pill, on his channel.21
The single was from Sivans five-song EP, which was released August 15, 2014. The EP
debuted at No. 1 on iTunes in 55 countries22 and made No. 5 on the Billboard 200 a week
later.23 The album also went gold as certified by the Australian Recording Industry
Association.24
VLOGGING: THE INTERNETS REALITY TELEVISION

Even video blogging, or vlogging, has found success on YouTube. The term is a hybrid of
the words video and blogging, and this diary-style genre has become one of the most
popular types of content on the site.
In his clip, Me at the Zoo, YouTube cofounder Jawed Karim stands in front of elephants
at the San Diego Zoo, and describes the animals for 18 seconds.25 His clip was the first such
video posted to YouTube, and is perhaps one of the earliest examples of what could be
considered a vlog on the site. The clip has no intro or end card, no background music, and isnt
edited with any jump cuts or transitions; its raw. Vlogging has become more sophisticated,
with content creators typically employing some degree of editing to keep content concise and
interesting, but the genre in general remains bare bones in nature.
Outside Karims video, its difficult to determine exactly who the first YouTube vloggers
were, but Philip DeFranco definitely was one of the first. DeFranco created his main channel,
sxephil during his junior-year finals at East Carolina University26 and has been uploading
content since 2006. DeFrancos channel focused on news commentary and satire. In 2007, he
created a second channel, PhilipDeFranco, for vlog-style content. It was well received by
fans of his main-channel videos.
Shay Carl Butler, known online as ShayCarl has found massive success with this genre.
Butler got his start after discovering YouTube and watching videos by early creators, including
DeFranco. Butler began making videos of his own and entered a contest that earned him an
endorsement from DeFranco promoting Butlers content, which also earned him new
subscribers. Butler said in an interview with Forbes:
It was amazing to me that some dude across the country was taking the time to send me
an e-mail asking for more videos. I remember waking up and feeling like I got to make
a video I dont want to let this guy down. I loved the feedback and the gratification was
instant. I would film some random thought I had about hand sanitizer or gas prices or
me dancing in my wifes old unitard and I would upload it and people were instantly
there to tell me if they thought it was funny or not. I loved the communication and the
community of it all.27
Butlers audience grew as he continued producing videos, and in 2008 he launched his
second channel to document his weight-loss journey.28 On March 5, 2009, Butler decided to
start posting daily vlogs to the channel. The videos have since documented the daily lives of
Butler, his wife, and their four kids, who are known as YouTubes first family, and have been
hugely successful.
Butler manages five YouTube channels and is producing and starring in Im Vlogging Here,
a 90-minute documentary about vloggers and the dramatic effect that posting their lives online
has had on them.29 Butler tapped into his YouTube following, securing funding through an
online campaign to cover production costs of the film.
The community aspect of YouTube that Butler describes in his Forbes interview is not only
one of the platforms greatest appeals for creators, but also is one of the most valuable assets it
provides. The enormous pool of talent on YouTube means the community has limitless potential
for collaboration, which has become a cornerstone of creativity and a best practice for content
promotion on the site.
YouTubes Creator Academywhich functions as a resource center for content creators
features an entire section on collaboration and highlights the importance finding
complementary and creative partners with whom to work. Collaboration comes in all shapes
and sizes and could be something as intricate as concepting, writing, shooting, and editing a
video together, or as simple as creators giving each other shout-outs in their video, similar to
the publicity Butler received from DeFranco in the infancy of his YouTube career.
In 2009, Butler and DeFranco took collaboration to the next level when they joined forces
with fellow YouTube personalities Lisa Donovan, Kassem Gharaibeh, Danny Zappin, Scott
Katz, and others to create The Station, a channel built entirely as a collaborative work.30
Featuring sketches created by the high-profile cast of viral stars, the team was able to leverage
the popularity of their already well-established personal channels to drive viewers to their
collaborative projects.
The Station later evolved in 2009 into Maker Studios, Inc., one of the biggest multichannel
networks that now helps aspiring content creators build their brands online. Maker Studios and
other similar networks offer a wide range of tools such as analytics reporting, video
management and distribution systems, and community forums that help connect creators who
have similar interests and who might want to work on projects together.
CREATIVE CAREERS IN THE DIGITAL AGE

For many of these creators, making videos on YouTube has become so much more than a
hobby. The niche audiences and communities they build around their content are assets theyve
been able to leverage and monetize to make a living as a full-fledged YouTube career.
The Google AdSense program enables creators to get paid for ads displayed with their
videos by advertisers who have recognized and acted on laser-targeted marketing
opportunities to engage with potential customers of very specific demographics and interests.
The platform also lends itself to brand partnerships between advertisers and YouTube talent
who will actually promote products or services in their videos. Sometimes its as simple as
YouTube giving a shout-out to sponsors and encouraging their audience to check out the brand.
Other times, endorsements on YouTube come from product reviews. Tanya Burr, for example,
is a U.K. vlogger known for her beauty channel and makeup tutorials. Burr has received free
products from luxury brands like Chanel, Dior, and TSL who give out the freebies in hopes of
being featured in one of Burrs videos or on her Instagram feed.31 It is not guaranteed
coverage, but if Burr uses and enjoys a product her endorsement has the potential to increase
sales and convert her viewers into brand-loyal customers.
One of the largest brand partnerships with YouTube talent was a campaign by Ford called
the Fiesta Movement. The auto manufacturer recruited some of YouTubes most visible stars as
Fiesta Agents and gave them a car to drive. The auto manufacturer also covered the
insurance and gas for the duration of the project. The Fiesta Agents in exchange created videos
in response to challenges Ford issued that featured the car and showcased its versatility. The
agents were asked to cross-promote their videos on Twitter with #fiestamovement, engaging
their social networks even further and giving Fords campaign an additional boost in visibility.
Merchandise also is a popular revenue opportunity for YouTubers. Channels across all
genresand especially musicians, comedians, and vloggers who have well-known
catchphraseshave made money designing and selling branded apparel through sites such as
District Lines and Spreadshirt.
Multichannel networks such as Maker Studios and Fullscreen work with YouTube talent
not only to grow their channels and help the YouTubers produce great content, but also to take
advantage of all the potential of all revenue streams available to creators. The networks
frequently manage channels advertising inventory on behalf of their partners, and often the
networks are responsible for connecting brand representatives to the talent that might be
interested in partnering with them. Some networks offer merchandise solutions such as in-
house production or partnerships with production companies to create and sell apparel at a
discounted rate. Networks also offer creators access to music and other assets to use in their
videos free of royalties thanks to licensing agreements with major record labels. This gives
creators clearance to monetize covers of songs or to use their favorite tracks to audibly
enhance their projects.
Because the success of these partnerships or even the size of Google AdSense checks
depends on the size of each channels audience, however, self-promotion and ensuring that
creators audiences are as engaged with their channels as possible is essential. Fortunately,
social media provides Internet personalities with countless touchpoints that can be leveraged
to interact with fans 24/7. Even YouTube makes it easy for creators to cross-promote their own
content right on their channels with annotations that can be configured to link to other videos or
to other social media. This makes it quick and effortless for YouTubers to promote their
holistic presence on the Web and invite their fans to engage even when there might not be any
new content posted.
EMOTIONALLY DRIVEN ENTERTAINMENT AND THE NEW ROLE OF

THIRD-PARTY MEDIA
As entertainment moves online into the world of user-generated content, things seem to be
classifiable into distinct categories. It also still is easy to see that the genres of content on
YouTube and even Tumblr, Reddit, and other social networks differ vastly from those of
traditional entertainment media. But what content does well on the social Web in general?
The answer can be found through an examination of memesone of the earliest forms of
viral online content. The word memes comes is an alteration of the word, mimesis,
meaning imitation or mimicry. Memes are static images, usually featuring a text overlay
conveying humor or adding commentary, and are a prime example of the social Webs ability to
spread content across the Internet rapidly. It seems since the dawn of social media, the digital
world has been infatuated with catswhich were the subject of some of the earliest memes
and continue to be popular today. A 2010 article from Mashable titled, The Million Dollar
Question: Why Does the Web Love Cats?, featured commentary from creators, viral marketing
experts, and other industry professionals aiming to shed light on what made cats the Internet
sensation theyve become.32 Cats get themselves into all kinds of amusing predicaments, the
article reads, and when theres a human on hand to capture the moment thats raw material
just begging to be shared. And because lots of people have cats, thats lots of content.33
Memes havent stopped with animals, however. In January 2012, the image that became the
Bad Luck Brian meme hit Redditanother news and social networking sitewith the text
overlay Takes drivers test. Gets first DUI. Kyle Craven, the subject of the photo explained
Bad Luck Brian was born as the result of a high school yearbook photo botched intentionally.
Craven had a reputation as a class clown, and bad yearbook photos were something he looked
forward to every year. When the school principal made Craven retake the photo he didnt think
much else of it, and the photo faded into obscurity until Ian Davies, a friend of Cravens since
elementary school posted the image to Reddit. Users up-voted the photo, increasing its
popularity and visibility until Bad Luck Brian became an Internet sensation. Users ran with the
image, creating their own captions that kept the theme of a terrible streak of misfortune and
sharing their creations all across the Web.34
Even YouTuber Laina Morris got her start as a meme. On June 6, 2012, Morris uploaded
her video titled, JB Fanvideo in response to Justin Biebers announcement of a sing-off
promoting his new fragrance called Girlfriend. The video depicted her performing her own
rendition of Biebers song, called Boyfriend, with a clingy twist. Morris sings that, if she
was Biebers girlfriend, she would not let him out of her sight unless he wore a recording
device on his shirtsleeve. She goes on to say that she would always be checking in on his
where he is and who he is taking to, finally ending with, Spend a day with your girl, Ill be
calling you my husband.35
Morris video, like the Bad Luck Brian image, sparked its own meme when posted to
Reddit. The thread created around her video was called, Overly Attached Girlfriend, and it
spread like wildfire through social media. The video and users reactions to it were featured on
several prominent news and Internet culture blogs, including The Daily What, Jezebel,
Buzzfeed, and The Daily Dot.
What makes memes so successful as online content? When it comes to cats, theyre the
perfect distraction from our hectic lives, Know Your Meme cofounder Elspeth Rountree
explains to Mashable: You dont need any explanation or prior knowledge to understand the
slapstick humor that animals provide. Cat videos and images are a quick hit of pure, unfettered
cute. Theyre also entertainment in easily digestible doses.36
The same can be said for the popularity of Craven and Morris. They provide easily
shareable, small doses of entertainment and humor easily understood by the lay user of the
Internet. In the grander scheme of things, anything can go viral so long as it strikes a chord with
its audience. In an interview with AdWeek, publisher Dao Nguyen explained what does well
online based upon her experience working at Buzzfeed.
Basically content that stirs an emotion does well. It can range from a funny list about
kids to an insightful commentary on current events to investigative stories about an
injustice or a heartbreaking situation. It can be a list, it can be a long-form story, it can
be an essay, but if a story stirs an emotion then it drives sharing.37
By Nguyens explanation, any high-arousal emotion can encourage sharing, because if it

makes the audience feel something, then its relatable. New viral content is born every day
dancing across newsfeeds as links to videos, photos, and articles. For instance the mom who
strung together witty one-liners from her four-year-old daughter38 to promote her book on
parenting, or the parents who perfectly perform to the soundtrack of Frozen, entertaining their
child who listens from the cars backseat.39 Buzzfeed headlines such as, 23 Times Rachel
from Friends Perfectly Summarized What Its Like to Be in Your Twenties40 are built on this
entire concept of content relatable to the audience.
NEW MEDIA FOR NEWS MEDIA: TRADITIONAL PRESS AND THE

MIGRATION TO SOCIAL MEDIA
If theres one industry that picked up on this trend after learning the hard way, it was
traditional news media. On journalism and social medias implications on the profession,
Nieman Fellow Michael Skoler wrote that the shift between readers and traditional news
media began long before the booming growth of social channels. Twenty-five years before the
rise of citizen journalism, readers still depended on reporters to gather and disseminate the
news. Advertisers paid into news publications because everyone was watching the 6:00 p.m.
newscast or reading the Sunday paper, and it was a surefire way to get the advertisers
messages in front of a captive audience. Traditional media became less reliable in the eyes of
citizens, however, as large conglomerates bought out local papers. Big media companies cut
costs by parsing back original reporting in favor of syndicated stories, restricting allocation of
column inches and airtime for local coverage to reports on fires and storms. Traditional media
lost its relevance with local audiences when it expanded its scope and devoted less time to the
news important to small communities.41
Unluckily for news media, audience discontent converged with the rise of social medias
popularity. Suddenly citizens no longer had to accept roles as passive recipients and had
options for digging deeper into the subjects that mattered to them. Citizens took it upon
themselves to cover what they found important in their communities. Anyone could shoot
photos and videos, blog about local issues, or even break major news stories if they happened
to be in the right place at the right time with a smartphone in hand. Local coverage became the
dominion of these citizen journalists who took the time to tell stories as they unfolded close to
home.42
It didnt take long for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to become staple sources of news
for most people offering diverse perspectives and real-time updates that pressured traditional
news providers to adapt and find ways to become relevant once again and survive. The
pressure was on for reporters and editors to find a way to leverage social platforms to
reconnect with their audiences and win back their loyalty. The two-way nature of social media,
however, meant that for news media it wouldnt be as simple as meeting their readers where
they were. Plus the additional power social media gave citizens to filter out all but the content
they wanted to consume meant the traditional packaging of stories wouldnt translate to new
channels.
Skoler explained a cultural shift in how citizens view the role of journalism. People now
had an expectation that information is to be shared, and not simply fed to them. Social media
set a new standard requiring news media to listen when the audience has questions or
commentary to add to a story. The discontentment with how the news industry functioned
before the Internet cost traditional media organizations some of the trust of their audiences.
Today, audiences expect the news media to build and maintain relationships with them by
honing in on and prioritizing the stories audiences care about.43
FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS: MEDIA OVEREXPOSURE AND

FAMEBALLS
Sometimes news media take exposure to the extreme, as explained by Gawker, a popular
celebrity gossip and news blog based in New York City. Gawker credits the definition of the
term fameball to Vimeo and CollegeHumor founder Jakob Lodwick, who described
fameballs as individuals whose fame snowballs because journalists cover what they think
other people want them to cover.44 The idea is that coverage of Kim Kardashians photo shoot
with Paper magazine,45 Rihannas battle with Instagram over topless photos,46 Justin Biebers
arrests,47 and Amanda Bynes erratic online behavior48 all get people talking due to the shock
value.
Controversial and provocative subjects elicit an emotional response of astonishmentand
even ridiculefrom online communities due to the high-profile subjects of the stories. But the
fameball phenomenon perpetuates a cycle of content burnout. Third-party media continue to
cover the stories because people keep talking about themeven if that conversation advances
to discussions of how tired people are getting seeing the same folks in the headlines day after
day. It should be noted that all media institutions fall susceptible to fameball coverage because
it drives clicks. The trend isnt exclusive to institutions that began as traditional news
outlets. Perez Hiltons blog and numerous other sites are known to specialize in celebrity
gossip and fameball coverage, advancing the visibility of even those who are most famous just
for being famous.
Regardless, the response of traditional media companies to societys adoption of social
platforms has been evident across the board. Today, televised newscasts include hashtags and
Twitter handles of the anchors encouraging viewers to discuss stories in real time. Videos are
packaged and posted to YouTube for later review and commentary. Local newscasts have
found success with Facebook as an online forum to discuss current events.
Additionally, although migration into the social sphere has given traditional news
institutions an opportunity to win back and build relationships with audiences, it has also
paved the way for new unique media institutions to enter the fold. The merging of citizen
journalism and traditional reporting has given birth to news aggregation blogs such as The
Huffington Post and Mashable. In addition to providing original content these sites benefit
from packaging and sharing other content from all across the Web. Born in the digital space,
its something such blogs do well.
The Huffington Post, founded in 2005 as an alternative to more conservative news and
commentary sites,49 covers everything from politics to entertainment, business, tech, media,
world news, health, comedy, sports, science, and more. Original blogs and columns elevating
voices from minority communities, parents, and columnists across all areas of interest give The
Post an interesting position as the Internets newspaper, with a sense of community stemming
from the vast diversity of contributors. That same year, Pete Cashmore founded Mashable,
covering tech, social media, and news pertinent to what the site calls the connected
generation.
Being native to the Web, news aggregation and online culture blogs are adept at catering to
the carefully pruned niche audiences of the Web. Many sites separate their content into narrow
verticals, making it easy for users to browse only news about topics of interest. Their social
media presence mirrors this organization, and institutions manage multiple social media
profiles dedicated to each segment. This structure optimizes these sites for the choosy reader,
giving them the opportunity to subscribe and follow only the verticals that interest them.
The massive audiences these sites have earned prove that generation of original content in
tandem with digital curation is a recipe for success when working in the social media space,
but no matter where the content originates, the relevance and the high-arousal emotional factor
must be present. The third-party media institutions that have come out on top have been those
whose editors have learned to tell stories in the digital space in a way that lifts up the voices
of online communities and elicits those emotional responses.
These principles are the same driving force behind successful content on YouTube.
Creators tell their own stories on the Web and share their passions, which elicits that
emotional reaction from viewers. It could be argued that vlogging as a genre owes much of its
success to the effect it has on an audience. Those raw, less edited clips make content creators
more human to their viewers. They help YouTubers build deeper relationships with their fans
by pulling them a little more down to earth and giving viewers the opportunity to draw
parallels between themselves and content creators as ordinary people. Its those relationships
that allow content creation to flourish on the Web, and its those relationships that are
redefining what it means to be oneself on the Web.
SOME CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Huge changes across the digital media landscape mean that the concept of personal
branding never has been more important than it is today. The personal brand has come to
symbolize the pursuit of micro-celebritycommercialization of our self-expression online and
the change we can make through the use of our newfound voices in the global conversation.
That isnt exactly a negative thing.
Thanks to social media and the numerous outlets for content creation across the Web
virtually anyone is enabled to pursue and make a career of their passions. The entire concept of
what it means to be a celebrity is changing, and a louder voice for the everyday user means an
equal playing field when it comes to opportunities across all content genresdigital and
social media have stripped away the barriers that once barred entry into the view of the public
eye.
Today its easier than ever for people to get in front of a camera and find their calling on
the Web. We can connect with those who share our quirksthe people who get us. Even the
most obscure interests can flourish into entire communities of creators and fans, and
advertising and marketing intersect with the endeavors of those creators to support them and
connect with those communities. Today, its easier than ever to make a career out of simply
being oneself on the Web. All it takes is pulling out a smartphone or turning on a camera and
telling the world, Hello. This is me.
NOTES
1. Parmigianino, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 152324, narrated by Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, Khan
Academy, November 5, 2012, https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/renaissance-reformation/mannerism1/v/parmigianino-
self-portrait-in-a-convex-mirror-1523-24.
2. Selfie Is Named Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2013, OxfordWords Blog, November 19, 2013,
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/press-releases/oxford-dictionaries-word-of-the-year-2013/.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Selfie: Definition (U.S. English), Oxford Dictionaries, August 2013,
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/selfie.
6. Warfield, Katie, Making Selfies/Making Self: Digital Subjectivit[i]es in the Selfie (2014), 4.
7. Ibid.
8. Jill Walker Rettberg, Seeing Ourselves through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to
See and Shape Ourselves (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
9. Megan Rose Dickey, The 22 Key Turning Points in the History of YouTube, Business Insider, February 15, 2013,
http://www.businessinsider.com/key-turning-points-history-of-youtube-2013-2?op=1.
10. Statistics, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html, accessed December 12, 2014.
11. Smosh Exclusive Interview: The Partners Project Episode 13, YouTube, March 10, 2011,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ_yUutK4pQ.
12. Lev Grossman, Smosh, Time, December 16, 2006,
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570729,00.html.
13. Ibid.
14. Kirsten Acuna, Lionsgate Is Making a Movie with Two of YouTubes Biggest Stars, Business Insider, September 18,
2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/smosh-the-movie-announced-2014-9.
15. Felix Kjellberg, Goodbye Forever Comments, YouTube, August 29, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=4_hHKlEZ9Go&list=UU-lHJZR3Gqxm24_Vd_AJ5Yw.
16. Starcount, Social Star Awards Live May 23rd, YouTube, May 23, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=S7QjrK9vrqk&feature=youtu.be&t=2h17m17s.
17. Jason Schreier, Pewdiepie Starred Again on Last Nights South Park, Kotaku, December 11, 2014,
http://kotaku.com/pewdiepie-starred-again-on-last-nights-south-park-1669826680.
18. Stuart Dredge, YouTube Star PewDiePie Launches $250k Save the Children Fundraiser, The Guardian, March 25,
2014, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/25/pewdiepie-youtube-crowdfunding-save-the-children-indiegogo.
19. PewDiePie Celebrates His 25 Million YouTube Subscriber Milestone by Supporting Save the Children, Save the
Children,
http://www.savethechildren.org/site/c.8rKLIXMGIpI4E/b.9052337/k.ECCD/PewDiePie_Celebrates_his_25_Million_YouTube_Subscribe
msource=weklppdp0314.
20. Kamala Kirk, YouTube Star Grace Helbig Is Coming to Your TV, E! Online, January 5, 2015,
http://www.eonline.com/news/607365/grace-helbig-is-coming-to-e-with-new-show-premiering-in-april-get-all-the-details.
21. Troye Sivan, Happy Little Pill(OFFICIAL AUDIO)Troye Sivan, YouTube, July 25, 2014,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXeKoGx9zoM.
22. Bradley Stern, Troye Sivan Shoots to #1 on iTunes (in 55 Countries!) with Debut EP, TRXYE, Idolator.com, August
15, 2014, http://www.idolator.com/7531054/troye-sivan-shoots-to-1-on-itunes-with-debut-ep-trxye.
23. Keith Caulfield, Troye Sivan Set for Top 10 Debut on Billboard 200, Billboard, August 15, 2014,
http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/chart-alert/6221699/troye-sivan-set-for-top-10-debut-on-billboard-200.
24. ARIA ChartsAccreditations2014 Singles, Australian Recording Industry Association, accessed December 14,
2014.
25. Jawed Karim, Me at the Zoo, YouTube, April 23, 2005, http://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw.
26. Nicole Powers, Philip DeFranco Is Sxephil, Suicide Girls, December 31, 2008,
https://suicidegirls.com/girls/nicole_powers/blog/2680080/philip-defranco-is-sxephil/.
27. Michael Humphrey, ShayCarls Epic Journey to YouTube Stardom, Forbes, May 31, 2011,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelhumphrey/2011/05/31/shaycarls-epic-journey-to-youtube-stardom/3/.
28. Shay C. Butler, SHAYTARDS BEGIN! YouTube, October 2, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=pLvKz2LMRs8.
29. Apprentice A Productions, Im Vlogging Here Documentary, http://imvlogginghere.com/, accessed January 2, 2015.
30. Maker Studios, Inc., Our Story, Maker, http://www.makerstudios.com/about#/history, accessed January 1, 2015.
31. Tanya De Grunwald, Meet the YouTube Big Hitters: The Bright Young Vloggers Who Have More Fans than 1D,
Mail Online, September 18, 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-2656209/The-teen-phenomenon-thats-taking-
Youtube.html.
32. Amy-Mae Elliott, The Million Dollar Question: Why Does the Web Love Cats?, Mashable, October 21, 2010,
http://mashable.com/2010/10/21/why-does-the-web-love-cats/.
33. Ibid.
34. Jessica Contrera, Being Bad Luck Brian: When the Meme that Made You Famous Starts to Fade Away, Washington
Post, January 5, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/being-bad-luck-brian-when-the-meme-that-made-you-
famous-starts-to-fade-away/2015/01/05/07cbf6ac-907c-11e4-a412-4b735edc7175_story.html.
35. Laina Morris, JB Fanvideo, YouTube, June 6, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yh0AhrY9GjA.
36. Ibid.
37. Michelle Castillo, From Humor to Heartbreak, BuzzFeed Thrives by Stirring Emotions, AdWeek, January 5, 2015,
http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/buzzfeeds-new-publisher-says-data-shows-emotional-content-shareability-key-viral-
success-162095.
38. K.C. Ifeanyi, Mom Spins Her 4-Year-Olds Harshest Burns into Hilarious Marketing Gold, Fast Company, October
1, 2014, http://www.fastcompany.com/3036533/the-recommender/mom-spins-her-4-year-olds-harshest-burns-into-hilarious-
marketing-gold.
39. Watch this Adorable Disney Frozen Car Sing-a-Long, FOX2 Now St. Louis, March 13, 2014,
http://fox2now.com/2014/03/13/watch-this-adorable-disney-frozen-car-sing-a-long/.
40. Brian Galindo, 23 Times Rachel from Friends Perfectly Summarized What Its Like to Be in Your Twenties,
BuzzFeed, January 6, 2015, http://www.buzzfeed.com/briangalindo/23-times-rachel-from-friends-perfectly-summarized-what-
its-l#.eeygWB5Vg, accessed June 8, 2015.
41. Michael Skoler, Why the News Media Became Irrelevant and How Social Media Can Help, Nieman Reports,
September 16, 2009, http://niemanreports.org/articles/why-the-news-media-became-irrelevant-and-how-social-media-can-help/.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Sheila McClear, Look, We Made You a Gawker Glossary! Gawker, July 9, 2008, http://gawker.com/5022007/look-
we-made-you-a-gawker-glossary.
45. Jolie Lee, Kardashian Photo Plays off Controversial Black Imagery, USA Today, November 13, 2014,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/11/13/kim-kardashian-photo-black-female-bodies-grio/18962603/.
46. Alyssa Toomey, Rihanna: I Do Not Have an IG Account! E! Online, May 19, 2014,
http://www.eonline.com/news/543294/bye-bye-badgalriri-rihanna-blasts-instagram-imposter-and-confirms-i-do-not-have-an-ig-
account.
47. Lesley Messer, Justin Bieber Arrested for Dangerous Driving and Assault in Canada, Authorities Say, ABC News,
September 2, 2014, http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/justin-bieber-arrested-dangerous-driving-assault-canada-
authorities/story?id=25214851.
48. Jeff Nelson, Amanda Bynes Returns to Twitter, Blasts Her Family and Sam Lutfi, People, October 31, 2014,
http://www.people.com/article/amanda-bynes-twitter-return-leaves-mental-health-facility.
49. The Huffington Post | Web Site, Encyclopedia Britannica Online,
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1192975/The-Huffington-Post. October 29, 2013.
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13
The Rise of Journalism Accountability

Zac Gershberg
Public trust in journalism has never been lower. According to a 2014 nationwide poll
conducted by Gallup, only 40 percent of Americans expressed confidence in the ability of the
mass medianewspapers, television, and radioto report the news fully, accurately, and
fairly.1 Another 2014 Gallup poll asked Americans whether they had a great deal or quite
a lot of confidence in the news media, and reported that only 22 percent held such views for
newspapers, 19 percent for online news, and 18 percent for television news.2 Aside from trust,
a majority of Americans63 percentfinds the news media to be biased in its reporting.3
Complicating matters even more, a host of economic forces beset contemporary journalism,
ranging from ownership issues such as media consolidation to an overall loss of advertising
revenue. From the vantage point of the public and of journalists themselves, the outlook seems
grim, yet journalism, both as a practice and topic of public concern, is a highly visible issue.
The current digital media landscape, filled as it is with bloggers, citizen groups, and
professional media watchdogs such as the Media Research Center (on the political right) and
Media Matters (on the left), serve a twofold functionto identify bias, fabrications, and
inaccuracies; and to provoke a sustained public discussion of the proper role of journalism and
journalistic practices.
There is no mistaking the structural problems facing the business and practices of
journalism. The question is whether it is worth acknowledging that digital media also has
ushered in an age of unprecedented journalism accountability, which leads to greater
participation in journalism from the publicboth as a forum for democratic discourse and as
an independent monitor of those who supply society with information. Two key elements drive
this change. One is that the news media no longer possess their longstanding gatekeeping
function as an elite site of power that assesses what information and issues are worthy of
public dissemination.
As Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel describe it, the gatekeeper metaphor referred to how
editors, producers, and journalists stood by an imagined village guardhouse and determined
which facts were publicly significant and sufficiently vetted to be made public.4 This no
longer is the case, as online news sites and social media networks can simultaneously cover a
multiplicity of subjects unencumbered by the daily confines of newspaper space or a 30-minute
television broadcast. As a result, the information available to the public is more fluid and open
because of digital media, even if many consumers are self-selecting in choosing where they
obtain news. Second, digital media has demonstrated a more immediate ability to assess and
discuss the practices of contemporary journalism. The exposure of numerous ethical lapses,
fabrications, and plagiarism in the news media over the past two decades certainly has fed into
the strong public mistrust of journalists and the mass media, but this newfound propensity of
the public to hold journalists and media outlets responsible for such transgressions ultimately
serves and reflects a healthy democratic society. That which constitutes effective and ethical
journalism is now regularly a part of public discourse, and this self-reflexive function requires
media outlets and journalists alike to diligently consider the accuracy of their reporting lest
they be cited as biased, unethical, or having fabricated material.
Scandals certainly embarrass and devalue the respect the public has for journalists and the
media outlets that publish or broadcast their work, but the ensuing public discourse generated
about the practices of journalism, broadly construed, is a relatively new and worthy
phenomenon. The tension between the publics perceptions of journalism and the media itself
marks an index of democratic alertness in American society. Digital media have engendered a
highly discursive forum whereby journalism truly is valued as the fourth estateor branchof
government. Americans now can more adequately check the news media and exercise the
democratic right to voice dissatisfaction with the media. Although media critiques at times
could be motivated by cynical political gain, journalists, on the whole, now are held more
accountable for their workwhich is a positive development. Besides, a perfect press is an
illusory goal for a democracy: Although journalists can and should seek an ideal of excellence
in reporting, the methods of newsgathering and the dissemination of information never can
achieve unqualified neutrality, objectivity, or transparency. A democratic public, moreover,
would be wise to distrust a national media infrastructure working in such monolithic lockstep.
Thus, although the economic and structural problems facing the practices of journalism
certainly are very real and merit the appropriate concern, the current state of affairs deserves
some degree of appreciation. Journalism no longer merely is a repository of information
shoveled to a passive public by elite gatekeeping forces. Journalism now represents both
diffuse forms of public information and a dialogic clearing space within which citizens,
institutions, organizations, and politiciansin addition to media professionalsopenly assess
how information is procured, published, and broadcast. Both the fierce, contemporary debates
about journalism and the recent spike in exposing journalistic malpractice help solidify the
separation of powers between the government, the press, and the public. This newfound ability
to immediately identify journalistic scandal and then engage in public discourse about it
ultimately reflects a more vigorous and democratic public sphere. The public, it is true,
exhibits more feelings of distrust in the news media than ever before, but American journalism
owing to the profusion of digital medianever has been held more accountable for its work.
To establish this, the following sections review examples of journalistic malfeasance that went
unchecked in previous eras of media, and then pivot to consider howbecause of digital
mediacontemporary journalistic misconduct is swiftly exposed and initiates an engaging
public discourse about journalism.
(ALMOST) GETTING AWAY WITH IT: A HISTORICAL LACK OF
JOURNALISTIC ACCOUNTABILITY
The two key factors contributing to the publics distrust of contemporary journalism are
accusations and perceptions of media bias and high-profile scandalsranging from fabrication
and plagiarism to the ethical violations of norms. Digital media platforms have called attention
to and in some cases have exacerbated these tensions, but these issues are not new. Bias, for
instance, is no stranger to American media. According to Si Sheppard, For most of American
history there was no news as we understand it, in terms of the reporting of the facts; there was
only opinion, and highly partisan opinion at that.5 Bias thus has been the rule and not the
exception in American journalismbeginning with the colonial press, which supported
independence en masse,6 and the early partisan press, which soon after independence was fully
funded by the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties as explicit political instruments
that served to galvanize public opinion.
Although the private letters of founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson and passages in
Alexis de Tocquevilles Democracy in America provide engaging discourses about the
constitutional protections and evolving nature of the press, there was little public discussion
from newspapers themselves or citizen-led groupsabout journalistic integrity or bias. When
the elite, subsidized partisan press eventually yielded to the more open, independent penny
press newspapers and magazines of the 1830s, bias by no means disappeared. Many of the
news outlets focused exclusively on either promoting the abolition of slavery or opposing
womens suffrage.7 The pioneering journalism of muckraking magazines in the early 20th
century, characterized by the investigative work of journalists such as Upton Sinclair and Ida
Tarbell, openly championed explicit political reform. There is no doubting the ubiquitous
presence of biased political commentary in the current media landscape, but it is hard to accept
that the reporting of the news media is now more biased than ever before, given the history of
American journalism.
Fabricating materiala gross violation of journalistic ethicsregularly occurred in
American history as well. Colonial papers such as the Boston Journal of Occurrences, led by
Samuel Adams, propagandized in favor of independence through scurrilous accounts of the
behavior of British soldiers.8 Adams is celebrated as a true patriot of the revolution, but it was
historians and not his contemporaries who identified and considered the depth with which his
deceptions affected the medias relationship to the public. At the same time, the partisan press
exhibited a great deal of specious behavior in publishing accounts about its political
oppositionfrom insisting that Jefferson was an atheist9 to inventing tales of Aaron Burrs
sexual licentiousness.10
The yellow press of the late 19th century, typified by the newspapers of William Randolph
Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, is remembered for its sensational headlines and lurid crime stories.
The media drumbeat for war after the explosion of the U.S.S. Maine off the coast of Cuba in
1898, however, relied on willfully ignoring available evidence that exculpated Spain of direct
responsibility for the destruction of the naval ship.11 Hearst is reported to have told an
illustrator of his New York Journal, whom he sent to Cuba to investigate, in what is now a
legendary turn of phrase, You furnish the pictures and Ill furnish the war.12
Although this is just a sampling of journalistic malfeasance in the 18th and 19th centuries,13
it is worth observing that the fabrications recounted here were neither discovered at the time
nor seen to provoke any substantive public dialogue about journalism itself among citizens or
within the media. Until recently, there were few if any media watchdogs monitoring the
credibility of journalism. As such, the contemporary public distrust of the news media can be
seen as a function of the current digital media landscape, which, in contrast to previous eras,
features an ability to root out bias, fabrications, and inaccuracies.
The case of Janet Cooke, a reporter for The Washington Post, is instructive in this regard.
In September of 1980 Cooke published a front-page story, Jimmys World, about an eight-
year-old heroin addict who lived among drug dealers and had been using drugs since the age of
five. It was a heart-wrenching news item that garnered political attention from then
Washington, DC, mayor Marion Barry, who initiated a police search for the boy in question.
Though Jimmy was never found and, according to Bill Green, the newspapers ombudsman at
the time, there were some staff members who were skeptical of the piece, the newspaper
nominated Cookes article for a Pulitzer Prizeone of the highest honors in the profession of
journalismwhich she won in April of 1981.14
It was, no less, a respected authority of journalism Bob Woodwardthe legendary
investigative reporter famous for breaking the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernsteinwho, as
the Posts metro editor, initially defended Cookes reporting and supported the articles
nomination for the award.15 Not until after the prestigious award was announced and the
Associated Press published biographical information on Cooke that contradicted her
application materials to the Post and to the Toledo Blade, where she previously worked, did
suspicions about the story grow in earnest. When confronted, Cooke admitted to falsifying her
personal history and inventing the child drug user, prompting the Pulitzer committee to
withdraw its award. Green, the Post ombudsman, reported a flood of calls and letters to the
paper expressing outrage about the endangerment of the child soon after the articles
publication and the mayor expressed doubt in public about whether such a child existed, but
there was no highly visible media or citizen pressure either applied or sustained to ascertain
the veracity of the story.16 The question remains, then, as to whether the storys fabrications
would have gone unnoticed if Cooke had not misled the Pulitzer committee about her academic
credentials.
For most of American history, unfortunately, fact-checking was difficult. People calling
newsrooms or drafting letters to the editor pale in comparison to the digital infrastructure in
place now, in which a story such as Jimmys World would draw public attention from social
media until it could be confirmed or disproved. Although historians could later piece together
contradictory or fabulist renditions of media content, the lag between publication and exposure
was substantial. One of the benefits of the digital agewhich is characterized by a rapid
velocity of communication both about and within the mediais that fact-checking and calling
attention to fabrication and ethical transgressions are more immediate.
The first high-profile example demonstrating the power of digital media to root out
journalistic fabrications took place in the 1998, when the prolific magazine writer Stephen
Glass, who wrote for The New Republic among other publications, was identified as a
fabulist. According to Buzz Bissinger, Glass fabricated material in 27 of the 31 articles he
published in The New Republic and covered them by the production of the false backup
materials which he methodically used to deceive legions of editors and fact checkers.17
Editors initially stood by his work, Bissinger writes, but Glass was exposed when editors
from Forbes Digital Tool, an early online publication, confronted him in a conference call
with The New Republic staff about the e-mail addresses and Web sites of companies written
about in an article about hacking.18 Glass, they alleged, had invented the e-mail addresses and
Web sites himself, and Bissinger reports this prompted Charles Lane, the editor of The New
Republic, to search Glasss computer and eventually discover other anomalies in his work,
including having his brother pose as an executive at Jukt Micronics, a fictitious company
prominently featured in one of Glasss articles.19 The editors of Forbes Digital Tool, a
forerunner to the news Web site forbes.com, conducted a Lexis-Nexis search and discovered
that Jukt had no other citations or mentions.20 The duplicity and fabulist writings of Glass were
thus exposed, yet it is worth remembering that, for a few years of the 1990s, Glass was a
highly respected journalist publishing work in some of the more elite magazines in the country.
Before the creation of algorithmic search engines available to the public, which might have
exposed Glass sooner, it took an article he wrote on hacking, which alarmed editors from a
competitor publication familiar with the tech industry and what were then sophisticated digital
search tools, to begin the process of sifting through the hoaxes that Glass perpetrated. How
long, one could ask, would Glass have continued his journalistic fraudulence had he not chosen
subject matter monitored by those with the technical wherewithal to spot a fake Web site?
Glasss fabrications ran so deep that his undoing perhaps was inevitable, but now that search
tools are so prevalent and accessible, to both editors and the public alike, it is doubtful that
Glass would have enjoyed the run of publishing success he experienced a decade later.
Two other scandals, which involved high-profile reporters Jayson Blair and Jack Kelly,
broke in 2003 and 2004, respectively, and provide a sense of the exposure lag prior to the
current robust digital media landscape. Blair wrote more than 600 articles for The New York
Times over a four-year period, at least 36 of which were proven to be fabricated or
plagiarized in his last seven months, until he was forced to resign in May 2003.21 According to
the Times own internal report following his resignation, Blair, like Glass, used e-mail and the
Internet to cover his tracks. For Blair, this enabled him to both lie about his whereabouts to
create false datelines and plagiarize copy from the work of other reporters around the
country.22 This was in addition to writing that plainly fabricated stories, sources, and quotes.
Although some of Blairs editors over the years expressed concern about inaccuracies in his
reporting, he continued to be promoted. Blairs unraveling arrived in late April 2003 when
Macarena Hernandez, a former colleague of Blairs and reporter for the San Antonio Express-
News, read a front-page article in the Times that copied her own work verbatimwithout
acknowledgmentfrom the previous week.23 Hernandez then placed a call to her contact at the
Times, where she was once an intern, which set off a chain reaction that ultimately led to
Blairs resignation.24
Blair was certainly caught and held responsible for his fraudulent reporting. Although, it is
worth observing that in addition to the exposure lag, Blair, like Glass and Cooke before him,
gained prominence despite the concerns of some colleagues and flourished professionallyat
least for a timebefore an unwitting public because at that time there was no access to social
media or advanced search engines. Manuel Roig-Franzia, who at the time was Southern bureau
chief of The Washington Post, later recalled visiting San Antonio in April 2003 and reading
the stories authored by Hernandez and Blair. He consulted with his editor about covering
what appeared to be an egregious case of plagiarism, but Roig-Franzia eventually decided
against publishing what could be considered a gotcha piece about another journalist.25
Reflecting on the incident in May 2014, he wrote, If all this had taken place 11 days ago,
instead of 11 years ago, Im sure I would have tweeted about the whole mess right there on the
side of the road.26 It is a telling statement by a newspaper editor, one that reflects the
innovative developments happening during the past decadein traditional and new media
that make journalism more accountable. The immediacy and interconnectedness of the
communications technologies available now could have halted the fabulist works of Glass and
Blair much sooner, but fact-checking was not a social enterprise as it is now.
The case of Jack Kelley, a foreign correspondent for USA Today who had written for the
paper from its 1982 inception until his resignation in January 2004,27 makes this clear as well
and occurs right at the tipping point of the digital media era. Kelley, who had been nominated
for a Pulitzer Prize in 2001, was forced to step down due to conspiring with a translator to
mislead editors overseeing an inquiry into his work. The newspaper subsequently
investigated Kelleys journalistic practices and discovered that he fabricated substantial
portions of at least eight major stories, lifted nearly two dozen quotes or other materials from
competing publications, [and] lied in speeches he gave for the newspaper.28 To probe the
extent of Kelleys malfeasance, USA Today reporters spent seven weeks sifting through more
than 700 of his articles and sent fact-checkers to Kelley datelines such as Cuba, Israel, and
Jordan to interview his sources, a process that uncovered evidence that found Kelleys
journalistic sins were sweeping and substantial.29 Additionally, an independent report
commissioned and published by the newspaper found that despite concerns expressed by both
his professional colleagues as well as government officials objecting to his work, editors
consistently gave him good performance marks.30 The depth of Kelleys infractions ran
spectacularly deep, but it should not be forgotten that he maintained a high-profile position at a
national newspaper for more than two decades, despite the independent report finding that his
dishonest reporting date[d] back at least as far as 1991.31
Of course, there is no way to prove that Cooke would not have won her Pulitzer or that the
careers of Glass, Blair, and Kelley would have been stopped short in the digital media age. Yet
the combined forces of innovative communications technology, media watchdogs, and social
media serve to bring about journalistic accountability in a much more immediate and public
manner. In each instance of journalism misconduct in the quarter-century leading up to the
digital era cited above, suspicions were raised by colleagues and government officials. The
cover of friendly editors, however, resulted in there being no recourse for those who were
suspicious to prove such misgivings. As the following examples drawn from late 2004 to the
present make clear, however, the tools available in the current digital landscape supply just
such an environment.
JOURNALISM ACCOUNTABILITY IN THE DIGITAL ERA

The year 2004 is used as the point of departure for the digital era in journalism for several
reasons. Although the Internet and blogosphere certainly predate that year, 2004 featured a
series of events that make it stand out as a shift in the abilities and practices of digital media:
Google had its initial public offering, Facebook was created, and, according to the Pew
Research Center, for the first time more Americans began to access the Web via broadband
connections rather than dial-up connections.32 Politically speaking, going back as far as to Vice
President Spiro Agnew of the Nixon administration, conservatives had labelled the mainstream
media as liberal, yet the 2004 reelection campaign of President George W. Bush focused
sharply on running against the biases of the newsmost prominently in the speeches delivered
at the Republican National Convention that year.33 Significantly for journalism, 2004 marks the
beginning of the swift and public reaction to media wrongdoing, beginning with the now
infamous 60 Minutes Wednesday television news story, aired on September 8, 2004. That TV
program released documents that purported to reveal how President Bush received preferential
treatment during his service in the Air National Guard at the time of the Vietnam War.
The storywhich fed into, if not accelerating, preexisting charges of media biasresulted
in the firing of CBS executives and producers, as well as the stepping-down of long-time news
anchor Dan Rather. Most notably for the purposes here, is the time frame within which the
documents were discredited.
According to Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post media critic at the time, a flurry of
published activity on the conservative discussion forum Free Republic that night, and blogs
Power Line and Little Green Footballs early the next morning analyzed and challenged the
authenticity of the documents, which had been attached to the CBS Web site and, under
scrutiny, were revealed to have been created using Microsoft Word software.34 Three of the
nations top daily newspapers covered the story the next day without mentioning any
possibility that the documents might be forged.35 National media eventually questioned the
documents by Friday of that week36 and conducted forensic analyses. The media outlets finally
also discredited the documents as forgeries, but they were scooped by the blogosphere, which
was both accurate and immediate. In this instance, blogswhich tend to be focused on
opinion, not reportingspurred the national media to vigorously investigate the story. Within a
week of the story airing on television, CNN had interviewed the three experts hired by CBS to
authenticate the documents before running the piece, each of whom expressed ambivalence
about their provenance but whose reservations ultimately were ignored.37 To this day, Dan
Rather continues to stand by the overall reporting in the story,38 if not the documents
themselves.
It is worth noting how the digital media landscape played a role in exposing the forgery.
Digital tools enabled both the fabrication of the documents and their subsequent exposure. The
mainstream press initially reported the conclusions of the story without authenticating the
documents until pressured by the blogosphere to do so. The lag time between initial media
fraud and its exposurewhich previously required journalistic malfeasance to be discovered
through research by later historians or as fortuitous coincidence by other media members
suspecting something amissdisappeared. By late 2004, then, journalists could be seen as
operating in a complex media environment providing a check on their reporting practices
through a highly visible and public feedback loop of concern and verification.
Blogs perhaps rightly are criticized for injecting political cynicism and polarization into
the public sphere, but in this case their ability to monitor the news media served an important
role in identifying journalistic malpractice. Daily newspapers took note of this when, in
October 2013, 60 Minutes was again called out for airing a discredited story. In this case the
producers and reporters did not broadcast fabricated documents but rather based their
reporting on a disreputable source who had given conflicting accounts of the 2012 attack on the
American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Soon after the television piece aired, The Washington
Posts Karen DeYoung reported that the source in question, using a pseudonym, had written a
separate report admitting that he had not been present at the consulate the night of the attack,
which conflicted with what he told 60 Minutes; the source was thus proven to be an unreliable
witness.39
These scandals by no means suggest that 60 Minutes, as a television newsmagazine
program with a respected history of investigative journalism, and CBS as a network, are
fraudulent perpetrators of news. The stories in question are far less egregious than the
examples recounted above by fabulists in print journalism prior to the age of digital media. If
anything, the 60 Minutes news staffexecutives, producers, and reporters alikewere, in
their collective eagerness to break a story, too trusting in their sources and lacked the diligence
necessary to verify evidence. As such, the digital age is demanding more accountability of
journalists and news media outlets, from an insistence on fact-checking, as in the case of 60
Minutes, to original reporting and ethical newsgathering practices.
Two recent plagiarism scandals in journalism bear this out in that each of the reporters in
question had, in fact, stolen material from their own previous work. In 2012, Jonah Lehrera
scientific reporter for newspapers including The Wall Street Journal and magazines including
Wired and The New Yorkerwas found to have recycled his own previous material. In 2014,
CNNs news editor in London, Marie-Louise Gumuchian, cribbed from her earlier written
work for Reuters.
Lehrers self-plagiarism was first discovered by Jim Romenesko, who operates A Blog
About Media and Other Things Im Interested In at jimromenesko.com, and posted Lehrers
near-identical content to his site a week after the offense appeared.40 Numerous other instances
of self-plagiarism would soon be detailed around the Web. Edward Champion of the blog site
Reluctant Habits discovered that Lehrer had plagiarized from his New Yorker colleague
Malcolm Gladwell.41 Michael Moynihan of Tablet, a daily Jewish online magazine, found that
Lehrer fabricated material in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works.42
Marie-Louise Gumuchian lasted only six months in her position writing for CNN.com
before a routine editing check found an instance of self-plagiarism, which led CNN to run
her work through plagiarism-flagging software, begetting a more problematic, deeper
examination of her reporting.43 All told, CNNs internal investigation found more than 50
instances of self-plagiarism in Gumuchians articles.44 From a journalistic perspective, the
case of Lehrerwho was found guilty of more than mere self-plagiarismis more troubling
than Gumuchians. Taken together, the plagiarism scandals evince a discerning and media-
literate public that monitors journalism in a watchdog capacity as well as a professional news
media more sensitive and proactive to plagiarism.
Craig Silverman of the Poynter Institute suggests that the Lehrer example is the latest
instance of what he considers The Google Game, wherein a more active, crowdsourced
public, including fellow media professionals, can immediately assess journalism that is
suspected of plagiarism by searching for cribbed reporting.45 Silverman compares the
downfall of Lehrer to that of Tim Goeglein, an aide to President George W. Bush, who was
forced to resign in 2008 for plagiarizing columns he wrote for the Fort Wayne (IN) News-
Sentinel. Goegleins plagiarism was first spotted by a former reporter for the paper, Nancy
Derringer who, according to Silverman, used Googles search engine to discover plagiarism
and posted the findings to her blog.46 Within 12 hours of her initial posting, according to
Derringer, 20 instances of Goegleins plagiarism were uncovered by other bloggers, and
Goeglein had resigned from the White House.47
Though the digital age might be best known for disseminating a prolific quantity of
information, these more recent examples of journalistic plagiarism demonstrate how the current
media infrastructure possesses an effective toolkit to also evaluate the originality and veracity
of content. Beyond just verifying information, digital media also provide an environment for
public discourse about the ethical practices of journalisma new phenomenon that is
encouraging both for journalists themselves as well as for the public in general.
A healthy, interactive, and accountable journalistic dialogue ensued rather quickly after
Grantland, an ESPN-owned webzine about sports and pop culture, published an investigative
article into a new and dynamic golf putter by Caleb Hannan. The piece revolved around the
putters inventor, Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt, who told Hannan that she was a MIT-trained
scientist who used to work on top secret projects for the U.S. Department of Defense.48 As
Hannan investigated further he discovered, among other things, that Vanderbilts academic
credentials were not what she claimed and that she was transsexual. During the course of
another interview, Hannan revealed Vanderbilts gender identity to a business associate who
had not known, and then published the sequence including that Vanderbilt had committed
suicide before the article went to press.49
Bill Simmons, the editor-in-chief at Grantland, later reported that although the story
initially received praise on Twitter, within 56 hours there was outrage against the site on
social media.50 In addition to writing an article apologizing for never consulting anyone within
the transgender community before running the article, Simmons invited a critical response on
Grantland from Christina Kahrl, a sportswriter for ESPN.com and a member of the board of
directors for GLAAD (a media organization devoted to issues affecting the lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgendered community). Kahrl accused Hannan and his editors of treating Dr.
Vanderbilt poorly and ignoring important issues, such as a high rate of suicide among
transgendered persons. Additionally, she offered a more ethical way in which the story should
have been reported, [Grantland] really should have simply stuck with debunking those claims
to education and professional expertise relevant to the putter itself, dropped the element of
[Vanderbilts] gender identity if she didnt want that to be public informationas she very
clearly did notand left it at that.51
Given the responses of Simmons and Kahrl, it is clear that the process by which the story
was reported, edited, and published was unfortunate, if not unethical and outright tragic.
Grantland, however, as a Web-based media outlet, was within five days able to publicly
apologize for the story, run a critical response to it, and provoke a larger discussion of
journalism ethics for the public. Although the ensuing apology and dialogue by no means
attenuate the initial grievous errors of judgment committed by the reporter and his editors, the
episode speaks to a more self-conscious news media that is able to more quickly identify
unethical newsgathering practices and published work that adversely affects vulnerable
populations.
A different set of ethical concerns beset Rolling Stone magazine in late 2014 but indicate
the necessity of responsible reporting and editing in the digital age of journalism
accountability. In the opening narrative of an article about the problems of sexual assault on
college campuses, Sabrina Rubin Erdely featured a visceral, traumatic story about Jackie, a
student at the University of Virginia who alleged that she had been gang-raped at one of the
schools fraternity houses.52 The article went on to discuss a host of issues plaguing college
campuses, from sexual assault itself to reporting practices and Title IX (a federal statute
requiring gender equity). Jackies story and the newsgathering practices that led to its
publication began undergoing intense scrutiny just a week later. Erdely discussed her reporting
on a Slate podcast, DoubleX Gabfest, and admitted that, out of respect for Jackies concerns,
she did not speak to the alleged perpetrators of the act.53 Although Erdely apparently did
contact the local chapter president and a national representative of the fraternity, both she and
her editor said they were unable to reach the accused.54 From there, more challenging
questions surfaced about the veracity of Jackies account, leading Rolling Stone, two weeks
after the story was published, to issue an apologetic disclaimer that, given the subsequent
reporting on the story, conceded errors in judgment.55 The magazine rightly earned a great deal
of criticism for its handling of the story, but a broader examination of the practices of
journalism also was provoked. Allison Benedikt and Hannah Rosin wrote of the lessons
learned,
You try very, very hard to reach anyone youre accusing of something. You use any
method you can think of. If you fail to reach the person, you write a sentence
explaining that you triedand explaining how you triedas a way to assure your
readers that you gave the person a chance to defend themselves. Were not sure why
Rolling Stone didnt think that was necessary.56
And from a legal perspective, law professor Eugene Volokh, whose blog The Volokh
Conspiracy was acquired by The Washington Post Web site, assessed the libel implications if
the claims made in the story were materially false.57 The newsgathering practices of the story
thus were quickly and publicly identified as flawed, unethical, and potentially liable to
litigation. Though a public parsing of the problems of this case does not mitigate the damage
wrought by the initial reporting, it is encouraging that unscrupulous journalistic practices are
held accountable through a combination of traditional and online media platforms.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Although the author has sought to trace the positive developments in reaction to journalism
scandals over the past decade, some qualifications are necessary. First, the foregoing examples
of journalism misconduct, although broadly representative, do not constitute an exhaustive
account of media scandals in American history. It is hoped, in this regard, that more in-depth
analyses of journalism accountability are spurred moving forward. Second, there are worthy
topics of debate about journalism that, it must be admitted, the present essay omits a good deal
of academic research,58 and popular opinion-making59 attempt to establish (or rebut the
existence of) liberal media bias and a lack of objectivity among journalists; identify the
harmful consequences of corporate, often conservative, control of news media organizations;60
and trace the rise of commentary and sensationalism over robust public affairs and
investigative reporting.61 My purpose has thus been decidedly narrowto establish how
journalism has entered into an era of unprecedented accountability due to digital medias swift
exposure of plagiarism, fabrication, and unethical behavior. By no means does the present
essay suggest that the rise of such accountability can mask or overcome the economic and
structural problems that plague the news media or the cynicism that exploits the publics
mistrust of journalists. These are harsh realities that media businesses and professionals must
openly face.
But for all of the criticisms of traditional journalism, to say nothing of the blogosphere and
social media, it is ultimately a bonus for a democratic society to suspiciously monitor and
discuss the news. This rise in journalism accountability reflects a digital environment wherein
the media share a symbiotic relationship with the consumer-citizen public it reports to.
Besides, journalists should never assume that their work will be accepted without any
skepticismirrespective of what factors inform the publics perceptions. There is a
possibility that such a state of affairs might intimidate journalists or media outlets from
aggressively pursuing important stories, but effective reporting requires following ethical
practices of newsgathering, which the public is rightly more sensitive to now. Requiring that
journalism be thoroughly fact-checked and original, and sources be properly vetted and
respected, are simple truisms that have circulated among newsrooms, professional media
codes of ethical conduct, and schools of journalism for at least a century. Now, however, the
public is part of the discussion as to what constitutes effective and ethical reporting.
In the digital age, the media is itself a robust subject of reporting, and although this sheds
inordinate attention on instances of fabrication, plagiarism, and unethical behavior, journalism
deserves such scrutinyeven at the expense of its public image. If anything, this increased
monitoring function demands that the news media exercise a due diligence commensurate with
the awesome responsibility required for journalism. As such, editors and producers as well as
print, online, and television reporters must perforce thoroughly scrutinize their own work lest
they be exposed as biased, fraudulent, plagiarized, unethical or as having been deceived by a
source. The twin forces of social media and search engines dictate that journalists handle
information with proper care because the exposure lag that previously existed in rooting out
journalistic misconduct has effectively vanished. It is plain that the scandals of the past decade
do not reflect well on journalists, yet digital media has created a landscape wherein journalism
is held more immediately accountable to the public and become a site of discussion. Just as the
news media provides an important check on the powerful interests of government and industry,
the public now is keenly aware of, concerned with, and even participating in making sure the
practices of reporting and journalistic content are credible sources of information; and that, for
whatever else is said about the media, is an encouraging sign befitting a democratic society.
NOTES
1. Justin McCarthy, Trust in Mass Media Returns to All-Time Low, Gallup (September 14, 2014),
http://www.gallup.com/poll/176042/trust-mass-media-returns-time-low.aspx.
2. Andrew Dugan, Americans Confidence in News Media Remains Low, Gallup (June 19, 2014),
http://www.gallup.com/poll/171740/americans-confidence-news-media-remains-low.aspx.
3. McCarthy, Trust in Mass Media.
4. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2014), 25.
5. Si Sheppard, The Partisan Press: A History of Media Bias in the United States (Jefferson, NC: McFarland &
Company, 2008), 19.
6. Philip Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941),
226.
7. Roger Streitmatter, Mightier than the Sword (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2012), 1746.
8. Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution, 236.
9. Edward J. Larson, A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, Americas First Presidential
Campaign (New York: Free Press, 2007), 17173.
10. Nancy Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (New York: Viking, 2007), 144, 259.
11. Joseph E. Wisan, The Cuban Crisis As Reflected in the New York Press 18951898 (New York: Octagon Books,
1965), 385438.
12. Streitmatter, Mightier than the Sword, 6970.
13. See Marcus Daniel, Scandal and Civility: Journalism and the Birth of American Democracy (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009).
14. Bill Green, The Players: It Wasnt a Game, Washington Post (April 16, 1981),
http://www.public.asu.edu/~lthornt1/413/jimmy.htm.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Buzz Bissinger, Shattered Glass, Vanity Fair (September 1998), http://www.vanityfair.com/
magazine/archive/1998/09/bissinger199809?src=longreads.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Adam L. Penenberg, Lies, Damn Lies and Fiction, Forbes Digital Tool (May 11, 1998),
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelnoer/2014/11/12/read-the-original-forbes-takedown-of-stephen-glass/
21. Dan Barry, David Barstow, Jonathan D. Glater, Adam Liptak, and Jacques Steinberg, Times Reporter Who Resigned
Leaves Long Trail of Deception, New York Times (May 11, 2003),
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/national/11PAPE.html/?pagewanted=all&src=longreads.
22. Ibid.
23. Seth Mnookin, Hard News: Twenty-one Brutal Months at The New York Times and How They Changed American
Media (New York: Random House, 2005), 103.
24. Ibid., 104.
25. Manuel Roig-Franzia, A Fragile Trust Exhibits Irresponsibility behind Jayson Blair Plagiarism Scandal, Washington
Post (May 5, 2014), http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/a-fragile-trust-exhibits-irresponsibility-behind-jayson-blair-
plagiarism-scandal/2014/05/05/596aca28-d45d-11e3-95d3-3bcd77cd4e11_story.html.
26. Ibid.
27. Jill Rosen, The Rise and Fall of Jack Kelley, American Journalism Review (April/May 2004),
http://ajrarchive.org/article.asp?id=3619.
28. Blake Morrison, Ex-USA TODAY Reporter Faked Major Stories, USA Today (March 19, 2004),
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/2004-03-18-2004-03-18_kelleymain_x.htm?src=longreads.
29. Ibid.
30. Bill Hilliard, Bill Kovach, and John Seigenthaler, The Problems of Jack Kelley and USA Today, USA Today (April 22,
2014), http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/2004-04-22-report-one_x.htm
31. Ibid.
32. Kathryn Zickuhr, and Aaron Smith, Home Broadband 2013, Pew Research Internet Center (August 26, 2013),
http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/08/26/home-broadband-2013/.
33. Sheppard, The Partisan Press 57, 28690.
34. Howard Kurtz, After Blogs Got Hits, CBS Got a Black Eye, Washington Post (September 20, 2004),
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34153-2004Sep19.html.
35. Mark Memmott, Scoops and Skepticism: How the Story Unfolded, USA Today (September 21, 2004),
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/president/2004-09-21-guard-scoops-skepticism_x.htm.
36. Michael Dobbs and Mike Allen, Some Question Authenticity of Papers on Bush, Washington Post (September 10,
2004), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9967-2004Sep9.html.
37. CBS Experts Say They Didnt Authenticate Bush Memos, CNN (September 15, 2004),
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/09/15/bush.guard.memos/index.html.
38. Dan Rather with Digby Diehl, Rather Outspoken: My Life in the News (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2012),
5.
39. Karen DeYoung, 60 Minutes Broadcast Helps Propel New Round of Back-and-Forth on Benghazi, Washington
Post (October 31, 2013), http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/60-minutes-broadcast-helps-propel-new-
round-of-back-and-forth-on-benghazi/2013/10/31/fbfcad66-4258-11e3-a751-f032898f2dbc_story.html.
40. Jim Romenesko, Jonah Lehrers NewYorker.com Smart People Post Borrows from Earlier WSJ Piece Jim
Romenesko (June 20, 2012), http://jimromenesko.com/2012/06/19/jonah-lehrers-newyorker-com-smart-people-post-look-
familiar/.
41. Edward Champion, How Jonah Lehrer Recycled His Own Material for Imagine, Reluctant Habits (June 22, 2012),
http://www.edrants.com/how-jonah-lehrer-recycled-his-own-material-for-imagine/.
42. Michael Moynihan, Jonah Lehrers Deceptions, Tablet (July 30, 2012), http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-
politics/107779/jonah-lehrers-deceptions.
43. Erik Wemple, CNN Fires News Editor Marie-Louise Gumuchian for Plagiarism, Washington Post (May 16, 2014),
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/05/16/cnn-fires-news-editor-marie-louise-gumuchian-for-
plagiarism/. Accessed June 8, 2015.
44. Meredith Artley, Manuel Perez, and Richard T. Griffiths, Editors Note, CNN.com (May 16, 2014),
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/05/16/world/editors-note/.
45. Craig Silverman, Jonah Lehrer Is the Latest Target of Google Game, Crowdsourced Investigation, Poynter,
http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/177917/jonah-lehrer-is-the-latest-target-of-google-game-crowdsourced-investigation/.
Last updated November 25, 2014.
46. Ibid.
47. Nancy Derringer, Gone in 60 Seconds, Slate (March 3, 2008),
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2008/03/gone_in_60_seconds.html.
48. Caleb Hannan, Dr. Vs Magical Putter, Grantland (January 15, 2014), http://grantland.com/features/a-mysterious-
physicist-golf-club-dr-v/.
49. Ibid.
50. Bill Simmons, The Dr. V Story: A Letter from the Editor, Grantland (January 20, 2014),
http://grantland.com/features/the-dr-v-story-a-letter-from-the-editor/.
51. Christina Kahrl, What Grantland Got Wrong, Grantland (January 20, 2014), http://grantland.com/features/what-
grantland-got-wrong/.
52. Sabrina Rubin Erdely, A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA, Rolling Stone
(November 19, 2014), http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campus-20141119.
53. Hanna Rosin, June Thomas, and Katy Waldman, DoubleX Gabfest: The Butch Goddess Edition, Slate (November, 27,
2014),
http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/doublex_gabfest/2014/11/the_double_x_gabfest_on_uva_frats_and_rape_in_rolling_stone_husban
54. Paul Farhi, Author on Rolling Stone Article on Alleged U-Va. Rape Didnt Talk to Accused Perpetrators, Washington
Post (December 1, 2014), http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/ author-of-rolling-stone-story-on-alleged-u-va-rape-
didnt-talk-to-accused-perpetrators/2014/12/01/e4c19408-7999-11e4-84d4-7c896b90abdc_story.html.
55. Will Dana, A Note to Our Readers, Rolling Stone (December 5, 2014), http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/a-
note-to-our-readers-20141205.
56. Allison Benedikt and Hannah Rosin, The Missing Men, Slate.com (December 2, 2014),
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/12/sabrina_rubin_erdely_uva_why_didn_t_a_rolling_stone_writer_talk_to_the_alle
57. Eugene Volokh, Libel Law and the Rolling Stone / UVA Alleged Gang Rape Story, Washington Post (December 6,
2014), http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/12/06/libel-law-and-the-rolling-stone-uva-alleged-
gang-rape-story/.
58. For a statistical study confirming the medias liberal bias, see Tim Groseclose and Jeffrey Milyo, A Measure of Media
Bias, Quarterly Journal of Economics 120, no. 4 (2005): 1191237; for a statistical analysis refuting liberal bias, see Dave
DAlessio and Mike Allen, Media Bias in Presidential Elections: A Meta-Analysis, Journal of Communication 50, no. 4
(2000): 13356.
59. See, from the political right, Bernard Goldberg, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News
(Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2002), and from the left, Eric Alterman, What Liberal Media? The Truth about Bias
and the News (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
60. See Robert W. McChesney, The Political Economy of Media (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008); Edward S.
Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (New York: Pantheon
Books, 2002).
61. See Kovach and Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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left).
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http://edition.cnn.com/2014/05/16/world/editors-note/.
Barry, Dan, David Barstow, Jonathan D. Glater, Adam Liptak, and Jacques Steinberg. Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves
Long Trail of Deception. New York Times (May 11, 2003). http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/national/11PAPE.html/?
pagewanted=all&src=longreads.
Benedikt, Allison, and Hannah Rosin. The Missing Men. Slate.com (December 2, 2014).
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Bissinger, Buzz. Shattered Glass. Vanity Fair (September 1998).
http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/archive/1998/09/bissinger199809?src=longreads.
CBS Experts Say They Didnt Authenticate Bush Memos. CNN (September 15, 2004).
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Champion, Edward. How Jonah Lehrer Recycled His Own Material for Imagine. Reluctant Habits (June 22, 2012).
http://www.edrants.com/how-jonah-lehrer-recycled-his-own-material-for-imagine/.
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(2000) 13356. Statistical analysis refuting liberal bias.
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our-readers-20141205.
Daniel, Marcus. Scandal and Civility: Journalism and the Birth of American Democracy (New York: Oxford University
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Dobbs, Michael, and Mike Allen. Some Question Authenticity of Papers on Bush. Washington Post (September 10, 2004).
Dugan, Andrew. Americans Confidence in News Media Remains Low. Gallup (June 19, 2014).
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2002) (from the political right).
Green, Bill. The Players: It Wasnt a Game. Washington Post (April 16, 1981).
http://www.public.asu.edu/~lthornt1/413/jimmy.htm.
Groseclose, Tim, and Jeffrey Milyo. A Measure of Media Bias. Quarterly Journal of Economics 120, no. 4 (2005): 1191
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Hannan, Caleb. Dr. Vs Magical Putter. Grantland (January 15, 2014). http://grantland.com/features/a-mysterious-physicist-
golf-club-dr-v/.
Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (New York:
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Hilliard, Bill, Bill Kovach, and John Seigenthaler. The Problems of Jack Kelley and USA Today. USA Today (April 22, 2014).
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/2004-04-22-report-one_x.htm.
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(June 20, 2012). http://jimromenesko.com/2012/06/19/jonah-lehrers-newyorker-com-smart-people-post-look-familiar/.
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http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/08/26/home-broadband-2013/.
Part III
Community and Globalization
14
Social Media Mechanisms: A Change

Agent
Kiran Samuel
On March 27, 2014, a 23-year-old writer and activist Suey Park coined a hashtag so
controversial that it sent the Internet into a rabid frenzy within hours of its inception. That
hashtag was #CancelColbert.
The term was created by Park in response to a tweet made by @TheColbertReport, the
official account for Stephen Colberts highly popular comedy show of the same name. I am
willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong
Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever, it said.1 The tweet was meant as satire; it
was mocking the Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation, a charitable
organization set up by Redskins owner Daniel Snyder to benefit Native Americans while non-
ironically using an offensive Native American slur as part of the foundations name.
Colbert first made the joke on his show,2 but @TheColbertReport published the tweet on
Thursday nightindependent of the aired segments original context. Park, who didnt see the
original segment but caught wind of the tweet,3 wrote the following in response: The Ching-
Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals has decided to call for
#CancelColbert. Trend it.4
Once she hit send, the Internet roared. Park already had amassed a considerable following
on Twitter as a result of previous activist efforts she performed via hashtags. Among them was
#POC4CulturalEnrichment, a conversation started in September 2013 about whitewashed
(censored) media.5 It gained traction on Twitter among activists and writers who contributed
their own frustrations about mainstream media excluding minority voices.6 Park gained Twitter
fame in December 2013, however, with #NotYourAsianSidekick, which aimed to foster
discussion in support of Asian American feminism and to encourage Asian American women
to join in to discuss their frustrations with mainstream feminism.7 #NotYourAsianSidekick
landed her into The Guardians list of Top 30 Young People in Digital Media.8 So when
Park tweeted #CancelColbert, she already had an audience.
Thousands upon thousands of Colbert supporters flocked to defend the joke, clarify
Colberts context, and attack Park. She, meanwhile, volleyed for her followers to use
#CancelColbert enough to make it a trending topic, Twitters list of terms or phrases that
indicate what is popular in conversation. It did trend, and it did so nationwide. Comedy
Central quickly deleted the tweet and released a statement to ensure the awareness that
@TheColbertReport was a corporate account and was not actually manned by the comedian.9
News publications and blogs picked up the story and scrambled to cover it as it evolved, in
both news and opinion pieces that ranged in topic from how the event was indicative of a
larger cultural conversation about racial sensitivity, to the appropriateness of constant political
correctness, to the overall effectiveness of hashtags.10 The following Monday, Colbert himself
addressed #CancelColbert on his show, which aired during its usual time slot. Colbert echoed
Comedy Centrals statement that he was not the one who posted the tweet, and responded to the
hashtag in his famed faux-conservative character, saying, [T]he interweb tried to swallow me
whole but I am proud to say that I got lodged in its throat and it hacked me back up like a
hastily chewed chicken wing. Im still here.11
So, did Parks effort fail? Not really. Park never actually wanted to cancel The Colbert
Report, as she revealed to news editor Jay Caspian Kang in a follow-up article for The New
Yorker. Park saw the hashtag as a way to critique white liberals who use forms of racial
humor to mock more blatant forms of racism.12 But if she didnt want to actually cancel The
Colbert Report, why use such extreme language? Kang wrote,
Park says that the point of the movement was to argue that white liberals who
routinely condemn what she called worse racism will often turn a blind eye to, or
even defend, more tacit forms of prejudice, especially when they come from someone
who shares their basic political beliefs.13
In essence, Parks aim was to point out the hypocrisy of so-called allies of racial progress
who were okay with using racism toward one group (Asian Americans) to condemn racism
against another group (Native Americans), especially when coming from a beloved star such
as Stephen Colbert.14
Through her efforts, Park clearly learned what to say to ignite conversation. She used that
knowledge to generate buzz specifically around her issue with Colberts joke, but also (and
perhaps not directly her intention), contributed something intrinsically important in the larger
fight for racial progress: Access to her perspective. Even Colbert admitted as much on his
show, saying, To recap: A web editor Ive never met posts a tweet in my name on an account I
dont control, outrages a hashtag activist, and the news media gets 72 hours of content. The
system worked.15
As coverage accrued across the Internet in the days that followed, widely read and highly
regarded publications including The New Yorker and Salon called Park for interviews. Parks
narrative moved beyond social media to other communication channels, providing exposure to
a larger, broader audience that otherwise might not have been privy to the conversation. In the
comments section of a Salon interview with Park, a reader registered as
thinkbeforeyouspeak wrote,
By pointing out her oppression as an Asian woman, she is racist?? She also clearly
states that she wishes no harm or ill-will on white people, but she bravely stands up to
say what no one is comfortable saying. As a white person, this was tough for me to
swallow, too, but yall really need to pull your heads out of your asses.16
Regardless of whether Park persuaded the public with her rationale is an issue independent
from the fact that people were exposed to it. The hashtag #CancelColbert generated 350
million impressions,17 which included direct engagement such as retweets and mentions, but
also viewsand thats just for the tweet. That type of access is instrumental to amplifying
minority voices in their expression of cultural criticism and shared perspectives, especially
when those same voices historically have been subjugated, ignored, or deemed less important
in the larger media landscape.
This chapter explores how social and digital media provide minority voices with platforms
for sharing experiences and enacting change. The chapter makes the following arguments:
Social media places consumers in a participatory role, which shapes how we perceive
the importance of our own perspective and thus encourages us to speak up.
Social media democratizes media coverage, thus diminishing bias and increasing
accountability.
Social media provides tools for groups to self-protect when traditional justice models
fail.
Social media empowers people to create rallying points around which they can build
communities and movements. It thus diminishes the power of gatekeepers to police
movements, which further promotes democracy, accountability, and education.
Social media transforms the relationship between authors and readers from a
monologue to a dialogue. This enables authors to become better educators, but also
gives them the opportunity to learn from their readers, both through comments and
through collaborative writing models.
ACTIVATING THE CONSUMER

Arguably, the differentiator of digital media from traditional channels is the interactivity
available to creators and readers online. A commercial broadcast on television, for example,
places viewers in a different role than for the same commercial when it is posted on YouTube.
Television treats viewers as passive consumers, whereas a social network such as YouTube
provides viewers with a range of actions to react or interact with media. In addition to
watching, viewers can rewind, fast-forward, like, dislike, share, and comment upon that
specific piece of content. Viewers also can interact with one another and show their approval
for others comments by casting an up or down vote, and by replying to comments with their
own.
The relation between content creator and consumer, however, is not purely reactive:
consumers also can upload their own videos to the platform themselves at no cost, corralling
the public to interact with their content the same way a big brand would. The same activity is
possible across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other sites. Whereas a commercial treats
viewers as receptacles for a message, YouTube and other social media networks expect
viewers to react and participate.
In general, digital media mechanisms encourage various types of actions from users, but
these mechanisms all share a similar functionthey all provide users with a role. The ability
to participate, conjoined with the increasing ubiquity of social media, builds into consumers an
expectation that they can participate. An expectation to participate translates into a right to
participate. Social media thus bolsters consumers belief in their own power, which increases
those consumers actual power.
That kind of expectation and empowerment not only has shaped the ways people interact
and react with media from established powers, it also has revolutionized the way they interact
and regard one another. One of the consistent functionalities across digital media platforms is
the option to share. This certainly isnt a recent developmente-mail arguably was the first
advancement that enabled widespread digital sharingbut functionalities such as social
plugins on Web sites, which allow people to share content directly to their social networks,
and native share options on social media platforms have morphed the publics native behavior
to share more often.18
Social media thus provides the tools for individuals to amplify each others voices. On
Twitter, users can retweet another users 140-character tweet to their own respective
followers, thereby broadening the scope of the original posters reach. Through this process, a
user with 150 followers might amass quadruple the amount of impressions. Similarly, a public
Facebook post made by an individual with 500 friends could be shared with just a click of a
button to increase visibility by an order of magnitude. The same goes with other platforms,
such as Tumblr and Pinterest. These share functionalities serve to echo content through digital
word of mouth.
The result is that the Internet enables consumers to participate in public discussions. They
can engage with the people they know in person, the people they follow, or even strangers that
they encounter for the first time in the course of engaging in a communal dialogue. These
participants are able to extend the scope of their reach when communicating online, uniting
with others who might have nothing in common except one common goal: conversation.
CORRECTING MEDIA BIAS

Noninstitutional actors now can participate in producing original content. This directly
impacts social justice by creating widespread visibility of content that otherwise might go
unnoticed, be distorted, or be underrepresented. Social media played a substantial role, for
example, in the coverage of the Arab Spring (the 2011 wave of uprisings in the Arab world
fighting for democracy). Protestors used collective activismaction taken by a group of
individuals in the advancement of a particular ideology or idea19and cataloged the events
that unfolded in front of them using social media, particularly Twitter. This grassroots news
coverage provided accurate depictions of the revolutions to circumvent traditional media
outlets biased and lacking media coverage.20
That same spirit was mirrored in recent events on U.S. soil after the deaths of Michael
Brown and Eric Garner, unarmed black men who died at the hands of police in 2014. Their
deaths came just two years after that of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager shot by
neighborhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman. After a long trial, Zimmerman was
acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter. Martins death and Zimmermans
subsequent acquittal enraged many people around the country who thought it a miscarriage of
justice for Zimmerman to walk free. Brown and Garners deaths, both of which resulted in no
grand jury indictment of the police officers involved, tipped the scales even further into a
national outrage.21
When 18-year-old Michael Brown was fatally shot by white police officer Darren Wilson
in August 2014, Browns death rippled not only locally in Ferguson, Missouri, amid mounting
racial tensions between majority white cops and majority black residents, but also
nationwide.22 There were conflicting reports about what actually happened between Brown
and Wilson. Within hours of the shooting, social media teemed with posts about the incident,
sharing what limited information was available as well as memorial and protest details.23
Soon, Ferguson became the central news story on every network and in every medium.
Although we cannot ascertain for sure whether news coverage of the unfolding events
would have been as prevalent in the absence of social media, the hundreds of thousands of
mentions in the hours that followed are evidence that it played a significant role. As in the case
of the Arab Spring, bystanders captured the protests in Ferguson in large part on social media.
People used their proximity and access to be the eyes and ears for people listening and
watching from afar, and provided on-the-ground reporting.24 Not only did these eyewitness
accounts bypass television broadcasts with their public, first-person accounts of the events,
they also provided coverage expeditiouslyfar faster than traditional channels, because there
were no editors with whom to contend.25 The result was raw, real, emotional, and sometimes
untethered from traditional journalistic guidelines, but coverage was plentiful.26 Social media
provided an unrivaled realm of access to what was happening in Ferguson by facilitating a
direct connection from witness to reader, reporter to recipient, creator to consumer.
Antonio French and DeRay McKessen were two of the most widely shared and
appreciated participants of the protests because of their prolific, on-the-ground reporting, done
primarily through their Twitter and Vine accounts. Many heralded French, an alderman for the
district of St. Louis, as calm and judicious in his documentation of events through text, photos,
and videos.27 French captured the marches, the chants of Hands up, dont shoot, and
confrontations with the police, which at one point escalated to violence, with tear gas and
rubber bullets being shot into the large crowds.28 McKessen, an activist who drove nine hours
from Minneapolis to Ferguson when he caught word of the shooting, was similarly prolific. He
also used his social media accounts to get word out about events and protest information, as
well as emotional expressions to rally the public. On November 24, 2014, a grand jury
eventually chose not to indict Darren Wilsonthus igniting more protests, discussion, and
debate. The movement raged on. French and McKessen were just two of thousands who
propelled the national debate about racial tensions forward through their use of social media.
Among them were trained journalists, academics, politicians, celebrities, and laypersonsall
of whom played a part in feeding a public hungry for information and discussion about what
was happening in the United States.
Farther north, in Staten Island, NY, a similar yet very different case was also unfolding.
Whereas Michael Browns shooting saw conflicting accounts of the shooting, Eric Garners
death was caught on video. On July 17, plainclothes police officers confronted Garner outside
a beauty supply store on suspicion that he was selling loose cigarettes. According to witnesses,
Garner had just broken up a fight, which is what might have drawn police attention to him.
Garners friend, Ramsey Orta, recorded the exchange on his phone as police officers
surrounded Garner. Officer Daniel Pantaleo put Garner in a chokehold and pushed Garner
down to the ground while Garner expressed his inability to breathe. The following is the
exchange, including Garners last words.
Get away [garbled] for what? Every time you see me, you want to mess with me. Im
tired of it. It stops today. Why would you ? Everyone standing here will tell you I
didnt do nothing. I did not sell nothing. Because every time you see me, you want to
harass me. You want to stop me [garbled] selling cigarettes. Im minding my business,
officer, Im minding my business. Please just leave me alone. I told you the last time,
please just leave me alone. I cant breathe. I cant breathe. I cant breathe. I cant
breathe. I cant breathe. I cant breathe. I cant breathe. I cant breathe. I cant breathe. I
cant breathe. I cant breathe.29
Ortas footage echoed across the Internet in screenshots and clips. It circulated across Web
sites and news publications. It served as visible evidence of excessive force.
On December 3, 2014just nine days after a grand jury refused to indict Officer Darren
Wilson in Michael Browns deatha grand jury reached a decision to not indict Officer
Pantaleo in Eric Garners death. The news compounded the publics distress and intensified its
rage.30 The countrys focus zoomed in even further on police brutality and what many
perceived as a broken judicial system. Protests grew, now with added flame under an already
stoked fire. I cant breathe joined Hands up, dont shoot among the protests messages.31
Friends, acquaintances, and strangers shared these words in conversations with one another,
athletes emblazoned the words on their pregame t-shirts, and protesters staged die-ins across
the country.
The national debate about police brutalitywhich at the time of this writing is ongoingis
not a result of the mainstream media delegating enough airtime to make it a primary national
issuethe conversation is omnipresent as a result of constant participation from people
everywhere, using what mediums they have at their disposal as conduits for expressing
themselves.
The effect was undeniably largepeople from around the globe retweeted, shared, and
reblogged content centered around Ferguson, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and a number of
other deaths fueling a nationwide debate.32 One of McKessens tweets from Christmas Day,
2014, sums up the power of social sharing in these events: The fact that you know about the
protests means that they are working. This conversation about racism is now front and
center. Minute by minute, users flocked to channels to document what they saw, heard, and
felt. The Internet became a vessel for grieving, organizing, and collective action. People of
color and allies congregated togetherunconfined by their respective geographiesechoing
each others thoughts and validating each others narratives like friends chatting across a
dining room table.
SUPPLEMENTING JUSTICE SYSTEMS

Social media also can promote accountability. Once content ends up on the Internet, it
becomes documented by the larger public that has access to that content. The First Amendment
protects all Americans right of free speechwhich absolves them of prosecution by the legal
system, but doesnt necessarily let them off the hook when it comes to public scrutiny. Not only
are peoples words often preserved on the Internet for all to see but often in cases of
derogatory statements those words also can be used against the speakers by a public that
wants to hold them accountable and find another way to impose justice.
The founders of Racists Getting Fired, a Tumblr site, created their Web site for this express
purpose. The readership of Racists Getting Fired documents the abuse of privilege and the
racist remarks posted on the Internet by screenshotting cases and sending the shots to the sites
curator, who in turn posts the wrongdoing, as well as any available employment information.33
The site implores its readers to contact the perpetrators employers and ask that they take
action against them. Its simple, yet effective. The site further documents any resulting action
that employers take. In this way, social media can function as a tool for individuals to
supplement already existing justice systems by facilitating collective action that otherwise
would be difficult to organize.
Another way that people bypass traditional justice is by posting customer testimonials for
businesses on a review site. Yelp.coms creators built the site on the idea that customer
reviews fuel new business.34 Yelps model is based on customer testimonials and a 5-star
rating system, used to rank everything from real estate to restaurants. Reviews vary in type,
from complimenting service and pointing out highlights, to voicing gripes and critiquing how
the business is run. Although the implication is that commenters who leave reviews on
businesses Yelp page are customers, however, thats not a requirementwhich means anyone
who decides to make an account and post a review can do so.35 When news that a business
treats customers poorly circulates around the Web, thats exactly what people do.
When Big Earls Bait House and Galley Caf in Pittsburg, Texas, refused service and
hurled homophobic slurs at a gay couple, the owners probably didnt expect it to become
national news. They also probably didnt expect that, upon hearing the news, users would go to
Yelp and leave testimonials, knocking their rating down to 1 star, and reviewing the business
as the best gay club in town. [T]his place is great you can really let your freak flag fly
here, said one Yelp review.36 Another said, On the positive side, it says Bait House but the
place was more like a Bath House with all the horny Texas cowboys flirting and slapping each
others behinds. Very gay-friendly atmosphere!37
Big Earls managed to get the fake reviews taken down, likely because they were
disingenuous to the business standing as a restaurant and not a gay club (a violation of Yelps
content guidelines).38 It didnt happen immediately, however, and reviews still can be found in
articles and blog posts across the Internet that covered the story. Big Earls mistake was a
lesson for all businessesbig and smallto recognize the power of consumers and the power
of the tools at their disposal. Big Earls employees freedom of speech is protected under the
law, but people found justice another way. They most likely always will.
Many wonder whether such actions constitute vigilante justice and are unreasonably harsh,
in that people should not be held accountable in such ways for the things they express online in
their profiles or offline as personal opinions.39 Many people, however, disagree. Ayesha
Siddiqi, writer and editor-in-chief of The New Inquiry, tweeted,
So many people of color have had their livelihoods ruined by the racist white people
around them but we should feel bad about outing bigots? Finally being a bigot carries
some threat of consequence and were supposed to regret this as an era of outrage?40
It is not the purpose of this chapter to interrogate the relative merit of using social media to
exact noninstitutional justice. What is important to recognize is just that the power is there, and
that it is used by communities that traditional justice models tend to marginalize.
CREATING RALLYING POINTSHASHTAG ACTIVISM

Any discussion about the relationship between social media and social movements would
be incomplete without addressing the importance of hashtag activism. Hashtag activism is the
act of creating a movement online through a hashtagged word or phrase. Park is one of many
who have seen success using hashtags to ignite conversation around a social issue. With its
use, people across the world are able to join together in discussion or debate. Critics of
hashtag activism frequently refer to it as slacktivism because participation in a hashtag does
not require any action outside of online spaces.41 However, hashtag activism can spread
widespread awareness of an issue or cause. Social progress requires awareness. Therefore,
hashtag activism can play an important role.
Hashtags by design encourage behavior. They do this in two ways, by categorizing
conversations and by inviting others to participate using the same hashtagged word or phrase.
The former is a facet of their functionality, in that their use on social media and Web sites
enables similar content to show up in conjunction when explored. A user might type 20
different hashtags to accompany a photo of a Maine landscape, among them: #NewEngland,
#trees, #ilovefall. Once posted these hashtags become links. On Instagram, clicking on a
hashtag expands other content from users whose link to each other is that they all used the same
hashtag. As a result, someone from Finland who snapped a photo of a pretty scene in Helsinki
and tagged his photo with #trees would show up in the same content stream.
The other effect of hashtagsencouraging others to participate using the same hashtagis
based upon Twitter users familiarity with the categorizing function. Participating with one
another through hashtags in this way is a learned behavior. So, yes, Twitter users who tag
#myworstfirstdate categorize their tweet and enter a conversation with other Twitter users who
previously contributed with that same phrase, but they also recruit people in their network to
participate by virtue of the fact that their tweet is specifically shared with them, those people
who follow the original poster. A hashtag is an entry phrase into a conversation, and by using it
a participant provides a shared umbrella under which responsesboth among the same
immediate network and outside of itcan string together.
With that said, there are no rigid guidelines for their implementation. The process of
tagging content or integrating hashtags into colloquial digital language is an extremely frequent
occurrence. People use hashtags as the punch lines to jokes, invent hashtags that start
conversations in which no one else participates, or employ them in unconventional contexts to
layer on new meaning.
The Importance of Understanding Your Audience

There are no guidelines for participants, therefore hashtags can be co-opted by whoever
decides to contributean occurrence that sometimes yields disastrous results.
On April 22, 2014, the NYPD coined and pushed out #MyNYPD with the express purpose
of generating support for their police force through kind anecdotes sourced from New York
City residents. Their account, @NYPD News, tweeted, Do you have a photo w/ a member of
the NYPD? Tweet us & tag it #myNYPD. It may be featured on our Facebook.42
Submissions poured in, but instead of seeing heartwarming stories about the NYPD, stories
about racial profiling, photos of police brutality, and general grievances with the police force
filled up the NYPDs mentions immediately.43
#MyNYPD makes me feel paranoid, sweaty, and nervous when Im doing absolutely
nothing wrong. Justice shouldnt make me fear for my life. said @williamcson.
#MyNYPD rolled up on me demanding I show them the weapon I had concealed in my
pocket. It was my iPod. I felt so safe! said @Are0h.
The NYPD, in turn, could do nothing about it; control was out of their hands. Anyone who
came across the hashtag could click on it to expand the content it housed. It was a prime
illustration of crowdsourcing the Internet as akin to opening Pandoras Box.
That type of influx of conversation is precisely the point of hashtag activism. Its
effectiveness in offline activism aside, what hashtag activism seeks to accomplish is more
narrow and specific in its purpose: It creates visibility for a topic and opens a discussion for
both sides of a debate. Suey Park, through #CancelColbert, was able to raise attention through
her choice in hashtagcontroversial enough to spark attention amid people who were ally or
were perceived enemy, those familiar with Park or, more likely, passersby. The beauty of the
hashtag is that it begged explanationwhich perusal of the hashtag might not have provided.
Nevertheless, the hashtag certainly added to the controversy, propelling it into a national
conversation with diverse participants.
Subverting Mainstream Awareness through Minority Opinion

Although #CancelColbert is unique in phrasing, the phenomenon it produced is not an
anomaly. Hashtag activism has led to a number of conversations propelled forward by
activists, academics, comics, and everyday people who use social media to generate interest
or awareness of the multifaceted discussion of a particular topic.
Take Mikki Kendalls #solidarityisforwhitewomen, a conversation she started to highlight
the divisiveness of mainstream feminism in only uplifting white feminists and highlighting their
voices, but actively ignoring the experiences of WOC, trans women, and other minority
feminists.44 Kendall coined the hashtag as a direct response to the Twitter meltdown of self-
proclaimed male feminist and oft called-upon expert Hugo Schwyzer.45 In his extensive
barrage of tweets, he admitted to stalking, targeting, and stamping out the voices of women of
color through backchannel politics. So to the many people I hurt I am sorry. To the women of
color I trashed in 2008, I am so sorry, said one tweet. Schwyzer continued, And WOC, yes
you @amaditalks and @Blackamazon, you were right. I was awful to you because you were in
the way.46 Schwyzers semi-famous presence in digital feminism despite these documented
occurrences against minority voices spoke to the larger problem regarding so-called feminist
sites not actually representing all women. They consistently afforded people like Schwyzer a
platform, but Kendall and others were shut out.47
Its a controversial problem. Although the Internet affords the potential for visibility by
giving everyone a voice, gaining mainstream visibility for those voices still depends on media
publications that are mostly curated and operated by white editors.48 For nonwhite feminists,
mass coverage of their message depends on white feminists empowering and making room for
others to be heard. Not only did Kendall see that not happening, but the opposite was occurring
minority voices were being actively silenced.49
[I]f youre publishing on gender issues and all of the people you choose to reach out to
are white and/or cis, then youve contributed to the erasure of trans people, or people
of color, and someone is eventually going to notice that maybe youre not really
committed to the advancement of all women.50
Issues like racism and transphobia were seen as separate from feminism, which alienated
the core identities of many women. A refusal to acknowledge these experiences, not only by
covering these issues but by not hiring qualified people who are living examples of those
experiences, is antithetical to inclusive female empowerment.51
Kendalls hashtag struck a chord because so many women shared in her personal
experience. #Solidarityisforwhitewomen soon made its way into a trending topic nationally,
with global contributions from feminists around the world who shared in the experience.
#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen when convos about gender pay gap ignore that white women
earn higher wages than black, Latino and Native men, said @raniakhalek.52
#solidarityisforwhitewomen when pink hair, tattoos, and piercings are quirky or alt on a
white woman but ghetto on a black one, said @zblay.53
#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen is when Femen gets to decide the Muslim womens attire, said
@roadtopalestine.54
Nobody from mainstream networks had to give license to Kendall and others who were
allies in #solidarityisforwhitewomenthe mere act of so many women congregating under the
hashtag was subversive and overwhelming enough to cause people to take notice on social
media, and carry the conversation to other platforms. What side people were on was secondary
to the fact that the discussion was public, and the discourse that ensued was rich, intimate, and
necessary for moving feminism forward.
National Events Become Personal

After footage was released of Baltimore Ravens football player Ray Rice in an elevator
punching his then-fiance Janay and knocking her out cold, a number of questions arose. What
was to become of Rice? What does it mean that Janay still married him? How could she be so
weak to stay? Bev Gooden, an HR manager in North Carolina, wasnt an academic or an
activist, but Janays story triggered a reflection of her own experiences in an abusive
relationship that turned her into a powerful spokesperson.55
As the tweets came in, mostly victim-blaming Janay for staying and then for marrying Ray,
Gooden was fed up.
When I saw those tweets, my first reaction was shame. The same shame that I felt back
when I was in a violent marriage. Its a sort of guilt that would make me crawl into a
shell and remain silent. But today, for a reason I cant explain, Id had enough. I knew I
had an answer to everyones question of why victims of violence stay. I cant speak for
Janay Rice, I can only speak for me.56
Gooden recounted her experience on Twitter. I tried to leave the house once after an
abusive episode, and he blocked me. He slept in front of the door that entire night
#WhyIStayed, she tweeted.57 I stayed because my pastor told me that God hates divorce. It
didnt cross my mind that God might hate abuse, too. #WhyIStayed.58 As she continued
voicing her own experience, #WhyIStayed immediately took off as other women began to
contribute their own.
#WhyIStayedBecause he told me that no one would love me after him, and I was insecure
enough to believe him, said @BBZaftig.59
I was determined to make it work, wanted kids to have their dad, convinced myself that what
he did to me wasnt affecting them #WhyIStayed said @ReIgniteRomance.60
#WhyIStayed: because my word was the only evidence, said @RachelMcKibbens.61
Within hours, the discussion evolved into including a new hashtag: #WhyILeft.
#WhyIStayedI thought my baby boys needed their dad. #WhyILeft? I didnt want them to
learn to hit any woman ever, said @notokmaybeok.62
#whyistayed: He told me no one will ever love you like I do #whyileft: I realized that no
one should ever love me like he did, said @kirin_rosemary.63
The social media sphere shifted the conversation from a place of negativity and victim
blaming to a space in which women felt supported and empowered as survivors with important
stories to tellall via a hashtag.
Educating through Widespread Awareness

What do these mentions and contributions amount to? Well, the mere fact that nobody had to
grant Kendall or allies of #solidarityisforwhitewomen a place to speak is, in itself, huge.
Women were able to shift the national dialogue about Janay Rice from victim blaming to
survivorship also is significant. The conversations that ensue from joining all kinds of
perspectives together are subversive to mainstream coverage, and necessary in including all
voices.
Education is a critical byproduct of hashtag activism, and with specifically that goal in
mind, its tremendously successful. The mechanisms of social networks allow for connectivity
to thrive among people who do not know each other and might not share the same views, yet
coexist in a space where their messages are seen, acknowledged, discussed, and amplified.
One of the necessary byproducts of #solidarityisforwhitewomen was to be heard by white
feminists and compel them to be introspective about the ways in which they are complicit in
the media sphere.64 On August 12, 2013, feminist organizer Shelby Knox tweeted, Fellow
white feminists: #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen is not for us to defend, explain, protest. Its time
for us to take a damn seat & listen.
The prevalence of these conversationswhether they are about feminism, domestic
violence, racism, LGBTQ issues, or something elseis helped by social media mechanisms.
The connectivity, visibility, and amplification inherent in social media propels forward
otherwise subjugated voices into a space where they cannot be ignored by mainstream media
systems. The access this affords is tremendous in pushing the envelope toward inclusivity and
progress.
BUILDING COMMUNICATION CHANNELS BETWEEN AUTHOR AND

READER
One of the compelling and dynamic ways that people take advantage of their individual
power is through commenting systems. Whether on Facebook or YouTube, news Web sites or
blogs, digital media has provided a way for people to express themselves and respond to
whats being presented to them. In turn, the infrastructure of digital media systems has
welcomed this behavior or, at the very least, made accommodations for its inevitability. The
empowered readers newfound capability as collaborator and public dissenter has changed the
way in which the public consumes information, at least online. The author is no longer
infalliblethe model shifts from broadcast messaging to conversation, joining together
different perspectives to flesh out the whole story.
Its not only on social media that people are given a role. Web sites such as blogs and
digital publications have comment sections that empower people in similar ways. In both
forms, digital media has allowed ample space for peoples opinions to sit side by side one
another. Its democratized the Web in that everyone has the right to speak.
Many publications not only embrace but also encourage commenters. Gawker Media, the
parent company of affiliate sites including Jezebel, Deadspin, and ValleyWag, developed a
platform called Kinja, which treats comments as necessary components of the articles
themselves. As a result, comment sections on Gawker Media sites are thrivingreaders act as
copyeditors, supporters, dissenters, collaborators, and authors.65 Gawker writers often engage
with readers to clarify, thank, validate, and argue. Commenters can create their own pages,
hosted by Kinja, which allows readers to write their own articles; some of these are reposted
to the main Gawker page.66
The Atlantic rewards commenters, too. Ta-Nehesi Coates, senior editor, arguably the most
widely read journalist on the site and definitely the most celebrated on the topic of race and
culture, has built a strong community of intellectual discourse through his comment section.67
He expects a lot from participantsdemands it, really. Coates himself is the second-highest-
ranked commenter site-wide.68 He has no problem banning trolls (Internet slang referring to
people who try to create discord, start arguments, or upset people by posting in an online
community and deliberately intend to provoke others into an emotional response or otherwise
disrupt normal on-topic discussion) or ripping into people who stoop to making slurs. Coates
acts not only as a writer, but as an educator, ally, and student as well.69 Watching an article
hes written about racial politics evolve and deepen from robust commentary within a few
hours demonstrates the benefits of new media in real time.
THE TROUBLE WITH ANONYMITY ONLINE

Commenting systems are not perfect and rarely if ever function without flaw. Not every site
sees the type of well-formed discussions typical of Gawker and The Atlanticthese examples
are closer to anomalies than to the norm.70 One of the most valid criticisms against commenting
systems is the veil of anonymity it affords people when they arent forced to affiliate their
identities with their comments, which happens on Web sites. That, along with the lack of
interpersonal connection across a computer screen, can turn discussions destructive,
dangerous, and wholly unhelpful.71 Of people online, 73 percent have witnessed harassment
online.72 Studies have shown that people holding predisposed opinions are likely to further
polarize their views based on their exposure to uncivil commentsthey also defend their
views publicly in those forums to outdo or outwit the opposing side for the sake of their
reputations or their opinions.73
As a result of rampant vitriol and spam, some sites have shut down their comment sections
and rerouted discussions to social networks. Popular Science and Mic are among the sites that
phased out their comment sections. Reuters only permits commenting on its opinion pieces.
Medium and Quartz launched without a comment section entirely.74 The sentiment is that
participation is still valued, but not on that forum.
That might not be the optimal route, especially when the visibility of informed dissenters
can be educational and add alternate opinions75inherently important for social progress,
especially for the visibility of minority opinions. Even if conversation thrives on platforms
such as Twitter, the visibility depends on who you follow. Also, although journalists and
editors usually have Twitter accounts, not every reader has oneonly 23 percent of online
adults use Twitter.76 That puts a big limit on the conversation as well as the participants
involved.
So whats the solution? There is no clear-cut answer, but certain publications are definitely
trying to champion great contributions. There is a segment of sites that instead of redirecting
conversation have started curating it. The New York Times and Washington Post have hired
community managers to pick out comment highlights. Gawker Media founder Nick Denton flat
out refuses to give up on that potential.
Its not just about leveling the playing field between commenters or readers and writers
we want sources as well, we want them to be able to participate in these
discussions. And the principle is that in order to be able to achieve the potential of the
Internet we need to harness the collective intelligence of the readership.77
CONCLUSION
However strong the cultural appetite is for enriching conversation to yield progress for
representation of minority voices, there are many situations in which social and digital media
can result in a negative and even ugly state of affairs.
The ease in which people are able to disseminate information and talk to and about each
other doesnt mean whats being shared among them is necessarily true. Things can be taken
out of context, sensationalized, and misreported. The veil of anonymity (discussed previously)
also can relieve people of accountability and interpersonal sensitivity,78 making them mean,
gossipy, and altogether cruel to one another.
Monica Lewinsky, in an essay for Vanity Fair, talks about her own experiences as a part of
what she refers to as humiliation culture. Lewinsky, whose catapult into infamy happened
almost two decades ago, in 1997, didnt have to contend with overexposure that would have
been inevitable had her affair with President Bill Clinton happened today. As much as it
played out online and in publications, in living rooms, and at watercoolers, those sentiments
werent expressed as publicly and rampantly as they would have through social media.
Lewinsky still feels the aftereffects, however, even today.
Yes, were all connected now. We can tweet a revolution in the streets or chronicle
achievements large and small. But were also caught in a feedback loop of defame and
shame, one in which we have become both perps and victims. We may not have become
a crueler societyalthough it sure feels as if we havebut the Internet has seismically
shifted the tone of our interactions. The ease, the speed, and the distance that our
electronic devices afford us can also make us colder, more glib, and less concerned
about the consequences of our pranks and prejudice. Having lived humiliation in the
most intimate possible way, I marvel at how willingly we have all signed on to this
new way of being.79
As truthful as her words are, they dont mitigate progress made on other fronts. It can be
true that the democratization of the Internet will yield progress for minority voices as a result
of accessibility and connectivity, and that people will have more opportunity to do damage to
one another, too. These results can and do happen simultaneously; they are not mutually
exclusive.
But in terms of net benefit to our society, the long-term effects of education through
exposure to new ideas is an undeniable positive, especially regarding creating a socially
progressive, more forward-thinking world. Embrace it or not, it is inevitableand we are
changed as a result of it.
NOTES
1. Jay Caspian Kang, The Campaign to Cancel Colbert, New Yorker (March 30, 2014),
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-campaign-to-cancel-colbert.
2. Sport ReportProfessional Soccer Toddler, Golf Innovations & Washington Redskins Charm Offensive, The Colbert
Report, March 26, 2014 (New York: Comedy Central).
3. Prachi Gupta, #CancelColbert Activist Suey Park: This Is Not Reform, This Is Revolution, Salon (April 3, 2014),
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/03/ cancelcolbert_activist_suey_park_this_is_not_reform_this_is_revolution/.
4. Kang, The Campaign to Cancel Colbert.
5. Muna Mire, Tweeting for Racial Justice: Millennials Take to Organizing Online, Youngist (September 9, 2013),
http://youngist.org/tweeting-for-racial-justice-millennials-take-to/#.VLnVzWTF93V.
6. Ibid.
7. Yoonj Kim, #NotYourAsianSidekick Is a Civil Rights Movement for Asian American Women, The Guardian
(December 17, 2013), http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/17/not-your-asian-sidekick-asian-women-feminism.
9. Nellie Andreeva, The Colbert Report Embroiled in Racial Controversy, Deadline (March 27, 2014),
http://deadline.com/2014/03/the-colbert-report-embroiled-in-racial-controversy-705803/.
10. Gupta, #CancelColbert Activist Suey Park: This Is Not Reform, This Is Revolution.
11. Linette Rice, Stephen Colbert on #CancelColbert: We Almost Lost MeVIDEO, Entertainment Weekly (April 1,
2014), http://insidetv.ew.com/2014/04/01/stephen-colbert-cancelcolbert/.
13. Ibid.
14. Suey Park and Eunsong Kim, We Want To #CancelColbert, Time (March 28, 2014), http://time.com/42174/we-want-
to-cancelcolbert/.
15. Bill Chappell, When the Twit Hit the Fan: Im Still Here, Colbert Says, NPR (April 1, 2014),
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/04/01/297683346/when-the-twit-hit-the-fan-i-m-still-here-colbert-says.
16. thinkbeforeyouspeak, June 17, 2014, comments on #CancelColbert Activist Suey Park: This Is Not Reform, This Is
Revolution, Salon (April 3, 2014),
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/03/cancelcolbert_activist_suey_park_this_is_not_reform_this_is_revolution/.
17. TweetArchivist, March 28, 2014May 31, 2014, last updated May 31, 2014,
http://www.tweetarchivist.com/becmarydunn/9/source.
18. Jenny Price, Study Shows Role of Media in Sharing Life Events, University of Wisconsin-Madison News (July 24,
2014), http://www.news.wisc.edu/23018.
19. Tom Postmes and Suzanne Brunsting, Collective Action in the Age of the Internet: Mass Communication and Online
Mobilization, Social Science Computer Review 20 (3) (2002): 290301.
20. Alexandra Petri, Ferguson, MO, FOX News, and the Difference between Looking at and Seeing, Washington Post
(August 14, 2014), http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2014/08/14/ferguson-mo-fox-news-and-the-difference-
between-looking-at-and-seeing/.
21. Timeline: Eric Garner Death, NBC New York (December 4, 2014), http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Timeline-
Eric-Garner-Chokehold-Death-Arrest-NYPD-Grand-Jury-No-Indictment-284657081.html.
22. Ibid.
23. Rubina Madan Fillion, How Ferguson Protesters Use Social Media to Organize, Wall Street Journal (November 24,
2014), http://blogs.wsj.com/dispatch/2014/11/24/how-ferguson-protesters-use-social-media-to-organize/.
24. Ibid.
25. Deron Lee, In Ferguson, Local News Coverage Shines, Columbia Journalism Review (August 20, 2014),
http://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/local_coverage_ferguson_michae.php?page=all.
26. Ibid.
27. Laura Mandaro, 300 Ferguson Tweets: A Days Work for Antonio French, USA Today (August 26, 2014),
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/08/25/antonio-french-twitter-ferguson/14457633/.
28. Ibid.
29. The Advise Show TV, NYPD Publicly Executes Eric Garner for Illegal Cigarettes (YouTube video) (July 22, 2014),
http://youtu.be/g-xHqf1BVE4.
30. Timeline: Eric Garner Death
31. Ibid.
32. Fillion, How Ferguson Protesters Use Social Media to Organize.
33. Racistsgettingfired.tumblr.com.
34. Yelp, 10 Things You Should Know about Yelp (December 13, 2014), http://www.yelp.com/about.
35. Yelp, Responding to Reviews (December 13, 2014), https://biz.yelp.com/support/responding_to_reviews.
36. Khushbu Shah, Yelpers Slam Texas Restaurant for Asking Gay Couple to Not Return, Eater (May 29, 2014),
http://www.eater.com/2014/5/29/6216059/yelpers-slam-texas-restaurant-for-asking-gay-couple-to-not-return#4141546.
37. Cavan Sieczkowski, Texas Restaurant that Refused Fag Customers Touted As Gay Bar Online, The Huffington
Post (May 31, 2014), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/31/texas-restaurant-fag-customers-gay-bar_n_5423727.html.
38. Yelp, Responding to Reviews.
39. Hessie Jones, Racists Getting Fired: Vigilante Justice or Civic Duty? ArCompany (December 19, 2014),
http://arcompany.co/racists-getting-fired-vigilante-justice-or-civic-duty/.
40. Ayesha Siddiqi, Twitter post (December 17, 2014; 3:08 PM),
https://twitter.com/pushinghoops/status/546079768903696385.
41. Caitlin Dewey, #Bringbackourgirls, #Kony2012, and the Complete, Divisive History of Hashtag Activism,
Washington Post (May 8, 2014), http://www.washingtonpost.com/ news/the-intersect/wp/2014/05/08/bringbackourgirls-
kony2012-and-the-complete-divisive-history-of-hashtag-activism/.
42. NYPD News, Twitter post (April 22, 2014; 10:55 PM), https://twitter.com/NYPDnews/status/458665477409996800.
43. Ryan Broderick, The NYPD Learned A Very Valuable Lesson about Asking the Internet to Use a Twitter Hashtag,
Buzzfeed (April 22, 2014), http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/the-nypd-just-learned-a-very-valuable-lesson-about-asking-
th#.voGQ2LAaN.
44. Mikki Kendall, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen: Women of Colors Issue with Digital Feminism, The Guardian (August
14, 2013), http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/14/solidarityisforwhitewomen-hashtag-feminism.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Jia Tolentino, A Chat with Mikki Kendall and Flavia Dzodan about #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, The Hairpin
(August 16, 2013), http://thehairpin.com/2013/08/solidarity-is-for-hairpin.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
52. Erin Gloria Ryan, Our Favorite #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen Tweets [Updated], Jezebel (August 13, 2013),
http://jezebel.com/our-favorite-solidarityisforwhitewomen-tweets-1125272401.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. Audie Cornish, and Bev Gooden, Hashtag Activism in 2014: Tweeting Why I Stayed, NPR (December 23, 2014),
http://www.npr.org/2014/12/23/372729058/hashtag-activism-in-2014-tweeting-why-i-stayed.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. Jared Keller, 19 #WhyIStayed Tweets that Everyone Needs to See, Mic (September 8, 2014),
http://mic.com/articles/98326/19-why-istayed-tweets-that-everyone-needs-to-see.
63. Ibid.
64. Tolentino, A Chat with Mikki Kendall and Flavia Dzodan about #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen.
65. Bob Cohn, Comments on the Web: Engaging Readers or Swamping Journalism? The Atlantic (August 2, 2013),
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/comments-on-the-web-engaging-readers-or-swamping-
journalism/278311/.
66. Derek Thompson, The Case for Banning Internet Commenters The Atlantic (September 23, 2013),
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/the-case-for-banning-internet-commenters/279960/.
67. Cohn, Comments from the Web.
68. Chris Ip, Ta-Nehisi Coates Defines a New Race Beat, Columbia Journalism Review (October 29, 2014),
http://www.cjr.org/feature/ta-nehisi_coates_defines_a_new.php?page=all.
69. Ibid.
70. Thompson, The Case for Banning Internet Commenters.
71. Elizabeth Suhay, Comment Threads Are Messy, but So Is Democracy, Washington Post (December 18, 2014),
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/12/18/comment-threads-are-messy-but-so-is-democracy/.
72. Maeve Duggan, Part 5: Witnessing Harassment Online, Pew Internet Project (October 22, 2014),
http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/part-5-witnessing-harassment-online/.
73. Suhay, Common Threads Are Messy, but So Is Democracy.
74. Thompson, The Case for Banning Internet Commenters.
75. Monica Anderson, and Andrea Caumont, How Social Media Is Reshaping News, Pew Research Center (September
24, 2014), http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/24/how-social-media-is-reshaping-news/.
76. Duggan, Part 5: Witnessing Harassment Online.
77. Mathew Ingram, Gawker Founder Nick Denton Is Still Trying to Reinvent Reader Commentsand Its Working,
Gigaom (September 23, 2013), https://gigaom.com/2013/09/23/gawker-founder-nick-denton-is-still-trying-to-reinvent-reader-
comments-and-its-working/.
78. Seth Fiegerman, No Comment: Why News Websites Are Ditching Comment Sections, Mashable (December 17,
2014), http://mashable.com/2014/12/17/no-comment/.
79. Monica Lewinsky, Shame and Survival, Vanity Fair (June 2014), http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2014/06/monica-
lewinsky-humiliation-culture.
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Ingram, Mathew. Gawker Founder Nick Denton Is Still Trying to Reinvent Reader Commentsand Its Working. Gigaom
(September 23, 2013). https://gigaom.com/2013/09/23/gawker-founder-nick-denton-is-still-trying-to-reinvent-reader-
comments-and-its-working/.
Ip, Chris. Ta-Nehisi Coates Defines a New Race Beat. Columbia Journalism Review (October 29, 2014).
http://www.cjr.org/feature/ta-nehisi_coates_defines_a_new.php?page=all.
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http://mic.com/articles/98326/19-why-istayed-tweets-that-everyone-needs-to-see.
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between-looking-at-and-seeing/.
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15
Habermas in the African E-Village:

Deliberative Practices of Diasporan
Nigerians on the Internet
Farooq Kperogi
The notion of the public sphere is at the core of the reconstruction of deliberative democracy.1
In the age of the Internet, deliberative democracy is increasingly instrumentalized through
spatially dispersed but nonetheless organic online communities. Mary Chayko calls these the
portability of social connectedness,2 and they have been mushrooming exponentially even in
digital backwaters of the world such as Africa, that Manuel Castells had gloomily
characterized as the black hole of informational capitalism.3 Thanks to the ubiquity of
Internet-ready mobile devices, several African countriesincluding Nigeria, the continents
most populous nation and biggest economyare active participants in participatory, many-to-
many, user-led online communities.
This chapter examines a vibrant Nigerian online community called the Nigerian Village
Square (www.NigeriaVillagesquare.com). Over the years, this community has functioned as
an arena for the vigorous exchange of ideas among Nigerians both at home and in the diaspora,
and as a veritable locus for the initiation of petition drives to change or influence state policies
in Nigeria. The author argues that several of the deliberative practices of
Nigerianvillagesquare.com resonate withor at least consciously seek to abide bysome
features of Habermass characterization of the 17th- and 18th-century public spheres in Britain,
France, and Germany.
This chapter first gives a brief review of the literature on the public sphere, with a special
reference to the conception of the public sphere as popularized by Jrgen Habermas. It next
reviews and interrogates the contending theoretical constructions on the deliberative potential
and practicesor lack thereofof the Internet. It also dissects the internal categories of the
Habermasian ideal speech situation and reviews the trajectory of scholarship that affirms or
repudiates the symbolic nexus between the traditional, normative conception of the public
sphere that Habermas theorizes, and the phenomenally dizzying democratic marketplace of
ideas that, in the authors opinion, the Internet enables. The author contends that the Internet,
although sometimes falling short of the requirements of a normative Habermasian conception of
the public sphere, in many respects also creates the opportunity for the robust flowering of a
variety of public spheres, especially transnational, diasporic spheres of public discourse.
A BRIEF OUTLINE OF THE CLASSICAL PUBLIC SPHERE
Jrgen Habermas, arguably the most notable of the second-generation members of the
Frankfurt School,4 popularized the concept of the public sphere in the English-speaking world
when his book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, first published in 1962,
was translated into English in 1989.5 The remarkable popularity of the Internet as a new arena
for deliberative practices, coupled with the dramatic corporatization of and disillusionment
with both the content and form of the traditional media of mass communication that were
hitherto construed as embodying the public sphere, have been incentives in the renewed focus
on Habermas theory of the public sphere.
It is noteworthy, however, that although Habermass theory of the public sphere might be
the most influential, it by no means stands alone; there exists a multiplicity of competing
conceptions of what constitutes the public sphere. An influential conception of the public
sphere that is coeval with but radically different from Habermass, for instance, is that of
Reinhart Koselleck. Kosellecks concept of the public sphere is found in his historicization of
the role that secret societies such as the Freemasons played in challenging totalitarian authority
in Europe.6 By countervailing the totalitarianism prevalent in Europe in the 18th century, he
argued, the secret societies created moral alternatives that expanded the range of discourse in
much the same way that the bourgeois public sphere Habermas historicized served as
counterweights to feudal absolutism.
For John Dewey, an influential American theorist, the public is called into being by the
concatenation of indirect, extensive, enduring and serious consequences of conjoint and
interacting behavior of individuals and groups in the society.7 What is noteworthy about
Deweys conception of the public is that, unlike Habermass and Kosellecks, it is not
uncoupled from the state. It is beyond the scope of this chapter, however, to explore all the
conceptions of the public.8 Nevertheless, the notion of the public sphere that forms the
theoretical bedrock of this chapter is that propounded by Habermas. This is because, as Nancy
Fraser argues, no attempt to understand the limits of actually existing late-capitalist
democracy can succeed without in some way or another making use of [Habermass early
conception of the public sphere].9 Habermas (1991: 398) defines the public sphere as
follows.
By public sphere we mean first of all a domain of our social life in which such a
thing as public opinion can be formed. Access to the public sphere is open to all
citizens. A portion of the public sphere is constituted in every conversation in which
private persons come together to form a public. When the public is large, this kind of
communication requires certain means of dissemination and influence; today
newspapers and periodicals, radio and television are the media of the public sphere.
We speak of a political public sphere when the public discussions concern objects
connected with the practice of the state.
Habermass theory derives inspirational strength from a historical juncture during the 17th
and 18th centuries in Western Europeparticularly in England, France, and Germanywhen
coffee houses, salons, societies, the town hall, the village church, the tavern, the public square,
convenient barns, union halls, parks, factory lunchrooms, and even street corners became the
arenas of debate, political discussion, and action. Habermas extends this to a normative model
of popular involvement in the public sphere for contemporary times. He explains that in these
venues, everyone had an equal right to speak as if they were equals. In England, for example,
the coffee house conferred discursive sanctuary not only on the nobility but also on the wider
strata of the middle class, including craftsmen and shopkeepers.10 The dialogue, he posited,
transpired in a profoundly democratic forum where the status differentials and positional
hierarchies of participants were bracketed, and issues were discussed without external
coercion.
The public sphere, Habermas contends, was governed by a moral-practical discourse, and
the apparatus for the mediation of this discourse was rational and critical argumentation. His
analysis of communication in the archetypal bourgeois public sphere reveals that every
participant who engaged in the moral-practical discourse of the time made recourse to a
number of normative conditions, which he later called the ideal speech situation in his
extension of this theory. The requirements to qualify for the Habermasian ideal speech
situation are:
The discourse should be independent from state and corporate interferences;

The exchange of points of views during a discourse should be amenable to criticism
and review, and dogmatism should be eschewed;
Participants in the discourse should demonstrate reflexivity and a willingness to
question both their individual assumptions and those of the social milieu in which they
live;
Participants should show a capacity for tolerance, sympathy, and even a vicarious
identification with points of views that are at variance with theirs and also avoid the
use of emotive and insulting language;
Participants must make an effort to be sincere in their search for the truth; and
There must be discursive inclusivity and equality.11
It is important to note that Habermas himself has recognized that these are mere ideals that
have never been fully realized even in the classical bourgeois public sphere.
Nonetheless, as persuasive as his historicization and idealization of the bourgeois public
sphere is, critics from different theoretical and ideological orientations have criticized it.
Specifically, it has been criticized as Eurocentric, biased in favor of the bourgeoisie and
against the working class, as patriarchal, and as logocentric.12 Poststructuralists like Lyotard
even questioned the functional relevance of Habermass model of consensus through rational-
critical discourse.13 He specifically queried the emancipatory and social utility of excessive
rationalism in the conduct of discourse for the wider strata of society. The concept is also
criticized for instituting a linear, evolutionary, and progressive history of the world that ignores
the differential socio-historical experiences of non-Western or, to be sure, non-European
societies. It is accused of falsely conferring on the idiosyncrasies of Enlightenment Europe a
universality it never possessed, and of consigning the differential temporalities of other
societies to the discursive fringes.14
Feminist theorists such as Nancy Fraser also point out the exclusion of women in
Habermass public sphere.15 As Neil McLaughlin observes, a typical participant in the public
sphere usually was male, educated, and propertied; with the means and leisure to take part in
public discourse.16 Economically disaffiliated segments of the society that had a needindeed
an obligationto work hard to survive the vicissitudes and cruelties of the incipient capitalist
socioeconomic order did not have the luxury to expend energies and time to participate in the
discussions. Certainly, women at that time were either too ensnared by the drudgery of
domestic engagements or the suffocating stranglehold of male tyranny and oppression to
participate in the discursive indulgence of the public sphere. Several feminist theorists such as
Anne Fernald,17 including a whole host of other critics in an edited volume titled Feminists
Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse,18 also point out that the putative
discursive openness of Habermas public sphere was premised on practices of deliberative
omission not only of women but also of other marginal and subordinate groups in the society.
Jodi Dean even suggests that Habermass account of the bourgeois public sphere was at best
apocryphal.19
Aside from poststructuralist, postcolonial, and feminist critics, other critics such as Oskar
Negt, Alexander Kluge,20 Nancy Fraser, and Michael Warner21 also instructively call attention
to Habermass privileging of a hegemonic public sphere, which they argue was structured to be
congenial only to the preferences and prejudices of people who occupy the upper end of the
social scale. In place of one overarching, dominant public sphere, they postulate the concept of
multiple public spheres that are not only oppositional to the hegemonic public sphere but that
also incorporate the aspirations of marginal groups in the society such as the working class,
women, and racial and sexual minorities. The symbolic utility of their argument in terms of
contemporary scholarship in computer-mediated communication is that the landscape of the
public sphere has been shifted from a historico-transcendental veneration of Europe during the
Enlightenment to a multiplicity of trans-historical loci of discourses. This crucial change in the
notion of the public sphere assumes its full consequence when it is seen in relation to the
Internet, which, in many ways, defies simplistic spatial and temporal categorizations, and
encompasses a robust array of spheres of discourses in ways that are probably unparalleled in
human history.
Now, how does the Internet relate with classical notions of the public sphere and how does
it depart from it? Do Internet chat rooms, e-zines, news groups, electronic bulletin boards, and
cyber salons qualify to be labeled modern-day public spheres? What conditions must they
fulfill to approximate the status of public spheres? The next section addresses how some
scholars have answered these questions.
THE INTERNET AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Although it is obvious that Habermas did not envision the Internet when he formulated his
theory of the public sphere, his caution against Athens envy in his subsequent work no doubt
anticipates the debates about the deliberative capacities of the Internet. Habermasin an
important extension of his theory of the public sphereargued that if democracy is to be
implemented in todays diverse and complex world, then society has to learn to adjust to the
reality of the impracticability of a spatially bound agglomeration of mutually consenting
members in the public sphere. Instead, he proposes that citizens who are not necessarily
physically co-present can develop forms of communication that dispense with the necessity for
corporeal presence.22 Although Habermas did not specifically refer to the Internet when he
said this, many communication scholars have interpreted him as affirming the deliberative
potential of the Internet. As Heinz Brandenburg instructively observed,
[I]t is not the case that Habermas himself or deliberative theorists went on the search to
discover an effective and inclusive forum of public deliberation on a mass scale and
came across the Internet. It is rather the other way around: namely that early cyber-
enthusiasts quickly embraced Habermas notion of the public sphere and the theory of
deliberative democracy and began to claim that the Internet provides just that: a virtual
public sphere.23
One of the most notable early cyber-theorists who rhapsodized over the emancipatory and
deliberative potential of the Internet was Howard Rheingold.24 Rheingold popularized a cyber-
enthusiastic vision of the electronic agora, or what Robin and Webster have characterized as
the vision of an Athens without slaves.25 Rheingold believes that Internet technology, if
properly understood and defended by enough citizens, does have democratizing potential in the
way that alphabets and printing presses had democratizing potential.26 He postulates that the
formation of virtual communities on the Internet provides the chance to revitalize the public
sphere, and that the chance to do this has been put back in the hands of the public in a manner
that is unparalleled in the records of human democratic progress. One of the main benefits of
the Internet, he said, is the wide latitude it gives its users to find others who share similar
interests, concerns, and worries with them. He made the point that although a person cannot,
for instance, simply pick up a phone and ask to be connected with someone who wants to talk
about Islamic art or Californian wine, but a person can join a newsgroup on any of those topics
and converse with the people there, either privately or publicly.
Rheingold, in spite of his faith in the strengths and promises of the Internet, was cautious
not to draw a mechanical link between the normative public sphere and the Internet, preferring
to use the word potential. Hubertus Buchstein was less restrained. He was certain that the
Internet is the Habermasian public sphere reincarnated in an electronic form. He contends that
it looks like the most ideal speech situation.27 Douglas Kellner also states that the Internet
has produced new public spheres and spaces for information, debate, and participation that
contain the potential to invigorate democracy and to increase the dissemination of critical and
progressive ideas.28 Similarly, Hauben and Hauben, from their empirical inquiry into the
discursive practices of Usenet groups and other forms of deliberation on the Web, conclude
that the Internet expands the range and diversity of communication and viewpoints through the
freewheeling and rambling discussion that it enables.29
Several other scholars, however, do not share in the optimism of these cyber-enthusiasts.
Dahlberg, for instance, on the basis of an empirical research, concludes that the gains of
Internet discussion groups in terms of opening up new vistas for advancing the concept of the
public sphere are vitiated by the growing commercialization and commoditization of
cyberspace by state and corporate concerns.30 He also notes that the Internet as presently
constituted is hallmarked by a dearth of reflexivity, a deficit of mutual tolerance, difficulty in
authenticating identity claims and information put forward by participants in Internet discussion
groups, the disaffiliation of large sections of people from online political forums, and the
monopolization of cyber-discourse by a few individuals and groups. Dahlberg contends
therefore that this reality detracts from the ascription of the status of public sphere to the
Internet. In their introduction to Resisting the Virtual Life, Brook and Boal were even harsher
in their critique of the Internet. They say it is pernicious when it is deployed as substitutes
for face-to-face interactions.31
There are scholars such as Susan ODonnell, however, who strike a happy balance
between the cyber-enthusiasts and the cyber-skeptics. ODonnells research applies the public
sphere concept to the Internet and argues that although the Internet does have democratizing
potential it often fails as a public sphere in practice.32 How do these views relate to an actual,
extant site of discourse on the Internet?
THE NIGERIAN VILLAGE SQUARE AS A COLLABORATIVE,

HABERMASIAN ONLINE COMMUNITY
The Nigeriavillagesquare.com was founded in 2003 by a group of immigrant Nigerians
based in the United States. The main figure associated with the site is Philip Adekunle, a
Chicago-based computer information systems specialist. The Web site was created to serve as
a locus for the untrammeled exchange of ideas and opinions about the homeland by Nigerians
both in Africa and in the diaspora.33 It is the reinvention, in an electronic form, of the
deliberative content of the village square in the precolonial African social formation where
people from all corners [met] at the Village Square after a hard days work to sip
unadulterated palm-wine, share news, gossip, jokes, music, dance, events and opinions.34 In
many respects, the pre-colonial African village square that the owners of this Web site
reference has many resonances with the early European bourgeois public sphere that Habermas
historicized; only that the African village square was premodern, pre-bourgeois, and did not
function as a counterweight to the ruling class, nor did it have any purposive, codified,
normative ideals that guided its deliberative practices. It was a core cultural institution,
however, that was crucial to the intergenerational perpetuation of traditions, customs, and
mores, which were disrupted with the advent of colonialism.
The reincarnated village square in electronic form, however, both replicates and
transcends the structures and discursive practices of its predecessor. Although the
NigeriaVillagesquare.com site has guidelines on the form of articles to be posted on its front
pages and in its discussion forums, the site is largely unmoderated. It accepts opinion articles,
news commentaries, trivia, and even fictional creative writing from all Nigerians and non-
Nigerians interested in Nigerian affairs. Contributors to the site do not have to be subscribers
or registered users to submit articles, although they must register to participate in online
discussions of materials posted on the site. This speaks to the sites inclusivity.
Although the site is not primarily a news site, it publishes breaking news stories, has a
citizen media project called i-Witness,35 which collates reports from citizen reporters from
all over Nigeriaespecially during periods of conflictsand it often is the interim medium
for many of Nigerias robust diasporan citizen media projects.36 Many of the strictly news
citizen media sites still share their news stories on the Village Squares message boards, and a
great number of politically consequential citizen reports that went on to change state policy
started on this site.
The site also has links to the Web addresses of major Nigerian newspapers that have an
online presence, it periodically posts high-impact and controversial news stories both from the
domestic newspapers and from diasporan online newspapers on its front page, and it invites
discussion from subscribers. This feature has made it one of the most popular Internet sites for
Nigerians both at home and in the diaspora. The debates in the sites forums are not only
robust, and sometimes frenzied, even emotional, but also evince a studious concern for civility
in public discourse.
Because Internet deliberation is easily susceptible to degeneration into ad hominem
attacks, the site has what it calls the Nigerian Village Square Publishing Guide, which not
only gives instructions on how commentaries should be posted on the site but also provides the
ground rules for deliberation. It stresses the importance of eschewing emotive language and
embracing what Habermas would call rational-critical debate. One of the mechanisms
established to ensure that this rule is observed is the formation of what is called the village
dumpster where articles, comments, and discussions that are deemed irreverent or overly
personal and insulting are consigned.37 The decision about what posts should be pushed to the
village dumpster often is arrived at through the votes of registered members of the site. This
structural check has imposed self-moderation on many discussions in the forum, but it also
occasionally raises allegations of majoritarian tyranny.
It is instructive that, over the years, the site has transformed from being a mere cyber salon
for quotidian dialogic disputations to a close-knit, many-to-many, collaborative cyber
community where deliberations and decisions about national politics take place. In 2006, for
instance, when former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo wanted to manipulate the
national legislature to amend the constitution to allow him to run for a third term, villagers,
as members of the discussion forums on the site call themselves, started an Internet petition
drive to stop the move. They generated petitions from thousands of Nigerians in the diaspora
and contributed money to send a representative to deliver the petition to the president of the
Nigerian Senate and the speaker of the House of Representatives. It was also delivered to the
president when he visited the United States.38 This move generated publicity in the Nigerian
national media and contributed to the defeat of the presidents third-term bid.
Similarly, in the same year, when a Nigerian immigrant by the name of Osamuyia
Aikpitanhi was murdered by Spanish immigration officers, the villagers not only vigorously
deliberated on the issue, they contributed money and sent a delegation to Spain to demand an
explanation of the circumstances that led to the death of their compatriot. The delegation also
met with the parents of the deceased and gave them a $1,200 check that the villagers
contributed. It was robustly covered by Nigerias biggest, state-run television network, the
Nigerian Television Authority, more popularly known by its initialism, NTA.39 The Nigerian
Village Square delegation also had a meeting with Nigerian government officials and got the
president and the Nigerian legislature to request that Spanish authorities explain the
circumstances that surrounded the death of the Nigerian and to pay compensation to the family
if need be. Weeks after this visit, what would have been an ignored issue was elevated to a
major diplomatic row between Nigeria and Spain.40 At last, the Spanish government created a
commission to investigate the murder of the Nigerian and issued an interim apology to the
Nigerian government while the investigation was in progress.41
The villagers, many of whom have never met except through the virtual village square,
directly intervene in many other domestic political issues. Another prominent example of their
collaborative political activism was the petition drive that they started in the village square in
the midpoint of 2007 to force the then Nigerian vice president Goodluck Jonathan (who later
became president) to declare his assets. Although the Nigerian constitution does not require
public officials to declare their assets publicly, Nigerias then newly elected president, in a
bid to show his seriousness in fighting corruption, publicly declared his assets for the first time
in the countrys history.42 This singular act earned him praise, but it also paved the way for
citizens to demand the same forthrightness from other elected representatives. The vice
president insisted that because he was under no constitutional obligation to declare his assets
publicly, he would not be railroaded into doing so. Again, members of the Nigerian Village
Square started a petition drive to which hundreds of Nigerians in the diaspora appended their
signatures. A representative physically went to Nigeria not only to deliver the petition but to
attract wide media attention to this event.43 This pressure contributed to forcing the vice
president to publicly declare his assets.44 Efforts were doubled to shame other well-placed
public officers into also publicly declaring their assets.
The media attention that the interventionist activities of members of the
Nigerianvillagesquare.com has generated has given it a lot of visibility and clout in
government circles, and many well-known personalities in government are known to be
registered members of the forum either anonymously or under their full names. A case in point
is that of a Mr. Olusegun Adeniyi, who was the spokesman for the late Nigerian president,
Umar Musa Yaradua. In the wake of withering attacks against him in the village square over a
frivolous trip he had taken to the United States,45 he appeared in the forum under his own name
to defend himself.46 In no way, however, can this be construed as an infiltration of the forum by
government. On the contrary, it represents a dialogue with citizens who ordinarily would not
have had the privilege to engage in this deliberative exchange had they sought the traditional
means of communication with the government.
As most scholars argue, at the heart of most conceptions of the public sphereespecially
the Habermasian oneis the idea of conversation, which this Internet forum seems to enhance
in more ways than spatially bounded notions of deliberation can. Indeed many scholars contend
that conversation in the public sphere is a precondition for democracy. Michael Schudson, for
instance, notes that [d]emocracy is government by discussion.47 Bruce Ackerman also states
that [d]ialogue is the first obligation of citizenship.48 This Internet discussion group does
certainly make possible the type of categories necessary for most, if not all, of Habermass
ideal speech situation to occur.
CONCLUSION
The communicative acts that take place in this Nigerian virtual village square confirm, to a
large degree, that the Internet is capable of facilitating discourse that replicates the central
construction of rational-critical debate and that, in a variety of ways, approximate the
prerequisites of the Habermasian public sphere. It is discursively inclusive, as evidenced in its
policy of not moderating its discussions and in not requiring that potential contributors of
articles to the site be registered members. Participation also is entirely voluntary and is not the
product of coercion by government or corporate interests, and the sites deliberative practices
so far have impacted governance in the homeland. What is more, although members of the
forum come from different social backgroundsincluding professors in United States, United
Kingdom, and Nigerian universities; engineers; doctors; students; and Nigeria-based working-
class peoplethere has not been any record of open social discrimination in the discursive
enterprise. Although the main preoccupation of the forum is politics in the homeland, however,
it also features short-story fiction and trivia and sometimes can get bogged down by petty
personality disputes.
Bohman notes that a crucial deficiency of Internet public spaces is that they have no
linkages with structures of power, a condition, he says, that divests them of the capacity to
secure the conditions of publicity but also in order to promote the interaction among publics
that is required for deliberative democracy.49 Bohmans arguments are difficult to sustain
when applied to the Nigerian Village Square because the activities of this Internet site generate
a lot of media attention in Nigeria.
Nancy Frasers recent exposition of what constitutes a transnational public sphere also
strengthens the case for the Nigerian Village Square to be ascribed the status of a transnational
online public sphere. According to Fraser, a public sphere is supposed to be a vehicle for
mobilizing public opinion as a political force. It should empower the citizenry vis--vis
private powers and permit it to exercise influence over the state.50 This Web sites continually
productive engagements with the Nigerian state on domestic policy issues certainly elevate it
to a politically consequential public sphere.
Admittedly, however, the relative numerical inferiority of this Internet-based public sphere,
and the uncertainty whether it can sustain its activities, potentially detract from its potency.
Similarly, although many contributors to the forum are identifiable by their names, others use
anonymous handles. Scholars have debated whether the incidence of anonymity on the Internet
invalidates the notion of conversation in news groups and chat rooms in the real sense of the
word. This concern is perfectly legitimate but, as Dean reminds us, anxieties around
authenticity on the Net function primarily to reassure our trust in the authenticity of other sorts
of mediated interactions, indeed, to pathologize our justifiable paranoia.51 The point,
therefore, is that although some of the Internets shortcomings significantly detract from the
Habermasian status of the public sphere that many scholars ascribe to it, there are certainly
important respects in which it fulfils this requirement, as the analysis of the Nigerian Village
Square suggests.
The foregoing, though, does not seek to institute the relative discursive openness of the
Nigerian Village Square as representative of the sort of interaction that takes place on all
Nigerian online media forums. Although several such examples abound on the Internet, there is
also a multiplicity of Web sites that do not have deliberative democracyor anything remotely
related to such democracyas their raison dtre. It is incontestable that the Internet meshes
with existing and preexisting social functions and extends them in many fresh and new ways,
but it does not fit easily in comparison to characteristically modern organizations or
stereotypically idyllic early modern social and cultural institutions such as the Habermasian
public sphere.
The new peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of the Internet can become intelligible only if a
conceptual frame of reference is adopted that does not limit the discussion of the Internet from
the outset to predetermined and pre-given patterns of interpretation. More importantly, the
Nigerian Village Square has shown the possibility for the coexistence between online
communities and citizen journalism. The site provides the platform for citizen reports, for
discussions about politics in the homeland, and for direct action. This fits the outlines of the
traditional conceptions of alternative journalism. The Village Square, however, is a loose
collection of disparate people and interests that are not all united by notions of progressive
ideology. In more ways than one, it problematizes the boundaries between alternative and
citizen journalism in that it provides an arena for both forms of interaction.
NOTES
1. Deliberative democracy is the reconceptualization of democracy in more participatory and substantive terms. It expands
the notion of democracy beyond such institutional rituals as periodic elections to more popular and practical civic and discursive
engagement in the process of governance. For a useful introductory discussion on the origin and development of this concept,
see Heinz Brandenburg, Pathologies of the Virtual Public Sphere, in Civil Society, Politics and the Internet: A Comparative
Perspective, eds. S. Oates, D. Owen, R. Gibson (London: Routledge, 2005). Also see Jon Elster, Introduction in Deliberative
Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, eds. J. Bohman, W. Rehg (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997): 1; and John
Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond. Liberals, Critics, Contestations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000):
162.
2. See Mary Chyko (2008), Portable Communities: The Social Dynamics of Online and Mobile Connectedness
(Albany: SUNY Press).
3. See Manuel Castells (1998), End of Millennium (Malden, MA: Blackwell).
4. The Frankfurt School, also known as the Institute of Social Research, was founded in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1923 by
German Jewish Marxists Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, and Erich Fromm. As a result of Nazi
persecution, they fled Germany and went into exile first in Geneva and later to California and to Columbia University in New
York. For a discussion of the influence they brought to bear on the social sciences and philosophy, see Neil McLaughlin, Origin
Myths in the Social Sciences: Fromm, the Frankfurt School and the Emergence of Critical Theory, Canadian Journal of
Sociology 24 (1) (1999): 10939.
5. Habermas (1989), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
6. See Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1988).
7. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1927): 64.
8. For other influential conceptions of the public sphere, see, for instance, Hanna Arendts The Human Condition (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1958), Walter Lipmanns Public Opinion (New York: Free Press, 1922). For an excellent
comparison of the different traditions of public sphere theorizing, see Seyla Benhabib, Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt,
the Liberal Tradition, and Jrgen Habermas, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun (MIT Press,
1992). Benhabib delineates three models of the public sphere and associates them with the work of particular theorists. She
calls the first model, represented by the work of Hanna Arendt, the agonistic model. She characterizes the second model,
represented by the work of Ackerman, as the legalistic model, and labels the third model, represented by the work of Habermas,
as the discursive model.
9. Nancy Fraser, Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy, in
Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun (MIT Press, 1992): 111.
10. Jrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 33.
11. This summary of Habermass requirements for a rational-critical debate in the quintessential public sphere was adapted
from the model developed in Lincoln Dahlberg, Computer-mediated Communication and the Public Sphere: A Critical
Analysis, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 7 (1) (2001): par.4 [journal online], available at
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol7/issue1/dahlberg.html, accessed October 12, 2007. It encapsulates the whole range of Habermass
theoretical postulations, published in different books, on the public sphere.
12. Habermas responded to the criticisms of his conception of the public sphere in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in
Political Theory, edited by Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).
13. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Brian Massumi and others (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984).
14. For a review of the criticism of Habermas public sphere, see Craig Calhoun, Introduction, in Habermas and the
Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
15. Nancy Fraser, Rethinking the Public Sphere, Social Text 25/26 (1990): 8056.
16. Neil McLaughlin, Feminism, the Public Sphere, Media and Democracy, Media Culture and Society 15 (4) (1993):
599.
17. Anne Fernald E., A Feminist Public Sphere? Virginia Woolfs Revisions of the Eighteenth Century, Feminist Studies
31 (1) (2005): 158250.
18. Johanna Meehan (ed.), Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse (New York: Routledge,
1995).
19. See Jodi Dean, Why the Net Is not a Public Sphere, Constellations 10 (1) (2003): 96.
20. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and
Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi and others (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
21. See Nancy Fraser, Rethinking the Public Sphere, in Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone
Books, 2005).
22. Cited in John Durham Peters, Distrust of Representation, Media, Culture and Society 15 (4) (1993): 564.
23. Heinz Brandenburg, Pathologies of the Virtual Public Sphere, in Civil Society, Politics and the Internet: A
Comparative Perspective, edited by S. Oates, D. Owen, R. Gibson (London: Routledge, 2005): 4.
24. Howard Rheingolds seminal text, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Boston, MA:
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1993): 279, provides, in the view of many scholars, the first systematic, scholarly
reflection on online sociability and the democratizing promise of the Internet. The book basically is a recounting of Rheingolds
experiential encounters with online environments, particularly with the WELL (Whole Earth Lectronic Linkone of the
Internets earliest bulletin board systems).
25. Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, Athens without Slaves or Slaves without Athens? The Neurosis of Technology,
in Science as Culture vol. 1 (London: Free Association).
26. Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 279.
27. Hubert Buchstein, Bytes that Bite: The Internet and Deliberative Democracy. Constellations 4 (October 1997): 250.
28. Douglas Kellner, Intellectuals, the New Public Spheres, and Techno-politics, In The Politics of Cyberspace: A New
Political Science Reader, edited by C. Toulouse and T. W. Luke (New York: Routledge, 1998): 16786.
29. Michael Hauben and Rhonda Hauben (eds.). Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet (Los
Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997): 69.
30. Lincoln Dahlberg, Computer-Mediated Communication and the Public Sphere.
31. James Brook and Iain A. Boal (eds.), Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information (San
Francisco: City Lights, 1995): vii.
32. Susan ODonnell, Analyzing the Internet and the Public Sphere: The Case of Womenslink, Javnost-The Public 8 (1)
(2001): 3958.
33. See The Nigerian Village Square, About Us, http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/about-us.html.
34. Ibid. For another insightful fictional reconstruction of precolonial deliberative practices in what were called village
squares in Nigeria and, by extension, Africa, read Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart.
35. http://iwitness-nigeria.com/index.php/main.
36. See Farooq Kperogi (2008), Guerillas in Cyberia: The Transnational Alternative Online Journalism of the Nigerian
Diasporic Public Sphere, Journal of Global Mass Communication 1 (1/2): 7287; Farooq Kperogi (2011), Webs of
Resistance: The Citizen Online Journalism of the Nigerian Digital Diaspora, Ph.D. Dissertation. Georgia State University.
http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_diss/27.
37. Isaac Olawale Albert (2010, April 19), Whose Deliberative Democracy? A Critique of Online Public Discourses in
Africa, Nigerian Village Square. www.nigeriavillagesquare.com.
38. Concerned Nigerians in Diaspora (2006, March 29), Letter to President obasanjo on Third Term Agenda on His Visit to
the White House. Nigerian Village Square. www.nigeriavillagesquare.com.
39. See Ahaoma Kanu (2007, August 13), NVS Members Donate $1200 to the Aikpitanhi Family, NTA Goes Haywire,
Nigerian Village Square. http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com.
40. Shola Adekoya (2007, June 29), FG Probes Killing of Nigerian Aboard Spanish Plane, Nigerian Tribune.
41. El Pais (2007, November 11), Aikpitanhis Death Causes Major Policy Change in Spain. Nigeria Village Square.
http://nigeriavillagesquare.com. The report was culled from a Spanish newspaper called El Pais.
42. Bashir Adigun (2007, June 28), Nigerian President Declares Assets, The Associated Press.
43. Guardian (2007, August 8), DYA [Declare Your Assets] Campaign: The Vice Presidents Assets.
44. P.M. News (2007, August 8), VP Jonathan Declare Assets, P.M. News.
45. Olusegun Adeniyi (2007, September 7), Why the Hell Am I Here? Nigerian Village Square,
http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/.
46. Empowered Newswire (2007, September 4), I am Here to Understudy the AmericansAdeniyi, YarAduas
Spokesman, on US Visit. Nigerian Village Square, http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com.
47. Michael Schudson, Why Conversation Is Not the Soul of Democracy, Critical Studies in Mass Communication 14
(4) (1997): 297309.
48. Bruce Ackerman, Why Dialogue?, Journal of Philosophy 86 (1989): 6
49. James Bohman, Expanding Dialogue: The Internet, the Public Sphere and Prospects for Transnational Democracy, in
After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere, edited by Nick Crossley and John M. Roberts (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2004): 146.
50. Nancy Fraser, Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-
Westphalian World, Theory, Culture & Society 24 (4) (2007): 7.
51. Jodi Dean, Virtually Citizens, 27778.
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16
When Bad Timing Is Actually Good:

Reconceptualizing Response Delays
Stephanie A. Tikkanen and Andrew Frisbie
This chapter is about how time can communicate. Timealthough often overlooked as a part
of the communication processplays an integral role in how we understand messages. Have
you ever sent an e-mail to a friend or coworker and never received a reply? Where you left
wondering whether your friend or coworker received the message? Similar situations are
studied by communication researchers. The study of time and its role in the communication
process is called chronemics. Specifically, chronemics is the study of time in nonverbal
communication.
Before discussing how chronemics vary in different settings, this chapter first examines
how time is understood in general. When it comes to studying time there are two ways that
humans understand time, monochronic and polychronic (also known as M time and P
time). People that have a monochronic view of time like to do one (mono) thing at a time.
They tend to focus on the task at hand and will also put an emphasis on punctuality. Conversely,
people functioning with a polychronic view of time might focus on several different tasks and
do so with ease. This is not to say that people on P time can handle multiple tasks better, but
that they might have less rigid guidelines for completing tasks and place more emphasis on
building relationships. Also, a P-time person might not find a deep personal commitment to
punctuality. These differences typically are understood as cultural. Regardless of orientation,
our understanding of time shapes the way we communicate with others and our understanding
of how others communicate with us. Consequently, as technology increases the amount of
mediated communication in which we engage every day, chronemics begin to play a powerful
role in our interpersonal communication processes.
THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY IN CHRONEMIC RHYTHMS

The world is quickly becoming a global village. Vast amounts of information are sent from
person to person, or from group to group, across long distances. Not only do technologies
close the gap between people who are geographically separated, but new technologies also
change the way in which we communicate. Social media (e.g., Facebook) and microblogging
(i.e., Twitter) are reorganizing norms of communication.
One way to think about time is to think of communication rhythms. During face-to-face
(FTF) conversations, patterns or rhythms emerge over the course of the discussion. Typically,
FTF conversations are fluid exchanges of dialogue with short intervals of silence.
Communication exchanges that are fairly immediate and responsive are considered
synchronous dialogue. That is to say that two or more individuals have sustained a dialogue
that is in sync.
There also are asynchronous modes of communication; dialogue that is sporadic and
littered with pauses. It might be easier to think of this type of communication as punctuated
equilibrium, or moments of fast dialogue separated by long durations of silence. Have you
ever been texting a good friend and the conversation is quickly developing with messages
sending one right after another? Maybe youre both texting so much that the conversation
becomes difficult to track because each of you is commenting on multiple things at once. Then,
all of a sudden, the texts stop. Maybe your friend went to class and couldnt text anymore or
maybe they stepped into a meeting and had to turn their phone off. After about an hour goes by
you get a reply and the messages start up right where they left off. Those moments of intense
messaging and periods of silence are an example of punctuated equilibrium.
Just like notes on sheet music, each word that we send is surrounded by hosts of symbols
that make up sentences (measures) and full conversations (a full song). Depending on the
musicians or conversationalists, the rhythms created are different with each song or
conversation. Unlike FTF conversations, when we communicate through text-based media (i.e.,
e-mail, mobile phone text messages, snail mail) there pauses between the message we send and
the reply we get. Conversations develop different patterns that are created by both the
individual users and the type of technology that is used. Much like music can evoke different
emotions, patterns of communication over time can create different feelings that we associate
with technology.
The way we communicate varies from medium to medium. Media Richness Theory (MRT)
states that when it comes to transferring information not all media are equal.1 Each medium
(e.g., FTF, e-mail, phone call, text message) allows for information to be sent through a variety
of cue channels (e.g., sight, sound, visuals). One such difference across media in MRT is the
potential for immediate feedback, an essential component of asynchronous communication.
There are certain text-based media that limit feedback, and thus are considered strictly
asynchronous. Much like how MRT places media forms on a continuum of richness based on
how many cue systems are available to the user, its best to think of different types of
technology ranging on a scale between really fast and really slow communication. The fastest
type of communication happens face to face. Slower (but still quite fast) conversations take
place via text message, Snapchat, and in online chat sites such as Match.com. Even slower
communication takes place through e-mail, microblogs, and through mail delivered by a postal
system. (Importantly, this scale is subjective; some individuals use e-mail in a way similar to
text messages and reply very quickly, whereas others might be particularly slow at answering
text messages.)
First, lets talk about technologically mediated communication that is generally considered
to be fairly fast. Many people have cell phones and use those cell phones to connect with a
variety of people each day. Text messaging has become a popular way for people to
communicate because it allows brief intermittent exchanges without disrupting someones
schedule. Depending on the phones network, most texts can be sent and read almost
instantaneously. Because cell phone service is fast the authors consider mobile phone texting to
be nearly synchronous. Texting enables friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances to
interact with very little delay. The unique thing about text messages, however, is that they can
quickly become an asynchronous way of communicating. Mobile phone text messaging lets
conversations oscillate from synchronic to asynchronic rhythms at any given moment. As
mentioned, sometimes when people are deep in a thumb-tapping typhoon, conversations can go
quiet without notice. Texting has the unique affordance for cell phone users to switch back and
forth between instantaneous conversation and very sporadic, slow conversation. Texting is
discussed further elsewhere in this chapter.
E-mail and microblogs are slightly slower than text messages because users might be using
a desktop computer. E-mails can take on a slightly more formal style and require more care for
proper grammar and syntax. Accessibility can play a significant role in contacting someone. If
a person doesnt have access to a computer then it could take them awhile to respond, let alone
know that you tried to contact them. E-mail conversations also can vary by the nature of the
context. If you send an e-mail to your coworker it is likely that you will get a quicker response
than what you would if you sent an e-mail to your senator. Your senator, or your senators
assistant, might reply, but it most likely wont be immediate or even within the same day.
Typically, people with high status are expected to take more time to respond. Friends and peers
with the same social status are expected to respond more quickly. One reason for the difference
in expectations is the personal relationship that exists outside of the technology. Relationships
with people help shape our understanding of a persons communication whether it is face to
face or through text messaging. Over time, people in a relationship learn their friends or
partners style of communication and dispel some of the initial uncertainty that surrounds text-
based conversations. Interpersonal communication through a text-based channel can be just as
rich, in some instances, and can be more personal than FTF communication.
According to many communication scholars,2 one vital difference in FTF and mediated
communication is the lack of other cues available for interpretation. Reader might ask, So
what? Whats the big deal when the person youre talking with cant see your facial
expressions and hear your tonal inflections? The answer is that there is slightly more potential
for miscommunication to happen when a person does not have all the signs they are used to
having when interpreting another person. To try and compensate for the lack of some of those
social cues, new media might incorporate visual aids to help the communication process flow
smoothly. Many smartphones have waiting bubbles that appear when the person on the other
end of a text message is typing a response. Some phones even include receipts to mark the time
that a text was delivered and read. Smartphones are not the only devices that employ nonverbal
cues; e-mail, Facebook, and some online dating sites (i.e., OK Cupid, Zoosk, Plenty of Fish)
are starting to adopt extra cues to let communicators decipher what is happening. All of these
cues help to reduce uncertainty in a conversation. Generally, the more information a person has
in a conversation the more apt she or he is to understand what is being said.
Thus, text-based communication isnt necessarily a bad way to communicate. But what
about the pauses that are inherent with text-based communication? Texting affords the ability to
pause a conversation mid-sentence, if one so chooses. The conversational expectations of face-
to-face communication do not allow interlocutors to postpone responses. In text conversations,
adjusting the rate and speed of replying becomes a way to communicate in itself. Or does it? Is
the timing between texts during a conversation a facet that creates meaning? The answer is not
clear. How an individual interprets or perceives the behaviors of their partner in text-message
conversations remains fairly understudied. What is known, however, is that response delays do
indeed hold meaning for communicators, and often are perceived as inherently negative.
ACKNOWLEDGING THE BAD: NEGATIVE PERCEPTIONS OF

RESPONSE DELAYS
Imagine a couple that just went out on a blind date set up by a mutual friend. They met for
the first time over lattes and muffins at a local coffee shop. While getting to know one another
they exchanged phone numbers. After a couple of days had passed, Jordan, one of the people
on the date, decided to ask Cameron out for a second date and sent a text to see if Cameron
would like to see a movie. Hoping to hear back, Jordan waited to see what Cameron would
say. As time passed, the suspense started to build and Jordan started to wonder. Jordan started
to come up with reasons as to why Cameron wasnt responding and even thought about calling.
As time passed the stories became more elaborate as Jordan tried to make sense of the silence.
The experience of waiting for a response can be agonizing. In FTF communication, a
longer-than-average response time can be uncomfortable for both partiesthe sender must
mull over possible response options immediately in front of the recipient, who is left to
wonder what is going on in the other persons mind. When communication is conducted through
some mediated form (e.g., telephone, e-mail, Facebook, other social network site), the sender
is freed from normal time constraintsbut the recipient still is left wondering, only now the
recipient lacks any nonverbal clues from the sender. This is perhaps the root of the majority of
frustration stemming from time delays: as communicators, people often try to infer meaning
from these delays, and commonly do so incorrectly.
Americans, as a monochronic society, value immediate replies. As technology advances to
make individuals more accessible, our expectations of others accessibility also increase.3
Consequently, response delaysany difference between when a response was anticipated and
when one was actually receivedcan hold a wide array of negative meanings for an expectant
recipient.
Each person deals with uncertainty in different ways. Humans do not like cognitive
dissonance (mental discomfort) and will go to great lengths to make sense of conversations. In
monochronic cultures there is an emphasis on efficiency and immediacy. When those
expectations of immediacy are not met, negative inferences can be made. Depending on the
individuals involved and on the particulars of the situation, response delays can be interpreted
as confusion, anger, carelessness, or indecision, among other things. Studies have shown that
response delays hold implications for our perceptions of status differences,4 credibility,5 and
personal perceptions,6 such that longer responses indicated higher status but more negative
perceptions. Simply put, the longer it takes for someone to get back to us, we often fear the
worst. Consider examples such as a job applicant waiting for a decision, or a teenager
confessing his feelings to his crush. In both cases, rarely does the waiting party view the delay
as anything other than rejection.
This fear likely stems from the established link between uncertainty and anxiety.7 When
expectations for how something should occur are violated, often some level of uncertainty is
experienced;8 thus, when a response takes longer than a person believes it should, the sender is
left to decipher the meaning of the pause. Consequently, this uncertainty leads anxiety.
Tikkanen, Afifi, and Merrill9 found that parents who were waiting for a response from their
adolescent children experienced increased uncertainty during the delay, and those who
perceived their child to potentially be at risk also experienced heightened anxiety. When
parents were unsure of their childs safety, many developed negative explanations for the delay
(e.g., that their child was in danger), whichunsurprisinglyled to this anxiety. Notably,
however, those parents who did not perceive their child to be at risk did not experience any
heightened anxiety levels.
Risk perception, however, is not the only possible negative implication of response delays.
Individuals in other close relationships outside of the parent-child relationship also can
experience anxiety or upset as a result of a partner taking longer than normal to respond to a
contact effort. In these moments, many relational qualities and contextual cues can impact the
recipients attributions for the response delay. A sender who knows that the recipient is
unavailable due to school or work obligations, for example, might not be alarmed by a slow
response. Someone who can reasonably expect a response but does not receive one could
experience a more negative reaction. Emotional contexts can impact these explanations, as
well; an individual who is fighting with a significant other could attribute silence to anger
more often than those who are not fighting.
Frisbie10 explored the attributions that individuals in close relationships make when they
do not receive responses within the expected time frame. He found that many people do not
conjure up negative explanations for response delays, instead attributing them to unavailability.
Immediate responses convey positive attitudes and are typically appreciated. One might think
that long delays are interpreted negatively, but many participants showed that long delays might
indicate consideration, appreciation, or preoccupation. In short, although response delays
certainly can lead to anxiety or attributions of negative effect, the majority of individuals seem
to accept or even ignore the meaning of these delays. Because this text focuses on both the
good and the bad of mediated communication forms, it can be argued thatdespite the
potential for these negative outcomesthe asynchronicity of mediated communication also
presents myriad benefits for both the sender and receiver.
FINDING THE GOOD: MOVING TOWARD POSITIVE
INTERPRETATIONS OF RESPONSE DELAYS
As discussed previously in this chapter, text-based communication such as text messages,
e-mails, or messages sent via online forums span a continuum of synchronicity, with some
being more synchronous than others. Although these time delays certainly can cause some
uncertainty or anxiety, they also can prove the old adage Good things come to those who
wait. In terms of response time, there is conflicting research between FTF interactions and
mobile-to-mobile interactions. On one hand, it is understood that immediate response to
another individual is preferred, especially when potentially private or intimate information is
shared.11 In another study, however, respondents listed large gaps in conversation as a sign
for a well-thought-out response.12 Asynchronous channels let interlocutors pause between
messages. Pausing gives time for interlocutors to reflect and construct messages as desired.
Depending on the social currency available to an individual, channels that afford delays might
be preferred for tough conversations that would not be easy to address in person.
It can be difficult for someone to form a good message when under pressure. People also
often feel nervous being in front of a crowd or an important individual, which can make a
person somewhat tongue-tied. In such situations, a bit of a time delay can be beneficial for all
involved; taking time enables a speaker to send messages that fit into the image being
portrayed, and the audience receives a more relevant, well-prepared, and thoughtful message.
This is the good in asynchronicity; such often-dreaded delays frequently translate into richer,
clearer, and more supportive communication. The following examines how response delays
can be effective in four interpersonal communication contextsimpression management, self-
disclosure, social support, and persuasion.
IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
Early researchers of computer-mediated communication argued that it would never
compare to FTF communication in terms of quality and interpersonal benefits. As time
progressed and both technology and societys knowledge of technology advanced, however,
people began to find that, in some cases, interpersonal communication actually was better on
the computer. People had richer, more fulfilling relationshipswhich, of course, was entirely
counterintuitive. How could someone have close, personal relationships with people they had
never even met?
Joseph Walther, a noted communication researcher, developed a rationale to explain this
phenomenon. His hyperpersonal model13 explored the role of response delays in relationship
development. He argued that when individuals are given time to cautiously craft messages, they
are able to better manage the impressions they are sending to others. In other words, when we
have time to think about what were saying, we can come off as wittier, smarter, or even kinder
onlinedepending on the image we wish to portray. Because computer-mediated
communication is characterized by these delays, it is an environment rich in impression
management, the act of carefully molding the impressions others form of us.
The model originally was crafted to explain how relationships between two strangers
could develop so rapidly through strictly mediated communication, but also can be used to
explain how CMC contributes to relationship satisfaction in established relationships, as well.
The hyperpersonal model credits the amount of control over messages we have in computer-
mediated communication with enabling us to create better impressions. When we are not face
to face with someone, we decide what messages we want to send. If a person chooses to
communicate via e-mail when nervous, for example, the audience will not hear a quivering
voice or see shaky hands. Likewise, the audience will not be privy to unintentional facial
expressions or reactions.
Although the lack of nonverbal cues is important, chronemics also plays a special role. The
time delays inherent in mediated communicationsuch as those used to type a message
provide more control over the messages than when in a face-to-face, real-time communication.
These delays, however long or short, give us a bit more control over how we choose to portray
ourselves. They give us time to think when we are confused about how to respond, time to
calm ourselves when we are angry or upset, and time to look up things we do not know so that
we can sound informed when replying. The hyperpersonal model argues that when recipients
receive only these carefully formed versions of ourselves, they form idealized images of us.
(Importantly, note that these images are not inherently deceptive; they still are reflections of
who we really are, just often more polished.) In turn, we form idealized images of our
audience. Satisfaction in a relationship largely is based on our perceptions of our partner, thus
idealized images contribute to interpersonal success. Consequently, the time delays that enable
us to manage the impression that others have of us are important in developing successful
relationships.
SELF-DISCLOSURE
A second implication of asynchronicity in mediated communication concerns a persons
willingness and desire to share personal information, also known as self-disclosure. Self-
disclosure is a key part of developing and maintaining healthy interpersonal relationships,14
and for increasing liking15 and trust.16 Sharing things about ourselves also can be scary,
however, because it can make us vulnerable to ridicule or rejection. In mediated
communication, self-disclosure often is increased due to feelings of anonymity; Kim and Raja17
found that in mediated settings individuals were more likely to engage in face threatening
behaviors, such as disclosure of highly personal information. Presumably, knowing that you
will not meet the recipient of your secrets makes you more likely to disclose them.
Time delays in mediated communication can influence our willingness to disclose, as well.
By distancing us from the immediate reactions of our audience, asynchronicity shields us from
possible negative reactions until we are ready to face them. This buffer allows for what
psychologist John Suler18 refers to as an emotional hit-and-run. Many gay and lesbian
adolescents talk openly on YouTube about their experiences with coming out on sites such as
Facebook. They state that changing their sexual preferences from opposite-sex to same-sex on
the site enabled them to communicate to all of their family and friends en masse about their
sexualitysimultaneously giving themselves some time prepare for the onslaught of responses,
both positive and negative. This buffer also is helpful in a variety of other self-disclosure
scenarios, such as offering social support.
SOCIAL SUPPORT
One context in particular where self-disclosure is affected by response delays is the online
forum, in which individuals discuss sensitive issues in a sort of online support group. In this
mediated context, individuals are empowered to seek support and advice from others who are
in similar situations and who have relevant knowledge and experiences. Here, users are
encouraged to share their stories and can emotionally benefit from the delay between their own
statements and others responses. Additionally, users can share their stories without
interruptions, control what details to include, and hide any nonverbal cues such as crying or
stammering. These forums offer a sort of cathartic, long-form space to share ones story, and
also to receive supportive and informative replies. In these spaces, users are able to creatively
express themselves and share sensitive information with minimal levels of embarrassment.19
The sender is not the only party who benefits from asynchronicity in this context, however.
Because the messages in these forums often contain sensitive and emotional information,
recipients could feel confused about how to respond in a supportive way. Often, when face to
face with a person in distress, we do not know what to say or how to respond. As a result, we
might offer poor support, or struggle to manage our own emotions in conjunction with the
disclosers. Because messages online are meant to be delayed an immediate response is not
required; this gives recipients time to process the message emotionally, and to determine the
best way to respond.20 This helps us to feel more competent and confident in our reply, and
also ensures that the original sender receives the best possible support available. Additionally,
Pfiel, Zaphiris, and Wilson21 found that social support group users stated that asynchronicity
allowed them to not only give more honest and frank responses, but also to check for
misunderstandings before sending. Because the provision of social support often can be
difficultboth informationally and emotionallyextra time to process can be invaluable.
PERSUASION
Lastly, asynchronicity can have persuasive advantages for users. Patrick OSullivan22
argues in his Impression Management Model that individuals strategically choose the best
medium to portray messages. Often this is used to manage the information given to a recipient
and to uphold a certain impression that the sender is trying to make (much like in the
hyperpersonal model), but OSullivan also notes that strategic media selection can be useful in
conflict scenarios.
There can be many communication goals when people are engaged in conflict. Each might
wish to provide their side of the story without being interrupted, for example, or want to make
their emotional state exceedingly clear, or even might wish to ensure that those involved in the
conflict have equal opportunity to defend themselves. Each of these goals is differentially
facilitated by media; asynchronous media is especially useful when individuals wish to share
information without interruption. In FTF communication interruptions are nearly inevitable.
People talk over one another, or plan their next statement instead of actively listening to the
speaker. As a result, messages sent in this format often can be misunderstood or cut off
prematurely.
In contrast, messages sent via computer-mediated communicationsparticularly through
less synchronous forms such as e-mailoften flow uninterrupted, and can be fully processed
by the recipients. This heightens the persuasive power of these messages, allowing senders to
fully express their position completely, and giving recipients time to process both the original
message as well as their own response without having to do so simultaneously. This can lead
to more productive conflict, as both sides can take time to fully express their opinions in
addition to listening more carefully to each other.
Although it is important to acknowledge the power of asynchronicity in developing strong
verbal messages, the delay itself also can send an importantand persuasivenonverbal
message. Much like teachers use uncomfortable silences to compel reluctant students to speak
up in class, silence can be a powerfully persuasive tool in other situations. Johannesen23
speaks to the utility of silence in a variety of interpersonal functions. He notes that in political
communication voters most often are swayed by a politicians silence on an issue; silence
prompts listeners to interpret meaning themselves. As such, the silence of a delayed
response can serve a persuasive function in and of itself; a sender who does not receive a
response might reword the message in a more favorable way, or interpret the silence as a
rejection of ideas and begin to negotiate meaningregardless of whether the original recipient
intended for this to occur.
NEGOTIATING THE GOOD AND THE BAD: CHANGING HOW WE

INTERPRET RESPONSE DELAYS
Given the examples outlined in his chapter, the perception that response delays are
inherently negative is flawed. Certainly, a longer-than-expected delay has the potential to cause
anxiety, especially when one is concerned about the safety of the sender. Immediate responses
are preferred most of the time, and studies have shown that immediate and frequent responses
are signs of relational quality. That means that simply sending a reply quickly tells the other
person that they are important. Conversely, long pauses do not necessarily indicate negative
feelings with regard to the relationship. Although long pauses might cause some uncertainty, the
person waiting for a reply does not always automatically think that a delay is negative. Pauses
become part of the conversation between people who are texting, but texters have not been
found to use pauses as a way of communicating. Long durations of silence actually can indicate
that the receiver is thinking about what was said, and is taking time to develop a response.
Thoughtfulness is a process that can take time, andto a certain pointtaking time to think
about a response might be appreciated by the other person.
Response delays serve several important interpersonal functions, such as more liberated
and idealized self-expression as well as improved listening and support provision. As
technology advances and gives users greater freedom in when they choose to communicate, a
better understanding of how asynchronicity affects communicative processes can hopefully
improve the reputation of response delays.
The root of most negative perceptions surrounding response delays stems from a violation
of expectations: A response took longer than expected, and the sender then is left to interpret
the meaning of that delay. Just as a response that is quicker than expected can imply positive
feelings (e.g., eagerness, excitement, expertise), these delays often are taken to mean the
opposite (e.g., apathy, reluctance, lack of knowledge). Rarely, however, are other factors
considered. Delays can mean thoughtfulness, caution, or simply having a phone set to silent.
The solution, then, is simple: Manage expectations.
Tikkanen and colleagues24 suggest that parents have discussions with teens in advance of
outings to set rules and guidelines surrounding phone use. By making expectations explicit,
teens are less likely to violate the rules. If parents expect a call back within five minutes of a
missed contact effort, for example, then teens know they should be more diligent in checking
their phone.25 Similarly, setting expectations for a response can help reduce the anxiety
associated with waiting. Employers can provide a time line for a job search so that
prospective employees can set reasonable expectations for expecting a reply. This does not
even need to be an explicit conversation; expectations can be managed technologically, by
setting an automated out-of-office reply or by not turning off read receipts if one knows they
cannot immediately reply. By managing expectations and explaining reasons for response
delays, some of the negative associations and interpretations can be reduced or avoided.
Though the asynchronous nature of mediated communication has long been touted as a
reason for its inferiority to FTF communication, it is hoped that this chapter has persuaded
readers otherwise. Not only can delayed responses be viewed just as positively as negative
responses, but the delays intrinsic to asynchronous communication actually could make it better
than more synchronous forms. As mediated communication grows in popularity, there are just
as many opportunities to create meaningful relationships with people on the other end of the
conversation. As technologies emerge, with them come profoundly original ways to
communicate with one another. In many ways, the medium does not limit the capacity to share
it simply alters it.
NOTES
1. Richard Daft and Robert Lengel, Organizational Information Requirements, Media Richness and Structural Design,
Management Science 32 (5) (1986): 555.
2. Ibid., 554; Sara Kielser, Jonathan Siegel, and Timothy McGuire, Social Psychological Aspects of Computer-mediated
Communication, American Psychologist 39 (1984): 1123; Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler, Reducing Social Context Cues:
Electronic Mail in Organizational Communication, Management Science 32 (1986): 1492.
3. Naomi Baron, Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World (Oxford University Press, 2008).
4. Nicola Dring and Sandra Pschl, Nonverbal Cues in Mobile Phone Text Messages: The Effects of Chronemics and
Proxemics, in The Reconstruction of Space and Time, edited by Rich Ling and Scott Campbell (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 2008): 109; Joseph Walther and Lisa Tidwell, Nonverbal Cues in Computer-mediated Communication,
and the Effect of Chronemics on Relational Communication, Journal of Organizational Computing 5 (1995): 355.
5. Yorman Kalman and Sheizaf Rafaeli, Chronemic Nonverbal Expectancy Violations in Written Computer-mediated
Communication (presentation, Annual Convention of the International Communication Association, Montreal, Canada, 2008).
6. Oliver Sheldon, Melissa Thomas-Hunt, and Chad Proell, When Timeliness Matters: The Effect of Status on Reactions to
Perceived Time Delay within Distributed Collaboration, Journal of Applied Psychology 91 (2006): 1385.
7. Maria Miceli and Cristiano Castelfranchi, Anxiety As an Epistemic Emotion: An Uncertainty Theory of Anxiety,
Anxiety, Stress, and Coping 18 (2005): 291.
8. Kathy Kellerman and Rodney Reynolds, When Ignorance Is Bliss: The Role of Motivation to Reduce Uncertainty in
Uncertainty Reduction Theory, Human Communication Research 17 (1990): 5.
9. Stephanie Tikkanen, Walid Afifi, and Anne Merrill, Gr8 Textpectations: Parents Experiences of Anxiety in Response to
Adolescent Mobile Phone Delays, in Family Communication in an Age of Digital and Social Media, edited by Carol
Bruess (New York: Peter Lang International, 2015).
10. Andrew Frisbie, Mobile Phone Text Messaging: Implications of Response Time within an Asynchronous Medium
(presentation, Annual Convention of the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender, Houghton, MI,
October 1013, 2013).
11. Sandra Petronio, Boundaries of Privacy: Dialectics of Disclosure (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2002).
12. Dominick Madell and Stephen Muncer, Control over Social Interactions: An Important Reason for Young Peoples Use
of the Internet and Mobile Phones for Communication? CyberPsychology and Behavior 10 (2007): 137.
13. Joseph Walther, Computer-Mediated Communication: Impersonal, Interpersonal, and Hyperpersonal Interaction,
Communication Research 23 (1996): 20; Joseph Walther, Group and Interpersonal Effects in International Computer-
Mediated Collaboration, Human Communication Research 23 (1997): 342.
14. Irwin Altman and Dalmas Taylor, Social Penetration: The Development of Interpersonal Relationships (New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973).
15. Nancy Collins and Lynn Miller, Self-Disclosure and Liking: A Meta-Analytic Review, Psychological Bulletin 116
(1994): 457.
16. Robert Larzelere and Ted Huston, The Dyadic Trust Scale: Toward Understanding Interpersonal Trust in Close
Relationships, Journal of Marriage and Family 42 (1980): 595.
17. Min-Sun Kim and Narayan Raja, Verbal Aggression and Self-disclosure on Computer Bulletin Boards (presentation,
Annual Conference of the International Communication Association, Chicago, IL, May 1991).
18. John Suler, The Online Disinhibition Effect, CyberPsychology & Behavior 7 (2004): 321.
19. Dawn Braithwaite, Vincent Waldron, and Jerry Finn, Communication of Social Support in Computer-mediated Groups
for People with Disabilities, Health Communication 11 (1999): 123.
20. Marsha White and Steve Dorman, Receiving Social Support Online: Implications for Health Education, Health
Education Research 16 (6) (2001): 693.
21. Ulrik Pfeil, Panayiotis Zaphiris, and Stephanie Wilson, Older Adults Perceptions and Experiences of Online Social
Support, Interacting with Computers 21 (2009): 159.
22. Patrick OSullivan, What You Dont Know Wont Hurt Me: Impression Management Functions of Communication
Channels in Relationships, Human Communication Research 26 (2000): 403.
23. Ronald Johannesen, The Functions of Silence: A Plea for Communication Research, Western Journal of
24. Stephanie Tikkanen, Walid Afifi, and Anne Merrill, Gr8 Textpectations: Parents Experiences of Anxiety in Response to
Adolescent Mobile Phone Delays, in Family Communication in an Age of Digital and Social Media, edited by Carol
Bruess (New York: Peter Lang International, 2015).
25. Alyssa Bereznak, Mom-Made App Allows Parents to Lock Their Kids Phones Until They Call Back, Yahoo! Tech,
accessed August 18, 2014, https://www.yahoo.com/tech/mom-made-app-allows-parents-to-lock-their-kids-phones-
95121969584.html. In a more extreme version of parental monitoring, mother Sharon Standifird created an app called Ignore-
No-More in which parents can remotely lock their childs phone until the child calls them for the password, forcing the child to
return the parents calls.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Altman, Irwin, and Dalmas Taylor. Social Penetration: The Development of Interpersonal Relationships (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1973).
Baron, Naomi. Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World (Oxford University Press, 2008).
Bereznak, Alyssa. Mom-Made App Allows Parents to Lock Their Kids Phones Until They Call Back. Yahoo! Tech.
Accessed August 18, 2014. https://www.yahoo.com/tech/mom-made-app-allows-parents-to-lock-their-kids-phones-
95121969584.html.
Braithwaite, Dawn. O., Vincent Waldron, and Jerry Finn. Communication of Social Support in Computer-Mediated Groups for
People with Disabilities. Health Communication 11 (1999): 12351.
Collins, Nancy, and Lynn Miller. Self-Disclosure and Liking: A Meta-analytic Review. Psychological Bulletin 116 (1994):
45775.
Daft, Richard, and Robert Lengel. Organizational Information Requirements, Media Richness and Structural Design.
Management Science 32 (5) (1986): 55471.
Dring, Nicola, and Sandra Pschl. Nonverbal Cues in Mobile Phone Text Messages: The Effects of Chronemics and
Proxemics. In The Reconstruction of Space and Time, edited by Rich Ling and Scott Campbell, 10936 (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008).
Frisbie, Andrew. Mobile Phone Text Messaging: Implications of Response Time within an Asynchronous Medium.
Presentation at the Annual Convention of the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender,
Houghton, MI, October 1013, 2013.
Johannesen, Ronald, L. The Functions of Silence: A Plea for Communication Research. Western Journal of Communication
38 (1974): 2535.
Kalman, Yorman, and Sheizaf Rafaeli. Chronemic Nonverbal Expectancy Violations in Written Computer-Mediated
Communication. Presentation at the Annual Convention of the International Communication Association, Montreal,
Canada, 2008.
Kellerman, Kathy, and Rodney Reynolds. When Ignorance Is Bliss: The Role of Motivation to Reduce Uncertainty in
Uncertainty Reduction Theory. Human Communication Research 17 (1990): 575.
Kielser, Sara, Jonathan Siegel, and Timothy McGuire. Social Psychological Aspects of Computer-Mediated Communication.
American Psychologist 39 (1984): 112334.
Kim, Min-Sun, and Narayan Raja. Verbal Aggression and Self-Disclosure on Computer Bulletin Boards. Presentation at the
Annual Conference of the International Communication Association, Chicago, IL, May 1991.
Larzelere, Robert, and Ted Huston. The Dyadic Trust Scale: Toward Understanding Interpersonal Trust in Close
Relationships. Journal of Marriage and Family 42 (1980): 595604.
Madell, Dominick, and Stephen J. Muncer. Control over Social Interactions: An Important Reason for Young Peoples Use of
the Internet and Mobile Phones for Communication? CyberPsychology and Behavior 10 (2007): 13740.
Miceli, Maria, and Cristiano Castelfranchi. Anxiety As an Epistemic Emotion: An Uncertainty Theory of Anxiety. Anxiety,
Stress, and Coping 18 (2005): 291319.
OSullivan, Patrick, B. What You Dont Know Wont Hurt Me: Impression Management Functions of Communication
Channels in Relationships. Human Communication Research 26 (2000): 40331.
Petronio, Sandra. Boundaries of Privacy: Dialectics of Disclosure (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).
Pfeil, Ulrik, Panayiotis Zaphiris, and Stephanie Wilson. Older Adults Perceptions and Experiences of Online Social Support.
Interacting with Computers 21 (2009): 15972.
Sheldon, Oliver, Melissa Thomas-Hunt, and Chad Proell. When Timeliness Matters: The Effect of Status on Reactions to
Perceived Time Delay within Distributed Collaboration. Journal of Applied Psychology 91 (2006): 138595.
Sproull, Lee, and Sara Kiesler. Reducing Social Context Cues: Electronic Mail in Organizational Communication.
Management Science 32 (1986): 1492512.
Suler, John. The Online Disinhibition Effect. CyberPsychology & Behavior 7 (2004): 32126.
Tikkanen, Stephanie, Walid Afifi, and Anne Merrill. Gr8 Textpectations: Parents Experiences of Anxiety in Response to
Adolescent Mobile Phone Delays. In Family Communication in an Age of Digital and Social Media. Edited by Carol
Bruess (New York: Peter Lang International. 2015).
Walther, Joseph. Group and Interpersonal Effects in International Computer-Mediated Collaboration. Human Communication
Research 23 (1997): 342369.
Walther, Joseph. Computer-Mediated Communication: Impersonal, Interpersonal, and Hyperpersonal Interaction.
Walther, Joseph, and Lisa Tidwell. Nonverbal Cues in Computer-Mediated Communication, and the Effect of Chronemics on
Relational Communication. Journal of Organizational Computing 5 (1995): 35578.
White, Marsha, and Steve Dorman. Receiving Social Support Online: Implications for Health Education. Health Education
Research 16 (6) (2001): 693707.
17
In Defense of Slacktivism: How KONY

2012 Got the Whole World to Watch1
Christopher Boulton
In March 2012, the Internet video KONY 2012 swept across Facebook and Twitter racking up
more than 100 million views in just six days,2 making it the most viral video in history.3 KONY
2012s stated intent was to draw attention to how Joseph Konys Lords Resistance Army
(LRA) abducts, abuses, and forces children to fight as soldiers in and around Uganda; and to
inspire young activists to pressure celebrities and politicians to do whatever it takes to stop
Kony.4 The backlash was swift; critics objected to the facts, foreign policy agenda, and racial
politics of the video as well as to the financial priorities of Invisible Children (IC), the
organization behind the video.5 Many of these objections were well founded. The video
oversimplified and exaggerated Konys power (comparing Kony to Hitler when Kony had only
a few hundred followers), called for a United Statesled military intervention into an oil-rich
country, and cast young, mostly white teenagers as Africas saviors (echoing neocolonial
notions).6 International Children also came under scrutiny for spending more money on making
and showing movies than actually directing aid to the affected region.7
Other critics questioned the approach of the KONY 2012 campaign, dismissing the sharing
of a video on social media as the epitome of slacktivism,8 a term combining the lazy
connotations of slacker with activist to convey how the Internet makes political expression
more convenient or, as Snopes founder Barbara Mikkelson first put it to The New York Times
back in 2002, the desire people have to do something good without getting out of their chair.9
Thus, although this author concedes that KONY 2012 made mistakessome of them uglythis
chapter argues that the film also did something much more important by turning suburban teens
into slacktivists10it made human rights cool.
Malcolm Gladwell most certainly would beg to differ. Writing in The New Yorker two
years before the release of KONY 2012, Gladwell quipped that the revolution will not be
tweeted and cited the 1960s lunch counter sit-ins of the Civil Rights Movement as the kind of
high-commitment protests necessary for social change.11 Although various good causes might
use Facebook as a platform to increase online participation, Gladwell argues they can only do
so by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.12 In other words, it is easy
to get a slacktivist to click the like button, but its more difficult to get them to actually show
up at a protest occurring offline, much less be willing to accept personal injury or arrest.
Indeed, strategic, disciplined, and hierarchical organizations such as the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE) trained Civil Rights activists ahead of time to expect and even provoke such risks,
and to conduct their civil disobedience nonviolently. Though technology enthusiasts were quick
to characterize more recent protests in Moldova and Iran as Twitter revolutions, Gladwell
points out that social media did not drive or even organize the protests so much as provide a
platform for Westerners to discuss them.13 Thus, the crux of the slacktivist critique: All those
retweeted hashtags might have raised awareness, but did they actually change anything on the
ground? Does this kind of attention create international solidarity or global rubbernecking? The
answer, of course, is a bit of both. History suggests that watching in itself matters, however,
even if the audience never gets off the couch.
In August 1968, thousands of students gathered in a park outside of the Democratic
National Convention in Chicago to protest the Vietnam War. On the eve of the convention,
police invaded the park with fire trucks, launching teargas canisters and swinging batons. The
next day, Don Rose, press secretary for the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in
Vietnam (MOBE), was asked how to respond to the police brutality and said, Tell them the
whole world is watching, and theyll never get away with it again.14 Two days later, during
what would later become known as The Battle of Michigan Avenue, demonstrators gathered
in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, where many of the convention delegates and news media
were staying. Police moved in to clear the street, beating and arresting demonstrators and
onlookers alike. As the television news cameras rolled, the protestors chanted, The whole
world is watching! The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching! And they
were right. Nearly 83 million Americans saw the horrifying events unfold on their TV screens,
and the images quickly traveled around the globe.15
Even if the demonstrators could not get the convention to adopt a peace platform, having
the whole world watch helped them to publicly shame the Democratic Party and Chicago city
officials. Similarly, civil rights protestors knew that nonviolent civil disobedience in the South
alone might not be enough to persuade racist shop owners to desegregate their lunch counters,
but it would draw the inherent violence of Jim Crow apartheid, typically enforced in the
shadows, out into the light for the camerasand thus people all around the country at home on
their couchesto see.16
I understand, on a very intuitive level, why KONY 2012 went so viral so fast. I think there
are two central reasons for thisinspiration and aspiration. When I was in high school and
college, for instance, I began to learn about injustice in the world and longed to be part of a
good cause. I often wished I had been alive in the 1960s so I could have joined the antiwar or
civil rights movements. They seemed, in retrospect, to be so clear, pressing, and righteous,
culminating in bright shining moments like the March on Washington in 1964 or the National
Moratorium Antiwar Demonstrations of 1970.17 These were events full of courageous, young,
antiestablishment, and presumably cool people just like me, and I longed to have been part of
the scene. I aspired to be like the charismatic leaders and was inspired by their mission to
change the world. Where could I find my movement in the 1990s? Who could I follow? And
could they connect me with like-minded people? Where was my Woodstock? I looked to my
idols, rock bands of course, for guidanceU2 introduced me to Amnesty International, a
human rights organization that writes letters requesting the release of political prisoners. REM
got me interested in Greenpeace, a radical environmental organization that uses direct action to
confront polluters.
The bands endorsements of these causes were very important to me; they made the issues
seem cool and, most importantly for an insecure adolescent, popular. So, when I organized
the Amnesty International club at my high school, I was trying to change the world to be sure,
but was also hoping to make friends with other people like me and meet cute girls who
would think that I was cool, and popular, too. In short, if KONY 2012 and the Internet had been
around at the time, Im sure I would have jumped on the bandwagon as another slacktivist
ready to share the latestand coolestcause with everyone I hoped to impress. This chapter
examines how KONY 2012 used inspiration, aspiration, role models, and the lure of friendship
to make it the type of cause that so many wanted to spread, and defends slacktivism as an
online reboot of the cherished protest march tradition.
KONY 2012 is inspiring. Narrator Jason Russell raises the stakes in the introduction by
making historiceven revolutionaryclaims. The opening sequence depicts planet Earth as
seen from outer space and then, over poignant moments from YouTube and the Arab Spring,
Russell declares that social media is changing the way the world works such that
governments are trying to keep up, the older generations are concerned, and the game has
new rules.18 In this way, Russell winks at his target audience of young Facebook users and
challenges them to seize their destiny. Russell then tells a very simple story of good versus
evil, casting three characters in starring roles: Joseph Kony, warlord and kidnapper, as the
villain; Jacob Acaye, escaped child soldier, as the victim; and himself, along with his
audience, as the hero that saves the day. Russell shows us his own sons birth as a symbol of
the universal value of human life then introduces us to another boy who would change his
life entirely: Jacob, his friend from Uganda whom he had met 10 years earlier.19 We then see a
clip of Jacob crying about seeing his brother killed and Russell promising Jacob that he will
stop Kony. Russell, back in his narrator role, then invites his audience to join the crusade
because that promise is not just about Jacob or me, its also about you. And this year, 2012, is
the year that we can finally fulfill it.20 With the main characters clearly established, the
introduction closes by boiling down a very complex situation into a simple call to action: Stop
Joseph Kony and change the course of human history.21 This goal is presented as both
feasible and urgent, with the added bonus of narrative closure because the movie expires on
December 31, 2012.22 Thus, like a summer blockbuster action flick, the fate of the planet
hangs in the balance and the hero must avenge the victim by defeating his nemesis once and for
all.
Russell, who once described IC as the Pixar of human rights stories,23 is tapping into a
long, successful narrative tradition in Hollywood, described by Matthew Hughey in his book
The White Savior Film.24 In this genre, the (white) hero acts as a bridge character for white
audiencesentering a hostile territory populated by people of color, making a sacrificial
rescue, and completing a journey of self-discovery. In Cry Freedom, Denzel Washington plays
Stephen Biko, the slain antiapartheid activist, but the film is really about Kevin Klines white
journalist who befriends Biko and risks his familys life to liberate Black South Africans from
white rule. Willem Dafoes FBI agent rescues blacks from the KKK in Mississippi Burning.
Kevin Costner goes native and sacrifices himself for the Sioux in Dances with Wolves. Tom
Cruise goes to Japan, learns martial arts, joins the rebellion, defeats the ninjas, and ends up as
The Last Samurai standing. Clint Eastwood defends his Hmong neighbors in Gran Torino.
Avatar, much like Dances with Wolves, features a white protagonist who goes native,
sacrifices himself for the Navi nation and, to top it all off, gets reincarnated. Sandra Bullock
literally picks up a football star on the side of the road in The Blind Side. The Help stars a
white woman who discovers the stories of black maids, publishes a book and goes to New
York while the maids stay home. Other examples include Lawrence of Arabia, Glory,
Dangerous Minds, Amistad, Blood Diamond, and Cool Runnings.25 The point here is that
Russells audience has already been trained to identify with bridge characters, so casting
himself (and his son) in such prominent roles surely helped inspire his white Western audience
to embrace the film and its mission to save other African children like Russells friend Jacob.
KONY 2012 is aspirational. The video targetedand was, in turn, endorsed and retweeted
byfamous celebrity role models such as Oprah Winfrey, Justin Bieber, Angelina Jolie, Bill
Gates, Rihanna, Ryan Seacrest, Nicole Richie, Diddy, and the Kardashian sisters.26 This
exposure helped distribute the video to a wider audience while building its credibility as a
popular cause. In addition to fame, the campaign embraced rebellionanother aspirational
value of youth cultureby co-opting the street art tactics portrayed in Exit through the Gift
Shop, a documentary nominated for a 2010 Academy Award.27 Ostensibly directed by the
anonymous and widely celebrated street-artist Banksy, Exit through the Gift Shops opening
credit sequence presents a montage of young peopleoften wearing hoodies or kerchiefs over
their facessneaking around at night to glue up posters, spray on stencils, and paint graffiti
onto buildings, bridges, tunnels, traffic signs, and other urban public spaces. Most of the
sequence occurs after darkechoing the songs refrain that [t]onight, the streets are ours
and culminating in a young man escaping two pursuing police officers by scaling a wall and
disappearing into the shadows.28 As the narrator explains, this footage presents a behind-the-
scenes perspective on an explosive new movement that would become known as street art, a
hybrid form of graffiti driven by a new generation using stickers, stencils, posters, and
sculptures to make their mark by any means necessary.29 Although the earliest street art
largely was local and ephemeral, with the arrival of the [I]nternet, these once temporary
works could be shared by an audience of millions; street art was poised to become the biggest
countercultural movement since punk.30 As an example of one of the first artists to cross over
into the mainstream, Exit through the Gift Shop introduces Shepard Fairey.
One day, Shepard would be famous for transforming the face of an unknown senator
[Barack Obama] into a universally recognized icon. But, even back in 2000, Shepard
was the world most prolific street artist. Shepherds experiment with the power of
repetition went back to 1989 and an image based on 1970s wrestler Andre the Giant.
Combining Andres face with the command to Obey, Shepherd had already clocked
out over a million hits around the world.31
Fairey then explains how the Obey campaign slowly gained influence over time and
space.
Even though the Andre the Giant sticker was just an inside joke and I was just having
fun, I liked the idea of the more stickers that are out there, the more important it seems,
the more people want to know what it is, the more they ask each other and it gains real
power from perceived power.32
Toward the end of KONY 2012, Russell adapts Faireys tactics when he poses the problem
that ICs version of street art will solve: Kony is invisible, so the best way to stop him is to
make his image ubiquitous so Americans will care and subsequently pressure the U.S.
government to continue to support local efforts to locate and arrest him. Russell predicts that
this DIY negative publicity campaign will make Kony world news by redefining the
propaganda we see all day, every day, that dictates who and what we pay attention to.33
The next sequence strings together images of billboards and magazine ads for with a media
consumer watching television to set up the videos counter-cultural alternative to passivity,
apathy, and conformity, as explained by street arts patron saint. Again, Shepard Fairey:
A lot of people feel powerless to communicate their ideas. They think that, Okay, Im
not a corporation. I dont own my own magazine or news station. I just dont have any
say. But seeing what Ive done, I think its empowered a lot of people to realize that
one individual can make an impact. I actually want to demystify and say, Here are
these really simple tools. Go out and rock it!34
Russell immediately follows Faireys injunction to rock it by promising and thats just
what we intend to do as the video soars over a crowd of young people in red KONY 2012 T-
shirts raising their arms in a synchronized peace symbol salute. As the soundtrack blasts I
cant stop, and another group of teens runs through a parking garage, Russell explains that IC
is prepared to distribute hundreds of thousands of posters, stickers, yard signs, and flyers
with Konys image so that all of these efforts will culminate on one day, April 20th, when we
cover the night.35 He promises that young people from all over the world will meet at
sundown and blanket every street in every city till the sun comes up so that, the next day,
everyone will wake up to hundreds of thousands of posters demanding justice on every
corner.36 This is a big, bold claim, but the imagery backs him up. In a sequence reminiscent of
the opening of Exit through the Gift Shop, KONY 2012 pre-enacts37 what the night of April
20th will look like with a rapid-fire montage of young people running around at night, putting
up posters, unfurling banners, throwing flyers off a bridge, dashing across bridges, and ducking
through road flairlit tunnels. Most of these shots are handheld, and thus connote the rough
authenticity of amateur camcorder footage. Although there are no depictions of direct
confrontations with police, the sense of deviance and transgression through petty vandalism is
palpable, especially when a young man stands in front of a mirror and menacingly pulls a
kerchief up over his nose.
Which leads to the third aspirational aspect of KONY 2012: Showing its viewers a future
vision of themselves. I came to this idea by way of two previous research projects; the first
looked at how print advertisements for designer childrens clothing so often pose the young
models as very serious adults, staring straight into the camera. I argued that this offered
mothersthe ostensible target of the ada foretaste of their childrens future success.38 The
second project extended this theory through audience research and found that mothers tended to
view the child models in the ads as their own, then imagine how other mothers might judge the
childrens clothing and, by extension, their own performance as mothers. In other words, they
donned virtual goggles to audition the gaze of other mothers in a kind of vicarious dress
rehearsal.39 Therefore, I would suggest that, by pre-enacting Cover the Night, Kony 2012
made a future promise through a vicarious gazethis is, what you will look like through
others eyes: running around a big city at night with a bunch of your friends dressed up in cool
clothes and pasting posters on walls, lighting up tunnels with flares, and dodging police.
Crucially, in addition to inspiration and aspiration, KONY 2012 got the whole world to
watch by promoting the formation of friendships. The video explains that the action kit
includes two bracelets (one to keep and one to give away) with unique ID numbers that
participants can input online to join the mission to make Kony famous and geotag your
posters and track your impact in real time.40 In support of this idea, the video shows
photographs of participants posing with their posters, selfie-style, to imply that the pictures
could be posted and shared online with hashtags so as to join and connect with others putting
up posters in their part of the world. The video is full of young people congregating together in
groups. Whether assembled in tight formation wearing matching KONY 2012 merchandise or
running around outdoors and having the time of their lives, the youth are shown in relationship
with each other having fun in publicwhich is both inspirational and aspirational.
It is ironic that this very active vision of hundreds of young participants taking to the streets
was passively watched by millions more who stayed indoors. Yet, at the same time, this is the
very beauty of slacktivismits ability to use the Internet to connect causes to marginalized
supporters. In this way, friendships can be formed across divides of relative distance and
perhaps interests. Even in the heyday of the antiVietnam War movement, there were plenty of
people who showed up at the demonstration to get drugs, meet the opposite sex, or just watch;
for a time, it was trendy, stylish, and even aspirational to be against the war. Some mimicked
the opinions of their rock-star role models. Others were radicalized by an inspiring speaker.
Still others just wanted to Tune In, Turn On, and Drop OutKNOYs tagline. KONY 2012
dipped into the IC archives to compile a highlight reel of past events to persuade its young
viewers to cover the night with an updated, decentralized protest march united online by
Instagram. Even if someone only watchedand did nothing elsethey still got the message
loud and clear: the human rights scene is a cool place to be and to be seen.
KONY 2012s online success can be traced back to the groundwork that IC already had laid
over the previous eight years. First formed in 2004 after the completion of Invisible Children:
Rough Cut, IC debuted the film on a national tour to high schools and college campuses in
2006 and then organized the Global Night Commute, with an estimated 80,000 people in 130
American cities walking to their city centers and sleeping outdoors to show support for young
Ugandan Night Walkers who do the same to avoid capture by the LRA.41 In 2009, IC
organized The Rescue, a 100-city international event across 10 countries where participants
abducted themselves and politicians and celebrities such as Representative John Lewis and
Oprah Winfrey came to their rescue.42
The groups first legislative victory came in 2010, when President Obama deployed 100
U.S. advisers through the LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act. Just a month
after the launch of KONY 2012, Obama extended the mission. That November, IC hosted
Move DC with thousands of volunteers joining actors from the television shows Glee and
Breaking Bad to march to the White House and demand an end to LRA violence. The following
January, Congress authorized $5 million for information leading to Konys capture. That
summer U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, spoke at ICs Fourth Estate
Summit. All in all, over the course of 10 years, ICs numbers are impressive: $32 million
dollars raised; 5 million students educated about the LRA through 13,000 screenings of 12
different films; 400,000 activists attending 8 international awareness events; 3,000 in-person
congressional lobby meetings; and the passage of two bipartisan bills through the U.S.
Congress.43 Although far more people might have watched versus acted, things still got done.
As promised, the KONY 2012 campaign did expire, but the ending was less than happy. Cover
the Night, the campaign to plaster KONY posters all over the world (rendered so compelling
and exciting by KONY 2012s dramatic pre-enactments) was a dud.44 Additionally, as of this
writing, Joseph Kony is still at large and IC plans to shutter its doors by the end of 2015.45
Despite its mixed results, ICs Kony 2012 remains a compelling case study of the promise
and limitations of slacktivism. If we measure the videos worth by its ability to recruit
participants for its signature culminating global event and its promise of closure through the
timely capture of a notorious war criminal, then it failed. However, it also is true that this
videoonly the latest of many previous versionswas only able to intervene in the global
conversation when it leveraged ICs existing activist network through online social media
platforms. This got the ball rolling, but then the videos popularity with so many of those
outside of ICs immediate network spiked the viewership and forced the issue to the top of the
worlds headlines.
To be sure, Jason Russell is no Martin Luther King, but his white savior bridge character
still managed to mobilize tens of millions of young, largely white, Americanstypically
thought to be too self-involved to care about world affairs46to consume and spread a story
about the plight of black children in a far-off land. Unlike so many activist documentaries,
KONY 2012 did not only preach to the converted. Rather, it managed to capture the attention of
mostly apolitical teenagers, that most elusive of demographics, by inspiring them with a
generationally specific and grandiose tone and by reframing and simplifying a complex issue
as urgent, timely, and righteous by casting clear villains, victims, and heroes. It also used
tactics that tapped into young aspirations; associating famous celebrities with the cause added
glamour and social acceptability, co-opting the rebellious cache of street art made earnest
activism more transgressive, and showing young people future visions of themselves made
fighting the good fight look a lot like having fun with friends.
In the fall of 2012, a picture of president-elect Barack Obama with the caption Four more
years became the most popular tweet in the history of Twitter. That record held for almost
two years until Ellen DeGeneres snapped a selfie onstage at the Oscars with some fellow
celebrities (Jennifer Lawrence, Channing Tatum, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Kevin Spacey,
Bradley Cooper, Brad Pitt, Lupita Nyongo, and Angelina Jolie). DeGeneres tweet smashed
Obamas record in a mere 33 minutes. An obvious lesson to draw here is that celebrities are
more popular than politicians. One might even conclude that this proves Twitter to be a trivial
venue, unfit for politics or, as Gladwell put it, revolutions.
After taking a closer look at what made KONY 2012 the kind of viral video that so much of
the world chose to watch, however, I would like to suggest another moral to this story. The
most popular tweet, by far, is a selfie of a group. Think about that. People love watching
groups that theyd like to join, but deciding not to get up out of your chair and climb onto that
particular stage does not make you a slacker or lurker; it makes you a watcher who is inspired,
aspiring, and longing to build meaningful friendships. Russell understood this sensibility and
his KONY 2012 manifesto is a master class in adolescent wish fulfillment; teachers, parents,
mentors, and, yes, even activists, should watch and learn.
NOTES
1. This chapter was written with support from The University of Tampa Dana Foundation grant.
2. Invisible Children, KONY 2102, accessed January 2, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc.
3. Sam Sanders, The Kony 2012 Effect: Recovering from a Viral Sensation, accessed January 2, 2014,
http://www.npr.org/people/349243304/sam-sanders.
4. Invisible Children, KONY 2102.
5. Teju Cole, The White-Savior Industrial Complex, accessed January 2, 2014,
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/.
7. Sanders, The Kony 2012 Effect.
8. Tom Watson, The #StopKony Backlash: Complexity and the Challenges of Slacktivism, accessed January 2, 2014,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomwatson/2012/03/08/the-stopkony-backlash-complexity-and-the-challenges-of-slacktivism/.
9. Barnaby Feder, They Werent Careful What They Hoped For, New York Times, accessed January 2, 2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/29/nyregion/they-weren-t-careful-what-they-hoped-for.html.
10. Amy Finnegan, The White Girls Burden, Contexts 12 (1) (2013): 3035.
11. Malcolm Gladwell, Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted, New Yorker, accessed January 2, 2014,
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-3.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Laura Washington, The Whole World Was Watching, accessed January 2, 2014,
http://inthesetimes.com/article/3876/the_whole_world_was_watching.
15. Ibid.
16. James A. Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Paradox of Nonviolent Direct Action, Phylon 47.1 (1986): 1628.
17. Of course, I would soon learn that those movements, as well as most others, were not so glamorous or exciting at the
time but rather could go through many fits, starts, and long slogs of stalemate, unpopularity, and failure.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Jessica Testa, Two Years after KONY 2012, Has Invisible Children Grown Up?, accessed January 2, 2014,
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/two-years-after-kony-2012-has-invisible-children-grown-up#.hxO7rVj0A.
24. Matthew Hughey, The White Savior Film: Content, Critics, and Consumption. (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University
Press, 2014).
25. Ibid.
26. Testa, Two Years after KONY 2012.
27. Banksy, Exit through the Gift Shop (DVD) (London: Paranoid Pictures, 2010).
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Michael Renov, Theorizing Documentary (New York: Routledge, 1993), 203. In one of the footnotes of his book
Theorizing Documentary, defines pre-enactments as visions of what could be, presented in a documentary format.
Remember that KONY 2012 was posted to YouTube on March 5, 2012, so any talk or depiction of the April 20 Cover the
Night event is a prediction about the future. In other words, the images portrayed in the pre-enactment scenes were shot well
in advance of the actual poster-bombing event.
38. Chris Boulton, The Mothers Gaze and the Model Child: Reading Print Ads for Designer Childrens Clothing,
Advertising & Society Review 10.3 (2009).
39. Chris Boulton, Dont Smile for the Camera: Black Power, Para-Proxemics and Prolepsis in Print Ads for Hip-Hop
Clothing, International Journal of Communication 1.1 (2007).
42. Invisible Children, International Events, accessed January 2, 2014, http://invisiblechildren.com/program/international-
events/.
43. Invisible Children, Homepage, accessed January 2, 2014, http://invisiblechildren.com.
44. Rory Carroll, Kony 2012 Cover the Night Fails to Move from the Internet to the Streets, accessed January 2, 2014,
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/apr/21/kony-2012-campaign-uganda-warlord.
46. Pew Research Center, Politically Apathetic Millennials, accessed January 2, 2014, http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-
number/politically-apathetic-millennials/.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Banksy. Exit through the Gift Shop (DVD) (London: Paranoid Pictures, 2010).
Carroll, Rory. Kony2012 Cover the Night Fails to Move from the Internet to the Streets. Accessed January 2, 2014.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/apr/21/kony-2012-campaign-uganda-warlord.
Colaiaco, James A. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Paradox of Nonviolent Direct Action. Phylon 47.1 (1986): 1628.
Cole, Teju. The White-Savior Industrial Complex. Accessed January 2, 2014.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/.
Feder, Barnaby. They Werent Careful What They Hoped For. Accessed January 2, 2014.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/29/nyregion/they-weren-t-careful-what-they-hoped-for.html.
Finnegan, Amy. The White Girls Burden. Contexts 12 (1) (2013): 3035.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted. Accessed January 2, 2014.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-3.
Hughey Matthew. The White Savior Film: Content, Critics, and Consumption. (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press,
2014).
Invisible Children. Homepage. Accessed January 2, 2014. http://invisiblechildren.com.
Invisible Children. International Events. Accessed January 2, 2014. http://invisiblechildren.com/program/international-events/.
Invisible Children. KONY 2102. Accessed January 2, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc.
Pew Research Center. Politically Apathetic Millennials. Accessed January 2, 2014. http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-
number/politically-apathetic-millennials/.
Renov, Michael. Theorizing Documentary (New York: Routledge 1993), 203.
Sanders, Sam. The Kony 2012 Effect: Recovering from a Viral Sensation. Accessed January 2, 2014.
http://www.npr.org/people/349243304/sam-sanders.
Testa, Jessica. Two Years after KONY 2012, Has Invisible Children Grown Up? Accessed January 2, 2014.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/two-years-after-kony-2012-has-invisible-children-grown-up#.hxO7rVj0A.
Washington, Laura. The Whole World Was Watching. Accessed January 2, 2014.
http://inthesetimes.com/article/3876/the_whole_world_was_watching.
Watson, Tom. The #StopKony Backlash: Complexity and the Challenges of Slacktivism. Accessed January 2, 2014.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomwatson/2012/03/08/the-stopkony-backlash-complexity-and-the-challenges-of-slacktivism/.
18
Public Healths Courtship with the Internet:

Slow but Steady
Samantha Lingenfelter
Health cannot be bought at the supermarket. You have to invest in health. You have to
get kids into schooling. You have to train health staff. You have to educate the
population.
Hans Rosling1
QUESTION OF THE CENTURY: HOW DO YOU USE THE INTERNET?

(Thats not your cue to skip this chapter. Keep reading, please.)
Its probably easier to list the things we do not supplement with Internet support than it is to
give a timely answer to the question posed above. The simple idea of being disconnected for a
weekend camping trip on the Appalachian Trail is enough to give many Millennials severe
anxiety, or at least raise their blood pressure. A good example is the episode of Daria, an
MTV show from the 1990s and early 2000s. In the episode, The Teachings of Don Jake, the
Morgandorfer family goes into the wild to enjoy some disconnected time away from the
phones, fax machines, and computers due to Darias fathers stress-related health issues.
Darias mother cannot escape her need to be connected and smuggles a mobile phone into her
backpack for the trip. This was in the 1990s, before every high school student had a cell phone.
The shows creators knew we were too connected back thenand that was more than a decade
before this book even was being considered and at least five years before the first iPhone was
sold.
Whether arguing for its positive or the negative aspects, the Internet has really done a lot
for humans as a species. Some might argue that the benefits of constantly being connected are
more detrimental than beneficial but, like any tool, it is really all about how you use it. Using a
cheese grater for cutting bread is just not going to be as effective as using a knife unless
youre making breadcrumbs, in which case that cheese grater could be useful, but still is not
recommended.
Another (arguably more relevant) example could be inviting 100 people to a holiday party
only using handwritten invitations sent via a postal service. Sure, it will do the job, but not as
quickly or as efficiently as sending invitations through Facebook. This is a typical tradeoff that
we have accepted into our developed American society in the 21st century.
As of 2013, the World Bank found that 40 out of every 100 people living on this planet use
the Internet in some capacity2and that number is steadily increasing. Although this accounts
for less than half of the worlds population, having access to the Web is slowly but surely
expanding to all corners of the globe. It can be argued that this number consists mostly of those
living in developed nationsa fair argument, to be sure, and even more so when compared to
the 2011 statistic that only 57 percent of all roads on our planet were paved. That seems like a
fairly reasonable estimation. Those living in the upper echelons of our societies typically are
wealthy enough to afford Internet connectivity, both in developed nations and in parts of the
Third World. Considering the amount of wealth that is distributed among those who have
potential access to the Internet, and the fact that the populations of China, India, and the United
States combined equal more than 2.5 billion people, it is fair to say that those countries have
the lions share of Internet users.
Why is this important? How does having Internet access really help the public in any way?
Cat photos are in no short supply. Other than that, however, where are the real benefits?
Internet connectivity can improve quality of life for the worlds populations in countless ways,
especially when paired with health initiatives and educational tools. Rapid communication
opportunities and access to updated research and knowledge can expedite the process of
improving quality of life for many. Sending an e-mail to someone who is 5,000 miles away and
receiving a response within minutes is a level of connectivity that previous generations did not
experience. This type of access enables societies to create health initiatives and programs,
along with communicating with the masses as directly (and quickly) as possible.
Public health has directly benefitted from the Internets influence during the 20th century.
Although the concept of public health is broad and seemingly endless, there are numerous ways
that health practitioners can use Internet communications in beneficial ways to improve quality
of life locally, nationally, and globally.
This chapter reviews the important relationship shared between health, communication, the
Internet, and the public. Always being connected has its benefits and its liabilities. Like many
things in our society, technology can be accused of being both a blessing and a curse. Being
able to protect and improve the health of the public, however, is one positive way that
ubiquitous connectivity is beneficial to the world as a whole.
SO, WHAT IS PUBLIC HEALTH, EXACTLY?

Its the middle of May and you wake up to an air raidlike siren blaring from your cell
phone. It is an alert from your city warning you of severe weather in your area. Perhaps a
supercell thunderstorm has led to the development of a tornado. Thats public health.
A local nonprofit health center is offering free HIV testing, educational seminars on safe
sex, and access to free condoms for anyone in the community. Again: Public health.
A city is working to clean up pollution in a nearby lake to prevent contamination of local
drinking water sources. You guessed it! Public health.
A new design for vehicle airbag systems is implemented in all new models of minivans.
You get the idea. Public health.
Essentially everything that can impact the quality of human life is, in one way or another,
related to public health. As I said, pretty broad, right? Absolutely.
The concept of public health is rather new, although it seems like a term that should have
been established as a concrete idea centuries ago. Considering that the concern for the health of
the public led to the significant scientific inventions and discoveries that improved life
expectancy by decades, the development of public health and public health organizations
would seem to be a natural next step.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines public health as all organized measures
(whether public or private) to prevent disease, promote health, and prolong life among the
population as a whole.3 There are numerous job positions and public interventions that could
easily fall within this definitions spectrum, thus making a clear categorization simultaneously
easy and difficult. Who counts as a public health practitioner when the definition incorporates
such vast possibilities?
Job titles and duties that could be categorized as public health positions can range from
the obviousthe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) creating a more effective
Ebola vaccine to more subtle jobs, such as car manufacturers improving the safety of new
car models through design and innovation. Public health easily creeps into many corners of the
U.S. job market and potentially can be found within the job descriptions of our elected
officials. Rallying for political support for certain health innovations and initiatives has an
impact on constituents, and politicians prefer to keep that population healthy and happy. Our
congressmen and senators might not see themselves as public health practitioners, but there are
some occasions for which the case could be made.
Our planet experiences one human birth every 8 seconds and a human death every 12
seconds.4 More than 7 billion people currently inhabit planet Earth, and there are more people
are being born (at a rapid rate) than are dying. The population worldwide will continue to
grow, thus resulting in increased public health demands. Considering the issues associated
with sustaining a growing population with diminishing natural resources and the shrinking of
habitable space, public health will need to be increasingly effective in the expectedly near
future. The improvements in various health-related sectors such as sanitation have led to a
longer life expectancy but result in population explosions. Birth rates have clearly increased
and death rates have slowed, thus resulting in an overall graying of the worlds population.5
Communications are incredibly important for disseminating key information, both for the
public and for public health professionals. Considering the rapid development of
communications networks and tools within the past century, there are numerous options and
methods that can be used to benefit practitioners of various public health disciplines.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF PUBLIC HEALTH

How can one understand the real establishment and need for a sector like public health
without some history? Health has no real need for a historical review, but understanding key
events and time lines can illustrate where public health actually began and how we got to
where we are today.
Throughout the centuries communicable diseases that have ravaged populations. Three
major plague pandemics have been recorded in history, the first experienced by the Byzantine
Empire. The Justinian Plague occurred in the sixth century and killed more than 25 million
people.6 The second recorded pandemicone of the better-known pandemicswas the
bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death, which spread through Europe in the 14th
century. Scholars and researchers note that 60 percent of the European population7 died as a
result of the epidemic.8 The third pandemic on record occurred in the 1860s. The modern
plague (a bacterial infection) killed more than 10 million people over a 20-year period.9
Entire populations can be completely destroyed by a communicable disease, as evidenced by
these historical examples.
Religious leaders and communities originally thought that the disease was a result of
debauchery-laden behaviors and a vast lack of prayer10 (although, ultimately, the source was
found to be fleas). Tactics such as isolation, quarantine protocols for travelers, and even
fumigation became tools for disease control. According to Slack, these eventual developments
led to increasing government presence and essentially paved the way for interventions for
public health.11
Public health discoveries and interventions continued into later centuries, mostly
discovered through observational research.12 Considering that many scientific standards and
breakthroughs were decadesif not centuriesaway, observational data were very important
for the world of public health. Some of the major developments were the discovery of
vaccinations, creation of sanitation services and standards, and the understanding of how
infections spread. The observational research conducted by Louis Pasteur and others has led to
the extended life span previously discussed.13
The CDC actually has a list on its Web site of what it considers to be the top-10 greatest
health achievements of the 20th century. Considering the increase of the American life span that
occurred due to these discoveries, it is fair to say that they were very important.
1. VaccinationsIncluding school-required vaccinations for children.

2. Improvement in neonatal and OBGYN careReducing infant and maternal mortality
rates.
3. Family planningBetter access to contraceptive methods, for example.
4. Fluoridation of drinking waterHaving healthier teeth leads to fewer health issues.
5. Tobacco as a health hazardSmoking and chewing tobacco being recognized as
carcinogenic, for instance.
6. Safer and healthier foodsRead Upton Sinclairs The Jungle for a realistic
understanding of how bad food manufacturing conditions used to be.
7. Motor-vehicle safetySeatbelts, air bags, traffic laws.
8. Workplace safetyDecreased fatalities in the workplace, better workplace safety
regulations.
9. Control of infectious diseases.
10. Declines in death from strokes and heart attacksHealthier diets are one factor that
helped this issue.14
Outbreaks of disease have been scattered throughout Earths time line and humans have
adapted in countless ways. The 20th century introduced a plethora of new practices and
procedures that have led to an increase in the average lifespan of Americans and of people
around the globe. Without vaccines, for instance, the United States might still be seeing
significant outbreaks of polio and smallpox. Safer food standards and health-code regulations
keep diseases under control through sanitation practices, thus resulting in a reduced risk for
food poisoning. Public healths broad scope clearly made many improvements to our global
way of life in the 1900s.
THINKING SMALL: COMMUNITY-LEVEL COMMUNICATIONS

Lets talk about what everybody already is talking about: Social media. The first thought
that comes to mind might be annoying corporate branding Tweets or Like if you agree
posts on Facebook. The (arguably) irritating parts of social media certainly exist, but the entire
concept of social media changes when you put a professional, medical spin on its purpose.
Community-building is a good first step.
Community-building has been an extremely beneficial side effect of social media. Those
with illnesses or certain ailments can join together on Web sites such as Facebook or Reddit
and have conversations about issues they face. Sometimes speaking to others is more calming
than simply searching for symptoms in any search engine (Internet search diagnoses never
really are a great substitute for a seeing trained medical professional). Reddit users might not
have a degree in neuroscience or psychology, but the site is a free service that has the potential
to help numerous people on emotional levels. Sharing experiences can help educate and spread
awareness as well as create solutions that others might not be able to find. Limited access to
medical care could be supplemented through social media services such as these. One
example of an online community like this could be a Facebook group or message board for
breast cancer survivors. Sharing ones story and discussing it with others could be both
therapeutic and educational.
Discussions on globalization seem to always include the Internet and the communication
options that go along with it. One of the biggest developments clearly is social media. Instant
messenger services through AOL, Yahoo!, Google, Skype, and others keep people connected
without the need for snail mail or landline telephones. It is even possible to acquire a free
Internet phone number through GoogleVoice! This type of communication has been used by
everyonefrom elementary schoolage children to leading medical professionals in the field.
Always being connected and able to communicate expedites diagnoses, processes, and
conditions for just about any situation.
Considering that there are links to corresponding social media accounts on many (if not
most) of the U.S. government Web sites, its easy to assume that social media networks are not
going anywhere any time soon. New services can be advertised and communications with
health professionals can be made potentially without fees or costs. These concepts are still in
the early stages of development but there is great potential for future use of these mediums of
communication.
State public health departments also use social media for communications. According to
Thackeray et al., health departments use social media but the actual implementation of social
media into health plans still is in its infancy.15 Strategic communication planning must be
established for the use of social media to become a more mainstream practice.16 According to
one study conducted in 2012, only 24 percent of local health departments surveyed had a
Facebook page and only 8 percent had a Twitter account.17 The same study also found
information further supporting the increase use of social media by local health departments if
the state health department had adopted the technology into its practice as well.18 Because this
still is in early stages for local health departments, best practices have yet to be established for
effective communications to be determined. The implications of state health departments using
Twitter, Facebook, and other methods of social media for information dissemination increases
the ability for direct communication to the public.
Studies have found that it is possible to track illness through social media resources. Web
sites have even been created to mine keywords related to illnesses and track them through
social media accounts. HealthMap (found at HealthMap.org) conveniently places all the live-
tracking information on a world map that shows various outbreaks in real time.19 The speed
that communicable diseases can travel in this world has significantly increased thanks to
globalization; a case of Ebola can be caught in Africa and brought back to the United States via
air travel in less than one day. Having live updates from mined information is helping public
health practitioners keep ahead of illness trends, such as the Ebola outbreak in Liberia or
SARS in China. Studying social media for trends within illnesses still includes caveats
regarding potential accuracy of the statistics. Supporting this practice with more information
could yield many positive implications for public health.
THINKING BIG: NATIONWIDE AND INTERNATIONAL

COMMUNICATIONS
Community-based use of the Internet for the benefit of public health is wonderful for niche
groups and local communities, but there have been beneficial uses on a much grander scale as
well. Top government agencies from around the world work on public health initiatives for the
benefit of their countries, and share their ideas and messages through modern-day
communications. Intergovernmental organizations such as the World Health Organization
(WHO) use Web sites for educational purposes and for providing real-time updates on public
health crises as they occur.
The CDC was established in the 1940s to research and work toward fighting
communicable diseases. The agency then expanded and focused heavily on the study of malaria
and its eradication.20 Since its inception, the CDC has grown dramatically and now works and
researches all areas of public health including chronic diseases, workplace hazards,
environmental health concerns, and countless other areas.21
The CDC supplies information to communities and states through its Web page, including a
list of current outbreaks that is available on its homepage, along with access to numerous
beneficial resources. One example is the page dedicated to health-related travel warnings. The
list is updated as new epidemics or illnesses are experienced in different countries across all
continents. In early 2015, numerous African countries rose to the top of the Avoid
Nonessential Travel list due to the recent Ebola outbreak. This travel-warning tool benefits
not only those who are traveling but those who might come in contact with a person after
returning from a trip to a place on the list. This is just one useful tool made available for the
protection of public health.22
The Ebola outbreak in Liberia during the spring of 2014 is a prime example of how the
Internet has improved global communications for health professionals. According to the CDC,
the Ebola outbreak of 2014 experienced more than 21,000 infections with more than 8,500
deaths.23 The crisis reached the United States when a doctor unknowingly was infected with
the disease, traveled back to Texas, and eventually died from the illness. Others were infected
due to exposure and one exposed nurse even flew on a commercial jet (with CDC permission)
before being tested for the illness. Once the news was released that she was infected, however,
many people quarantined themselves as a precautionary measure if they felt they were at risk of
contracting the virus. The CDC worked with communities and quarantined areas as needed.
Thankfully the illness did not spread, but receiving updates during a very dramatic time was
useful, particularly for understanding the needs of the health care community when such
emergencies arise.
THE DANGERS OF MISINFORMATION: THE NEGATIVE

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE INTERNET AND PUBLIC HEALTH
There are many great things about the Internet and its effect on public health. When
combined, problems can be solved, disasters potentially can be avoided, and information can
be disseminated. As is the case for many good things in this world, however, there is
potentially a dark side. Misinformationespecially related to healthcan be a dangerous
thing, and the Internet provides access to overwhelming amounts of misinformation, all
available at anyones fingertips.
The prime example that must be discussed is the antivaccination movement. There has
existed a group of people who are against vaccines since the days of Edward Jenner and Louis
Pasteur.24 Vaccinations are responsible for eradication and prevention of many diseases in the
19th and 20th centuries, including smallpox and polio. Many school districts require students
to receive measles, mumps, and rubella vaccinationsknown as MMRbefore attending
kindergarten.
One concept that has helped keep vaccine-preventable diseases at bay is herd immunity.
Herd immunity occurs when enough of a population is vaccinated that there is minimal risk of a
susceptible individual becoming exposed to the disease in question.25 Herd immunity has been
key in keeping many diseases at bay and for protecting people who have compromised immune
systemssuch as chemotherapy patients, people who are immunocompromised due to medical
interventions, and the elderly. A surge of misinformation on the Internet, however, has been
disseminated about vaccinations in relation to risks for children, under the guise of parental
autonomy,26 civil liberties, and causes of autism. Celebrity support of the antivaccination
movement also helps in spreading and publicizing the misinformation about vaccines.
The measles vaccine was introduced during the 1960s and infection rates immediately
declined.27 Measles was deemed to be eliminated from the United States in 2000. To give
some perspective on the severity of this illness, measles was responsible for 145,000 deaths
(equaling more than half of everyone infected) worldwide in 2014.28 The Measles and Rubella
Initiative was developed in 2001 with support from the CDC, the American Red Cross, the
United Nations Foundation, UNICEF, and the World Health Organization. Its goal is to
reducing measles-related deaths by 95 percent worldwide by 2015 and to eliminate measles
and rubella in at least five of the six World Health Organization regions by 2020.29 This is a
global effort to increase vaccinations and eliminate this disease worldwide, but many new
cases still are being found in the United States in 2015.
The CDC considers the elimination of most infectious diseases to be one of the greatest
public health achievements in the 20th century. The antivaccination movement is taking public
health multiple steps backward, however; all because of some radical misinformation that was
posted on the Internet. One doctor actually has written about immunizations and their effect
on children but failed to cite any reliable resources for the claims made. Another doctor used
various studies to show a connection between immunization and autism; however, many later
studies indicated that this was not in fact the case.30 Regardless, many people have latched on
to the concept that vaccinations are the cause of conditions such as autism and Aspergers.
Although on social media there is strong opposition to the antivaccination movement, the
misinformation will simply not disappear. Continuous corrections of misinformation are
needed to reverse the damage done by antivaxxers.
Thats one of the greatest threats of the Internet: The inability to remove inaccuracies. The
freedom of the Internet is wonderful for the First Amendment and the ability to speak ones
mind, but it is the virtual wild west of regulationthe absence of regulation enables people
to run rampant. It therefore is important to always remember that anyone can post
information on the Internet.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
As is the case for many things in our world, the Internet has its good, bad, and ugly sides. In
the realm of public health, however, there are many benefits that have not yet been established.
Reaching those people who otherwise might not receive important information has further
solidified the concept of globalization and the spread of western knowledge to the most remote
parts of the planet. The continuing goal should be to reach even more peopleespecially those
who currently might not have access to the resources and tools of technology.
There definitely are ugly parts of the Internet that are related to personal health. A simple
Internet search of basic symptoms can reveal a myriad of terminal illnesses that could be the
cause, when the Internet user actually just has a common cold. Personal hypochondria aside,
however, there are some benefits to having research readily available. Smartphone browsers
and digital applications provide rapid access to basic first aid in case of an emergency, and the
technology can help untrained people to save lives while waiting for responders to arrive. The
benefits of this technology and interconnectivity make the quality of such experience
immeasurable.
Other good things the Internet provides, however, include simple alerts from a university
indicating that classes are cancelled due to weather, which benefit public health by reducing
the risk of exposure to or danger from life-threatening driving. Weather alerts from community
and state governments can indicate when dangerous conditions require people to evacuate or
take shelter. Our technology-obsessed society is reaping benefits of public health, but more
integration into public health practice is needed.
Having the foresight to know exactly where public health will go from this point is nearly
impossible. There still are many lessons to be learned, challenges to be addressed, and
procedures to be established. Because the categorization of public health still is fairly new,
there could be significant growth through its Internet counterpart. As other nations and states
increase access to resources including the Internet there will be further growth and support for
public health globally. Who knows what future health discoveries and innovations will be on
the CDCs illustrious list for the 21st century? Perhaps everyone will find out in 2100.
NOTES
1. Hans Rosling, The Best Stats Youve Ever Seen (February 1, 2006) (transcript), accessed January 15, 2015,
http://www.ted.com/talks/ hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen/transcript?language=en.
2. Internet Users (per 100 People), World Bank Data, accessed January 18, 2015,
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.P2/countries?display=graph.
3. GlossaryPublic Health, World Health Organization, accessed January 14, 2015,
http://www.who.int/trade/glossary/story076/en/.
4. United States Census Bureau, Population Clock (January 1, 2010), accessed January 13, 2015,
http://www.census.gov/popclock/.
5. Anne Nadakavukaren, Our Global Environment: A Health Perspective (Waveland Press, 2011).
6. Plague History, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (November 18, 2014), accessed January 31, 2015,
http://www.cdc.gov/plague/history/.
7. Ibid.
8. Paul Slack, Responses to Plague in Early Modern Europe: The Implications of Public Health, Social Research (1988):
43353.
9. Plague History, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Leon Gordis, Epidemiology, 5th ed. (Philadelphia, PA: Saunders, 2014).
13. Ibid.
14. Our HistoryOur Story, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (April 26, 2013), accessed January 26, 2015,
http://www.cdc.gov/about/history/ourstory.htm.
15. Rosemary Thackeray, Brad L. Neiger, Amanda K. Smith, and Sarah B. Van Wagenen, Adoption and Use of Social
Media among Public Health Departments, BMC Public Health 12, no. 1 (2012): 242.
16. Ibid.
17. Jenine K. Harris, Nancy L. Mueller, and Doneisha Snider, Social Media Adoption in Local Health Departments
Nationwide, American Journal of Public Health 103, no. 9 (2013): 17001707.
18. Ibid.
19. Charles Schmidt, Trending Now: Using Social Media to Predict and Track Disease Outbreaks, Environmental Health
Perspectives (January 1, 2012), accessed January 26, 2015, http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/120a30/?
utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=120-a30.
20. Our HistoryOur Story, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
21. Ibid.
22. Travel Health Notices, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accessed January 20, 2015,
http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/.
23. Travel Health Notices, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
24. Gregory A. Poland and Robert M. Jacobson, The Clinicians Guide to the Anti-Vaccinationists Galaxy, Human
Immunology 73, no. 8 (2012): 85966.
25. Anne Nadakavukaren, Our Global Environment: A Health Perspective.
26. Anna Kata. A Postmodern Pandoras Box: Anti-Vaccination Misinformation on the Internet, Vaccine 28, no. 7 (2010):
170916.
27. Walter A. Orenstein, Mark J. Papania, and Melinda E. Wharton, Measles Elimination in the United States, Journal of
Infectious Diseases 189, Supplement 1 (2004): S1S3.
28. Jason Beaubien, Measles Is a Killer: It Took 145,000 Lives Worldwide Last Year, NPR, (January 30, 2015), accessed
January 31, 2015.
29. LearnMeasles & Rubella Initiative, Measles & Rubella Initiative, accessed January 31, 2015,
http://www.measlesrubellainitiative.org/learn/.
30. Gregory A. Poland and Robert M. Jacobson, The Clinicians Guide to the Anti-Vaccinationists Galaxy, Human
Immunology 73, no. 8 (2012): 85966.
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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Plague History. November 18, 2014. Accessed January 31, 2015.
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Index
ABC Online Forum, 222

Acaye, Jacob, 324
accessibility, xiiixiv, 333335; education, 91109; multi-platform, 3
activism, 165176 , 267270; hashtag, 271277; information and communication technologies (ICTs), 165166, 170; Internets
impact on, 183195
Adams, Samuel, 244
Adekunle, Philip, 293
Adweek, 231
The Agency Group, 48
Agnew, Spiro, 248
AllLacqueredUp.com, 205
Amazon, 8; Prime Instant Video service, 9
American Association for the Advancement of Science, 127128
American Council on Education (ACE), 100
Amnesty International, 323
Android, 94; Music apps, 6
Anti-vaccination movement, 340342
Apple, 4, 67
Arab Spring, 165, 169, 267268, 323
art, 317; accessing, 1112; audiences and markets for, 317; digital, 1214; digital; museums, 1314; interactive, 12; internet,
1213; internet distribution of, 1112; internet installations, 1213; marketing and promoting, 1112; mobile streaming, 15;
modernism, 13; net artists, 1213; organizations, 12; post-Internet, 13; postmodernism, 1112; shows, 12; streaming, 1213;
virtual reality and, 1415
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 14
A$ASP Rocky, 4849
Assange, Julian, 130
Astronauts Wanted, 226
athletes; advocacy and activism, engaging in, 2932; fan advocacy, 2729, 32; media framing, negative, 2729; minority, 29;
self-presentation, optimizing, 2427, 31; social media and, 2333
The Atlantic, 209210, 277278
Australian Recording Industry Association, 226
Babson Survey Research Group, 97

Bad Luck Brain, 230
Banksy, 325
Barnes, Nora Ganim, 206
BBC, 10, 125
Beatport, 56; application programming interface (API), 5; consumer-facing strategy, 4
Benedikt, Allison, 252
Benkler, Yochai, ixx
Berens, Ricky, 30
Bernstein, Carl, 121, 245
Betaworks, 209
Big Earls Bait House, 270271
Bikini Kill, 4041, 4344, 49
bin Laden, Osama, 129
Bissinger, Buzz, 245246
Black Eyed Peas, 187
BlackBerry riots, 169
Blackboard, 97
Blair, Jayson, 122, 246247
The Blind Side, 324
blog(s), xii, 12, 120, 203204, 277; advertising on, 214; audience, finding an, 212214; demoblog, 146; fame and, 203206; future
of, 206208, 210212; impact of social media on, 208210; micro, 307; new technologies and, 207208; political, 146, 185;
video, 226228
A Blog About Media and Other Things Im Interested In, 250
Blogdorf Goodman, 204
Bloomberg, 4, 11
Borthwick, John, 209
Boston Journal of Occurrences, 244
Boston Red Sox, 27
Bradlee, Ben, 121
Brandenburg, Heinz, 291292
Branding, personal, 221235
Branzburg v. Hayes, 124
Brazil, 165
Brown, Michael, 29, 267269
Bryant, Kobe, 29
Burr, Tanya, 228
Bush, George W., 123124, 128, 192, 248, 250
Butler, Shay Carl, 227228
BuzzFeed, 61, 212, 231
camera obscura, 57
Cameron, David, 131
Camp Takota, 226
Campbell, Mel, 207
#CancelColbert, 263265, 273
Canva, 213
Car Advice, 206
Carpini, Delli, 190
Carr, David, 129
Cashmore, Pete, 233
Castells, Manuel, ix, 287
CBS, 249
The Center for Marketing Research, 206
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 335, 337, 339341
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 123124, 129
Centro de Investigaciones Sociolgicas (CIS) Barometer, 144145
Champion, Edward, 250
#change, 29
Chayko, Mary, 287
Cheney, Dick, 123124
Chicago Sun Times, 123
Child, Julia, 203
Chilean Winter, 169
China, 193
chronemics, 305; e-mail, 307310; face-to-face (FTF) conversations, 306, 308309, 311312; feedback, 307; online forums, 310;
role of technology in, 306308, 310; text messaging, 307, 310
Civil Rights Movement, 322323
Clinton, Bill, 130, 279; online strategy, 184185
CNN, 185, 249250; YouTube debates, 187
Coates, Ta-Nahesi, 277
CODE.org, 105106
Cohen, Dan, 121
Cohen, Roger, 63
Cohen v. Cowles Media Co., 121
Colbert, Stephen, 263265
collective action, 165176
Comedy Central, 263264
Communications Decency Act, 128
community-building, xiiixiv, 167, 338339
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 322
consumers, activating, 266267
content creation, 221, 223224
Cooke, Janet, 122, 244245, 247
Cooper , Anderson, 187
Cornelius, Robert, 57
Consumer Electronics Show (2015), 7
Coursera, 92, 100, 105
Craven, Kyle, 230
Cruz, Victor, 29
Cry Freedom, 324
C-SPAN, 185
Cupcakes and Cashmere, 214
cybercrimes, 127, 166
cyberspace, corporate colonization of, xii
cyber-utopianism. 167
da Vinci, Leonardo, 57
Daguerre, Louis, 57
The Daily Dot, 231
Daily Grace, 225
The Daily What, 231
Dances with Wolves, 324
Daria, 333
data mining, 195
Davies, Ian, 230
Daydream Nation, 47
De Tocqueville, Alexis, 243
Deadspin, 277
Dean, Howard, 185186
Dean, Jodi, 290
DeFranco, Philip, 226228
DeGeneres, Ellen, 55, 329
Democracy in America, 243
Democratic National Convention (1968) 322
democratization, xiiixiv
Denton, Nick, 278
Derringer, Nancy, 250251
Dewey, John, 288
DeYoung, Karen, 249
digital democracy, 141154; downside of, 144145
digital divide, xii, 93, 143
digital media platforms, 243
District Lines, 229
Dole, Bob, 185
Donovan, Lisa, 228
Dorfman, Dan, 122
Drake, Thomas A., 129
DuBravac, Shawn, 58
E! Entertainment Television, 226

e-mail conversations, 307308
East Carolina University, 227
Easy Gourmet, 206
Eco, Umberto, 144
education, xiv; definition of, 9293; distance, 92; face-to-face, 98; formal, 83; higher, 91, 9798, 101102; informal, 83; K12,
9899; massive open online courses (MOOC), 91, 99102; nonprofit organizations, 105106; nonprofit resources, 106107;
online, 91109; online, benefits of, 108109; online, how were learning, 9799; peer learning, 8586
edX, 104105
Electric Zoo, 5
Eler, Alicia, 60, 65
Ellsberg, Daniel, 121
England, 165
Ephron, Nora, 203
ePolicy, 146
Erdely, Sabrina Rubin, 252
Erdogan, Recep, 165
Espionage Act, 120, 129
Etsy, 12
European Parliament, 145
Exit Through the Gift Shop, 325326
Extra TV, 205
Facebook, 2728, 55, 6163, 107, 208, 211, 213, 221, 248, 267, 277; artists pages, 12; communities, 338339; Fortune 500
companies and, 207208; iTunes, 4; NYPD, 272273; political movements and, 146, 193194; terms and Conditions, ix
Fairey, Shepard, 325326
Falkner, Nickolas, 103
Falkner, Vivian, 103
Fallah, Alborz, 206
fameballs, 232234
Federal Rules of Evidence, 124
Felt, Mark, 121
Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse, 290
#Ferguson, 29
Fernald, Anne, 290
15M Spanish Movement, 165, 169170, 174
Fisher, Ian, 206207
Fitzgerald, Patrick, 124
Flickr, 222
Florida Marlins, 2627
Food & Wine Magazine, 205
The Food Illusion, 204
food standards, 337338
Forbes, 227
Forbes Digital Tool, 245246
Ford Fiesta Movement, 228229
Fort Wayne (IN) NewsSentinel, 250
Franco, James, 64
Frankfurt School, 288
Fraser, Nancy, 288290, 297
Free Flow of Information Act, 130131
Freedom of Information Act, 128
Freemasons, 288
Freer Gallery of Art, 14
French, Antonio, 268
Friedlander, Lee, 5758
Fulfillment Fund, 105106
Fullscreen, 229
Galley Caf, 270271

Gallup, 241
Garner, Eric, 267269
Gates, William Henry Bill III, 210
Gawker Media, 277278
Geocities, 206
Gharaibeh, Kassem, 228
Gladwell, Malcolm, 250, 322
Glamour, 205
Glass, Stephen, 245247
Global Night Commute, 328
Globalization, xiiixiv
Goeglein, Tim, 250251
Goffman, Erving, 60
Google, 6, 108, 193, 248, 250251; Adsense, 206, 228229; Art Project, 14; Chrome Cast, 4, 7; Fiber, 10; Hummingbird, 206
Gordon, Kim, 42
Gore, Al, 184
government accountability, 119132
GPS technology, 13
GQ magazine, 42
Graces Guide: The Art of Pretending To Be a Grown-Up, 226
The Grace Helbig Project, 226
Gran Torino, 324
Grantland, 251
Green, Bill, 244
Greenpeace, 323
The Guardian, 263264
Gumuchian, Marie-Louise, 250
Habermas, Jrgen, x, 288291

hacking, 128131
Hamilton, Josh, 28
Hanna, Kathleen, 4041
Hannan, Caleb, 251
Hart, Mamrie, 226
Harvard University, 211, 221; Harvardx, 101, 104105; Neiman Lab, 208
hashtag activism; audience, understanding, 272273; education through widespread awareness, 276; national events become
personal, 275276; subverting mainstream awareness through minority opinion, 273275
HealthMap, 339
Hearst, William Randolph, 244
Hecox, Ian, 224
Heiderman, Marvin, 59
Helbig, Grace, 225226
The Help, 324
Hernandez, Macarena, 246247
HeyUSA, 226
Hochman, Jessa, 212
Holder, Eric, 131
the Horrors, 4243, 51
Hotmail, 208
The Huffington Post, 233
Hughey, Matthew, 324
humiliation culture, 279
Hussein, Saddam, 123
Imagine: How Creativity Works, 250

In Defense of Food, 204
In Rainbows, 50
information and communication technologies (ICTs), 165166, 172, 193; debates and challenges, 166169
Instagram, 55, 61, 208, 222; filters, 61; posting teasers on, 214
Internet; civic mobilization and, 192194; crafting legislation for, 191192; persuasion and, 190191; political discussion and,
183195; political knowledge and, 188190; service providers (ISPs), 128
Invisible Children (IC), 321329
Invisible Children: Rough Cut, 328
iPhone, 94; music apps, 6
Iran, 322
Iraq War, 130, 192
ItsGrace, 226
iTunes, 4, 4345, 209, 226; Facebook, 4; iTunesU, 107; Radio, 4, 7; Store, 7, 4344
ITV, 125
J-Phone, 58
Jefferson, Thomas, 243
Jezebel, 231, 277
Jordan, Michael, 29
journalists/journalism; accountability, 241254; accountability, historical lack of, 243248; accountability in the digital age, 248
253; anonymous sources, verifying, 122123, 126127; anonymity, promise of, 119122, 127128; anonymity versus
transparency, 120125; citizen, 120; Fifth Estate, 120, 125128; legal protections for, 120; mistrust of, 242; online sources and,
126127; plagiarism, 122123, 246247, 250; plagiarism-flagging software for, 250; scandals, 242, 246253; sock puppet,
191; technology and, 125128
Julia & Julia, 203
Julia and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, 203
The Jungle, 337
Kahlo, Frida, 5657, 60, 64
Kahrl, Christina, 251
Kang, Jay Caspian, 264

Karim, Jawed, 226
Kaskade, 4
Katz, Scott, 228
Kelly, Jack, 122, 246247
Kelner, Douglas, 292
Kendall, Mikki, 273274, 276
Khan, Philippe, 58
Khan Academy, 105107
Kindle, 1516; Unlimited Program, 1617
Kinja, 277
Kirakou, John, 129
Kjellberg, Felix Arvid Ulf PewDiePie, 225
Kluge, Alexander, 291
Knox, Shelby, 276
Kony, Joseph, 321329
KONY 2012, 321329
Koselleck, Reinhart, 288
Kovach, Bill, 242
Kurutz, Steven, 214
Kurtz, Howard, 248
Kwantlen Polytechnic University, 223
Landis, Floyd, 27
Lane, Charles, 246
The Last Samurai, 324
Le, Stephanie, 205206
Le Cordon Bleu, 203
leak(s), government, 119132; morality and legality of, 128131; planned, 12
Leake, Lisa, 204
Lehrer, Jonah, 250
Lewis, John, 328
Lewinsky, Monica, 130, 279
Libby, Lewis Scooter, 123
Liberia, 339340
Libya, 165, 249
Lieberman, Matthew D., 63
Life in Color, 5
Little Green Footballs, 248
Llaurad, Josep M., 145
Lochte, Ryan, 30
Lodwick, Jakob, 233
Long. Live. A$AP, 48
Loomio, 148149
Lords Resistance Army (LRA), 321329
LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act, 328
Los Angeles Times, 191
Lustig, Andrea, 204205
Maker Studios, Inc., 228229

Mandela, Nelson, 60
Manning, Bradley, 130
Manz, Brianne, 205
Marche, Stephen, 57, 63
Marcus, Greil, 42
Marie Claire, 205
MarksDailyApple.com, 205
Martin, Trayvon, 29, 267
Mashable, 230231, 233
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 104105; MITx, 100101
massive open online courses (MOOC), 91, 99102; badge-style format, 103; categories of, 103; cMOOC, 100101; definition
of, 101; degree programs, 102103; developing, 102103; future of, 104; in 2012, 101102; in 2013, 102; providers, 104105;
purpose of, 101; xMOOC, 100101
Match.com, 307
Mayes, Stephen, 59
McCain, John, 185186
McKessen, DeRay, 268270
McLaughlin, Neil, 290
Measles and Rubella Initiative, 341
media bias, 267270
media overexposure, 232234
Media Research Center, 241
Media Richness Theory (MRT), 306307
Medium, 208
memes, 230
Mexico, 165, 171173
Microsoft, 210
Mikkelson, Barbara, 321
Mismas, Michelle, 204205
Mississippi Burning, 324
mobile devices; 4k on, 11; high-definition link (MHL) 3, 11; subscribers, 204; UHD video, 11
mobile networks, 10
mobile phones, 58, 94; camera, 125
The Modest Man, 205
Moldova, 322
Monash University, 207
Money Magazine, 122
Moodle, 97
Morris, Laina, 230231
Morrison, Logan, 27
Moss, Benjie, 208
movies, 317; audiences and markets for, 317; 4K content, 810; streaming, 810
Moynihan, Michael, 250
Mukasey, Michael B., 130131
Murphy, Eileen, 207
music, 317, 3952, 209; audiences and markets for, 317, 4849; digital, benefits for listeners, 4446; distribution, 4041;
distribution, new approaches to, 48; DJs, 5; downloads, 4344; economics, 78; festivals, 5; geography and, 4648; imports,
4546; Internet and, 3940; local scenes, 4142; on-demand, 5; pre-Internet, 43; royalties, 8; sampling, 4445; streamed, 34
Myanmar, 193
MyDamnChannel, 225
#MyNYPD, 272273
MySpace, 4243, 45, 51, 221
Napster, 43
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 322
National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE), 322
National Moratorium Antiwar Demonstrations, 323
National Security Agency, 129
NBC News, 124
Negt, Oskar, 291
Netflix, 8
The New Inquiry, 271
The New Republic, 191, 245246
New York Journal, 244
New York Police Department, 272
New York Times, 63, 121, 206207, 214, 226, 246, 278, 321
The New Yorker, 63, 250, 264
News sites, 242, 277
Nguyen, Dao, 231
Nielsen SoundScan, 3
Nipce, Joseph Nicphore, 57
Nigeria, 287298
Nigerian Village Square, 287; as a collaborative online community, 293296; citizen journalism on, 296298; guidelines, 293294;
i-Witness, 294; Publishing Guide, 294
Nirvana, 47
Nixon, Richard, 121, 248
#NotYourAsianSidekick, 263264
Novak, Robert, 123
Obama, Barack, 55, 60, 129, 131, 328329; online strategy, 186188; Twitter, 186; YouTube, 186187; Web ads, 188
Obasanjo, Olusegun, 294295
Occupy Wall Street, 165, 169, 174, 194
Oculus VR, 1415
ODonnell, Susan, 293
OK Cupid, 308
online demographics, 9496, 333335; age, 9596; ethnicity, 9495
Orta, Ramsey, 269
OSullivan, Patrick, 314315
Oxford Dictionaries, 55, 222
Pablo Honey, 50
Padillo, Anthony, 224
Page Street Publishing, 206
Pandora, 4, 78, 47
Pantaleo, Daniel, 269
Park, Suey, 263265, 273
Parmigianino, 222223
Pasteur, Louis, 337
Patriot Act, 120, 128
PC Magazine, 11
Pentagon Papers, 121
Petrusich, Amanda, 61
Pew Research Center, 55, 9396, 189, 248
PhilipDeFranco, 227
photography; digital, 5859; history of, 57
PicMonkey, 213
Ping, 4
Pinterest, 211, 213, 267
Pitchfork.com, 51
Plame, Valerie, 123124
Plenty of Fish, 308
#POC4CulturalEnrichment, 263
Podemos, 142153; digital revolution and, 145146; Facebook and, 150151; fan pages, 151152; online circles, 148150, 153;
online tools used by, 146148; worldwide debates on, 152153
political campaigns, history of online, 184186
political mobilization, 142144; pseudo-participation, 143
politics, future of, 195
Pollan, Michael, 204
Powell, Julie, 203
Power Line, 248
The Poynter Institute, 206, 250
public health, xiv; definition of, 335336; history of, 336338; Internet and, 333342; misinformation and, 340342; social media
and, 339
public spheres, 287298; definition of, 289; the Internet and, 291293
Pulitzer, Joseph, 244
Racists Getting Fired, 270

radical transparency, 119132
Radiohead, 4950
Rajoy, Mariano, 145
Rather, Dan, 249
Recording Industry Association of American (RIAA), 4344
Reddit, 147, 153, 208, 230, 338
Reluctant Habits, 250
REM, 323
Republican National Convention (2004), 248
Resisting the Virtual Life, 293
response delays; asynchronous channels, 311; changing how we interpret, 315316; e-mail, 309, 310; expectations for responses
and, 315316; face-to-face (FTF) conversations, 309, 311; impression management, 311312; negative perceptions of, 308
310; nonverbal, 309, 312313; online forums, 310; persuasion and, 314315; positive interpretations of, 310311;
reconceptualizing, 305316; self-disclosure and, 312313; social support and, 313314; text messaging, 310
Rettberg, Jill Walker, 223224
Rheingold, Howard, 292
Rice, Janay, 275276
Rice, Ray, 275
Roig-Franzia, Manuel, 247
Rolling Stone, 252
Romenesko, Jim, 250
Romney, Mitt, 188; Facebook, 188; Twitter, 188
Ronstein, Richard, 5
Rose, Don, 322
Rosenstiel, Tom, 242
Rosin, Hannah, 252
Rosling, Hans, 333
Rough Trade, 51
Rountree, Elspeth, 231
Rucker, J. D., 214215
Russell, Jason, 323325, 329
Salon, 265
San Antonio Express-News, 246
San Diego Zoo, 226
sanitation practices, 337338
Saveur, 205
Schilling, Curt, 27
Schmidt, Eric, 108
Schonfeld, Erick, 209
Schuman, Emily, 214
Schumer, Charles, 131
Schwartz, Peter, 4849
Schwyzer, Hugo, 273274
Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves,
223224
Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 222223
self-presentation, 31, 61; gender and, 2526, 31; optimizing, 2427
selfpromotion, 62, 221235
selfies, 222223; as a communication tool, 5565; definition of, 55; history of, 5659; rise of modern, 5759; self-portraiture
before the camera phone, 5657; why people post, 6264
SFX Entertainment, 5
Sheppard, SI, 243
Sherman, Cindy, 58, 60
Siddiqi, Ayesha, 271
Siemens, George, 104
Silverman, Craig, 250251
Simmons, Bill, 251
Sinclair, Upton, 244, 337
Sission, Mark, 205
Sivan, Troy, 226
60 Minutes Wednesday, 248250
Skoler, Michael, 231
Sky News, 125
Skying, 51
slacktivism, 271277; defense of, 321329
Slate, 252
smartphones, 9495, 222, 308
Smithsonian Institution, 14
Smosh.com, 224225
Snapchat, 11, 208, 307
Snowden, Edward, 130
Snyder, Daniel, 263
social media, 12, 6264, 222; as an agent of change, 263279; athletes and, 2333; blogging and, 208210; collective action, 166,
267270; community building through, 338339; directions for future research, 3132; filters, 61; mechanisms, 263279;
missteps, 32; news and, 231232; positive side of, 2333; practitioner implications, 3233
Social Media Examiner, 211
Social Media Today, 204, 206
social mobility, xiv
social networks/networking, xii, 60, 221, 242; analysis, 32; collective action and, 169172; self-worth and, 6364
societal transformation, Internets impact on, 183195
#solidarityisforwhitewomen, 273274, 276
Sonic Youth, 42, 47
Sony Entertainment, 4, 10, 131, 203
Soshable, 214215
SoundCloud, 4, 224
Spain, 141154; government transparency, 141; Podemos, 142153; political parties in, 141
Spotify, 4, 67, 47, 51; music economics and, 78
Spreadshirt, 229
Sprout Social, 212
Stack Overflow, 108
Stelzner, Michael, 211
Stewart, Potter, 124
Stroller in the City, 205
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 288
Sundin, Per, 7
surveillance, 189, 192
Swift, Taylor, 6
sxephil, 227
Tablet, 250
Taksim Dayanismasi (Taksim Solidarity), 174
Tarbell, Ida, 244
Tea Party, 193
Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) Talks, 106
Telecommunications Act, 128
television, streaming
Texas Rangers, 28
third-party media, 229231
Time, 124, 225
#tippingpoint, 29
titanpad, 148
Toledo Blade, 245
Tomorrowland, 5
Tour de France, 27
Trip, Linda, 130
Tumblr, 194, 208, 267, 270
Turkey, 165
Twitter, 55, 107, 172, 211212, 221222, 266267, 278, 339; activism and, 165176, 193194; athletes on, 2627, 2930; brand
building on, 27; #CancelColbert, 263265, 273; #change, 29; iTunes, 4; #Ferguson, 29; Fortune 500 companies and, 207208;
#MyNYPD, 272273; #NotYourAsianSidekick, 263264; #POC4CulturalEnrichment, 263; political movements and, 146;
revolutions, 165, 169, 322; scheduling, 212; #solidarityisforwhitewomen, 273274, 276; #tippingpoint, 29; #WhyILeft, 276;
#WhyIStayed, 275276
Udacity, 100, 105

United Nations; Education for All program, 9293; Foundation, 341
United States; Anti-Doping Agency, 27; Congress, 129; Department of Commerce, 93; Department of Education, 97; Supreme
Court, 121
U.S. Constitution; First Amendment, 124, 270, 342; Fifth Amendment, 119; Sixth Amendment, 124
U.S.S. Maine, 244
Universal Music Group, 4; Sweden, 7
University of Bergen, Norway, 223224
University of New Orleans, 46
University of North CarolinaWilmington, 30
Upworthy, 212
Urban Music, 4849
USA Today, 122, 247
U2, 323
Valley Wag, 277

van Rijn, Rembrandt, 5657
Vanderbilt, Essay Anne, 251
Vanity Fair, 279
video blogging/vlogging, 226228
Vietnam War, 121, 248, 322
Villarrasa, Colombo, 142
Vlogging Here, 227
Volokh, Eugene, 252
The Volokh Conspiracy, 252
Wall Street Journal, 250

Walther, Joseph, 311
Warfield, Katie, 223
Warner, Michael, 291
Warner Music Group, 4
Washington Post, 121122, 124, 244245, 248249, 252
Washington Redskins, 263
Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation, 263
Watergate scandal, 121, 245
Web 2.0, 168, 170, 175
webcams, 222
Webdesigner Depot, 208
What a Brand, 205
WhatsApp, 11
whistle-blowers, 119132; protection of, 120
White, Byron, 124
White, Roddy, 29
White House Internet page, 184
The White Savior Film, 324
#WhyILeft, 276
#WhyIStayed, 275276
WikiLeaks, 120, 130
Wikipedia, 105107, 129130
Wilson, Darren, 267269
Wilson, Joseph C., 123124
Winfrey, Oprah, 328
Wired, 59, 250
Woods, Tiger, 2728
Woodward, Bob, 121, 245
WordPRess, 13
World Bank, 334
World Health Organization (WHO), 335, 339, 341
World Social Forum (WSF), 165
World Trade Organization, 192
written word, the Internet and, 1516
#YoSoy132, 165, 171174

Yorke, Thom, 4950
YouTube, 8, 48, 92, 193, 234, 266, 323; advertisements on, 84; careers in, 228229; Creator Academy, 227228; critical
ambivalence and, 8485; debates, 187; Edu, 107108; frequently asked questions (FAQs), 7880; FAQ for life, 8184;
instructional videos, 7787; instructional videos, analyzing, 8081; life hacking, 80; Music Key, 4, 6; non-neutrality of, 8485;
political economy of expertise, 8586; revenue opportunities, 228229; videos, 224226; walkthroughs, 7880
Zapatista Army, 165, 192

Zappin, Danny, 228
Zimmerman, George, 29, 267
Zoosk, 308
EDITORS
DANIELLE SARVER COOMBS (PhD) is an associate professor in the School of Journalism
and Mass Communication at Kent State University. Her research primarily focuses on sports,
politics, and the intersection of the two. Danielle co-edited two anthologies for Praeger: We
Are What We Sell: How Advertising Shapes American Life and Always Has (2014), and
American History through American Sports (2013). Dr. Coombs is coauthor of Female Fans
of the NFL: Taking their Place in the Stands (2015), and the author of Last Man Standing:
Media, Framing, and the 2012 Republican Primaries (2014). Danielle also has published in
major international journals, including International Journal of Sport Communication, the
Journal of Public Relations Research, and Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media,
Politics. Dr. Coombs has been invited to provide expert commentary on sports fandom and
political affairs around the world.
SIMON COLLISTER is a senior lecturer at the London College of Communication, University

of the Arts London in the United Kingdom, where he teaches strategic communication, social
media, and critical approaches to public relations. Collister currently is completing doctoral
research into strategic political communication and digital media at Royal Holloway,
University of Londons New Political Communication Unit. His current research interests
include strategic communication, big data, computational aspects of communication,
algorithms, the mediation of power, 21st century organizational models, and the future of the
public relations industry.
Simon has recently authored and coauthored articles in leading journals, including
Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization and the International Journal of
Communication and authored and coauthored book chapters on PR and big data in Share This
Too (2013) and social media and text-mining in Innovations in Digital Research Methods
(2015). He is cofounder of the research hub, The Network for Public Relations and Society,
and also a founder member of the UK Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) Social
Media Advisory Panel. Before academia, Simon worked with some of the worlds leading
public relations consultancies, including We Are Social, Edelman, and Weber Shandwick.
CONTRIBUTORS
LZARO M. BACALLAO-PINO is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chile (Fondecyt
Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme). He earned his PhD (Summa Cum Laude) in sociology at
the University of Zaragoza (Spain) in 2012. Dr. Bacallao-Pino has been a professor and a
researcher at the University of Zaragoza and the University of Havana (Cuba). His main
research interests include communication and power relationships and social movements,
specifically their communication dimension and the use of information and computer
technologies (ICTs). He has published more than 30 articles, books, and chapters on these
topics.
EVAN BAILEY is an assistant professor of advertising and public relations at Kent State
University. Prior to Kent State, Evan spent nearly a decade working in newsrooms, design
studios, and advertising agencies in northeastern Ohio. Bailey holds a bachelors degree in
advertising and a masters degree in media management from Kent State. Mr. Baileys research
interests include graphic design, audience analysis, new media technology, and live
entertainment marketing. In his spare time, Bailey works with SFX Entertainmentone of the
worlds leading live entertainment producersdeveloping marketing strategies for concerts in
more than 100 markets in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Latin America.
RICHARD (RICK) J. BATYKO, APR, Fellow PRSA, President Regional Marketing Alliance
of Northeast Ohio. Mr. Batyko has more than 25 years of Fortune 100 and nonprofit
communications, marketing, and brand strategy experience at organizations including Babcock
& Wilcox, AlliedSignal, Honeywell International, and The Cleveland Foundation. Rick is a
graduate of Ohio Universitys E. W. Scripps School of Journalism, where he majored in public
relations, and received his Master of Arts in public relations from Kent State University. He
holds his accreditation with the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), and in 2009, he
was inducted into PRSAs College of Fellows. Batyko is an adjunct faculty member at Kent
State Universitys College of Journalism and Mass Communication. He has published work in
the PR Journal, in the ABC-CLIO book We Are What We Sell, and in other outlets. His thesis,
The Impact of Corporate and Country Culture on Public Relations Crisis Response in Japan:
A Case Study Examining Tokyo Electric Power Companys Response to the Fukushima
Nuclear Power Plant Disaster, was published to OhioLink in December 2012.
CHRISTINA BEST is a graduate of the University of Mount Union (2011) and holds a masters
degree from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Kent State University. Ms.
Best currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband. She does freelance social
media consulting and graphic design.
CHRISTOPHER BOULTON is both a veteran and critic of the creative industries. After
working in public and cable television, Boulton earned his doctorate and is now an assistant
professor at the University of Tampa, where he teaches critical media studies and production.
Boultons research focuses on the intersection of communication, inequality, and activism, and
his writing has appeared in the International Journal of Communication, The Communication
Review, Advertising & Society Review, The Routledge Companion to Advertising and
Promotional Culture, and New Views on Pornography.
KRISTEN CHORBA is an instructional designer at Kent State University, where she also
earned a PhD in educational psychology and a masters degree in higher education
administration. The focus of Chorbas dissertation was a peer mentoring project, originally
created to support undergraduate teacher education majors. Her dissertation research
incorporated reflecting processes, photo elicitation, and phenomenological interviewing to
describe the experiences of the mentors who participated in this mentoring project and to
continue the conversation regarding what it is to be a mentor. This research project is ongoing
and continues to evolve. Dr. Chorbas research interests include teacher education, mentoring,
relational learning, and online education.
KATHRYN CODUTO is a junior strategist at an advertising agency based in Cleveland, Ohio.

She graduated from Kent State Universitys School of Journalism and Mass Communication in
2014 with a graduate degree in media management. While at Kent State, Coduto focused her
research on the music industry, specifically examining how listeners choose to access music,
and the differences between physical and digital interactions in the music industry. Kathryn
herself is an avid collector of vinyl records, as well as a daily user of online streaming
services, which she uses to listen to whatever music she chooses all of the time.
ANDREW FRISBIE is a doctoral student at Ohio University. Frisbie earned a masters degree
in communication with a certificate in conflict and dispute resolution at Missouri State
University. His general research interests include information processing, self-construction,
and inquiry methodology. More specifically, he is interested in the use of new media for self-
expression and identity construction. One of his current research projects explores the use of
long-duration latencies with asynchronous media. Frisbies nonacademic interests include
kayaking, cycling and folk music.
ZAC GERSHBERG is an assistant professor of journalism and media studies in the

Department of Communication, Media, and Persuasion at Idaho State University. Dr. Gershberg
earned a PhD in communication studies from Louisiana State University, and his research
interests include the history of journalism, media ecology, and political communication. Before
entering academia, Gershberg was a reporter for the Honolulu Weekly among other
publications, and he served as an adviser to The Signal, the student newspaper at California
State University, Stanislaus, while teaching there. In addition to his current position, he
contributes a media-industry column to the Idaho State Journal, the daily newspaper of
Pocatello, Idaho.
R. BENJAMIN (BEN) HOLLIS is a senior instructional designer at Kent State University

(KSU). Dr. Hollis has worked with KSU faculty to design more than 125 online courses, a
fully online masters degree program in public relations, and fully online degree concentrations
in health informatics, museum studies, and scholastic education. He also teaches online
workshops in the Instructional Technology program and graduate courses for in-service
educators in the scholastic education concentration at KSU. Hollis won national awards for
innovation and interactive multimedia for his instructional design contributions to the online
course Media, Power and Culture offered by the School of Journalism and Mass
Communication at KSU. He holds a masters degree in instructional technology and a doctoral
degree in educational psychology, both from KSU. In his dissertation, Dr. Hollis examined
mind wandering in online learning, an intersection of technology learning and cognitive
psychology. In this study, he investigated how individual differences in interest, working
memory capacity, and motivation impacted off-task thinking and academic performance. Hollis
aims to continue researching the practical approaches to improving student achievement in the
classroom based on findings in technology-enhanced learning and cognitive psychology.
KEVIN HULL holds an MAT from North Carolina A&T University and is a PhD candidate in
the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida. Hulls research
focuses on how sports broadcasters are using social media to engage viewers, sports
organizations, and athletes. Before returning to academia, he spent nearly 10 years as a
television sports broadcaster and news reporter in Wilmington, North Carolina. Hull will start
his next career as a journalism professor at the University of South Carolina in fall 2015. His
work has appeared in outlets such as International Journal of Sport Communication and
Journal of Sport and Social Issues.
FAROOQ KPEROGI is an assistant professor of journalism and citizen media in the

Department of Communication at Kennesaw State University, Georgia. Dr. Kperogi received
his PhD in communication from Georgia State University. A former Nigerian newspaper
journalist and presidential researcher and speech writer, Dr. Kperogi has written several
journal articles and book chapters on a wide range of communication topics, including
alternative and citizen journalism, online journalism, journalistic objectivity, public sphere
theory, indigenous language newspaper publishing in Africa, cybercrime, international English
usage, and media theory. His work has appeared in The Review of Communication, New
Media & Society, Journal of Global Mass Communication, and Asia Pacific Media
Educator. Kperogi was managing editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, and
blogs at www.farooqkperogi.com.
JUSTIN LAGORE, a central Ohio native, holds a bachelor of science degree from Kent State
University, where he completed both the advertising and public relations sequences in the
School of Journalism and Mass Communication. During his academic career, Lagore studied
abroad short-term in London, where he examined variances in social medias applications to
marketing and customer service in the United States and the United Kingdom, specifically
within the hospitality industry. His other research interests include online community
management, digital media applications for reputation management, online identity and self-
esteem, and content creation and consumption in the digital age.
SAMANTHA LINGENFELTER is a graduate student in the College of Public Health at Kent

State University working toward a masters degree in public health with a focus on health
policy and management. She earned a bachelors degree in political science with a focus on
international relations from Kent State University and a Certificate of Nonprofit Business
Management in 2010. Lingenfelters research interests include substance abuse, health literacy,
and communicable diseases. When shes not writing book chapters or reading for school,
Lingenfelter can be found reading, playing video games, and hanging out with her corgi.
JAMES D. PONDER holds a PhD from Kent State University and is an assistant professor in
the School of Communication Studies in the College of Communication and Information at Kent
State University. His primary area of research is mass communication, with a secondary
specialization in political communication. In particular, Ponders research focuses on the uses
and effects of political media by citizens and how this use can influence conversations with
similar and dissimilar others, political knowledge, and other politically relevant outcomes. He
has also examined how different social movements have used social media to connect with
others and seek social and political change. Ponder has begun to examine how people use
financial information available to them and how this use affects issues related to credit and
knowledge and, ultimately, how this affects debt.
LINA RAHM is a doctoral student in the Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning at
Linkping University, Sweden. She holds a BSSc in gender studies and an MSSc in welfare
studies. Rahms current research includes citizenship in adult education and socio-material
aspects of survivalism and prepping.
KIRAN SAMUEL is a masters student in the Media, Culture and Communication department at
NYU and award-winning digital strategist whos worked on some of the most culturally
relevant brands today in entertainment, music, technology, fashion, and others, including Beats
by Dre, TNT/TBS, Google, YouTube, Reebok, Playtex, and Armani Exchange. Shes a
research junkie, relying on insights to create rich, dynamic stories for her clients. Kiran has
also guest lectured classes on digital strategy and strategic storytelling at Columbia University
and New York University. Continually amazed by the ways digital mediasocial media
especiallyhas affected society and behavior, Samuel hopes to use that curiosity within her
work as an academic at the Masters level and beyond.
JIMMY SANDERSON holds a PhD from Arizona State University and is an assistant
professor and director of the Sports Communication Program in the Department of
Communication Studies at Clemson University. Dr. Sandersons research interests center on the
influence of social media on sport media, sport organizational governance, fan-athlete
interaction, advocacy, and identity expression. His research has appeared in outlets such as
Communication & Sport, Journal of Sport & Social Issues, Journal of Sports Media, and
Mass Communication and Society. He is the author of Its a Whole New Ballgame: How
Social Media Is Changing Sports (2011).
REKHA SHARMA holds an MA and an MS from Kent State University and is a doctoral
candidate and an assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies in the College of
Communication and Information at Kent State University. Her primary area of research is mass
communication, with a secondary specialization in political communication. Sharmas
educational background is in journalism and information use. She has examined a diverse array
of topics in mass media and computer-mediated communication, including portrayals of issues
and people in news and film, messages about war, and about consumerism in animated
cartoons, potential knowledge gains from infotainment, motives and outcomes of political
social media use, history and applications of viral marketing, and case studies of television
fandom. Her research has been published in academic journals such as the Ohio
Communication Journal, Mass Communication & Society, Electronic News, Global Media
JournalCanadian Edition, Media, War, & Conflict, and the Journal of Fandom Studies.
Sharma has also contributed to the anthologies War and the Media: Essays on News
Reporting, Propaganda and Popular Culture; We Are What We Sell: How Advertising Shapes
American life and Always Has; and Heroines of Film and Television: Portrayals in
Popular Culture.
JRGEN SKGEBY is an associate professor at the Department for Media Studies at

Stockholm University, Sweden. Skgebys research interests include material interactions
theory, post-social media, and feminist design.
SALOM SOLA-MORALES holds a PhD in media, communication and culture from the
Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain (2012). Dr. Sola-Morales has worked as a
researcher and assistant professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (200713) and
at the International University of Catalonia (2013). She is currently an associated professor at
the School of Journalism, Universidad de Santiago de Chile (Chile), and chair of
Communication Theory and Thesis Seminar I and II. Dr. Sola-Morales is principal investigator
of a project on Identity Politics, Participation and Youth and co-investigator on the
international World of Journalism Project. Her research interests include communication
theory, anthropology of communication, identity processes, political participation, and the
Internet.
STEPHANIE A. TIKKANEN is an assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies

at Ohio University. She earned her MA and PhD in Communication at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Tikkanens research program focuses on the growing role of
new media (e.g., social networking sites, mobile phones) in interpersonal relationships.
Specifically, she takes a theoretical approach to understanding the way in which channel
features interact with individual and relational motivations to affect interpersonal processes
across relational types. Dr. Tikkanens work has been published in journals including the
Journal of Communication and Communication Research Reports. She enjoys both research
and teaching, but spends the rest of her time baking, reading, and secretly analyzing all of her
friends posts on Facebook.
Copyright 2016 Danielle Sarver Coombs and Simon Collister
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review,
without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Debates for the digital age : the good, the bad, and the ugly of our online world / Danielle Sarver Coombs and Simon Collister,
editors.
volumes cm
Includes index.
Contents: Volume 1. The Good
ISBN 978-1-4408-0123-5 (vol. 1 : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4408-0124-2 (ebook) 1. Information technologySocial
aspects. 2. Information technologyMoral and ethical aspects. I. Coombs, Danielle Sarver, editor. II. Collister, Simon, editor.
HM851.D4325 2016
303.4833dc23 2015013116
ISBN: 978-1-4408-0123-5
EISBN: 978-1-4408-0124-2
20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5
This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook.
Visit www.abc-clio.com for details.
Praeger
An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC
ABC-CLIO, LLC
130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911
Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911
This book is printed on acid-free paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
Contents
Volume 2. The Bad and the Ugly
Introducing the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Our Online World
Simon Collister
PART I ACCESSIBILITY
1. Searching for the Schoolhouse Gate in Cyberspace

Mark Goodman
2. Internet Filters in Schools: More than Simply Annoying to Students

Candace Perkins Bowen
3. Bring the Hate: Problematic Internet Use from Fans Toward Athletes
Jimmy Sanderson
4. Uploading Ideology: Reading Egyptian Social Capital Using Facebook Lenses

Alamira Samah Farag Abd-Elfattah Saleh and Nermeen N. Alazrak
PART II DEMOCRATIZATION
5. Are All Sources Really Equal? Credibility and the News, or the Shift from the Age of
Deference to the Age of Reference
Jan Leach
6. The Boundaries of Digital Dissent: Assessing the War on Hacktivism

Jason L. Jarvis
7. Hands Up, Dont Shoot: Social Media As a Site of Government (Dis)Trust

Sarah Turner McGowen
8. Trial by Social Media: How Misleading Media and Ideological Protests Led to
Disastrous Results in The State of Florida v. George Zimmerman
Joshua Daniel Phillips
9. The Digital Migration of Anti-Immigration Rhetoric: Anxiety, Addressivity, and

Networked Public Culture
Maggie Franz
PART III COMMUNITY AND GLOBALIZATION
10. Participation Fetishism in the Digital Age

Brent Kice
11. Lose a Stone or Two Before You Start Dating: Power and the Construction of Bodies in
Online Dating
Shana Kopaczewski
12. Digital Deception: Online Dating, Identity Development, and Misrepresentation

Justin Lagore
13. For Love or Money: Exploring Personal Matrimony Ads, Sugar Web Sites, and Catfishing
through Social Exchange Theory
Carol A. Savery and Rekha Sharma
14. Vomitorium of Venom: Framing Culpable Youth, Bewildered Adults, and the Death of
Amanda Todd
Michelle Stack
15. Finding Fascism in the Comments Section: Online Responses to Viral Videos of the
Transportation Security Administration
George F. McHendry Jr.
Index

Introducing the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
of Our Online World
Simon Collister
One of the defining characteristics of contemporary societys metamorphosis from a

hierarchically led, industrial, and largely national concept to a fragmented, post-industrial, and
globalized space is the emergence and exponential growth of telecommunications networks and
the Internet.1
This has radically altered the communities, politics, and media of traditionally private,
localized sociocultural environmentstransforming them into highly public, international
networks of communication and mediation. Indeed, Livingstone goes as far as to assert that
networks are the archetypal form of contemporary social and technical organization.2
Scholars such as Manuel Castells and Yochai Benkler conceive of this phenomenon at a macro
level as the network society3 or networked information economy,4 respectively.
Without doubt, such developments have significantly impacted all aspects of our social and
cultural domains. Yet, at the same time, the emergence of such complex factors has equally
challenged the capability of scholarly research to adjust to the rapid pace of change.5
Such a challenge in part accounts for creation of this text. In setting out to capture
contemporary thinking on the Internet and its impact on society and culture, the authors sought
to identify and address a range of issues less susceptible to change as frequently as Facebooks
Terms and Conditions or be subject to the forces of changing consumer demand. Rather, the
two volumes plot, analyze, and make sense of slowly shifting macro-themes of the socio-
cultural domain whichalthough not immediately evidentare likely to have long-term, far-
reaching, and deeply profound effects on the world around us.
In making sense of such a varied and potentially complex thematic landscape, this book
adapts an approach that echoes the work of other scholars who have developed typologies for
interpreting diverse literature on networked culture, media, and politics.6 In particular, we
have drawn on both Chadwicks and Chadwick and Howards distinction between
optimistic/positive and pessimistic/negative approaches to the Internets impact on society and
culture. In their typology, optimistic perspectives understand the Internet as redressing the
balance of power away from dominantoften elitegroups or spaces and returning it to
networked communities of informal or amateur individuals. Conversely, pessimistic
perspectives interpret the Internet as reinforcing traditional power structures, albeit in new
forms.
This typology underpins the way in which the two volumes of this text are positioned.
Optimistic perspectives are addressed in Volume 1, The Good, and pessimistic perspectives
are covered in Volume 2, The Bad and the Ugly. Each volume is further subdivided into a
series of thematic sections to enable contributors to undertake a detailed investigation into
specific areas of Internet culture. Before setting out the specific themes covered in each
volume, it is helpful to set the tone of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly by providing a
summary of some of the broader shifts presently occurring.
THE GOOD
Optimistic analyses of the contemporary environment created by the Internet have
conventionally articulated a vision of society and culture consistent with the idea of the public
sphere as identified by German philosopher and sociologist Jrgen Habermas. For Habermas,
the public sphere represents a space within society for people to freely meet, discuss, and act
on the important issues of the day.
For optimists, the Internet plays a vital role in empowering and connecting individuals in a
global public discourse that facilitates communicative links between citizens and the power
holders of society.7 Broadly speaking, an Internet-enabled networked public sphere8 argues
that the way the Internet has come to operate as the 21st centurys public space can be seen as a
force for goodthanks to the expanded and accelerated flows of information and the increased
interactivity between participants it generates.9
Specifically, Yochai Benkler explains a networked public sphere has fundamentally
altered the capacity of individuals to be active participants as opposed to passive
readers, listeners or viewers in the pursuit of social, cultural, and political issues.10 Benkler
goes so far as to argue that such an account of the contemporary public sphere, although aligned
with Habermass model, is more capable of accounting for the social and cultural complexity
of modern democracies. By empowering all members of societynot just well-educated,
middle- or upper-class individualscontemporary online communities can act collectively to
perform a watchdog role and operate as a source of salient observations regarding matters
of public concern, and provide a platform for discussing the alternatives open to a polity.11
A further reason for optimistic analyses of a networked public sphere is the Internets
distributed communications architecture combined with the low costs for producing and
distributing information (all you need is a smartphone, tablet, or computer and an Internet
connection). Both Benkler and Castells believe these low barriers to entry enable anyone with
Internet access to shape (or reshape) the social, cultural, or political dimensions of everyday
life. This mass self-communication12 transforms the traditional power and influence of the
mass mediatypified as more centralized, homogeneous and less pluralistic13into a
decentralized, heterogeneous social communication process14 characterized by a diverse and
pluralistic range of participants.15 As a result, it offers avenues for citizen independence from
mainstream news media and larger social forces.16
In addition to the social, political, and cultural diversity offered by the Internet, some
scholars also argue that it provides a greater resilience to control by governments, states, or
corporations. For example, the Internet is a communication network technically organized
without any control or management by any central individual or organization. Thus, it crucially
lacks any single central point of control, making it difficult to censor contentious or sensitive
information.
This inevitably leads to the emergence of multiple axes of information [that] provide new
opportunities for citizens to challenge elite control of political issues17 and enhances the
potential for the media to exercise accountability over power.18 Tewksbury and Rittenberg
see this as a democratization of the creation, dissemination, and consumption of news and
information19 and Castells goes further by asserting that mass self-communication
empowers individuals to challenge and eventually change the power relations
institutionalized in society.20
Such individual and collective efforts to challenge and transform social and cultural
relations have been identified across a range of fields (including political activism) that use
the Internet to share information and organize protests,21 as well as in democratic politics for
which networked communications have been used to facilitate increased engagement with and
participation in democratic institutions.22
THE BAD AND THE UGLY

Although most scholars agree that the Internet is bringing together individual citizens and
informal networks through interconnected global webs of public communication,23 the idea of
the networked public sphere as a force for good is not without criticism.
One of the most persistent pessimistic analyses of the Internet draws attention to the issue
of access. For example, significant parts of global society are on the wrong side of what is
called the digital divide.24 As a result, the universal participation in political and cultural
discussion is likely to be significantly limited to those individuals who have Internet access.25
Conversely, some scholars argue that those members of global society who do have access
also are biased towards affluent elites.26
Scholars also have questioned whether the society, culture, and democracy being produced
by the Internet follow the same ideals imagined in Jrgen Habermass original model. They
argue that, in reality, rather than enabling civic and democratic discourse fulfilling the lofty
principle of improving society, the Internet merely is facilitating broader cultural trends
characterized by an increased focus on lifestyle or entertainment content.27
Despite its disruptive nature, for example, scholars have pointed out that the Internet
merely replicates traditional media consumption habits.28 Thus, although in theory the Internet
enables people to democratically select information that matters to them, the reality is that the
information consumed by the public usually excludes political information of democratic
interest29 or is limited to content that mirrors users personal beliefs.30
Pessimist perspectives of the Internets impact on society and culture also challenge the
view that it can overcome censorship. Hargittai, Mansell, and Dahlberg,31 for example, assert
that the traditional dominance of commercial elites is, in fact, replicated online. This process
termed by Dahlberg as the corporate colonization of cyberspace32weakens, rather than
strengthens, the Internets potential for free democratic, social, and cultural discussion. Despite
a perceived communicative abundance generated by the networked public spheres low
barriers to entry,33 corporations are outmaneuvering the publics adoption of the Internet and
are hijacking social communication toolssuch as blogs and social networksto continue
and expand economic dominance.34
For some scholars, the commercial adoption of the Internet represents an even more
troubling aspect of the transformation of the social, political, and cultural dimensions of
everyday life. Dean35 and Terranova36 argue that corporations and political elites co-opt
public and civic discussion online and use it to create the illusion of increased individual
empowerment which, in fact, instead conceals a complete removal of individual agency. For
Dean, the convergence of democratic idealssuch as participation and open accessand
capitalisms colonization of the networked public sphere gives rise to a communicative
capitalism37 which captures political power in an ever-increasing displacement of political
conflict to the terrain of networked media.38 Moreover, every click and interaction made in
the networked media environment can be traced, capitalized and sold39 as free labor
creating a blurred territory between production and consumption, work and cultural
expression.40
SUBTHEMES: ACCESSIBILITY, DEMOCRATIZATION, AND

COMMUNITY AND GLOBALIZATION
To help categorize and interpret subthemes such as accessibility, democratization,
community, and globalization, the two volumes of this set are divided into three subthemes:
accessibility to information; the democratization of everyday life; and community and
globalization. Adopting these broad subthemes across the two volumes enables the contributing
authors to isolate and perform a detailed study intoand make greater sense ofindividual
elements of Internet-enabled cultural phenomena.
The first subtheme, accessibility, examines the opening of new markets and audiences
for cultural actors, such as musicians and sports players; the freeing up of teaching and learning
across informal, everyday spaces and not just in formal education settings; and the
opportunities which the Internet presents for increasingly self-directed identity-formation and
expression. This subtheme also challenges such constructive readings by pointing out how
greater information accessibility also can lead to greater intolerance and reactionary responses
by traditional elite groups, which simply undermine the Internets potential to open up society
and culture.
The next subtheme examineddemocratizationencompasses a wide range of topics,
including the political role of the Internet in empowering democratic engagement. The section
highlights the Internets increasingly important role in enabling and generating extra-democratic
activism, particularly in the context of post-crisis Europe and the events of the Arab Spring.
Crucially, it also raises important questions as to the real-world effects of such optimisticyet
largely theoreticalaccounts of the Internets democratizing power.
In the democratization section, the notion of democracy also is applied to broader, cultural
topics such as the ways in which anyone with an Internet connection can create an identity (or
identities) or build a commercially successful personal brand, and what this means for self-
management in an increasingly commercial space where traditional issues of privacy become
challenged. Lastly, this subtheme addresses the ways in which journalism and the media
increasingly are being held accountable for the ways in which they represent society and
whether the Internets democratization of news-making offers greater freedom or merely
reinforces the same old problems.
The last subthemecommunity and globalizationexplores ways in which the Internet
is used to transform communities at a local level as well as create globalized, participatory
communities where specific, localized events increasingly take on a national or international
significance. In doing so, the impact of these Internet-enabled transformations on community
members, structures, and relations are considered from both a beneficial and a detrimental
perspective. This subtheme also investigates specific features and concerns of traditional
communities, such as health, education, and social mobility, and offers positive as well as
problematic readings of how these phenomena are impacted by the rise of Internet-enabled
individuals and groups.
VOLUME 2 CHAPTER SYNOPSES

The opening chapter of Volume 2 provides a salutary lesson for Internet free-speech
advocates by outlining the potential consequences of online self-expression. Focusing on a
specific historical case, Emmett v. Kent School District, Goodman in Chapter 1 provides a
comprehensive account of the ways in which traditional state settings and regulations
continually have clashed with the rapidly evolving social and cultural norms of the Internet.
Building on Goodmans overview, in Chapter 2 Perkins Bowen offers a more granular
assessment of some of the specific tactics adopted by education settings to address concerns
about the freedom of information access available to students. Specifically, Perkins Bowen
examines Internet filtering technologies and approaches, and questions their suitability and
efficacyat least in their current stateas a protection mechanism.
Chapter 3 highlights the raw impact that unfiltered and unmediated social media can have.
In this chapter, Sanderson draws attention to the hate-filled messages directed at sports players
and provides a number of theoretical frameworks to account for such fan behavior. He then
outlines directions for future research and suggests ways to support sports players in such
situations.
In Chapter 4, Abd-Elfattah and Alazark switch attention of the Internets potentially
damaging force from sport to politics. Focusing on events occurring in Egypt during the Arab
Spring, they provide a counternarrative to the emancipatory fervor reported elsewhere.
Looking at social media use from the perspective of social capital, they suggest that social
media also played a role in intimidating and silencing political and democratic debate and
action.
The complexity of social media and the ways in which it can help or hinder people in
making sense of the world around them are further explored by Leach in Chapter 5. Turning
attention to the media and journalists use of sources in guiding audiences, Leach unpicks the
difficulty faced by news producers and consumers by investigating how news sources are used
in the digital age and what can be done to strengthen source credibility.
In Chapter 6, Jarvis explores what he terms the limits of digital dissent by offering a
context for the Internet and online networks as a military domain. Interpreted as such Jarviss
chapter examines ways in which war has been waged on hacktivistsonline activists
through rhetorical, legal, and digital formats, and concludes that such phenomena risk limiting
the future of free public expression and dissent.
The now infamous death of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri, and the response of
the online community of the Internet is the focus of Chapter 7. In particular, Turner McGowen
analyzes the ways in which opinions expressed through social media helped spread
(mis)information about the event, and encouraged extra-democratic action. McGowen provides
theoretical context for these phenomena and raises pertinent questions about what this means
with regard to citizens trust in government.
In Chapter 8, Daniel Philips adopts a similar approach to Turner McGowen where he
draws on another high-profile court case: The State of Florida v. George Zimmerman. Taking
a different approach in his argument, however, Daniel Philips argues somewhat paradoxically
that the profusion of online expression surrounding the case could have led to Zimmermans
acquittal.
In Chapter 9, Franz adds a further cautionary note about the Internets impact on
networked public culture. The author assesses how the power of viral content and ideas can
spread both nonprogressive causessuch as anti-immigration rhetoricas well as
progressive causes.
In Chapter 10, Brice proposes a critical Marxist and Debordian reading of online
engagement and participation. Building on the Debordian notion of the Spectacle and
adopting Marxs theory of commodity fetishism, Brice argues that in the contemporary digital
age our socially networkedselves fetishize virtual connections and use technologies to create
and maintain multiple relationships. Brice concludes by identifying ways through which
individuals can locate and enact agency and thus break free from such participation
fetishism.
Undertaking an analysis of identity and online embodiment, Kopaczewski in Chapter 11
provides a broad overview of online dating as a specific cultural phenomenon. Starting with a
comprehensive overview of online dating as a social practice, Kopaczewski then focuses
critical attention on a number of Web sites by providing a reading of the discourses occurring
about body image in such digital spaces.
In Chapter 12, Lagore further analyses online dating and specifically examines the rise of
online dating, self-expression, and the potential for misrepresentation of personal identity.
Lagores analysis explores the conscious and unconscious motivations for such
(mis)representation.
In Chapter 13, Savery and Sharma investigate the role of the Internet in shaping, forming,
and maintaining online relationships. Turning their attention to three distinct areas of
interpersonal relationshipsmatrimonial and sugar daddy advertisements and online
relationship scamthe authors use social exchange theory to account for the motivations,
rewards, and losses encountered by participants in such digital settings.
The online scams examined in Chapter 13 only are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to
personally and socially damaging online behaviors. In Chapter 14, Stack offers an account of
how policy options in response to online sexual violence have been represented by the media.
Focusing on a specific case, Stack argues that the media is responsible for framing such
contemporary sociocultural phenomena in ways that merely serve to reify existing structural
imbalances.
McHendry Jr. also explores the Internets darker side in the final chapter. In Chapter 15, the
author analyzes online commentary relating to two YouTube videos criticizing the United States
Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and argues that the vitriolic rhetoric
although adhering to the open and free speech rationale of the Internetmerely serves to
undermine any valid case complainants have against the TSA. McHendry Jr.s argument is
contextualized within the theoretical framework of haecceity, and the wider implications of
such encounters are extrapolated and discussed further.
CONCLUSIONS
The two volumes forming the present work gather together a range of topics, authors, and
methodological approaches that the authors think will help move forward an understanding of
the ways in which the Internet is changing (or not changing) the socio-cultural domain. The
assembled chapters have been selected to stimulate, provoke, and challenge, but also reassure
scholars interested in Internet culture. Despite the rapid but arguably superficial changes in our
networked society, at a macro level the transformations in the accessibility of information, the
concordant shift towards the democratization of everyday life, and the effects this has on
notions of local as well as globalized communities are evolving at a much more measured pace
albeit with much deeper and longer-term impacts on our socio-cultural realm.
Lastly, although the authors believe that these volumes provide a good grounding for
students and scholars of Internet culture, it is important to recognize that even the material
contained within these two volumes eventually will be superseded by new and hitherto
unthinkable changes. Returning to Chadwick and Howards optimistic/pessimistic dichotomy,
the authors also introduce a third position into their typology which they term surprising.41
This term is used to account for events that introduce entirely new and unrecognized ideas into
the ways in which we understand society, politics, and culture in an Internet-enabled world.
This third way offers a potent and constructive perspective on the ways the Internet is re-
shaping the everyday world and, importantly, suggests a conceptual escape route from attempts
to lock scholarship into an alternatively revolutionary or evolutionary dichotomy42 that
tends to treat media choice, source choice, and interactivity habits as distinct areas of
inquiry.43 Although this text focuses on arranging the contributors analyses from a
good/bad/ugly perspective, we are confident that new and surprising directions for future
study and research into the Internets impact on our society and culture can be glimpsed within
these two volumes. Moreover, we intend for the collection to act as a springboard for the next
round of enquiry into the ever-increasing and fertile domain of our online world.
NOTES
1. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
2. Sonia Livingstone, Critical Debates in Internet Studies: Reflections on an Emerging Field, Chap. 1 in Mass Media and
Society, edited by James Curran and Michael Gurevitch, 929 (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005), 12.
3. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
4. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2006).
5. Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3.
6. Barry Wellman, The Three Ages of Internet Studies: Ten, Five and Zero Years Ago, New Media & Society 6, no. 1
(2004), 12329; Philip N. Howard and Andrew Chadwick, Political Omnivores and Wired States, in Routledge Handbook of
Internet Politics, edited by Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard (London: Routledge, 2009); Andrew Chadwick Web 2.0:
New Challenges for the Study of E-Democracy in an Era of Informational Exuberance, I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy 5,
no. 1 (2009): 942; Sonia Livingstone, Critical Debates in Internet Studies: Reflections on an Emerging Field, Chapter 1 in
Mass Media and Society, edited by James Curran and Michael Gurevitch, 929 (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005), 12.
7. Peter Dahlgren, The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation, Political
CT: Yale University Press, 2006): 176177.
9. Brian McNair, Cultural Chaos: Journalism, News and Power in a Globalised World (London: Routledge, 2006): 221
223.
11. Ibid., 271.
12. Manuel Castells, Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6572.
13. Charlie Beckett and Robin Mansell, Crossing Boundaries: New Media and Networked Journalism, Communication,
Culture and Critique 1, no. 1 (2008): 4.
15. Bruce Bimber, The Internet and Political Transformation: Populism, Community, and Accelerated Pluralism. Polity 31,
no. 1 (Autumn 1998), 13360.
16. David Tewksbury and Jason Rittenberg, Online News Creation and Consumption: Implications for Modern
17. Bruce A. Williams and Michael X. Delli Carpini, Monica and Bill All the Time and Everywhere: The Collapse of
Gatekeeping and Agenda Setting in the New Media Environment, American Behavioral Scientist 47, no. 9 (2004): 1209.
18. Brian McNair, Cultural Chaos: Journalism, News and Power in a Globalised World (London: Routledge, 2006),
229.
20. Manuel Castells, Communication, Power and Counter-Power in the Network Society, International Journal of
21. W. Lance Bennett, New Media Power: The Internet and Global Activism, in Contesting Media Power: Alternative
Media in a Networked World, edited by Nick Couldry and James Curran (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 1737;
Manuel Castells, Communication, Power and Counter-Power in the Network Society, International Journal of
Communication 1 (2007): 23866; Manuel Castells, Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
22. Bruce Bimber, Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Bruce Bimber, The Internet and Political Transformation: Populism,
Community, and Accelerated Pluralism, Polity 31, no. 1 (Autumn 1998): 13360; Bruce Bimber, The Study of Information
Technology and Civic Engagement, Political Communication 17 (2000): 32933; Caroline J. Tolbert and Ramona S. McNeal,
Unraveling the Effects of the Internet on Political Participation? Political Research Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2003): 17585.
23. James Curran and Tamara Witschge, Liberal Dreams and the Internet, in New Media, Old News: Journalism &
Democracy in the Digital Age, edited by Natalie Fenton (London: Sage, 2010).
24. Jan A. G. M. Van Dijk, The Deepening Divide: Inequality in the Information Society (London: Sage, 2005).
25. Peter Dahlgren, The Public Sphere and the Net: Structure, Space and Communication, in Mediated Politics:
Communication in the Future of Democracy, edited by W. Lance Bennett and Robert Entman (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), 3356; Colin Sparks, The Internet and the Global Public Sphere, in Mediated Politics: Communication in
the Future of Democracy, edited by W. Lance Bennett and Robert Entman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
26. Colin Sparks, The Internet and the Global Public Sphere, in Mediated Politics: Communication in the Future of
Democracy, edited by W. Lance Bennett and Robert Entman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001), 83.
27. Zizi Papacharissi, A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 11225.
28. Klaus Schoenbach, Ester de Waal, and Edmund Lauf, Research Note: Online and Print Newspapers: Their Impact on
the Extent of the Perceived Public Agenda, European Journal of Communication 20, no. 2 (2005): 24558; Eszter Hargittai,
Content Diversity Online: Myth or Reality, in Media Diversity and Localism: Meaning and Metrics, edited by Philip M.
Napoli (London: Routledge, 2006).
30. Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.Com 2.0 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
31. Robin Mansell, Political Economy, Power and New Media, New Media & Society 6, no. 1 (2004): 7483; Lincoln
Dahlberg, The Corporate Colonization of Online Attention and the Marginalization of Critical Communication? Journal of
Communication Inquiry 29, no. 2 (2005): 16080.
32. Lincoln Dahlberg, The Corporate Colonization of Online Attention and the Marginalization of Critical Communication?
Journal of Communication Inquiry 29, no. 2 (2005): 160.
33. Kari Karppinen, Rethinking Media Pluralism and Communicative Abundance, Observatorio 11 (2009): 15169.
34. Manuel Castells, Communication, Power and Counter-Power in the Network Society, International Journal of
Communication 1 (2007): 248; Manuel Castells, Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6572;
James Stanyer, Web 2.0 and the Transformation of News and Journalism, in Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics,
edited by Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard (London: Routledge, 2009).
35. Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Cambridge: Polity, 2010).
36. Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004).
37. Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 45.
38. Ibid., 124.
39. Ibid., 66.
40. Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 7394.
41. Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard, eds. Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics (London: Routledge, 2009),
424426.
42. Robin Mansell, Political Economy, Power and New Media, New Media & Society 6, 1 (2004): 7.
43. Philip N. Howard, and Andrew Chadwick, Political Omnivores and Wired States, in Routledge Handbook of
Internet Politics, edited by Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard (London: Routledge, 2009), 431.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Culture and Critique 1 (1): 92104.
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CT: Yale University Press.
Bennett, W. Lance. 2003. New Media Power: The Internet and Global Activism. In Contesting Media Power: Alternative
Media in a Networked World, edited by Nick Couldry and James Curran, 1737. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.
Bimber, Bruce. 2003. Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power. Cambridge:
Bimber, Bruce. 2000. The Study of Information Technology and Civic Engagement. Political Communication 17: 32933.
Bimber, Bruce. 1998. The Internet and Political Transformation: Populism, Community, and Accelerated Pluralism. Polity 31
(1) (Autumn): 13360.
Castells, Manuel. 2009. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Castells, Manuel. 2007. Communication, Power and Counter-Power in the Network Society. International Journal of
Castells, Manuel. 2001. The Internet Galaxy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell.
Chadwick, Andrew. 2013. The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power. New York: Oxford University Press.
Chadwick, Andrew. 2011. The Political Information Cycle in a Hybrid News System: The British Prime Minister and the
Bullygate Affair. The International Journal of Press/Politics 16 (3): 329.
Chadwick, Andrew. 2009. Web 2.0: New Challenges for the Study of E-Democracy in an Era of Informational Exuberance.
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Chadwick, Andrew. 2007. Digital Network Repertoires and Organizational Hybridity. Political Communication 24: 283301.
Chadwick, Andrew, and Philip N. Howard, eds. 2009. Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics. London: Routledge.
Curran, James, and Tamara Witschge. 2010. Liberal Dreams and the Internet. In New Media, Old News: Journalism &
Democracy in the Digital Age, edited by Natalie Fenton. London: Sage.
Dahlberg, Lincoln. 2005. The Corporate Colonization of Online Attention and the Marginalization of Critical Communication?
Journal of Communication Inquiry 29 (2): 16080.
Dahlgren, Peter. 2005. The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation. Political
Communication 22 (2): 14762; 17677.
Dahlgren, Peter. 2001. The Public Sphere and the Net: Structure, Space and Communication. In Mediated Politics:
Communication in the Future of Democracy, edited by W. Lance Bennett and Robert Entman, 3356. Cambridge:
Dean, Jodi. 2010. Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. Cambridge: Polity.
Hargittai, Eszter. 2006. Content Diversity Online: Myth or Reality. In Media Diversity and Localism: Meaning and
Metrics, edited by Philip M. Napoli. London: Routledge.
Howard, Philip N., and Andrew Chadwick. 2009. Political Omnivores and Wired States. In Routledge Handbook of
Internet Politics, edited by Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard. London: Routledge.
Karppinen, Kari. 2009. Rethinking Media Pluralism and Communicative Abundance. Observatorio 11: 15169.
Livingstone, Sonia. 2005. Critical Debates in Internet Studies: Reflections on an Emerging Field. Chapter 1 in Mass Media
and Society, edited by James Curran and Michael Gurevitch, 929. London: Hodder Arnold.
Mansell, Robin. 2004. Political Economy, Power and New Media. New Media & Society 6 (1): 7483.
McNair, Brian. 2006. Cultural Chaos: Journalism, News and Power in a Globalised World. London: Routledge.
Papacharissi, Zizi. 2010. A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity.
Schoenbach, Klaus, Ester de Waal, and Edmund Lauf. 2005. Research Note: Online and Print Newspapers: Their Impact on
the Extent of the Perceived Public Agenda. European Journal of Communication 20 (2): 24558.
Sparks, Colin. 2001. The Internet and the Global Public Sphere. In Mediated Politics: Communication in the Future of
Democracy, edited by W. Lance Bennett and Robert Entman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Politics, edited by Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard. London: Routledge.
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Routledge.
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ClintonLewinsky Scandal. Journalism 1 (1): 6185.
Part I
Accessibility
1
Searching for the Schoolhouse Gate in

Cyberspace
Mark Goodman
Nick Emmett was an 18-year-old senior at Kentlake High School in Kent, Washington. By
typical measures he was a model student; he had a 3.95 grade point average, was cocaptain of
the schools basketball team, and had a spotless school record. In February 2000, however,
Emmettin the minds of his school administratorscrossed a line that countless teenagers
unwittingly cross every day. He posted material online that his school didnt like.
On February 13, a Web site Emmett created, called the Unofficial Kentlake High Home
Page, went live. The site, which was created entirely at home, included prominent
disclaimers warning visitors that the site was not sponsored by the school and was for
entertainment purposes only.
The Web site included some mild criticism of the school administration and faculty; but the
content that most ruffled feathers were mock obituaries of two of Emmetts friends at the
school. The obituaries were clearly tongue-in-cheek, inspired by a creative writing assignment
from the previous school year in which students were asked to write their own obituary.
Emmetts site allowed visitors to vote on who should die next and thus be the subject of the
next mock obituary. The obituaries created a buzz among students, faculty, and staff at the
school.1
On February 16, a local television station aired a report about Emmetts Web site with a
wildly hyperbolic slant. The story described the site as a hit list of people intended to be
killed. The day the story aired, Emmett shut down his site. The following day he was expelled
from school for intimidation, harassment, disruption to the educational process, and violation
of Kent School District copyright. Later, his punishment was reduced to a five-day
suspension, which would have caused Emmett to miss classes and prevented him from playing
in a playoff game with the schools basketball team. Emmett and his parents quickly went to
court requesting a temporary restraining order.
At the court hearing, the school district offered no evidence that Emmett intended to
intimidate or threaten students at the school, let alone that any student actually felt threatened
by the Web site. That, combined with the fact the Web site was created entirely outside of the
schools supervision or control, prompted the federal district court for the Western District of
Washington to grant Emmetts request and lift his punishment. The school chose not to appeal
that decision and the case ended.
In terms of legal significance, the court decision in Emmett v. Kent School District2 is a
blip on the radar screen in the ongoing debate about students free-expression rights. But the
case provides one early illustration of how the Internet once again has changed the ground
rules in the most significant interactions of our liveseven for teenagers. More than a decade
after Nick Emmetts suspension, educators, free expression advocates, and the courts still
cannot agree on exactly where public school officials authority ends when it comes to
punishing students for online speech that is created entirely outside of school but whose impact
might be felt on campus.
SUPREME COURT GUIDANCE

Defining the First Amendment protections afforded to students at public high schools is a
far from simple task. The U.S. Supreme Court has yet to confront a case involving school
punishment of off-campus online speech. The Court has waded into the murky waters of student
free expression rights a handful of times over recent decades, however, at least for speech that
occurs in school.
As far back as1943, the Court recognized that students do have some First Amendment
protection in school. In that year, the Supreme Court issued its decision in West Virginia v.
Barnette,3 a case that questioned whether education officials in that state could compel
students to salute the American flag and recite the pledge of allegiance. Members of the
Jehovahs Witness faiththe tenets of which demand allegiance only to God and consider
saluting the flag to be worship of a graven imagebrought suit after their children were
expelled for refusing to obey the rule. The Supreme Court upheld the claim of First Amendment
infringement by a 63 vote. Independent of the fact that the parents objection was based on
their religious faith, the Court said that the government could not require children to express
views with which they disagreed, absent a compelling justification. The Court rejected the
West Virginia requirement, finding it to be in conflict with the First Amendment protections for
free speech that are afforded all Americans.
The most significant and well-known court decision on the subject is the 1969 ruling in
Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District.4 In the Tinker case, the Court
by a 72 vote rejected the Des Moines, Iowa, School Districts punishment of students John
and Mary Beth Tinker and their friend Chris Eckhardt for wearing black armbands to school in
protest of the Vietnam War. Students do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of
speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate, is the decisions often-cited guiding principle.5
The Tinker decision remains important today because in it the Court established a test for
determining circumstances in which public school officials are prohibited by the First
Amendment from censoring student expression. When those officials can reasonably forecast a
material and substantial disruption of school activities or an invasion of the rights of
others, then First Amendment protections will give way, the Court said. The mere desire to
avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint,
however, is not a sufficient justification for censorship.6 The Court in the Tinker case
concluded that the school had not presented evidence that a material disruption of school
would have occurred had the students been allowed to wear their armbands without
punishment.
Tinker was thenand remains to this daythe most important legal precedent on defining
students First Amendment rights and is almost universally cited in court cases attempting to
define whether schools can punish students for things they publish online outside of school.
Three subsequent Supreme Court decisions have narrowed the broad protections of Tinker in
limited circumstances.
In the 1986 case Bethel School District v. Fraser,7 a 72 majority of the Supreme Court
upheld a schools punishment of Washington state high school senior Matthew Fraser for giving
a speech at a school assembly that contained what the Supreme Court described as an
elaborate, graphic, and explicit sexual metaphor.8 In nominating his friend Jeff Kuhlman for a
student government office, Fraser said the following.
I know a man who is firmhes firm in his pants, hes firm in his shirt, his character is
firmbut most of all, his belief in you, the students of Bethel, is firm.
Jeff Kuhlman is a man who takes his point and pounds it in. If necessary, hell take
an issue and nail it to the wall. He doesnt attack things in spurtshe drives hard,
pushing and pushing until finallyhe succeeds.
Jeff is a man who will go to the very endeven the climax, for each and every one
of you.
So vote for Jeff for A. S. B. vice-presidenthell never come between you and the
best our high school can be.9
After giving his speech, Fraser was suspended from school and, unsurprisingly,
removed from the list of students eligible for selection as a graduate speaker. Fraser
contested his punishment in court and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the
schools discipline. The rights of students to speak freely (at least when at school) are
not automatically coextensive with the rights of adults in other settings, the Court
said.10
The Bethel decision has come to stand for the conclusion that the First Amendment
does not prohibit school officials from silencing or punishing student expression at
school that is vulgar, lewd, indecent, or plainly offensive. Most courts regard
the holding as a narrow one that has little relevance to most mainstream student
expression.
Two years later, in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier,11 a 53 majority of
the Supreme Court allowed a schools censorship of stories about teen pregnancy and
divorce from a Missouri high school student newspaper that was tied to a journalism
class. When student expression occurs in a school-sponsored context and the venue for
expression has not been opened as a public forum, school officials can censor if they
can demonstrate that their actions have a valid educational purpose or are
reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns,12 a lesser level of protection
than given to independent student speech at issue in the Tinker case. Because the
Hazelwood decision specifically applies only to the context of school-sponsored
student speech, it is rarely raised in support or opposition of the ability of school
officials to punish independent, off-campus speech.
Finally, in Morse v. Frederick, the Supreme Court upheld the right of Juneau,
Alaska, school officials to punish a high school student for conveying a drug-related
message at a school event in 2007. Joseph Frederick was suspended from school after
he and some friends held up a 14-foot banner that said Bong Hits 4 Jesus as the
Olympic Torch Relay passed the school en route to the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter
Olympics. School officials said that the banner promoted illegal drug use. Frederick
said he believed the message was nonsense but had hoped it would get him on
television.13
In rejecting Fredericks First Amendment claim, the Court held that the special
characteristics of the school environment and the governmental interest in stopping
student drug abuse allow schools to restrict student expression that they reasonably
regard as promoting illegal drug use. The Court rejected the schools argument that it
be allowed to censor speech simply because school officials find it offensive or in
conflict with the schools educational mission. [M]uch political and religious
speech might be perceived as offensive to some, the Court majority said.14 Two of the
justiceswho joined the majority opinion but wrote separately in a concurring opinion
said that they would give a narrow reading of the Courts holding in Morse. The case
goes no further than to hold that a public school may restrict speech that a reasonable
observer would interpret as advocating illegal drug use. [I]t provides no support for
any restriction of speech that can plausibly be interpreted as commenting on any
political or social issue, including speech on issues such as the wisdom of the war on
drugs or of legalizing marijuana for medicinal use.15
Both collectively and individually, Tinker, Bethel, and Morse can be read as Supreme
Court support for the view that student speech occurring outside of school deserves strong
First Amendment protection. In Tinker, for example, the Courts statement that students do not
shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate
only makes sense if one presumes that students have full constitutional protection beyond that
schoolhouse gate. If students already had shed some of their free speech protection before they
got to school, then the Tinker analysis would necessarily have been something much different
and even more limiting.
In the Bethel case, the Court noted that the constitutional rights of students in public
school are not automatically coextensive with the rights of adults in other settings,16 language
that indicates the Court would have considered Frasers speech in a new light had he given it
off campus at a non-school-sponsored event.17 In Morse, the Court went to great lengths to note
that Fredericks banner presentation was considered on-campus speech, even though
technically it occurred on a public sidewalk across the street from the school.
[W]e reject Fredericks argument that this is not a school speech case. The event
occurred during normal school hours. It was sanctioned by Principal Morse as an
approved social event or class trip, and the school districts rule[s] expressly provide
that pupils in approved social events and class trips are subject to district rules for
student conduct. Frederick cannot stand in the midst of his fellow students, during
school hours, at a school-sanctioned activity and claim that he is not at school.18
Again, there would have been no need for the Court to emphasize that point if the
limitations on Frederick while at school were to be the same as those when he wasnt. To
make his point clear, however, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority in Morse
made it explicit by referencing the Bethel case: Had Fraser delivered the same [vulgar]
speech in a public forum outside the school context, it would have been protected.19
All three of these Supreme Court decisions reflect a belief that First Amendment rights,
applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment, are available to
teachers and students.20 If so, the corollary must be true: Absent the special characteristics of
the school environment, students First Amendment protections are indistinguishable from
those of anyone else.
LOWER COURTS DEAL WITH OFF-CAMPUS SPEECH

Since at least the 1970s, the lower federal courts have been reluctant to give schools the
ability to regulate expression outside of school. When the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the
Fifth Circuit was confronted with a Texas case involving a schools attempt to punish students
for distributing an underground newspaper off school property, the court, somewhat
sarcastically, upheld the students First Amendment protection from such punishment. The court
in Shanley v. Northeast Independent School District said,21
It should have come as a shock to the parents that their elected school board had
assumed suzerainty over their children before and after school, off school grounds, and
with regard to their childrens rights of expressing their thoughts. We trust that it
will come as no shock whatsoever to the school board that their assumption of authority
is an unconstitutional usurpation of the First Amendment.22
In a case from New York with remarkably similar facts, an independent student newspaper
produced and distributed outside of school, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second
Circuit echoed sentiments similar to those of the Fifth Circuit.
[B]ecause school officials have ventured out of the school yard and into the general
community where the freedom accorded expression is at its zenith, their actions must be
evaluated by the principles that bind government officials in the public arena. The
First Amendment forbids public school administrators and teachers from regulating the
material to which a child is exposed after he leaves school each afternoon. Parents still
have their role to play in bringing up their children, and school officials, in such
instances, are not empowered to assume the character of parens patriae (parent of the
nation).23
Admittedly, it is more difficult to determine whether the speech should be considered to

occur on-campus and thus be entitled to diminished First Amendment protection when it was
created entirely off campus but then was brought onto campus by someone other than the
original speaker. In a Louisiana case, a high school student drew a picture at home depicting a
violent assault on his school. Two years later, his middle schoolaged brother found the tablet
that contained the older brothers drawing in a closet and took it to school to use for his own
schoolwork. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that the older brother should still be
protected.
Private writings made and kept in ones home enjoy the protection of the First
Amendment, as well as the Fourth, the court said in Porter v. Ascension Parrish School
Board.24 For such writings to lose their First Amendment protection, something more than
their accidental and unintentional exposure to public scrutiny must take place.25
In contrast, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in Doe v. Pulaski
County Special School District26 ruled that a threatening letter written by an Arkansas student
at home could be the basis for school punishment even though the student never brought the
letter to school. The student wrote two letters that described how he would sodomize, rape,
and murder his former girlfriend, who also was a student at the school. Several months later,
the boys best friend discovered the letters and was allowed to read them. Eventually the
friend took one without the authors consent and showed it to the girl being discussed. The
author of the letter in telephone conversations with the girl subsequently admitted what the
letter said and also described the contents to the girls best friend. The court concluded that the
student who had authored the letter intended to communicate its contents to the girl, who then
shared it with school officials. The court determined that the letter constituted a true threat,
which gave school officials the authority to punish the letters author.27
COURTS CONFRONT ONLINE SPEECH

The Doe case reflects a view that a growing number of lower courts have been willing to
follow, especially when confronted with cases of schools punishing students for off-campus
speech that is posted online. These courts conclude that the precise boundary of the
schoolhouse gate no longer appears to provide such a firm dividing line between where school
authority should end and parent or police authority begins, especially when concerns about
cyberbullying or school violence are involved.
In Wisniewski v. Board of Education of Weedsport Central School District,28 the U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit confronted a New York case involving instant
messages sent by an eighth grader to friends from his home computer. His messages, sent to 15
recipients over a period of three weeks, included a drawing of pistol firing a bullet at a
persons head, with splattered blood above it and the word kill followed by the name of the
students English teacher below it. Although the student never sent the message to the teacher
or to any school official, one of the other students who received it eventually shared it with
school staff. School officials referred the issue to the police, who determined that the student
intended his instant message icon as a joke, had no violent intent, and posed no threat to the
school or the teacher. The police investigator concluded that the student understood the
severity of what he had done and expressed regret for it. Nonetheless, the student eventually
was suspended from school for a semester and subsequently moved from the area because of
school and community hostility.29
The student contested his punishment as a violation of his First Amendment rights, but the
Second Circuit upheld the schools discipline. Although the court agreed that the words and
images in question did not rise to the level of a true threat, it said that the student should have
reasonably foreseen that his messages would reach school property and would cause a
material and substantial disruption there, pulling the censorship standard enumerated in the
Supreme Courts Tinker decision that was created to apply to on-campus speech. That the
transmission occurred outside of school does not necessarily insulate him from school
discipline, the court concluded.30
In a case with strikingly different facts, the same court permitted school punishment of a
Connecticut high school student for postings she made outside of school on her own blog. In the
case of Doninger v. Niehoff,31 Lauren Doninger had been elected to student council and as
secretary of her junior class. When she and her fellow student council members believed that
school officials had effectively cancelled an annual battle-of-the-bands event that the students
had organized, Doninger sent an e-mail to classmates and their parents objecting to the
schools decision and asking supporters to call the school superintendent to complain. She also
posted a message on her personal blog, in which she described the situation and referred to
school officials as douchebags and describing the superintendent as pissed off because of
the complaints she was receiving. As a result of her electronic communications, school
officials subsequently prohibited Doningers name from appearing on the ballot for senior
class secretary. Whenas a write-in candidateDoninger received the greatest number of
votes from her classmates, school officials refused to allow her to serve. Doninger was not
suspended from school or otherwise punished beyond the limitation on serving as a class
officer.
When the Second Circuit heard Doningers lawsuit contesting her punishment, the court
looked to Supreme Court precedents for guidance, especially the Bethel case and its limitation
on First Amendment protection for vulgar speech in school. The court said that if Doninger
had distributed her electronic posting as a handbill on school grounds, this case would
fall squarely within the Supreme Courts precedents recognizing that the nature of a
students First Amendment rights must be understood in light of the special
characteristics of the school environment and that, in particular, offensive forms of
expression may be prohibited.32
Ultimately, however, the court found that its earlier decision in Wisniewski provided the
legal framework for analyzing Doningers situation as well. Because Doninger should have
reasonably foreseen that her words would reach school property and cause a material and
substantial disruption of school activities, it was punishable under the Tinker standard.
Ironically, the court concluded that the action Doninger was encouraging supporters to take as
an advocate for her peerscalling school officials to urge them to reinstate the eventwas
exactly what constituted the substantial disruption.33 It is perhaps the first time a federal
appeals court ruled that urging students to voice their concerns to public officials can be
substantially disruptive and thus punishable. The court did note that its conclusion might
have been different had Doningers punishment been something greater than denied
participation in an extracurricular activity.34 The decision, however, left many questions about
how protected political activism by students is when it is directed at school officials.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit faced a situation more similar to
Wisniewski than Doninger when West Virginia high school student Kara Kowalski created a
Web page that disparaged another student at the school. In true mean girls fashion, Kowalski
named her MySpace page S.A.S.H., which she said was short for Students Against Sluts
Herpes. Other students said that they believed the acronym meant Students Against Shays
Herpes, referencing another girl at the school. In fact, many of the comments Kowalski and
others posted on the page were about Shay, including Shay has herpes and the posting of
altered photographs of Shay that indicated that she had the sexually transmitted disease. One
photo of Shay was labeled portrait of a whore. After Shays family complained to school
officials, Kowalski eventually was suspended from school for five days and was not allowed
to participate in school activities for 90 days. The punishment meant Kowalski was not
allowed to serve as a cheerleader for the reminder of the school year and lost the opportunity
to crown her schools new Queen of Charm, an ironic title that she had received the previous
school year. Kowalski went to court to fight the punishment, and her case, Kowalski v.
Berkeley Count Schools,35 eventually reached the federal appeals court.
The Fourth Circuit examined many of the same questions the Second Circuit had explored
in the Wisniewski case. The court described it as a metaphysical question to determine
where speech occurred when one used the Internet as the medium. The court concluded,
however, that Kowalski indeed pushed her computers keys in her home, but she knew that the
electronic response would be, as it in fact was, published beyond her home and could
reasonably be expected to reach the school or impact the school environment.36 Even though
the speech did not occur at school it was foreseeable that it would reach the schoolas, in
fact, it did, and where it created the substantial disruption envisioned by Tinker.37
In contrast to these rulings, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has been much
more hesitant to cross the literal line of the schoolhouse gate for punishment of student online
speech. In a pair of cases decided on the same day by a 14-judge en banc panel of that court,
the Third Circuit described where it believed the limits of school officials authority should
lie.
In J. S. v. Blue Mountain School District,38 a Pennsylvania middle school student, J. S.,
contested the 10-day suspension she received for creating a fake MySpace profile of her
school principal. The profile did not use the principals name but did include his photograph
that was taken from the school Web site. The profile described the man pictured as a married
bisexual whose interests include having sex in his office and hitting on students and their
parents; the profile also made disparaging comments about the principals wife and children.
Because the schools computers blocked access to MySpace, no student or school official
accessed the profile at school. Additionally, one day after creating the page, J. S. restricted its
access to her MySpace friends. One of those friends eventually printed a copy and delivered it
to the school principalat the principals request.
In confronting J. S.s legal challenge, the Third Circuit dodged the question of whether
school officials authority to punish her was limited because her speech occurred entirely off
campus. The appellants argue that the First Amendment limits school official[s] ability to
sanction student speech to the schoolhouse itself. While this argument has some appeal, we
need not address it to hold that the School District violated J. S.s First Amendment free
speech rights.39 Rather, the court noted that the school itself admitted no substantial disruption
occurred as a result of the Web site and that any forecast of substantial disruption was
unreasonable. The court said that the Web site was so outrageous that the evidence showed no
one took it seriously and, thus, the school had no grounds for punishment.40
In the companion case to J. S. v. Blue Mountain, the Third Circuit also considered the case
Layshock v. Hermitage School District.41 Like J. S., Pennsylvania high school senior Justin
Layshock created a fake profile of his principal on MySpace using his grandmothers computer
at her home. His parody profile also used his principals official school photo and described
the principal as a fan of illegal drugs, sex, and alcohol. Although Justin created the page
outside of school, he did access it at least once in a classroom and showed the page to others.
Several other fake profiles of the principal were created by other students. After school
officials found about Justins profile, he admitted to creating it and apologized to his principal.
Nonetheless, he received a 10-day suspension, was placed in an alternative education program
for the remainder of the school year, was banned from all extracurricular activities, and was
not allowed to participate in his graduation ceremony. All involved agreed that Layshocks
profile was the least offensive of the fake profiles about the principal and he was the only one
to apologize for his actions. But he was also the only student to be punished. Justin and his
parents contested the punishment as a violation of his rights under the First Amendment.
In the words of the court:
We realize, of course, that it is now well established that Tinkers schoolhouse gate
is not constructed solely of the bricks and mortar surrounding the school yard.
Nevertheless, the concept of the school yard is not without boundaries and the reach
of school authorities is not without limits. It would be an unseemly and dangerous
precedent to allow the state, in the guise of school authorities, to reach into a childs
home and control his/her actions there to the same extent that it can control that child
when he/she participates in school-sponsored activities. Allowing the District to
punish Justin for conduct he engaged in while at his grandmothers house using his
grandmothers computer would create just such a precedent, and we therefore conclude
that the district court correctly ruled that the Districts response to Justins expressive
conduct violated the First Amendment guarantee of free expression.42
The court again declined to define the precise perimeters of school officials authority to
punish speech that occurs outside of school or a school-sponsored activity. It concluded,
however, that because both parties had agreed that no substantial disruption resulted from the
parody MySpace profile, Layshocks punishment was unconstitutional.43
These federal appeals court cases represent the clearest indication thus far of how the
Supreme Court might deal with the question of school punishment of students for speech they
publish online. The vagueness, inconsistency, and uncertainty these decisions reflect, however,
make it difficult for reasonably informed school administratorslet alone high school students
to feel confident that they understand the full parameters of their rights and responsibilities
regarding off-campus online speech.
WHERE TO DRAW THE LINE?

What conclusions can be drawn from all of this? Some circumstances present the strongest
case for school officials authority to punish students for what they post online from home.
Messages that can be considered true threats against teachers or fellow students would seem
likely subjects for punishment. Even the term true threat is subject to disagreement, however.
A case decided by the Supreme Court in 2015not involving a studentasked the question
whether words published online and perceived as a threat by those who read them should be
punishable without evidence that the person who uttered the words intended them to be
threatening.
The case Elonis v. United States44 involves an aspiring rapper, Anthony Elonis, who
posted lyrics on Facebook that contained violent images of torture and murder that Elonis had
written about his wife. His wife had left him and taken their two children with her. Elonis
maintained that his lyrics were a therapeutic way to work out his anger and frustration. The
Third Circuit Court nonetheless convicted Elonis of making a threat to injure in violation of
federal law and sentenced him to four years in prison.
In oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court, one of the lawyers expressed how
important it was that the Court clearly define what constitutes a true threat that is criminally
punishable especially for online speech, because many of the people who are being
prosecuted now are teenagers who are essentially shooting off their mouths or making sort of
ill-timed, sarcastic comments, which wind up getting them thrown in jail.45 Without
conducting a full First Amendment analysis, the Supreme Court majority nonetheless concluded
that the speaker must have some intent to threaten or awareness that his words would be
perceived as a threat before he can be criminally prosecuted.46
The danger of creating an ill-defined legal standard for censorship of student speech
especially when speech originates outside of schoolis very real. As University of Florida
professor Clay Calvert points out, school officials can easily enough camouflage their interest
in protecting themselves from embarrassment by claiming that their real motivation is
protecting the interests of their students.47 Courts must be vigilant in ensuring that schools are
not allowed to punish all criticism by students of their education simply because the school
dislikes it.48
Imagine a situation such as the following. High school senior Sue Smith, with her parents
support, is an active participant in the national debate over illegal immigration. Smith supports
candidates that take a hard line against easing immigration rules and who oppose granting
amnesty for undocumented immigrants already in the country. After attending a political
rally, Smith decides that she needs to play a greater role in engaging her peers on the issue. She
then starts a blog, offering her own thoughts about the immigration debate and noting the impact
the issue has on her school and the future of the students who attend it.
In one blog post, Smith specifically references the number of undocumented students at her
school who are taking scholarship money that would otherwise be going to American
citizens. Some students and teachers at Smiths school are outraged and demand that the
school take action. The school eventually agrees that Smiths views are so controversial and
hurtful to some people at the school that she has created a material and substantial disruption of
school activities. The school removes her from the honor society and bans her from speaking at
the schools scholarship awards ceremony. This perhaps is what the Supreme Court envisioned
when it said in Tinker, In our system, students may not be regarded as closed-circuit
recipients of only that which the State chooses to communicate. They may not be confined to
the expression of those sentiments that are officially approved.49
If we want high school students to learn the value free expression plays in our
constitutional democracy and to be active participants in community and national debates about
important issues of the day, we must accept that occasionally they will express themselves in
ways that are intemperate, hurtful, and even wrongjust like adults sometimes do. Lucky for
us, the First Amendment protects our right to do that. It should apply with no less force for
students who are living their lives in cyberspace and learning what it means to be the next
generation of Americans.
NOTES
1. All facts of the case are as reported in the federal district courts decision in Emmett v. Kent School District, 92 F. Supp.
2d 1088 (W.D. Wash. 2000).
2. Emmett v. Kent School District, 92 F. Supp. 2d 1088 (W.D. Wash. 2000).
3. West Virginia Board of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943).
4. Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969).
5. Id. at 506.
6. Id. at 509.
7. Bethel School District v. Fraser, 478 U.S. 675 (1986).
8. Id. at 678.
9. Id. at 687.
10. Id. at 682.
11. Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260 (1988).
12. Id. at 273.
13. Morse v. Frederick, 551 U.S. 393, 401 (2007).
14. Id. at 409.
15. Id. at 422 (Alito, J., concurring).
16. Bethel, 478 U.S. at 682 (emphasis added).
17. In fact, the court majority explicitly said that in Morse v. Frederick, 551 U.S. 393, 405 (2007).
18. Morse, 551 U.S. at 400401.
19. Id. at 405.
20. Tinker, 393 U.S. at 506 (emphasis added).
21. Shanley v. Northeast Independent School District, 462 F.2d 960 (5th Cir. 1972).
22. Id. at 964.
23. Thomas v. Board of Education, Granville Central School District, 607 F.2d 1043, 10501051 (2nd Cir. 1979).
24. Porter v. Ascension Parrish School Board, 393 F.3d 608 (5th Cir. 2004), cert. denied, 544 U.S. 1062 (2005).
25. Porter, 393 F.3d at 617618 (5th Cir. 2004).
26. Doe v. Pulaski County Special School District, 306 F.3d 616 (8th Cir. 2002).
27. Id. at 626.
28. Wisniewski v. Board of Education of Weedsport Central School District, 494 F.3d 34 (2nd Cir. 2007), cert. denied,
552 U.S. 1296 (2008).
29. Wisniewski, 494 F.3d at 36.
30. Id. at 39.
31. Doninger v. Niehoff, 527 F.3d 41 (2nd Cir. 2008), cert. denied, 132 S. Ct. 499 (2011).
32. Id. at 49.
33. Id. at 51.
34. Id. at 53.
35. Kowalski v. Berkeley County Schools, 652 F.3d 565 (4th Cir. 2011), cert. denied, 132 S. Ct. 1095 (2012).
36. Kowalski, 652 F.3d at 573.
37. Id. at 574.
38. J. S. v. Blue Mountain School District, 650 F.3d 915 (3rd Cir. 2011) (en banc), cert. denied, 132. S. Ct. 1097 (2012).
39. J. S., 650 F.3d at 926.
40. Id. at 930.
41. Layshock v. Hermitage School District, 650 F.3d 205 (3rd Cir. 2011), cert. denied, 132 S. Ct. 1097 (2012).
42. Layshock, 650 F.3d at 216.
43. Id. at 219.
44. Elonis v. United States, 730 F.3d 321 (3rd Cir. 2013), cert. granted, 134 S. Ct. 2819 (2014).
45. Editorial Board, What Is a True Threat on Facebook? New York Times, Dec. 1, 2014.
46. Elonis v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 2001 (2015).
47. Clay Calvert, Qualified Immunity and the Trials and Tribulations of Online Student Speech: A Review of Cases and
Controversies from 2009, First Amendment Law Review 8 (Fall 2009): 101.
48. See Evans v. Bayer, 684 F. Supp. 2d 1365, 1373 (S.D. Fla. 2010) (Moreover, if school administrators were able to
restrict speech based upon a concern for the potential of defamation, as Bayer claims, students everywhere would be prohibited
from the slightest criticism of their teachers, whether inside or outside of the classroom).
49. Tinker, 393 U.S. at 511.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baxter, Lee. The Unrealistic Geographic Limitations of the Supreme Courts School-Speech Precedents: Tinker in the Internet
Age. Montana Law Review 75 (Winter 2014).
Bethel School District v. Fraser, 478 U.S. 675 (1986).
Calvert, Clay. Qualified Immunity and the Trials and Tribulations of Online Student Speech: A Review of Cases and
Controversies from 2009. First Amendment Law Review (Fall 2009).
Doe v. Pulaski County Special School District, 306 F.3d 616 (8th Cir. 2002).
Doninger v. Niehoff, 527 F.3d 41 (2nd Cir. 2008), cert. denied, 132 S. Ct. 499 (2011).
Editorial Board, What Is a True Threat on Facebook? New York Times (Dec. 1, 2014).
Elonis v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 2001 (2015).
Emmett v. Kent School District, 92 F. Supp. 2d 1088 (W.D. Wash. 2000).
Evans v. Bayer, 684 F. Supp. 2d 1365, 1373 (S.D. Fla. 2010).
Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260 (1988).
J. S. v. Blue Mountain School District, 650 F.3d 915 (3rd Cir. 2011) (en banc), cert. denied, 132. S. Ct. 1097 (2012).
Kowalski v. Berkeley County Schools, 652 F.3d 565 (4th Cir. 2011), cert. denied, 132 S. Ct. 1095 (2012).
Layshock v. Hermitage School District, 650 F.3d 205 (3rd Cir. 2011), cert. denied, 132 S. Ct. 1097 (2012).
Martin, Allison. Tinkering with the Parameters of Student Free Speech Rights for Online Expression: When Social Networking
Sites Knock on the Schoolhouse Gate. Seton Hall Law Review 43 (2013).
Morse v. Frederick, 551 U.S. 393 (2007).
Porter v. Ascension Parrish School Board, 393 F.3d 608 (5th Cir. 2004), cert. denied, 544 U.S.1062 (2005).
Shanley v. Northeast Independent School District, 462 F.2d 960 (5th Cir. 1972).
Thomas v. Board of Education, Granville Central School District, 607 F.2d 1043 (2nd Cir. 1979).
Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969).
West Virginia Board of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943).
Wisniewski v. Board of Education of Weedsport Central School District, 494 F.3d 34 (2nd Cir. 2007), cert. denied, 552 U.S.
1296 (2008).
2
Internet Filters in Schools: More than

Simply Annoying to Students
Candace Perkins Bowen
By the mid-1990s, the Internet was the place to learn just about everything. Second grade
teachers were helping students download photos and create calendars, middle school students
used graphing software to plot data as they accessed it,1 and high school students were
starting to post their own work online as their school newspapers and other content appeared
as PDFs. The Internet and Schools: A Survey of Networking Activities, a paper presented at
the Internet Societys INET 94 Conference in Prague, announced that a recent informal
census conducted via voluntary reporting over the Internet estimates the number of teachers and
students (individual and classroom accounts) in the U.S. using the Internet, either directly or
indirectly, at almost 250,000.2 At the time, that estimate seemed like a lot, but the numbers
grew quickly. The National Center for Education Statistics followed the increased use of the
Internet: 8 percent of all public schools in 1995, 77 percent in 2000, 97 percent in 2004, and
98 percent in 2008.3
EARLY PROTECTION FROM THE INTERNET

School administrators began to worry. What about stalkers? What about pornography?
What bad materials would children be accessing? What unsavory people might be reaching out
to children? How could educators protect their students? The concerns mounted. Would a legal
approach to make some Internet communications illegal be the answer? Would a technological
approach to prohibit the receiving of such messages through some kind of filtering be better?
Then Congress got involved. February 1, 1995, Senator James Exon (D-Neb.) made the
first attempt at regulating speech on the Internet. Introducing the Communications Decency
Amendment (CDA), Exon said that the Internet was a danger to society, stating that [t]he
information superhighway should not become a red light district. This legislation will keep that
from happening and extend the standards of decency.4 What sounded logical and protective of
innocent students had some flaws, though. For one thing, the wording on the CDA had some
legal loopholes, the most often cited being the following:
Title 47 U.S.C.A. 223(a)(1)(B)(ii) (Supp. 1997) criminalizes the knowing

transmission of obscene or indecent messages to any recipient under 18 years of age.
Section 223(d) prohibits the [knowing] sending or displaying to a person under 18 of
any message that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as
measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or
organs. Affirmative defenses are provided for those who take good faith, effective
actions to restrict access by minors to the prohibited communications, 223(e)(5)
(A), and those who restrict such access by requiring certain designated forms of age
proof, such as a verified credit card or an adult identification number, 223(e)(5)(B).5
Part of the problem was the wording. Although the legal definition of obscenity is
somewhat vagueJustice Potter Stewart is known for saying, I know it when I see itthe
word indecent has no legal definition at all.6 This lack was one of the concerns of the 20
plaintiffs in the case the American Civil Liberties Union had put together before Congress had
even approved the bill. The minute Congress turned this bill into law, the ACLU filed suit. Its
press release when the ACLU filed its brief said:
Saying that the Internet has no parallel in the history of human communication, the
American Civil Liberties Union today sent the U.S. Supreme Court a passionate
defense of free speech and urged the Justices to prohibit government censorship of the
Internet.
The ACLU said a broad spectrum of individuals and organizations filed friend-of
the-court briefs in the case, asserting a diverse range of arguments in support of the
ACLUs legal challenge to the Communications Decency Act. In a Supreme Court first,
one of the groups will be submitting their brief today on an interactive CD-ROM as
well as on paper.
The breadth of speech that plaintiffs and amici in this case engage in demonstrates
that content on the Internet truly is as diverse as human thought, said Ann Beeson,
ACLU national staff attorney and a member of the Reno v. ACLU legal team. By
imposing a censorship scheme unprecedented in any medium, the CDA would threaten
what one lower court judge called the never-ending world-wide conversation on the
Internet, she added.
In its brief filed today, the ACLU asserts that the governments efforts to end that
conversation amount to a flat ban on constitutionally protected speech.7
The ACLUs plaintiffs represented groups such as content and Internet service providers
Human Rights Watch, Planned Parenthood, Electronic Freedom Foundationand educational
groups, such as the Journalism Education Association (JEA), the only national organization for
secondary school journalism teachers and student media advisers. Sections in JEA president
Candace Perkins Bowens affidavit attained obtained prior to the court hearing included
concerns of JEA members who increasingly use online communications as part of a course of
instruction in high school journalism classes.8 Their use of online newsgathering and
journalistic research, sometimes using school computers and labs, was another point of
concern. By using the World Wide Web, students of JEA members gain exposure to online
communications about a wide variety of subjects during the course of the learning process.9
The affidavit further argued that student newspapers provide an opportunity for students to
exercise their right to free speech on issues of their own choosing, whether it is student
accomplishments in academics or sports, disputes between students and the school
administration, or issues such as the problem of teen pregnancy. As they do this, they also are
reaching a wider audience. The need for online research is crucial to the education10 of these
journalism teachers students.
When instructing their students in online research, the affidavit continued, JEA members
have encountered material that could be deemed indecent or patently offensive under the
statute.11 For example, one JEA member had recently assisted a student with online research
for an article on media treatment of women. The search led to online sites that contained very
graphic information and pictures depicting violence against women.
JEA members, Perkins Bowen said, were concerned they would risk criminal prosecution
if such a situation happened after the passage of the Communications Decency Act (CDA).
Thus, they would be afraid to allow their students to conduct their own online research using
school computers and believe this would violate their students First Amendment rights to
constitutionally protected speech.
Patently offensive was another term that was troubling to the journalism teachers. To
comply with the statute, JEA members could review and, if necessary, censor patently
offensive material in online student publications under their supervision; but because JEA
members do not think they know what patently offensive means, they fear they would censor
constitutionally protected material. JEA members who are student publication advisers do not
know how to comply with the statute in this instance without also violating their students First
Amendment rights. They were further concerned that the CDA would not protect them from
liability in these cases. Members stated that it is difficultif not impossibleto screen
indecent or patently offensive material from appearing in search results.
For example, if a high school journalism teacher were instructing students on how to
search for information on a story about war crimes in Bosnia, the search could reveal
graphic testimony by rape victims that might be deemed indecent or patently
offensive under the statute. Because the search function is based on a string of words,
it is impossible to screen indecent or patently offensive pictures from the search
results.12
Perkins Bowens statement also explained that some JEA members have used screening
programs, also called filters, that block access to certain online sites containing sexually
explicit material. They have discovered that use of these programs results in the blocking of
many useful online sites containing material about subjects such as medieval life, poetry,
education, soccer, and extremism. JEA members believe that mandatory use of such screening
programs, in order to comply with the statute, would block students access to much
constitutionally protected material.13
With the input like this and statements from the other 19 plaintiffs, a special three-judge
court in Philadelphia in June 1996 ruled that the Communications Decency Act was an
unconstitutional abridgement of rights protected by the First and Fifth Amendments. The judges
indicated there were less restrictive ways to protect children from material that might
potentially harm them. The Department of Justice filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court,
which heard oral arguments in the case, then known as Reno v. ACLU. In a landmark 72
decision issued on June 26, 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the lower court decision
and held that the Communications Decency Act violated the First Amendments guarantee of
freedom of speech.
The Court held that the Act violated the First Amendment because its regulations
amounted to a content-based blanket restriction of free speech. The Act failed to
clearly define indecent communications, limit its restrictions to particular times or
individuals (by showing that it would not impact adults), provide supportive statements
from an authority on the unique nature of Internet communications, or conclusively
demonstrate that the transmission of offensive material is devoid of any social value.
The Court added that since the First Amendment distinguishes between indecent and
obscene sexual expressions, protecting only the former, the Act could be saved from
facial overbreadth challenges if it dropped the words or indecent from its text.14
The Supreme Court agreed with the lower court that other means would protect children
but not abridge their Constitutional rights. It would not take long for those other means to be
available to protect the nations children.
AFTER THE COMMUNICATIONS DECENCY ACT

When the Court overturned the Communications Decency Act, software developers saw
Internet filters as an alternative to legislation to protect children from the evils of the Internet.
First marketing to parents to control the Web-surfing of their offspring, the companies soon
began targeting schools and libraries.15 Filtering, at this time, was touted as a less restrictive
alternative to criminal laws such as the CDA.16 Still, the filters often prevented access to
material that was clearly not obscene or pornographic. A 2000 report from the COPA
Commission (Information and Resources About the Commission on Online Child Protection)
stated:
This technology raises First Amendment concerns because of its potential to be over-
inclusive in blocking content. Concerns are increased because the extent of blocking is
often unclear and not disclosed, and [when it is used in schools] may not be based on
parental choices. There is less of an impact on First Amendment concerns if filtering
criteria are known by the consumer or other end-user and if filters are customizable and
flexible.
This, however, often was not the case.17 The findings also stated, There are significant
concerns about First Amendment values when server-side filters are used in libraries and
schools.18
Clearly, court decisions were not the end of the debate over balancing free speech and
protection for children. In 1998, Childrens Online Protection Act (COPA) was the next
attempt to pass legislation similar to the CDA, but it never was allowed to go into effect.
COPA would have established criminal penalties for those who knowingly transmitted material
that could be deemed harmful to minors. The Supreme Courts decision in Ashcroft v. ACLU
(2004) threw out COPA because filters were available and could be used to avoid some of the
harms raised by the government. According to Mark Goodman, then the director of the
Student Press Law Center, the Court in essence said that parents who wanted to protect their
children from content on the Internet dont have to rely on government controls. Instead they
have the option of choosing to put filtering software on their computers. Voluntary use of filters
gives families control without imposing government sanctions that conflict with the First
Amendment interests.
Ironically, being able to use filters actually helped free speech in this instance, Goodman
said in a December 2014 e-mail.
THE CHILDRENS INTERNET PROTECTION ACT AND THE USE OF

FILTERS
In 2000, Congress enacted the Childrens Internet Protection Act (CIPA) to address
concerns about childrens access to obscene or harmful content over the Internet.19 CIPA
impacts libraries and schools that are part of the E-rate program, which cuts the cost of some
communications services and products they use. In early 2001, the Federal Communications
Commission issued rules implementing CIPA and provided updates to those rules in 2011.
Schools and libraries cannot receive their E-rate program discounts unless they have an
Internet safety policy that includes technology protection measures. The protection measures
must block or filter Internet access to pictures that are: (a) obscene; (b) child pornography; or
(c) harmful to minors (for computers that are accessed by minors).20
Schools and libraries that want the federal funding also must have an Internet safety policy
that addresses such things as minors inappropriate access on the Internet; their access to
materials harmful to them; safety of minors who use e-mail, chat rooms, and other digital
communication; and their disclosure and dissemination of their personal information.21
Thus, filters must be in place for virtually all schools and libraries. These work in one of
two main ways. Keyword blocking, which prohibits access to Web sites based on the words
found in URLs or searches involving blacklisted terms, is one technique. Filtering based on
dynamic content analysiseffectively reading the content of requested Web sitesthough
theoretically possible, is not often used because of its time-consuming nature.22
FILTER BLOCKS TOO MUCH

Keyword blocking, which most commonly is used, has serious drawbacks. Chicken breast
recipes and magna cum laude are just two often-cited examples of search topics that
filtered computers block, although they do not eliminate some sites that are clearly
pornographic, especially if they are sites with images. For the American Library Association,
Nancy Kranich wrote,
[Filters] sweep too broadly, blocking only some sites with indecent materials while
restricting access to thousands of legal and useful resources, and failing to block
communications sent through e-mail, chat rooms, non-Web sources, peer-to-peer
exchanges, and streaming videonow popular modes for distributing pornography.
Filters are cumbersome to disable and to override.23
The ACLU did argue that voluntary filtering could be a good thing, but government-
mandated filtering is not.
Filtering has been shown to be quite successful in blocking sexual sites, but at a price
it over-blocks. As much as 20 percent of all Internet content can be over-blocked by
some filters, including valuable nonsexual material. Reports by the Kaiser Family
Foundation, Consumer Reports, and the Free Expression Policy Project have all found
that filters improperly block important websites about health, sex education, civil
rights, and politics.24
Kranich wrote, Filters can give parents and guardians a false sense of security
prompting them to believe that children are protected when they are not.25 A Kaiser Family
Foundation report, See No Evil: How Internet Filters Affect the Search for Online Health
Information showed the results of searching for youth-oriented health topics on popular search
engines using six filter products often used in schools, libraries, and homes. Topics included
everything from diabetes to safe sex and pregnancy prevention. Even when set on the least
restrictive level (pornography only), the study showed filters blocked 1.4 percent of all health
sites. With the same least restrictive level, they blocked 1 in 10 nonpornographic health sites
using search terms condoms, safe sex, or gay and did not block access to 1 in 10
pornographic sites under conditions simulating intentional access, and 1 in 3 pornographic
sites under conditions simulating accidental access.26
Based on the Kaiser study, Vicky Rideout, vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation,
shared filter access concerns in a 2003 USA Today commentary. She pointed out that filters
alone are not the issue. Whats at stake is how they are configured and whether they are set to
block more than simply pornography. Some filtering vendors offer default configurations
that block such categories as profanity, news and games as well as such intriguing catchalls as
illegal/questionable and militancy/extremism. 27 She further noted that [a] University of
Michigan review of 20 schools and libraries having more than a half million students and 2.5
million library users found that just one single site of the 20 had configured its filter to block
only pornography.28
FILTER REMOVAL HAS PROBLEMS, TOO

One of the CIPA guidelines, however, does state, An authorized person [at the school or
library] may disable the blocking or filtering measure during use to enable access for bona fide
research or other lawful purposes.29 Librarians, educators, and First Amendment advocates,
however, say this is not sufficient help for students. Expert witnesses in a number of court
cases testified that it is technologically impossible to unblock only images that are not obscene,
pornographic, or harmful to minors. Some said only one terminal cannot be unblocked. Library
experts say that customized blocking programs take more technical expertise than their
employees have, and the process could often take a number of days.30
Although it might take the official employees days to unblock sites, anecdotal evidence
shows that students often can access what they want, and that many times the sites they are
visiting are exactly those that concerned parents and others want them to avoid. A Google
search using the words accessing blocked websites at school yielded 70,600 sites in 0.33
seconds. Some could be legitimate, but ones like excitebuzz.com and tweakandtrick.com talk
directly to students and share simple technology tricks such as using proxy servers and online
translators to circumvent school restrictions. The geekdaily.com does warn, However you
should be careful while gaining access to restricted websites as you might have to face serious
consequences if your school/college authorities or your employer finds out about it.31 Even if
they fail to thwart the schools (or librarys) filters, students can use computers at home or at
friends houses, or can access information on the smartphone that studies show 70 percent of
them have.32
Goodman said students frequently see Internet filters as a joke. When we discovered in
about 2004 that some schools Internet filters were blocking the Student Press Law Centers
website, it became clear how easily filters, created with the best of intentions, could become a
tool for government thought control.
Besides being an amusing challenge to students and a time-consuming chore for Web
administrators, filtering software used in schools can be indicative of other free-expression
issues in schools. Three national journalism organizationsJournalism Education Association,
National Scholastic Press Association, and the Quill and Scroll International Honorary Society
sponsor the First Amendment Press Freedom Awards (FAPFA), which they give annually to
high schools that teach and protect such freedoms. To become a FAPFA school, the principal,
all student media advisers, and all student editors must submit completed questionnaires about
free speech issues, and the Internet filtering question is one key factor. JEAs Scholastic Press
Rights Committee chair John Bowen said that, of the schools who apply annually, generally a
third report that filters cannot be removed for journalistic research, and they fail to receive the
award. Not removing the filters is bad enough, but it often goes hand-in-hand with other First
Amendment limitations, Bowen said. Those include schools not fully supporting complete
First Amendment expression for journalism students or for others, not allowing students to
make final decisions of all media content, applying prior review of student media content, and
punishment of students for speech outside school property. Usually, the attitude of those who
remove filters comes across more supportive of critical thinking by students and as inclined to
support student decision making and the responsibility for those decisions, Bowen said.
Not removing Internet filters for journalistic use can contribute to at least three other
educational issues, Bowen said.
Lack of trust in students. Not removing filters to enable information gathering and
verifying displays a mistrust in the students to do the right thing, and leads to students
potentially publishing incomplete information and stories. That not only affects student
learning about how journalism works, but it also leads to misinforming various
communitiesfrom students to adult votersabout factual information and balance.
Inability to exercise critical thinking. If students cannot explore all aspects of a story,
including all points of view of background, they are limited in their ability to learn and
to apply critical thinking skills to everyday situations. They can also begin to think that
certain information should not be available to them, or that authorities always have a
right to protect citizens from certain information.
Inability to question authority. If particular topics or views are not available or are
incomplete, students can neither fully evaluate them nor know enough about them to
protest them thoroughly.
FILTERING SOCIAL MEDIA SITES

Nothing in the CIPA guidelines indicates that certain types of sites must be blocked.
Schools frequently forbid use of social media sites on school computers, but staff at the
Federal Communications Commission told those at the Student Press Law Center (SPLC) that
this is not necessary to be CIPA-compliant. Sara Tirrito, a SPLC reporter, in an article on the
organizations Web site in November 2013, said that she received an e-mail from a spokesman
of the FCC, which said,
Although schools and libraries are free to block social media websites such as
Facebook, the FCC does not require schools and libraries to block these websites in
order to receive E-rate funds. Whether content other than the visual depictions
specifically mentioned in CIPAobscenity, pornography or those that are harmful to
minorsis inappropriate for and should not be accessible to minors is a decision left
to local school and library authorities.33
In a report and order released in 2011, the FCC wrote that Facebook and MySpace are not
per se harmful to minors Indeed, the U.S. Department of Education recently found that
social networking websites have the potential to support student learning.34
What does this mean to high school student journalists? Because social media undeniably
is part of todays commercial mainstream media, teachers want to be sure their students know
about it and can use it, too. Aaron Manfull, JEAs Digital Committee chair, said his journalism
students use Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, and Snapchat as ways to spread their
information. They have three Twitter accountstheir main account, one for live broadcasting,
and another to use as a text-messaging service for the community to get announcements/updates
sent to their phones. We have other social media that come and go but those are the ones in
active duty right now, Manfull said in an e-mail dated January 2, 2015.
Other schools are not as open to social media opportunities. Melissa Wantz, journalism
adviser at Foothill Technology High Schoolwhere the student publication is solely online
told Tirrito that her students also use Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr
accounts to augment their coverage, but they cant be used with the schools Internet, and
students must update them from home. Because social media has become a necessity in getting
the attention of readers who believe if the news is important enough, it will find them, Wantz
said, its frustrating to have those sites blocked.35
A POSSIBLE CHANGE IN SIGHT?

In his State of the Union message in 2014, President Barack Obama called for increasing
bandwidth in schools nationwide. Although, as the National Center for Education Statistics
showed, 98 percent of schools are online, these often do not use high-speed connections. The
day after President Obamas speech, a letter from a group of top CEOs went to Federal
Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler. It touted the good learning in schools
where
gigabit speeds are enabling one-to-one learning technologies that let students learn at
their own pace; two-way video that beams in experts and experiences from around the
globe; blended learning models that let teachers spend more time in small group
instruction; immersive learning games as engaging as the best video games; online
assessments that provide real-time feedback to address issues before students fall
behind; and collaboration tools that give parents daily access to their childrens
homework and grades.36
The letter, however, pointed out that nearly 40 million of Americas K12 students are
being left behind without the Internet access and Wi-Fi they need to take advantage of the
power of digital learning.37 The group then encouraged the FCC to
modernize, expand, and strengthen the successful E-rate program by: 1) focusing the E-
rate program on broadband connectivity and infrastructure to ensure that we maximize
the impact of E-rate on learning; 2) investing in upgrades, starting with the FCCs $2
billion E-rate down payment to connect every school to fiber and every classroom to
Wi-Fi; 3) improving the affordability of broadband for Americas schools by
maximizing competition and the broadband options available; and 4) increasing
transparency and accountability to reduce costs and improve efficiency by collecting
and releasing more data about existing network infrastructure, how funds are spent and
the prices paid by schools for their E-rate services.38
In February 2014, The Atlantic writer Abigail Walkhausen pointed out what else has to
happen to make such better Internet service worthwhile. In Schools Should Be Teaching Kids
How to Use the Internet Well, but Outdated Web Filters Make that Mission Quite Difficult,
she called for giving students better education about what it means to be citizens of the World
Wide Web in the 21st century. Integration of conscious social media use as well as policies
that provide more free and unfiltered Internet access are two ways of modeling best practices
and actively teaching Internet skills within schools.39 She cited widespread use of Internet
filters in schools as a barrier to accomplishing this, thanks to CIPA and its requirements.
Although in many cases adults can disable filters, the process is often complicated and
cannot be done easily for a class of students working on an assignment that requires
access to blogging platforms or other social media. In blocking harmful content,
commonly used software like Websense and AutoExec Admin limits access to much
important social media because of the difficulty of filtering explicit content from user
generated material.40
She reported that Karen Cator, education technology director at the U.S. Department of
Education said that Internet filters in schools have shut down wide swaths of the Internet, like
all of YouTube, for example. Or they may shut down anything that has anything to do with
social media, or anything that is a game. These broad filters arent actually very helpful,
because we need much more nuanced filtering.41
It also appears some things are changing. In fall 2013, the New York City Department of
Education released the #SoMeGuidelinesNYC, student social media guidelines. The first
bullet point of the introduction says,
The New York City Department of Education (DOE) works to provide all students with
access to an education that prepares them to succeed in college and careers. Part of
being a successful citizen is understanding that social media and digital communication
are essential parts of our world today. It is important to recognize that access to
information can result in tremendous advantages, but it can also create new
responsibilities of which students should be aware.42
Then the Federal Communications Commission apparently listened to the presidents

speech or read the letter from the CEOs. In July 2014, the group announced a modernized E-
rate program to expand Wi-Fi to 10 million more students through schools and libraries.
While e-rate over its 18-year life has succeeded in connecting virtually all schools and
libraries to the Internet, it is not currently geared for todays world of interactive,
individualized digital learning. By continuing to support broadband connectivity to the
building while significantly expanding support for robust Wi-Fi networks within
classrooms and libraries, the FCCs reforms can deliver the benefits of customized
learning to students over tablets and laptops and enable library patrons to fully
participate in todays digital world.43
In December 2014 the FCC announced the second E-rate modernization order, which
upped the spending cap to $3.9 million. This extends until 2019.44
Goodman said, The reality is Internet filters have a tortured history. Whether portrayed as
a godsend or a devil, they rarely have solved any problems without creating more. It should
become increasingly obvious whether an influx of funding for technology, more tech-savvy
students, and more enlightened educators can change the filtering landscape. Considering the
dramatic changes in the 20 years between 1994 and 2014, this might be entirely possible.
NOTES
1. Linda K. Colburn, Integrating Technology in Your Middle School Classroom: Some Hints from a Successful Process,
Reading Online (August 2000), accessed December 13, 2014, http://www.readingonline.org/electronic/elec_index.asp?
HREF=/electronic/colburn/index.html.
2. Tracy LaQuey Parker, The Internet and Schools: A Survey of Networking Activities, paper presented at Internet
Societys INET Conference, Prague, Czech Republic, June 1317, 1994.
3. Anne Cattagni and Elizabeth Farris Westat, Internet Access in Public Schools and Classrooms: 19942000, National
Center for Education Statistics: Statistics in Brief (May 2001), accessed December 19, 2014,
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/2001071.pdf.
4. Robert Cannon, The Legislative History of Senator Exons Communications Decency Act: Regulating Barbarians on the
Information Superhighway, Federal Communications Law Journal, November 1996, accessed December 19, 2014,
http://www.cybertelecom.org/cda/cannon2.htm.
5. Supreme Court Decision in Reno v. ACLU, et al., American Civil Liberties Web site (June 26, 1997), accessed
December 19, 2014, https://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/supreme-court-decision-reno-v-aclu-et-al
6. Potter Stewart Biography, The Oyez Project at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law, accessed December 19, 2014,
http://www.oyez.org/justices/potter_stewart.
7. ACLU Sends Supreme Court Passionate Defense of Free Speech in Cyberspace (press release) (February 20, 1997),
accessed December 13, 2014, https://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/aclu-sends-supreme-court-passionate-defense-free-
speech-cyberspace.
8. Candace Perkins Bowen, Journalism Education Association Affidavit in ACLU, et al. v. Reno (February 26, 1996),
accessed December 12, 2014, https://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/journalism-education-assoc-affidavit-aclu-et-al-v-
reno.
9. Perkins Bowen, Journalism Education Association Affidavit.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. ACLU v. Reno, The Oyez Project at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law, accessed December 20, 2014,
http://www.oyez.org/cases/1990-1999/1996/1996_96_511.
15. Comments Submitted to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, U.S. Department of
Commerce: Internet Protection Measures and Safety Policies, The Free Expression Policy Project (August 26, 2006),
accessed December 21, 2014. http://www.fepproject.org/whitePapers/ntiacomments.html.
16. Ibid.
17. Final Report of the COPA Commission (October 20, 2000), accessed December 26, 2014.
http://www.copacommission.org/report/filteringblocking.shtml.
18. Ibid.
19. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Childrens Internet Protection Act (updated December 31, 2014),
accessed January 2, 2015, http://www.fcc.gov/guides/childrens-internet-protection-act.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. About Filtering, OpenNet Initiative, accessed January 2, 2015. https://opennet.net/about-filtering.
23. Nancy Kranich, Why Filters Wont Protect Children or Adults, Library Administration & Management, 18, no. 1,
(2004): 14.
24. Joe Engardio, January 26, 2009, Internet Filters: Voluntary OK, Not Government Mandate, Blog of Rights, acceded
June 13, 2015, https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech-technology-and-liberty/internet-filters-voluntary-ok-not-government-
mandate.
25. Kranich, Why Filters Wont Protect, 16.
26. Victoria Rideout, Caroline Richardson, and Paul Resnick, See No Evil: How Internet Filters Affect the Search for
Online Health Information (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2002), 6.
27. Vicky Rideout, Internet Filters Block Valuable Data, Too, USA Today, August 5, 2003, 15A.
28. Ibid.
29. FCC, Childrens Internet Protection Act.
30. Kranich, Why Filters Wont Protect, 18.
31. The Daily Geek, 5 Ways to Access Blocked Websites, accessed January 2, 2015, http://thegeekdaily.com/top-5-ways-
to-access-blocked-websites/.
32. Nielsen, Ring the Bells: More Smartphones in Students Hands Ahead of Back-to-School Season (October 29, 2013),
accessed January 2, 2015, http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2013/ring-the-bells-more-smartphones-in-students-hands-
ahead-of-back.html.
33. Sara Tirrito, Student Journalists Work around Internet Filters to Reach Audiences, Student Press Law Center
(November 15, 2013), accessed December 19, 2014, http://www.splc.org/article/2013/11/student-journalists-work-around-
internet-filters-to-reach-audiences.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. EducationSuperHighway, Help Shape a Smarter E-rate, accessed January 3, 2015,
http://erate2.educationsuperhighway.org/.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Abigail Walthausen, Schools Should Be Teaching Kids How to Use the Internet Well, The Atlantic (February 14,
2014), accessed December 17, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/schools-should-be-teaching-kids-
how-to-use-the-internet-well/283807/.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. New York City Department of Education, #SoMeGuidelinesNYC (Fall 2013), accessed January 3, 2014,
http://schools.nyc.gov/NR/rdonlyres/9765B2DF-9BD5-42AA-8D85-
005D0FC8AA23/0/Student_Social_Media_Guidelines_final_20131223.pdf.
43. Federal Communications Commission, FCC Modernizes E-rate to Expand Robust Wi-Fi Networks in the Nations
Schools and Libraries (press release) (July 11, 2014), accessed December 30, 2014, http://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-
modernizes-e-rate-expand-robust-wi-fi-schools-libraries.
44. Federal Communications Commission, Modernizing E-Rate (updated December 22, 2014), accessed January 3, 2015,
http://www.fcc.gov/e-rate-update.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The American Civil Liberties Union. ACLU Sends Supreme Court Passionate Defense of Free Speech in Cyberspace (press
release) (February 20, 1997). Accessed December 13, 2014. https://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/aclu-sends-
supreme-court-passionate-defense-free-speech-cyberspace.
Bowen, Candace Perkins. Journalism Education Association Affidavit in ACLU et al. v. Reno (February 26, 1996). Accessed
December 12, 2014. https://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/journalism-education-assoc-affidavit-aclu-et-al-v-reno.
Cannon, Robert. The Legislative History of Senator Exons Communications Decency Act: Regulating Barbarians on the
Information Superhighway. Federal Communications Law Journal (November 1996). Accessed December 19, 2014.
http://www.cybertelecom.org/cda/cannon2.htm.
Cattagni, Anne, and Elizabeth Farris Westat. Internet Access in Public Schools and Classrooms: 19942000 (National Center
for Education Statistics: Statistics in Brief, May 2001). Accessed December 19, 2014.
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/2001071.pdf.
Colburn, Linda K. Integrating Technology in Your Middle School Classroom: Some Hints from a Successful Process.
Reading Online (August 2000). Accessed December 13, 2014. http://www.readingonline.org/electronic/elec_index.asp?
HREF=/electronic/colburn/index.html.
COPA Commission. Final Report of the COPA Commission (presented to Congress October 20, 2000). Accessed December
26, 2014. http://www.copacommission.org/report/filteringblocking.shtml.
The Daily Geek. 5 Ways to Access Blocked Websites. http://thegeekdaily.com/top-5-ways-to-access-blocked-websites/.
EducationSuperHighway. Help Shape a Smarter E-rate. Accessed January 3, 2015. http://erate2.educationsuperhighway.org/.
Engardio, Joe. Internet Filters: Voluntary OK, Not Government Mandate. Blog of Rights (January 26, 2009). Accessed June
13, 2015. https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech-technology-and-liberty/internet-filters-voluntary-ok-not-government-
mandate.
Federal Communications Commission. Childrens Internet Protection Act. (December 31, 2014). Accessed January 2, 2015.
http://www.fcc.gov/guides/childrens-internet-protection-act.
Federal Communications Commission. FCC Modernizes E-rate Program to Expand Robust Wi-Fi Networks in the Nations
Schools and Libraries (press release) (July 11, 2014). Accessed December 30, 2014. http://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-
modernizes-e-rate-expand-robust-wi-fi-schools-libraries.
Federal Communications Commission. Modernizing E-Rate (updated December 22, 2014). Accessed January 3, 2015.
http://www.fcc.gov/e-rate-update.
The Free Expression Policy Project. Comments Submitted to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration,
U.S. Department of Commerce: Internet Protection Measures and Safety Policies (August 26, 2006). Accessed
December 21, 2014. http://www.fepproject.org/whitePapers/ntiacomments.html.
Kranich, Nancy. Why Filters Wont Protect Children or Adults. Library Administration & Management 18, no. 1, (2004):
1418.
New York City Department of Education. SoMeGuidelinesNYC (Fall 2013). Accessed January 3, 2014.
http://schools.nyc.gov/NR/rdonlyres/9765B2DF-9BD5-42AA-8D85-
005D0FC8AA23/0/Student_Social_Media_Guidelines_final_20131223.pdf.
Nielsen. Ring the Bells: More Smartphones in Students Hands Ahead of Back-to-School Season (October 29, 2013).
Accessed January 2, 2015. http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2013/ring-the-bells-more-smartphones-in-students-
hands-ahead-of-back.html.
OpenNet Initiative. About Filtering. Accessed January 2, 2015. https://opennet.net/about-filtering.
The Oyez Project at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. ACLU v. Reno. Accessed December 20, 2014.
http://www.oyez.org/cases/1990-1999/1996/1996_96_511.
The Oyez Project at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. Potter Stewart Biography. Accessed December 19, 2014.
http://www.oyez.org/justices/potter_stewart.
Parker, Tracy LaQuey. The Internet and Schools: A Survey of Networking Activities Paper presented at Internet Societys
INET Conference, Prague, Czech Republic, June 1317, 1994.
Rideout, Vicky. Internet Filters Block Valuable Data, Too. USA Today (August 5, 2003).
Rideout, Victoria, Caroline Richardson, and Paul Resnick. See No Evil: How Internet Filters Affect the Search for Online
Health Information. Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Foundation, 2002.
Supreme Court Decision in Reno v. ACLU, et al. American Civil Liberties Union (Web site) (June 26, 1997). Accessed
December 19, 2014. https://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/supreme-court-decision-reno-v-aclu-et-al.
Tirrito, Sara. Student Journalists Work around Internet Filters to Reach Audiences. Student Press Law Center (November 15,
2013). Accessed December 19, 2014. http://www.splc.org/article/2013/11/student-journalists-work-around-internet-filters-to-
reach-audiences.
Walthausen, Abigail. Schools Should Be Teaching Kids How to Use the Internet Well. The Atlantic (February 14, 2014).
Accessed December 17, 2014. http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/schools-should-be-teaching-kids-how-
to-use-the-internet-well/283807/.
3
Bring the Hate: Problematic Internet Use

from Fans Toward Athletes
Jimmy Sanderson
Warning: This chapter contains graphic language that some readers could find
offensive.
The proliferation of Internet technology has produced many benefits for users. People now can
connect with family and friends across geographical and spatial barriers as well as selectively
self-present aspects of their identity that they perceive to be most salient.1 Additionally, the
Internet has opened up avenues for people to interact with those whom they might be unlikely
to encounter via face-to-face interaction. Moreover, with the advances of social media
technology, these connective capabilities are perhaps more pronounced than ever before.
Consider that, at the time of this writing, Facebook reports 864 million daily active users,
Twitter reports 284 million monthly active users with 500 million tweets sent per day, and
Instagram reports 300 million users who share more than 70 million photos and videos daily.2,
3, 4 The sheer number of users and the volume content that is generated on a daily basis is
astounding. As noted, there are many positive outcomes emanating from these technologies.
Nevertheless, the positive results represent only one side of the equation. There also exist a
diverse number of problematic behaviors that percolate the Internet and social media
experience. Some examples include cyberbullying, cybersexual harassment, and spreading
racist and misogynistic discourse.5, 6, 7, 8
Whereas these behaviors are most certainly problematic in any context, there is one domain
where they arguably occur with significant frequency and visibilitysport. To be sure,
inappropriate behaviors in sport developed well before advances in Internet technology.
Indeed, actions such as trash-talking, excessive alcohol consumption, and language grounded in
homophobic and misogynistic discourse almost seem to be part and parcel of the sport
experience.9, 10 Sport and Internet technologies have become increasingly intertwined,
however, particularly as athletes increasingly have adopted social media platforms, thereby
providing fans with digital access that often is easier to attain than face-to-face access.
Consequently, this has created some unique opportunities for fans, such as a Little League
player who tweeted Cincinnati Reds player Brandon Phillips and requested that Phillips attend
his Little League gamewhich Phillips did.11 In another case, during the 2011 National
Basketball Association (NBA) lockout, Oklahoma City Thunder player Kevin Durant sent out a
tweet asking whether there was a flag football game taking place in the Oklahoma City area.
He received a response from a fraternity member at Oklahoma State University informing him
that there was a flag football game occurring at the schooland Durant subsequently showed
up and participated in the game.12
Although these incidents are certainly memorable, they are coupled with what has become
a rising tide of problematic behavior directed at athletes by fans via social media.13, 14 After
the 201112 National Football Conference Championship game, for example, San Francisco
49ers player Kyle Williamswho had several miscues during the gamereceived death
threats from fans via Twitter.15 Such messages unfortunately are no less common in
intercollegiate athletics, particularly football and most notably for placekickers. Consider the
case of University of Missouri kicker Andrew Baggett who, after missing a field goal that
would have sent Missouris game against the University of South Carolina into overtime,
received messages via Twitter that included, @ABaggett99 go kill yourself everyone in
Missouri hates you; and @ABaggett99, you fucking suck.16 Athletes family members are
not spared from this behavior either. In one illuminating example, after Los Angeles Lakers
player Steve Blake missed a game-winning shot in a 2012 playoff game against the Oklahoma
City Thunder, fans began tweeting hateful messages to his wife, Kristen, one of which
included, I hope your family gets murdered.17
Given the intensity and vitriolic nature of these messages, it is important to investigate this
growing trend. In that vein, this chapter addresses the emergence of Internet and social media
technologies in sport and discusses how the confluence of these two constructs has contributed
to these behaviors. The chapter then discusses relevant research that has been done in this area,
including the theoretical frameworks that have been utilized to explain this behavior. The
chapter concludes with a discussion of ways that scholars can advance this line of research
and how sport organization personnel can work with athletes to assist them when they are the
recipients of such messages.
THE PROLIFERATION OF THE INTERNET AND SOCIAL MEDIA IN

SPORT
In the early stages of the Internet, sport organizations and sport media outlets developed
Web pages where fans could peruse exceptional amounts of information.18, 19 The emergence of
message boards and discussion forumsincluding those operated by sport media organizations
such as ESPNwherein fans could discuss sport at their convenience with others across the
globe was a significant development as well.20, 21, 22 As Web technologies evolved into
platforms built on user-generated content technology, such as Wikipedia, fans were given the
ability to construct and contest the reputation of teams and the legacies of athletes.23 Certainly
these developments gave fans opportunities to collectively demonstrate culture, and to contest
information disseminated by sport organizations.24, 25 Social media technology, however
with its capabilities to broadcast ones thoughts at any time and to interact and connect in real
time with othershas mushroomed the relationship between sport and social in a very short
period.
In the contemporary sport landscape, essentially every professional sport organization
operates at least one social media account, as do most amateur organizations, particularly in
the realm of North American intercollegiate athletics. Prominent athletes such as Lance
Armstrong, Curt Schilling, and Shaquille O Neal were early adopters of social media
technology, which has contributed to fans flocking to social media platforms to obtain
messages directly from athletes.26 As the number of athletes who have adopted social media
has increased, fans are subjected to more aspects of an athletes personality (e.g., music
preferences, restaurant preferences) a leveling (or seeing athletes more like them) that might
contribute to fans perception that sending hateful messages to athletes is an acceptable action.
Sanderson, for instance, discussed how Twitter enabled rookie athletes entering Major
League Baseball (MLB), the National Basketball Association (NBA), the National Football
League (NFL), and the National Hockey League (NHL) to showcase both more of their
personality and their dedication to the sport (e.g., through posting pictures of their workout
routines).27 Sanderson also noted that these particular athletes frequently solicited information
from fans (e.g., restaurant and movie recommendations), which cultivated a sense of closeness
that was difficult for fans to obtain through face-to-face interaction, as those opportunities with
athletes are greatly limited.
Thus, when fans see athletes display more diverse identities (Sanderson 2014) and engage
in communication with athletes, this prompts perceptions that the athlete is similar to them,
perhaps leading fans to perceive that firing off messages to athletes via social media platforms
at the fans convenience is a normal behavior. Whereas these interactions take place across a
variety of platforms, the predominant forum for engagement between athletes and fans is
Twitter. Twitter seems to be the social media platform of choice for athletes and the real-
time interaction is more central to Twitter than it is to other platforms, such as Facebook and
Instagram.28, 29 This real-time component coupled with the emotionality that accompanies many
sporting events makes it quite convenient for fans to simply pick up their mobile device
Twitter reports that 80% of its users are on mobile devicesand tweet a message directly to
an athlete, without processing whether such an action is appropriate or warranted.30 Moreover,
some research suggests that athletes predominantly use Twitter via their mobile devices,
making it difficult for sport organization personnel to monitor and regulate the messages that
athletes send out.31
Although it certainly can be enabling for athletes to send messages directly to fans without
the filtering of team personnel and sport journalists, this autonomy also can lead to pushback
and vitriolic reactions from fans. In May 2011, for example, after the death of Osama bin
Laden was publicly announced, Pittsburgh Steelers player Rashard Mendenhall sent out
several tweets questioning the public celebration over Bin Ladens death, and which also
seemed to speculate that the September 11, 2011, terrorist attacks were a conspiracy.32 As a
result, both Medenhall and the Steelers received significant backlash and Mendenhall lost an
endorsement deal with Champion apparel. In another case, in 2009, Kansas City Chiefs player
Larry Johnson sent out tweets questioning head coach Todd Haleys qualifications, which
resulted in criticism from fans toward Johnson for going public with such a critique. Johnson
subsequently responded using a homosexual-related slur and was suspended and fined
$213,000.33
The capabilities that social media provides to athletes suggest that their adoption of these
technologies is not an anomaly or a fad and the same can be said of social media use by fans
and sports information consumers. It is unrealistic to think that a significant portion of athletes
or fans will stop using these platforms. Thus, it is imperative for researchers to investigate
such problematic behavior of fans toward athletes via social media platforms and the ways that
athletes deal with such behavior, and also to propose recommendations for sport organization
personnel that will help them assist athletes in dealing with this trend. Work undertaken to
better understand this phenomenon and this research is the subject of the following section.
FANS AND HATEFUL MESSAGES TO ATHLETES: A RESEARCH

SYNTHESIS
Hateful and vitriolic messages and other forms of incivility unfortunately are not an
uncommon characteristic of online communication.34, 35 Whether considered flaming,
trolling, or another descriptive, this behavior has escalated in the sport context. As noted,
such behavior certainly has a history in sport, but the ability of fans to directly express these
sentiments to athletes has been limited to those sitting in close proximity to athletes, those who
have chance encounters with them, or those who go to extreme measuressuch as the Houston
Texans fan who repeatedly drove past quarterback Matt Schaubs residence after he had a
subpar game during the 2013 NFL season.36 These barriers, however, are significantly
lessened through the digital access that is afforded to fans through athletes social media usage.
Additionally, because some athletes have a habit of soliciting information from fans, this could
escalate perceptions of similarity and, consequently, of fans perceiving that sending messages
to athletes is an action that athletes expect.37, 38
Whereas incidents of hateful messages directed by fans toward athletes have surged with
the proliferation and integration of social media in sport, the literature on this subject still is
somewhat sparse. One of the first efforts to investigate this behavior was Sandersons study of
MLB player Curt Schilling.39 Schilling was an early adopter of blogging and was prolific in
posting updates to his blog (38pitches.com). Using parasocial interaction as a guiding
framework, Sanderson investigated expressions of parasocial interaction for inflammatory
comments Schilling made about fellow player Barry Bonds during a radio appearance.40
Sanderson noted that, although there were positive expressions of parasocial interaction, also
present was criticism that centered on Schillings propensity to speak candidly; his overt
professions of Christianity; and his public support for the Republican Party (GOP) and (then)
President George W. Bush.41 Examples of these critical messages include, You are nothing but
a media whore, have been forever, and will continue to be one; by the way where was that
great faith in God and all the rest when you were dropping the F bomb after Arod took you
deep (the first time)?; and the following:
Youve got the blood of 3373 and (counting) decent, dead American soldiers on your
hands through your shilling for George Bush and Dick Cheney and their useless war.
These deaths and those tens of thousands of other innocents in this war are what you
should be talking about, not some silly news report about a bloody sock. Shame on you.
Have some integrity and Christian decency and admit you made a mistake. Gary Thorne
sure did. Apologize to the families who suffer their loss quietly. Jesus will forgive
you.42, 43, 44
Based on these results, Sanderson suggested that parasocial interaction should encompass
negative relational behaviors in addition to the prosocial behaviors that predominantly were
studied in the literature.45 The findings of this research are noteworthy, as the criticism of
Schilling was centered on issues that were not related to his athletic performance. With media
attention centering more intently on athletes private lives in addition to their exploits in the
competitive arena, the Internet and social media offer an avenue for fans to express contempt
for athletes private decisions. In Schillings case, many of these criticisms might have
stemmed from him going on the offensive and making the case via his blog, whereas there
might have been fewer critics had Schilling not offered these comments on a public platform.
Nevertheless, like Schilling, many athletes choose to express their views via digital channels,
and this facilitates criticism and resistance from fansan outcome that also is discussed in the
concluding section of this chapter.46
Whereas Sanderson suggested that future research should more substantially investigate the
dark side of parasocial interaction, few efforts have traversed in that direction.47 Kassing
and Sandersonnoting the increase in problematic behavior from fans to athletes through
social media channelscoined the term maladaptive parasocial interaction to capture this
behavior.48 They noted one particular case involving New York Giants player Steve Smith that
began after Smith posted an update on his Facebook page announcing that he had signed a
contract with the Philadelphia Eagles. In the announcement, Smith thanked Giants fans for their
support. His post drew more than 5,000 comments, many of which were very hateful including,
for example, ur terrible I hate u u were my favorite receiver on the g-men now i hate u go get
hurt again in philly; and youre an idiot i hate you, hope you have a career ending injury, we
wont miss you. Although it is understandable that fans would be upset at a player voluntarily
leaving to join another team, these expressions illustrate the problems that can arise when a
person invests much of their identity and self-esteem in the performance of sport teams.
Nevertheless, sport fandom is an essential identity component for many people, and it is
not surprising that people would seek to satisfy their belonging needs by affiliating with a sport
team.49 In accordance with social identity theory (SIT) people maintain both individual and
social identities, and social identities often are derived from group membership.50, 51 Group
membership is valued and often is a source of self-esteem that contributes to group members
perceiving that they are better than a member of a different out-group.52 When social
identity is threatened, it can prompt group members to feel vulnerable and insecure. Thus, for
fans who are strongly identified with sport teams, when an athlete who is seen as key player
voluntarily decides to join another team, this plausibly creates a stigma for some fans as they
interpret the athlete essentially declaring that the group (team) is not good enough and that
they have found a more satisfactory group elsewhere. When this occurs, as in the case of Steve
Smith, fans utilize social media to send hateful messages to athletes. This behavior essentially
functions as a way to mitigate the social-identity threat.53
These responses, however, are not solely limited to situations when an athlete voluntarily
leaves a team. At times, a fan might hold a team member (group member) accountable for the
social-identity threat and respond accordingly. One notable athlete group in which this has
occurred is college football placekickers. College football fans often very strongly identify
with the football team.54, 55 Therefore, when a team loses a gameparticularly if the loss was
close and involved a missed field-goal attemptvia Twitter kickers often are the recipients of
vitriol from fans, regardless of other factors that might have influenced the games outcome. As
discussed in the case of the University of Missouri kicker, Andrew Baggett, although the
messages he received were problematic, they seemingly pale in comparison to those received
by University of Alabama kicker Cade Foster after a 2013 rivalry game that Alabama lost to
Auburn University.
Sanderson and Truax extended Kassing and Sandersons notion of maladaptive parasocial
interaction by examining tweets that were directed toward Foster in the period from the start of
the Auburn game to 24 hours after.56, 57 During the game Foster struggled, missing three field
goal attempts. Near the end of game, Alabama head coach elected to replace Foster with back-
up kicker Adam Griffith. Griffith missed what would have been the game-winning field goal
attempt, and the ball was returned for a touchdown scored by Auburn player Chris Davis. This
ended the game in very dramatic fashion.
Sanderson and Truax collected tweets that mentioned Foster directly (@Foster_43) and in
the specified 24-hour period found 12,311 tweets that directly mentioned Foster. Using a
systematic sample, they found that maladaptive parasocial interaction manifested in four ways:
belittling; mocking; sarcasm; and threats. To illustrate, examples of belittling included,
@Foster_43 I hate you man! This is all your fault! If you would have made at least one field
goal this would be over! I hope you break your leg! and @Foster_43 YOU LOST US THE
GAME! You suck.58 Mocking consisted of comments such as, @Foster_43 Better stay 4
years and get that degree, your obviously not getting drafted; and @Foster_43 tried to hang
himself but he couldnt kick the chair from under him.59 Sarcasm was conveyed through
expressions such as, @Foster_43 congrats on the great game dude! and @Foster_43 youre
awesome, just awesome.60 Whereas these comments were troubling, they were dwarfed by
the vitriolic nature of the threats communicated to Foster. For example, @Foster_43 hey kill
yourself. Seriously. Do it; @Foster_43 YOU FUCKING SUCK BITCH YOU COST US A
FUCKING NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP I HOPE YOUR MOM GETS RAPED BY A
BLACK MAN FUCK YOUR FAMILY; and @Foster_43 you should kill yourself you piece
of shit.61
The hostile and inflammatory language underpinning these tweets is certainly problematic.
However, Sanderson and Truax discovered a silver lining in their data, as fans
overwhelmingly expressed support for Foster and lambasted those who were sending the
hateful messages.62 Examples here included, @Foster_43 you dont deserve all the hate
youre getting. True fans dont say things like that. Much love. #RollTide; and @Foster_43
We love you man! Sorry to hear about the threats. This Alabama fan stands with you! The
others arent true Bama fans. Roll Tide.63 Sanderson and Truax noted that fans might advocate
on behalf of athletes who are being targeted with hateful tweets, and collectively, these
supportive fans could ensure that hateful messages decrease or are eliminated altogether.
Interestingly, they also observed that the athletes Twitter account might serve as a venue to
contest the meaning of what it means to be a true fan. In their research, Sanderson and Truax
found that fan responses overwhelmingly suggested that the hateful messages were
inappropriate and evidence of inauthentic Alabama fandom. Although these supportive
messages comprised the majority of their data, the nature of the hateful messages is
illuminating and even if Foster read only a fraction of them, the possibility for psychological
problems to arise from viewing such messages is a viable question with which athletes and
those who supervise and advise them must be concerned.64
Considering the vast number of messages that Foster received in such a short period, it is
imperative to examine how athletes respond to the negativity they receive via Twitter.
Browning and Sanderson interviewed 20 Division I athletes to better understand how they
processed and dealt with these messages.65 One notable finding in the research was that the
athletes in the sample paid a lot of attention to what was being said about them on Twitter, with
some even acknowledging that they checked Twitter during halftime of games to see the
conversation around their name. With respect to how they interpreted these messages, the
researchers found that athletes used a variety of strategies. Some indicated that the tweets had
no effect on them and stated that they ignored critical tweets. Others acknowledged that they
read them but stated that they had no effect on them, although some reported that they had
initially responded to those sending criticism, but were reprimanded for doing so, and
accordingly learned to view the messages but not act upon them, other than letting them serve
as motivation to perform better. Finally, others acknowledged that the critical messages did
take a toll, and that it was deflating to continually receive criticism and they wondered what
would prompt a person to send them a message of that nature. They also noted that there were
several individuals who they would block, but who would then create new identities and
accounts and continue to harass the athletes, suggesting that the resources Twitter provided
were ineffectual in their efforts to combat abusive behavior.
Although athletes varied in their responses to critical tweets by either not responding,
viewing but not responding, or using them as motivation to improve, some athletes noted that
they had taken countermeasures to deal with this behavior. Specifically, some athletes revealed
that they sub-tweeted (a process wherein a person uses the designation OOF [One of my
followers]) so as to not reveal the identity of the person she or he was tweeting about. This
enabled them to express sentiments without directly identifying the target, thereby avoiding
censure. Others indicated that they simply re-tweeted the message, and supportive fans banded
together and attacked the person sending the hateful message. This strategy again avoided
direct accountability and conveniently outsourced the problem to fans who were more than
willing to come to the athletes defense.
Although each of these studies offers an important contribution, they provide only a very
small segment of the potential research literature on this compelling topic. The vast number of
social media users and the popularity of sport suggest that this behavior is not going to be
something that can simply be ignored while waiting for another issue to take its place. Indeed,
although it is problematic that these messages occur and are directed toward professional
athletes, that these messages are directed at amateur athletesincluding highly touted high
school athletes whose college commitment process is under a microscopeas well as the
family members of athletes being targeted suggest the importance of better understanding this
area of research. Thus, the final section of this chapter outlines directions for future research as
well as implications for industry practitioners.
FANS AND HATEFUL MESSAGES: FUTURE DIRECTIONS AND

IMPLICATIONS
When the issue of athletes receiving problematic messages via social media is discussed,
one of the popular retorts is that athletes should simply stop using the platforms. Although this
might be appropriate for some athletes, it is unreasonable to expect this to occur en masse
given how embedded social media is across society, particularly for teenagers. Moreover, this
strips athletes of the benefits that can be derived from using social media, and places little
accountability on those who construct and disseminate such messages. One important area that
future research can examine is the effects that these messages have on athletes. Although
Browning and Sanderson did uncover some ways that athletes responded to criticism via
Twitter, they had a limited sample size. It would be important to understand the effects of these
messages across a wider group of athletes, both professional and amateur, and across other
social media channels.66 Certainly, some athletes might be reluctant to admit that these
messages bother themas athletes are expected to eliminate distractionsyet the content of
some of these tweets makes that a difficult undertaking.
One writer, for example, chronicled tweets sent to NFL players that included,
3 INTERCEIPTIONS ELI IM GOING TO KILL YOU! I HATE YOU RIGHT NOW I

JUST CANT BELIEVE IT! at first I wanted to stab you now [icon of gun] imanning;
DONT COME TO PRACTICE WEDNESDAY I PROMISE YOU BULLETS
EVERYWHERE @Mark_Sanchez; and
Gatorboyrb FULFILL MY ORDERS STATED IN THE PREVIOUS TWEET OR
THAT YOUR LIFE BRUH AND IM NOT PLAYING.67
Whereas some of the hateful messages athletes receive can be attributed to impulsive,
emotional reactions, tweets of this and similar natures raise questions about athletes safety
and well-being and about potential criminal liability for fans who disseminate such messages.
In the United States there has been little action legal action taken against people who send
these messages. Internationally, in one case in 2012, police in the United Kingdom detained a
teenager who was sending hostile tweets to swimmer Tom Daley. The teen ultimately was
given a harassment warning and released.68
Admittedly, it might be difficult to identify the people behind these messages; many operate
using anonymous usernames and it can be a bureaucratic process to work with social media
providers to uncover the identities of those behind malicious messages. In December 2014,
however, Twitter released new anti-harassment tools and indicated that they would increase
response times for dealing with online abuse.69 Although this is a promising development, it
seems important that those who work with athletesespecially younger athletes and those who
are not professionalsto ensure that athletes who receive such messages feel safe and have
resources available to them to ameliorate the issue. This could include involving law
enforcement or team security personnel, or might include simply inquiring about the athletes
well-being. In any event, making sure that this issue is dealt withrather than ignoredwill
help to ensure that athletes avoid any harmful outcomes and have the resources needed to help
them cope with being targeted.
A second direction for researchers to address is to investigate hateful messages that are
directed to other team personnel and family members. As noted in this chapter, family members
are not exempt from the wrath of fans; neither are coaches, general managers, and other team
employees. In one study, Sanderson explored a Facebook group entitled Get out of our City
Brian Kelly after Kelly left his post as the head football coach at the University of Cincinnati
to become the head football coach at the University of Notre Dame.70 Utilizing social identity
theory, Sanderson examined how fans used this Facebook group to mitigate the social-identity
threat arising from Kellys voluntary departure. Sanderson discovered that fans invoked
malicious and threatening language that included people championing those who had
vandalized Kellys property, people threatening to burn down Kellys house, and people
invoking Kelly with a barrage of homophobic and misogynistic slurs. Again, there could be
safety issues that arise and warrant the attention of team security and potentially involve law
enforcement.
A third direction for future research to investigate centers on the cultural constructs
underpinning these messages and behaviors. Kassing and Sanderson noted that much of the
hostile communication emanating from fans to athletes via social media was underpinned by
hypermasculinity and cloaked with homophobic and misogynistic discourse.71 One compelling
example of this characteristic occurred in November 2014, prior to an NFL game between the
Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers. Chloe Trestman, the daughter of (then) Bears head
coach Marc Trestman, tweeted a picture of a cheese grater (a play on the popular moniker for
Packers fansCheeseheads). In response, Chloe was bombarded with a litany of hateful
tweets that included, youre dads a faggot; and dont let me catch you walking alone.72
Researchers could work on the other side of the equation and survey fans to determine the
motivations for sending these types of messages and investigate what specifically prompts fans
to engage in this behavior. Additionally, researchers could utilize a critical lens to learn how
this discourse reinforces sport ideology that privileges masculinity and heterosexuality, further
marginalizing those who do not conform to those norms.
For those working in the sport industry, in addition to being aware of this behavior and
providing resources to athletes, one important avenue to pursue is social media education.
Particularly with younger people who still might be cultivating social media habits, it is
important to educate them about the realities of this behavior, let them know that the
organization or association does not tolerate the behavior, and to inform them of how they can
obtain assistance in dealing with these matters. At present, research suggests that, at least for
college athletes, social media education often is nonexistent. When it does occur, it only is to
inform athletes of what they cannot do on the platforms and includes little discussion of how
the platforms can be used in strategic and responsible manners.73 Yet research also suggests
that, at the intercollegiate level, athletes perceive that social media education is important and
would welcome such curriculum.74 Making education a priority will help sport organization
personnel take a proactive approach in dealing with social media and harnessing its power.
In conclusion, social media is a complex phenomenon that is evolving rapidly and will
only grow further entrenched in sport. It is crucial that researchers and practitioners are aware
of the trends occurring in these digital spheres, and work collaboratively to illuminate an
understanding of hateful messages directed at athletes and help athletes cope with being the
recipients of these messages. This is a daunting yet exciting task, as social media continues to
impact and influence more facets of social life and interaction.
NOTES
2. Facebook, Company Info, December 29, 2014, http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/.
3. About Twitter, Inc., December 29, 2014, https://about.twitter.com/company.
4. Instagram, 300 Million: Sharing Real Moments, December 29, 2014,
http://blog.instagram.com/post/104847837897/141210-300million.
5. Anthony J. Roberto, Jen Eden, Matthew W. Savage, Leslie Ramos-Salazar, and Douglas M. Deiss, Outcome Evaluation
of School-Based Cybersafety Promotion and Cyberbullying Prevention Intervention for Middle School Students, Health
6. Barbara A. Ritter, Deviant Behavior in Computer-Mediated Communication: Development and Validation of a Measure
of Cybersexual Harassment, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19 (2014): 197214.
7. Jamie Cleland, Racism, Football Fans, and Online Message Boards: How Social Media Has Added a New Dimension to
Racist Discourse in English Football, Journal of Sport & Social Issues 38 (2014): 41531.
8. Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Megan M. Wood, Posting Racism and Sexism: Authenticity, Agency, and Self-Reflexivity in
Social Media, Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 11 (2014): 28287.
9. Kirk L. Wakefield and Daniel L. Wann, An Examination of Dysfunctional Sports Fans: Method of Classification and
Relationships with Problem Behaviors, Journal of Leisure Research 38 (2006): 16886.
10. Kenneth S. Zagacki and Dan Grano, Radio Sports Talk and the Fantasies of Sport, Critical Studies in Media
11. Amy K. Nelson, Brandon Phillips: #adifferentidentity, ESPN.com (Bristol, CT), June 16, 2011,
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/otl/news/story?id=6665894.
12. Barry Petchesky, When You Invite Kevin Durant to Play Intramural Flag Football, He Might Just Show Up,
Deadspin.com (New York), November 1, 2011, http://deadspin.com/5855180/when-you-invite-kevin-durant-to-play-intramural-
flag-football-he-might-just-show-up.
13. Jeffrey W. Kassing and Jimmy Sanderson (Forthcoming), Playing in the New Media Game or Riding the Virtual Bench:
Confirming and Disconfirming Membership in the Community of Sport, Journal of Sport & Social Issues.
14. Jimmy Sanderson and Carrie Truax, I Hate You Man!: Exploring Maladaptive Parasocial Interaction Expressions to
College Athletes Via Twitter, Journal of Issues in Intercollegiate Athletics 7 (2014): 33351.
15. Doug Padilla, Kyle Williams Threatened after Game ESPNChicago.com (Chicago, IL), January 23, 2012,
http://espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs/2011/story/_/id/7493708/2012-nfl-playoffs-san-francisco-49ers-kyle-williams-received-death-
threats.
16. Ben Cornfield, Twitter Takes: Fans Shred Andrew Baggett after Missed Field Goal Costs Mizzou, Gamedayr.com
(Tampa, FL), October 27, 2013, http://gamedayr.com/sports/twitter-andrew-baggett-mizzou-missed-field-goal/.
17. Dave McMenamin, Steve Blake, Wife Get Hate Tweets, ESPNLosAngeles.com (Los Angeles, CA), May 18, 2012,
http://espn.go.com/los-angles/nba/story/_/id/7943732/steve-blake-los-angeles-lakers-wife-receive-threats-twitter.
18. Catherine Palmer and Kirrilly Thompson, The Paradoxes of Football Spectatorship: On-field and Online Expressions of
Social Capital among the Grog Squad, Sociology of Sport Journal 24 (2007): 187205.
19. Hur Youngin, Jae Ko Yong, and Joseph Valacich, Motivation and Concerns for Online Sport Consumption, Journal of
Sport Management 21 (2007): 52139.
20. Galen Clavio, Demographics and Usage Profiles of Users of College Sports Message Boards, International Journal
of Sport Communication 1 (2008): 43443.
21. Jon J. Dart, Blogging the 2006 FIFA World Cup Finals, Sociology of Sport Journal 26 (2009): 10726.
22. Jimmy Sanderson, Weighing in on the Coaching Decision: Discussing Sports and Race Online, Journal of Language
and Social Psychology 29 (2010): 30120.
23. Meghan M. Ferriter, Arguably the Greatest: Sports Fans and Communities at Work on Wikipedia, Sociology of
Sport Journal 26 (2009): 12754.
24. Mark Norman, Online Community or Electronic Tribe? Exploring the Social Characteristics and Spatial Production of
an Internet Hockey Fan Culture, Journal of Sport & Social Issues 38 (2014): 395414.
25. Darcy C. Plymire, The Wiki Defense: Contesting the Status of Knowledge in the Floyd Landis Doping Case,
International Journal of Sport Communication 1 (2008): 30719.
2011).
28. Blair Browning and Jimmy Sanderson, The Positives and Negatives of Twitter: Exploring How Student-Athletes Use
Twitter and Respond to Critical Tweets, International Journal of Sport Communication 5 (2012): 50321.
29. Jimmy Sanderson and Jeffrey W. Kassing, Tweets and Blogs: Transformative, Adversarial, and Integrative
Developments in Sports Media, in Sports Media: Transformation, Integration, Consumption, edited by Andrew C. Billings
(New York: Routledge, 2011).
30. Twitter, About Twitter, Inc., https://about.twitter.com/company, accessed on December 29, 2014.
31. Browning and Sanderson, The Positives and Negatives of Twitter (2012).
32. Dan Pompei, Mendenhalls Tweets Draw Criticism, Chicago Tribune (Chicago, IL) (May 3, 2011),
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-05-03/sports/ct-spt-0504-rashard-mendenhall-osama-20110503_1_tweet-rashard-
mendenhall-twitter-comments.
33. Adam Ostrow, The Cost of Larry Johnsons Gay Slur on Twitter: $213,000, Mashable.com (New York) (October 28,
2009), http://mashable.com/2009/10/28/larry-johnson-gay-slur-twitter/.
34. Amy Binns, Dont Feed the Trolls! Journalism Practice 6 (2012): 54762.
35. Jay D. Hmielowski, Myiah J. Hutchens, and Vincent J. Cicchirillo, Living in an Age of Online Incivility: Examining the
Conditional Indirect Effects of Online Discussion on Political Flaming, Information, Communication & Society 17 (2014):
1196211.
36. ESPN, NFL Security Eyes Schaub Incident, accessed December 29, 2014,
http://espn.go.com//nfl/story/_/id/9795996/nfl-eyes-fan-incident-home-matt-schaub-houston-texans.
2011).
39. Jimmy Sanderson, You Are the Type of Person that Children Should Look Up to As a Hero: Parasocial Interaction on
38pitches.com, International Journal of Sport Communication 1 (2008): 33760.
40. Donald Horton and Richard R. Wohl, Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction, Psychiatry 19 (1956): 215
29.
41. Sanderson, You Are the Type of Person that Children Should Look Up to As a Hero (2008).
42. Ibid., 350.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., 351.
45. Ibid.
46. Annelie Schmittel and Jimmy Sanderson (Forthcoming), Talking about Trayvon in 140 Characters: Exploring NFL
Players Tweets about the George Zimmerman Verdict, Journal of Sport & Social Issues.
47. Sanderson, You Are the Type of Person that Children Should Look Up to As a Hero (2008).
48. Kassing and Sanderson, Tweets and Blogs: Transformative, Adversarial, and Integrative Developments in Sports
Media (2011).
49. Daniel L. Wann, Joel Royalty, and Angie Roberts, The Self-Presentation of Sport Fans: Investigating the Performance
of Team Identification and Self-Esteem, Journal of Sport Behavior 23 (2000): 198206.
50. Henri Tajfel and John Turner, Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior, in Psychology of Intergroup Relations,
2nd ed., edited by Stephen Worchel and William G. Austin (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1986).
51. John Turner, Towards a Cognitive Redefinition of the Social Group, Self, Identity, and Intergroup relations, edited
by Henri Tajfel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
52. John Turner, Social Comparisons and Social Identity: Some Prospects for Intergroup Behavior, European Journal of
Social Psychology 5 (1975): 534.
53. Jimmy Sanderson, From Loving the Hero to Despising the Villain: Exploring Sports Fans Social Identity Management
on Facebook, Mass Communication and Society 16 (2013): 487509.
54. Todd Vernon Lewis, Religious Rhetoric in Southern College Football: New Uses for Religious Metaphors, Southern
Communication Journal 78 (2013): 20214.
55. Rachel A. Smith and Norbert Schwarz, Language, Social Comparison, and College Football: Is Your School Less
Similar to the Rival School than the Rival School Is to Your School? Communication Monographs 70 (2003): 35160.
56. Jimmy Sanderson and Carrie Truax, I Hate You Man!: Exploring Maladaptive Parasocial Interaction Expressions to
College Athletes Via Twitter, Journal of Issues in Intercollegiate Athletics 7 (2014): 33351.
57. Kassing and Sanderson, Tweets and Blogs: Transformative, Adversarial, and Integrative Developments in Sports
Media (2011).
58. Sanderson and Truax, I hate you man! at 340.
59. Ibid., 341.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 34142.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., 342.
64. Eric Olsen, Players Can Struggle When Heckling Turns to Hate, Associated Press (Omaha, Nebraska) (October 29,
2013), accessed June 13, 2015, http://sports.yahoo.com/news/players-struggle-heckling-turns-hate-190735810--ncaaf.html.
65. Browning and Sanderson, The Positives and Negatives of Twitter (2012).
66. Ibid.
67. Ebenezer Samuel, Death Threats and Vile Hate Are Price Athletes Pay to Reach Fans and Promote Their Brand on
Twitter, New York Daily News (New York) (November 2, 2013), accessed June 13, 2015,
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/athletes-bitter-tweet-article-1.1504795.
68. Paisley Dodds, Tom Daley Twitter Controversy: UK Police Arrest Teen over Malicious Tweets Directed at Olympic
Diver, Huffingtonpost.com (New York) (July 31, 2012), accessed June 13, 2015,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/31/tom-daley-twitter-police-olympic-diver_n_1722739.html.
69. Sarah Perez, Twitter Releases New Suite of Anti-Harassment Tools, Promises Faster Response Times for Dealing
with Abuse, Techcrunch.com (San Francisco, CA) (December 2, 2014), http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/02/twitter-releases-
new-suite-of-anti-harassment-tools-promises-faster-response-times/.
70. Jimmy Sanderson, From Loving the Hero to Despising the Villain: Exploring Fans Social Identity Management on
Facebook, Mass Communication and Society 16 (2013): 487509.
71. Jeffrey W. Kassing and Jimmy Sanderson, Playing in the New Media Game or Riding the Virtual Bench: Confirming
and Disconfirming Membership in the Community of Sport, Journal of Sport & Social Issues (forthcoming).
72. Samer Kalaf, Twitter Users Harass Marc Trestmans Daughters after Bears Loss, Deadspin.com (New York)
(November 10, 2014), accessed June 13, 2015, http://deadspin.com/twitter-users-harass-marc-trestmans-daughters-after-bea-
1657009542.
73. Jimmy Sanderson and Blair Browning, Training Versus Monitoring: A Qualitative Examination of Athletic Department
Practices Regarding Student-Athletes and Twitter, Qualitative Research Reports in Communication 14 (2013): 10511.
74. Jimmy Sanderson, Blair Browning, and Annelie Schmittel, Education on the Digital Terrain.
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4
Uploading Ideology: Reading Egyptian

Social Capital Using Facebook Lenses
Alamira Samah Farag Abd-Elfattah Saleh and Nermeen N.
Alazrak
INTRODUCTION
Beginning about four years ago, Facebook became an equivalent partner of the Egyptian
revolution helping in the sweeping political collective movement; it helped in the deep and
severe struggle between the people and security forces, a situation that has left the country with
a massive security gap. This security gap made way for a very significant phenomenon
occurring all over Egypt and known as Popular Defense Committees. The Popular Defense
Committees were like clear mirrors, reflecting the ties that brought together inhabitants of
every neighborhood to collectively protect themselves, their families, their neighbors, and their
properties. Half of all Egyptians who are age 24 or younger have been characterized as being
extraordinarily resilient and closely connected in voluntary communities created using social
networking sites (SNS), particularly Facebook. Thus, SNS helped to consolidate the stock of
Egyptian social capital.
The groups and pages of the Islamic and secular parties (before and after June 30, 2013),
specifically target and attack each other electronically in a reflection of the on-the-ground
social and political mobility and severe polarization. Roots of the social polarization date
back to the very beginning of the January 25, 2011, revolution when a faction of the Egyptians
denied the calls for toppling the old regime of Mubarak made by the massive protests against
him. Gradually, many different heterogeneous political sects clashed on the ground and also by
exploiting social media. These sects are divided into those who support or belong to
The Muslim brotherhood,

The oldest regime or Mubaraks regime,
The military,
The secularist opposition (which is represented by a number of activists such as Al-
Baradi, who actually stopped his political tweets and disappeared from the Egyptian
political scene),
Traditional organs, especially the Al-Wafd Delegation as a traditional wing in the
Egyptian opposition, and
Those who support Hamdain Sabahi, founder and leader of the Al-Karamah Dignity
party (and one of the most famous faces of the Egyptian opposition until he lost the last
presidential election).
Different Facebook pages have used metaphorical ammunitionabusive phrases and

content specifically intended to embarrass people personally and publicly in front of their
followers or readers, making them think twice before writing, publishing, commenting, or
sharing their views.
In a challenge to the well-known notion of Putnams concept of social capitalthe notion
that societies succeed, and democracy works and thrives, when groups of people are bound
tightly together in networks of common purpose, the present chapter examines whether
different Egyptian political ideologies infiltrate Facebook in ways that affect how the political
comments of like-minded Facebook users strengthen their ability to react positively to each
other, and the political comments of people who think differently face counterreactions,
creating a state of hatred, polarization, and the holding of grudges and how this could affect the
whole Egyptian social capital at last. In other words, the chapter attempts to answer a primary
question: Which Facebook politically related interactions and behaviors are more likely to
predict Egyptian social capital?
It is worth noting, however, that studying Egyptian social capital among other well-known
cases comes from the severe contradictions between whats known about Egyptian tolerance,
synergy, and cohesion in the face of the severe disputes and conflictwhich left almost every
Egyptian family with apparent dissent well expressed via the Facebook interactions of
political connections.
SOCIAL MEDIA AND SOCIAL CAPITAL

The concept of social capital traces its origins to the work of Bourdieu, who considered it
as the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a
durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and
recognition;1 then to the work of Coleman, who considered social capital as an important
resource for individuals and may affect greatly their ability to act and their perceived quality
of life.2 It is considered as the resources available to people through their social
interactions.3 Then arising from the realm of computer-mediated communication is the idea
of socio-technical capital, or social capital achieved through information and communication
technologies.4
Social networking sites serve a supplemental role by providing another channel through
which individuals can maintain their relationships,5 and many studies have indicated the
apparent effect of computer-mediated communication (CMC) on maintaining relationships.
Early studies concerned the effects of the Internet in general, and how or to what extent it can
affect social capital. Wellman et al.,6 for example, investigated how the rise of Internet use
affects social capital; whether it transforms, diminishes, or supplements social capital. The
work reveals that, on one hand, the Internet produces short-term effects that can add to social
capital rather than transforming or diminishing it and, on the other hand, the long-term effects
could be extensive and could create new and unexpected behaviors and changes.
Later, many studies concerned specifically with Facebook and its impact on social capital
explain that social capital is a concrete part in the structure of social networks and that there is
a positive relationship between certain types of Facebook use and both the creation and
maintenance of social capital. For example, the Internet is particularly useful for connecting
friends who are geographically and socially dispersed, and using Facebook has made students
relationships mildly stronger than those of other students who have larger friend networks on
Facebook.7
Another important motivation for online friending is that the costs of adding a friend are
low and the social costs of rejecting a friend request can be high.8 Thus, many users have
significant numbers of friends, and exchanging messages with friends is considered an
indicator in bridging social capital.9 Studies examining the relationship between Facebook and
social activities have confirmed that the greater the Facebook use either between individuals
or between groups, the greater the life satisfaction, social linkage, and civic and political
participationa correlation that seems greater for users experiencing low self-esteem and low
life satisfaction and who report greater benefits.10 It can be said that, according to such
findings, social networking sites (especially Facebook) offer their users an appropriate method
for maintaining many weak ties.
Conversely, some researchers hypothesize that the role of online social networks might not
work creatively in strengthening offline ties that users might have,11 thus online social ties tend
to be weaker than relationships that began and are maintained in real life.12 Others, however,
have confirmed that user motives influence the type of social capital resulting from using
Facebook, and that communication practices on Facebook impact social capital outcomes.13
Although most previous studies dealt mainly with the social capital from a
sociopsychological perspective, the recent unrest in different regions of the world imposed
thinking about Facebook and other social networks from the perspective of political impact
and whether they play only positive roles of gathering and collecting social connections or
whether they could have negative roles that could affect a nations social capital.
A Pew Research Center study of political disagreement on social networks found that 82
percent of SNS users have not taken any steps to ignore or disconnect from someone whose
views are different, and only 18 percent of SNS users have taken such steps, thus clarifying
that the majority of those who have been ignored or refused as friends were people who did
not have deep connections with users.14
The recent spate of unrest in Egypt, however, underscores the hotly debated role of
technology and social media as agents constructing and reinforcing society relations,
encouraging and enhancing social capital, and ultimately fostering the conditions for political
change. Indeed, technological instrumentsnotably Facebook and Twitterhave been
deployed to mobilize collective protests, provide logistical support for ensuing
demonstrations, and as conduit for alternative histories of events, in opposition to official
reports.
THE BEGINNINGS ALWAYS MATTER

A remarkable wave of popular protest swept over Egypt in what was known as the January
25, 2011, Revolution. Massive popular movement and strikes toppled a long-ruling president
in Egypt, helped spark bloody confrontations in many other Arab countries, and fundamentally
restructured the nature of politics all over the world and in the Arab region specifically.
There was a strong commonsense situation that these new media really affected the Arab
uprisings, a widespread notion that led to many remarks and even to jokes that ridicule the
toppling of Arab leaders by different meansone of these is how ex-president Hosny
Mubaraks regime was toppled: through Facebook!
Many of the protest organizers who gathered Egypts January 25th march on Tahrir Square
had a strong online presence. Facebook pages such as the Egyptian We Are All Khaled Said
page were the first to serve as key online gathering places for disgruntled and discontented
youth, as a platform for information, and (to some extent) as a new outlet for organizing
protests.
The protests on June 30, 2013locally defined as the June 30 correction revolution and
supported by different Egyptian media callswere a collective revolt that erupted in Egypt,
marking the 365th day after the inauguration of Egypts ruler, Islamist president Mohamed
Morsi. The protests ended with a new rule, after millions of disaffected citizens across Egypt
marched down the countrys streets and demanded the immediate resignation of the president.
The protests partly were a response to a widespread popular movement called Rebellion,
Tamarod, that launched a petition in April 2013 calling for the president to step down, and
claimed to have collected more than 22 million signatures supporting that demand. The number
of protesters was estimated to be 14 millionthe biggest protest in Egypts history,
according to military sources that stated that military helicopters had counted the number of
people participating by scanning the demonstrations perimeters across the country.
Reasons for demanding Morsis resignation included accusations of increasing
authoritarianism and Morsis pushing through of an Islamist agenda and disregarding the
predominantly secular opposition.15 The Society of the Muslim Brothers (from the ranks of
which president Morsi had been elected)shortened to the Muslim Brotherhood (MB)is
a group with a long history. The Muslim brotherhood was founded by Hassan Albanna in
Ismailiya, one of the canal governorates in Egypt. The slogan of Muslim brotherhood was
Believers are but Brothers.
The Muslim Brotherhood initially began as a twofold movement for the reform of both the
individual and social morality. Through its considerable political significance the Brotherhood
broadened its goals and grew in strength and number through the support of the populous in
order to challenge the secular leadership within the Arab Republic of Egypt.16
Evidence of its wide influence was clear, with more than 2,000 branches throughout the
country, and 2,000 charity and social service societies. It established and contributed in
founding thousands of charities, health polyclinics, schools, and Islamic centers. Arab Spring
first was a political success for the Muslim brotherhood but, beginning in 2013, it suffered
serious and complicated repercussions.
Egypt continues to grapple with the effects of these eventswhich were hailed as a new
revolution by some and as a coup by others. To this day, both sides continue to build
narratives and counternarratives to suit their own interpretation of the events. The country
remains strongly polarized, and increasingly the population is forced to take a stand for or
against this interventionwith little space for anyone to stand on a middle ground. Both sides
narratives are built around words such as legitimacy, popular will, and people are
uprising. Social movement enthusiasts cannot help but notice the glaring framing and
counter-framing processes that have unfolded in Egypt.
Such a complicated situation motivated concern for the political disagreements between
Egyptian social media sites users and Facebook in particular. The entire media situation was
summed up by CBCs (one of the most prominent Egyptian private TV channels) anchor, Dina
Abdelrahman, who on her August 14, 2013, broadcast said, There are not two groups [in
Egypt]. There is the Egyptian nation (on one side) and there is a group of Muslim Brothers (on
the other side). This suggests that the Brotherhood and its supporters represented a tiny
fraction of Egyptians.17 This type of media trying to inject its opinion into coverage meant that
its role and thus its effects on society were marginalized; a situation that can be seen when
trying to analyze the intensive usage of the social media by Morsis supporters, as they couldnt
find a media forum for their reaction.
In the weeks that followed July 3, 2013, the post-event government and an obsequious,
sympathetic media industry tried desperately to show that ongoing antimilitary intervention
protests were tiny and were not representative of the sentiments of most Egyptians. Television
networks were prevented from covering the protestswhich regularly were described as
merely occupying street corners. Perhaps unsurprisingly, supporters of the extra-democratic
movement to remove Morsi from office bought into and helped propagate this quantitative
rationalization. Pro-June 30 activists argued at length that the Egyptian people had risen up and
proclaimed their rejection of the Muslim Brotherhood.
CONSTRUCTING THE HERO AND PATRIOT

George Lakoff, the American linguist and cognitive scientist, argues that repetition of
language has the power to change brains. In his research on the rise of the conservative right
in the United States, he shows that the word freedom, if repeatedly associated with radical
conservative themes, may be learned not with its traditional progressive meaning, but with a
radical conservative meaning as Freedom is redefined brain by brain.18
In its attempt to construct its own narrative, the overall master frame used by the military is
al iradaah al shaabiya (popular will). In this case the frame has a spectacular visual
element, the message is clear: millions and millions of people were seen on TV rising up
against a president, and the military has no choice but to intervene on the side of the
people, having listened and heeded the call of the popular will. The military had provided an
anti-Morsi director (Khaled Yousef) with an army helicopter to shoot the dramatic footage
seen in Egypt and around the world, dubbed by the imaginative Egyptian media as the largest
protest in human history.
The popular will frame was masterfully presented by General Sisi himself in his address
to the nation on July 3, in which he effectively fired Morsi. Sisi opened his speech with, The
armed forces couldnt plug its ears or close its eyes to the movement and demands of the
masses calling for them to play a national role. Then stated,
The armed forces sensedgiven their sharp visionthat the people sought their
support, not power or rule but for general services and necessary protection of the
demands of the revolution. This is the message that the armed forces received from all
over urban Egypt, its cities, and its villages; it (the military) recognized the invitation,
understood its intentions, appreciated its necessity and got closer to the national scene
hoping, willing and abiding by all limits of duty, responsibility and honesty.
And with regard to Morsi, Sisi stated that
[t]here was hope of achieving national reconciliation, developing a future plan and
providing causes of confidence, assurances and stability to the people in order to
achieve their ambitions and hopes. But the presidents speech last night and before the
end of the 48-hour ultimatum didnt meet or agree with the demands of the people.19
DENIAL AND CONDEMNATION

If one had to compact the Muslim Brotherhoods counterframing processes into one all-
encompassing master frame it would be al shariya (legitimacy). Ex-president Morsi began
the process of framing himself in his last speech to the nation, mentioning the word not less
than 56 times in a two-hour speech and prompting a counter for the word. The MBs argument
solidly rests on the case that Morsi was popularly elected.
It is interesting to note that, beyond the core supporter base of the MB, the legitimacy frame
found a more receptive ear outside of Egypt rather than inside, as the MBs official speaker,
Gehad el Haddad, was able to promote the legitimacy frame overseas.
As a result of such conflicting points of view, a new discourse began on Facebook pages
justifying the process of uploading ones ideology. One side defended support of Morsi by
asserting the value of legitimacy, and the other sides asserted his thin margin (51 percent),
his broken promises to revolutionary forces, his extrajudicial presidential decrees that
attempted to shield his decisions from constitutional oversight, and, of course, the gloomy
record of his on-site performance as a president.
The quarrels and polarization therefore were not limited to broken relations between
Egyptians themselves, and extended to the Egyptians relations with other Arab, regional, and
international counterparts, thus affecting the Egyptian social capital in its main elements,
bonding and bridging.
Look people, I dont want grudge in my page. Im proud that Ive authorized El Sisi to
fight terrorism. I dont care if the say[ing] Egypt will be the best is bothering you.
Ive already lost money and clients for boycotting Turkey in support for Egypt. Im
happily ready to lose more. I wish Morsi will be executed or die. I cant separate
between business and my own beliefs. I cant deal with you, Morsi supporters, and I
didnt ask you to deal with me.20
EGYPTIANS POLITICAL INTERACTIONS ON FACEBOOK

Political discussions and long and careful public discussionswhich resemble the healthy
sign of democratic societiessometimes scramble online. Different social media sites have
numerous communities designed for expressing political points of view and orientations, such
as political forums, users comments on political articles, and through pages and official Web
sites administered by official government representatives. Yet, political differences and
struggling orientations greatly affect and hinder exposure to dissenting views. Giving people
the chance to critically examine, exchange, and deliberate more diverse political opinions is a
growing trend of work in interaction characteristics. Thus, the first question addressed here is,
How do Egyptians manage political interactions on Facebook with friends holding opposing
political opinions?
Political interactions often are thought to be able to result in and deepen the democratic
sphere because they are vehicles for content exchange and opinion articulation. Discussions
thus enhance political knowledge and lead people into a self-perpetuating participation
cycle.21 When these interactions expose users to contrasting views, however, then the positive
impact of discussion could be weakened or even become negative. Feldman and Price, for
instance, showed that discussion leads to increases in political knowledge mainly when
disagreement within discussion networks [is] low.22 More directly relevant to this chapter, a
number of studies have asserted the negative impact of disagreement and conflict on political
involvement.23 Therefore, the second question is, How do perceptions of differences affect
involvement on Facebook during the June 30th events and therefore affect the Egyptian social
capital?
Theoretically, as Mutz argued, exposure to disagreement leads to awareness of the
rationales behind the opposing view.24 In fact, to the extent that people can persuade each
other through discussion, having a like-minded discourse network tends to generate attitudinal
duality; that is, peoples perceptions about and affect toward specific cases become less one-
sided and polarized.25 As political psychologists have shown, inconsistency tends to reduce
attitude strength, opinion certainty, and engagement.
Many key questions remain unexamined, however. First, little research has focused on the
idea that types of people with whom one interacts who are demonstrated, for example, by the
distinction between bridging and bonding interactions. Putnam claims that bridging
interactions with people from different social backgrounds are more conducive to the
acquisition of political information than bonding interactions with people from similar
backgrounds.26 Similar to the arguments made by sociologists about the power of weak ties to
transmit information and social norms (e.g., Coleman 1988), knowing diverse others can
promote a better understanding of different political viewpoints and transmit important
information about the political world.27 Political discussions with people who hold different
viewpoints force people to constantly rethink and refine their issue stances as a result of
potentially being challenged in their opinions by non-likeminded others.28 This process might
strengthen a heightened awareness of ones political orientations and might spread mobilizing
information that in turn motivates political participation.
Conversely, there is an excessively shared point of view that social media sites serve as an
echo chamber in which users tend to seek political information that is aligned with their
orientations, or to discuss political issues and leaders with citizens who also support those
issues and figures (e.g., Wallsten, 2011). Adamic and Glances study about political blogs, for
example, reported that the the majority of blogs in their sample only linked to blogs that
shared the same political ideology.29 Similarly, Bergstrom et al. analyzed blog comments and
found that blogs were echo chambers: comments were more likely to be in agreement with the
original blog post.30
The present chapter, however, does not aim to tackle all these ambivalences once and for
all, as long as the Egyptian case represented both sides in different political stages. As has
been said before, the Internet and specifically Facebook are the most effective means for
collective action and movement, before and after the January 25, 2011, revolution. Although
this role changed dramatically before the first presidential election in 2012, and reached its
climax after the June, 30, 2013, events occurred.
In Egypts dreadful political situation, one of the most important ways to understand the
complexities of the scene is through the new media; supposedly the institutions that seek to
deliver a diversified view and present it to its users.
This polarization has brought up a society and a media system suffering from borderline
personality disorder, where black and white thinking prevails. A lot of rumors, twisting and
taking events out of context is being practiced now by the media; journalists need to dig deep
before they air or publish.31
One post that has gone viral on social network websites juxtaposes the coverage of sit-in
dispersal by two major channels; it describes how on Al Jazeera Mubasher Misr (owned by
the state of Qatar) viewers saw security forces brutally shooting at the brotherhood members
and supporters; while on Al-Arabiya (owned by Saudi Arabia) one saw the same security
forces helping out protesters. The post reflects the state of polarization in the media, both local
and international, is covering the Egyptian crisis. It also points to how the framing of the
current events in Egypt is politically charged by the position of media outlet user.32
Bassil Nofal from Media Credibility Watch, a website that assesses and rates news
websites, highlights false news, makes a cumulative point system for each website for the
number of invented stories they report and interacts with these websites in an attempt to
improve reporting.33 Nofal asserts that, [p]olarization and bias increase every day. In our
work, the number of false news stories has been on rise for the past two months, theyd be
equivalent to almost six months of false news.
According to Media Credibility Watchs recent monthly report, the overall number of
violations was 3,885 found in a sample of news stories including 2,278 news pieces from 17
news websites. For example, the popular Youm 7 newspaper has received a warning from
Media Credibility Watch for publishing 19 false news stories during the month of August,
before the end of the month.
Nofal notes that a significant issue in local online news Web sites results from the fact that
they translate some news from foreign news agencies and Web sites: This contributes to
rumors and affects the credibility of news in general. This is a huge problem because not
only could the translation be inaccurate, but also some websites intentionally block names of
sources, which disfigures the news and misleads the readers.34
For a time it was expected, for instance, for a taxi driver to ask a young rider, So, whats
Facebook saying today? Another way of inquiring, What do the revolutionaries think about
this or that issue and what are they going to do about it?
MISSED OPPORTUNITIES FOR DIVERSITY

Since its inception and heavy usage in Egypt, many have hoped that Facebook would
diversify the market place of ideas and provide an improved forum for political
deliberation.35 For many, Facebook
held out hopes of reinvigorating democracy by encouraging discourse among those of

opposing views, one where the status of participants is less important, and where ideas
sink or swim by virtue of the strength of their arguments. Others have conversely
emphasized the Facebooks potential to damage deliberative ideas by facilitating
selective exposure to like-minded political views.36
However, Facebook now has become a field of ideological war, aiming at manipulating
minds to dismiss a specific group or party beliefs and ideologies. Users usually use files,
images, and videos that adopt the perspective of sneaking out viewpoints and convincing users
with ideology and attitude. Facebookin this casepromoted political and social
polarization, supporting the view that new media might be more fruitful for quarrelsome
politics than for ordinary democratic political discussions.
Here, Egypt offers particularly intense evidence that the same motives that connected
Facebook with the Egyptian revolution and among activist users also alienate them from
mainstream popular society and from each other in some other cases.
During January and February of 2011, hundreds of thousands Egyptian citizens joined
dedicated activists to bring down Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak but over the
following years, a hard-core group of Egyptian activists continued to take the streets
and call for millions to join them in denouncing the transitional military leadership.
However, only a few thousand typically joined in these later protests.
The results of the March constitutional referendum (where activists urged a no vote but
82 percent voted yes) and of parliamentary elections (where Islamists swept the voting, and
activists and seculars scored extremely poorly)37 exposed that there is a considerable
popularity for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt but, conversely, these results demonstrated that
there is a loud opposition and a profound gap between the different Egyptians factions.
Unending and thorough demonization of the Muslim Brotherhood was countered by most
Brotherhood supporters/defenders with utter neglect of its excesses, complicity with the army,
fuloul, and transgressions, especially after 2011. Exposure to one page or another exclusively
prejudices outcomes beyond reason. The vitriol in most secular Egyptian Facebook pages
against the Muslim Brotherhood and nearly everything they stand for today or stood for in the
past is most dangerous. This discourse mobilizes not just bodies but minds, preparing them to
anticipate, accept, and perhaps justify violent and brutal action. The reactionary Muslim
Brotherhood equivalent about the other is and was at play in Facebook and in action.
Perhaps people are accustomed to it and were unmoved. Yet this reactionary equivalent of the
Brotherhood pales in comparison with the institutional and coercive actionbacked discourse
against it.
Clearly a new style of engagement with politics has become an inescapable feature of
life for ordinary people. Countless examples may be cited, but one may suffice. During
the struggle over the constitution at the end of 2012, with millions of people on the
streets and the country on the edge of civil war, the most elementary observation of all
appeared to escape all concerned: that this was the first time in modern Egyptian
history that ordinary individuals actually cared about a constitution in such large
numbers. That care was itself a profoundly new social phenomenon, indicating a great
social transformation and the entrenchment in society of a perspective that no longer
saw whatever happened at the level of high politics as external to ordinary people. But
ordinary citizens do not know, yet, how to normalize this high politics, that it to say,
how to bring it closer to them.38
Based on research previously conducted by the authors on the same topic, the present
chapters argument is based on a systematic observation and survey of Facebooks political
users input. This reveals that, despite the on the ground disputes and polarization of
political views, most of Facebooks Egyptian users perceive their friends to be like-mind.
Additionally, they would be most likely to be friends with others holding opinions different
from their own political opinion rather than losing them, especially if they know each other
offline, or because they were more likely to neglect posts about politics after the apparent
severe political polarization. Most of them did not frequently talk about politics with their
onlinesometimes offlinefriends who hold differing opinions. Though many have gotten a
strong negative reaction from a friend or someone who follows, they did not like or comment
on their politically opposed point of view. Facebook was somehow a place to talk about
politics, 47.8 percent of the survey respondents posted at least one item during the political
events Egypt had witnessed.
Many people felt that relationships having weak online and offline ties had changed, and
even those with strong relations and ties, as well. These changes happened after realizing that
their friends had a political orientation they did not know before, or that their friends were not
being as supportive of their ideas as was usual.
However, it was unclear how social capital formation occurs when online and offline
connections are closely coupled, as with Facebook. Williams (2006) argues that although
researchers have examined potential losses of social capital in offline communities due to
increased Internet use, they have not adequately explored online gains that might compensate
for such losses.39
The present analysis found that Egyptian users perceptions of similarities reshaped
attitudes and behaviors during many political events that left few opportunities to be exposed
to varied opinions. Those who perceived more friends more differently, with a large number of
dissenting friends, were less welcoming to others. One user, for example, posted, Anyone
who belongs to the Brotherhood or pro them: unfriend me now please. This is for your own
good. How come you want to be a friend with a coup supporter? If peoples coup against
traitors is a crime, then Im proud to be a coup supporter.40 Another stated, I relatively
unfriended all people who belongs to the Brotherhood or even denies to belong to them and
claims just to respect them from my Facebook friends list.41
This could be one reason that online political discussions often seemingly happen in an
echo chamber. Those who have a massive number of friends with different opinions are not as
tolerant. Different opinions are not allowed when it is critical, such as during a debate, both as
an active participant and as a receiver. One participant who uses Facebook more frequently
than the norm indicated that this was due to confusing factors such as many news events
happening at the same time. Thus, perceptions of conflict and polarization directly decreased
the intent to log on to Facebook. Moreover, it pushed many users to deactivate their account
altogether. Facebook arguments were described as insolvable, offensive, and confrontational.
Often they resulted in users agreeing to disagree. The following quotes illustrate examples of
such occurrences.
When I ask one of the Brotherhoods the meaning of legitimacy that you call for,
his answer would be is to do whatever you like, but once I oppose him politically he
regards me one of El SiSis supporters! If everybody thinks this way, theres no hope
Egypt gets a step forward.42
I relatively unfriended all people who belongs to the Brotherhood. I think this is a
better scenario than having to go through senseless discussions that will only make
everyone cling to his opinion more, which is normal.43
When moving to examine the impact of disagreements on relationships, hearing dissenting

voices on Facebook generated challenges, especially for those having weak online and offline
ties. We found that most of our participants thought that Facebook affected their relationships
powerfully (89.3 percent); furthermore this effect was perceived as being negative and to
weaken relations (77 percent). This opposes Lees notion that discussion with disagreeing
others may encourage participation in non-position-taking activities.44 As one user posted,
Dear family and friends, Ive made a decision and I want you all to help me to fulfill it.
I decided to stop, completely and forever, writing any posts on Facebook. Ill just
return back to street like normal people and only care about my family, work, chapter,
books, papers, and my writing attempts. This is an honest try to get myself and my
human nature back in the real world away from the hypothetical world that made me
lose tens of my friends and family members. I hope I keep my word and dont retreat by
tonight.45
Our participants reported a number of negotiations employed to manage relationships with

friends holding opposing opinions. Rather than involving their friends, they discussed ways to
actively avoid confrontation. Most dramatically, ending a friendship or deactivating an account
can result from a heated political argument. Unfriending did not seem to be an option with
close family members. Instead pretending and hiding posts from the newsfeed (meaning that
posts no longer appeared in a social news stream) was the result. For people who saw each
other offline on a frequent to occasional basis, unfriending or blocking them on Facebook
could result in friction in the relationship, Again, I dont want anyone to be upset that I hide
him/her on Facebook, it was only because I care for him/her being a part of my real life.46
The critical perspective here relates to the danger that the public sphere could disintegrate
into fragmented partial publics that no longer can connect sufficiently to form a shared public
world. The other critical point is the notion of spreading hatred, holding grudges, and inciting
conflict among society members. The question arising now is to what extent Egyptian
Facebook relations need a regulatory code or code of ethics that could systemize the political
public sphere at a time of severe polarization.
We asked our study participants how important it is to adopt a firm code of ethics to
control the climate of hatred, insulting, discriminatory, and differing ideologies on Facebook.
The findings proved that there is a significant relationship between Facebook use intensity and
the need for a code of ethics. The result could enhance the concept of produsagethat is,
production and usagein which Egyptian Facebook content could change positively, leading
to more effective interactivity, collective user groups, and reconciled thematic shifts, affecting
the whole Egyptian social capital at the end.
Here there is a noticeable problem related to the impact of different political reactions via
Facebook in Egypt, which is the extent to which such interactions affect the real relations
among people. It is worth noting that some Egyptians no longer connect with eachother through
online relations, butworseno longer connect through offline relationships either. This
could be explained as a result of the on the ground disputes that affected many Egyptians
lives and properties. It is a loss that cant be compensated by only connecting online through
Facebook.
On a long-term basis, it is worrying to notice many indications affecting interactions on
Facebook in Egypt. The right to freedom of thought and expression is a principle concern in
this field. Losing friends due to differing opinions raises questions around the freedom of
expression via social media and how people believe in a culture of diversity.
We can easily deduce such a situation by relying on many previous circumstances;
international press freedom rankings 2013 show that the news media in Egypt still operate in a
heavily restricted environment. Egypt fell from Partly Free to Not Free due to official
campaigns to intimidate journalists, increased efforts to prosecute reporters and commentators
for insulting the political leadership or defaming religion, and intensified polarization of the
pro- and the anti-, which reduced the availability of balanced coverage.
More state media employees were subjected to professional investigation under the
different rules in Egypt. Typically, these investigations targeted those who departed from the
script on air, gave airtime to highly vocal critics of the government, or covered the protests
against the Muslim Brotherhood in sympathetic terms. Some state media professionals were
reprimanded on charges of indecency for purportedly breaking social taboos.47
Thus, political discussion can have a negative effect on Facebook use intensity by causing
users to deactivate their personal accounts for many reasons, such as: I was subject to slander
and offensive words because of my opinion; I have already lost many of my friends because
of our inconsistent points of view, so I preferred to deactivate my account to maintain relations
with the rest of my actual offline relations and friends; I thought of democratic discourse but
I didnt find it on fb public space, so I preferred to connect with others in some specific
preferable forums.48
More broadly speaking, this chapter raises the alarm regarding the online democratic
trajectory in Egyptian social media society as a whole. With all these political conversation
barriers, the question remains: Might such problems lead Egyptians to retreat from the political
process by putting politics at the end of their priorities in an attempt to avoid its negative
effects on their relations?
Millions of independent cybercitizens and cyberactivists who use social media share the
platform with a powerful group that has mobilized its e-militias to try to upload its ideology
and shape the language of politics and the very thought processes of users. Therefore, the
scores of ordinary citizens using social media must work both collectively and individually to
resist the ideological content uploaded by different political members. They should not be
tricked by false profiles and scripted talking points (indeed, many users are fully aware of
these tactics). They should reject any closing of virtual and physical spaces where the Socratic
collective spirit of deliberation that began stirring in the lead up to the revolution continues
with urgency.
Only by approaching both social media and traditional media with eyes wide open, seeing
them as spaces where each person takes responsibility for critically educating others, will the
youth of the revolutionary generation take control over their own struggle and write their own
script about what constitutes freedom. In this way, they will work collectively to construct a
new paradigm for society instead of succumbing to someone elses ideology.
NOTES
1. Pierre Bourdieu (1986), The Forms of Capital, in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of
Education, edited by John C. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press), 24158.
2. James S. Coleman (1988), Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital, American Journal of Sociology 94, 95
120.
3. Nan Lin (2005), A Network Theory of Social Capital, Hand Book on Social Capital (Oxford University Press).
4. Jessica Marie Vitak (2008), Facebook Friends: How Online Identities Impact Offline Relationships, M.A. Thesis,
submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the M.A. in Communication, Culture and Technology, 22.
5. Jessica Vitak (2012), Keeping Connected in the Facebook Age: The Relationship between Facebook Use, Relationship
Maintenance Strategies and Relational Outcomes. PhD dissertation, Doctor of Philosophy, Communication Arts and Sciences,
Michigan State University.
6. Barry Wellman, Anabel Quan Haase, James Witte, and Keith Hampton (2001), Does the Internet Increase, Decrease,
or Supplement Social Capital? Social Networks, Participation, and Community Commitment, American Behavioral
Scientist45, 43655, http://www.sagepub.com/oswcondensed/study/articles/05/Wellman.pdf.
7. Ronald S. Burt (2005), Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital (New York: Oxford University
Press); Nicole Ellison, Charles Steinfield, and Cliff Lampe (2007), The Benefits of Facebook Friends: Social Capital and
College Students Use of Online Social Network Sites. JCMC 12 (4), 1431168. A. Kamal (2011), Egyptian Universities
Students Usage of Social Networking Sites and its Impact on Social Capital, a Study of Facebook, Egyptian Journal of
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Communication School of Professional Studies, Gonzaga University; Kristin A. Isaacson (2011), The Impact of Facebook
Usage on Social Capital and Retention of First-Year University Students, MS thesis, St. Cloud, Minnesota.
8. Nicole Ellison, Charles Steinfield, and Cliff Lampe (2009), Connection Strategies: Relationship Formation and
Maintenance on Social Network Sites. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Communication
Association, Marriott, Chicago, IL, May 20, p. 13.
9. Nicole Ellison, Cliff Lampe, and Charles Steinfield (2009), Social Network Sites and Society: Current Trends and Future
Possibilities, Interactions Magazine (16) 1.
10. Sebastin Valenzuela, Namsu Park, and Kerk F. Kee (2009), Is There Social Capital in a Social Network Site?
Facebook Use and College Students, Life Satisfaction, Trust and Participation, Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication 14, 875901; Nicole Ellison, Charles Steinfield, and Cliff Lampe (2006), Spatially Bounded Online Social
Networking and Social Capital: The Role of Facebook. Proceeding for the Annual Conference of the International
Communication Association, Dresden, Germany.
11. J. Donath and Danah Boyd (2004), Public Displays of Connection, BT Technology Journal 22, 7182.
12. Robert Kraut, Sara Kiesler, Bonka Boneva, Jonathan Cummings, Vicki Helgeson, and Anne Crawford (2002), Internet
Paradox Revisited, Journal of Social Issues 58, 4974.
13. Nicole Ellison, Charles Steinfield, Cliff Lampe (2011), Connection Strategies: Social Capital Implications of Facebook-
Enabled Communication Practices, New Media & Society 13, 85572.
14. Pew Research Center (2012), Social Networking Sites and Politics: A Project of the Pew Research Center,
Washington, DC.
15. Susan Dumais (2014), Outlook on Egypt, http://cola.unh.edu/thecollegeletter/2014-02/outlook-egypt.
16. Michelle Paison, The History of the Muslim Brotherhood: The Political, Social and Economic Transformation of the
Arab Republic of Egypt,
http://tiglarchives.org/sites/default/files/resources/nimep/v4/The%20History%20of%20the%20Muslim%20Brotherhood.pdf.
17. Mohamad Elmasry (2014), Egypts Campaign of Elimination: Pro-June 30 Analysts and the Quantitative Rationalization
for Egypts Coup, https://www.opendemocracy.net/arab-awakening/mohamad-elmasry/egypt%e2%80%99s-campaign-of-
elimination-pro-june-30-analysts-and-quantitative.
18. Linda Herrera, and Mark Lotfy (2012), E-Militias of the Muslim Brotherhood: How to Upload Ideology on Facebook,
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/7212/e-militias-of-the-muslim-brotherhood_how-to-upload.
19. Adel Abdel Ghafar (2013), Egypts Framing Wars of June 30th https://www.opendemocracy.net/adel-abdel-
ghafar/egypts-framing-wars-of-june-30th.
20. Facebook status written by an Egyptian Jewels Saleswoman (November 4, 2013, 8:52 p.m.).
21. Zhongdang Pan, Lijiang Shen, Hye-Jin Paek, and Ye Sun (2006), Mobilizing Political Talk in a Presidential Campaign:
An Examination of Campaign Effects in a Deliberative Framework, Communication Research 33, 31545.
22. Lauren Feldman and Vincent Price (2008), Confusion or Enlightenment? How Exposure to Disagreement Moderates
the Effects of Political Discussion and Media Use on Candidate Knowledge, Communication Research 35 (1), 6187.
23. Paul Blanger and Munroe Eagles (2007), Partisan Cross-Pressure and Voter Turnout: The Influence of Micro- and
Macro-Environments. Social Science Quarterly 88, 85067. Scott McClurg (2006), Political Disagreement in Context: The
Conditional Effect of Neighborhood Context, Disagreement, and Political Talk on Electoral Participation, Political Behavior
28, 34966.
24. Diana C. Mutz (2006), Hearing the Other Side (New York: Cambridge University Press).
25. Bryan M. Parsons (2010), Social Networks and the Affective Impact of Political Disagreement, Political Behavior
32, 181204.
26. Robert D. Putnam (2000), Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon &
Schuster).
27. Jason Barabas (2004), How Deliberation Affects Policy Opinions, American Political Science Review 98: 687701;
Seung-Jin Jang (2009), Are Diverse Political Networks Always Bad for Participatory Democracy? Indifference, Alienation,
and Political Disagreement, American Politics Research 37, 87998.
28. Dietram Scheufele, Matthew Nisbet, Dominique Brossard, and Erik Nisbet (2004), Social Structure and Citizenship:
Examining the Impact of Social Setting, Network Heterogeneity, and Informational Variables on Political Participation,
Scandinavian Political Studies 26, 4966.
29. Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance (2005), The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They
Blog. Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Workshop on Link Discovery 3643.
30. Eric Gilbert, Tony Bergstrom, and Karrie Karahalios (2009), Blogs are Echo Chambers (HICSS).
31. Ekram Ibrahim (2012), Egypt Media: Politics and the Growth of Polarization,
http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/61352/Egypt/Politics-/Egypt-media-Politics-and-the-growth-of-polarisatio.aspx.
32. Sarah El-Masry (2013), Polarized, Politicized and Biased: Covering Egypt, Daily News,
http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2013/08/21/polarised-politicised-and-biased-covering-egypt/.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Magdalena Wojcieszak (2010), Dont Talk to Me: Effects of Ideologically Homogeneous Online Groups and
Politically Dissimilar Offline Ties on Extremism, New Media & Society 12 (4), 63755.
36. Magdalena E. Wojcieszak and Diana C. Mutz (2009), Online Groups and Political Discourse: Do Online Discussion
Spaces Facilitate Exposure to Political Disagreement? Journal of Communication 59 (2009) 4056.
37. Sean Aday, Henry Farrell et al. (2012), New Media and Conflict after the Arab Spring, United States Institute of
Peace, Peace Works No. 80, 67.
38. Mohammed Bamyeh (2013), The June Rebellion in Egypt, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12876/the-june-
rebellion-in-egypt.
39. Nicole Ellison, Charles Steinfield, and Cliff Lampe (2007), The Benefits of Facebook Friends: Social Capital and
College Students Use of Online Social Network Sites, JCMC 12 (4), 1431168.
40. A Facebook status written by a university lecturer on his own page on November 11, 2013.
41. A comment written by a university lecture in response to another friend status calling for unfriending him from any
Muslim Brotherhood page or supporter.
42. A status written by a university professor arguing that there is no way to have a successful dialogue with a Muslim
Brotherhoods supporter, November 3, 2013.
43. A Facebook status written by a female professor on August 20, 2013, confirming her firm believe that there is no benefit
behind any virtual discussion now about Egypts political situation.
44. Francis L. F. Lee. (2012), Does Discussion with Disagreement Discourage All Types of Political Participation? Survey
Evidence from Hong Kong, Communication Research 39 (4), 54362.
45. A status written by a male friend finalizing his relationship with Facebook and confirming that it is much better to deal
with the political situation in Egypt through on-ground discussion rather than losing friends online, August 22, 2013.
46. A status written by a male friend assuring his attitude toward Facebooks political interactions affecting his relationships
with his friends. He satirically calledat the endto use blocking and to search for those who agree with your opinion.
47. Egypt, Freedom of the Press 2013, https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2013/egypt#.VOh5QfnF8b0.
48. A Facebook status for a female friend declaring the deactivation of her account in response to the insult and cursing she
had faced as a result of expressing her political point of view as a Muslim Brotherhood supporter, October 31, 2013.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A comment written by a university lecture in response to another friend status calling for unfriending him from any Muslim
Brotherhood page or supporter.
A Facebook status for a female friend declaring the deactivation of her account in response to the insult and cursing she had
faced as a result of expressing her political point of view as a Muslim Brotherhood supporter (October 31, 2013).
A Facebook status written by a female professor on August 20, 2013, confirming her firm belief that there is no benefit behind
any virtual discussion now about Egypts political situation.
A Facebook status written by a university lecturer on his own page on November 11, 2013, 6:26 p.m.
A Facebook status written by an Egyptian jewel saleswoman on November 4, 2013, 8:52 p.m.
A status written by a male friend assuring his attitude toward Facebooks political interactions was affecting his relationships
with his friends. He satirically calledat the endto use blocking and to search for those who agree with your opinion.
A status written by a male friend finalizing his relationship with Facebook and confirming that it is much better to deal with the
political situation in Egypt through on-ground discussion rather than losing friends online (August 22, 2013).
A status written by a university professor arguing that there is no way to have a successful dialogue with a Muslim
Brotherhoods supporter (November 3, 2013).
Abdel Ghafar, Adel (2013). Egypts Framing Wars of June 30th. https://www.opendemocracy.net/adel-abdel-ghafar/egypts-
framing-wars-of-june-30th.
Adamic, Lada, and Natalie Glance (2005). The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog.
Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Workshop on Link Discovery, 3643.
Barabas, Jason (2004). How Deliberation Affects Policy Opinions. American Political Science Review, 98: 687701.
Blanger, Paul, and Munroe Eagles (2007). Partisan Cross-pressure and Voter Turnout: The Influence of Micro- and Macro-
Environments. Social Science Quarterly, 88, 85067.
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Coleman, James S. (1988). Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94, 95120.
Donath, J., and Danah Boyd (2004). Public Displays of Connection. BT Technology Journal 22, 7182.
Ellison, Nicole, Charles Steinfield, and Cliff Lampe (2011). Connection Strategies: Social Capital Implications of Facebook-
Enabled Communication Practices. New Media & Society 13, 85572.
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Possibilities. Interactions Magazine (16) 1.
Ellison, Nicole, Charles Steinfield, and Cliff Lampe (2007). The Benefits of Facebook Friends: Social Capital and College
Students Use of Online Social Network Sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12 (4), 11431168.
Ellison, Nicole, Charles Steinfield, and Cliff Lampe (2006). Spatially Bounded Online Social Networking and Social Capital: The
Role of Facebook. Proceedings for the Annual Conference of the International Communication Association, Dresden,
Germany.
El-Masry, Sarah (2013). Polarized, Politicized and Biased: Covering Egypt, Daily News.
http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2013/08/21/polarised-politicised-and-biased-covering-egypt/.
Elmasry, Mohamad (2014). Egypts Campaign of Elimination: Pro-June 30 Analysts and the Quantitative Rationalization for
Egypts Coup. https://www.opendemocracy.net/arab-awakening/mohamad-elmasry/egypt%e2%80%99s-campaign-of-
elimination-pro-june-30-analysts-and-quantitative.
Feldman, Lauren, and Vincent Price (2008). Confusion or Enlightenment? How Exposure to Disagreement Moderates the
Effects of Political Discussion and Media Use on Candidate Knowledge. Communication Research 35 (1), 6187.
Gilbert, Eric, Tony Bergstrom, and Karrie Karahalios (2009). Blogs Are Echo Chambers. HICSS.
Herrera, Linda, and Mark Lotfy (2012). E-Militias of the Muslim Brotherhood: How to Upload Ideology on Facebook.
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/7212/e-militias-of-the-muslim-brotherhood_how-to-upload.
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and Political Disagreement. American Politics Research 37, 87998.
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Evidence from Hong Kong. Communication Research 39 (4), 54362.
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Political Talk on Electoral Participation. Political Behavior 28, 34966.
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Examination of Campaign Effects in a Deliberative Framework. Communication Research 33, 31545.
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204.
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Schuster.
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the Impact of Social Setting, Network Heterogeneity, and Informational Variables on Political Participation. Scandinavian
Political Studies 26, 4966.
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Part II
Democratization
5
Are All Sources Really Equal? Credibility

and the News, or the Shift from the Age of
Deference to the Age of Reference
Jan Leach
Its the challenge heard on playgrounds, in school hallways, at parties, and around
watercoolers: Who said so? Three simple words that carry enormous weight, convey
skepticism, and signal the need for authentication. Who said so? is the verbal test people use
to demand confirmation. This question isor should beat the heart of every piece of
information people hear, read, view, and consume because the answer to that question can lead
to greater knowledge, new understanding, and trust.
If information is the lubricant of democracy,1 then in a digital democracy news and
information are ever-more crucial for citizens to understand their country; their government;
and issues, trends, and people that they encounter. This perspective places responsibility for
accurate news and information squarely on journalists. Sources can add to accuracy in
journalistic storytelling. Today, however, news and information are available from resources
other than traditional media organizations. How, then, do sources in myriad online and social
media platforms stack up in terms of accuracy? How do sources in digital platforms establish
and retain credibility?
This chapter examines media credibility by analyzing the use of sources in journalism.
Sources that are valid, authentic, and reliable lend authority to news and information. If news
consumers cannot determine the validity of sources, then credibility can be damaged. In some
ways, learning how to evaluate journalistic sources is an exercise in learning how to evaluate
news itself: Why do journalists use sources, how can journalists and audiences assess source
validity, what are the differences in sources and credibility between traditional media and
online and social media? (This chapter does not examine the separate ethics issue of using
anonymous sources.)
Journalists and media organizations use sources to confirm information; to describe events
and activities; to verify information; to provide context for stories; to add detail and color; and
sometimes to offer history, nuance, and background. Using sources to bolster reporting has
been a foundation of journalism for centuries because journalists cannot be everywhere all the
time. They must rely on eyewitnesses, documents, and background to provide detail and add
validity to their reports. They need people, research, and data to strengthen their reports.
Journalists also use sources to describe things such as legal or scientific concepts and other
concepts that are beyond the journalists expertise.
Sources are crucial to journalistic credibility. If, for example, American viewers see a
television news report about kidnappings in Nigeria, they know that the anchorperson is
delivering the news from a set in in New York and is not in Nigeria. Viewers expect attribution
for the report from someone with knowledge of the situationa correspondent or someone
who is on the ground where the events supposedly happened. This attribution lends
authenticity and believability to the news and adds authority to the news organization reporting
it. Without such attributionessentially answering the viewers questions Who said so? or
How do you know that?news consumers should rightly question the truth and accuracy of
the report. The lack of such attribution weakens journalistic credibility.
Source validity is important for journalists and for media consumers. People rely more and
more on digital sources of news and information,2 thus the question of source validity relates to
journalistic practice (how sources are found and evaluated), and relates to the platform people
use to get and share news (e.g., Web, blog). The question is useful because all journalistic
sources are not equal, and all news content providers do not enjoy equal credibility. People
can get news and information from mainstream media such as newspapers, television, and
cable broadcasts; magazines; and pamphlets. People can, and increasingly do, get news and
information online, from Web sites, blogs, and social media. New technology for accessing
news includes computers and devices like smartphones, tablets, and wearables. Consumers
can find and share stories in their newsfeed on Facebook, via Twitter hashtags, in a photo on
Instagram, or on any number of Web sites, both traditional (such as the Web site of The New
York Times) and innovative (such as Reddit).
Blog posts can be authored by journalists working for established media organizations or by
anyone with access to a computer and an Internet connection. Some Web sites feature news
posts generated by algorithms or that are aggregated by people with no journalistic training.
When news is available all the time and in countless formats, it is helpful to understand how
sources are used, how they are assessed, and what consumers can do to establish source
legitimacy. Todays busy news audiences must have a discerning attitude and be committed to
finding credible sources. What happens when source skepticism creeps into news
consumption? What can journalists and consumers do to ensure source credibility?
WHY DO JOURNALISTS USE SOURCES?

Sources provide journalists with important information about issues and events. Sources
give journalists descriptions and factual information, and can add context to a story. Sources
verify information; their expertise can bring clarity to what a journalist understands about an
issue. Reporters covering the White House usually havent run for office, nor do they hold
government jobs. They are unlikely to be professional policy makers. But they do more than
simply attend official press briefings. They gather and review information, and then cultivate
relationships with people in politics, government, and elsewhere to add depth to reports
originating from the White House.
Sources bring a level of authenticity and give the journalist a pathway to writing reliable,
substantive stories,3 according to Bob Steele, retired professor of ethics at DePauw
University and one of the nations foremost authorities on media ethics. Steele says that sources
add credibility to journalism and media reports because they can add new information that can
expand the nature and substance of the reporting process, and can raise stories to a higher level
of meaningful information.4 Using good sources shows consumers that a journalist is providing
a high level of authenticity for readers.
Sources are critical to journalists, to media credibility, andmore than ever in a digital
worldto consumers. Source credibility has been defined as a persons believability as a
source of information or as the degree to which information from a source is perceived by a
journalist as accurate, fair, unbiased, and trustworthy.5 These attributes gain increasing
importance when news is available everywhere and at all times.
For journalists, sources broaden the types of stories that can be written,6 explains Kelly
McBride, vice president for academic programs and former head of the ethics faculty at the
Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. If journalists reported only what they saw
themselves or what they learned in person, there would be limited material and little sense of
world news. Sources provide ideas for news. Sources add perspective to reporting and
storytelling. Consider the gripping stories of soldiers and embedded reporters from Iraq and
Afghanistan during the wars there. Recall the firsthand accounts of people who survived the
2013 Boston Marathon bombings, or of people who faced the devastation of Hurricane Katrina
in 2005 or Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Good sources reinforce good journalism, especially if
journalists and their audiences practice the discipline of verification.7 Making efforts to
verify the truth or falsity of information is the core of objectivity in journalism, which is
itself an important ethics issue.8
To explain reporters work and the importance of sources, Steele uses an analogy of a
jigsaw puzzle. He says that when journalists gather information for a story the work is like
putting together the outside border of a jigsaw puzzle. The journalist is constantly trying to
put together piecesfacts, historical data, documents, intervieweesand all along the
journalist is creating a fuller picture.9 Steele says that sources help add pieces of the puzzle
and bring clarity to the picture. In any medium, Steele says, at the same time youre doing
the (journalism) jigsaw puzzle, youre simultaneously doing an ethics puzzle by addressing the
issues of fairness and completeness.10 Reliable, credible sources canand usually do
provide that clarity, fairness, and completeness.
EVALUATING THE CREDIBILITY OF NEWS SOURCES

There are widely accepted journalistic procedures and routines used to verify the
legitimacy of sources. These include checking the credentials of the source, confirming the
experience or expertise, questioning the relationship to the event or to the material (such as an
eyewitness or the author of a report), understanding motives for providing information (such as
bias or having an ax to grind), gauging reliability (past and future), and weighing the timeliness
of the information. Journalists are taught to use more than one source for most controversial
information and to double- or triple-check factseven if a source volunteers those facts with
authority.
There are numerous examples of journalists being duped by sources, including the New York
magazine reporter who in 2014 told the story of a 17-year-old high school stock trader who
made $72 million. (He didnt.)11 Reporters also must be careful about fake news stories.
Chinas Peoples Daily Online, for example, reported that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un
was named the sexiest man alive for 2012,12 based on a satirical story from The Onion.
Journalists also must beware of hoaxes. In 1984, for example, a Cincinnati ad agency created a
campaign for Plummet Mall, an underground shopping center. (The campaign was an effort
to show the power of radio advertising, but no such shopping center development was
planned.)13 In the New York magazine and Plummet Mall cases, reporters talked to real people
who were phony sources. There also are countless examples of journalists reporting what
people say verbatim, when what was said was wrong or misleading. Journalists in such cases
are reporting accurately but not carefully.
Sometimes a speaker misspeaks and, although a speaker might do so innocently, a journalist

who repeats the error is spreading misinformation. Ohio governor John Kasich in a television
appearance in January 2015 quoted Abraham Lincoln. You cant build a little guy up by
tearing the big guy down, Kasich said. Abraham Lincoln said it then, and hes right.14 The
problemaccording to PolitiFact, an online fact-checking organizationis that Lincoln did
not say that. PolitiFact attributes the quote to the Rev. William J. H. Boetcker, a minister and
public speaker who was born eight years after Lincoln was assassinated. (To be fair, Kasich
was appearing on live television with no opportunity for interviewers to check and challenge
his words, but the example is useful and it points out how easily journalists can be accurate but
incorrect.)
Authenticity of sources is so important that journalism and media experts and academic
researchers constantly study it and offer best practices and cautionary tips. Recent analyses
include comparisons of Internet and traditional sources and effects on credibility. A 1998 study
of politically interested Web users found credibility is crucial for the Internet because past
studies suggest people are less likely to pay attention to media they do not perceive as
credible.15 Among the findings, the study showed that the more credible the public finds a
particular medium the more they rely on it as their primary news source. Therefore, the most
relied-upon sources are deemed the most credible.16 A 2007 study suggested that
[c]ompared to more traditional sources, the credibility of web-based information may

be less reliable due to the structural and editorial features of the web environment.
Web-based information suffers from a relative lack of professional gatekeepers to
monitor content, faces a convergence of information genres, such as the blending of
advertising and information, lacks established reputations for many information sites,
and is particularly prone to alteration, which may be difficult to detect.17
In The Elements of Journalism, What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should
Expect, authors Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel explain the concept of journalism of
verification. They say that the essence of journalism is a discipline of verification, which
they explain this way.
[T]he discipline of verification is what separates journalism from entertainment,

propaganda, fiction, or art. Entertainmentor its cousin infotainmentfocuses on
what is most diverting. Propaganda selects facts or invents them to serve the real
purpose: persuasion and manipulation. Fiction invents scenarios to get at a more
personal impression of what it calls truth. Journalism alone is focused on the
process employed to get what happened down right.18
Kovach and Rosenstiel offer ideas to evaluate the credibility of sources including: edit
skeptically, check for accuracy, and question all assumptions.19 News consumers should
consider doing the same things. In another book by Kovach and Rosenstiel, Blur, How to Know
Whats True in the Age of Information Overload, the authors devote an entire chapter to
source validity and another to the journalism of verification.20 In Blur, the authorsformer
journalists who now helm two prestigious journalism industry organizations (the Nieman
Fellowships at Harvard and the American Press Institute, respectively)delve into significant
source issues that influence journalism and credibility. These include journalists themselves as
sources; journalists as experts (such as medical doctors who report on the flu, Ebola, or a
measles outbreak); sources as witnesses; witnesses and faulty recollection; corroboration of
eyewitnesses (two sources with different facts), and sources who are participants but not
witnesses (such as a police officer investigating a crime, but not the crime victim).
EVALUATING THE CREDIBILITY OF ONLINE NEWS SOURCES

For journalists, evaluating the credibility of a source is paramount and most reporters do it
instinctively. As described above, even the most seasoned reporters can get stung by bogus
sources, fake news, and hoaxes. Now, digital technology can put more hurdles in the way of
journalists seeking to verify sources authenticity. Accuracy is a basic principle in journalism
and a significant ethics issue for media. Inaccurate informationeven if the mistake is just a
small part of the overall storycan be misleading, dangerous, or lead to legal action. Because
of the rush to post news online, some news organizations struggle with accuracy. There are
many examples of immediacy trumping accuracy in online news reporting.
In August 2008, numerous news outletsincluding the Cleveland Plain Dealerfirst
reported online the death of Ohio congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, hours before she
actually died.21 Similar problems with online reporting occurred when legendary Penn State
Coach Joe Paterno died in early 2012.
Speed versus accuracy is not just a problem for online news producers. There are several
studies of the June 2012 live television error when CNN and Fox News initially reported that
the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down the individual mandate part of the Affordable Care
Act (Obamacare) when, in fact, the Court had upheld the laws individual mandate.22 The
Supreme Court decision was much anticipated and news organizations prepared for the ruling
in advance. In the rush to be first with news of this significant decision, however,
correspondents apparently did not read, or did not fully understand, the summary text of the
decision. Media analysts scrutinizing the goof reported when and how the mistake was made
and when and how it was corrected by comparing how many seconds had passed between the
different reports.
What contributes to the tension between immediacy and accuracy in online and digital
news reporting? There is enormous competition for online viewers and clicks, there is greater
haste in efforts to get things posted first, there are demands to produce stories across multiple
platforms, there are a decreasing number of fact-checking/gatekeeping positions (such as copy
editors) in newsrooms. These are problems both for journalists and for people who get their
news digitally online or through social media. The Society of Professional Journalists new
code of ethics offers this warning for todays journalists, Remember that neither speed nor
format excuses inaccuracy.23
For journalists, resources are available to help ensure accuracy in online reporting. The
Society for Professional Journalists offers research tools in its Journalists Toolbox.24 The
Verification Handbook25 and the Online Journalism Handbook offer tips to survive and
thrive in the digital age.26 PolitiFact and its new sibling, PunditFact, check the accuracy of
claims made by politicians or elected officials and by pundits, columnists, and bloggers,
respectively. FactCheck.org does similar reviews. Harvards Shorenstein Center on the Media,
Politics and Public Policy offers the Journalists Resource, which includes various studies,
tips, data, and ideas.27 There also are many more resources readily available.
Such resources can make reporters more thorough, but journalists also must understand the
digital universe. According to McBride, in the digital world the concept of source can mean
two thingsthe typical source (witness, expert) for any story, and the (new) journalist as
source for content posted online.28 Journalists and consumers should ask whether what they
find online is original content or whether it has been repurposed by or from someone else. Is
the story or the central information thorough and complete or is it a small piece of a larger
story? If its part of a larger story, how can you get the rest of the story for context? Do you get
such information from this (story, Web site, link) or do you have to look elsewhere? McBride
says that these ideas underlie reporting and source validity in traditional media, but because
digital media make it easy to distribute thingsand distribute them quicklyjournalists and
consumers must commit to examining source value and credibility.29 Additionally, some people
might accept news and information based on recognition of an organization or the reputation of
a reporter. Some find news and information in a newsfeed right alongside their colleagues
vacation photos. Because of the jumble and volume of information available online, consumers
must be perceptive about where and how they get news digitally. They must take responsibility
for all kinds of content. They can ask questions of content and sources and establish for
themselves the validity of the information.
One way that journalists can establish source validity and credibility online is through
transparencythe concept of telling consumers what was done to get a story, who the sources
are, and why they should be believed. In their book, The New Ethics of Journalism, McBride
and Rosenstiel state,
The most persuasive way to make a case for why audiences should trust you is to show
your work, offer evidence to back it up and explain how you gathered it. In a world
where so many people and organizations can create news and spread information,
transparency becomes a mechanism that allows the public to sort the reliable from the
suspect.30
Transparency equals trust. Transparency leads to source credibility. Transparency is

imperative for consumers who get their news digitally.
Transparency in reporting is useful for consumers, too. Steele says,
[It] speaks to the methods of reporting in terms of the choice of sources, [the] role of
sources in the story, potential conflicts of interest the sources may have; it can provide
information about the limits of reporting such as multiple versions of what happened in
a breaking news story.31
Steele cautions against over-reliance on transparency, however. He states that transparency

should go hand in hand with accountability; for example, answering for errors made in haste or
correcting errors immediately and prominently.
Journalists are smart enough to ask questions of their sources. They generally know when
information is flawed and they can usually see through a source that is unreliable, mistaken, or
simply seeking the limelight. Journalists usually recognize the red flags in source reliability
conflicts of interest, lack of expertise or credentials, and bias. Steele suggests that in this
digital age journalists now need to be smart enough to ask the right questions in order to
reveal not only the right pieces for the jigsaw puzzle (the story) but to reveal inconsistencies
and fault lines.32
Today, consumers also have to ask these questions.
For media audiences, the issue of credibility (of reporters, their sources, and of news
providers) is a new responsibility. Research shows that stories on traditional media Web sites
are considered relatively credible, in view of the common interpretation that such
organizations typically apply some editorial rigor and fact-checking procedures to the
information that they provide.33 But aggregate sites, blogs, wikis, and other Web sites such as
those connected to businesses and e-commerce, sponsored sites, and social media sites might
not have that same perceived credibility.34
When it comes to social media sites, credibility and source validity are and should be
concerns for consumers. The issues of credibility and source validity also are of concern to
journalists because of the growing number of people who say they get their news or learn about
issues and events through social networking sites.35
SOURCE SKEPTICISM
With information overload affecting virtually all adults,36 it is no wonder people have
problems processing the hundreds of messages and pieces of information they receive every
dayfrom e-mails and tweets to texts and photos, from YouTube videos to television reports,
and everything in between. People are bombarded with information, and media and journalists
are at the center of this brain burden. The result of information overload in news consumers
can be (what this author calls) source skepticism.
Source skepticism is the result of too much information, too many choices for news and
information, and too much doubt about Who said so? People who experience source
skepticism might be cynical about virtually all information; they could disregard most sources
of news and self-select news items according to ideology (politics or religion, for example) or
for entertainment (cat videos, for instance). Source skepticism can lead to mistrust of even the
most legitimate, reliable information providers. Online and digital news outlets could be
intensifying the problem of source skepticism because of the sheer volume of material that is
available and the lack of any mechanism to rank or prioritize the materials importance.
Steele says that the idea of source skepticism always has existed in journalism but there is
more of it now because news organizations have cut back on their stafffewer people do
more newsgathering with fewer resources. They might no longer have the time to fully
investigate sources claims. News consumers might not believe what sources relay in news
stories because the validity of a source is not evident or it is not apparent to the audience that
anyone asked, How do we know that?37
Rosenstiel agrees that news audiences always have experienced some measure of source
skepticism, but he says that in the past there were fewer sources for people to be skeptical
about.38 He contends that people used institutional or organizational cues to take things on
faithThis story came from the New York Times so I believe it. Rosenstiel explains that as a
society, however, we have moved beyond taking things on faith. He says that it no longer is
enough for journalists to report what happened or what was said, journalists also must include
sources that establish whether what was said is true. Part of source skepticism and the demand
for confirmation is cultural, and part is due to consumers having so many choices; that is,
information overload.
News credibility and source validity also are related to time, according to Rosenstiel. News
consumers dont have an infinite amount of time; they want journalists and media to protect
(not waste) their time.39 Consumers want sources in stories to be evident and credible. In a
world of unlimited choice, people still want help in making good choices.40 That help can
come from journalists who pay attention to transparency, who demonstrate citizen empathy
(What does a citizen need to know on this subject? What questions are not answered? What is
incomplete? What is most helpful?), who use new story forms and new methods of conveying
information, and who embrace the potential of technology. Journalists today, if they still
believe in the work and the mission, have to believe in the potential of how to make things
work and be better. [They must] exploit the potential of technology and not focus on its
limitations.41
There is another way of looking at the idea of source skepticism, and that is as a useful
tool. Its a skill and its a good thing, says McBride. According to McBride, more news
consumers are seeing information that either seems too good to be true or is super-sensational
or particularly salacious, and theyre learning to question it or tune it out.42 McBride explains
that when people scroll through a social media newsfeed they often see a number of headlines
some are legitimate news stories and some are clickbait (content that has the sole purpose
of attracting attention to a Web page). A newsfeed, for example, could carry a story
headlined, You wont believe what my 3-year-old can do! If the news consumer opens that
link expecting something clever, funny, or emotional and finds that the item is not clever, funny,
or emotional, the consumer develops source skepticism and ignores it.43 McBride suggests that
journalists can help an audience avoid source skepticism by building a relationship with
audiences. This enables journalists to understand consumers needs and the best ways to meet
those needs, especially in online and social media. As examples, McBride cites neighborhood
news Web sites that focus on specific topics such as crime or entertainment.
FROM DEFERENCE TO REFERENCE

In the good old days of journalismthe 1970s or 1980sit often was enough for
readers or viewers (there were no online or social media at the time) to absorb news and
information from respected institutions and well-known journalists. Think of Watergate
reporting from The Washington Post, investigative pieces on CBSs 60 Minutes, or the work
of network anchor Walter Cronkite or reporter Barbara Walters. People knew the background
of the media companies or the public characters of journalists; news companies and
practitioners earned a measure of regard from audiences, even if people disliked the company
or disagreed with the reporters. Those days could be called the age of deference, as
certainly there was deference to media legacy and legends.
At the same time, journalists sometimes lent a measure of deference to sources, such as to
an elected official or a prominent business person. That deference wasand can bepositive,
but it also can be difficult. Rosenstiel says that deference to an institution or person is
changing. In the past, media choices were in front of you and you had some recognition of, or
relationship to, them. People knew that someone in the news business reported, edited, and
chose to publish or broadcast stories. Now, media choices are myriad and consumers might not
have any recognition ofor relationship tothe people and organizations reporting the news.
A story might come from a share from a company on social media, or a recommendation
from your mother, your friend, or your boss. You might not be aware of who reported a story or
whether it was reported or simply aggregated. You might not be familiar with the source of the
news, let alone the claimant in the story. You might see, hear, select, and consume stories
online or through social media and have no particular allegiance to different sites. The age of
deference has evolved to an age of reference where one must ask, Where did this come from?
Do I want to spend time on this? Do I believe this? Rosenstiel says that when people today
consume information, the deferential relationship has gone away.44 There is a new relationship
and its referential.
NEWS VERSUS KNOWLEDGE

How does the digital age affect democracy? We are armed with information about how
journalists do their work, and the importance of finding suitable sources for stories. We know
how to investigate sources for validity and reliability, and understand how sources affect
credibility. We see how online news and information empowers and also frustrates people in
ways that traditional media did not. It is said that information is power. In a digital
democracy there is more information. Consumers must accept responsibility for wading
through the volume of information as well as determining its legitimacy and any power that
results from having that information. Sources are vital to journalistic credibility, whether the
story is in print, on television, or online. Are all sources equal? They are not; our
understanding of source validity has improved.
What has changed is how journalists provide knowledge. Rosenstiel sums up these efforts
this way, Were not in the news story business; thats a practice. The principle we were
living up to (in the past) was we created knowledge for people every day. Were in the
knowledge business and there are lots of ways we can add knowledge for people.45 Online
and digital news and information offer great possibilities for expanding knowledge. The debate
for the digital democracy is how we do that responsibly. Using properly selected, credible
sources is one aspect of that responsibility. Now the responsibility for asking Who said so?
falls to professional journalists and to news consumers.
NOTES
1. Tom Rosenstiel, phone interview with author (January 28, 2015).
2. Andrea Caumont, 12 Trends Shaping Digital News, The Pew Research Center (October 16, 2013), accessed January
6, 2014, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/10/16/12-trends-shaping-digital-news/.
3. Bob Steele, Phone interview with author (January 13, 2015).
4. Ibid.
5. Zvi Reich, Source Credibility and Journalism, between Visceral and Discretional Judgment, Journalism Practice 5, no.
1 (2011): 51.
6. Kelly McBride, phone interview with author (January 14, 2014).
7. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism, 3rd ed. (Crown Publishing, 2014), 71.
8. University of Iowa, Journalism Ethics: Sources, accessed January 6, 2015,
www.uiowa.edu/~c019168/168s6online18.html.
9. Bob Steele, phone interview with author (January 13, 2015).
10. Ibid.
11. Terrence McCoy and Elahe Isadi, New York Magazines $72 Million Teenage Stock Trader Says He Made It All Up,
Washington Post, December 16, 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/12/16/new-york-
magazines-72-million-teenage-stock-picker-says-he-made-it-all-up/.
12. Kim Jong-Un Named The Onions Sexiest Man Alive for 2012, The Onion 48 no. 46, accessed November 14 2012,
http://www.theonion.com/articles/kim-jongun-named-the-onions-sexiest-man-alive-for-30379/.
13. Plummet Mall Promo 1Jerry Galvin (1984), YouTube, accessed January 13, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=fDLLIEWQsjs.
14. Lauren Carroll, Ohio Gov. John Kasich Puts Words in Abraham Lincolns Mouth about Tax Policy, PolitiFact.com,
accessed January 25, 2015, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jan/25/john-kasich/did-abraham-lincoln-
say-you-cannot-build-little-gu/.
15. Thomas J. Johnson and Barbara K. Kaye, Cruising Is Believing?: Comparing Internet and Traditional Sources on
Media Credibility Measures, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 75, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 325.
16. Ibid., 331.
17. Andrew J. Flanagin and Miriam J. Metzger, The Role of Site Features, User Attributes, and Information Verification
Behaviors on the Perceived Credibility of Web-Based Information, New Media and Society 9, no. 2 (2007): 320.
18. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism, 3rd ed. (Three Rivers Press, Crown Publishing, 2014),
9899.
19. Ibid., 12932
20. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, Blur, How to Know Whats True in the Age of Information Overload (Bloomsbury
2010): Table of Contents.
21. Greg Mitchell, News Outlets Report Death of CongresswomanWhen Still Alive, Editor & Publisher (August 20,
2008), accessed January 13, 2015, http://www.editorandpublisher.com/PrintArticle/News-Outlets-Report-Death-of-
Congresswoman-When-Still-Alive.
22. Brian Stelter, CNN and Fox Trip Up in Rush to Get the News on the Air, New York Times (June 28, 2012), accessed
January 13, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/29/us/cnn-and-foxs-supreme-court-mistake.html?_r=0.
23. Society of Professional Journalists, Code of Ethics, Preamble (revised September 6, 2014), accessed January 23, 2015,
http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp.
24. Society of Professional Journalists, Journalists Toolbox (December 2, 2012), accessed January 23, 2015,
http://www.journaliststoolbox.org/archive/general-resourcesfact-checkinglibraries/.
25. Craig Silverman (ed.), The Verification Handbook, accessed January 23, 2015, http://verificationhandbook.com/.
26. Paul Bradshaw and Lisa Rohumaa, The Online Journalism Handbook: Skills to Survive and Thrive in the Digital
Age (Pearson Education Limited, 2011).
27. The Journalists Resource, Harvard University Kennedy School, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public
Policy, accessed January 23, 2015, http://journalistsresource.org/about/.
28. McBride, phone interview with author (2015).
29. Ibid.
30. Kelly McBride and Tom Rosenstiel, The New Ethics of Journalism, Principles for the 21st Century (SAGE/CQ
Press, 2014): 92.
31. Bob Steele, phone interview with author (2015).
32. Ibid.
33. Flanagin and Metzger at 321 (2007).
34. Ibid., 33233.
35. Jesse Holcomb, Jeffrey Gottfried, and Amy Mitchell, News Use across Social Media Platforms, The Pew Center for
Journalism & Media (November 14, 2013), accessed January 6, 2015, http://www.journalism.org/2013/11/14/news-use-across-
social-media-platforms/.
36. Laura Shin, 10 Steps to Conquering Information Overload, Forbes (November 14, 2014), accessed January 23, 2015
http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2014/11/14/10-steps-to-conquering-information-overload/.
37. Steele, phone interview with author (2015).
38. Rosenstiel, phone interview with author (January 28, 2015).
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. McBride, phone interview with author (January 14, 2015).
43. Ibid.
44. Rosenstiel, phone interview with author (January 28, 2015).
45. Ibid.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bradshaw, Paul, and Liisa Rohumaa. The Online Journalism Handbook: Skills to Survive and Thrive in the Digital Age.
Pearson Education Limited, 2011. Accessed January 23, 2015. https://onlinejournalismhandbook.wordpress.com/.
Carroll, Lauren. Ohio Gov. John Kasich Puts Words in Abraham Lincolns Mouth about Tax Policy. PolitiFact.com (January
25, 2015). Accessed January 28, 2015. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jan/25/john-kasich/did-
abraham-lincoln-say-you-cannot-build-little-gu/.
Caumont, Andrea. 12 Trends Shaping Digital News. The Pew Research Center (October 16, 2013). Accessed January 6,
2014. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/10/16/12-trends-shaping-digital-news/.
Flanagin, Andrew J., and Miriam J. Metzger. The Role of Site Features, User Attributes, and Information Verification
Behaviors on the Perceived Credibility of Web-based Information. New Media and Society Vol. 9, No. 2. (2007): 319
342.
Holcomb, Jesse, Jeffrey Gottfried, and Amy Mitchell. News Use Across Social Media Platforms. The Pew Center for
Journalism & Media (November 14, 2013). Accessed January 6, 2015. http://www.journalism.org/2013/11/14/news-use-
across-social-media-platforms/.
Johnson, Thomas J., and Barbara K. Kaye. Cruising Is Believing? Comparing Internet and Traditional Sources on Media
Credibility Measure, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly Vol. 75, No. 2 (Summer 1998): 32540.
The Journalists ResourceHarvard University Kennedy School, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.
Accessed January 23, 2015. http://journalistsresource.org/about/.
Kim Jong-Un Named The Onions Sexiest Man Alive for 2012. The Onion (November 14, 2012). Accessed January 13,
2015. http://www.theonion.com/articles/kim-jongun-named-the-onions-sexiest-man-alive-for,30379/.
Kludt, Tom. Story of $72 Million Teen Trader Unravels. CNN Money (December 15, 2014). Accessed January 13, 2014.
http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/15/media/mohammed-islam/.
Kovach, Bill, and Tom Rosenstiel. The Elements of Journalism. 3rd edition. New York: Three Rivers Press Crown Publishing,
2014.
Kovach, Bill, and Tom Rosenstiel. Table of Contents. Blur, How to Know Whats True in the Age of Information Overload.
New York: Bloomsbury, 2010.
McBride, Kelly. Phone interview with author (January 14, 2015).
McBride, Kelly, and Tom Rosenstiel. The New Ethics of Journalism, Principles for the 21st Century. Washington, DC: Sage
CQ Press, 2014.
Mitchell, Greg. News Outlets Report Death of CongresswomanWhen Still Alive. Editor & Publisher (August 20, 2008).
Accessed January 13, 2015. http://www.editorandpublisher.com/PrintArticle/News-Outlets-Report-Death-of-
Congresswoman-When-Still-Alive.
Plummet Mall Promo 1Jerry Galvin (1984). YouTube. Accessed January 13, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=fDLLIEWQsjs
Reich, Zvi. Source Credibility and Journalism, between Visceral and Discretional Judgment. Journalism Practice Vol. 5, no.
1 (2011): 5167.
Rosenstiel, Tom. Phone interview with author (January 28, 2015).
Shin, Laura. 10 Steps to Conquering Information Overload. Forbes (November 14, 2014). Accessed January 23, 2015.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2014/11/14/10-steps-to-conquering-information-overload/.
Silverman, Craig (ed.). The Verification Handbook. Accessed January 23, 2015. http://verificationhandbook.com/.
Society of Professional Journalists. Code of Ethics, Preamble. Last modified September 6, 2014. Accessed January 23, 2015.
http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp.
Society of Professional Journalists. Journalists Toolbox (December. 2, 2012). Accessed January 23, 2015.
http://www.journaliststoolbox.org/archive/general-resourcesfact-checkinglibraries/.
Steele, Bob. Phone interview with author (January 13, 2015).
Stelter, Brian. CNN and Fox Trip Up in Rush to Get the News on the Air. New York Times (June 28, 2012). Accessed
January 13, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/29/us/cnn-and-foxs-supreme-court-mistake.html?_r=0.
University of Iowa. Journalism Ethics: Sources. Accessed January 6, 2015. www.uiowa.edu/~c019168/168s6online18.html.
6
The Boundaries of Digital Dissent:

Assessing the War on Hacktivism
Jason L. Jarvis
INTRODUCTION
Cyberspace is a unique domain, and is different from infrastructuresuch as highways, for
examplebecause users can alter the digital environment.1 Digital communication networks
have spawned new forms of activism or counterpower,2 such as the hacktivist networks that
constitute Anonymous. Institutional actors have taken notice of the tools given to average
citizens and are actively mobilizing to combat potential changes in the balance of power
between citizens and their leaders. The research in this chapter documents a discursive, legal,
and direct war on hacktivism by the United States, the United Kingdom, and their corporate and
other allies.
The National Security Agency (NSA) and U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM) are the
two agencies most responsible for U.S. cybersecurity. Although many people are aware of the
intelligence operations conducted by the NSA, CYBERCOM is a lesser-known agency that
began in 2009 under the first Obama administration. CYBERCOMs purpose is to defend the
American digital homeland by coordinating the cyberspace operations of all branches of the
U.S. military. Notably, the NSA and CYBERCOM are co-located at Fort Meade in Maryland
and run by the same personpreviously by General Keith Alexander and presently by Admiral
Michael Rogers. The NSA and CYBERCOM treat cyberspace as a military domain. The
rhetoric and policies of these agencies support an ongoing effort to securitize cyberspace and
limit the boundaries of acceptable digital dissent.
Public rhetoric is significant because it is symptomatic of legal and clandestine efforts to
disrupt the tools of digital activism, free assembly, and free speech. Debates about digital
activism are uniquely important because the parameters of free speech in cyberspace are
evolving globally. The cycle of rhetoric between Western security networks and hacktivists
frames larger debates about cyberspace and regulation of digital communication. Legal
regimes and the parameters of the digital public sphere are under construction. The distinction
between a hacktivist and a cyberterrorist or cybercriminal is increasingly blurry in the public
pronouncements of the officials making cybersecurity policy. In short, the legal and rhetorical
walls constructed around hacktivists will determine the boundaries of acceptable behavior,
assembly, and speech in cyberspace.
Anonymous networks reside at the intersection of the global conflict over control of
cyberspace, making them a worthy case study for considering the implications of the
militarization of cyberspace. The year 2015 started off with the network Anonymous
declaring that it had begun #OpCharlieHebdo, a series of cyberattacks on Islamic extremist
Web sites, in response to the massacre of journalists in France.3 Anonymous was one of the
100 most influential people in the world in 2012.4 From its humble beginnings on anonymous
image board 4chan in 2006, Anonymous has evolved into a global phenomenon, sometimes
referred to as the hive mind, a hacker collective, a group of cyberterrorists, or a collection
of technoanarchists.
Anonymous is not a singular entity. Rather, it is a complex of visual and tactical memes
shared by multiple networks of activism and dissent.5 Anonymous networks are noted for
meme warfare and trolling; cultural practices rooted in the creative flaming of 4chan. The
symbols of Anonymous are flexible enough to function as rhetorical weapons both for and
against established institutions. Saudi Arabia, for example, banned Guy Fawkes masks
claiming that they represent violence.6 In contrast, Polish parliamentarians wore the mask in
protest against ACTA legislation.7 Anonymous networks also have gained notoriety through
(sometimes contradictory) operations against a range of targets including the Church of
Scientology, pedophiles, ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Westboro Baptist Church, Fox News, rapists in
Ohio, feminists, the Koch brothers, and YouTube personalities. Anonymous networks also have
engaged governments in Egypt, China, Israel, Brazil, Quebec, and the United States.
The remainder of this chapter begins with an examination of the three facets of the war of
hacktivism: discursive, legal, and digital. It next analyzes a digital text from the cycle of
rhetoric between Anonymous and its institutional opponentsthe essay What Is Anonymous,
from Cyberguerilla.org. The document is a response to arrests by the U.S. government of
people participating in Operation Payback protests in support of WikiLeaks in 2011. The
chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of the conflict between digital activists
and institutional cybersecurity actors. I contend that vilification of hackers is drawing narrow
boundaries for digital speech and assembly that threaten the future of public expression and
dissent in cyberspace.
HACKTIVISTS IN THE CROSSHAIRS

The war on hacktivism has discursive, legal, and digital components. Discursively, there is
a steady expansion of the term hacker in the public discourse of American officials,
particularly the people responsible for national security and cybersecurity. The legal war on
hacktivism also has many casualties. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act punishes digital
crime severely. Moreover, digital speech has less protection than does offline speech, as old
legal systems wrestle with new technology and forms of organization. The war on hacktivism
is happening in cyberspace. The FBI investigation of Julian Assange and documents released
through NBC by Edward Snowden demonstrate that America and its ally in the United
Kingdom have directly targeted the servers and IRC channels used by Anonymous and other
activists, in covert attempts to disrupt digital activists.
The Discursive Component

Pick up any news report about Anonymous and you will find the word hacker or the
phrase hacker collective used to explain or describe Anonymous. In Hacker Culture, Doug
Thomas8 traces the rhetorical evolution of the term hacker and the culture that fostered early
computer pioneers. According to Thomas, there are several generations of hackers and the term
continues to evolve through usage in the mass media and popular culture. Early hackers of the
1950s were university professors that designed complex machines, and in the 1980s they were
geeks (such as Bill Gates) that worked out of their garages and coordinated through computer
clubs. In the 1980s, the seminal movie Wargames showed a side to hacking that could be
dangerous. After 9/11, media coverage of hackers began to shift, asserting a link between
hackers and terrorism.9
Since the 2009 creation of the United States Cyber Command by President Obama,
hacker has become synonymous with all cyber threats. Anonymous is the poster child for
the threat that hackers pose to the United States and other nations. In February 2012, the
leader of the National Security Agency and the newly formed U.S. Cyber Command, General
Keith Alexander, warned the White House and congressional leaders of the threat posed by
hackers and hacktivists. Alexander claimed that hackers soon would have the ability to
attack critical infrastructure, such as power grids.10 The following year, 2013, U.S. director of
National Intelligence, John Clapper, upped the ante, telling the Senate Intelligence Committee
that hackers are a greater threat to U.S. national security than Al-Qaeda.11 In late 2014, the
invasion of Sony computer systemspossibly by North Koreaand the subsequent media
frenzy surrounding the feature film The Interview gave rise to a rash of lurid stories about the
danger of hackers and hacking.12
Government pronouncements about hacktivists provoked responses. Characterizations of
Anonymous and digital activists as terrorists, criminals, and spies by officials such as General
Alexander were ridiculed by various Anonymous-linked sources who argued that this
fearmongering made no sense. Hacktivists, after all, are network-dependent entities that
seemingly would have no interest in shutting down the infrastructure (e.g., power grids) that
makes their activism possible.13 TheAnonNews said on Twitter that [t]he moment you are
labeled a terrorist, is the moment you become one. #Anonymous.
Other Anonymous posts responded satirically, such as post from an Anonymous network
news Web site that was identified as a Terrorist Identification Chart.14 The Terrorist
Identification Chart typifies the political use of images that characterizes the digital image
politics of Anonymous. An image of the Guy Fawkes mask is a Fictional Terrorist, directly
mocking the notion of a stable identity for Anonymous. A peace sign becomes a sign that there
are Terrorists Nearby, mocking attempts to paint activists and protesters as anti-American.
The challenge to power made possible by networked technology exists in a silhouette of a
woman with a video camera, labeled an Armed Terrorist.
The U.S. founding fathers believed that anonymity was essential to the functioning of the
marketplace of ideas.16 Anonymity was essential to unfettered speech because it protected
people who held unpopular opinions from retribution.
Public debate and exposure to diverse opinions about the proposed Constitution
informed, educated, and persuaded the new nation about the newly proposed form of
government. Anonymity played a key, if often undervalued, role in the process. Freeing
authors from direct attack to their reputations and their safety, anonymity provided a
cloak of security and confidence to debate the merits of the proposed Constitution. It
allowed a vigorous and heated debate to occur on paper, often using the names and
wisdom of the ancients as both guises and guides in the process.15
The founding fathers had an inherent fear of recriminations from a government that was
questioned about its behavior. In fact, Benjamin Franklin actually published a book on secret
ciphers and used them widely to camouflage his writing.17
The Legal Component

The conflict between the network state and hacktivist groups such as Anonymous extends to
legislatures and courtrooms. The discursive war on hacktivism has material implications. The
primary law governing computer-related crime in the United States is the Computer Fraud and
Abuse Act (CFAA). Prosecutions under the CFAA are severe. David Nosal was prosecuted
and convicted under the CFAA despite never having used a computer.18 (Nosal convinced
friends to do this work for him). Similarly, reporters for the Scripps News service were
charged under the CFAA after finding the personal dataincluding Social Security numbers
of 170,000 people applying for subsidized phones under Lifeline, an FCC program.19 The
lawyer for Scripps News noted that the reporters found the information with a Google search
(not exactly high-tech hacker software), and that this data is explicitly not supposed to be
retained by telecom firms working with the FCC.
Participants in Anonymous raids face severe prosecution.20 Barrett Brown was arrested
under the CFAA simply for posting a link to material other Anonymous networks obtained and
leaked about private intelligence firm Stratfor.21 Brown is serving five years in prison and was
ordered to pay a $900,000 fine. Browns prosecution raises serious questions about press
freedom.22 Jeremy Hammond, for example, is serving 10 years in prison for his participation in
Anonymous raids on a range of targets.23 Margot Kaminski, executive director of the
Information Society Project at Yale Law School, explains that free speech itself is at stake in
debates about Anonymous and the merits of digital activism.
Anonymity thus has played and continues to play a significant role in both online and
offline assembly and the related topic of one-to-many communication. The historical
use of anonymity to protect pamphleteers and door-to-door canvassers should show
how much political organization benefits from protection for anonymity. The rise of the
hacktivist group Anonymous in both the offline and online worlds demonstrates this
continuing link between mass information dissemination, assembly, and anonymity both
online and offline.24
The name Anonymous puts American security actors in the unenviable position of having
to resignify a name that evokes a long tradition of dissent in the founding of the United States
and Western nations more generally.25 Kaminski points to the tradition of anonymous speech
that is at the core of the American democratic system. The use of pseudonyms and masks by
Anonymous members to hide their identity has a long history in Americathe Boston Tea
Party was conducted by people dressed in costumes and masks who pretended to be Native
Americans.26
Digital speech is in flux because laws governing free speech online lack clarity and, in
many cases, require updating to address cyberspace. President Obama began a push for laws
protecting citizens from identify theft and hackers, but it is unclear when (or if) Congress
will take legislative action to protect digital privacy and free speech.27 At present, the
Supreme Court has provided no conclusive guidance regarding the scope of online
anonymity.28 There can be little doubt that data mining of citizens is taking place on a massive
scale by both corporations and government agencies, adding urgency to questions of anonymity,
digital privacy, and dissent online.29
The lack of clear guidance from the Supreme Court means that conflicting lower-court
decisions are serving as guides, with the Ninth Circuit being the most influential because so
many digital servers reside within its jurisdiction.30 The Ninth Circuits decision in In re
Anonymous Online Speakers, however, is criticized for creating reduced protection for online
speech (due to the speed with which information can be distributed) and for not establishing
clear standards for when an ISP can and should reveal a users identity.31 The Ninth Circuit
ruling fails to account for the differing contexts created by diverse online platforms.32 For the
court, the Internet is a monolithic entity. The court did not consider differences in rules and
norms on different platforms. For example, on Twitter anonymity is not a benefit because
names and pseudonyms can increase the number of followers. Journalists, politicians,
celebrities, and citizens attain followings through direct public communication using their real
names. Messages are short and concise. In contrast, on the image board 4chan, all postings are
anonymous and generally are image based and not textual. Different posting and comment
rules govern different platforms, thus making it problematic to treat the Internet as though it is
an undifferentiated place.
Part of the problem facing security actors is that they simply have underestimated the
power of teenagers with digital tools. Parmy Olson33 points out that Western security officials
refused to believe the arrested members of Anonymouss offshoot network, LulzSec, when
they explained that only a few peoplewho met onlinewere responsible for such a long list
of operations and hacks. Laws and law enforcement concepts do not neatly apply to
cyberspace. The RICO statutes were built to thwart criminal organizations and syndicatesnot
dispersed networks that lack a hierarchy. Network models of organization (legal or criminal)
simply do not fit into traditional statist approaches to crime and dissent. This is why
reorganization is both necessary and inevitable if states intend to regulate cyberspace in any
coherent fashion. It also is why citizen voices must be part of the discussion and policy debate
about Internet governance.
The Digital Component

The war on hacktivism is not only taking place discursively and through punitive
punishments. Surveillance, infiltration, and spy games are standard procedure for intelligence
and legal actors in the United States and among its Western allies and corporate actors.
Journalist Parmy Olson provides a detailed account of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
operation on Anonymous affiliate network LulzSec. The FBI was successful at turning one of
their members into a double agent, enabling them to participate in raids and conduct
surveillance of other digital activists, such as Julian Assange.34 Browns punishment was
interesting, because the data he distributed revealed that cybersecurity firm HB Gary was
trying to discredit journalist Glenn Greenwald as he reported on revelations by Edward
Snowden.35
Dissident NSA contractor Edward Snowdens famous leak underscores Margot Kaminskis
warnings about the threats to online speech. The NSAin conjunction with Australia, Canada,
New Zealand, and the United Kingdomis engaged in a long-term effort to control cyberspace
as a military domain equivalent to air, land, sea, and space.36 General Alexander has a history
of opposing legal restrictions on NSA surveillance, because Obtaining a court order, based on
the constitutionally required showing of probable cause, slows, and in some cases prevents
altogether, the Governments efforts to conduct surveillance of communications it believes are
significant to the national security.37
In addition to efforts to collect metadata, the NSA has automated the infection of global
computer systems with surveillance malware.38 A key component of the strategy to gain
operational control of cyberspace targets digital activists. Anonymous networks, and other
hacktivist networks, were infiltrated and their Internet Relay Chat (IRC) servers were attacked
by British Intelligence as slides released by Edward Snowden demonstrate unequivocally.39
Op Wealth in the summer of 2011, for example, included denial of service attacks that made it
difficult for Anonymous networks to gather and communicate, limiting their ability to organize.
Op Wealth also included information-gathering and intelligence activities such as
disinformation operations.40
There is a dangerous paranoia involved in believing that every citizen and political
protester represents a systemic threat to the United States. Although it hardly is surprising that
Western intelligence agencies are attempting to disrupt criminal activity, it is important to
remember that IRC servers support legitimate online assembly by law-abiding citizens. Not
every action by a person or group that is Anonymous is criminal. Although some Anonymous
networks engage in illegal activity, many networks engage in pro-social protests. The
KnightSec network, for example, successfully targeted rapists in Steubenville, Ohio, resulting
in the prosecution of both the perpetrators and their protectors.41
The cyber war with hacktivists constitutes a significant threat to the viability of free speech
and free assembly online. When IRC channels are fair game for security organizations, it is
hard to claim that freedom of assembly exists online. The United States has a long history of
legal, anonymous assembly, enshrined by the Supreme Court in the 1958 NAACP v. Alabama
decision. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by British Intelligence agency
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) against servers that support Internet
Relay Chat are a direct assault by a foreign government on digital places of assembly used
legitimately by American/global citizens. Online privacy and free speech are in flux, and
digital activists are at the center of the storm.
The cycle of exchanges between Anonymous and its institutional opponents produces many
artifacts. The next section analyzes one response to the arrest of Anonymous participants in the
raiding of PayPal during Operation Payback in 2011 as part of a campaign to support
WikiLeaks. The open letter What Is Anonymous? is an example of an Anonymous network
responding to government actors. It is an artifact of the cycle of public discourse taking place
between digital citizens and institutional actors worried about the erosion of power generated
during the digital revolution. The letter analyzed here responds to arrests of Operation Payback
participants and defines Anonymous networks as part of the larger tradition of civil rights in
America.
CYCLES OF RHETORIC: WHAT IS ANONYMOUS?

Anonymous networks consistently seek publicity for their actions through a range of digital
tactics. Anonymous regularly trolls its targets online and offline to provoke reaction and
encourage mass media coverage of protests. Anonymous often has been successful at initiating
feedback loops that lead to further protests and responses from protest targets. On July 19,
2011, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a nationwide sweep of suspected
members of Anonymous. In the process, 16 different people were arrested.42 The sting was a
government response to Operation Payback hacks against PayPal in support of WikiLeaks.43 In
response to the arrests, a letter entitled, What Is Anonymous? appeared on
Cyberguerilla.org. The letter provides a useful case study for understanding why Anonymous is
unlikely to disappear, in spite ofand perhaps because ofefforts to control cyberspace. The
document also is significant because it presents a stark contrast to claims that digital activists
are criminals, terrorists, or threats to the American homeland and way of life.
We are Anonymous. We are unbounded, limitless; we are less a collective and more the
idea of a collective, an idea communicated through action; we are the strange and
circling stars, ineffable and intractable, we are the love and lust for freedom which
forms the white hot cores and births the white hot light. We will not be constricted.
We refute their lies and resist their restriction. We recognize the authority of neither
borders nor kings. Instead we recognize the sovereignty of the individual. We recognize
the power and beauty of a collective of free individuals, each employing their unique
capabilities toward a common end. We dance round the wild and expanding fires of
liberty. We are the inchoate, blistering lights flooding the eyes of petty clerks and
imposing tyrants who have come to see that we now realize what they have for so long
known: that neither they nor their system is invincible. It is a symbol of possibility
meant to inspire action and hope. It is a call to arms, a call empowered by each of our
successes in exhibiting the faults lines which with hungry smiles creep up the walls of
their deceptive pose of invulnerability.44
What Is Anonymous? illustrates several things that the present research attempts to
document. First, Anonymous engages in collective action, but is more than simply a hacker
collective. Anonymous is not a singular collective, but rather it is a set of oppositional
collective networks that challenge the consolidation of power within institutions on a range of
issues. The author(s) of What Is Anonymous? argue that the idea of Anonymous is one linked
to action. Many networks are engaged in collective action. Anonymous networks regularly
invoke patriotic American terms that imply they are defenders of human rights, particularly in
cyberspace. For example, the open letter argues that participants in Anonymous dance round
the wild and expanding fires of liberty. The second paragraph of the document begins with a
defense of the sovereignty of the individual.
Second, What Is Anonymous? challenges efforts to securitize cyberspace through appeals
to fear. It is a direct response to efforts to label Anonymous as a group of terrorists or
criminals. The authors of this letter argue that the propagation of fear in the public is a
symptom of a deeper fear in the hearts of institutional actors. It is not an overstatement to
suggest that Anonymous has exposed holes in the network state and demonstrated the power of
civic action using digital tools.
Fear of hackers is clear in the public rhetoric of security officials when General Alexander
and director of National Intelligence, John Clapper, tell Congress that super-empowered
individuals and political protesters inevitably will create security problems through legal
forms of digital dissent.45 This claim makes every citizen a potential security threat. Anyone
can be the cyberterrorist that walks among us and todays dissident is tomorrows national
security risk.
A key aspect of the Anonymous challenge to Western institutions is that its name evokes a
legal appeal to the foundational values of free, unfettered speech. Networked movements do
not seek policy change so much as they seek a change in values.46 A common call among the
public rhetoric of Anonymous networks is a demand for changes in culture and values. What
Is Anonymous? argues that Our actions speak directly to that most human, universal love of
freedom which may be feared, terrorized, repressed, but which is never quieted in entirety or
extinguished absolutely.47 In this case, appeals to freedom serve as a rallying cry for human
security and dignity.
Further, What Is Anonymous? connects Anonymous networks to the history of all
oppositional politics. The authors present Anonymous in the most general form, with a
vagueness that supports an expansive interpretation of Anonymous without focusing on the
details of individual operations and networks. All love of freedom and action toward liberty
may be considered to be acts of Anonymous, even if they are not designated as such in
name.48 The authors of What Is Anonymous? want the pseudonym Anonymous to reflect
all movements for freedom, even in cases in which the participants do not consider themselves
Anonymous. It is not even necessary to know that you are Anonymous to be Anonymous.
The final sentence of What Is Anonymous? invokes Martin Luther King Jr. in the
conclusion of his I have a dream speech, by suggesting that you are Anonymous if you wish
to see all free at last. Dr. King concluded his speech by reciting a list of places where he
wants to let freedom ring before loudly proclaiming that when freedom rings everywhere
[w]e can invoke the words of the old negro spiritual. Free at last. Free at last. Thank God
almighty, we are free at last. Anonymous is enthymematically linked to the great civil rights
movement of the 1960s, and by extension identified as a digital version of efforts to guarantee
equality to all citizens. In this letter, all oppositional movements become Anonymous because
they seek liberation.
What Is Anonymous? concludes with support for digital actions against NATO and
praise for people arrested in the nationwide police action against participants in Operation
Payback. The letter is a flowery defense of Anonymous that is short on specifics and long on
visions of liberation and freedom. What Is Anonymous? encourages a broad interpretation of
Anonymous. The problem of course, is that this means Anonymous wants to be all things to all
people. Would Crimeans who want to secede from Ukraine be Anonymous? What about Kurds
in Iraq who want an independent country, are they Anonymous? What Is Anonymous? implies
that Anonymous is global and lends credence to General Alexanders paranoia about the
hacker-terrorists that live among us. In this sense, the letter itself constitutes a very poetic troll
and another salvo in the cycle of rhetoric between Anonymous and the security apparatus of the
American government.
CONFRONTATION AND RESPONSES: SHOULD HILLARY CLINTON

JOIN ANONYMOUS?
According to digital scholar and critic Evgeny Morozov,49 Hillary Clinton should join
Anonymous because their agendas (Internet freedom) and the results of their efforts are the
same: tactics that hurt online speech and digital rights. Morozov argues that Hillary Clintons
rhetorical defense of Internet freedom fails because it encourages a crackdown on Net freedom
by nation-states. Morozov is right about the problematic nature of the contradictory messages
coming from U.S. leaders. At the same time, Morozov missed the boat on the efficacy and
importance of Anonymous and spectacle as tools of dissent. His comments provide a useful
foil for considering the implications of digital activism and the U.S. security apparatuss
securitization of cyberspace.
Morozov argues that Anonymous does not promote Internet freedom because protest and
spectacle are not effective forms of mobilization. He contends that protesters will lose their
ability to control the content of public screens when the media lose interest. I contended that
Morozov50 misunderstands Anonymous and its significance. Anonymous suggests that dissent
and citizen organization are changing. Anonymous proves that social media is a tool for gaining
access to the screens of mass media. Project Chanology organized through social media, but
garnered international media attention because it successfully held sustained physical protests
at Church of Scientology centers around the world, which are still ongoing.
Although it is certainly the case that the media lose interest in issues over time, the key
issue is not whether a movement or political group is able to control the public screens of mass
media indefinitely. Occupy Wall Street is proof that it is possible to circumvent mass media
and to benefit from even small amounts of coverage in the mainstream presseven if that
coverage is negative.51 Earth First! was a success because it was able to hijack public screens
long enough to plant a seed of information that challenged the meaning and signification of
important ideas through breathtaking spectacle.52 Similarly, Operation RollRedRoll in
Steubenville, Ohio, brought the full weight of fear and hyperbole about Anonymous to a small
Ohio town. Though the events in Steubenville already had garnered attention from the media
due to blogger Andrea Goddard, Anonymous network KnightSec turned up the volume of
national media attention. The result was enough public pressure to help spur law enforcement
into action.
CONCLUSION
Echoes of 9/11 still reverberate through U.S. institutions, most notably in the metadata
program that Snowden made infamous and which was successfully reauthorized in December
2014.53 General Alexanders speeches repeat many of the tropes extant in the post-9/11
speeches of George W. Bush. Both people exhibit what Marc Redfield identifies as virtual
trauma in response to 9/11.54 Most people did not directly experience 9/11. Rather, for a
majority of Americans and citizens globally, it was a mediated horror show. Mediation made
the experience worse for viewers who repeatedly watched clips of the building collapses and
the jets hitting the towers. Constant references to 9/11 and justification of current policy
through appeals to this singular past event reflect virtual trauma. A decade later, the ghosts of
9/11 continue to reappear.
For General Alexander, virtual trauma is at the heart of his approach to cybersecurity. He
is fond of the claim that terrorists walk among us. Alexander is quick to remind his audiences
that cyberspace is a converged domain where good citizens and bad apples both mingle, using
the same social media platforms and tools.
Terrorists and other foreign adversaries hide in the global networks, use the same
communications networks as everyone else and take advantage of familiar services
Gmail, Facebook, Twitter. Technology has made it easy for them. We must develop and
apply the best analytic tools to succeed at our mission.55
Because it is impossible to know who is good and who is bad, it becomes important to
evaluate everyone, or at least to have a mechanism for investigating all citizens. We have
moved from a world where people are innocent until proven guilty, to a world where you are
guilty until CYBERCOM investigates your digital life and declares you innocent. Edward
Snowden has proven that this rhetoric supports a range of domestic and international policy
initiatives, many of which appear to have been kept secret from everyone, including civilian
oversight conducted by the executive and congressional branches of government, much less by
the Fifth Estate.
What is remarkable about the continuous invocation of 9/11 and the claim that
securitization of cyberspace is necessary to prevent terrorism, is that the programs revealed by
Edward Snowden did not stop the Boston Marathon bombing. Moreover, it is now apparent
that the FBI and security actors interviewed Tsarnaev but closed the case for lack of evidence
that he was dangerous.56 Russia re-sent its warning to the CIA in 2011, resulting in no action by
U.S. intelligence officials.57 Even worse is that Boston Police never knew about Russias
warnings.58 More surveillance would not have solved the institutional problems that are clear
here. Punitive prison sentences against activists and journalists such as Barrett Brown will not
deter ideologically driven lunatics like Tsarnaev.
If cyberspace is a military domain, then what constitutes legitimate dissent in this domain?
If CYBERCOM and the NSA must target civilian populations to get hackers, and hackers
are everything from criminals, to terrorists, to citizens exercising their political rights, then it
will be difficult to protect civil liberties and securitize cyberspace. Operations targeting IRC
networks by intelligence agencies working for democratic Western nations suggest that digital
speech is not entirely free.
In reality, many of the threats that exist in cyberspace are old threats wearing a digital mask
pirates, criminal organizations, violent extremists, and other nations. Moreover, the demands
to take action to solve the many problems created by digital technology contain echoes of past
statist solutions to the challenges of new technology.59 General Alexanders articulation of
cyberspace as anarchic and dangerous, and his branding of hackers as representative of all
cyber threats, creates rhetorical resources for other government officials. Investigation and
legal censure of cyberactivists mirrors the security rhetoric of General Alexander. The future
of digital speech is very much in doubt. It is worrying that the top court to rule on digital
speech, the Ninth Circuit, ruled that online speech is less protected than offline speech.60 The
Ninth Circuit ruling (and lack of guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court) raises the stakes in
debates about digital privacy and the merits of online dissent. Congress needs to act to codify
digital privacy and to clarify competing legal doctrines. To make this possible, an informed
citizenry and clear public consensus in favor of expanded protections for online privacy is
imperative.
* Special thanks to Dr. Amelia Arsenault, Dr. Shawn Powers, and Dr. Brendan Howe for their constant support for my
research and academic work. It is sincerely appreciated.JJ
NOTES
1. Gabriella Coleman, Hacker Politics and Publics, Public Culture 23, no. 3 (2011): 51116.
2. Manuel Castells, Network Theory: A Network Theory of Power, International Journal of Communication 5 (2011):
77387.
3. Olivia Solon, Charlie Hebdo: Anonymous Declares War on Jihadists in Retaliation for Paris Massacre with
#OpCharlieHebdo, Mirror (January 9, 2015), http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/technology/charlie-hebdo-
anonymous-declares-war-4949878.
4. Barton Gellman, Anonymous-2012 Time 100: The Most Influential People in the World, Time (April 18, 2012),
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2111975_2111976_2112122,00.html.
5. Jason Jarvis, Digital Image Politics: The Networked Rhetoric of Anonymous, Global Discourse: An Interdisciplinary
Journal of Current Affairs and Applied Contemporary Thought 4, no. 23 (February 2014),
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23269995.2014.923633.
6. Esther Tanquintic-Misa, Saudi Arabia Bans Guy Fawkes Vendetta Masks, Invokes Culture of Violence,
International Business Times (May 31, 2013), http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/473121/20130531/saudi-arabia-guy-fawkes-
vendetta-masks-violence.htm#.UdSHCm0d-O5.
7. Parmy Olson, Amid ACTA Outc[r]y, Politicians Don Anonymous Guy Fawkes Masks, Forbes (January 27, 2012),
http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2012/01/27/amid-acta-outcy-politicians-don-anonymous-guy-fawkes-masks/.
8. Douglas Thomas, Hacker Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
9. Sandor Vegh, The Medias Portrayal of Hacking, Hackers, and Hacktivism before and after September 11, First
Monday: Peer-Reviewed Journal on the Internet 10, no. 2 (February 2005): n.p.
10. Anonymous Hackers Getting More Disruptive, Could Cause Power Outage, GMA News (February 21, 2012),
http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/248850/scitech/technology/anonymous-hackers-getting-more-disruptive-could-cause-
power-outage.
11. Ken Dilanian, Cyber-Attacks a Bigger Threat than Al Qaeda, Officials Say, Los Angeles Times (March 12, 2013),
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-worldwide-threats-20130313,0,3374690.story.
12. Three examples of media vilification of hackers in the wake of the Sony invasion: Agence France Presse, Hackers
Threaten Sony Employees in New Email, The Telegraph (December 6, 2014),
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/11277086/Hackers-threaten-Sony-employees-in-new-email.html;
Emily Flitter and Mark Hosenball, FBI Says Sony Hackers Got Sloppy, Posted from North Korea Addresses, Reuters
(January 7, 2015), http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/07/us-northkorea-cyberattack-usa-fbi-idUSKBN0KG1V220150107;
Reuters News Agency, North Korea May Have Hired Hackers to Attack Sony, India Today (December 30, 2014),
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/technology/story/north-korea-may-have-hired-hackers-to-attack-sony/1/410558.html.
13. Stefano Rellandini, Anonymous Accuses NSA of Fear-Mongering, News, RT (Russia Today) (February 21, 2012),
http://rt.com/usa/news/anonymous-nsa-fear-mongering-government-871/.
14. Anonymous, 2012 US Government Terrorist Identification Chart, CyberGuerilla (December 19, 2011),
http://www.cyberguerrilla.info/?p=3464.
15. Victoria Smith Ekstrand and Cassandra Imfeld Jeyaram, Our Founding Anonymity: Anonymous Speech during the
Constitutional Debate, American Journalism 28, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 52.
16. Jason M. Shepard and Genelle Belmas, Anonymity, Disclosure and First Amendment Balancing in the Internet Era:
Developments in Libel, Copyright, and Election Speech, Yale Journal of Law and Technology 15, no. 92 (Winter, 201213).
17. John A. Fraser III, The Use of Encrypted, Coded and Secret Communications Is an Ancient Liberty Protected by the
United States Constitution, Virginia Journal of Law and Technology 2, no. 2 (Fall 1997), Lexis/Nexis Academic.
18. Matt Brian, Hacker Convicted by US Court Despite Never Hacking, The Verge (April 25, 2013),
http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/25/4264356/david-nosal-guilty-of-hacking-cfaa-violation.
19. Sean Gallagher, Reporters Use Google, Find Breach, Get Branded as Hackers, Ars Technica (May 21, 2013),
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/reporters-use-google-find-breach-get-branded-as-hackers/.
20. Nate Anderson, Two Years after Anon Kochblock, Wisconsin Man Charged with DDoS, Ars Technica (March 27,
2013), http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/two-years-after-anon-kochblock-wisconsin-man-charged-with-ddos/.
21. Hanni Fakhoury and Jennifer Lynch, Prosecution of Barrett Brown Still Threatens Journalistic Freedom in U.S.,
Electronic Frontier Foundation (March 12, 2014), https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/03/prosecution-barrett-brown-still-
threatens-journalistic-freedom-us.
22. Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez, and Kevin Gallagher, Barrett Brown Sentenced to 5 Years in Prison after Reporting on
Hacked Private Intelligence Firms, Democracy Now (January 23, 2015),
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/23/barrett_brown_sentenced_to_five_years.
23. Jeremy Hammond, Jeremy Hammonds Sentencing Statement, The Sparrow Project (November 15, 2013),
http://www.sparrowmedia.net/2013/11/jeremy-hammond-sentence/; Janet Reitman, The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Hammond:
Enemy of the State, Rolling Stone (December 7, 2012), http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-rise-and-fall-of-jeremy-
hammond-enemy-of-the-state-20121207.
24. Margo Kaminski, Real Masks and Real Name Policies: Applying Anti-Mask Case Law to Anonymous Online Speech,
Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal 23, no. 815 (Spring 2013), Lexis/Nexis Academic.
25. Ekstrand and Jeyaram, Our Founding Anonymity: Anonymous Speech during the Constitutional Debate.
26. Eran Shalev, Ancient Masks, American Fathers: Classical Pseudonyms during the American Revolution and Early
Republic, Journal of the Early Republic 23, no. 2 (July 1, 2003): 15172, doi: 10.2307/3125034.
27. Nedra Pickler, Obama Seeks Laws on Data Hacking, Student Privacy, Huffington Post (January 12, 2015),
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/12/obama-law-student-privacy_n_6456394.html.
28. Brandon T. Crowther, Digitally Unknown: Why the Ninth Circuit Should Wish to Remain Anonymous in In Re
Anonymous Online Speakers, Brigham Young University Law Review 2012, no. 2 (March 2012): 44560; Sarah Gibson and
Brad Reid, Who Is That Masked Man: Should Anonymous Posters to Newspaper Websites Be Unmasked? Southern Law
Journal 22, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 11744; Jane E. Kirtley, Mask, Shield, and Sword: Should the Journalists Privilege Protect the
Identity of Anonymous Posters to News Media Websites? Minnesota Law Review 94, no. 5 (May 2010): 14781513; Sophia
Qasir, Anonymity in Cyberspace: Judicial and Legislative Regulations, Fordham Law Review 81, no. 3651 (May 2013),
Lexis/Nexis Academic.
29. Ira S. Rubenstein, Ronald D. Lee, and Paul M. Schwartz, Surveillance: Data Mining and Internet Profiling: Emerging
Regulatory and Technological Approaches, University of Chicago Law Review 75, no. 261 (2008), Lexis/Nexis Academic;
Omer Tene, What Google Knows: Privacy and Internet Search Engines, Utah Law Review 2008, no. 1433 (2008),
30. Mallory Allen, Ninth Circuit Unmasks Anonymous Internet Users and Lowers the Bar for Disclosure of Online
Speakers, Washington Journal of Law, Technology and Arts 7, no. 75 (Fall 2011), Lexis/Nexis Academic.
31. Brandon T. Crowther, Digitally Unknown: Why the Ninth Circuit Should Wish to Remain Anonymous in In Re
Anonymous Online Speakers, Brigham Young University Law Review 2012, no. 2 (March 2012): 44560.
32. Musetta Durkee, The Truth Can Catch the Lie: The Flawed Understanding of Online Speech in In Re Anonymous
Online Speakers, Berkeley Technology Law Journal 26, no. 1 (Annual Review 2011): 773821.
33. Parmy Olson, We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous and the Global Cyber
Insurgency, New York, Boston, London: Little, Brown and Company, 2012.
34. Ibid.
35. Goodman, Gonzalez, and Gallagher, Barrett Brown Sentenced to 5 Years in Prison after Reporting on Hacked Private
Intelligence Firms.
36. Keith B. Alexander, Gen. Keith Alexander Commander CYBERCOM Testimony at House Armed Services
Committee, defense.gov Special Report: The Cyber DomainSecurity and Operations (September 23, 2010),
http://www.defense.gov/home/features/2013/0713_cyberdomain/; Kevin P. Chilton, 2010 Cyberspace Symposium: Keynote
USSTRATCOM Perspective, US Strategic Command (May 26, 2010),
http://www.stratcom.mil/speeches/2010/37/2010_Cyberspace_Symposium_Keynote_-_USSTRATCOM_Perspective/.
37. Statement for the Record of LT GEN Keith B. Alexander, Director, National Security Agency before the Committee
on the Judiciary United States Senate, National Security Agency/Central Security Service (July 26, 2006),
http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/speeches_testimonies/26july06_dirnsa.shtml.
38. Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher, How the NSA Plans to Infect Millions of Computers with Malware, The
Intercept (March 12, 2014), https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/03/12/nsa-plans-infect-millions-computers-malware/.
39. Mark Schone, Richard Esposito, Matthew Cole, and Glenn Greenwald, War on Anonymous: British Spies Attacked
Hackers, Snowden Docs ShowNBC News.com, NBC News (February 5, 2014),
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/war-anonymous-british-spies-attacked-hackers-snowden-docs-show-n21361.
40. Ibid.
41. Adrian Chen, Weaponize the Media: An Anonymous Rappers War on Steubenville, Gawker (June 12, 2013),
http://gawker.com/weaponize-the-media-an-anonymous-rappers-war-on-ste-512747826?src=longreads; Alexandria Goddard, I
Am the Blogger Who Allegedly Complicated the Steubenville Rape Caseand I Wouldnt Change a Thing, XOJane (March
18, 2013), http://www.xojane.com/issues/steubenville-rape-verdict-alexandria-goddard.
42. Jana Winter, 16 Suspected Anonymous Hackers Arrested in Nationwide Sweep, Fox News (July 19, 2011),
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2011/07/19/exclusive-fbi-search-warrants-nationwide-hunt-anonymous/.
43. Anonymous, What Is Anonymous? CyberGuerilla (July 21, 2011), http://www.cyberguerrilla.org/?p=2402.
44. Ibid.
45. James Clapper, Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community; Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence (Office of the Director of National Intelligence) (March 12, 2013), http://www.lawfareblog.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/03/WWTA2013.pdf.
46. Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012).
47. Anonymous, What Is Anonymous?
48. Ibid.
49. Why Hillary Clinton Should Join Anonymous: The State Department and the Online Mob Are Both Destroying
Internet Freedom, Slate (April 23, 2012),
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/04/internet_freedom_threat_posed_by_hillary_clinton_s_state_department_a
50. Ibid.
51. John W. Delicath, and Kevin M. DeLuca, Image Events, the Public Sphere, and Argumentative Practice: The Case for
Radical Environmental Groups, Argumentation 17 (2003): 31533.
52. Kevin M. DeLuca, Sean Lawson, and Ye Sun, Occupy Wall Street on the Public Screens of Social Media: The Many
Framings of the Birth of a Protest Movement, Communication, Culture & Critique 5 (2012): 483509.
53. David Kravets, NSA Warrantless Bulk Phone Metadata Spying Continues Unabated, Ars Technica (December 8,
2014), http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/nsa-warrantless-bulk-phone-metadata-spying-continues-unabated/.
54. Marc Redfield, Virtual Trauma: The Idiom of 9/11, Diacritics 37.1 (Spring 2007): 5580.
55. Keith B. Alexander, Remarks as Delivered by General Keith Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency,
Open Hearing on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Authorities, U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; Thursday,
September 26, 2013; 216 Hart Senate Office Building, Capitol, Washington DC, Office of the Director of National
IntelligenceIC on the Record (September 26, 2013), http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/post/62359076197/remarks-as-
delivered-by-general-keith-alexander.
56. Peter Finn and Sari Horwitz, Boston Police Werent Told of Russian Warning on Brother, Washington Post (May 9,
2013), http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/lieberman-critical-of-us-agencies-for-failure-to-stop-boston-
bombing/2013/05/09/22acbe00-b830-11e2-aa9e-a02b765ff0ea_story.html.
57. Scott Shane, Jihad Discussions Led to Warning on Tamerlan Tsarnaev, New York Times (April 27, 2013),
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/us/jihad-discussions-led-to-warning-on-tamerlan-tsarnaev.html?_r=0.
58. Finn and Horwitz, Boston Police Werent Told of Russian Warning on Brother.
59. Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (New York: Vintage Books, 2011).
60. Allen, Ninth Circuit Unmasks Anonymous Internet Users and Lowers the Bar for Disclosure of Online Speakers
Crowther, Digitally Unknown: Why the Ninth Circuit Should Wish to Remain Anonymous in In Re Anonymous Online
Speakers.
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7
Hands Up, Dont Shoot: Social Media As

a Site of Government (Dis)Trust
Sarah Turner McGowen
Monday, November 24, 2014, arguably was a difficult day for many in the city of Ferguson,
Missouri, including St. Louis county prosecutor Robert McCulloch. As crowds of people filled
the streets of Ferguson, awaiting a decision that had divided much of the country along race-
based lines, Americans throughout the country tuned in to various media outlets to follow the
announcement McCulloch would make regarding whether a grand jury had decided to indict
Ferguson-based police officer Darren Wilson in the death of unarmed black teenager, Michael
Brown Jr. As McCulloch began his statement approximately 15 minutes past 8 p.m. CST, he
briefly acknowledged Browns family before describing the details that transpired shortly after
Browns death. McCulloch said,
On August 9th, Michael Brown was shot and killed by Police Officer Darren Wilson.
Within minutes, various accounts of the incident began appearing on social media.
Accounts filled with speculation and little, if any solid, accurate information. Almost
immediately, neighbors began gathering and anger began growing because of the
various descriptions of what had happened and because of the underlying tension
between the police department and the significant part of the neighborhood.1
McCullochs description of the events that transpired immediately following Browns

death suggest that social media was largely influential in not only disseminating misinformation
regarding the circumstances of Browns shooting, but also in encouraging individuals to act on
that false information.
Although this might seem like a victory for those who argue for the importance of social
media, McCullochs words also can read as a condemnation of those who use social media to
organize and share information. Later in his statement, he continues criticizing the media in
general, saying the most significant challenge encountered in this investigation has been the
24-hour news cycle and its insatiable appetite for something, for anything to talk about.
Following closely behind were the nonstop rumors on social media.2 Not only does
McCulloch suggest that news and social media were guilty of creating more controversy than
the situation warranted, he condemns the media for spreading different accounts of Browns
death. Regardless of whether fault lies with either entity, both news and social media
undoubtedly play a vital role in the dissemination of information while facilitating public
discussion of police force and racism in America.
Although media scholars could (and should) analyze the news medias coverage of the
Fergusons communitys unrest, this chapter explores social medias ability to function as a
discussion forum at an important moment in our nations recent history. Shah, Cho, Eveland,
and Kwaks previous research has shown that individuals might use the Internet as a resource
and a discussion forum, which can strongly influence civic engagement by accompanying news
media reports and interpersonal communication. The authors argue that online media
complement traditional media to foster political discussion and civic messaging [that], in turn,
influence civic participation.3 As this research suggests, this chapter argues that social media
likewise plays a significant role in terms of encouraging political conversations. Unlike
McCulloch and other critics of social medias spread of misinformation, this chapter does not
seek to assess the accuracy of material shared through social media, but rather to assess how
individuals use social media to participate in the political process. Building on previous
research that has explored how political engagement is enacted through social media use, it
highlights the ways in which social media has influenced notions of democratic involvement.
Social media use in its very nature has altered the way individuals share ideological values
with one another, thus shifting the cultural landscape greatly in the past decade. The author
problematizes this move, using Browns death and the ensuing public unrest in Ferguson as an
example of how social media use influences cultural discourses toward the democratic process
and political engagement by extension.
To begin, first is a brief overview of the series of events that lead to the unrest in Ferguson
(and around the country), providing context to the claims of racial injustice and police
militarization discussed online. After this, the chapter reviews some of the literature regarding
online political engagement, suggesting the importance of social media as more than just a
casual diversion away from political conversations. In fact, it argues specifically that social
media has unique attributes that create a potential for greater democratic participation
(regardless of whether it is used in that way). Last, after a brief review of cascading activation
and media convergence, the chapter suggests three different ways that individuals used social
mediaparticularly Twitterto engage in a political discussion regarding Browns death and
Wilsons role in that death. Specifically, this chapter relies on tweets captured from the day
McCulloch announced the results of the grand jury investigation, revealing that Wilson would
not be indicted in regards to Browns death.
UNREST IN FERGUSON
To understand the role social media played in the Ferguson protests, it is important to have
some contextual knowledge of Browns death and the events preceding and following his
killing. According to McCullochs report of the official investigation, on August 9th Wilson
responded to a radio call regarding theft of cigars from a local convenience store. He received
a physical description of the robbery suspect, one that matched Browns look and attire that
day.4 (Note: Security footage from the store released at a later date showed Brown grabbing a
handful of cigars and walking out without paying for them. Browns alleged theft became the
source of much public debate about whether his actions classified him as a dangerous criminal
worth shooting.) While on patrol in his car shortly thereafter, Wilson encountered Brown and a
friend walking in the middle of the street. Upon encountering the two young men, Wilson
initially remained in his police vehicle and confronted Brown. According to several
eyewitness statements, while Wilson remained in his car and Brown stood outside it, the two
had an altercation. During this tussle Wilson fired two shots, which prompted Brown to flee on
foot. Wilson followed on foot as well, and it is during the chase that Brown was fatally shot.
Official reports and eyewitness statements released to the press vary on the details of the
shooting. According to McCulloch, the official investigation found evidence to support the fact
that Brown stopped running, turned to face Wilson, and began to run at the officer.5 It was at
this point that Wilson, fearing for his safety, fired the fatal shots that killed Brown. Some early
eyewitness reports, however, argue that Brown was shot with his hands in the air while
moving backward, indicating his willingness to cooperate with Wilson.6 (This is partially
where the catchphrase Hands up, dont shoot came fromthe idea is that Brown was not
shot for his aggression or attack against Wilson, but rather as he was trying to flee the
situation.) During his statement regarding the grand jurys decision to not indict Wilson,
McCulloch emphasized that physical evidence collected from the scene of the shooting and
Browns autopsy was weighted more heavily than eyewitness reports, saying, all decisions in
the criminal justice system must be determined by the physical and scientific evidence and the
credible testimony corroborated by that evidence, not in response to public outcry or for
political expediency.7
McCullochs suggestion that public protest has no place in the justice system lies in direct
contrast to the national conversation sparked in the aftermath of Browns death, a conversation
fueled by the closely timed deaths of other black men at the hands of police officers around the
country. Further, the dichotomy between McCullochs statement and the public outcry is quite
easily visible through social media,8 as is evident in several posts highlighted in this chapter.
Browns death, along with the death of Eric Garner (a black man who was choked to death
by a New York City police officer during an altercation with the police), reignited a national
conversation on police use of excessive force and the systemic racism present in law
enforcement organizations. A CNN article summarizes survey data that indicate trust in police
officers has declined recently, especially among African Americans,9 tying this distrust to
demographic changes and visible instances of police violence against black men (including
Brown, Garner, and Rodney King, among others). Although it is certainly the purview of law
enforcement officers to determine when lethal force is required, the employment of fatal
methods coupled with the racial composition of the police officers and victims led many to
question current law enforcement practices. The U.S. Justice Department, for example, has
launched civil rights investigations into both Browns and Garners deaths. Yet, to some
people the inherent racism against nonwhites present in the justice system already is apparent
and obvious.
After the Ferguson grand jury announcement, the hashtags (or search terms)
#BlackLivesMatter and #JusticeforMikeBrown appeared on Twitter. As USA Today writer
Jenny Doren said, Twitter again showed how big a role the network can play in a breaking
news story that lends itself to frequent visual updates from citizen journalists and one thats
engendered intense discussion over police treatment of African-Americans.10 These hashtags
arguably were meant as a way to say that the law enforcement system devalues the realities of
black individuals, which has resulted in the unfortunate and real consequence of death for
Brown and Garner, among others. Much could be said about the problems inherent in the
American justice system, but this chapter is about social medias role in discussing these
problems. Thus, it next discusses political engagement in an online environment, specifically
arguing that previous research already has demonstrated that social media can be
democratically participatory in nature.
SOCIAL MEDIA AND POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT

To clarify what political engagement means, the term commonly refers to pro-social
variables that positively influence the democratic process, including but not limited to political
issue evaluation,11 civic engagement,12 political interest, political trust, political efficacy, and
political participation.13 Political communication scholars typically seek out the presence of
these variables, with the assumption that, in general, higher degrees of political engagement
variables in an individual or population lead to a more democratic society. Political
engagement traditionally has been experienced (and therefore studied) in both interpersonal
and mass-mediated contexts, but as voters in the 21st century seek to complete these
experiences online, researchers have sought to better understand what this means for the
democratic process. This chapter focuses on online communication as a form of political
participation, one that did not exist prior to the proliferation of social media use in daily life.
Several scholars previously theorized the importance of social media in terms of political
engagement and democracy broadly. This research is not surprising because, as the Pew
Research Internet Project put it, social media is increasingly home to civil society, the place
where knowledge sharing, public discussions, debates, and disputes are carried out. As the
new public square, social media conversations are as important to document as any other large
public gathering.14 Although scholars such as Robert McChesney have suggested that online
political participation does little to influence the democratic process,15 other research shows
that the Internet can in fact facilitate greater political engagement, especially in terms of
information seeking and sharing. Delli Carpini has argued that the Internets egalitarian design
is particularly appealing for young citizens,16 a group commonly known for lacking in political
interest and engagement. Coupled with the fact that the largest percentage of people who use
social media are individuals aged 18 to 29,17 further research indicates that many young adults
regularly use social media Web sites to participate in politics.18,19,20 Although young citizens
often rely on online sources (including friends, family, news outlets, and opinion pieces) to
obtain information, they also might supplement information acquired from traditional media
outlets such as broadcast news stations.21
We should question exactly how beneficial these online behaviors can be, however,
particularly when the information presented might be inaccurate or its dissemination
irresponsible. It seems that social media users are also aware of these potential problems.
Schmierbach and Oeldorf-Hirschs study on Twitter and its credibility found that although
online blogs often can be judged to contain credible information among online users,
information presented via Twitter actually was found to be less credible. Information shared
through Twitter also was deemed subsequently less important than the same information
presented in story format on a newspaper Web site.22 Problems like these sometimes bleed into
young adults confidence in the information they do obtain online.
Kushin and Yamamotos research found that young adults use of social media to obtain
political information did nothing to increase self-efficacy and political involvement. The
authors explain that if attention to social media for political information is not as purposive as
some might expect, the unintended receiving of political content may not serve to activate
users motivation to seek out information.23 Thus, those who go online to seek political
information are more likely already politically engaged, and social media does not add any
additionally benefits to the democratic process. Social media does indeed influence the
democratic process, but it does not necessarily do so in the most pro-social way. The ability
for information (whether accurate or inaccurate) to spread rapidly, along with the ability for
any individual (whether trained or untrained) to convincingly report information have positive
and negative potential implications for democracy, as is apparent in the case of the Ferguson
protests. Before delving into the particulars of the case study presented in this chapter, the
theories of cascading activation and media convergence, both of which relate to social medias
political potential, are explained below.
NEW MEDIA THEORIES

There are as many varied approaches to studying social media as there are opinions that
are shared online. One such way to understand social media is from a networking perspective,
such as exploring how groups form into various crowds. A Pew Research study published in
February 2014 found that the use of the social media site Twitter to discuss political issues
resulted in several regularly observed clusters.24 As individuals refer to one another through
replies and mentions in their own individual tweets, identifiable group contours take shape in
one of the following commonalities: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, and inward and
outward hub-and-spoke structures. Note that these groups primarily are composed of those
who are already interested in political discourse and exchange, which could discourage
researchers who wish to know more about the general population of those who use social
media. The authors of the study put forth the following argument:
Still, the structure of these Twitter conversations says something meaningful about
political discourse these days and the tendency of politically active citizens to sort
themselves into distinct partisan camps. Social networking maps of these conversations
provide new insights because they combine analysis of the opinions people express on
Twitter, the information sources they cite in their tweets, analysis of who is in the
networks of the tweeters, and how big those networks are. And to the extent that these
online conversations are followed by a broader audience, their impact may reach well
beyond the participants themselves.25
The positive benefits listed here notwithstanding, political engagement through social
media still has potential problems. Social media inherently provides a sense of anonymity (to
those who wish to maintain it), making it easier for individuals to distance themselves from the
ramifications of voicing certain perspectives. The potential lack of accountability is further
complicated by the two new media theoriescascading activation and media convergence
which propose explanations for widespread popular narratives and online media consumption,
respectively.
CASCADING ACTIVATION
To make sense of the civic unrest in Ferguson following Browns death, researchers should
seek to understand how and why certain narrative explanations became more salient throughout
the community. Cascading activation does this by positing that social media helps circulate
relevant and significant narratives among a group of people. Cascading activation essentially
is a social-networking theory, in which case it can be applied to incorporate new technologies
such as social media. Entman proposed the use of cascading activation as a way to understand
how certain frames of referenceor ways of understanding a particular issuecan spread
more rapidly among a given culture due to their relevancy among various networks.26 In other
words, certain stories can resonate and spread more quickly than others because they are more
culturally significant than their counterparts.
An example might help further explain. When McCulloch announced that the grand jury
investigation did not lead to an indictment of Wilson, two main narratives arose on Twitter to
explain this decision. The first was provided by McCullochthat the evidence uncovered in
the investigation was not enough to find probable cause of any criminal act. The second,
however, seemed to carry more weight among Twitter users, suggesting thatregardless of any
amount of evidenceno indictment would ever occur because Brown was African American.
To better understand why this second explanation might have been more widely accepted, refer
back to cascading activation. Ease and speed of a storys spreading are influenced by a number
of factors, including the power of the narrative, the motivation of the media, and the cultural
convergence of that narrativein other words, how true is that explanation perceived to be.
Without speculating on motivations of new media organizations, the potency of Browns death
among the Ferguson community is evident and apparent. Further, because a significant portion
of Twitter users already believed that the justice system is biased against black Americans, it
was easy for them to believe that the police force, prosecutor, and grand jury members had no
regard for black lives. This disregard seemed to explain why no indictment occurred much
more so than did McCullochs justification of lack of evidence.
Widely used and accepted narratives (such as the notion that the legal system places no
value on black lives) maintain high levels of credibility, overshadowing other stories and
themes. Greater credibility and acceptance of stories lead to a reciprocal outcome, in that
stories with these components spread more easily and rapidly through social networks (causing
them to be more widely used). The process described here is referred to as a cascade, which
can be amplified even further in a new media environment that enables more participatory
information dissemination than that of traditional broadcast media. Knowing which stories
spread rapidly through a given network enables social media users to participate in political
conversations, presenting an opportunity to those who wish to challenge mainstream beliefs
that might perpetuate racism and systemic inequalities. Thus, although social media is
particularly well suited to spread common narratives among a vast social network quickly and
efficiently, if these stories are inaccurate or irresponsible in nature, then the potential for harm
remains. The very thing that makes social media more participatory in nature than more
traditional mediaits egalitarian designactually could invite inaccuracies into the broader
political conversation.
MEDIA CONVERGENCE
Thanks in large part to the ever-changing technological advances of the 21st century,
individuals can participate in politics in ways previously unseen. Media convergence seeks to
explain the ways in which technology and cultural development shape critical discourse about
topics both mundane and significant. Jenkins, Ford, and Green explain, saying,
[T]he growth of networked communication, especially when coupled with the practices
of participatory culture, provides a range of new resources and facilitates new
interventions for a variety of groups who have long struggled to have their voices
heard. New platforms create openings for social, cultural, economic, legal, and
political change and opportunities for diversity and democratization for which it is
worth fighting.27
The authors suggest that new media, including social media, has altered notions of
conventional political involvement, opening up space for new perspectives and diverse voices
to be heard. Diversity is key here, because media convergence relies on the notion that current
media practices involve several moving parts and significant players. Previously only a select
group of peoplenamely journalists and public officialspossessed the ability to
communicate mediated messages to a broad audience. As media companies consolidate
ownership, fewer content sources exist, subsequently reducing the quantity and diversity of
mediated messages. Coupled alongside greater consolidation is an increase in specialized
media outlets that narrowly tailor content to various topical interests. Although the combination
of these facts implies that media companies engage in monolithic action, consolidated
ownership and narrowcasting are contrasted by increased diversity online. This chapters use
of media convergence theory, at its heart, refers to the balancing act between these two
contradictory ideas.
Ideally, diverse opinions promote positive democratic practices, such as public
deliberation, and media convergence theory suggests a potential for greater inclusion of
previously unheard voices. The interactive nature of social media shifts roles, as those who
used to be traditional media consumers are now active producers, too. Jenkins, Ford, and
Green explain that participatory models of communication see individuals shape, share, and
reframe media content in new ways, doing so not as isolated individuals but within larger
communities and networks, which allow them to spread content well beyond their immediate
geographic proximity.28 With regard to excessive use of police force against black men,
Browns death yielded great interest across the nation, unlimited by its geographical
boundaries. Thus, unrestricted geographic proximity sets a foundation for protestors to
organize in various cities around the country, using Twitter to coordinate efforts. A Wall Street
Journal report showed that two of the main organizers [prepared] for the protests by sending
out tweets with information and calls to action. The two reached more than 20,000 followers
each with their Ferguson updates.29 Media convergence, then, shifts the balance of power (in
terms of message content and political action) solely from traditional producers such as news
outlets and disperses it more equitably among consumers, as well.
When media convergence and cascading activation are considered together, scholars could
begin to understand how particular narratives circulate widely through social media sites, even
if those narratives contradict the stories put forth by those who hold positions of power. Social
media has become a new site of cultural resistance and struggle for power, where alternate
viewpoints vie for significance alongside their mainstream counterpoints. If media participants
are to be viewed as de Certeau described themas fighters in a guerilla war30the new
media environment is a battleground for the creation of meaning and legitimacy. Media
convergence does present an optimistic outlook on the ability of individuals to participate in
democracy through new media technologies, providing a form of resistance to oppressive
power structures. Scholars, however, must remain attentive to the implications that social
media use has on notions of democratic involvement and political participation. Despite the
positive influence social media can have on increasing democratic discourse, it also could
further divide the electorate because it encourages polarization through the reinforcement of
contentious narratives. By looking at the tweets surrounding the civic unrest in Ferguson, this
chapter next provides an example of social medias political power to reinforce partisan
viewpoints online.
GOVERNMENT (DIS)TRUST ON SOCIAL MEDIA

For this project, the author collected a rough sample of public tweets sent on Monday,
November 24, 2014, between 3:40 p.m. and 9:15 p.m. CST. The date and time are significant
because that was the window of time leading up to and briefly following McCullochs
announcement regarding the grand jury investigation into Wilsons actions in Browns death.
Tweets were collected for 15-minute periods every hour leading up to the announcement, as
well as throughout the duration of McCullochs announcement and for approximately 30
minutes afterward. Tweets were limited to those that included the search term #Ferguson,
which served as a filter of sorts to weed out tweets that were unrelated to the grand jury
announcement.
Although the intention of this study was not to conduct a systematic, quantitative analysis of the
tweets sent throughout the duration of the civic unrest in Ferguson, it was intended to give a
snapshot of the political sentiments being communicated online on the evening of November
24th. This method most certainly has its weaknesses in terms of identifying the broad content of
information communicated on Twitter; however, this chapter is intended simply to demonstrate
the wide-ranging messages sent in regard to the grand jury investigation and, more importantly,
to explore how social media was used in terms of political engagement.
To become familiar with the particulars of social media use here, the author initially
reviewed all the tweets collected, taking notes on the initial reaction to the messages. After
reading through the tweets once, the author then reviewed them several more times to begin
grouping the tweets into categories of political involvement. Broadly speaking, #Ferguson
tweets varied greatly in content, length, and tone. Certainly, Twitter was not dominated by a
single overwhelming opinion of the grand jury decision, yet outrage at the lack of indictment
for Wilson did seem more predominant than was satisfaction with the decision. Outrage might
stem from the fact that a grand jury indictment does not necessarily indicate guilt of action but
rather a volume of evidence that warrants closer examination at a trial. Failing to provide the
grieving population of Ferguson and other communities with the opportunity for further
investigation most certainly outraged those who used Twitter to communicate their displeasure
with the verdict. The most significant implication found when examining these tweets,
however, is the ways in which Twitter users were involved with discussions of this political
topic, using social media to converse, take action, and ultimately to express distrust in the
government. This chapter next explains the importance of conversation through social media.
CONVERSATION
Social media is characterized by its collective nature, referring to the capacity for
individuals to connect with others through a variety of topics. The events in Ferguson were no
exception, and several individuals used social media as a way to converse with friends and
strangers alike, often tweeting as if in the middle of a conversation. Twitter user
@TheBrianFikes exemplifies this pseudo exchange, saying, the system didnt allow this to
happen, your son attacked a police officer! #Ferguson. (If the user was responding directly to
someone, the tweet did not indicate it.) Some users entered an ongoing debate, and others
offered general advice to the Ferguson community, saying things like take a deep breath
everyone; #Ferguson, hope for the best but prepare for the worst; and #Ferguson stay calm
no matter what. Comments were addressed to individuals, both online and otherwise, as well
as groups of people, such as protestors, black men, and police officers. @HollaBlackGirl
seems to address all three, saying those of you on the ground in #Ferguson know that we are
with you in spirit. Please be safe, be vigilant and be alert. As evident in these tweets, social
media provides an opportunity for users to speak to others they otherwise might be unable to
reach.
Although chatting with others via social media is nothing new, the scope of the subject
matter indicates that these conversations occur among various social networks. The Pew
Research Internet Project found that Twitter networks form in numerous ways, including groups
divided among partisan political topics. The authors of the study explain that highly divisive
and heated political topics often create polarized groups who do little to reach out to or learn
from those holding opposing views.31 Interest in political topics certainly is a positive
democratic outcome, but the lack of back-and-forth dialogue undoubtedly is not what
democracy scholars envision as a form of political engagement. Unfortunately, those who
engaged in political conversation about the Ferguson unrest through social media did so in two
limited waysbonding in solidarity with like-minded people and distancing themselves from
those with whom they disagreed. User @elakdawalla noted that the Twitter feed was split into
happy chatter & anger; and @LeftBelle referred to November 24th as division day. As
these users observed, social media sites such as Twitter provide a forum for political
conversation, yet the talk is more often an echo chamber than an exchange.
Further unpacking the one-sided conversations, the tweets collected indicate that solidarity
was often communicated by sharing thoughts and quotes from others, such as when
@ScholarshipCntr said, silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Elie Wiesel
#Ferguson #MichaelBrown. A statement like this can be interpreted as a voice of
encouragement for those protesting the grand jury decision, yet it does not directly mention any
particular group beyond the tormented. Distance was frequently communicated through the
mocking of other individuals, usually protestors. User @AmericanBaby22 mocks protestors in
Ferguson after the announcement that there would be no indictment, saying, congratulations
#Ferguson citizens, youre trashing your own town. Absolutely ridiculous. Although these
comments clearly condemn the protestors (more likely looters) actions, conversing on social
media has a vastly different impact than does protesting. Yet, commenting online might appeal
to some as a way to be politically engaged without committing any substantive act.
Many Twitter users indirectly engaged in the debate on November 24th, yet several
individuals expressed a desire to avoid any political conversation. For example,
@jayne_tweets said, in preparation for #Ferguson grand jury decision (which I suspect will
be, well, an awful one), Im staying off social media for the night. Outside of mentioning the
situation in general, such users refrained from participating in the broader political
conversation as well as any other talk on social media. The avoidance of social media in this
example indicates two significant implications: a willingness to give up conversing with
followers about any topic, even topics that are pleasurable or enjoyable; and the assumption
that social media will become an overwhelming public forum for political discussion. The
later implication almost certainly carries a negative connotation among some users, whether
stemming from the polarized nature of the conversations or from a lack of desire for political
engagement. Either way, both are clear indications that social media has altered perceptions of
how individuals engage in the political process. Whether this change is beneficial is
questionable, especially when compared to political actions such as voting or protesting.
ACTION
Although conversations are an important form of political engagement in the civic unrest
surrounding Ferguson, talk is not the only action completed through social media use. Action
occurred in several waysorganizing protests, posting news sites stories, sharing pictures of
scenes occurring in Ferguson and around the country, and specifically calling Twitter users to
task. As noted in The Wall Street Journal article, social media acted as a site for organizing
protests throughout the country.32 Organization is one of the strongest forms of action taken on
Twitter and arguably one of the clearest forms of political engagement. Sharing information
from news sites, however, also is of great value to the democratic process. Although the
information originated in traditional news sources, individuals of all backgrounds were able to
pass along valuable messages to friends and followers. The Pew Research Internet Project
notes, there are still powerful agenda setters and conversation starters in the new social
media world. Enterprises and personalities with loyal followings can still have a large impact
on the conversation.33 The act of sharing news is a significant step to take online, especially
when considering the cascading nature of particular narratives. The ease of reposting
information on Twitter enables users to rapidly spread narratives that seem credible and
salient among their network of followers, an important action for those politically involved in
the Ferguson unrest.
Several Twitter users not only shared news stories but also images from protests in
Ferguson and occurring around the country. For example, @shaylnpughdavis shared a picture
of protestors gathering in the streets in Oakland, California, featuring several people with
bicycles. User @AmyStephen posted several images of people seemingly destroying a car,
tagged with the text #Ferguson #NoIndictment. Even more users shared links to live
streaming footage from Ferguson or from other communities protesting the grand jury
announcement. In each instance, Twitter users acted as independent journalists of sorts, using
social media to share visual accounts of the civic unrest occurring around the country. Taking
action in this manner was substantive in a manner different from simply sharing other news
sites stories, yet the users did not always provide context to help explain the pictures they
posted (which could lead to confusion). Further, the same image of protestors could be
interpreted in multiple ways. One user might share images of protestors as a sign of solidarity
(or as an endorsement of particular actions to take); another user then could take that same
image and share it to condemn protestors behavior. Regardless of motive, images are strong
communication tools, and social media enables individuals to share visual information with no
geographic boundary.
Organization and information dissemination were common on the night of November 24th,
but social media also served as a pulpit for advocates of specific behaviors. Several Twitter
users called others to actionactions ranging from spiritual deeds to political acts. Often
users reported their own behaviors as an invitation for others to follow suit: prayer was one
commonly advocated action. User @CatholicLisa used the hashtag #PrayForFerguson, intoning
others to make this a holy night, not a violent night and @MidwestMMaven simply posted
#MidwestPrayer #Ferguson. Some Twitter users combined prayer with political
involvement, such as @quite_contrary7, who said, praying for peace no matter the verdict
tonight. Heres to more honest, open conversation to improve our city and our nation.
#Ferguson #STL. Others called for peaceful protest or for individuals to vote in future
elections. User @PetoskeySue called for calm actions and for Ferguson residents to vote the
#Sob out in the future. (It is unclear exactly who the S.O.B. is, but this users advice is at least
focused on traditional political behaviors.) The most radical tweets advocate violence, as
@kyleblarkes tweet indicates: quietly plant a bomb in every police station in st. louis and
have them all go off at the same time #ferguson. Extreme actions such these were rarely seen
in the sample used here, but the frustration apparent in the tweet was not uncommon. No matter
the behavior that was advocated, social media posts not only indicated a behavior on their own
(rather through organizing protests or sharing information) but also called on others to action.
DISTRUST
Perhaps the social media function with the greatest potential political implication stems
from both political conversations and online political actions. Although several Twitter users
engaged in conversation or specific behaviors regarding the civic unrest in Ferguson, many did
so to communicate their distrust of the establishment, including government officials (President
Barack Obama, U.S. attorney general Eric Holder, Missouri governor Jay Nixon, and county
prosecutor McCulloch, among others), the media, the police system itself, and police officers
in general. The explanations for this lack of trust are difficult to pinpoint exactly, but a common
theme communicated was concern over the timing of the grand jury announcement.
When it became clear that the announcement would be made at 8 p.m. CST, many users
expressed concerns about the strategy to release the information after dark. As @canativeobt
said, Why announce the #DarrenWilson grand jury decision at 9 p.m. EST? Its easier to do
your dirt in the dark than in the light. #Ferguson. This claim voices a common concern among
Twitter users, namely that the choice of time and location for the grand jury announcement was
done to obscure the problems present within the process. Another user, @C1TYofFL1NT,
compared the announcement to the obfuscation encountered a decade earlier when Congress
decided to go to war in Iraq, saying, much like Iraq we wait for the cover of darkness
#Ferguson #PoliceState. Not only does this user express concern over the lack of
transparency in the grand jury investigation, the user also compares the political scapegoating
that occurred after the Iraq War to the governments attempt to hide in the dark to avoid fallout
from Wilsons lack of indictment.
Political motivations notwithstanding, social media users also were skeptical of the
government officials words, whether it was Governor Nixons call for peaceful protest or
President Obamas statement after the announcement. User @jasonrobert said, its hard not
too [sic] see continuous delay of an official announcement as another way to show utter
disrespect for those impacted, and @HollyRFisher, said, #Obama to throw gas on the fire,
er, I mean speak, right now. Even more cynical was the sentiment that officials cared little
about the looting or rioting that might occur after the announcement, as @paulyballgames
tweet indicated: @weatherchannel Im worried. With the Polar Vortex covering the country,
where will #Obama go to play golf during the riots? Regardless of the direct target of
skepticism, there were several comments that expressed a lack of trust in government officials
of all varieties.
The government was not the only entity targeted by social media users. Journalists and
news companies alike were a common focus of attention among cynical tweets, as
@jeffreyatucker illustrated in the tweet, This much is true: the established media love nothing
more than to create and fuel racial conflict. For many, information about the grand jury
decision was obtained from traditional news sources, such as cable news channels CNN, Fox
News, and MSNBC. As @FrayedBlueJeans, notes, however, users believe these outlets to be
part of the problem, saying, hey #CNN #FoxNews #MNSBC [sic] and the rest of the
mainstream mediaits not entertainment. Twitter users criticized media outlets for
encouraging individuals to follow them online for updates about the protests, and they
questioned the medias ability to report unbiased information.
When CNN reporter Don Lemon commented that there was a smell of marijuana in the air
in Ferguson, several users responded with outrage. Twitter user @ThugLifee__ not only
responded to Lemons comment online but indicated that he or she would take action offline as
well, saying IM MAD NOW WHERE THE LAWRENCE PROTEST AT?! [sic] The overall
sentiment that news media was sensationalizing the grand jury announcement and protests that
followed was common on social media, yet mainstream medias dominance of news sharing
remained constant. Despite eyewitness reports shared online and links to streaming feeds,
many social media users continued to rely on dominant news outlets for information about the
events in Ferguson (despite their displeasure with journalistic choices).
A byproduct of the grand jury decision to not indict Wilson is a greater distrust of law
enforcement officials. Social media users varied in their support for police officers and their
distrustthe most extreme cases involved outlandish accusations. Not only did one user call
for bombing police stations, another admitted his belief that all white american police are
secret members of the kkk [sic]. Although most tweets were not as far-reaching in their
claims, several users did communicate concern for personal safety from police officers. As
@aye_itskristina said, I hope I dont slip up because I know if I get shot my family wont
have closure. #Ferguson #PoorLegalSystem #WhatIsJustice. For a topic as divisive as the use
of police force, social media provides a poor forum for an in-depth discussion of a complex
problem. The ease with which information spreads on social media, however, makes it easy
for particular narratives to gain traction among a wide audience. As cascading activation
suggests, the more widely used and accepted a narrative is, the greater credibility it maintains
with its audience. Therefore, the distrust of police, the justice system, the news media, and
government officials was able to cascade rapidly on Twitter on November 24th, despite
conflicting narratives that offered support for the grand jurys decision.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Conversation, calls to action, and expressing distrust are three different ways that social
media was used to engage in the civic unrest in Ferguson. Although each is related, the
differences between each category varied enough to be identifiable separately and distinctly.
Political conversation is surely an important component of political engagement, and taking
action is often a desirable outcome of engagement. However, the distrust of government
officials, journalists, the legal system, and police officers outweighed any democratic dialogue
online. There was potential for democratic exchange, yet the divisive nature of the topics
surrounding the protests in Fergusonracism and excessive police forcedid little to
encourage positive political engagement in this case.
Ultimately, when considering each different political use of social media described in this
chapter, it could be argued that these online messages communicate something greater about the
state of political engagement. Although there were plenty of protests around the country on
November 24th, providing numerous opportunities for individuals to voice concerns, many
people continued to rely solely on social media as an alternate to traditional protesting. Rather
than vote, talk to politicians, or organize ballot initiatives, social media users chose to
communicate their displeasure with current policies online. Not only is the choice to engage
with political topics online a well-established option, it is expected. Social media use has
altered perceptions of political engagement, which could be an underlying sign of government
distrust being more intense than ever.
Part of the distrust most certainly stems from a lack of open exchange among various
interested partiesincluding government officials, the news media, and citizenswhich has
blurred the line between protesting and rioting. This confusion of the two acts further increases
problematic implications, particularly when discussing the role of protestors as felons, as well
as the inclusion of racist language to describe those who vandalized or destroyed property.
Social media was an ideal medium for angry and inflammatory comments, especially those that
communicated negative stereotypes against black men. Twitter user @chrisblaker9999
recognized this, saying, Whats going on in #Ferguson does not make it ok to tweet racist
garbage you wouldnt otherwise say publicly #cowardly. As indicated in this tweet, social
medias relative anonymity makes it easy for individuals to use offensive language, especially
because there are few consequences relative to those of protesting.
Although this chapter paints a grim picture of how social media was used to participate in
the civic unrest in Ferguson, there are plenty of potential positive political outcomes. One such
benefit to online communication, including that which occurs on social media, is the inclusion
of a diversity of voicesmeaning that marginalized perspectives have the opportunity to be
heard. Cultural participation is an important part of the resistance of dominant norms, as Fiske
argues, because culture itself operates as an arena where meaning is negotiated among various
groups.34 The events in Ferguson following Browns death clearly indicate that modern culture
most certainly exists on social media. As Wangs research shows, the more often Internet users
voice opinions through new media outlets, the more likely they are to have greater trust in the
political process.35 Further study is needed to better understand social medias role, but
perhaps the key to encouraging less distrust of the government lies in being politically engaged
through social media.
NOTES
1. CNN, No Indictment: Brown Family Profoundly Disappointed; Pres. Obama to Speak Soon about Grand Jury Decision;
Prosecutor: There Was a Full Investigation, CNN.com, last modified November 24, 2014,
http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1411/24/acd.01.html.
2. Ibid.
3. Dhavan V. Shah, Jaeho Cho, William P. Eveland, and Nojin Kwak, Information and Expression in a Digital Age:
Modeling Internet Effects on Civic Participation, Communication Research 32, no. 5 (2005): 551.
4. CNN, No Indictment: Brown Family Profoundly Disappointed. CNN.com.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Laura Mandaro, Ferguson Tweets, Hashtags Spike As Anger Rises, USAToday.com, last modified November 26, 2014,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/11/26/twitter-ferguson-blacklivesmatter/70132602/.
9. Michael Pearson, Will the Eric Garner Case Change Things? CNN.com, last modified December 9, 2014.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/08/us/garner-case-attitudes/index.html.
10. Mandaro, Ferguson Tweets.
11. Kristin English, Kaye D. Sweetser, and Monica Ancu, YouTube-ification of Political Talk: An Examination of
Persuasion Appeals in Viral Video, American Behavioral Scientist 55, no. 6 (2011): 73348.
12. Shah, Cho, Eveland, and Kwak, Information and Expression in a Digital Age.
13. Wang, Song-In, Political Use of the Internet, Political Attitudes and Political Participation, Asian Journal of
14. Marc A. Smith, Lee Rainie, Ben Shneiderman, and Itai Himelboim, Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized
Crowds to Community Clusters, Pew Research Internet Project, last modified February 20, 2014,
http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/02/20/mapping-twitter-topic-networks-from-polarized-crowds-to-community-clusters/.
15. McChesney, Robert W., Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (New York: The
New Press, 2000).
16. Delli Carpini and Michael X., In Search of the Informed Citizen: What Americans Know about Politics and Why It
Matters, The Communication Review 4, no. 1 (2000): 12964.
17. Social Networking Fact Sheet, Pew Research Internet Project, accessed December 31, 2014,
http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fact-sheet/.
18. Arik Hesseldahl, Douglas MacMillan, and Olga Kharif, The Vote: A Victory for Social Media, Too, Business Week,
last modified November 5, 2008, http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2008/tc2008115_988160.htm.
19. Joe Marchese, Social Medias Election Effect, Online Spin, last modified January 8, 2008,
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=73844.
20. Simon Owens, Citizens, Media Use Social Media to Monitor Election, PBS, last modified November 3, 2008,
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2008/11/citizens-media-use-social-media-to-monitor-election308.html.
21. Shah, Cho, Eveland, and Kwak, Information and Expression in a Digital Age.
22. Mike and Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch, A Little Bird Told Me, So I Didnt Believe It: Twitter, Credibility, and Issue
Perceptions, Communication Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2012): 31737.
23. Matthew James Kushin and Masahiro Yamamoto, Did Social Media Really Matter? College Students Use of Online
Media and Political Decision Making in the 2008 Election, Mass Communication and Society 13 (2010): 623.
24. Smith, Rainie, Shneiderman, and Himelboim, Mapping Twitter Topic Networks.
25. Ibid.
26. Robert M. Entman, Scandal and Silence: Media Responses to Presidential Misconduct (Malden, MA: Polity Press,
2012).
27. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked
Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013).
28. Ibid., 2.
29. Fillion, Rubina Madan, How Ferguson Protestors Use Social Media to Organize, Wall Street Journal, last modified
November 24, 2014, http://blogs.wsj.com/dispatch/2014/11/24/how-ferguson-protesters-use-social-media-to-organize/.
30. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, in The Audience Studies Reader, edited by Will Brooker and
Deborah Jermyn, 10511 (New York: Routledge, 2003).
32. Fillion, How Ferguson Protestors Use Social Media to Organize.
34. Fiske, John, Understanding Popular Culture, in The Audience Studies Reader, edited by Will Brooker and Deborah
Jermyn, 11216 (New York: Routledge, 2003).
35. Wang, Political Use of the Internet.
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http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2008/11/citizens-media-use-social-media-to-monitor-election308.html.
Pearson, Michael. Will the Eric Garner Case Change Things? CNN.com. Last modified December 9, 2014.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/08/us/garner-case-attitudes/index.html
Schmierback, Mike, and Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch. A Little Bird Told Me, So I Didnt Believe It: Twitter, Credibility, and Issue
Perceptions. Communication Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2012): 31737.
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Internet Effects on Civic Participation. Communication Research 32, no. 5 (2005): 551.
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17, no. 4 (2007): 38195.
8
Trial by Social Media: How Misleading

Media and Ideological Protests Led to
Disastrous Results in The State of Florida
v. George Zimmerman
Joshua Daniel Phillips
Warning: This chapter contains graphic language that some readers might find
offensive.
On February 26, 2012, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed by 28-year-old George
Zimmerman at the Retreat at Twin Lakes townhouse community in Sanford, Florida, at 7:16
p.m. The police arrived on scene at 7:17 p.m., took Zimmerman in for questioning, and
photographed his injuries. On February 27, Zimmerman participated in a video-recorded
reenactment with the police at the Retreat at Twin Lakes. Given the consistency of
Zimmermans statements, his head and face injuries, witness statements, and 911 calls, the
police determined that Zimmerman had killed Martin in self-defense.1
For several weeks, the case seemed to be resolved. As information about the case began to
leak through social media, however, local conversations about the death of a young African
American teenager soon turned into an all-out social media firestorm that mobilized protests
across the country and sparked debates around the world. These protests largely focused on
communicating an ideological message about the value of young black mens lives, and
questioned whether authorities seriously investigated the deaths of young black men
especially when the killer was thought to be white.
On April 11, 2012, Zimmerman was arrested and charged with second-degree murder.
Prosecutors denied that public protests pressured them into making a hasty arrest.2 There is
reason to believe that Zimmermans arrest was premature, however, and that sufficient
evidence was lacking. Notwithstanding the lack of any new evidence being discovered
between February 27 and April 11, Martin supporters celebrated the arrest and applauded their
contributions in communicating, organizing, and mobilizing marches through social media.
Although the mass assemblage of protesters looking to support the deceased Martin and his
family is noble, in hindsight this author wonders whether social media activism actually did
more harm than goodespecially given the fact that Zimmerman eventually was found not
guilty, on July 13, 2013.
Ironically, one of the great, unexplored paradoxes of this case is that the social media
pressure demanding the immediate arrest of Zimmerman actually might have played a role in
his acquittal. In short, Martins supporters rallied for Zimmermans arrest, based in part on
inaccurate information and unsubstantiated evidence that circulated around social media:
Emotions were running high, a 17-year-old African American teenager was dead, and
somebody had to be held accountable. By demanding Zimmermans immediate arrest, however,
Martins supporters risked putting the case into motion before there was evidence sufficient for
a conviction. In the endeven with the en masse of citizen protests and full prosecutorial
resources of both the Florida State Attorney and the Department of Justiceat the time of the
trial there simply was not enough evidence to convict Zimmerman. To be clear, this is not a
discussion of whether Zimmerman is guilty or innocent; the evidence available at the time of
the trial was insufficient for a guilty verdict, however, and the jury had no other recourse
except to acquit the defendant. Therefore, the concern is that an emotional, inaccurate, and
ideologically driven social media newsfeed helped to usher Zimmerman to trial before a
proper case could be built. Although social media might have been a useful tool for organizing
protests and showing support for Martin, Martins supporters failed to consider the unintended
consequences of using social media to force a criminal case to trial before the evidence,
witnesses, and facts were fully vetted.
INACCURATE INITIAL REPORTS

On March 8, 2012, the Associate Press became the first media outlet to report the killing of
Trayvon Martin as a national news story.3 Although the AP filing was a mere 220 words long,
it soon became a cornerstone of controversy as it created the foundation for the misleading
racialized narrative of a young, unarmed black teenager being shot by a white Neighborhood
Watch leader. For the next two weeks, major media outlets including ABC and CBS continued
to report the killing through the racialized binary of a white man shooting a black teenager.4 By
March 22, some national media outlets realized the inaccuracy of their reporting on
Zimmermans race. In fact, Zimmerman self-identified as Hispanic* and his father referred to
him as a Spanish-speaking minority.5 Instead of retracting stories or offering corrections,
however, The New York Times simply offered the term white Hispanic.6 Although white
Hispanic offered a way for other national outlets to reframe their original reporting, some
sourcessuch as the Boston Globesimply decided to ignore the new information about
Zimmermans Hispanic heritage and continued to refer to him as being white.7
During the week that The New York Times coined the term white Hispanic several other
media inaccuracies were made that filtered the case through a deeply disturbing and racist
lens. In March 21, for example, Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN interviewed an audio expert to
determine whether Zimmerman had used the phrase fucking coon to describe Martin in the
initial phone call Zimmerman made to the Sanford Police Department (SPD).8 The results were
mixed; yet Cooper used the possibility of Zimmerman using the word coon as a vehicle for
discussing federal civil rights charges with CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin. On April 4,
CNN determined that Zimmerman actually had used the phrase fucking cold to describe the
rainy weather.9
During the same week, NBC released an edited version of the phone call Zimmerman had
made to the SPD on the night that Zimmerman shot and killed Martin. On March 27, NBC
News played the following recording.
Zimmerman: This guy looks like hes up to no good. He looks black.
The unedited version of the exchange went as follows.
Zimmerman: This guy looks like hes up to no good. Or hes on drugs or something. Its
raining and hes just walking around, looking about.
Dispatcher: OK, and this guyis he black, white, or Hispanic?
Zimmerman: He looks black.10
In NBCs edited version, it appeared that Zimmerman offered up information about

Martins race while simultaneously connecting Martins blackness with the idea that Martin
was up to no good. In fact, Zimmerman only offered a racial description of Martin after
being prompted by the dispatcher. The misleading edit was significant enough that on April 8,
NBC News president, Steve Capus, was compelled to apologize and referred to the editing as
a mistake.11
To be clear, none of these examples mean that race was not a factor in the confrontation
between Martin and Zimmerman. On its own, each instance of inaccurate reporting could be
viewed as irrelevant to the larger legal question as to whether Zimmerman murdered Martin.
When taken together, however, inaccurate reporting helped coalesce social mediadriven
protests around an incomplete ideological narrative that prematurely focused on race and
demanded the immediate arrest of a white racist for murdering a black teenager. Although race
might have been a factor, by the end of March 2012 the only things the public knew for certain
regarding race were that both Zimmerman and Martin were racial minorities. CNN determined
that Zimmerman had said cold and had not used a racist slur; and NBC had to apologize for a
misleading edit that specifically centered race. Regrettably, the first month of reporting from
leading media outlets was so inundated with conversations about how (not whether) race
factored into the death of Martin that, by the beginning of April 2012, it became impossible to
dissociate race from the case and focus on the legal question of Zimmermans intentthe
question that could lead to a conviction.
As a scholar deeply invested in intercultural communication, this author is fully aware that
race can be a volatile subject, especially when it involves the death of a young black man at
the hands of nonblack man. Ideological protests about race, driven by misleading reporting
regarding Zimmermans alleged racism, however, only could convict Zimmerman in the court
of public opinion. In a criminal trial there is a higher standard for proving intent, and it
therefore is important to slow down and verify the evidence before demanding a persons
arrest.
SOCIAL MEDIADRIVEN PROTESTS: #ARRESTZIMMERMANNOW

As unsubstantiated speculation and inaccurate reporting seeped through the media in the
final weeks of March 2012, Martins supporters began to mobilize via social media. In what
would become the symbol of the protests, digital strategist Daniel Maree organized the first
Million-Hoodie March in New York. Along with the march, Maree also set up an online
petition that called upon the State of Florida to arrest Zimmerman and for the Department of
Justice to charge Zimmerman with violating Martins civil rights.12 Thanks to the speed of
social media, the time between Maree first learning about the shooting of Martin and setting
up the petition was less than 24 hours. In a CBS interview, Maree explained that he acted so
quickly because he was outraged and wanted to do something.13 Marees efforts were
successful. By using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Change.org, Maree accumulated more
than one million signatures within three days.14 Marees online efforts even caught the attention
of his boss, McCann North America president Hank Summy, who wrote a staff memo
commending Marees as a brilliant example of how one persons idea, combined with the
power of social media, and built by collaboration, can change the world.15
Two days after the Million-Hoodie March, the National Basketball Players Association
released a letter on March 23 calling for the prompt arrest of Zimmerman and the firing of
Sanford police chief Bill Lee for botching the investigation and for racial bias.16 The same
day, LeBron James of the Miami Heat tweeted a photo of 13 Heat players wearing black
hoodies with their heads bowed in a tribute to Martin with the hashtags
#WeAreTrayvonMartin and #WeWantJustice.17 The picture was viewed more than 400,000
from Jamess account alone18 as people from around the world began posting selfies that
imitated the hoodie pose accompanied by top trending hashtags such as
#WeAreTrayvonMartin, #WeWantJusticeForTrayvonMartin, and #ArrestZimmermanNow.19
Unlike these peaceful protests, there were more frightening examples of social media
support taken by celebrities such as Roseanne Barr and Spike Lee that (intentionally or
unintentionally) promoted vigilantism. In the final week of March 2012, Roseanne Barr used
her Twitter account to post Zimmermans parents home address and phone number to her
110,000 Twitter followers. The tweet was quickly deleted, but the information already was
circulating and Barr tried to justify her actions by later tweeting, I thought it was good to let
ppl know that no one can hide anymore.20 Barrs sentiment was actualized as the Zimmermans
were forced to move out of their home and spend the next several months moving from one
hotel to another.21 In a similar act, Spike Lee posted the supposed address of George
Zimmerman to his 240,000 Twitter followers only to discover that the address belonged to
elderly couple David and Elaine McClain.22 The McClains received hundreds of death threats
and Lee was compelled to recognize his mistake and apologize to the couple via Twitter.23
Interestingly, Lee ended his Twitter apology with Justice In Court, which makes one wonder
why Lee ever posted Zimmermans alleged address in the first place.
As a reminder, while these social mediadriven protests that called for an arrest, civil
rights charges, the firing of investigators for racial biases, and hinted at vigilantism were
happening, national media outlets such as CNN, CBS, ABC, and NBC still were misreporting
the facts of the case. For the Million-Hoodie March, Maree and his one million signatories
were making legal demands based on inaccurate information a mere 24 hours after Maree
learned about Martins death. This begs the question: Why does a person in New Yorkwho
knows neither the shooter nor the victimfeel confident enough to adjudicate a shooting in
Florida within 24 hours of hearing about the case? Or for that matter, why did anyone feel
confident enough to adjudicate the case if the facts were still in question? Some of these
answers can be found in ideology.
By filtering these social mediadriven protests through the lens of ideological criticism, it
is easier to understand how and why some Martin supporters allowed certain media stories to
go unchallenged and instead decided to hastily mobilize online. In short, ideological criticism
analyzes how rhetorical acts operate to further certain political and social agendas.24 In this
instance, the conversations about the killing of Martin wereinaccuratelyframed around the
racialized binary of a white man killing a black teenager. As the case was covered throughout
March 2012, race became the defining variable that united Martins supporters through social
media and demonstrations. At some point during these demonstrations, the killing of Trayvon
Martin became bigger than the chant, Justice for Trayvon, and eventually morphed into larger
political discussions about the disproportionately large number of young black men being
killed. Although conducting large discussions about the killings of young black men is
extremely important, the criminal justice system must investigate and evaluate each individual
case on its own merit.
Martins death thus became an ideological symbol for a larger racial injustice and Martins
supporters therefore had to continue to push ideologies about race even when claims about
Zimmerman and the polices racism were yet unfounded, and in some cases were recanted. The
conundrum for the ideologically driven protesters was that ideological arguments about
Zimmermans alleged racism and the racial bias of the investigation only can persuade the
public outside of the courtroom. Public protests have the ability to reveal and to conceal
certain elements of a case based on whether those elements fit a preferred ideological
narrative about racism. In the courtroom, all elements of the case are subject to exposure and
claims about racism therefore can be refuted. Thus, while incomplete, inaccurate, and
misleading social media news feeds could convince the public that racism was at the center of
Martins killing, these ideological influences hold no sway with a jury that ultimately is
responsible for administering justice.
Perhaps the most visible, most thoughtless, and most damaging display of an ideological
agenda over a quest for justice came when Al Sharpton yelled, Arrest Zimmerman now!
during a pro-Martin rally in Sanford on March 22, 2012.25 During the rally and throughout the
next two weeks, Sharpton went on to threaten civil disobedience if Zimmerman was not
arrested, even though the full details of the case had not been released.26 To Sharptons credit,
in the days leading up to the rally, he had been using his show Politics Nation to question the
internal workings of the investigation.27 As a news pundit, these types of questions were
legitimate. Sharpton and others stopped questioning the investigation, however, and instead
became advocates for the immediate arrest of Zimmerman based on an unverified racial
narrativetherein lies a real legal quagmire for both Zimmerman and Martin.
For Zimmerman, the legal problem is obvious: No one should be arrested based on public
pressureespecially if that pressure is begotten from inaccurate social media newsfeeds. For
the deceased Martin, the legal problem is more nuanced and, in this authors opinion, far more
damaging. In short, Martins alleged murderer, Zimmerman, has his Sixth Amendment right to a
speedy trial. If Zimmerman was arrested and put on trial before the investigation had enough
evidence to convict, then Martins alleged murderer could walk free and have the legal
protection from double jeopardy even if new evidence that could lead to a conviction was
discovered years later. By pressuring Florida state attorney Angela Corey to file charges
against Zimmerman prematurely, protesters risked Zimmermans acquittal due to the lack of
substantiated evidence that might have been brought forth by a thorough, and perhaps lengthy,
investigation. Yet, the ideological narrative of this case demanded an immediate arrest;
therefore patience was not an option.
Unfortunately, succumbing to the pressures of protesters seems to be what happened.
Between February 27 and April 11, 2012, evidence was discovered and witnesses were
interviewed, but no new evidence was discovered indicating that Zimmerman had intentionally
killed Martin with malice. Thus far the question of malice had been the crux of the social
mediadriven protests, as demonstrators continued to assert that Zimmerman had targeted
Martin because of race. Even though no evidence of racial malice had yet been verified, on
April 11, 2012, state attorney Corey filed second-degree murder charges (intent with malice)
against Zimmerman. Coreys filing was so perplexing and seemingly heavy-handed that even
the openly sympathetic Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz referred to the charges as
irresponsible and predicted that Coreys overcharging would result in an acquittal.28
During an interview on MSNBCs Hardball, Dershowitz even went so far as to say that
Coreys filing was politically motivated to appease the protesters and that during the press
conference when she announced the charges, Corey was behaving as an elected official who
made a campaign speech for reelection,29 whose affidavit was so thin that it wont make
it past a judge.30
Although second-degree murder charges might have seemed like a legal overreach on the
part of the prosecution, examining the charges through the lens of an ideological critic shows
how Coreys second-degree murder charge is perfectly in line with the prevailing narrative of
the social media protests. In total, the second-degree murder charge helped perpetuate the
ideological narrative that race played a role in the killing of Martin, because a murder charge
assumes malice and intent. Ergo, Zimmerman intentionally killed Martin because Martin was a
suspicious young black man hanging around Zimmermans neighborhood. In contrast,
manslaughter charges assume things like emotional distress and negligence. Therefore, if
manslaughter charges were filed, Zimmerman still would be responsible for Martins death,
but it would not have been because of established racial prejudice or profiling.
Notably, manslaughter charges would have complicated the social media protests in two
ways. Manslaughter charges assume a lighter sentence for Zimmerman if convicted, and
therefore could have ramped up new protests against the prosecution for devaluing the death
of a young black man. By charging Zimmerman with second-degree murder, Corey could
guarantee that the protesters would be working with her and not challenging her during the
criminal court proceedings. Additionally, because manslaughter charges do not presume
malice, it would have become increasingly more difficult to argue that Zimmerman violated
Martins civil rights (i.e., Zimmerman killed Martin because Martin was black). If Zimmerman
killed Martin because of emotional distress or negligence, then race becomes a nonissue
and movements such as the Million-Hoodie March and the demands from the National
Basketball Players Association lose key talking points around issues of racial justice. By filing
second-degree murder charges, however, Corey made it possible for race to remain an
ideological focal point of the protests, the media, and the criminal case.
TRIAL: THE NARRATIVE HAS NO EVIDENCE

As the trial began to take shape, it was clear that the prosecution was not ready, the
evidence was shaky, and the witnesses were not prepared. The most immediate example of
how the narrative reshaped itself in the courtroom began when the jury was introduced to the
physical size and strength of both Martin and Zimmerman. Zimmerman was claiming self-
defense, therefore the defense had to establish that Zimmerman would be reasonably afraid for
his life under the physical assault of Martin. Leading up to the trial, the idea that Zimmerman
would be afraid of Martin seemed almost absurd. This was largely due to the fact that major
media outlets were using photos of Martin and Zimmerman that were several years old. For
example, the widely circulated and most well-known picture of Martin show[ed] him [as] 13
or 14 years old [and] wearing a red Hollister T-shirt.31 In this picture, Martin is smiling, baby
faced, and diminutive. At the time of the shooting, however, Martin was 17 years old and
slightly more than six-feet talla full four inches taller than Zimmerman.
Again, although these details do not denote guilt or innocence, they did have very real
effects on public perceptions and witness testimony. Three weeks after the shooting, for
example, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement interviewed Jeannee Manalo who had
seen the struggle. During the initial investigation Manalo only had reported that she had seen
one man on top of the other, but did not know which one was on top and which one was on
bottom because it was too dark for her to recognize race or clothing color. By the time Manalo
was on the witness stand during the trial, however, she had been exposed to more than a years
worth of press coverage that depicted Martin as a small 13-year-old boy. In her courtroom
testimony, Manalo acknowledged that the outdated photos shown in the media had convinced
her that Zimmerman must have been on top because the person on top was bigger than the
person on the bottom.32 Given the medias misleading perception of Martins size, Manalos
conclusion was understandable. But by the time the trial took place, physical and medical
evidence had clearly established that Martin was on top of Zimmerman during the altercation.
By testifying that Zimmerman was on top, Manalo was no longer a credible witness for the
prosecution. The fact that Manalos testimony was discredited in court illustrates a very real
example as to how misleading reports about Martins size and age actually hurt the
prosecution.
Over the course of the next few days, it became increasingly clear that Manalo was not the
only witness for the prosecution that the prosecution had failed to fully prepare. Jayne Surdyka,
for example, had claimed that she heard screaming during the night of the shooting.33 As the
defense pushed her for details during cross-examination, however, Surdyka also claimed to
have heard three gunshots (there was only one gunshot) and in the year leading up the trial
Surdyka had made several television appearances on national shows such as Anderson Cooper
360.34 Based on her unsubstantiated testimony and several media appearances, the defense
quickly painted Surdyka as a person who just wanted to be in the spotlight as opposed to being
a reliable witness.
Another eyewitness was Jonathan Good; the only eyewitness who could describe race and
clothing during the fight. As a witness for the prosecution, the prosecution was hoping that
Good could establish a timeline of events that portrayed Zimmerman as the initial aggressor.
But the prosecution would be sorely disappointed. In short, Good said that a black man with a
black hoodie [was] on top of the other guy with a red sweatshirt. Good went on to say that
the guy in the red sweatshirt was yelling out help, but that the guy on top in the black
hoodie just kept throwing down blows MMA-style.35 Although Goods testimony was
specific, straightforward, and aligned with the physical and medical evidence, it was almost
shockingly, destructive to the States theory of the case.36 In hindsight, it is almost
unbelievable that the prosecution even put Good on the stand without any type of favorable
explanation as to how Martin ended up on top of Zimmerman.
During this portion of the trial, the defense also presented pictures showing Zimmerman
with a swollen nose, bloodied face, and head wounds. For the 10 months following the
shooting, Zimmermans alleged wounds were the source of media speculation and social media
conspiracy. Before December 2012, the only images of Zimmerman in the aftermath of the
altercation were grainy security camera footage and a few black-and-white photos that failed
to indicate whether any blood was even present.37 Leading up to the trial, Martins family
attorney Benjamin Crump commented that Zimmermans injuries could not have been that bad
if they didnt take him to the hospital [and] stitch him up.38 The Crump assumption might be
reasonable, but the fact remained that no one had seen the extent of Zimmermans injuries in the
10 months that followed the killing of Martin, therefore the social media world was driving
prosecutorial judgments about whether self-defense was justifiable based on a limited set of
data. Had protesters known about the extent of Zimmermans injuries perhaps they would have
been more reserved about demanding an immediate arrest or, at least, might have been open to
the filing of lesser charges.
In addition to the eyewitnesses, the prosecution also put U.S. Army captain Alexis Carter
on the stand in an effort to paint Zimmerman as an over-zealous wannabe police officer. Carter
was Zimmermans criminal justice teacher at Seminole State College and had all the
credentials that demanded respect; his credibility would not be undermined. The prosecution
pushed Carter to describe Zimmerman as a top student who understood the legal system and
knew how to exploit the loopholes of self-defense laws. To this end, the prosecution was
mildly successful.
Upon cross-examination, however, the defense gave Carter full range to provide a legal
seminar for the jury39 on self-defense law. Carter took full advantage of the witness stand and
even made a few jokes and damagingly mentioned that You dont have to wait until youre
almost dead before you can defend yourself.40 Furthermore, because Carter was an African
American, his occasional smiles and friendly nods to Zimmerman during his testimony helped
the defense mitigate the idea that Zimmermans actions toward Martin were spurred by racism.
Like the mishap with Jonathan Good, the prosecution had failed to vet the extent of a witnesss
knowledge by moving too quickly and ended up providing Zimmerman with another reasonable
defense.
Lastly, was the prosecutions star witness and Trayvon Martins friend, Rachel Jeantel.
Jeantel had been on the phone with Martin in the moments leading up to the altercation.
Therefore she was in the best position to convey Martins mindset as he was being followed by
Zimmerman. Much like witnesses Manalo and Surdyka, Jeantels testimony became suspect
and her credibility was shaky. Unlike Manalo and Surdyka, however, Jeantels shaky
credibility was almost fully the fault of the prosecution. To begin, Jeantels first interview with
assistant states attorney Bernie de la Rionda happened while Jeantel was sitting next to
Martins mother, Sabrina Fulton, and the familys lawyer, Benjamin Crump. Having Jeantel
provide a statement in front of Martins mother caused two huge problems for the prosecution.
First, there was a concern about coercion and whether Jeantel was being led to make certain
statements to offer support to a grieving mother.41 This permitted the defense to challenge
inaccuracies between Jeantels statements and the physical evidence. Second, the defense was
able to compare and contrast Jeantels initial interview to her trial testimony. As it would play
out in the courtroom, Jeantel admitted to fabricating some details in her initial interview
because she wanted to spare the feelings of Sabrina Fulton.42 Of course, this inevitably led to
more questions about what else Jeantel might have fabricated.
Perhaps relying too heavily on the emotional pull a grieving friend would have on the jury,
the prosecution also had failed to prepare their star witness as a public speaker. Jeantel was
repeatedly asked to speak up and repeat herself because she mumbled, which made it hard for
anyone to hear and understand her testimony. Jeantel also was forced to admit that she could
not read cursive when the defense asked her to read her handwritten testimony to de la
Rionda.43 In a final unforced error, Jeantel became the only witness who referenced the
possibility of racial tensions between Martin and Zimmerman; however, her testimony
indicated that Martin, not Zimmerman, had racial bias when Martin told Jeantel that
Zimmerman looked like a creepy-ass cracka.44
In all, Martins alleged racist remarks suddenly made the fateful confrontation an act of
stereotyping and prejudice on behalf of both Martin and Zimmerman as opposed to just
Zimmerman profiling a young black man. Jeantels admission forced the ideological narrative
to change from people shouldnt be suspicious of young black men to all people shouldnt
stereotype. As the social media protests were built solely on the subject of young black men
being profiled, the idea that Martin also profiled was damaging to the overall message.
Although many observers empathized with the fact that this young woman had to testify about
the killing of her friend, the problem was that her constantly changing narrative (brought on by
the prosecutions initial failure to interview her without Martins family present), her uncertain
demeanor, and her admission that Martin had used a racist slur to convey his suspicions about
Zimmerman provided little help for obtaining a conviction.
IDEOLOGY PREVAILS AND JUSTICE IS DENIED

After just 16 hours of deliberation, the jury returned a not guilty verdict. In an interview
with CNN, Juror B37 said that there were jurors who wanted to find Zimmerman guilty of
something, but based on the evidence there simply was no way to convict Zimmerman.45
Notably, this jurors remarks were in line with those of many legal scholars who commented
on the verdict in the days that followed. During an interview on Charlie Rose the Monday after
Zimmermans acquittal, for example, ABCs legal commentator Dan Abrams mentioned that he
believed that the jury was correct in finding Zimmerman not guilty. In the following
statement, Abrams discusses media bias and how his thinking about the case changed over the
course of the trial.
The media has a bias towards conflict. Look, Ill admit, when I first heard this case,
I assumed that George Zimmerman basically assassinated Trayvon Martin and that there
were no charges filed. [Not filing charges] seemed ludicrous. And as the facts came
out, it became more nuanced. As George Zimmermans injuries came out, it became
more nuanced. And someone like me who has evolved so-to-speak coming into this
sort of thinking, Theres going to be no way of explaining George Zimmermans
behavior and coming out of it and saying, I dont think the verdict could have been
anything but not guilty, I dont think Im sort of an outlier with regard to the way the
media covered the story.46
Harvard Law professors Charles Ogletree and Noah Feldman also were a part of the
conversations with Charlie Rose that night and they too agreed that the not guilty verdict was
correct based on the evidence.
Upon reflection, this author agrees. The evidence presented at trial simply did not warrant
a guilty verdict. The rush to arrest Zimmerman also played a role in muddling the legal
process, and if the protesters would have slowed down, then perhaps Zimmerman might have
been found guilty of something or maybe even would have taken a plea deal on a lesser charge.
Even though the protesters had good intentions in bringing justice to Trayvon, in doing so,
they turned Martin into an ideological symbol and failed to look objectively at the facts of the
case. Protesters allowed inaccurate initial reports to go unchallenged; ultimately, they lost sight
of Martin and instead allowed false narratives to pass through their social media newsfeeds
because they fit a larger ideological narrative about racism in America.
In the end, the rush to convict Zimmerman on ideological grounds was disastrous for
Zimmerman, Martin, and the entire legal process. Instead of using social media to organize a
Million-Hoodie March that demanded an immediate arrest based on no credible evidence, it
would have been wiser to use social media to help collect and verify evidence that could have
built a stronger case. Yet, alas, sitting behind a keyboard and organizing social media protests
based on an ideological agenda is a whole lot easier than searching for evidence that will
uphold in a court of law. Moving forward, the concern is that we are living in an ideologically
driven social media environment that demands arrests and pressures a legal system that is
intended to move slowly. When the legal system moves quickly because of ideological
demands, it fails to prepare, details are lost, and mistakes are made. Now that the Zimmerman
trial is over, people only can imagine what type of outcome could have happened had
protesters been patient and the prosecution not felt rushed. A year or two later, might
prosecutors have found more witnesses and evidence that could have led to a conviction?
Well never know.
* The author is aware of the debate surrounding use of the terms Hispanic and Latino. Zimmerman and the media,
however, used the term Hispanic to describe Zimmermans background. In striving for consistency, this chapter mirrors use of
this term.
NOTES
1. All police reports, which include the dates and times of the events, were photocopied and cached at Trayvon
Martin/George Zimmerman Case Files, Axiom Amnesia, accessed December 18, 2014, http://trayvon.axiomamnesia.com.
2. Alan Dershowitz, Zimmerman Prosecutor Threatening to Sue Harvard for My Criticism, Newmax, June 5, 2012,
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Zimmerman-Trayvon-Angela-Corey/2012/06/05/id/441305.
3. Mike Schneider, Family Wants Answers in Fla. Teens Death, Associated Press (March 8, 2012),
http://news.yahoo.com/family-wants-answers-fla-teens-death-162019527.html.
4. Matt Gutman, Olivia Katrandjian, and Seni Tienabeso, Trayvon Martin Family Seeks FBI Investigation of Killing by
Neighborhood Watchman, ABC News (March 18, 2012), http://abcnews.go.com/US/trayvon-martin-family-seeks-fbi-
investigation-killing/story?id=15949879; Grand Jury Called in Trayvon Martin Shooting, CBS News (March 20, 2012),
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/grand-jury-called-in-trayvon-martin-shooting; Crimesider Staff, 911 Calls Released in Trayvon
Martin Fatal Shooting, CBS News, originally published March 19, 2012, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/911-calls-released-in-
trayvon-martin-fatal-shooting.
5. Suzanne Gamboa, Florida Shooters Race a Complicated Matter, Associated Press (March 29, 2012),
http://web.archive.org/web/20120406122016/http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_NEIGHBORHOOD_WATCH_WHITE_OR_HI
SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT.
6. Lizette Alvarez, City Criticizes Police Chief after Shooting, New York Times (March 22, 2012),
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/us/police-chief-draws-fire-in-trayvon-martin-shooting.html?_r=1&.
7. Mac DAlessandro, No More Yes, Sir: After Trayvon Martins Death, the Use of this Deference Has to End, Boston
Globe (March 28, 2012), http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2012/03/27/more-yes-
sir/6YBDwcn8LYqmwPcHlZdeyM/story.html.
8. Tim Graham, CNN Walks It Back: Oops, Zimmerman Didnt Say Coon, He Said It Was Cold! News Busters (April
6, 2012), http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2012/04/06/cnn-walks-it-back-oops-zimmerman-didnt-say-coon-he-said-it-
was-cold.
9. Ibid.
10. Listen to George Zimmerman 911 Calls, Axiom Amnesia, accessed December 18, 2012,
http://trayvon.axiomamnesia.com/zimmerman-9-1-1-calls.
11. Chris Francescani, Trayvon Martin Call Was Mistake, Not Deliberate: NBC, Reuters (April 8, 2012),
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/08/us-usa-florida-shooting-nbc-idUSBRE83609U20120408?
feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&rpc=22.
12. Amanda Sloane, 1 Million Sign Petition Against Zimmerman, HLN, updated July 16, 2013,
http://www.hlntv.com/article/2013/07/16/naacp-george-zimmerman-department-justice-petition-trayvon?hpt=hln10_3; Christina
Coleman, Founder of Million Hoodies Movement for Justice Talks Trayvon Martin & The March on Washington, Global
Grind (August 27, 2013), http://globalgrind.com/2013/08/27/founder-of-million-hoodies-movement-for-justice-trayvon-martin-
march-on-washington-daniel-maree-interview.
13. Crimesider Staff, Million Hoodie March Held in NYC in Memory of Trayvon Martin, CBS News (March 22, 2012),
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/million-hoodie-march-held-in-nyc-in-memory-of-trayvon-martin.
14. Ibid.
15. Rupal Parekh, McCann Staffer behind Million-Hoodie March to Protest Trayvon Martin Slaying: Daniel Maree Kick-
Started New York March with Social Media, Ad Age (March 23, 2012), http://adage.com/article/agency-news/mccann-staffer-
million-hoodie-march/233694.
16. National Basketball Players Association, Statement by the NBPA in Response to the Death of Trayvon Martin, NBPA
Press Release (March 23, 2012), http://www.nbpa.org/press-release/nbpa-press-release-march-23-2012.
17. Gene Demby, LeBron James Tweets Picture of Miami Heat Wearing Hoodies in Solidarity with Family of Trayvon
Martin, Huffington Post (March 23, 2012), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/23/lebron-heat-trayvon-
tweet_n_1375831.html.
18. LeBron James, #WeAreTrayvonMartin #Hoodies #Stereotyped #WeWantJustice, Camera+ (March 23, 2012),
http://campl.us/il4E.
19. Jimmy Boyd, Twitter Trends and Trending Topics for March 26, 2012, Writing Shares (March 26, 2012),
http://writingshares.com/twitter-trends-and-trending-topics-for-march-26-2012.
20. Rosanne Bar Joins Twitter Vigilante Crew: Star Tweeted Address of George Zimmermans Parents, The Smoking
Gun (March 29, 2012), http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/roseanne-barr-zimmerman-tweets-893416.
21. Dr. Drew Staff, Zimmermans Brother Speaks to Dr. Drew, HLN, updated June 24, 2013,
http://www.hlntv.com/video/2013/06/20/goerge-zimmermans-brother-speaks-dr-drew.
22. Colleen Curry, Spike Lee Sued over George Zimmerman Tweet, ABC News (November 11, 2013),
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/11/spike-lee-sued-over-george-zimmerman-tweet; CNN Wire Staff, Spike Lee
Apologizes for Retweeting Wrong Zimmerman Address, CNN (March 28, 2012),
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/28/justice/florida-teen-spike-lee.
23. Ibid.
24. Roderick P. Hart and Suzanne Daughton, Modern Rhetorical Criticism, 3rd ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2005), 309.
25. Rev. Al Sharpton: Arrest Zimmerman Now! in Trayvon Martins Shooting Death, WFTV 9 (March 22, 2012),
http://www.wftv.com/news/news/sanford-readies-travon-martin-rally-council-votes-/nLZZk.
26. Jeff Weiner, Jon Busdeker, and Martin Comas, Trayvon Martin: Thousands in Sanford Park Join Rev. Al Sharpton
Calling for Justice, Orlando Sentinel (March 22, 2012), http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-03-22/news/os-trayvon-
martin-al-sharpton-rally-20120322_1_national-action-network-sharpton-crowd; Arelis R. Hernandez, Al Sharpton: Civil
Disobedience Will Escalate If Zimmerman Remains Free, Orlando Sentinel (March 31, 2012),
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-03-31/news/os-george-zimmerman-trayvon-al-sharpton-20120330_1_civil-disobedience-
national-action-network-national-association.
27. Politics Nation with Al Sharpton (transcript) (March 19, 2012), http://www.talkleft.com/zimm/sharptonmar19b.pdf.
28. Alan Dershowitz (interview), Hardball with Chris Matthews, MSNBC (April 16, 2012),
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/47064491/ns/msnbc-hardball_with_chris_matthews/t/hardball-chris-matthews-friday-april/#.VJS-
Df8JAE.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Alicia Shepard, The Iconic Photos of Trayvon Martin & George Zimmerman & Why You May Not See Others,
Poynter (April 1, 2012), http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/168391/the-iconic-photos-of-trayvon-martin-george-
zimmerman-why-you-may-not-see-the-others.
32. Andrew Branca, Zimmerman Trial Day 3End-of-Day Analysis and Video of States Witnesses, Legal Insurrection
(June 26, 2013), http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/06/zimmerman-trial-day-analysis-and-video-of-states-witnesses.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Andrew Branca, Zimmerman Trial Day 5Analysis & VideoStates Own Witnesses Undercut Theory of Guilt,
Legal Insurrection (June 28, 2013), http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/06/zimmerman-trial-day-5-analysis-video-states-own-
witnesses-undercut-theory-of-guilt.
36. Ibid.
37. CNN Wire Staff, Photo Appears to Show Zimmerman Bleeding after Trayvon Martin Killing, CNN (December 4,
2012), http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/03/justice/george-zimmerman-photo/index.html?hpt=hp_c1.
38. Post Staff Writer, New Photos Show Zimmermans Bloody Head, New York Post (April 20, 2012),
http://nypost.com/2012/04/20/new-photo-shows-zimmermans-bloody-head.
39. Andrew Branca, Zimmerman Updated ExclusiveMid-Day 8State Wins Evidentiary Battle, Loses Testimony War,
Legal Insurrection (July 3, 2013), http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/07/zimmerman-update-exclusive-mid-day-state-wins-
evidentiary-battle-loses-testimony-war.
40. Ibid.
41. Andrew Branca, Zimmerman Trial Day 4End-of-Day Analysis & Video of States Witnesses, Legal Insurrection
(June 27, 2013), http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/06/zimmerman-trial-day-end-of-day-analysis-video-of-states-witnesses.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Dana Ford, Juror: No Doubt that George Zimmerman Feared for His Life, CNN (July 16, 2013),
http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/15/justice/zimmerman-juror-book.
46. The Trayvon Martin Verdict with Dan Abrams of ABC News, Charles Ogletree of Harvard University and Noah
Feldman of Bloomberg View, Charlie Rose (July 15, 2013), http://www.charlierose.com/watch/60241735.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
All police reports, which include the dates and times of the events, were photocopied and cached. Trayvon Martin/George
Zimmerman Case Files. Axiom Amnesia. Accessed December 18, 2014. http://trayvon.axiomamnesia.com.
Alvarez, Lizette. City Criticizes Police Chief after Shooting. New York Times (March 22, 2012).
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/us/police-chief-draws-fire-in-trayvon-martin-shooting.html?_r=1&.
Boyd, Jimmy. Twitter Trends and Trending Topics for March 26, 2012. Writing Shares (March 26, 2012).
http://writingshares.com/twitter-trends-and-trending-topics-for-march-26-2012.
Branca, Andrew. Zimmerman Updated ExclusiveMid-Day 8State Wins Evidentiary Battle, Loses Testimony War. Legal
Insurrection (July 3, 2013). http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/07/zimmerman-update-exclusive-mid-day-state-wins-
evidentiary-battle-loses-testimony-war.
Branca, Andrew. Zimmerman Trial Day 4End-of-Day Analysis and Video of States Witnesses. Legal Insurrection (June
27, 2013). http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/06/zimmerman-trial-day-end-of-day-analysis-video-of-states-witnesses.
Branca, Andrew. Zimmerman Trial Day 3End-of-Day Analysis and Video of States Witnesses. Legal Insurrection (June
26, 2013). http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/06/zimmerman-trial-day-analysis-and-video-of-states-witnesses.
CBS News. Grand Jury Called in Trayvon Martin Shooting. CBS News (March 20, 2012).
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/grand-jury-called-in-trayvon-martin-shooting.
Christina Coleman. Founder of Million Hoodies Movement for Justice Talks Trayvon Martin & The March on Washington.
Global Grind (August 27, 2013). http://globalgrind.com/2013/08/27/founder-of-million-hoodies-movement-for-justice-
trayvon-martin-march-on-washington-daniel-maree-interview.
CNN Wire Staff. Photo Appears to Show Zimmerman Bleeding after Trayvon Martin Killing. CNN (December 4, 2012).
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/03/justice/george-zimmerman-photo/index.html?hpt=hp_c1.
CNN Wire Staff, Spike Lee Apologizes for Retweeting Wrong Zimmerman Address. CNN (March 28, 2012).
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/28/justice/florida-teen-spike-lee.
Crimesider Staff. Million Hoodie March held in NYC in memory of Trayvon Martin. CBS News (March 22, 2012).
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/million-hoodie-march-held-in-nyc-in-memory-of-trayvon-martin.
Crimesider Staff. 911 Calls Released in Trayvon Martin Fatal Shooting. CBS News (originally published March 19, 2012).
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/911-calls-released-in-trayvon-martin-fatal-shooting.
Curry, Colleen. Spike Lee Sued over George Zimmerman Tweet. ABC News (November 11, 2013).
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/11/spike-lee-sued-over-george-zimmerman-tweet.
DAlessandro, Mac. No More Yes, Sir: After Trayvon Martins Death, the Use of this Deference Has to End. Boston
Globe (March 28, 2012). http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2012/03/27/more-yes-
sir/6YBDwcn8LYqmwPcHlZdeyM/story.html.
Demby, Gene. LeBron James Tweets Picture of Miami Heat Wearing Hoodies in Solidarity with Family of Trayvon Martin.
Huffington Post (March 23, 2012). http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/23/lebron-heat-trayvon-tweet_n_1375831.html
Dershowitz, Alan. Zimmerman Prosecutor Threatening to Sue Harvard for My Criticism. Newmax (June 5, 2012).
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Zimmerman-Trayvon-Angela-Corey/2012/06/05/id/441305.
Dershowitz, Alan (interview). Hardball with Chris Matthews. MSNBC (April 16, 2012).
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/47064491/ns/msnbc-hardball_with_chris_matthews/t/hardball-chris-matthews-friday-
april/#.VJS-Df8JAE.
Dr. Drew Staff, Zimmermans Brother Speaks to Dr. Drew. HLN. Last updated June 24, 2013.
http://www.hlntv.com/video/2013/06/20/goerge-zimmermans-brother-speaks-dr-drew.
Ford, Dana. Juror: No Doubt that George Zimmerman Feared for His Life. CNN (July 16, 2013).
http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/15/justice/zimmerman-juror-book.
Francescani, Chris. Trayvon Martin Call Was Mistake, Not Deliberate: NBC. Reuters (April 8, 2012).
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/08/us-usa-florida-shooting-nbc-idUSBRE83609U20120408?
feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&rpc=22.
Gamboa, Suzanne. Florida Shooters Race a Complicated Matter. Associated Press (March 29, 2012).
http://web.archive.org/web/20120406122016/http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_NEIGHBORHOOD_WATCH_WHITE_OR
SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT.
Graham, Tim. CNN Walks It Back: Oops, Zimmerman Didnt Say Coon, He Said It Was Cold! News Busters (April 6,
2012). http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2012/04/06/cnn-walks-it-back-oops-zimmerman-didnt-say-coon-he-said-it-
was-cold.
Gutman, Matt, Olivia Katrandjian, and Seni Tienabeso. Trayvon Martin Family Seeks FBI Investigation of Killing by
Neighborhood Watchman. ABC News (March 18, 2012). http://abcnews.go.com/US/trayvon-martin-family-seeks-fbi-
investigation-killing/story?id=15949879.
Hart, Roderick P., and Suzanne Daughton. Modern Rhetorical Criticism, 3rd ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2005): 309.
Hernandez, Arelis R. Al Sharpton: Civil Disobedience Will Escalate If Zimmerman Remains Free. Orlando Sentinel (March
31, 2012). http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-03-31/news/os-george-zimmerman-trayvon-al-sharpton-
20120330_1_civil-disobedience-national-action-network-national-association.
James, LeBron. #WeAreTrayvonMartin #Hoodies #Stereotyped #WeWantJustice. Camera+ (March 23, 2012).
http://campl.us/il4E.
Listen to George Zimmerman 911 Calls. Axiom Amnesia. Accessed December 18, 2012.
http://trayvon.axiomamnesia.com/zimmerman-9-1-1-calls.
National Basketball Players Association. Statement by the NBPA in Response to the Death of Trayvon Martin. NBPA Press
Release (March 23, 2012). http://www.nbpa.org/press-release/nbpa-press-release-march-23-2012.
Parekh, Rupal. McCann Staffer behind Million-Hoodie March to Protest Trayvon Martin Slaying: Daniel Maree Kick-Started
New York March with Social Media. Ad Age (March 23, 2012). http://adage.com/article/agency-news/mccann-staffer-
million-hoodie-march/233694.
Politics Nation with Al Sharpton (transcript) (March 19, 2012). http://www.talkleft.com/zimm/sharptonmar19b.pdf.
Post Staff Writer. New Photos Show Zimmermans Bloody Head. New York Post (April 20, 2012).
http://nypost.com/2012/04/20/new-photo-shows-zimmermans-bloody-head.
Rev. Al Sharpton: Arrest Zimmerman now! in Trayvon Martins Shooting Death. WFTV 9 (March 22, 2012).
http://www.wftv.com/news/news/sanford-readies-travon-martin-rally-council-votes-/nLZZk.
Rosanne Barr Joins Twitter Vigilante Crew: Star Tweeted Address of George Zimmermans Parents. The Smoking Gun
(March 29, 2012). http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/roseanne-barr-zimmerman-tweets-893416.
Schneider, Mike. Family Wants Answers in Fla. Teens Death. Associated Press (March 8, 2012).
http://news.yahoo.com/family-wants-answers-fla-teens-death-162019527.html.
Shepard, Alicia. The Iconic Photos of Trayvon Martin & George Zimmerman and Why You May Not See Others. Poynter
(April 1, 2012). http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/168391/the-iconic-photos-of-trayvon-martin-george-zimmerman-
why-you-may-not-see-the-others.
Sloane, Amanda. 1 Million Sign Petition against Zimmerman. HLN (updated July 16, 2013).
http://www.hlntv.com/article/2013/07/16/naacp-george-zimmerman-department-justice-petition-trayvon?hpt=hln10_3.
The Trayvon Martin Verdict with Dan Abrams of ABC News, Charles Ogletree of Harvard University and Noah Feldman of
Bloomberg View. Charlie Rose (July 15, 2013). http://www.charlierose.com/watch/60241735.
Weiner, Jeff, Jon Busdeker, and Martin Comas, Trayvon Martin: Thousands in Sanford Park Join Rev. Al Sharpton Calling for
Justice. Orlando Sentinel (March 22, 2012) http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-03-22/news/os-trayvon-martin-al-
sharpton-rally-20120322_1_national-action-network-sharpton-crowd.
9
The Digital Migration of Anti-Immigration

Rhetoric: Anxiety, Addressivity, and
Networked Public Culture
Maggie Franz
Virality, or the rapid spread of digital media across the Internet, often is thought of as the best
and worst aspect of Web 2.0. Although the networked interconnectivity that facilitates virality
enables ingenious marketing campaigns and new, creative forms of political activism, it also
enables the spread of hoaxes, misinformation, and biased political communication. For
example, the spreadabilitythe ability for media to travel across a wide range of formal
and informal, large-scale and small-scale digital networksof contemporary digital media
enabled what Gabe Ignatow and Alexander T. Williams call the anchor baby boom.1 The
authors argue that anchor babya pejorative term describing the U.S. citizen child of an
undocumented migrant who uses the childs citizenship status to remain in the countrywent
viral in 2010 due to increased Internet traffic to segmented, or medium-sized politically
biased, news Web sites (such as Newsmax) that have proliferated in the age of digital news.2
Accordingly, hyperlinks on segmented news Web sites aided the spread of the term by
connecting readers from small far-right political blogs such as VDARE (the authors argue that
the terms online usage originated on this site), to large-scale digital platforms such as The
New York Times online and Fox News online.3
According to Ignatow and Williams, the back-and-forth Web traffic pushed the term into the
mainstream lexicon.4 As such, the authors use database searches to show that the term was
used online 10 times in 2000; 30,000 times in 2005; and 436,000 times in 2010. In 2005 the
term only appeared on 441 blogs and in 2010 it appeared on 16,000. In 2010, Twitter users
tweeted approximately 12 tweets mentioning anchor baby daily.5 Moreover, The American
Heritage Dictionary added the term in 2011, Time Magazine added the term to its buzzwords
of 2010 collection, and The New York Times added it to its collection of buzzwords in 2006
and again in 2011.6 Importantly, however, evidenced by the onslaught of draconian immigration
and citizenship reforms beginning in the mid-2000s and peaking in the late 2000s, the
increased usage of the term in online media coincided with a reinvigoration of anti-
immigration and anti-birthright citizenship politics. Thus, the timing of the terms virality begs
the question of the relationship between the virality of the term, the spreadability of new
media, and anti-immigration politics. Moreover, does the anchor baby case illustrate that
new media lends itself to the mainstreaming of fringe politics?
This chapter attends to these questions by first providing an alternate interpretation of
anchor baby virality. Building on Ignatow and Williamss claim that the cross-pollination
of writers and readers on fringe anti-immigration and more mainstream news Web sites
caused the anchor baby to go viral, this chapter argues that we cannot grasp the rapid spread
of the term unless we look at the interaction between online and offline anti-immigration
political mobilization as well as how these contexts constructed the character of the anchor
baby. Next, the chapter complicates Ignatow and Williams construction of anchor baby as a
term with a denotative meaning, instead of as a symbol that addresses a public rhetorically.
Because publics are formed through the ability to feel addressed by a text through the ability of
seeing oneself in a text, anchor baby circulated widely in right-wing media because it
functions as what Kenneth Burke calls a god-term, or a term that sums up a manifold of
particulars and forges an emotional and affective identification with a text.7 Thus, by using
god-terms such as anchor baby and illegal alien that stand in for various public anxieties
about the demographic and political future of the United States, rightwing Web sites solicit a
public that then carries the terms to the other digital cultures in which they participate.
The chapter concludes with an argument that scholars of digital media should take into
account both the medium and its rhetorical messages. Thus, the anchor baby case illustrates
how the proliferation of segmented news Web sites and online and offline anti-immigration
rhetoric that addresses a broad array of public anxieties coalesce and work together,
increasing the possibility that fringe politics will become more mainstream. Extremist politics
are a product of both online and offline rhetorical situations, which elucidates that digital
media presents scholars with complex rhetorical, technological, and ethical conundrums.
ANTIBIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP POLITICAL MOBILIZATION IN

RIGHT-WING NETWORKED PUBLIC CULTURE
In their study of how the anchor baby boom occurred, Ignatow and Williams outline a
method of hyperlink tracing to track the spread of digital media content from one Web site to
another.8 As mentioned above, the researchers find that segmented news Web sites function as
a transfer point between the small right-wing blogs where the online usage of the term initiated
and the mainstream frequently visited news Web sites.9 Though this method expertly maps the
increased usage of the term online, the emphasis on online virality occludes the simultaneous
boom in offline popular support for anti-birthright citizenship legislation that occurred during
the same time, as well as the interaction between online and offline anti-immigration
publications.10 As digital media scholars Nancy Baym and danah boyd claim, online and
offline contexts cannot be separated from one another; offline contexts permeate online
activities, and online activities bleed endlessly back to reshape what happens offline.11 Thus,
the online and offline travel of both the term and its politics necessitates an inquiry into its
virality that can attend to more than just its online path.
Journalists first used the terms anchor baby and anchor child in the 1980s to describe
child refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia. John Tanton, the founder of Center for Immigration
Studies (CIS), Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and NumbersUSA, began
employing the term in the mid-1990s in his quarterly journal The Social Contract to describe
the United Statesborn children of undocumented (Mexican) immigrants.12 During this period,
Tantons contemporaryPeter Brimelowalso used this new connotation of the word in his
best-selling anti-immigrant treatise, Alien Nation.13
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, anchor baby began making appearances in books by
relatively well-respected Columbia historian Samuel Huntington and prolific conservative
politician Patrick Buchanan.14 Additionally, the anchor baby made sporadic appearances in
local newspapers, increasing in the mid to late 2000s.15 Moreover, conservative think tanks
such as The Manhattan Institute began using the term in print publications.16 These examples
show that the offline spread of the term anchor baby was not confined to fringe rightwing
print media, but instead already was a word that circulated in political, popular, and academic
texts.
In addition to tracking the spread of the term itself, grasping the full spread of the term
requires examining how the character of the anchor baby and his or her migrant mother was
constructed and deployed in public discourse. That is, we must look beyond the word itself
and interrogate how the anchor baby problemthat migrant women illegally migrate with
the sole purpose of having a citizen child and exploiting the welfare systemwas shaped and
circulated in right-wing media. Although U.S. immigration policy and discourse always have
aimed to restrict migrant reproduction as well as migrants ability to become burdens of the
state, the anchor baby discourse is a particular iteration of anti-immigration discourse that
specifically problematizes Latina and especially Mexican womens reproduction in the context
of undocumented and criminalized migration.17 As such, during the mid-1990s, the anti-
immigrant rhetoric supporting Californias Proposition 187, or the Save Our State
referendum and the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 mobilized the figure of the anchor baby by
citing the overly fecund migrant mother and her citizen child as national threats who were
abusing state resources.18 Both of these legal measures employed rhetoric constructing
Mexican and Latina migrants and their children as overly reliant on public resources, and thus
they advocated for barring migrants from receiving public entitlements and services including
nonemergency health care, welfare, and public school education.19 The overt focus on migrant
mothers and their citizen and non-citizen children led to a series of referendums and bills
proposed in other states that attempted to bar migrant women from receiving prenatal care and
to bar their children from receiving any sort of state benefits.20 Thus, the anchor baby
discourse spread from California to multiple other states around the country, infiltrating local
and national conservative political platforms.
The character of the anchor baby goes back even further than the 1990s, however. Legal
theorist Priscilla Huang argues that the inception of the anchor baby term transcends the
resurgence of anti-immigration campaigning in the 1990s.21 Huang claims that the current
connotation of the word emerges from two interconnected anti-immigration movements that
have their beginnings in late 1960s. The first is the Zero Population Growth (ZPG) movement,
headed by Paul Ehrlich and mobilized by his incendiary 1968 book The Population Bomb.
Population control advocates claim that supposedly out-of-control immigrant birthrates drain
public resources and burden the environment. The second anti-immigration movement is a
white supremacist nativist movement headed by right-wing pundits such as Patrick Buchanan,
Michelle Malkin, John Tanton, and Peter Brimelow, as well as organizations such as VDARE,
NumbersUSA, FAIR, and the CIS. These two facets of the anti-immigration movement are
closely intertwined, and many proponents of population control also incite panic about the
changing racial makeup of the nation. John Tanton, for example, is the founder of FAIR, a group
that primarily focuses on population control, but he is also editor of the nativist periodical The
Social Contract as well as the nativist think tank the CIS. Figures such as Tanton show that the
broader anti-immigration movement is concerned with both the perceived diminishment of
native white hegemony and the perceived out-of-control reproduction of women of color,
which they believe contributes to the depletion of white supremacy and state and natural
resources.
Although all of the rhetoric constructing the Save Our State campaign and earlier
campaigns concerning environmentalism and white nativism might not have explicitly named
the anchor babythough many did use the termthe rhetoric deployed in these movements
constructed the character of the anchor baby. By constructing the children of migrants as
criminal equals to their parents, the anchor baby was synecdochically related to figures such
as the illegal alien and the overly reproductive migrant mother through its ideological and
textual relation to these terms in anti-immigration texts. Kenneth Burke defines metonymy as
a reduction, and synecdoche as the device that reduces and thus represents.22 Synecdoche is
an integral relationship, a relationship of convertibility, between two terms; metonymy is a
one-way relationship of connectedness between terms.23 The migrant child was
synecdochically represented in terms of the constructed criminality of his or her parents
through language that decried the future crime and degeneration resulting from too many citizen
children.
Conservative journalist Heather Mac Donald for example wrote that the public dislikes
the effect on local communities of large numbers of poor Mexicans and their progeny, legal or
not. Some of the effects, such as crime, worsen dramatically from the first to the second
generation of Mexicans, who not only are legal but are American citizens.24 Moreover, the
parentand especially the motherwas synecdochically represented in terms of the anchor
baby through language that constructed migrant women as conniving welfare queens who
were using their citizen children to get welfare. Peter Brimelow, for example, wrote,
Unquestionably, the largest loophole in welfare-eligibility provisions, however, is the
birthright-citizenship provision of the Fourteenth Amendment.25 Thus, the diverse and
fragmented rightwing rhetoric supporting welfare reform, Proposition 187, population control,
and nativist anti-immigration all mobilized the figure of the overly fecund Mexican migrant
woman through the deployment of the term anchor baby, and the figure of the anchor baby
was mobilized through the figure of the overly fecund migrant mother. Through these
discourses, the meaning of anchor baby was more or less able to solidify in right-wing
rhetoric, as the children of undocumented migrants were constructed as future illegal aliens
and as tools of migrant invasion that undocumented women use to obtain welfare and bring
over more family members through immigration sponsorship.
Evidenced by Peter Brimelows comment about the Fourteenth Amendment, the anchor
baby articulated much more than just the figure of perverse reproduction, but also began
articulating a reformist project to reinterpret the birthright citizenship clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment to restrict the children of undocumented migrants from becoming citizens.26 During
the mid-1990s, the long-standing debate over birthright citizenship was reignited as politicians
and pundits advocated for reinterpreting the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to
exclude migrant womens U.S.-born children from citizenshipconstructing it as a magnet
pulling more and more migrants over the border.27
In 1995, Elton Gallegly of California proposed legislation denying birthright citizenship to
migrant womens children to discourage pregnant aliens from entering the country illegally in
order to have their babies delivered free of charge and become U.S. citizens eligible for an
array of benefits.28 Two years earlier, the governor of California, Pete Wilson, made a similar
comment, decrying that [t]he 14th Amendment to the Constitution was never intended to be a
reward for illegal immigration.29 Subsequently, the Fourteenth Amendment was rearticulated
in rightwing media as the anchor baby loophole by Tanton, the anchor baby racket by
Buchanan, and later as the anchor baby Amendment by Fox & Friends.30 The arguments
against the current interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment are not exclusive to right-wing
media, however; they all cite Yale law professor Peter Schuck and political scientist Rogers
Smiths Citizenship Without Consent. The book outlines an argument against jus soli
citizenship for the children of undocumented migrants.31 The multiple sources of the anchor
babys redefinition and subsequent signification show that the word and its politics were used
and circulated in a much wider sphere than just fringe blogs such as VDARE.
The trajectory of contemporary anti-immigration mobilization in relation to the terms use
is outlined here to show that a vibrant right-wing public culture already was in place by the
time Tanton, Brimelow, Buchanan, and other right-wing pundits in the 2000s began writing
about the topic in online publications on their respective blogs, The Social Contract
(Tanton), VDare (Brimelow), and Patrick J. Buchanan (Buchanan), which Ignatow and
Williams name as the patient zeros of anchor baby virality.32 Moreover, bestselling
rightwing pundits like Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, and Andrew Breitbart began to blog
during the same period, posting commentaries about anchor babies on Tanton, Brimelow,
and Buchanans blogs as well as on their own.
Therefore, to grasp how the anchor baby was able to spread so readily online requires
consideration that the term was constructed within a vibrant networked public culture that
organized (and organizes) in relation to diverse anti-immigration texts and sentiments. Michael
Warner defines a public as a collective characterized by stranger relationality that self-
organizes in relation to texts and their circulation, existing by virtue of being addressed.33 In
the case of anchor baby, a right-wing publicorganized in relation to the production and
circulation of anti-immigration, antiwelfare, and at times right-wing environmentalist texts
appropriated the term and began using it to describe the purported problem of migrant
reproduction and birthright citizenship. Importantly, however, this rightwing anti-immigration
public organized in relation to print-based and online publications, incorporating the online
platforms of blogging, commenting on news Web sites, and employing social media sites such
as Facebook and Twitter to further circulate and spread texts, converting it into what Baym and
boyd call socially mediated publicness.34
According to Baym and boyd, social media has vastly increased the potential scale and
penetrability of publicness. They claim that there are more layers of publicness available to
those using networked media than ever before, which brings into being multiple and diverse
kinds of publics, counterpublics, and other emergent social arrangements.35 The connectivity
and speed of networked media illuminate why Ignatow and Williams locate their scene of
analysis solely in cyberspace. Cyberspace speeds up the spread of messages and therefore
produces what is referred to as virality. Although media infrastructures provide
opportunities or technological affordances for the rapid spread of data to more diverse groups
of people than ever was possible before, the capability of online media to circulate digital
phenomena in an unprecedented fashion does not necessarily prove Ignatow and Williamss
point that the traffic to and from segmented news sites caused the anchor baby boom. Baym
and boyd as well as Jenkins, Ford, and Green point out that the vast majority of online
information circulated in the same social networks that spur viral media never cause a stir and
certainly never go viral.36 That an immense amount of media never infect a significant
amount of people demonstrates that the digital medium of segmented news Web sites itself is
not sufficient cause for virality. Thus, other aspects of anchor baby virality must be
examined, not to prove a causal relationshipwhich is impossiblebut to complicate the
good and bad qualities that are attributed to virality and new media.
METAPHOR AND ADDRESSIVITY: ANCHOR BABY AS A NODE OF

IDENTIFICATION
Thus far, this chapter has described a larger, multimodal networked public culture in which
the anchor baby boom occurred to complicatethough not refuteIgnatow and Williams
focus on cyberspace. The term is analyzed not just as a word that conveys information about
migrant motherhood and citizenship, but as a symbol that addresses its public, perpetuating the
rightwing public formation that circulates and spreads the term online and offline. Such an
analysis involves examining how the anchor baby functions as an affectively charged god-
term that elicits identification with right-wing social imaginaries.
As Michael Warner makes clear, publics exist by virtue of being addressed by a text.37 For
both Lauren Berlant and Chris Lundberg, members of a public feel addressed by a text when
recognizing a shared worldview, or a shared imagination.38 According to Lundberg, attention
to a singular text does not create a public ex nihilio: members of a public pay attention to a text
because it solicits them, trading on investments, that, although manifest in a text, precede and
organize a publics attention to it.39 One way that the circulation of texts solicits its readers is
by the ability of readers to find imaginary points of commonality, define themselves, and
demarcate the bounds of their identities relative to those who are presumed to be inside and/or
those marked as outside.40 The imagination, as the architecture of a public, fosters affiliation
through providing a sense of ones place in the world. A shared imagination, or what Cornelius
Castoriadis defines as a schema for conceiving of reality as coherent, closed, and determinate,
holds a public together by providing not only grounds for shared identarian claims, but also
ontological logics necessary to feel addressed by certain texts.41 Thus, social imaginaries are
akin to orientations for Kenneth Burke in that they are tacit agreements about actions, feelings,
and terms of address that are never explicitly thematized, but nevertheless are followed and
policed.
The previous section describes some of the components of a right-wing anti-immigration
imagination through a description of the social and political movements that reappropriated the
term, assigning it an activist problematic. That is, the nativist anti-immigration movement, the
right-wing conservationist movement, and antiwelfare movements share a common imagination
of national life in which members of these movements feel that the United States is being
invaded by criminal immigrants from the Global South who wish to exploit the nations natural
and economic resources. According to this imagination, to preserve both the material resources
allocated to citizens and the racial and sentimental attachments articulated with U.S.
citizenship, migrant women who bear children in the United States must be stopped. As such,
anchor baby texts address the publics that circulate them because they use terms that
construct this imagination, thus forging connections between strangers because of the
assumption that consumers of a text already share a worldview and emotional knowledge that
they have derived from a broadly common historical experience.42
Importantly, the term anchor baby is symbolically able to articulate a right-wing
imagination that solicits a public because it functions as a god-term. According to Burke,
god-terms are words in which we can posit a world.43 God-terms are Rome terms to
which all roads lead, though not in any simple or uniform manner.44 God-terms are words
such as freedom that signify an imagination and thus invite a sense of publicness that signals
shared feelings and shared orientations. God-terms elicit identification, which is Burkes key
term for rhetoric. Burke claims that, though rhetoric traditionally has been associated with
persuasion, identification is a necessary extension to a philosophy of rhetoric.45
To illustrate both the connection between identification and persuasion, Burke claims that
persuasion ranges from the bluntest quest of advantage through courtship, social etiquette,
education, and the sermon, to a form that delights in process of appeal for itself alone,
without ulterior purpose identification ranges from the politician who, addressing an
audience of farmers, says, I was a farm boy myself, through the mysteries of social status, to
the mystics devout identification with the source of all being.46 Thus, persuasion and
identification are two sides of the same rhetorical coin. As such, god-terms provide a road
to identification and persuasion because they encompass many diverse and contradictory
motives from the relational realm of courtship to the formal realm of identification with a God.
Thus, anchor baby invites identification with a right-wing imagination because it
encompasses orientations toward not only illegality, monstrosity, and criminality, but also the
preciousness of American citizenship and the defense of the nations boundaries.
Importantly, god-terms do not only posit worlds, they posit feelings and orientations
toward worlds through the affective components of any symbolic phenomena. Thus, affect, or
what Brian Massumi calls unqualified intensity, is a central component of cultivating and
recognizing a shared imagination because affect is integral to persuasion and the creation of
meaningful connections with texts.47 For Burke, the affective and corporeal realm of human life
is a crucial site of persuasion, or of responding to symbolic phenomena.48 Burke names two
distinct communicative modes of representationthe psychology of information and the
psychology of form.49 Information refers to the transmission of meaning, and form refers to
the expressive structure of communication and actualized through the effect it produces on the
receiver.50 Importantly, for Burke, the real force of text resides not just automatically but
autonomically in the affective, embodied response it provokes separate from the content or
ostensible subject.51 Thus, persuasion resides in the form and in the intensity of
communication. This leads Jeff Pruchnic to connect Burkes theory of form with contemporary
theories of affect that see affect as working parallel to and in tandem with the content features
of discourse. Although Burke is addressing form and affect by talking about art and literature,
popular and mundane forms of communicationlike those that construct the anchor baby
similarly rely on a psychology of form to address readers and thus enter into mass circulation,
eventually becoming part of dominant vocabularies about migration.
This chapter has outlined the role of the term anchor baby as a god-term that
symbolically and affectively addresses a right-wing publics imagination to convey that the
term solicits participation, which, the author argues, is a crucial component of its virality. By
not considering the anchor babys status as a symbol and an affectively charged god-term
that elicits identification with a text, Ignatow and Williams are able to claim that increased
readership of segmented news Web sites caused the term to go viral. Such a claimthough by
no means incorrectelides the participatory aspect of any networked public culture that is
much more complex than just the affordances of the medium it uses.52 Thus, it can be argued
that another way to interpret anchor babys virality is to view it as a word that solicited
public identification and thus, formation and participation both online and offline.
Because anchor baby is a term that encompasses an entire emotional and ideological
worldview toward immigration, it functions as an argumentative word that quickly forges
identification with the hearing public. As discussed in the previous section, the participatory
aspect of public culture is evident in politicians and pundits use of the word to refer to the
problem of the Fourteenth Amendment and the overall problem of undocumented migration
in the welfare state. Online, the participatory aspect of the word is evident in comments that
employ the word on both right-wing and mainstream Web sites, effectively spreading the word
without the use of hyperlinks. For example, the top comment on a Wall Street Journal Online
article about the attempt to reinterpret the Fourteenth Amendment is from DAVE FRANCIS,
who opens his multiparagraph comment by saying, Parents stay and then have more babies
that the taxed-out American is forced to pay for anchor babies.53 DAVE FRANCIS then goes
on to link to NumbersUSA, John Tantons restrictionist organization, bringing the anchor
baby saga full circle from fringe rightwing print journal, The Social Contract, to lobbying
and research organizations such as NumbersUSA, FAIR, and CIS, to The Wall Street Journal.
CONCLUSION
This chapter attempts to augment the mapping of anchor baby virality through an
engagement with rhetorical theories. As such, although the rhetorical analysis by no means
provides a perfect or a full view of an instance of virality, it does provide an alternate
perspective to the dominant mode of doing digital media analysis. The chapter first shows how
the virality of anchor baby online resulted from the entwinement of the terms use in a
networked public culture organized around online and offline anti-immigration texts. It then
showed that viewing the term as rhetoric that addresses a public illuminates how the term
functions as a god-term that forges identification with a text. Through the use of affectively
charged god-terms such as anchor baby and illegal alien, rightwing Web sites solicit a
public that will participate and circulate texts that employ the term to the other digital cultures
that these publics encounter online. In other words, segmented news Web sites have not
necessarily made right-wing politics more popular as much as they have provided one more
medium through which a public culture can organize and circulate shared meanings.
In conclusion, the anchor baby case does not demonstrate that the proliferation of
segmented news Web sites in the new media age of digital news causes the spread of fringe
right-wing politics. As Jenkins, Ford, and Green point out in their study of spreadable
media, the faster and easier circulation of new media does not guarantee audience
participation nor does it guarantee that anyone actually will pay attention and listen to media
products.54 The anchor baby case is evidence that active participation in the circulation of
digital media depends on multiple social, political, economic, technological, historical, and
symbolic factors. Because new media is much more spreadable than older forms of media in
that it provides technological affordances for linking and spreading information in digital
networks, however, segmented news Web sites ease the spread of fringe politics. They ensure
that people who feel addressed by such politics encounter networked publics within which to
participate. As such, the myriad of ethical and political debates that digital media instigates are
only partially ruminated when only looking online. Instead, to adequately confront the unsavory
politics that flourish in digital networks, scholars must investigate the blurry boundaries
between online and offline public cultures.
NOTES
1. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked
Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2013); Gabe Ignatow and Alexander T. Williams, New Media and the Anchor Baby
Boom, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 17, no. 1 (2011): 6076.
2. Newsmax is a right-leaning news Web site akin to Fox News online. They re-post news reports from the Associated
Press as well as Reuters and they also publish original posts from insiders including well-known commenters like Charles
Krauthammer, David Limbaugh, Fareed Zakaria, and Rich Lowry. They have a Google PageRank of 6 out of 10 and a large
Twitter presence with 16 million followers.
3. Ignatow and Williams, New Media and the Anchor Baby Boom. VDARE is an antimulticulturalist blog founded by
journalist Peter Brimelow. Named for Virginia Dare, the first Anglo born in what is now the United States, the blog features
commentaries by other prominent right-wing pundits like Patrick Buchanan, Michelle Malkin, James Fulford, and Paul Gottfried.
Ignatow and Williams report that in 2005 VDARE had a Google PageRank of 6 out of 10. In 2015, its PageRank has fallen to 5
out of 10. This could be due to the proliferation of right-wing blogs as well as the occasional pay-wall that VDARE erects after
not receiving enough donations to keep afloat. In contrast, Foxnews.com has a PageRank of 8 and nytimes.com has a
PageRank of 9.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 60.
6. Dennis Baron, Defining Anchor Baby, The Web of Language, December 9, 2011,
https://illinois.edu/blog/view/25/64516; Grant Barrett, Glossary, New York Times, December 24, 2006, sec. Week in Review,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/weekinreview/24barrett.html; Ignatow and Williams, New Media and the Anchor Baby
Boom.
7. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1961), 3.
8. Ignatow and Williams, New Media and the Anchor Baby Boom.
9. Ibid.
10. Allison S. Hartry, Birthright Justice: The Attack on Birthright Citizenship and Immigrant Women of Color, New York
University Review of Law & Social Change 36, no. 1 (2012): 57102.
11. Nancy Baym and Danah Boyd, Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction, Journal of Broadcasting and
Electronic Media 56, no. 3 (2012): 327.
12. Mark Arax (1987) in an article for The Los Angeles Times Magazine uses the term anchor babies to describe
Vietnamese refugees. One of the first uses of anchor baby that refers to the U.S. citizen children of undocumented migrants
occurs in Wayne Luttons 1996 article Anchor Babies in John Tantons quarterly journal The Social Contract. The
subsequent issue of The Social Contract was titled The Anchor Baby Loophole and featured articles describing the anchor
baby problematic by Schuck and Smith (1996) and Tanton (1996). This chapter specifies that undocumented often codifies a
Mexican or Latin American ethnicity because in popular (and especially right-wing) discourse the two terms are either equated
or presented as intimately connected. See De Genova (2005) or Chavez (2008) for excellent analyses of the construction of
illegality as Mexican in popular media and legal discourses.
13. Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation: Common Sense About Americas Immigration Disaster (New York: Harper Perennial,
1996).
14. Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We: The Challenges to Americas National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster,
2004); Patrick J. Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our
Country and Civilization (New York: St. Martins Griffin, 2002); Patrick J. Buchanan, State of Emergency: The Third World
Invasion and Conquest of America (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2006).
16. Heather Mac Donald, Hispanic Family Values?, City Journal, Autumn 2006.
17. See Eithne Luibhid (2002; 2013) for an excellent historical analysis of the intersections of sexuality, race, and
immigration law.
18. Leo R. Chavez, Covering Immigration: Popular Images and the Politics of the Nation, 1st ed. (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2001); Leo R. Chavez, The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation (Palo
Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Elena R. Gutirrez, Fertile Matters: The Politics of Mexican-Origin Womens
Reproduction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008).
19. Gutirrez, Fertile Matters, 113.
20. Other states that proposed similar legislation include: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Nevada, New Mexico,
New York, Oklahoma, and Texas. Recently North Carolina, South Carolina, and Alabama passed similar legislation.
21. Priscilla Huang, Anchor Babies, Over-Breeders, and the Population Bomb: The Reemergence of Nativism and
Population Control in Anti-Immigration Policies, Harvard Law & Policy Review 2 (2008): 385406.
22. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York: George Braziller, 1955), 5067.
23. Ibid., 508.
24. Heather Mac Donald, Seeing Todays Immigrants Straight, in The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than
Todays, edited by Heather Mac Donald, Victor Davis Hanson, and Steven Malanga (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007), 53.
25. Brimelow, Alien Nation, 149.
26. By using articulate I am referring to Stuart Halls (1985) use of the word to refer to how different things and people
are made to connect to each other through discursive struggles of meaning. According to Hall articulation performs the work of
making a connection between arbitrary elements seem natural and necessary.
27. Gutirrez, Fertile Matters, 114.
28. Jonathon P. Decker, Lawmakers Look to Revoke Automatic Citizenship Law, Christian Science Monitor, December
27, 1995, 3.
29. Pete Wilson, Crackdown on Illegals, USA Today, August 20, 1993, sec. A.
30. John Tanton, Jumping the Queue, The Social Contract Press, Anchor BabiesThe Citizen-Child Loophole, 7, no.
1 (1996): 1; John Tanton, Denis McCormack, and Joseph Wayne Smith, eds., Immigration and the Social Contract: The
Implosion of Western Societies (London: Avebury, 1996); Buchanan, The Death of the West; Buchanan, State of Emergency;
Adam Shah, Fox Dismisses the 14th Amendment as the Anchor Baby Amendment, Media Matters for America, accessed
October 2, 2012, http://mediamatters.org/blog/2010/08/04/fox-dismisses-the-14th-amendment-as-the-anchor/168745.
31. Peter H. Schuck and Rogers M. Smith, Citizenship Without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Policy (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
33. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Press, 2002), 67.
34. Baym and Boyd, Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction, 320.
35. Ibid., 321, 322.
36. Baym and Boyd, Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction; Jenkins, Ford, and Green, Spreadable Media:
Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture.
37. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics.
38. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Christian O. Lundberg, Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric
(Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2012).
39. Lundberg, Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric, 152.
40. Ibid., 128.
41. Cornelius Castoriadis, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination,
trans. David Ames Curtis (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
42. Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, viii.
43. Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 105.
44. Ibid.
45. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
46. Ibid., xiv.
47. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
48. Jeff Pruchnic, Rhetoric, Cybernetics, and the Work of the Body in Burkes Body of Work, Rhetoric Review 25, no. 3
(2006): 281.
49. Pruchnic, Rhetoric, Cybernetics, and the Work of the Body in Burkes Body of Work.
50. Ibid., 281.
51. Ibid., 282.
52. Jenkins, Ford, and Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture.
53. James C. Ho, Birthright Citizenship and the 14th Amendment, The Wall Street Journal Online, January 5, 2011,
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203731004576045380685742092.
54. Jenkins, Ford, and Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture.
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Barrett, Grant. (2006, December 24). Glossary. New York Times. Week in Review.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/weekinreview/24barrett.html.
Baym, Nancy, and Danah Boyd. 2012. Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction. Journal of Broadcasting and
Electronic Media 56, no. 3: 327.
Berlant, Lauren. 2008. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Brimelow, Peter. Alien Nation: Common Sense about Americas Immigration Disaster (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996).
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Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1997. World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination,
translated by David Ames Curtis (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press).
Chavez, Leo R. 2008. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press).
Chavez, Leo R. 2001. Covering Immigration: Popular Images and the Politics of the Nation, 1st ed. (Berkeley: University
of California Press).
Decker, Jonathon P. Lawmakers Look to Revoke Automatic Citizenship Law. Christian Science Monitor (December 27,
1995), 3.
Gutirrez, Elena R. 2008. Fertile Matters: The Politics of Mexican-Origin Womens Reproduction (University of Texas
Press).
Hartry, Allison S. 2012. Birthright Justice: The Attack on Birthright Citizenship and Immigrant Women of Color. New York
University Review of Law & Social Change 36, no. 1: 57102.
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2011. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203731004576045380685742092.
Huang, Priscilla. 2008. Anchor Babies, Over-Breeders, and the Population Bomb: The Reemergence of Nativism and
Population Control in Anti-Immigration Policies. Harvard Law & Policy Review 2: 385406.
Huntington, Samuel P. 2004. Who Are We: The Challenges to Americas National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster).
Ignatow, Gabe, and Alexander T. Williams. 2011. New Media and the Anchor Baby Boom. Journal of Computer-
Mediated Communication 17, no. 1: 6076.
Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked
Culture (New York: NYU Press).
Luibhid, Eithne. 2013. Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Luibhid, Eithne. 2002. Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Lundberg, Christian O. 2012. Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa: The University of
Alabama Press), 152.
Lutton, Wayne. 1996. Anchor Babies. The Social Contract.
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Part III
Community and Globalization
10
Participation Fetishism in the Digital Age

Brent Kice
The Digital Age has created a form of participation currency. Whereas a capitalist society
requires individuals to acquire monetary possessions, digital connections require individuals
to demonstrate participation. This participation comes in the form of time. The time it takes to
tweet, the time it takes to update a Facebook status, the time it takes to post a picture to
Instagram, the time it takes to get the newest form of social media and download the
application. Social media applications beg for participation through the reliance on peer
pressure. Individuals are expected to maintain a digital presence. Questions such as, Did you
get my e-mail? demonstrate the expectation that the e-mails recipient be digitally present.
This chapter adapts Karl Marxs notion of commodity fetishism to the Digital Age in the
form of participation fetishism, and expands Guy Debords concept of the spectacle (in
short, a social relation between people that is mediated by images consisting of mass media,
advertisement, and popular culture) to account for the peer pressure of multiple relationships
through images. In turn, this adaptation demonstrates the simultaneous balancing act between
individuals participation in the physical realm and their participation in the digital realm.
Although this chapter borrows Marxs notion of fetishism as a means to introduce a new
avenue of fetishism resulting from digital social connections, it does not suggest an evolution
from, or an addition to, Marxs original concept. This author merely borrows Marxs
vocabulary as a handy tool to advocate for the emergence of participation fetishism. This
chapter establishes the concept via a threefold approach. First, the fetishistic nature of our
current digital society is explored. Next the blurred line between connected and disconnected
space is linked to leisure time. The technological impact on society then is examined. The
chapter concludes with an exploration of the acknowledgment of agency as a solution to break
free of the reins of participation fetishism.
THE FETISHISTIC NATURE OF OUR CURRENT DIGITAL SOCIETY

Fetishism pertains to an individuals obsession with a particular object or idea. Auguste
Comte recognized fetishism as a metaphorical period of human development.1 Later, Karl
Marx applied the term to designate individuals obsessions with commoditiesa foundational
component of his critique of capitalism.2 Karl Marx linked commodity fetishism with the
abstract assignment of value. In the Digital Age, this abstract value has duplicated itself within
what Guy Debord referred to as the spectacle.3 But, whereas Marxs notion of commodity
fetishism is based on capital in the physical realm, this chapters author proposes that
individuals adhere to participation fetishism in the digital realm. This viewpoint expands from
Guy Debords notion of people having relationships through images (the spectacle). In the
21st century, individuals are concerned with how they interact within the spectacle, resulting in
two lives requiring participation. People have become obsessed with digital participation,
and this obsession results in participation itself becoming a form of digital currency.
Individuals still exist in the physical realm, subjected to commodity fetishism; but with the
onset of the Digital Age, individuals must simultaneously be present in the digital realm,
subjected to participation fetishism. Numerous pleas are made for people to put down their
smartphones and engage with those around them. These pleas, however, ignore the emergence
of a participative online currency. These pleas assume an opinion that physical engagement in
relationships should be prioritized over digital participation. When new social media
applications come out, an individual must weigh the cost of continuing participation in current
applications while adding and participating in new applications. Users are spread too thin;
they must determine whether they are expected to post daily on their blogs, answer work e-
mails, answer personal e-mails, respond to Facebook wall posts, respond to Facebook instant
messages, and/or respond to texts.
Participation fetishism reinforces Friedrich Nietzsches notion of a herd mentality.
According to Nietzsche, to subordinate themselves to the herd, individuals submit to religious
guidelines and allow ideas of sin and, in turn, guilt.4 Although Nietzsche saw the development
of a social herd mentality as a result of religions influence, participation fetishism mirrors a
similar pattern but without being caused by a traditional religion. Individuals succumb to the
peer pressure of digital participation from a normalized necessity, even instilling notions of
guilt for failing to stay digitally connected (such as not checking e-mail or responding to a text
message). An integral element to the institution of this norm is the social support for this
model. Once the expectation for participation became the norm, those violating that norm are
seen as the offenders, or sinners. The guilt resulting from failure to stay digitally connected
might be displayed as a persons desire to avoid potential conflict with others. Rather than face
another persons accusations of failing to be present some people simply accommodate others,
considering that to be an easier route, and thereby perpetuating the norm of constant
participation. This obsession with succumbing to peer pressure to avoid the guilt associated
with lacking constant participation thus illustrates participation fetishism.
Participation fetishism, however, is not an obsession with people. Human interaction is not
the cause of pressure; pressure comes from the immaterial idea of participating. Pressure is not
determined by an individuals desire to maintain or enhance a specific human relationship.
Pressure comes from the need to be accountable, the need to fulfill an expected duty. But when
did this turn to an expected duty? This form of fetishism is not connected to a material object;
rather, it is connected to a material action as object. Although these acts of online presence are
digitized, the measurable outcomes of the actions often appear in the form of text, such as text
of an e-mail or text of a created social media account. In essence, the byproduct is a paper
trail.
When referencing commodity fetishism, Marx states, So it is in the world of commodities
with the products of [peoples] hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the
products of labor, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore
inseparable from the production of commodities.5 In addition, Debord states, [commodity
fetishism] is absolutely fulfilled in the spectacle, where the perceptible world is replaced by a
set of images that are superior to that world yet at the same time impose themselves as
eminently perceptible.6
Whereas Marxs commodity fetishism is based on an exchange of things between
individuals, participation fetishism does not consistently provoke such an exchange. Some
communication channels, such as e-mail or text messages, might create the expectation of a
reciprocal message between sender and receiver. A participation fetish merely reinforces an
individuals duty to prepare for a possible exchange of information. Participation fetishism is
the preparation for the exchange, not the exchange itself. It illustrates an individuals need for
anticipation and the anxiety that results when the individual is unable to be docile. An
individual anticipates the image that the potential participation will create, thus contributing to
Debord saying, The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship
between people that is mediated by images [it] is capital accumulated to the point where it
becomes image.7
Although digital participation would appear to increase human interaction, this merely is
an illusion. To a certain degree, individuals are interacting with the images offered by each
other. The use of hash tags, for example, pressures individuals to re-tweet the hash tags due to
the perceived value of the action itself. In this case, the action of re-tweeting a hash tag is an
act of social validation separate from belief in the hash tags message. Hash tags are marketing
blitzes creating the perception of social support through a simulated grassroots effort. In no
way does this mean that the enhancement of human connections via technology is a negative
outcome. The use of technology to improve human communication is a positive development of
humankind. Rather, the social mindset of how technology is abused to subordinate individuals
to follow social pressures is where the problem rests. Likewise, value is not in human
connections through networking, instead networking creates a perceived value. People dont
value what individuals could potentially offer; they value the connection itself, not what the
connection symbolizes.
The decision to focus on the physical life or the digital life is not an either-or decision.
One does not choose to devote her or his attention to a digital management or physical world
managementindividuals are expected to do both. There is no dialectic, it is only perceived.
For instance, in the physical world people might be expected to put their smartphones down to
prioritize physical world management, such as a face-to-face conversation. At the same time,
those same individuals still might be asked, Did you get my e-mail?a nod to the expected
digital presence and simultaneous digital and physical world maintenance. Whereas only one
can be performed at a time with quality, people still are expected to do both simultaneously.
LEISURE TIME
The constant digital connection takes away from our leisure. Picture a movie scene with a
family on vacation only to have a hotel staffer interrupt the family with an urgent work phone
call for one of the parents. The other parent makes a disapproving face while the workaholic
parent leaves the family to take the call. In this example, work interrupts leisure time, meaning
that an external agent interrupts life. Participation fetishism, however, views this example
differently. For example, the workaholic spouse would be checking in throughout vacation to
provide continuous presence with work. In this case, the spouse is the agent disrupting leisure
time versus an external agent interfering. This pressure to be connected parallels Nietzsches
critique of religions inducement of guilt as a means to subordinate the herd. In the Digital Age,
individuals guilt of not being continuously connected prompts them to be connected,
illustrating participation fetishism in the Digital Age. Leisure contributes to individuals
abilities to engage in critical thinking in the public sphere and actively participate in political
communication that shapes social surroundings.8 The loss of leisure, then, lessens critical
thought and reduces the efficacy of the public sphere.
We both seek and resist a fetish with constant connection. To illustrate this point, consider
Microsofts 2013 Xbox One backpedal. After fan backlash, Microsoft was forced to rescind its
mandate that all new Xbox One game consoles have an active Internet connection.9 Individuals
might want to be constantly connectedbut on their own terms. Their terms, however, are an
illusion; participation fetishism perpetuates the norm of constant participation. In the Microsoft
example, some individuals might have disagreed with Microsofts decision to force an Internet
connection upon the user, but the reality is that an Internet connection is required for the
product to achieve all of its capabilities, which involves popular online play with others.
Consideration should be made for the individualistic nature of U.S. citizens as compared to
other (even Western) countries citizens. France recently instituted a labor deal affecting a
quarter of a million employees that requires them to disconnect after working hours,
specifically from work e-mail and phone calls.10 Essentially, this is the states attempt to
enforce private or leisure time among its citizenry. Such a law could be perceived as
encroaching on an individuals ability to make personal choices. In this case, the French labor
deal is a concerted effort to minimize participation fetishisms control over people. But in such
an individualistic country as the United States, suggestion of such a labor deal might result in
the self-censoring of individuals to vigorously reinforce the fetish of participation under the
guise of the freedom of choice. Such an ironic possibility of the captive fighting in support of
the means of his or her captivity would demonstrate the power of the fetish on people. Rather
than only positioning leisure as a means of enforcing freedom, social critic Michel Foucault
recognizes leisure as an enactment of power.11 In turn, the use or blurring of leisure time
designates relations of control. Participation fetishism highlights an individuals willingness to
give up control after succumbing to social pressures regarding the digital realm. David Wells
states that individualism undergoes a dialectical inversion. No longer signifying personal
freedom and the encouragement of differences, it means instead subjection to an automaton and
enforced uniformity.12
On the contrary, an individualistic culture should be more supportive of private time and
space than a collectivistic culture where relational maintenance takes precedence over
personal needs. Regarding the Digital Age, private space is virtual. Although it is virtual
instead of physical, however, the private space still is interrupted.
On a microscopic scale, participation fetishism moves against Kenneth Burkes notion of
the unending conversation13 because participation fetishism discourages conversations on
various subjects to take place without us being present. Burkes metaphor explains how
individuals are influenced by what comes before them, and in turn, will influence what comes
after; and those ideas will take new shape and continue to grow beyond them. Participation
fetishism throws a wrench in this progressive cycle by its attempts to halt the process, and by
failing to acknowledge that ideas can grow beyond us. Instead, participation fetishism
demonstrates our obsession with a constant connection, continuous input, and our inability to
let go. Essentially, this illustrates our self-centeredness in the Digital Agewhere virtually
anyone can aspire to be a public figure, whether real or, most likely, perceived.
Thorstein Veblen provides a different perspective regarding the merits of free leisure time.
According to Veblen, leisure activities are nonproductive actions indicative of members of the
wealthy social class.14 Not only do these individuals have time for unproductive activities, but
leisure activities are required to maintain the persons social status. Veblen says leisure does
not connote indolence or quiescence. What it connotes is nonproductive consumption of time.
Time is consumed nonproductively from a sense of the unworthiness of productive work, and
as evidence of pecuniary ability to afford a life of idleness.15 In turn, members of the lower
classes seek to mimic the wealthy leisure class by displaying proof of nonproductive or leisure
activities. Wearing designer clothes or unnecessary jewelry are examples of such displays.
Veblen refers to these tangible displays of leisure as conspicuous consumption.16
Conspicuous consumption also continues to reveal itself in todays digital realm. For
instance, most social media applications consume time and lack any true productive value; they
are designed as a means for self-expression, networking, and exchanging information. Active
social media users flaunt their uses of unproductive time through various status updates and
posts. Veblen states that the members of the leisure class should find some means of putting in
evidence the leisure that is not spent in the sight of the spectators.17 Regarding social media,
this evidence is amplified by the number of account followers or friends, hence the desire for
some individuals to expand their networks greatly. When celebrities with millions of Twitter
or Instagram followers display their leisure activities, countless others follow suit in attempts
to emulate celebrity status.
The desire to post aspects of ones personal life to publicize oneself is itself an act that
cancels out any notions of private time. Posting about ones daily feelings or blogging about
issues perceived as important also are attempts at publicity. The more frequently that some
people publicize themselves, the more frequently that others, in turn, also must publicize
themselves. The Digital Age is embodied in an individuals attempt to prioritize herself or
himself over others, and social media applications provide the avenue for accomplishing this
task. Posting pictures of a meal about to be devoured or demanding a response from an e-mail
sent during twilight hours illustrate Veblens notion of conspicuous consumption morphed for
the digital realm. Although such publicity might appear self-centered, it actually denotes
communal enforcement of a norm that demands that individuals participate. We must ask
ourselves whether the majority of individuals attempting to stand out at a party are being
selfish, or if the antisocial loner hiding in the corner truly is the selfish one.
TECHNOLOGICAL IMPACT ON SOCIETY

Although the technological achievements of the Digital Age in the form of various social
media applications might appear to drive participation fetishism, the pressure comes from
peers, not from the applications themselves. Technology is not the determining factor
controlling social change through social media participation, social relations themselves direct
social change.18 David Harvey explains Marxs take on technology by stating,
Capitalists can use machine technology to change and regulate the intensity and pace of
the labor process. Reducing what is called the porosity of the working day (moments
when work is not being done) is a key objective. How many seconds in a working day
can a worker goof off? If they are in charge of their own tools, then they can lay them
down and pick them up again. Laborers can work at their own pace. With machine
technology, the speed and the continuity are determined internally to the machine
system, and workers have to conform to the movement of, say, the assembly line.19
Many modes of digital communication follow a linear model of communication; however,

individuals might crave simultaneous experiences with immediate feedback. A linear model of
communication displays one-way communication of a sender transmitting a message to a
receiver. In turn, the sender must wait for a response. Telegraphs and traditional mail letters
both are examples the linear model. Conversely, in-person communication denotes constant
feedback with all individuals involved providing simultaneous communication through means
such as talking, nodding heads, and making (or avoiding) eye contact. Simultaneous
communication requires a constant connection throughout a communication event.
Many digital forms of communicationsuch as e-mail, message boards, texts, and social
media applicationsare designed to deliver linear communication, but participation fetishism
demands that those linear methods become simultaneous. The sender of a text message, for
instance, might expect immediate responses mirroring an in-person conversation. This
expectation of immediacy contradicts the linear design of these communication mediums.
Dawna Ballard and David Seibold find that communication load increases with work
flexibility.20 This means that, as the standard 9-to-5 workweek erodes, increased levels of
communication load, such as e-mail, demand attention. To prevent the stress brought on by an
overwhelming amount of communication, a worker might opt to continuously check on and
respond to communication, as opposed to doing so only within standard business hours.
The more applications with which we participate, the more we are distanced from quality
participation. In a critique of capitalism from a Marxist perspective, Jorn Bramann states, The
purpose of technology is not so much to make life more agreeable, but rather to gain an
advantage in the permanent struggle of economic competition.21 Even with the ever-expanding
reach of technology, this still holds true. The Digital Age does not only recognize economic
competition, however, it has seen increased social competition with the emergence of social
media. Participation fetishism does not demand quality participation so much as it merely
demands a quantity of participation.
Regarding a saturation point at which the economic workforce can no longer absorb
workers replaced by technology, Bramann states that this inability for absorption will result in
forced idleness resulting from new technologies.22 Whether this technologically forced
idleness has hit the point that an average person most fearssuch as the spectacle-induced
future of humans being whisked around like aphids by machines in Disneys WALL-E23it is
important to remember the social connection of new technologies might not prevent physical
idleness, it still promotes action, no matter how insignificant, through the constant need for
digital participation. Whether this action is a form of leisure or a part of a greater system of
control has yet to be explored. Although fiction, even the film WALL-E depicts humans as being
in constant social connection through digital networks.
Individual value is extremely low in social media. In Marxs critique of capitalism, he
designates individual value and market value to refer to the disparity between the inherent
value of an item that is produced and the monetary value that the item rates on the market.24
This medium requires the synergistic connections between individuals to produce a market
value for an individuals social media page. This means that the market value of an
individuals social media account correlates with the number of followers garnered by the
individual. Basically, the value depends on the accounts reach. Someone must be listening for
a message to have any impact, and increasing the number followers increases the number of
potential listeners. Promoting others social media accounts is a necessary action for an
individual to increase his or her own number of followers. The simple action of posting
another users link, for instance, spawns a reciprocal web that exponentially promotes an
individuals social media site to a whole new set of followers. Avery Holton and colleagues
state the following:
Linking on social networking sites is guided not just by simple social or utilitarian
motivations of information sharing but also by an expectation of reciprocity in linking
and information sharing from users. The findings help illustrate that even in the
seemingly simple act of posting a link on Twitter, users might be both relying on a web
of trust and reciprocation and helping build that web for others.25
For the social web to expand, individuals must participate. The problem rests on the
number of webs to which an individual must contribute. The introduction of each new social
media application creates the necessity for new webs. To be financially successful, each
application developer will argue the case that his or her application is better than the others,
leaving individuals to either select one apple from a bushel of apples or take the entire bushel.
Once individuals reach a saturation point they could feel the agency of resistance even though
the pressures for participation live on.
The technology enabling us to connect socially across physical distances should be a
celebrated form of interpersonal communication. Whether this technology is a cell phone or a
social media application, however, various communication styles will surface for individuals
to cope with any perceived conflicts. Abu Sadat Nurullah refers to a persons constant
availability via a cell phones Internet connection as a technosocial situation in which
technology enables individuals to not only be constantly connected, but also to proactively
manage social relationships.26 Miller-Ott, for instance, found that romantic couples are more
satisfied in their relationships if they did not have established relational rules limiting cell
phone usage, whether that meant always being able to contact the other partner or contacting
others in the presence of the romantic partner.27 This reinforces the norm that constant
connection is permissible. Also, young adults might experience romantic relational conflict
surrounding the autonomy versus connection dialectic due to expected availability of their
partners via cell phones.28 This dialectical tension pits the need of an individual to feel
independent against the need of an individual to feel connected to her or his partner.
Additionally, members of individualistic cultures are intolerant of others using cell phones in
public settings.29 Likewise, members of collectivistic cultures are less likely to view public
cell phone use as a cause of conflict, instead focusing attention on communal maintenance.30
Conversely, members of individualistic cultures are more likely to view public cell phone use
as a form of conflict due to a self-centered intrusion and the need to enact justice in response to
the intrusion.31
In 1970, Emmanuel Mesthene made the comment that enhanced communication and greater
opportunities for education is probably the first time in two centuries that such high
proportions of people have felt like individuals.32 There is no doubting the opportunities
afforded us by digitally connected networks. As explained, however, the pressures of
participation can be overwhelming. This is bittersweet, and the degree of individuality
afforded by technology is debatable. Of course, individuals can create and manage online
identities, but the question remains: For whom are these online identities created? Are
individuals social media accounts meant to be personal journals, or are they truly appeals to
large audiences?
The pressure to create more and more social media accounts dilutes the quality of such
accounts, resulting in the digitally connected value of quantity over quality. Henrik Juel states
that a lot of the traffic on social media is concerned with not just sending a message, that is
perhaps the least of it, but is all about people connecting with others in order to work out their
individuality for themselves.33 Juel asks whether social media provides parity to a workers
alienation.34 Digital connections provide individuals the means to express themselves to larger
audiences in a way that was not possible with mass communication via channels such as
television or newspaper. This expression gives individuals an opportunity to enhance agency.
Conversely, the increase in digital connections increases an individuals expectancy to be
connected.
The ability to both send and receive messages on a large scale comes with the burden of
increased presence, or a lack of private time or space. When this means of expression links
directly to an individuals occupationsuch as responding to e-mail or text messagesthen
that individuals newfound agency is an illusion that merely blurs the line between work time
and private time. The convenience of a digitally connected worldthat is, technology enabling
us to not be physically present in the officeincreases our allowing of work to have power
over us. We accept the role of being present more often.
CONCLUSION
This chapter uses the concept of participation fetishism to explain an individuals internal
conflict concerning the peer pressure to increase or maintain digital participation. By
examining the fetishistic nature of our current digital society, leisure time, and the
technological impact on society in the Digital Age, the grasp of participation fetishism is
revealed.
Although Debord offers hope regarding the spectacle in the form of detournement35or
turning an established image against itself as a means of social commentaryin the digital
realm, hope of participation fetishism comes in the form of a monumental realization that an
individual does not have to participate. Individuals might hit a breaking point when realizing
that they are unable to stay active on all social media accounts or answer e-mail 24/7. We
should reflect on David Harveys statement that if [workers] are in charge of their own tools,
then they can lay them down and pick them up again.36 Agency by itself is not the key; rather,
it is the acknowledgment of agency that is key.
Referencing Marx, Thomas Henricks contrasts animals to humans by stating human beings
have a capacity to reflect upon and change the conditions of their existence.37 Participation
fetishism warrants such a change to human beings conditions of existence in a digital age. The
evolution of technology for an ever-expanding digital network allows for such positive
potential. But that potential is constrained by the social pressures of connected participation.
The established norm that individuals always must be present and participating reinforces
Debords observation of relationships through images via the spectacle. The need to create an
account on the newest social media application is not truly a need at all. We have allowed
the spectacle of our society to convince us that we must create accounts for the newest
application. This does not illustrate our desire to use the newest social media application to
expand or maintain relationships; rather, we do so for the mere image that we appear to be
expanding or maintaining relationships. In this case, the appearance is whats valuedsimilar
to Veblens critique of the leisure classand not actual relationships. This form of fetishism
returns us to the fetishization of commodities, summing up the phenomenon with the common
saying, Keeping up with the Joneses.
In an established capitalist system, distinctions between work and private life must be
made. Although Henricks argues that Marx proposed a life in which there was no retreat to a
private life after work, that instead there should be a communal melding,38 expected digital
participation creates work out of an individuals private life. On one hand, an individuals
workespecially salaried workuses a constant digital connection to keep individuals
always thinking about or anticipating work. An individual might not be working 24/7, but he or
she is trained to constantly check for work on a 24/7 basis. Aside from employment work, the
pressure an individual feels to participate in digital networks is another form of work
constantly succumbing to peer pressure is not pleasurable. Individuals must work to create and
maintain various social media accounts.
Henricks states, Like leaves in a storm, [people] find themselves cast about by ideas and
desires not of their own making.39 This basic Marxian mindset of alienation holds true for
individuals and the pressures of digital connections. Like any form of peer pressure, an
individual cannot resist until she or he firmly says no. The norm of digital participation will
perpetuate until that moment of monumental realization followed by the individuals
employment of agency to produce action.
We each must ask ourselves, however, whether resisting the pressures of digital
participation is a culturally individualistic mindset. If so, would this resistance constitute an
ethnocentric way of thinking? If, as Campbell suggested, collectivistic individuals dont
recognize the existence of a conflict in situations where individualistic people might, then the
argument presented in this chapter could be culture-specific. Marx identified commodity
fetishism as an international issue, but if collectivistic cultures were to view digital
participation as a necessary act to maintain communal harmony, then further exploration is
needed to determine the efficacy of participation fetishism as existing in both individualistic
and collectivistic cultures.
Although masked as a form of creative expression, the pressures of digital participation
make it a burden, something to be loathed. Picture that moment, for instance, when anxiety
seeps in as you log in to an e-mail accounthoping that the inbox is empty, and breathing a
sigh of relief when it is so. Although the inbox might be empty at that moment, however, the
social norm begs us to systematically continue checking the inbox until we receive that
inevitable unwelcome e-mail. The same goes for when a friend tells us we have to get the
newest social media application and we drag our feet at the burden of creating yet another
personal account.
NOTES
1. Gertrud Lenzer (ed.), The Essential Writings: Auguste Comte and Positivism (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers,
1998), 46670.
2. Karl Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton and Company,
1978).
3. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995).
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (New York: Random House, 1989).
5. Marx, Marx-Engels Reader, 321.
6. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 26.
7. Ibid., 12, 24.
8. Annette Holba, Political Communication and Leisure, The Review of Communication 10, no. 1 (2010).
9. Paul Tassi, Microsoft to Reverse Xbox One Policies after Fan Revolt, Forbes.com (June 19, 2013),
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/06/19/microsoft-to-reverse-xbox-one-policies-after-fan-revolt/.
10. Lucy Mangan, When the French Clock Off at 6 p.m. They Really Mean It, TheGuardian.com (April 9, 2014),
http://www.theguardian.com/money/shortcuts/2014/apr/09/french-6pm-labour-agreement-work-emails-out-of-office.
11. Chris Rojek, Capitalism and Leisure Theory (New York: Tavistock Publications, 1985), 152.
12. David Wells, Marxism and the Modern State: An Analysis of Fetishism in Capitalist Society (New Jersey:
Humanities Press, 1981), 23.
13. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941), 110111.
14. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Working Class, edited by Martha Banta (New York: Oxford University Press,
2007).
15. Ibid., 33.
16. Ibid., 4969.
17. Ibid., 33.
18. Martin Hirst, One Tweet Does Not a Revolution Make: Technological Determinism, Media, and Social Change,
Global Media Journal: Australian Edition 6, no. 2 (2012):
http://www.hca.uws.edu.au/gmjau/archive/v6_2012_2/martin_hirst_RA.html.
19. David Harvey, A Companion to Marxs Capital (New York: Verso, 2010), 212.
20. Dawna I. Ballard and David R. Seibold, The Experience of Time at Work: Relationship to Communication Load, Job
Satisfaction, and Interdepartmental Communication, Communication Studies 57, no. 3 (2014).
21. Jorn Bramman, Capital As Power: A Concise Summary of the Marxist Analysis of Capitalism (Rochester, NY: Adler
Publishing Company, 1984), 42.
22. Ibid., 44.
23. WALL-E, directed by Andrew Stanton (2008; Walt Disney Studios) (film).
24. Wells, Marxism and the Modern State, 12.
25. Avery Holton et al., Seeking and Sharing: Motivations for Linking on Twitter, Communication Research Reports 31,
no. 1 (2014): 39.
26. Abu Sadat Nurullah, The Cell Phone as an Agent of Social Change, Rocky Mountain Communication Review 6, no.
1 (2009): 23.
27. Aimee E. Miller-Ott, Lynne Kelly, and Robert L. Duran, The Effects of Cell Phone Usage Rules on Satisfaction in
Romantic Relationships, Communication Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2012): 30.
28. Robert L. Duran, Lynne Kelly, and Teodora Rotaru, Mobile Phones in Romantic Relationships and the Dialectic of
Autonomy Versus Connection, Communication Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2011).
29. Scott Campbell, Perceptions of Mobile Phone Use in Public: The Roles of Individualism, Collectivism, and Focus of the
Setting, Communication Reports 21, no. 2 (2008): 77.
30. Ibid., 7779.
31. Ibid.
32. Emmanuel G. Mesthene, Technological Change: Its Impact on Man and Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1970), 85.
33. Henrik Juel, Social Media and the Enlightenment, Triple C: Cognition, Communication, Co-operation 10, no. 2
(2012), 770.
34. Ibid., 770.
35. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 14446.
36. Harvey, A Companion to Marxs Capital, 212.
37. Thomas Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2006), 34.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 41.
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11
Lose a Stone or Two Before You Start

Dating: Power and the Construction of
Bodies in Online Dating
Shana Kopaczewski
Anyways, I am not bad looking, I am in shape, but I chose to not have my picture up at
first for professional reasons. [H]oping1 that other individuals chose the same, I would
communicate with others who waited to have their picture up. Every single one turned
out to be obese and butt ugly. Then though I feel like an ass to close the match, so I just
stop communicating. I really read the profile to see if they are decent people, but I am
not going to base my chemistry decision on a profile. But I feel like those men who
dont display their pictures are deceiving me and what else would they deceive me on?
Katherine, 20062
Online dating is a growing phenomenon in contemporary American culture. Advertisements for

Web sites such as eHarmony.com and Match.com have inundated modern media and promise
consumers that professionals such as Dr. Neil Warren will use their scientific knowledge to
find users soulmates. Movies such as Youve Got Mail and Must Love Dogs feature online
romance as a central plot point bringing the characters together in a charming and
unconventional way. Popular sitcoms such as The Big Bang Theory and Mike and Molly
explore plotlines in which major characters experiment with online profiles and subsequent
dates.
More and more people are turning to personal ads and online dating sites to find romantic
partners, therefore it is important to interrogate the cultural discourse of online dating to
understand how people make sense of the online dating phenomenon. The quotation that began
this chapter is from the Web site eDateReview.com and demonstrates how discourse about
online dating can actually inform how people attach meaning to online dating decisions and
interpret the human body in online spaces. Katherines post directly illustrates the challenge of
the body in online spaces and online dating in particular: What is the place of the body in
digital space? This chapter briefly discusses the online dating phenomenon and, more
specifically, the debate over online embodiment, and then argues that discourse posted to the
Web site eDateReview.com represents an attempt to maintain existing ideologies of the body in
online spaces.
ONLINE DATING
Before analyzing a discourse of online dating, it is important to look at the phenomenon of
online dating. Merskin and Huberlie argue that modern times have changed the ways that
people find mates.3 Urbanization, industrialization, the changing roles of family, and religion
all contribute to a society in which traditional methods of finding matessuch as using
matchmakers and allowing families arranging marriagesare pass.4 Merskin and Huberlie
suggest that these changes have created a void, making it more difficult to find a mate and
forcing a change in how people seek potential partners. They propose media dependency
theory as a way of conceptualizing a move to personal ads as an accepted means of finding a
mate.5
Media dependency can be defined as a relationship in which the capacity of

individuals to attain their goals is contingent upon the information resources of the
media system. The basic propositions of the theory are that people in all societies
need information to make numerous decisions about political affairs; to obtain food,
shelter, and transportation; and to find a mate.6
Personal ads in newspapers fill a need in modern society that was once met through more
traditional means. The migration of personal ads from alternative papers into mainstream daily
papers is a reflection of societys growing need for and acceptance of personal ads as a
solution to dating difficulties brought about by changes in modern culture.7 To build on the
argument of Merskin and Huberlie, it also could be said that with the almost ubiquitous
presence of computers and the Internet in homes, schools, and places of business, the online
personal ad is another move to utilize media as a resource for goal attainment in an evolving
society. The growing popularity of Web sites such as eHarmony and match.com and of movies
such as Youve Got Mail, have made online dating a major player in social interaction.
According to Smith and Duggan, 1 out of every 10 Americans has used an online dating site
at some point.8 The innovative rationality of the personals lies in the notion that the
specification of attributes and interests that a person possesses and is seeking can be a shortcut
to finding a compatible person.9 Hardey maintains that online dating takes the hassle out of
locating potential partners.10 Using online dating, thousands of potential applicants are
available at your fingertips. Theres no need to get all dressed up, go out, and risk face-to-face
rejection only to find that the person thought to be a prospect instead is a smoker who enjoys
antiquing and collecting Victorian dolls and not someone who would make the cut anyway.
More than 85 percent of adults age 18 and older use the Internet, thus the opportunity to
utilize computer technology to facilitate relationships is widespread, and seems to be losing
the stigma with which it was once associated.11 According to Smaill, there is a stigma attached
to meeting potential partners online.12 Goodwin states that there is an assumption that because
an individual goes to a dating agency he or she is in some way differentperhaps
particularly socially inept or inadequate on some other dimension.13 Physical appearance or
body type could be a factor on which online daters are assumed to be inadequate.
The nature of the Internet and the anonymity it provides raise questions about the
presentation of self in online spaces, and the potential for people to create identities for online
dating profiles that are not the same as when offline, and perhaps even are idealized selves.14
Online dating is a phenomenon that enables people to interact textually, separate from the body,
and therefore questions of embodiment in online dating become particularly relevant. Smaill
states that questions of embodiment in online dating are unique because, although the
interaction begins textually, there is an assumption that participants will meet in person,
inevitably forcing them to deal with offline physicality.15 To understand how online daters
manage questions of the body, it is first necessary to think about the connections between
identity and embodiment in online spaces. The next section focuses on previous research about
the concept of online embodiment.
EMBODIMENT ONLINE
Miller and Slater argue that postmodernism and poststructuralism approach the Internet
differently.16 Postmodern theory interrogates mediated reality, and the poststructuralist position
looks at the Internet as a space in which identity can be separated from embodiment. In either
case, the Internet becomes a critical factor in understanding identity and subject position in
what Poster calls the second media age.17 According to Poster, the second media age is one in
which reality multiplies, and he points to the phenomenon of multiuser domains (MUDs) as a
transitional form of this multiple reality.18 Using MUDs, a virtual world is created, one where
users create identities that can be different from their offline identities.19 The virtual identity
can change over time in that world, and can be fluid, changing, multiple. Poster argues that a
multiple reality raises questions of the fixedness of the subject.20 If the Internet allows for fluid
identities, then there is a potential for cultural changes brought about by the ability for people
to connect with strangers without much of the social baggage that divides and alienates.21
Sherry Turkle poses the question Who am we? in an article that discusses the nature of
identity in online spaces.22 Turkle asserts that computers change not only lives but also selves,
and that through the Internet people are allowed to enact different pieces of their identity in
ways they would not be allowedor might not wantto do otherwise.23 Turkles claims of
fluid identity online also focuses on MUDs in which people re-create themselves as
characters, and the disconnect between the real life body and the virtual body creates an
opportunity for people to present a body of their choosing to others in the space.24
The possibility of fluid identities online has been widely discussed, and Turkles
optimistic view of the Internet as a place for identity shifting and exploration is only one part
of a larger discussion of what the Internet means for identity. Other perspectives are less
optimistic, stating that the Internet, although anonymous in some ways, reinforces dominant
ideologies, particularly ideologies that are connected to the body. Stone argues that the body is
very much a part of online interaction, despite the fact that the interaction is largely textual.25
According to Stone, virtual communities act as if they are located in a physical space, bodies
are described in detail, there is always a body attached even in the virtual.
Cyberspace developers foresee a time when they will be able to forget about the body.
But it is important to remember that virtual community originates in, and must return to,
the physical. No refigured virtual body, no matter how beautiful, will slow the death of
a cyberpunk with AIDS. Even in the age of the technosocial subject, life is lived
through bodies.26
The virtual-body connection that is discussed by Stone becomes problematic for the
ideology of marked bodies, particularly in regard to race and gender.
Nakamura explores the issue of race in cyberspace, stating that although there is an ability
to play with racially specific bodies in MUDs, the fact is that most of the participants are white
and middle class and that identity tourism by these individuals simply promotes racial
stereotypes by making race part of a costume.27 Bailey similarly argues that race and the
ideologies that surround it are active in online spaces, saying,28 The discourse of race is, by
history and by design, rooted in the body. Cybersubjectivity promises the fantasy of
disembodied communication, but it remains firmly connected to bodies through the imaginative
act required to project into cyberspace.29
According to Bailey, forfeiting ones bodypassing in cyberspace as another body
merely reinscribes binaries on the body. To project an alternate body in cyberspace, a person
must be keenly aware of the body he or she has.30
In addition to race, gender is an area that has been closely scrutinized in online spaces. In
much the same way that Nakamura discusses the problems of race as a costume, Morse
discusses the problems of gender online.31 The ease of becoming He-Man or Barbie without
the problems of physical embodiment, reinforces gender stereotypes about what is masculine
or feminine, even if the online Barbie is a man offline. The structure of gender offline is
reproduced in online spaces despite the potential for gender transcendence.32
Although many researchers have theorized about using the Internet to disconnect from the
body, other research has focused on how online interaction connects back to the physical self.
Daniels outlines the significance of embodiment issues in online spaces from a cyberfeminist
point of view.33 Daniels asserts that even though cyberfeminists have lauded the liberatory
potential of the disembodied Internet as a way to subvert gender oppression, for some people
the body discourses in online spaces (i.e., Pro-Ana Web sites, a Tranny Hormone Listservs)
do not represent an escape from gendered embodiment, but rather a means to transform their
embodied selves.34 Young and Whitty explore the online body connection through the idea of
somatic flexibility, arguing that some online users seek to extend the boundaries of their
own embodiment but that they do not necessarily seek to create new or inauthentic bodies
online as others have argued.35
The discussion of the body in virtual spaces becomes even more complicated when
examined in spaces where online connections could lead to offline interactions. To this point,
the discussion of online identity has focused primarily on MUDs, where interactions are based
in fiction, and users understand that they are dealing with characters. Often there is no
expectation that participants will ever meet offline.36 As noted, however, the popularity of
online dating is increasing, and online dating is a virtual situation predicated on a potential for
offline encounters. The expectation of face-to-face interaction might change how identification
of the body is approached in online settings. Yurchisin, Watchravesringkan, and Brown-
McCabe argue that Internet dating enables people to explore possible selves online and
offline.37 Gibbs, Ellison, and Heino state that people who post online personals with greater
expectations of face-to-face interaction are more honest in their self-disclosure.38 These
somewhat conflicting findings show that there is a potential in online dating to play with self-
presentation, but also that the promise of face-to-face encounters might mitigate that potential.
Hardey explores issues of embodiment in online dating sites and argues that the
disembodied anonymity of the Internet acts as a foundation for building trust that will translate
into an offline relationship, rather than the construction of fantasy selves.39 While the Internet
may facilitate, at least in the early stages of dating, a lightening of corporeal constraints, the
desires of users to physically meet a suitable partner illustrates the limitations of virtual
relations which never attain the thickness of the flesh.40 What Hardeys research shows, but
does not state explicitly, is that in online dating it is difficult to fully escape the constraints of
the body and the ideology attached to bodied selves because, ultimately, a face-to-face meeting
will expose the body to the other person.
Ellison, Hancock, and Toma echo this sentiment in their profile as promise framework
for online dating.41 In this framework they view the online presentation of selfwhich
ostensibly includes representations of the bodyas an assurance of what is real offline, so that
the ability for online daters to fabricate a body not based in truth would be seen as a broken
promise, and would not be appropriate in the context of online dating.42 This notion of
promise becomes very important when looking at how presentations of the body are
monitored and discursively controlled in discourse about online dating; promises are to be
kept.
A FOUCAULDIAN APPROACH TO ONLINE BODY DISCOURSE

Foucaults approach to the body and power is a useful theoretical tool for analyzing the
discourse on eDateReview.com because it establishes the importance of the body in structures
of ideology, as well as ways of disciplining the body to maintain power hierarchies. For
Foucault, the body is central to the maintenance of power. The classical age discovered the
body as object and target of power. It is easy enough to find signs of the attention then paid to
the bodyto the body that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes
skillful and increases its forces.43
The body is a site of power because the body can be monitored and disciplined.44 Foucault
discusses the notion of the docile body that suggests that bodies can be controlled individually
through a subtle and constant coercion that makes bodies more productive even while it
diminishes their agency in resisting the coercion.45 Ultimately, what is at stake for Foucault is
power. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault discusses the idea of power, stating,
We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it
excludes, it represses, it censors, it abstracts, it masks, it conceals. In
fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of
truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this
production.46
Foucault sees a link between power and knowledge, and views the body as an object of
knowledge that can be subjugated.47
According to Campbell, Foucaults connection between knowledge and power makes it
especially important to examine the production of knowledge and power in modern contexts
that infuse the human body whether through the medical gaze in the clinic or the panoptic gaze
in the prison, and it is this body entrenched in power relations that is reproduced in
cyberspace.48 Foucaults discussion of colonization of the body and bodily practices is one
way that Campbell frames his ethnographic study of Internet Relay Chats (IRCs).49
Through his participation in these online communities, Campbell examines a discourse of
the body that would not typically occur in an offline space and explores the relationships to the
physical body that develop through this online interaction. Campbell argues that his
experiences in these IRCs reveal a contradiction to the online disembodiment thesis.50 The
online disembodiment thesis holds that there is an absolute distinction between the real and the
virtual that makes online experience different than offline experience.51 Campbell asserts that,
in the end, people turning to cyberspace as an emancipatory move ultimately reproduce the
strict social models of the body online. Despite the rhetoric of bodily transcendence, many of
the social practices that render individuals docile bodies in the Foucauldian sense (such as
beauty hierarchies) are replicated online.52 Campbells work demonstrates both the utility of
Foucaults theory in looking at online discourses of the body, and the need to explore
embodiment on the Internet. Like Campbells research, the present study examines how body
characteristics are specifically linked to gender roles in online texts, and how different bodies
are constructed and valued.
Research on the potential for disembodied interactions in online spaces raises many
questions about the fluidity of identity and the ability to present bodied selves online that are
not the bodied selves of offline experience. Although there is some consensus that the Internet
could be a place where the body is transcended, many scholars argue that the constraints of the
body are reproduced in online spaces. Research dealing with embodiment in online dating
raises further questions about what it means to present oneself onlinewith the potential to
interact at a disembodied level and then to meet offline, thus confronting the physical reality of
the self and other. EDateReview.com offers the opportunity to address questions about how the
body is reproduced online, and how online daters talk about the experience of presenting and
confronting the bodies of self and other. This chapter seeks to address the questions: How are
bodies policed in the discourse on eDateReview.com? Does the discourse of the body on
eDateReview.com affirm or challenge previous understandings of the role of the body in online
discourse?
eDateReview.com is an online forum for users of online dating sites to rate dating services
on a scale from one to five, and to post comments or questions regarding the dating sites.53 In
this space real people can voice their own experience and read the experiences of others.
The earliest reviews on eDateReview start in fall of 2003, though there is no specific date for
when the site was started. According to eDateReview.com the primary goal of the Web site is
to help people find the best personals and dating sites and avoid the worst. The site is
comprehensive with message boards listed for general dating sites, Christian sites, gay sites,
Jewish sites, black dating, Ivy League dating, speed dating, United States dating, and Canada
dating. The most popular sites reviewed are eHarmony, Lavalife, Match.com, and Yahoo!
Personals. In becoming familiar with this Web site, this author was struck by the way the posts
appeared to focus on aspects of the body, particularly attempts to control the body and how it
was presented in online dating profiles. There appeared to be a very clear expression of
power and control, which prompted further inquiry into the discourse of embodiment and
power in online dating.
For the purpose of this study, 400 reviews were collected and analyzed. Only those
reviews explicitly discussing impression management were selected. These reviews were
identified as including explicit description of the posters self, comments on other people
whom posters encountered while online dating, and any general observations on dating and
relationships beyond a direct comment on the service. The study employed a thematic analysis
utilizing Atlas Ti to code, analyzing emergent themes in a multitiered process based on
grounded theory methodology.54 Because the goal of this project was to identify functions of
power and control related to the body and online dating, the process of coding and memo
writing was heavily informed by a Foucauldian framework examining how the body was
disclosed and disciplined in the discourse on eDateReview.com.
DISCUSSION
In evaluating the discourse of eDateReview.com, it becomes apparent that the body is
textually constructed by the people posting on the site. Analysis of the discourse in response to
the first research question reveals that the discussion of the body goes beyond mere description
and functions to police the body on two levelsdisclosure and discipline. As stated, in a
Foucauldian sense, the body is a site of power because it can be monitored and disciplined.
The following discussion looks at how disclosure enables the body to be monitored, and how
the discourse constructs an idealized body. This discussion is followed by an analysis of how
the body is discursively disciplined with regard to online dating on this site.
Disclosure
Disclosure here refers to posters who construct their body for viewers of the eDateReview
site. This disclosure supports surveillance of the body in this space and acts as a gateway to
monitor the behavior of certain bodies. The following examples highlight the disclosure of the
body in two casesjustification of reviewers desirability and demonstration of the
reviewers awareness of his or her body and compliance with its limitations. In some cases
this disclosure operates to justify the reviewers normalcy or desirability in light of dating
failures.
I am a very attractive 55 year old (who doesnt look or feel her age), oh and gentlemen,
I am realistic, I have been told this for years, especially from people much younger than
me. I am disappointed in the process of this site to say the least. I have emailed
several gentlemen, I found attractive, with several interests in common never heard
a word (Linda 2012).
Here, it is evident that Linda discloses that she is not ugly or old looking to convince
readers that the reason she has not been successful on this site is due to the process and not
because of her body. By constructing her body in this way she re-inscribes the idea that to be
attractive one should be pretty and young looking.
Another way disclosure functions on this site is a means to demonstrate that the reviewer
understands that his or her body is not normal, and to reassure the reader that the reviewer is
operating within the limits of his or her body.
Im a gay Asian man, and looking for that special connections [sic] has always been
very difficult. I simply dont fit the mold of what most gay men want. And since I dont
go to bars that often or clubs, where was I going to meet men that DIDNT want to jump
into the sack the minute you meet them? So I decided to try Yahoo personals. Well, let
me tell you, talk about an ego bruiser. I wrote a very honest profile that I felt would
garner some attention. It didnt work. So I decided to be bold and respond to guys that I
felt would be interested in me. But I specifically sought out men that didnt mind being
contacted by Asians or Pacific-Islanders. I avoided men who wanted only to date white
men. I knew that many white gay men only want to be involved with other white gay
men. And I dont have a problem with that. Its their choice (Luis, 2006).
Luis almost immediately identifies that he is Asian, followed by an admission that he is not
what most gay men are looking for. He discloses the inadequacy of his Asian body and later
states that he only wrote to guys he thought would be OK being contacted by an Asian man.
This post demonstrates a docile body in that Luis acquiesces to the idea that an Asian body is
less useful and makes explicit his compliance to not assert that body where it is not wanted.
Again this reinforces corporeal constraints in online interactions.
In another example, Barbara similarly discloses an overweight body and a desire to not
intrude on those who would reject that body.
I gave it a poor rating because they match you with non-paying people who have
submitted a profilean objection if Im paying but being matched with people who
cannot or will not reply. And because they dont allow those other people to deselect
those who are overweight. As I said, Im overweight and the man should have the
opportunity to say he wanted no matches that were overweight. No sense in matching
me with them, and Id rather not be so we dont waste anyones time (Barbara, 2006).
Barbaras post is a good example of how this disclosure of the body sustains a hierarchy
and makes evident Barbaras complacency in that hierarchy. These posts, while demonstrating
an acknowledgment of the nonideal body, also suggest that those having nonideal bodies can go
online to avoid the rejection that they would face offline. The idea that online spaces allow
online daters to be more than their body in a way that does not seem possible in offline spaces
is evident in these posts. It is also evident, however, that these people bring the corporeal
constraints they feel offline into their online encounters, making them complicit in supporting a
system that devalues their bodies.
Discipline
Disciplining the body on eDateReview.com refers to discourse that serves to maintain a
docile body through subtle coercion. It is discourse that manipulates, shapes, and trains the
body so as to maintain power. Although the disclosure that happens on eDateReview.com is
largely self-oriented, the discourse of discipline is other-oriented. Rather than disclosing ones
own body, the disciplinary discourse is meant to control how others manage their body in their
online dating pursuits. This is done in two ways on this site, by demonizing disembodiment and
by shaping the body.
The first way the body is disciplined in this space is by demonizing disembodiment. As
discussed, there is a potential in online dating for users to interact without markers of the body,
but that inevitably people will meet face to face, body to body. In this space there is a
discussion that makes very clear the importance of claiming a body in your online presentation
of self as well as being honest in that presentation.
I always close matches that dont post pictures. Ive found that usually means theyre
overweight, and I cannot be with someone whos overweight. Thats my right, isnt it? I
dont like their delayed photo posting option. If you meet someone in public, normally
the first thing you notice is appearance. Thats the reality of it. Why would I not want to
see your picture?? POST YOUR PICTURE because more people will close the match
right away, like I do, if you dont (Kate, 2006).
This post by Kate essentially states that if someone does not post a picture then it means
they are trying to hide their body, thus they will not be seen as a viable matchand sometimes
are closed out before any communication takes place. There is a threat implicit in this
statement that people who dont post pictures will be punished by people closing them out right
away, which leads to the inability to meet people who might be potential partners. This very
clearly sets a code of conduct that states that if you want to be successful at online dating, you
need to claim a body right off the bat. Other posts take this discipline even further.
Guys: If a photo doesnt have a date in the caption, proceed with extreme caution. Ive
met women who are unrecognizable in person. Apparently, some women think that
posting photos 1015 years old or 30 lbs ago is not going to be noticed. Its so
dishonest that Ive been tempted to go to the mens room and escape before the first
course or drink even takes place (Morris, 2013).
According to Morris, if you do not claim an accurate body, then you risk being judged as
dishonest to the point that your date feels the need to escape from your presence. This note is
directed to Guys, but it clearly tells everyone that they had better post and date their photos
carefully, and that claiming an accurate body in your profile is of paramount importance to
potential matches.
The second way the body is disciplined is through shape. One of the most common body
markers discussed on this site is weight. Overweight bodies are demonized again and again to
either isolate overweight people in terms of who they can approach in online dating, or to have
overweight people alter their body to conform to a more productive ideal.
Eharmony is the place where fat, overweight and ugly women try to look for a guy who
is 6 feet tall, looks as good as a model and makes 100,000+ a year. I got more than 200
matches in the last year and more than 100 of them were HUGE and most of the rest
didnt even have pictures. I saw like only 2 or 3 good looking matches out of 200+ and
they all closed the match even before answering any questions. Women in eharmony
have huge problems, both physically and emotionally and mentally. And i am not
talking about 3040 year old ones, all my matches have been 2124 year old girls
(most of them were single mothers anyways). So unless you love emotionally unhealthy
single mothers who are disturbingly fat please stay away from eharmony, go waste your
money somewhere else!!! (Nothing, 2006).
This post clearly positions overweight women as both undesirable and totally crazy for
thinking that they could match up with an attractive man. In fact, overweight people generally
are discussed as if they are delusional, turning to online dating as a way to snare a mate who
otherwise would not give them the time of dayalthough the discourse here shows that
overweight women dont get fair shake in online dating, either.
Joe (2006), for example, states, Beyond that, you then have to weed through ads from other
zip codes, ads for the morbidly obese, not to mention hundreds [of] fake ads that clutter these
sites. Obese people are just part of the clutter to be weeded through.
Chris (2013) states:

Can you make more of yourself? For example, if you are overweight to a degree that
describing yourself as about average is an outright lie, then lose a stone or two
before you start dating. Ladies, Im sorry: a man will tolerate it in a wife of twenty
years, but hes not going to actively seek overweight partners. Your wonderful
personality wont get a chance to shine. I daresay that exactly the same is true of
women seeking men.
This statement very overtly attempts to manipulate the body. To date, overweight people
must change their bodies. JT (2007) makes a similar claim when he says the following:
I saw that a guy on this site said that women 40 lb overweight say they are average. He
is absolutely right. I have tried going out with a heavier woman and it just doesnt
work. I sit at a restaurant with a normal weight, average looking woman and I get hard
as a rock just looking at her. When in bed with a heavier woman, I worry I cant
perform. Why heavy women will not go on diets and exercise a little is beyond me. I
would think that life for them would be much more fun if they could really turn their
mate on.
This quotation claims that if women do not conform to an ideal body through diet and
exercise they would not be able to have fun and really turn their mate on, and even though JT
says that he worries he cant perform with a heavier woman, his statement functions to make
women worry about whether their mates will be able to perform, thus compelling them to
change their bodies. The discourse on eDateReview.com very clearly demonstrates an
expectation of disclosure allowing the body to be monitored, and the construction of an
idealized body that is closely disciplined on this site.
The second research question asks how the discourse of online dating affirms or
contradicts previous understandings of the body online. Discourse on eDateReview clearly
supports claims made by researchers who argue that the constraints of the body function in
online spaces.55 Not only are bodies marked in the discourse, but there is a clear discourse of
the body and it functions to monitor and discipline the body to maintain power hierarchies
relating to the body including race, age, and weight. Additionally, the discourse provides
insight into how people who use online dating sites negotiate the move from a textual
interaction online to an offline, face-to-face interaction. People who use online dating sites
emphasize the importance of being honest in presentations of the body and of attaching oneself
to a body through discourse and pictures. By disciplining these practices they maintain power
over the body, and disempower those who would use online dating to transcend physical
limitations. Promoting a disclosure norm might protect online daters from unpleasant surprises,
but subtly reinforces oppressive constraints on the body.
CONCLUSION
The analysis of eDateReview.com supports less optimistic perspectives on the liberatory
potential of disembodiment in online spaces. As Campbell (2004) states, many social practices
such as beauty hierarchiesare replicated online rather than transcended. The discourse on
eDateReview demonstrates this through moves to identify and discipline bodies, thus
perpetuating oppressive ideologies attached to the body. Internet dating is not a situation in
which people can escape the confines of their physical form, but rather is a space in which
people are counted and judged based on their bodies. Additionally, online daters are
discursively demonized if they do not immediately and accurately own up to their physical
status.
The discourse on eDateReview clearly reflects the importance of the physical body in
online dating. Despite the potential for online daters to move beyond their appearance and
focus more on personality when seeking a romantic partner, there is a very clear discourse that
prioritizes the disclosure of physical appearance through accurate pictures and personal
descriptions. Focusing on the physical reinforces a more traditional system of attraction that
centers on aspects of appearance, including race, age, and weight. Reinforcing rules that
promote disclosing accurate physical images makes it very difficult to use the full potential of
online dating to transcend the traditional limits of physical appearance.
When online dating was a new tool to facilitate romantic relationships, it held the potential
to reframe cultural norms and expectations away from the body as the paramount factor of
attraction and mate selection. As more and more people began using online dating sites and
talking about their experiences, however, it became clear on eDateReview that traditional
ideologies of the body were being carefully transferred and strongly protected in the new
dating medium. Any attempts to diverge from traditional norms were met with suspicion and, in
some cases, contempt. Technology has catered to and supported the expectation of the body in
online dating by enabling users to post photosand in some instances videosin their online
dating profiles.
The evolution of online dating has led to further emphasis on the body through mobile apps
such as Tinder and OKCupid that make physical distance and appearance a priority over more
detailed descriptions of self and identity. These apps use GPS receivers to limit potential
matches to those daters who are physically within a short radius of the other user. The apps
quite literally track the body as a function of the online dating process. Users then are shown
photos of potential daters in the immediate area and need only swipe right if they are
physically attracted to the person, or swipe left if they are not. Rather than using search
parameters and browsing through profiles based on interests, smoking preference, and other
variables, the users are encouraged to simply accept or reject people based on photos
presented in rapid succession. Some might argue that, on some level, attraction always is
dependent on the physical, and that the nature of these online apps is no different than picking
up someone at a barbut that is a problem, not a justification.
In the end, examining the discourse of the body on eDateReview contributes to an
understanding of the way body constructs operate in online spaces specifically as they relate to
online dating. As online dating becomes an increasingly popular form of meeting and finding
potential partners, the need to explore and understand the cultural impact of the process
increases, particularly as it relates to the issues of power and control. This research shows
that, despite early arguments that the Internet could be used to escape or reframe bodied
constraints, online daters continue to carefully monitor and control attempts to reframe the
physical self in online profiles, thus reinforcing reigning ideologies of the body.
NOTES
1. To maintain the integrity of the text posted on eDateReview.com, quotes are copied as they appear, including any spelling
or grammatical errors.
2. In referencing quotes from eDateReview.com, the posters name, as provided on the site, and the year the review was
posted are cited.
3. Debra L. Merskin and Mara Huberlie, Companionship in the Classifieds: The Adoption of Personal Advertisements by
Daily Newspapers, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 73, no. 1 (Spring 1996).
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., 221.
7. Ibid.
8. A. Smith and M. Duggan Online Dating and Relationships, PEW Internet and Everyday Life Project, accessed June
15, 2015, http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Online-Dating.aspx.
9. Paul Hollander, The Counterculture of the Heart, Society 41, no. 2 (January/February 2004).
10. Michael Hardey, Life beyond the Screen: Embodiment and Identity through the Internet. Sociological Review 50, no.
4 (2002).
11. K. Zickuhr, Whos Not Online and Why, PEW Internet & American Life Project, accessed June 15, 2015,
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Non-internet-users.aspx.
12. Belinda Smaill, Online Personals and Narratives of the Self: Australias RSVP, Convergence: The Journal of
Research into New Media Technologies 10, no. 1 (Spring 2004).
13. Robin Goodwin, Dating Agency Members: Are They Different? Journal of Social & Personal Relationships 7,
no. 3 (August 1990): 424.
14. Jennifer L. Gibbs, Nicole B. Ellison, and Rebecca D. Heino, Self Presentation in Online Personals: The Role of
Anticipated Future Interaction, Self-Disclosure, and Perceived Success in Internet Dating, Communication Research 33, no. 2
(2006): 15277; Jeffrey T. Hancock and Catalina L. Toma, Putting Your Best Face Forward: The Accuracy of Online Dating
Photographs, Journal of Communication 59, no. 2 (2009): 36786; Catalina L. Toma, Jeffrey T. Hancock, and Nicole B.
Ellison, Separating Fact from Fiction: An Examination of Deceptive Self-Presentation in Online Dating Profiles, Personality
& Social Psychology Bulletin 34, no. 8 (2008): 102336; Monica T. Whitty, Revealing the Real Me, Searching for the
Actual You: Presentations of Self on an Internet Dating Site, Computers in Human Behavior 24, no. 4 (2008): 170723.
There has been a good deal of research exploring the issues of presentation, honesty, and the ability of digital technology to
support dishonest presentations of self.
15. Belinda Smaill, Online Personals and Narratives of the Self: Australias RSVP.
16. Daniel Miller and Don Slater, The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (New York: Berg, 2000).
17. Mark Poster, Postmodern Virtualities, in Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham
and Douglas M. Kellner (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006).
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 542.
22. Sherry Turkle, Who Am We? In Reading Digital Culture, edited by David Trend, 23650 (Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishers, 2001).
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Allucquere R. Stone, Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories About Virtual Cultures, in Reading
Digital Culture, edited by David Trend (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001).
26. Ibid., 196.
27. Lisa Nakamura, Race in /for Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet, in Reading Digital
Culture, edited by David Trend (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001).
28. Cameron Bailey, Virtual Skin: Articulating Race in Cyberspace, in Reading Digital Culture, edited by David Trend
(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001).
29. Ibid., 344.
30. Ibid.
31. Margaret Morse, Virtually Female: Body and Code, in Reading Digital Culture, edited by David Trend (Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishing, 2001).
32. Ibid.
33. Jessie Daniels, Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender, and Embodiment, Womens Studies Quarterly 37, no. 1/2
(Spring/Summer2009).
34. Ibid.
35. Garry Young and Monica Whitty, Progressive Embodiment within Cyberspace: Considering the Psychological Impact
of the Supermorphic Persona, Philosophical Psychology 24, no. 4 (2011): 537.
36. Belinda Smaill, Online Personals and Narratives of the Self: Australias RSVP.
37. Jennifer Yurchisin, Kittichai Watchravesringkan, and Deborah Brown McCabe, An Exploration of Identity Re-Creation
in the Context of Internet Dating, Social Behavior & Personality: An International Journal 33, no. 8 (2005).
38. Jennifer L. Gibbs, Nicole B. Ellison, and Rebecca D. Heino, Self Presentation in Online Personals: The Role of
Anticipated Future Interaction, Self-Disclosure, and Perceived Success in Internet Dating, Communication Research 33, no. 2
(2006).
39. Michael Hardey, Life beyond the Screen: Embodiment and Identity through the Internet, Sociological Review 50, no.
4 (2002).
40. Ibid., 582.
41. Nicole B. Ellison, Jeffrey T. Hancock, and Catalina L. Toma, Profile As Promise: A Framework for Conceptualizing
Veracity in Online Dating Self-Presentations, New Media & Society 14, no. 1 (2012): 4562.
42. Ibid.
43. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage
Books, 1995): 136.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., 194.
47. Ibid.
48. John Edward Campbell, Getting It on Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality, and Embodied Identity (New York:
Harrington Park Press, 2004): 189.
49. Internet Relay Chats essentially are chatrooms that allow mutliple users in different physical locations to communicate
textually online.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 190.
53. The eDateReview.com site has changed since the data were collected in 2013, making it difficult to access the reviews
used in this chapter. When the data were collected, eDateReview was a site to facilitate discussion about different online dating
services, which resulted in rich discourse about online dating. In and of itself, it never was an online dating site like Match.com
or eHarmony Users could not post pictures and did not have access to contact information for other users.
54. A. Strauss and J. Corbin, Grounded Theory Methodology, in Handbook of Qualitative Research (1994). Grounded
theory is an analytic approach based on constant comparison. Constant comparison is a process through which the researcher is
continually comparing each coded instance with previously coded instances. The Atlas Ti software facilitates coding the data,
organizing the text into categories, and creating comments, memos, and visual data displays while working with the text.
55. John Edward Campbell, Getting It on Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality, and Embodied Identity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001.
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Harrington Park Press, 2004.
Daniels, Jessie. Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender, and Embodiment. Womens Studies Quarterly 37, no. 1/2
(Spring/Summer 2009): 10124.
Ellison, Nicole B., Jeffrey T. Hancock, and Catalina L. Toma. Profile as Promise: A Framework for Conceptualizing Veracity
in Online Dating Self-Presentations. New Media & Society 14, no. 1 (2012): 4562.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books,
1995.
Gibbs, Jennifer L., Nicole B. Ellison, and Rebecca D. Heino. Self Presentation in Online Personals: The Role of Anticipated
Future Interaction, Self-Disclosure, and Perceived Success in Internet Dating. Communication Research 33, no. 2 (2006):
15277.
Goodwin, Robin. Dating Agency Members: Are They "Different? Journal of Social & Personal Relationships 7, no. 3
(August 1990): 42330.
Hancock, Jeffrey T., and Catalina L. Toma. Putting Your Best Face Forward: The Accuracy of Online Dating Photographs.
Journal of Communication 59, no. 2 (2009): 36786.
Hardey, Michael. Life beyond the Screen: Embodiment and Identity through the Internet. Sociological Review 50, no. 4
(2002): 57085.
Hollander, Paul. The Counterculture of the Heart. Society 41, no. 2 (January/February 2004): 6977.
Merskin, Debra L., and Mara Huberlie. Companionship in the Classifieds: The Adoption of Personal Advertisements by Daily
Newspapers. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 73, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 21929.
Miller, Daniel, and Don Slater. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. New York: Berg, 2000.
Morse, Margaret. Virtually Female: Body and Code. In Reading Digital Culture, edited by David Trend, 8797. Malden,
MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001.
Nakamura, Lisa. Race in / for Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet. In Reading Digital Culture,
edited by David Trend, 22635. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001.
Poster, Mark. Postmodern Virtualities. In Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and
Douglas M. Kellner, 53348. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Smaill, Belinda. Online Personals and Narratives of the Self: Australias RSVP. Convergence: The Journal of Research
into New Media Technologies 10, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 93107.
Smith, A., and M. Duggan. Online Dating and Relationships. PEW Internet and Everyday Life Project. Accessed June 15,
2015. http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Online-Dating.aspx.
Stone, Allucquere R. Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures. In Reading Digital
Culture, edited by David Trend, 18598. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001.
Strauss, Anselm., and Juliet. Corbin eds. Grounded Theory Methodology: An Overview. In Handbook of Qualitative
Research, edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 1994.
Toma, Catalina L., Jeffrey T. Hancock, and Nicole B. Ellison. Separating Fact from Fiction: An Examination of Deceptive
Self-Presentation in Online Dating Profiles. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin 34, no. 8 (2008): 102336.
Turkle, Sherry. Who Am We? In Reading Digital Culture, edited by David Trend, 23650. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishers, 2001.
Whitty, Monica T. Revealing the Real Me, Searching for the Actual You: Presentations of Self on an Internet Dating Site.
Computers in Human Behavior 24, no. 4 (2008): 170723.
Young, Garry and Monica Whitty. Progressive Embodiment within Cyberspace: Considering the Psychological Impact of the
Supermorphic Persona. Philosophical Psychology 24, no. 4 (2011): 53760.
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Context of Internet Dating. Social Behavior & Personality: An International Journal 33, no. 8 (2005): 73550.
Zickuhr, Kathryn. Whos Not Online and Why. PEW Internet and American Life Project. Accessed June 15, 2015.
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Non-internet-users.aspx.
12
Digital Deception: Online Dating, Identity

Development, and Misrepresentation
Justin Lagore
The Internet has radically altered the ways we communicate with one another, regardless of
the motivations behind our outreach. Online forums for hobbyists enable people around the
world to bond over their mutual interests. E-mail has become a staple for both business and
personal communication; and social media across diverse functionalities enable humankind to
share any and everything with a global network.
In recent years, the popularity of online dating has skyrocketed, with as much as 22 percent
of people aged 25 to 34, and 17 percent of people 35 to 44 years of age using an online dating
service. The stigma surrounding the online dating industry slowly is disappearing, as reports
from 2014 show that 59 percent of Americans think that online dating is a good way to meet
people as compared to only 44 percent in 2005.1 The online dating trend has evolved into an
entire industry in and of itself. New sites launch every day, and new users join the online
dating pool looking for anything from traditional monogamous relationships to no-strings-
attached casual sex.
But has the recent popularity of online dating actually made it easier for people to find a
match? Do the numbers themselves give online daters an advantage, or do the psychology and
systems behind online dating sites make it more complicated to try and find romance on the
Web?
Online dating has been widely researched as psychologists and sociologists have called
into question the authenticity of self-representation on the Internet and the tendency to carefully
assemble a personal narrative that might not represent users as accurately as the candidness of
traditional dating. The pressure a person faces while attempting to attract a mate online can
lead to this misrepresentation, either consciously or subconsciously, and the motivations
behind formation of a deceptive personal narrative can vary. This chapter reviews key findings
from the body of research surrounding the popularity of online dating as well as self-
identification and misrepresentation on the Web.
WHY DATE ONLINE?

Helene Lawson and Kira Leck explain that the tendency to pursue online relationships can
arise for any number of reasons. Just as it is a motivator for traditional dating, a desire for
companionship is one of the most common reasons people turn to the Web to cultivate
relationships. In many cases, lonely people report being dissatisfied with the relationships they
do have, leaving them cynical, bored, and depressed. These behaviors can create other
challenges for them, such as having difficulty making friends or hesitating to engage in social
activities. These obstacles all can leave people feeling incomplete socially. The Web,
however, offers some respite in the ease of connection it affords those who might be struggling
to build relationships traditionally.2
Others could turn to online relationships for comfort after going through a life crisis. The
Internet has been a source of social support for people going through all forms of medical
crises as well as for the victims of natural disasters or war. Research has proven that
individuals battling major depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other
emotionally debilitating conditions reported higher energy levels and ease coping with grief
after harnessing the power of the Web to connect with and talk to others. In many instances,
users of online dating services have reported feeling more comfortable turning to the Internet to
connect with people for social support because those close to them in real life sometimes tend
to judge those people who are struggling or blame them for their own situations.3
Online dating also could appeal to thrill seekers who are excited by the opportunity to
connect to new people they otherwise might never have met in person because of social or
geographical barriers or lifestyle differences. Online dating can be likened to blind dating in
that the people dont know what to expect until they start conversing with potential matches.
For some, talking to multiple people at a timewhich might be perceived as more of a taboo
when dating in personcan be exciting. For others, meeting people from other parts of the
country and having an excuse to travel or explore new areas can be part of the appeal.4
Whatever the reasons might be, the influx of options for online dating across numerous
platforms has enabled users to connect with any number of potential matches for countless
classifications of arrangements. One could argue that online dating has evolved with modern
dating culture. As more progressive attitudes and habits surrounding dating have emerged,
digital channels have adapted to fulfill the needs of users no matter what they seek.
THE MATCHMAKING BUSINESS: ONLINE DATING AS AN INDUSTRY

Financially, subscription models developed in the infancy of online dating are what
enabled the category to grow into the robust industry it is today. Although there are several
sites available that allow anyone to join for free, almost every online dating site still offers
some form of a subscription package. Subscriptions usually unlock additional features, such as
extra match filters, the ability to see who has viewed your profile, and being able to upload
private photos to share only with select users.
In 2010, Christian Rudder, one of the founders of the free online dating service OkCupid,
published an editorial criticizing the model. Rudder argued that online dating services rely on
the disappointment of customers for the prolonged success of the site. If customers find their
perfect matches, they walk away satisfiedand their money goes with them because they no
longer need the dating service.5
Regardless, the industry has continued to grow. In an interview with Forbes, Match CEO
Sam Yagan described the 20-year growth of the industry as categorized into three eras.6 Yagan
says the first era of online dating was all about search. Search features on dating sites built the
foundation for success and were revolutionary in their time. In 2000, however, the first era
came to an end when eHarmony came onto the scene promoting its computer algorithms and
personality assessments that allegedly would eliminate the guesswork for customers and find
the perfect match for them. The third era is the present. Yagan says that with all the available
algorithms, the migration to mobile, and the adaptation to new technology, online dating has
gotten as smart as it can be for a while.7
Today, online dating is a $2.1 billion industry and is expected to continue growing over the
next five years due to more targeted marketing, demographic shifts, and changing attitudes
toward using the services.8 Technological advances are also making it easier to develop and
improve upon online dating systems, making them more appealing and bolstering the user base.
RELATIONSHOPPINGAPPLYING THE MARKETPLACE

METAPHOR TO ONLINE DATING
The vast array of online dating services available today and the quantity of users across the
globe, make it easy to see how the marketplace metaphor can apply to the online dating scene.
In fact, Rebecca Heino, Nicole Ellison, and Jennifer Gibbs tested the marketplace metaphor in
a series of interviews with online dating users and, in several instances, unprompted
commercial comparisons were made.9
A key comparison between online dating and the marketplace metaphor is found in the
parallel between the initial phases of assessing matches and the first actions one takes when
making a purchase decision. Respondents first have to assess potential partners desirability to
determine whether the match is appropriate just as shoppers assess goods before purchase to
determine whether they will fulfill the shoppers needs.10 Interview respondents likened this
process to assessing personal marketing of those potential matches, comparing the task to a
consumer transaction. The profile was seen as a strategic tool used by the other party to
advertise himself or herself as that product that promises to fulfill a need. Respondents also
likened dating profiles to rsums; the potential match, through their profile, is applying for the
position as a users significant other. The first date is the interview, but the rsum has to be
impressive enough to win them the opportunity to have that interview.11
Just as consumers keep a sense of skepticism about them when being subjected to
advertising, users of online dating services have developed ways to identify what some of the
most likely exaggerations could be. For example, users have come to understand it isnt
uncommon for men to overstate their height or for women to understate their weight.
Participants noted they have developed a tendency to automatically account for these potential
exaggerations empirically. One woman said if a man claimed to be 511, she would assume
hes only 59. Additionally, a man noted that if a woman claimed to have an average body
type, he would interpret that to mean shes slightly heavier.12
At the same time that users are assessing others, theyre also focused on assessing their
own characteristics and deciding how to market themselves to potential matches. These
processes begin with not only a self-evaluation but also a marketplace evaluation to determine
what the user can supply and what potential matches demand or are seeking. The ease with
which one can make these comparisons of themselves and others again supports the
marketplace metaphor, as such a range against which to make comparisons doesnt exist in
traditional dating on such a broad scale.13
The shopping mentality of users is enforced by the structures and systems driving many
online dating sites, particularly filters. Systems enable users to filter by any number of criteria
including age, height, weight, gender, sexual orientation, body type, smoking and drinking
habits, economic status, and countless other factors. This segmentation likens online dating to
thumbing through a catalog, as matches are organized and served up to users based on these
narrow criteria rather than the more holistic compatibility factors traditional dating might
encourage matches to explore.14
Many respondents noted this ability to filter positively impacted their ability to find more
sustainable relationships by filtering out matches with deal-breaker qualities, but some also
noted that it encourages them to shop for perfect matches that meet any number of criteria,
which can be disappointing if there isnt a satisfying supply of matches once the users desires
have been outlined.15
Interviewees were also asked if they felt the heightened supply of potential matches and the
diversity of available options encouraged them to be more or less selective. The majority said
because of the time it would take to deliberately evaluate every single match, theyve been
encouraged to be more selective. Users look for reasons to filter people out after a quick
assessment to make time to move on to other potential matches.16
The case could be made for or against online dating based on applications of the
marketplace metaphor. Another study, however, suggests that when likening potential matches
to goods in a marketplace, making the distinction of people as experiential goods, the value
of a person cannot truly be realized through an online dating profile.
Experiential goods by definition are evaluated not necessarily by the tangible results they
produce but by the emotions or feelings they produce. That being the case, in most instances
its hard to determine the level of satisfaction a person might experience without the interaction
traditional dating provides that online dating doesnt replicate. For example, any potential
match could claim to be a comedian, but without personal experience to evaluate the
compatibility of a matchs sense of humor, its hard to determine whether that claim would hold
true.17
The theory of people as experiential goods pokes holes in the case for online dating,
especially when one considers the marketplace metaphors conclusions that the process of
getting from the spontaneous first impression to the in-person connection is so involved. The
tendency to filter people out rather than in diminishes the chances for users to experience
chemistry with matches they might filter out based on superficial or empirical criteria, all
because of the overloading supply online dating services can offer. In essence, if people really
are regarded as experiential goods, then modern online dating systems arent able to provide a
shared experience for qualitative evaluation by online dating participants.
SELF-PRESENTATION STRATEGIES IN THE ONLINE DATING ARENA

Through another series of interviews, researchers Ellison, Heino, and Gibbs explored self-
presentation strategies employed by online dating service users, the results of which were
published in 2006.18 Questions pertained to how users decided what to say about themselves
on their profiles, what specific impressions if any users were trying to convey, how users
believed their close friends would respond if shown their profiles, and whether there were any
personal characteristics users actively avoided mentioning or made an effort to deemphasize.19
Results indicated the strategic decisions made when creating online profiles were
considered within the context of fewer social cues afforded by online dating as compared to
traditional dating. In other words, users were consciously aware of the ways communication
through online dating media limited their expression, and as a result they demonstrated an
increased effort to consciously manage projected self-image, in response to an innate need to
establish credibility necessary to make social progress with potential matches.20
Small cues and minute details hidden in online dating profiles played a major role in
participants evaluations of others online. One respondent, for example, noted the writing skills
demonstrated by others and explained grammar and spelling were employed by her to evaluate
intelligence. Other respondents also labeled writing quality as a preliminary evaluation tool,
even describing spelling mistakes as unattractive.21 In understanding the effect small cues
have on them when reading others profiles, participants said this motivates them to analyze
their own writing and consider the many ways potential matches could read into their personal
essays. One participant, for example, explained that she purposely avoided any mention of
sexuality out of fear of being seen as promiscuous, and another opted to include sexually
explicit information to help weed out bad matches.22
The study revealed small cues also played a major role shaping impressions in a
conversational context once matches initiated contact as feedback exchanged between matches
shapes users behavior. One participant, who wrote his e-mails to matches late at night,
received a response from a woman questioning the timing of his messages, which he said he
later realized could be seen as unattractive to some. He also reported noticing the length of his
messages influencing impressions of him, leading him to regulate their brevity.23
On strategic representation of oneself online, Ellison, Heino, and Gibbs reference two
competing desires of those using online dating services. Although users want to present
themselves as authentically as possible, theres a conflicting compulsion to make oneself out to
be as desirable as possible to attract others.24 The compromise manifests as presentations of
an ideal self. Participants describe themselves as they wish they were or how they could be
in the future. For example, some participants admitted to presenting themselves as less heavy
than they actually were, knowing it to be false but also having the intention to lose weight.
Presenting a future or ideal self often is used as a mechanism to rationalize and dismiss
deception on the basis of success or meaningful intention.25
Neutralization of constraint also was revealed as rationality for inaccurate self-
presentation online. Age seemed to be a commonality, as participants often rounded theirs
down to improve their chances of being found in search results that could be limited by others
searching within parameters of natural breaking points (i.e., someone who is 37 rounding down
to 35 or 52 to 50).26 This finding highlights another disadvantage of online dating services as
described with the marketplace metaphor in that the rigid nature of the filtering process can
encourage users to find ways to subtly game the system. It encourages them to make strategic
decisions about what they can get away with lying about, even with the best of intentions, just
to ensure that they still have a chance to be seen. This tendency can become a more severe
issue if not kept in check.
DECEPTIVE REPRESENTATION ONLINE

Perhaps one of the most significant criticisms of online dating is the ease of
misrepresentation of oneself online. In popular culture, the phenomenon of extreme
misrepresentation has become a novelty as examined by the documentary, Catfish, and the
television program with the same name. Research, however, indicates that less-intensive
exaggerations emerge frequently as a result of users desires to make good first impressions
through their digital profiles.
In another study conducted by Ellison, Catalina L. Toma, and Jeffery Hancock, participants
in New York City who subscribed to Match.com, Yahoo! Personals, Webdate, and American
Singles were recruited to evaluate the accuracy of their own online dating profiles.
Participants also were asked to assess what they believed to be reasonable degrees of
deception when presenting oneself online. Results of profile accuracy were cross-validated by
the researchers who verified the self-reported information from each users profile, including
height, weight, and age.27
Profile information scored for accuracy was broken down into five distinct categories:
physical appearance, social status, relationship information, habits and interests, and beliefs.
Participants scored each category on a five-point scale with a higher score indicating a
stronger degree of self-reported accuracy.28 The study found that 81 percent of participants
provided information that deviated from at least one of their observable characteristics (height,
weight, age). Of those three, weight was the most commonly lied about with almost two-thirds
of participants deviating from the truth by five pounds or more. Deviation from the truth
occurred proportionally across genders.29
When it came to social acceptability of deception in self-presentation, approval of
inaccuracies fell below the midpoint across all categories. Relationship status was the most
strongly disapproved-of category.30
The researchers note in their report a key connection was the correlation between
deceptive self-presentation and profile photos. Results indicated the self-reported accuracy of
photos was the less than the average of other categories, revealing participants to be more self-
aware and intentionally deceptive when it comes to visual representation. The study also
accounted for profiles without photos, finding those users to be even more deceptive than those
who posted images.31
MISREPRESENTATION THROUGH MANIPULATION OF IMAGES

Countless studies have suggested that physical attractiveness plays a major role for those
seeking partners. Evolutionary theories have purported physical attractiveness as an indication
of health, good genes, reproductive fitness, suitability as a partner with whom to raise
children, and more. Thus, it stands to reason the importance society places on physical
appearance carries over into individual evaluations of matches on dating sites.
Its the subjectivity of visual representation that enhances profile photos potential to
deceive. Users might exercise the freedom to share only the most attractive of several images,
they could select older photographs that dont accurately convey current appearance, or they
could manipulate a photo when shooting it or after taking it.32
A study in which participants were asked to again self-report the accuracy of their profile
photos with their actual appearances compared those evaluations to the opinions of a panel of
judges. The judges were shown the pictures from a participants dating profile alongside
images taken at the research site on the spot. The differences of the judges scores of the
attractiveness of both sets of photos were used to determine whether the strategic
representations online were, in fact, more attractive and to some degree deceptive.33 Results
indicated dissonance between participants online self-representations and their everyday
appearances with strategies employed online yielding a more attractive impression. The results
also indicated less naturally attractive users of online dating services were likely to exaggerate
their attractiveness more through their photos than those who were naturally attractive, all as
determined by the judges ratings.
The researchers also concluded that when given an opportunity to increase their appeal to
potential matches through either manipulating their visual representations or manipulating their
social status to compensate for a lack of physical appeal, daters who were deemed less
attractive tended more often to opt for the former, if not both.34 This tendency could be in
response to users subconscious understanding of the role profile images play in shaping
spontaneous first impressions. Often, a thumbnail of an attractive photo is what drives initial
visits to ones profile, therefore the importance of making a good first impression visually is
easy to understand.
LYING WITH LANGUAGE: MISREPRESENTATION THROUGH

PERSONAL ESSAYS
In addition to visuals, linguistics accounts for the other half of representation of online
dating users. The potential for misrepresentation lies within the disembodied nature of online
dating. The first issue with linguistics as presented by online dating profiles is the absence of
audible context afforded by speech. Certain emotions or intentions such as surprise, humor, or
sarcasm are easily misunderstood when a messages receiver is made to present such
statements in writing. Additionally, misrepresentation can arise from the ability of daters to
more carefully craft their words, giving them greater control over the impressions they make
than if they were on a traditional date and might get caught on the spot during candid
conversation with a potential partner.
Whats interesting about linguistic deception, as uncovered by Toma and Hancock, is the
effect that the byproduct emotions of anxiety or fear of getting caught can have on the liar. The
way the liar tries to manage those emotions actually can reveal quite a bit about the validity of
his or her claims. Psychological distancing, for example, appears as a decline in self-reference
and an increase in negating words or phrases and can signal a lack of commitment to ones
story. Often this lack of commitment stems from the tellers discomfort with the story due to its
falsity.35
A high level of cognitive strain is placed on liars as they struggle to balance the effort of
putting together the story while ensuring that they dont contradict themselves, arouse
suspicion, orultimatelyget caught.36 Online dating, however, alleviates some of the stress
of fabricating a story. The ability to edit portions of an online dating profile over time gives
daters the freedom not only to take their time carefully piecing together a narrative they believe
would be attractive to other users, but they also constantly can go back and revise, edit, and
improve portions to make them more believable. As they think of another piece they could add
to a story to substantiate their claims, theyre able to make those amendments.37 The editable
state of dating profiles and a trial-and-error mentality also could work in the favor of users. As
they piece together their online representations over time, the feedback they receive in the form
of skepticism from othersor even being caught outrightcan teach them which parts of their
online representations are the least believable and might need to be presented differently so as
not to raise suspicion.
It also has been purported that, linguistically, liars employ a strategy of careful control
over topics of discussion once contact has been initiated to deemphasize or draw attention
away from the portions of their profiles that might be false, instead encouraging conversation
around whats true. Someone who has misrepresented himself visually in a profile picture or
linguistically on a close-ended question such as height or weight, for example, might avoid
discussing topics relevant to physique, such as diet or fitness routines, and instead could try to
steer conversations toward work, education, or hobbies.38
A series of studies that explored linguistic traces of deception in online dating profiles
uncovered that although hints of false claims could be found in the way users wrote their
profiles, these tales often were undetectable by other daters.39 Surprisingly, however, when it
comes to written self-representation, studies have shown that when a sender is writing to
establish trustworthiness the style of representation often has more of an effect on a message
receiver than does the content disclosed. In other words, how someone describes himself or
herself sometimes is more important than what he or she actually is disclosing to the other
party.40
UNCERTAINTY REDUCTION AND INFORMATION VERIFICATION

In understanding the potential for inaccurate representation in online dating, the natural
response from users is to employ strategies that reduce uncertainty about the validity of
information presented to them. The weight of these concerns is heavy given the common end-
goal of online dating, which is to eventually meet face to face and establish an intimate
relationship. Uncertainty verification tactics vary, and their selection is guided by the
individual users comfort level as well as the specific types of concerns a particular user
faces, for example privacy and recognition issues that could lead to embarrassment by friends
or coworkers, or safety concerns such as stalking or physical harm.
A study of uncertainty-reduction strategies used by participants of online dating found
direct questioning was the most popular.41 When direct questioning still left concerns
unaddressed or certain information unverified, users would seek to substantiate answers by
comparing the claims to other online profiles for the individual in question. Its important to
note, however, that this information-seeking strategy requires a greater level of technical
literacy, especially when the party seeking the information knows very little about the other
person.42 The degree of anonymity online dating affords userssuch as identification by an
arbitrary username rather than a legal namecan make it difficult to locate other
representations of a particular individual online, such as a Facebook profile or an Instagram
account when they arent provided voluntarily.
In response to this same study, Google was reported as the least popular information-
gathering strategy among participants, despite it boasting the greatest potential to provide the
largest cache of information about a potential match. Again, this could be due to the technical
limitations faced, depending on what the subjects profile or the responses to direct-
questioning strategies actually yield in terms of leads.43 It also could be a result of
technological illiteracy or an unfamiliarity with Googles more advanced features, such as
searching by images to find the profiles of daters who are using photos of themselves that are
present elsewhere on the Web.
Regarding information verification, its worth noting that in some instances the government
has stepped in to regulate online dating when the services cross international borders and
could present safety or security risks for citizens of other nations. Regulation by the U.S.
government began with the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act passed in March
2007. The law requires online dating services to run sex-offender checks on U.S. customers
before their contact information can be provided to a nonU.S. citizen.44
JDI Dating Ltd., a U.K.-based online dating company also was the target of government
policing when the FTC found out about a fake profile scam that the company was employing to
lure users into purchasing paid subscriptions.45
The defendants offered a free plan that allowed users to set up a profile with personal
information and photos. As soon as a new user set up a free profile, he or she began to
receive messages that appeared to be from other members living nearby, expressing
romantic interest or a desire to meet. However, users were unable to respond to these
messages without upgrading to a paid membership. Membership plans cost from $10 to
$30 per month, with subscriptions generally ranging from one to 12 months. The
messages were almost always from fake, computer-generated profilesVirtual
Cupidscreated by the defendants, with photos and information designed to closely
mimic the profiles of real people.46
JDIs settlement order prohibited the company from misrepresenting any information about
its products and services in the future, and the company faced more than $600,000 in fines.
Some developers are beginning to use cross-integration with other social media services to
promote identity verification. Permitting users to sign up for services using a Facebook account
rather than independent registration, for example, and requiring users to provide a valid phone
number during the registration process both are safeguards that discourage blatant identity
falsification online. Some mobile dating applications also are able to record a device
identification number, which enables moderators to disable falsified profiles. This type of
block occurs at a hardware level, which renders users unable to continue using the service
simply by reinstalling an application and creating a new profile.
IMPRESSION DOMINANCE: VISUALS VERSUS LANGUAGE

Regardless of accuracy, one consideration of online dating has been whether visuals or
written self-descriptions hold more weight when making impressions online. A study
conducted at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, put this question to the test with a
series of impression-forming tasks. The purpose of the study was to evaluate to what degree
these varying forms of information helped respondents form their impressions and to determine
whether the order of presentation mattered.47 The results showed that visual representations
in this case, facial attractivenessplayed a more significant role in spontaneous evaluations
than did self-descriptions on the profiles. Conversely, deliberate evaluations were influenced
by both the self-descriptions and the visual representations.48
SOME CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Online dating as a concept isnt new, but at the rate our technology is evolving, theres still
much we havent considered or researched significantly regarding the industry. The body of
research around the psychology of online dating and basic user habits and attitudes is robust,
but the rapid advancement of online dating systems in conjunction with societal changes gives
us much to ponder.
First, its interesting to consider spontaneous impressions and their strong dependence on
visuals when considering the way online dating platforms are evolving in the mobile space.
With screens getting smaller and users being conditioned to feel a greater sense of urgency as
members of an always-on culture, it could be argued that daters are being encouraged by the
design of online dating systems to rely more and more on those spontaneous impressions.
Mobile applications such as Tinder, for example, present users with photos of potential
matches. Users then simply swipe left or right to indicate interest, and contact is initiated only
if both users express a desire to connect based on those photos. This structure almost entirely
removes the use of deliberate evaluations based on anything other than the superficial.
If thats the case, what does it say about how we view the items in the catalog of online
dating? Are people still these experiential products, or are the conventions of modern
relationships in general working in tandem with new technology to amend that experiential
viewpoint? Perhaps some of the most important points for consideration when answering these
questions are the changes observed in peoples interactions with one another as views have
developed politically and socially, and how those changes are impacting the traditional dating
pool, which influences the composition of the active dating population within the digital space.
Homosexuality is exponentially more accepted today than it was even just a decade ago.
Gender-equality issues have a more prominent presence than they did at the dawn of the Digital
Age. Socioeconomic factors are pushing many to reexamine the labels commonly assigned to
relationships and to rethink the definitions of successful relationships. Even motivations behind
relationships are changing, as more progressive social norms pave the way for casual sexual
arrangements or friends with benefits situations to exist with far less stigma than they had a
decade ago. It could be possible that the increase in proximity-based dating and hook-up apps
are an industry response to a more prevalent consumer desire to form these types of
relationships.
When considering the filtering systems in place and the idea that the rigidity of such
systems can exclude some potential mates, its also important to consider very early screenings
that are evolving with the specialization of the online dating industry. Sites including
BlackPeopleMeet, FarmersOnly, OurTime, MillionaireMatch, and AsianDating segment the
online dating pool into even smaller groups based on racial and socioeconomic factors before
users even begin using the service, thus limiting the supply of potential matches simply by
catering to such specific niche audiences. Further, messaging applications have become a hot
item within the tech and social media worlds, as they are starting to compete with texting and
enable users to converse more rapidly and intimately than perhaps is possible when using e-
mail or an online dating site. Yet, the applications still empower users to maintain some degree
of separation that might not be afforded had a user been forced to disclose a private phone
number.
No matter how online dating evolves, its clear that the Internet is reshaping the way we
think about and approach the opportunity to form new, intimate relationships online. The
chance to break out of ones social circles and connect with potential romantic interests from
all over the globe is impressive, but new technology and the ease of identity fabrication online
warrants skepticism and serious scrutiny of the safeguards developers will embed into new
dating technology moving forward. Ultimately, online dating still has vast potential to improve
romantic pursuits for us today, but modern technology still presents a multitude of
disadvantages that eclipse the potential benefits.
Yagan was right to assert that, for the time being, online dating technology has become as
smart as its going to be for a whilebecause challenges are related not to the limitations of
the technology, but more so to its users. Through the technology were creating and the
exchanges were having through those channels, were perpetuating a culture of dishonesty. We
focus on the superficial, and we reward intentional misrepresentation with approval, because
the selves were encouraging each other to create online arent necessarily the most honest
selves; theyre our most shareable selves.
Outside of online dating, dishonesty also is seen across other social media platforms.
Facebook users are encouraged to post status updates that will garner the most likes rather
than a status the might be more meaningful. Twitter is all about spur-of-the-moment sharing, but
validation is given only to those who share what others find value in proliferating. Instagram
again conditions users to compete for likes on every post. And we never unplug. Mobile
trends have advanced the always-connected culture, which has made it more and more difficult
for us to step out of that mentality. In the same way that were constantly checking our
notifications and always longing to be part of the conversation, online dating has become rife
with the silent frustration of desiring approval. Validation is found in messages from others.
We put the power to determine our self-worth into the hands of others by opting to make
ourselves so vulnerable through technology.
An infographic created by WhoIsHostingThis? reveals that, in a study of 2,000 women,
nearly 30 percent admitted to lying on social media about being out doing something when they
really were home alone. Twenty-five percent of Facebook users have admitted to falsifying
some of their profile information. Twenty percent lied about holiday activities or jobs. More
than half of respondents to another survey admitted to checking social media when eating
dinner with others. It has been estimated that two out of every five people spend more time
socializing through technology than face to face.49 Forty-six percent of respondents to a Trakur
survey Googled their own names within 24 hours of taking the survey, and only 6 percent never
had. It also has been estimated that Instagram boasts more than 90 million self-portraits, and
that figure now is somewhat dated.50
Its clear that weve become a society thats somewhat self-obsessed, so until we grow a
thicker skin or learn to confront some of these issues on a larger scale, many of the challenges
associated with online dating will persist. Online dating will continue making it easier to
connect with others, but with that ease of outreach vast potential for emotional pain or a
warped sense of self-appreciation coexists.
Online dating applications can become only as smart as we arebut the impetus to get
smarter doesnt lie with the technology, the pressure is on us to be smarter about how we use
these channels, and to know what vulnerabilities we expose to others when we take down the
walls weve built around ourselves and cease our projections of an ideal self.
NOTES
1. Aaron Smith, 5 Facts about Online Dating, Pew Research Center (February 13, 2014), accessed June 15, 2915,
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/02/13/5-facts-about-online-dating/.
2. Helene M. Lawson and Kira Leck, Dynamics of Internet Dating, Social Science Computer Review 24, no. 2 (2006):
193.
3. Ibid., 193, 194.
4. Ibid., 197.
5. Christian Rudder, Why You Should Never Pay for Online Dating, OkTrends (April 7, 2010), accessed June 15, 2915,
http://web.archive.org/web/20101006104124/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating/.
6. Jeff Bercovici, Love on the Run: The Next Revolution in Online Dating, Forbes (February 14, 2014), accessed June
15, 2915, http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/02/14/love-on-the-run-the-next-revolution-in-online-dating/.
7. Ibid.
8. Steve Yoder, How Online Dating Became a $2 Billion Industry, The Fiscal Times (February 14, 2014), accessed June
15, 2015, http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/02/14/Valentines-Day-2014-How-Online-Dating-Became-2-Billion-
Industry.
9. Rebecca D. Heino, Nicole B. Ellison, and Jennifer L. Gibbs, Relationshopping: Investigating the Market Metaphor in
Online Dating, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 27, no. 4 (2010): 42747.
10. Ibid., 43435.
11. Ibid., 435.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 436.
14. Ibid., 437.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 439.
17. Jeana H. Frost, Zo Chance, Michael I. Norton, and Dan Ariely, People are Experience Goods: Improving Online
Dating with Virtual Dates, Journal of Interactive Marketing 22, no. 1 (2008): 52.
18. Nicole Ellison, Rebecca Heino, and Jennifer Gibbs, Managing Impressions Online: Self-Presentation Processes in the
Online Dating Environment, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11, no. 2 (2006): 434.
19. Ibid, 422.
20. Ibid, 423.
21. Ibid., 424.
22. Ibid., 424.
23. Ibid., 42425.
24. Ibid., 425.
25. Ibid., 426.
26. Ibid.
27. Catalina L. Toma, Jeffrey T. Hancock, and Nicole B. Ellison, Separating Fact from Fiction: An Examination of
Deceptive Self-Presentation in Online Dating Profiles, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34, no. 8 (2008): 1026.
28. Ibid., 1027.
29. Ibid., 1028.
30. Ibid., 1030.
31. Ibid., 103132.
32. Catalina L. Toma and Jeffrey T. Hancock, Looks and Lies: The Role of Physical Attractiveness in Online Dating Self-
Presentation and Deception, Communication Research 37, no. 3 (2010): 338.
33. Ibid., 341.
34. Ibid., 345.
35. Catalina L. Toma and Jeffrey T. Hancock, What Lies Beneath: The Linguistic Traces of Deception in Online Dating
Profiles, Journal of Communication 62, no. 1 (2012): 80.
36. Ibid., 81.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 82.
39. Ibid., 94.
40. Ibid.
41. Jennifer L. Gibbs, Nicole B. Ellison, and Chih-Hui Lai, First Comes Love, then Comes Google: An Investigation of
Uncertainty Reduction Strategies and Self-Disclosure in Online Dating, Communication Research 38 no. 1 (2010): 21100,
doi: 0093650210377091.
42. Ibid., 21.
43. Ibid., 22.
44. Michael Aytes, International Marriage Broker Regulation Act Implementation GuidanceHQOPRD 70/6.2.11. U.S.
Department of Homeland Security (July 21, 2006).
45. Online Dating Service Agrees to Stop Deceptive Use of Fake Profiles (October 29, 2014), accessed June 15, 2915,
http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/10/online-dating-service-agrees-stop-deceptive-use-fake-profiles.
46. Ibid.
47. Rajees Sritharan, Kimberly Heilpern, Christopher J. Wilbur, and Bertram Gawronski, I Think I Like You: Spontaneous
and Deliberate Evaluations of Potential Romantic Partners in an Online Dating Context, European Journal of Social
Psychology 40, no. 6 (2010): 1072.
48. Ibid.
49. Is Social Media Turning Us into Psychopaths? Who Is Hosting This: The Blog (June 03, 2013), accessed June 15,
2915, http://www.whoishostingthis.com/blog/2013/06/03/social-media-psychopaths/.
50. Ibid.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aytes, Michael. International Marriage Broker Regulation Act Implementation GuidanceHQOPRD 70/6.2.11. U.S.
Department of Homeland Security (July 21, 2006).
Bercovici, Jeff. Love on the Run: The Next Revolution in Online Dating. Forbes (February 14, 2014).
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/02/14/love-on-the-run-the-next-revolution-in-online-dating/.
Ellison, Nicole, Rebecca Heino, and Jennifer Gibbs. Managing Impressions Online: Self-Presentation Processes in the Online
Dating Environment. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11, no. 2 (2006): 434.
Frost, Jeana H., Zo Chance, Michael I. Norton, and Dan Ariely. People Are Experience Goods: Improving Online Dating with
Virtual Dates. Journal of Interactive Marketing 22, no. 1 (2008): 52.
Gibbs, Jennifer L., Nicole B. Ellison, and Chih-Hui Lai. First Comes Love, then Comes Google: An Investigation of Uncertainty
Reduction Strategies and Self-Disclosure in Online Dating. Communication Research 38 no. 1 (2010): 70100. Doi:
0093650210377091.
Heino, Rebecca D., Nicole B. Ellison, and Jennifer L. Gibbs. Relationshopping: Investigating the Market Metaphor in Online
Dating. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 27, no. 4 (2010): 427447.
Is Social Media Turning Us into Psychopaths? Who Is Hosting This: The Blog (June 03, 2013).
http://www.whoishostingthis.com/blog/2013/06/03/social-media-psychopaths/.
Lawson, Helene M., and Kira Leck. Dynamics of Internet Dating. Social Science Computer Review 24, no. 2 (2006): 193.
Online Dating Service Agrees to Stop Deceptive Use of Fake Profiles (October 29, 2014). Accessed June 15, 2915.
http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/10/online-dating-service-agrees-stop-deceptive-use-fake-profiles.
Rudder, Christian. Why You Should Never Pay for Online Dating. OkTrends (April 7, 2010). Accessed June 15, 2915.
http://web.archive.org/web/20101006104124/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-
dating/.
Smith, Aaron. 5 Facts about Online Dating. Pew Research Center (February 13, 2014). Accessed June 15, 2915.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/02/13/5-facts-about-online-dating/.
Sritharan, Rajees, Kimberly Heilpern, Christopher J. Wilbur, and Bertram Gawronski. I Think I Like You: Spontaneous and
Deliberate Evaluations of Potential Romantic Partners in an Online Dating Context. European Journal of Social
Psychology 40, no. 6 (2010): 1072.
Toma, Catalina L., and Jeffrey T. Hancock. What Lies Beneath: The Linguistic Traces of Deception in Online Dating
Profiles. Journal of Communication 62, no. 1 (2012): 80.
Toma, Catalina L., and Jeffrey T. Hancock. Looks and Lies: The Role of Physical Attractiveness in Online Dating Self-
Presentation and Deception. Communication Research 37, no. 3 (2010): 338.
Toma, Catalina L., Jeffrey T. Hancock, and Nicole B. Ellison. Separating Fact from Fiction: An Examination of Deceptive
Self-Presentation in Online Dating Profiles. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34, no. 8 (2008): 1026.
Yoder, Steve. How Online Dating Became a $2 Billion Industry. The Fiscal Times (February 14, 2014). Accessed June 15,
2915. http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/02/14/Valentines-Day-2014-How-Online-Dating-Became-2-Billion-
Industry.
13
For Love or Money: Exploring Personal

Matrimony Ads, Sugar Web Sites, and
Catfishing through Social Exchange Theory
Carol A. Savery and Rekha Sharma
Scholars have examined how interpersonal communication channels facilitate finding new
relationships and developing them. Personal ads and lonely-hearts columns in newspapers and
magazines are the traditional media channels for searching for a mate. The relationship process
now is augmented by sophisticated online Web sites that cater to those seeking specific
relationships, social media, and e-mail communication. These are all potent and ubiquitous
forms of online interpersonal communication that can provide both positive rewards and
negative outcomes.
This chapter explores several online channels available for interpersonal communication
linked to seeking and developing relationships. It addresses the cross-cultural contrast of
matrimonial and personal ads, as well as the topics of online dating and romance scams
facilitated by deception in social media. These themes exemplify the range of motives people
can have for forming relationships, and how status, wealth, and power might be just as
important in a relationship as love or companionship. In some cases, individuals find out the
hard way that the desire for money trumps the desire for love completely.
Social exchange theory,1 described by John W. Thibaut and Harold H. Kelly, is an analysis
of interactions between two individuals looking at the costs and benefits of the two
interactants. It serves as a framework to examine the profits, rewards, and costs of developing
an interpersonal relationship (profits equal rewards minus costs). According to the theory,
individuals choose relationships that are most profitable to them; those with the greatest
rewards and the least cost. Relationships are developed when an individual can maximize the
outcome profits of the relationship. Rewards can include love, affection, intimacy, friendship,
companionship, gifts, money, and security.2, 3 Costs and risks, in terms of personal ads and
online dating, are what an individual considers unpleasant or things that must be avoided, such
as behaviors, particular types of dress, physical discomfort, risk of disease, or performing
favors for someone who is disliked. Social exchange theory is used as a way of explaining
how these communication channels create relational outcomes of both rewards and costs to
those involved.
The first theme focuses on Indian online arranged-marriage matrimonial ads (e.g.,
www.shaadi.com). These emphasize a prospective brides and grooms education, occupation,
income, and other status indicators as representations of earning potential.4 This could be
compared and contrasted to North American personal ads in other media seeking prospective
spouses (e.g., magazines, newspaper lonely hearts columns, personal ads).5, 6, 7
The second theme of digital dating included here is the phenomenon of online dating via
sugar daddy, sugar mama, and sugar baby Web sites (e.g.,
www.seekingarrangement.com). The perceived rewards and risks to the individuals are
examined as well as the possible liability for these Web sites for facilitating prostitution under
Communications Decency Act.8 This gray area of sugar dating9 describes an agreement
between one individual who agrees to reward another individual financially in return for a
sexual relationship. In the past, if an individual paid for sex it was considered to be
prostitution, but the sugar-dating websites market the practice as being mutually beneficial
arrangements.10 The current U.S. student college loan debt crisis has provided a novel
entrepreneurial online source of financial support for college students through sugar dating.11
The third theme is the dark side of online datingromance scams. Catfishing is one form
of virtual dating deception that refers to an individual who communicates online and pretends
to be someone else, in hopes of luring a person into a relationship. The term catfishing
created a mainstream controversy in 2012, when the U.S. Notre Dame University football
player and Heisman Trophy runner-up Manti Teo revealed the death of his online girlfriend. 12
The shocking twist was that both the imaginary girlfriend (Lennay Kekua) and the
announcement of her death were faked online by another individual. The movie Catfish13 and a
subsequent MTV reality series Catfish: The TV Show14 provided insights into how easily
individuals can be duped in online relationships.
SPOUSE WANTED: MATRIMONIAL ADVERTISEMENTS

In todays society, many single people utilize classified sections of reputable newspapers
or magazines, dating services, or Web sites (such as Match.com) to locate people with whom
to socialize and form relationships.15 Advertising traditionally has been considered a one-way
form of mass communication in which the advertiser produces a message intended to be
interpreted by a specific audience.16 Mara B. Adelman and Aaron C. Ahuvia17 noted that
introductory services (i.e., advertising forums centered on connecting people for dating,
marriage, or other relationships) integrated mass media and interpersonal interactions by
allowing a single person to locate potential relationship partners from the widest pool of
choices possibleequating the modern quest for a mate to a consumer activity akin to catalog
or home shopping. They described three primary functions of a marriage market: searching
(i.e., getting information about the nature, availability, and costs of products), matching (i.e.,
uniting potentially compatible partners), and transacting (i.e., interacting interpersonally to
bargain, interrogate, and negotiate an agreement). Nan Zhou and Zulkifli Abdullah extended on
this metaphor, explaining that advertisers make a shopping list18 of essential and ideal social
assets in a potential relationship partner. Only when two people find the exchanged assets and
deficits equitable, i.e., the books are balanced in terms of market value, or the exchange is
seen as mutually profitable, can the individuals be drawn together and a potentially rewarding
and satisfying relationship develop and last.19
People in North America often elevate the concept of romantic love and emphasize
emotional attractiveness (e.g., loving, kind, romantic) when seeking companions because they
choose their own relationship partners; whereas traditionally collectivist societies such as in
India emphasize family background characteristics to satisfy the requirements of parentally
arranged marriages.20 Despite the Western ideal of romantic love, such sentiments exist in
parallel with pragmatic considerations about the costs and benefits associated with pursuing
relationships.21 Jagger (2005), for instance, pointed out that despite changes for women in
terms of employment opportunities and pay equity, household and childcare responsibilities
still require that women who want a family find a provider, at least temporarily.22
Additionally, Zhou and Abdullah (1995) found that Canadian heterosexual personal ads
highlighted emotional attractiveness as the most important aspect of compatibility, but their
content analysis also showed that older men who were more established in their careers and
younger, less financially stable women tended to be attracted to each other.
For the Western world as well as for South Asia and its diaspora communities, personal
and matrimonial ads are extensions of traditional matchmakers.23, 24 Although the use of dating
services and personals was more limited in the United States until the 1980s, it became more
commonplace for individuals to pursue serious or playful relationships in later decades due to
changing cultural norms and technological developments such as the Internet.25, 26 For many
South Asians, however, dating is discouraged, and matrimonial ads often are published by an
individuals parents or other older family members to arrange a marriage with a suitable bride
or groom.27 Matrimonial ads are placed in print and online newspapers, but there are Web
sites devoted to South Asian matrimonial pairings as well (e.g., shaadi.com or
bharatmatrimony.com).28 Srividya Ramasubramanian and Parul Jain stated, As a form of
advertising, those dealing with marriage treat people as products: they highlight the best
features of the product (eligible single people, in this case).29
Because South Asian matrimonial ads emphasize the alliance between families, the tone of
the ads tends to be serious, and the phrasing is meant to present the eligible person and his or
her family in the best light possible.30, 31 Ads may indicate age, physical descriptors,
education, occupation, patrilineal descent, astrological information, citizenship status, and
caste, to name a few items traditionally included in the bride/grooms biodata.32, 33, 34 In
contrast, Western personal ads emphasize the individual and often employ humor or explicit
sexual references.35, 36
In Indian matrimonial ads, the ideal Indian bride should be fair, beautiful, God-fearing,
quiet, respectful, innocent, humble, cultured, homely, dedicated, and finally, educated. 37 To
clarify, fair refers to a lighter skin tone, and homely is an Indian English adjective
indicating a domestic orientation or emphasis on taking care of home and family.38, 39
Increasingly, marriageable Indian women are expected to perform domestic responsibilities as
well as be educated and employed.40 In many ads, the females educational status is indicated
to assert her suitability for men with higher earning potential, and male matrimonial ads
included expectations of potential brides degrees; in some ads, males specifically requested
brides who were doctors or lawyers.41 Indian males usually are considered to be a suitable
match if they are a good provider financially.42 More than 90 percent of online matrimonial
profiles noted that the potential bride or groom possessed at least a bachelors degree or
higher level of education, but males tended to report higher incomes than females.43
Ramasubramanian and Jain found that ads placed on behalf of men were more likely to note the
mans career ambition and achievements, but were less likely to mention the professional
status desired in a female mate, instead pointing out a desire for a slim, attractive, caring
bride.44
The globalization processes impacted the economy, mediascape, and gender roles in India
during the 1990s.45 Due to the introduction of satellite television and the subsequent
importation of Western broadcasts and cultural norms, viewers in the Indian subcontinent
encountered female characters that depicted a mlange of traditional and alternative attributes.
In the transformed media environment, women were shown as independent, career-oriented
individuals but frequently were shown as self-sacrificing housewives and mothers. This
revolution in gender roles was important because it created tensions in expectations for
marriageable women. Tensions between individual consumerism fostered by the modern
economy and the collectivist traditions of Indian society created a new metric for measuring a
womans value as a spouse in that women were not only expected to take on the role of
caregiver but breadwinner as well.46 This extended the financial obligation of the brides
family, who traditionally bore the costs of wedding ceremonies as well as dowries to the
grooms family.47
The commodification of the search for companionship means that individuals must align
themselves with often unattainable ideals to remain marketable. Indeed, both matrimonial and
personal ads indicate social values and standards for gender roles, love, beauty, affluence, and
success.48 These advertisements are part of a larger context of mediated, economic, religious,
sexual, and historical influences.49, 50, 51 Consequently, such ads reveal how much
consumerism has influenced identity, impression management strategies, social capital, and
desirability.52
ONLINE DATING: COMPUTER-MEDIATED ROMANCE

A 2013 Pew Research Center study about online dating and relationships53 found that
online dating has lost much of its stigma of desperation and deception, with 59 percent of
participants perceiving that online dating was a good way to meet people. A Pew Research
study conducted in 200654 had indicated that only 44 percent of North Americans believed that
online dating was a good way to meet people, as compared to 59 percent in 2013. Smith and
Duggan (2013) found that 11 percent of American adults and 38 percent of those who currently
are single and looking for a partner have used online dating sites; 66 percent of online daters
have gone on a date with someone they met through a dating site, and 23 percent have met a
spouse or long-term partner through these sites.55 Attitudes toward online dating are becoming
more optimistic:56 Survey results showed that 59 percent of respondents agreed that online
dating is a good way to meet people, 53 percent agreed that online dating allowed them to find
a better match, and only 21 percent perceived that these sites cater to desperate people. In
general, 79 percent of online daters agreed that it was a good way to meet people, and 70
percent perceived that these sites help to find a better romantic match due to the wider range of
potential partners.
Intimate relationships hinge on self-disclosure by revealing personal information.57 Some
online relationships can be more intimate than face-to-face (FTF) relationships,58 and text-
based computer-mediated communication (CMC) interactions have been rated as being
significantly more intimate than FTF counterparts.59, 60 One explanation is the hyperpersonal
model defined by Joseph B. Walther.61 It highlights the thought and behavioral processes that
can contribute to greater online intimacy. The model suggests that this results from the absence
of nonverbal communication, as well as visual anonymity in computer-mediated exchanges
(e.g., e-mail). Senders of CMC messages are more selective about what information they share
about themselves (constrained by visual or nonverbal cues) and edit messages that often are
overly positive self-presentation.62 Message receivers, conversely, have limited access to
communication cues that can foster stereotypical impressions of their partners that are more
intense than in face-to-face interactions.63, 64 Hyperpersonal communication in CMC could
contribute to unhealthy patterns of romantic relationship development65 allowing individuals
with dishonorable intentions to use the Internet, e-mail, and text messages to manipulate
relationship partners to satisfy their own ulterior motives.
What motivates individuals to visit online dating sites? Data from the Pew Research
Internet Project66 indicate that individuals who use the Internet for a greater number of tasks
are much more likely to use online dating sites, and individuals who are trusting of others are
less likely to use online dating sites. Participant age, education, and perceived reliability of the
Internet were not found to be significant predictors of online dating use.
RISKS OF ONLINE DATING

The Internet provides opportunities for individuals to seek friendships, sexual partners, and
romantic relationships.67, 68 Very early in the diffusion of the Internet, however, it was
described by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a risky
environment because it was easily available to a wider population.69 A Pew Research Center
study 70 also pointed to negative experiences of online daters: More than half of respondents
felt that there was misrepresentation in profile information, and 28 percent of those contacted
by someone via an online dating site or phone app felt harassed or uncomfortable. Even with
the plethora of digital sites and tools for individuals to seek potential partners, only 5 percent
of Americans who are married or in committed relationships actually met their partner online.
Research on the risks of online dating and sex-seeking has focused on physical health risks
such as sexually transmitted infections or diseases, including HIV.71 The relationship between
Internet use and sexual risk behavior was examined with 1,276 female participants who
reported having sex with a person they first met on the Internet.72 The study results indicated
that 43 percent of the women had sex with the online partner, 57 percent never had sex with the
online partner, and 84 percent of the online partners were men. Condoms were used 83.5
percent of the time for vaginal sex occurring in the prior 12 months, but only 40 percent of
respondents used a condom for vaginal sex the last time they had sex with the online partner. In
terms of the Internet venues for meeting, 43.5 percent reported meeting in online chat rooms,
and 38.2 percent selected dating or matchmaking sites. Before meeting in person, 67.2 percent
read the other persons profile, 32.5 percent had cybersex before the meeting, 77 percent
exchanged photos, 89.9 percent exchanged phone numbers, 45.8 percent exchanged addresses,
90.6 percent exchanged e-mail addresses, and 64 percent traveled more than 100 miles to
meet. Results also showed the prevalence of locations for in-person meetings: 30.5 percent
occurred at the partners home, 29.1 percent at the respondents home, 22 percent at a bar, 62.8
percent at a restaurant/coffee house, and 23.6 percent at a park or outside. Online partners lied
about age (43.8 percent), gender (42 percent), marital status (13.4 percent), and provided a
false photo (7.1 percent).
Between 2008 and 2009, Danielle Couch, Pranee Liamputtong, and Marian Pitts conducted
interviews with people from Australia and the United States to question them about their online
dating perceptions concerning dangers and risks. All of the participants recognized the perils
of online dating but a few participants felt that although there might be risks online these were
generally less or equivalent to the offline world.73 Specific risks identified included: lies,
deception, being scammed, sexual diseases, sexual violence, emotional vulnerability, physical
violence, and encountering dangerous individuals online. The participants did not perceive that
the risks of contracting STDs were any greater with online dating than through face-to-face
interactions.
Sarah Tonkin74 suggested that the Internet has opened up a new channel for infidelity,
because it is highly accessible and user friendly. Online users can delete instant messages and
e-mails from an extradyadic involvement (i.e., physical or emotional intimacy that takes place
outside an existing romantic relationship) to prevent getting caught by their current partner.
Users can also arrange meeting times and locations with extradyadic partners online. The
Internet makes it possible for communication to take place and then be immediately erased and
nearly untraceable.75
Online dating scams are an underreported international crime76 that causes significant
emotional distress for the victims who experience financial lossesand even victims who did
not suffer financial losses.77 Otherwise known as sweetheart swindles, romance scams can
be devastating because this form of fraud exploits peoples compassion and trust.78 High
participant-trait scores in a romantic belief of idealization, neuroticism, loneliness, and low
openness to experience indicated the likelihood of being a romance scam victim.79 Romance
scammers use fictitious identities to approach and initiate romantic relationships with their
online targets with the intention to defraud them of large sums of money.80 Although romance
scams predated the Internet, technology has allowed criminals to exploit a wider range of
victims with a greater degree of distance and anonymity.81
Romance scams as a type of cybercrime were examined by analyzing language strategies
used in online interactions between a scammer and the target. The analysis indicated the
importance of the scammers online persona to romance, persuade, and deceive the target.82 To
establish good moral character, if the targets profile indicated a religious orientation then the
scammer made references to God and religion and used strategic religious wording (e.g., pray,
thank God, God fearing). The scammer also incorporated words that gave the impression of
trustworthiness, having a good education, a good career, expressing attraction or infatuation for
the target, emphasizing that the target was a main priority, praising and complimenting, and
expressing gratefulness to the target for the money requests.
In 2013, Whitty examined the persuasive strategic themes used by criminals in online
dating romances in the United Kingdom.83 Twenty anonymous participants ranging in from 39
to 71 years of age were interviewed; of those, 13 heterosexual women were scammed out of
money, two heterosexual men and one homosexual man were scammed out of money, and two
heterosexual men and one homosexual man were not scammed out of money but felt they were
victimized. The amount of money scammed ranged from 300 (approximately $465.52 US) to
240,000 (approximately $372,495.60 US).
The interview analysis84 corroborated research themes previously examined by other
victims of other mass-marketing fraud. These included errors in decision making made by the
victims of the fraud; trusting the authority of the scammer (e.g., studying to be a doctor, rich,
connected to a foundation); scammers narratives about needing money because of a sick
relative, medical bills, university tuition, or an emergency or crisis; or reciprocation by
sending a gift and hoping the online victim would send the money. Other victim themes were
falling in love or viewing the scammer as their ideal partner [and feeling] swept off her
feet.85 The analysis highlighted the victims lack of self-control and addiction to the
relationship, and the erroneous belief that despite holding suspicions that they might be
scammed, if they send enough money, they might eventually reap the rewards.86
This interview analysis by Monica T. Whitty87 assisted in the development of a Scammers
Persuasive Technique Model to explain how the online dating scam can progress. In the first
stage, the victim is motivated to find the ideal partner. In the second stage, the scammer
presents an ideal profile. The third stage involves grooming the victim to trust the scammer.
The fourth stage is the sting, in which the scammer first requests small amounts of money from
the victim, then progresses to requesting larger amounts. The fifth stage continues the scam
with new crises. In the sixth stage, sexual abuse occurs via cybersex (e.g., Skype). The seventh
stage involves revictimization by the same scammer or from a new online romance scam, after
being informed of the scam by law enforcement. This model could be important in educating
people about how to recognize and avoid online dating scams.
REWARDS OF ONLINE DATING
Online dating sites provide a channel for initial communication between potential romantic
partners. After the initial contact, partners must decide whether they will pursue other forms of
communication outside of the dating site. Some online daters extend the process of computer-
mediated dating, but most choose face-to-face meetings quickly after the initial contact. Past
research has shown that 65 percent of online daters arranged face-to-face meetings within one
week of their initial online contact.88 Ramirez, Sumner, Fleuriet, and Cole (2014) examined the
transition from online interactions to offline interactions.89 Results indicated that online daters
might benefit from meeting their partner in person after brief periods of online interactions.
The study participants reported positive reactions to relational messages about intimacy,
informality, composure, and social orientation. Continuing online interactions for extended
periods, however, produced negative relational outcomes.
Online dating sites allow women anonymous and safe ways to explore their sexuality, flirt,
and pursue relationships.90 In the past, these privileges have been afforded to males, who were
labeled with an idiomatic roving eye. As more women access online dating sites, there is a
new democratization of sexual access91 for women of any age or physical condition.
SUGAR WEB SITES

Brandon Wade,92 an online-dating site entrepreneur who began SeekingArrangement.com
for sugar relationships, provided definitions that were helpful in understanding the players
involved in sugar Web sites in the United States. A sugar baby (male or female) is an
individual who provides intimacy, companionship, or other forms of attention to a Sugar
Daddy or Sugar Mama in exchange for personal benefit (e.g., financial support, professional
advancement).93 A sugar relationship is based on an exchange of assets94 for various
types of companionship.95 These relationships are usually formed between an olderusually
wealthyman (Sugar Daddy) and a younger usually wealthy woman, or an older woman
(Sugar Mama) and a younger man. Web sites dedicated to the sugar lifestyle help the sugar
babies connect to the sugar daddies and sugar mamas. Individuals in the sugar lifestyle
consider these mutually beneficial relationships as an arrangement.
Sugar dating sites differ from escort services because they claim to promote long-term
relationships as opposed to escort service sites that provide immediate companionship-for-
hire.96 The conundrum is that sugar babies are requesting cash allowances from their sugar
daddies or mamas in return for their companionship. In exchange for the allowance and gifts,
most sugar daddies expect sex. This means that the sugar dating sites are a combination of
online dating sites and escort service sites. The U.S. courts have agreed since the 1970s that a
sexual act is not considered prostitution if there are actions that accompany the sex (e.g.,
companionship, dinner).97 Scrutiny over these sugar baby sites has focused on whether these
sites are masquerading as mutually beneficial sites but actually are promoting online
prostitution.98
Sugar daddy relationships were commonly believed to be the cause for the spread of
HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa.99 These sugar daddy relationships between older males who
exchange cash and gifts for sexual favors from a younger woman generally were believed to
limit the young womans ability to practice safe sex. The study examined these sugar
relationships in urban Kenya and found that the actual number of sugar daddies in the adult
male population was much lower than expected, and condom use was less common in the
relationships that had greater age and economic differences between the sugar daddies and
sugar babies.
A recent survey conducted by the U.S. sugar site SugarDaddyForMe.com100 found that
financial rewards abound in potential cyber-romances. The survey provided current insights
into the lucrative types of rewards received by the sugar babies from their sugar daddies,
including living arrangements, new cars (e.g., Mercedes Benz, BMW), jewelry, between
$10,000 to $12,000 in cash, travel, fur coats, designer clothes and accessories (e.g., Herms,
Louis Vuitton), and electronics. The majority of the sugar daddies gifted their sugar babies
$1,000 to $3,000 per month, and 15 percent of the sugar babies reported allowances of $4,000
to $6,000 per month. The online survey participants were members of the site (1,677 sugar
daddies and 5,333 sugar babies). Of the sugar babies who responded, 36 percent were
between 18 and 25 years of age, 31 percent were between ages 26 and 35, and 34 percent
were 36 years of age or older. Of the sugar daddies in the survey, 5 percent were 30 years old
or younger, 13 percent were 31 to 40 years of age, 30 percent were 41 to 50 years old, 36
percent were 51 to 60, and 16 percent were 61 years of age and older.
Earlier, SugarDaddyForMe.com101 published data about the changing attitudes of U.S.
women regarding age gaps between sugar babies and sugar daddies. The survey (completed by
4,000 active members of the dating site) indicated that 52 percent of the women felt
comfortable dating men 30 years (or more) older than themselves, 27 percent would date a
man 40 years than they were, 13 percent would date a man 50 or more years older, and 7
percent would date a man 60+ years older than them. Additionally, 36 percent would be
comfortable having a man 30 years or more older than them as their date for a family dinner, 32
percent would be comfortable taking a man 30 years older than them to go clubbing with
friends, 62 percent would be comfortable going on a date to a restaurant or movie with a man
30 years older than them, and 60 percent would be comfortable travelling with a man 30 years
older than them.
Sugar dating has spawned an online review site called SugarMama-Dating.org that helps
guide wealthy, mature, single women and their admirers to the right sugar mama dating sites.
The top five online sugar mamma sites in 2014 included OlderWomanDating.com,
SugarMommaCupid.com, SugarMommaMate.com, SugarMommaDating.org, and
102
CougarLife.com. A location-based sugar dating cellphone app that is compatible with
iPhones, iPads, Android, and Blackberry devices was launched by SugarSugar.com for those
interested in the staying abreast of the new technologies.103
CATFISHING: HOAX, SCAM, FRAUD, CRIME, OR CYBERBULLYING?
The Internet has provided channels to develop relationships with no physical contact. But
the lack of proximity also has increased the ease with which individuals can misrepresent
themselves online. The 2010 film Catfish104 explored the nexus of love and deception in online
romantic relationships and originated the term catfish for individuals who create fake
Internet profiles, pictures, and personal information to gain the trust of unsuspecting victims.
Carrying the topic into the realm of reality-based television, MTVs Catfish: The TV Show105
showcases the stories of virtual daters who have developed intimate relationships via the
Internet, unmasking fake profiles to reveal the true identities of the online individuals. Two
examples of how the episodes have dealt with online deception include a male named
Jamison, who actually is a bisexual woman named Chelsea (Series 1, Season 1, aired
November 12, 2012), and the case of Jasmine, who had been texting Mike only to find out
the he actually was a she named Missy, who had been seeking revenge on Jasmine for
dating her boyfriend (Series 1, Season 1, aired December 3, 2012). Viewers might question
whether this is just voyeuristic reality TV that sates the publics taste for suspense and drama
or whether it creates awareness about catfishing as a possible hazard of cultivating online
relationships.
The public was introduced to a high-profile catfishing saga when U.S. college football
player Manti Teo announced that he was a victim of an elaborate online hoax. He fell in love
with an online girlfriend named Lennay Kekua and ultimately mourned her death from
leukemia. Teo claimed he talked to Kekua all night on the phone when she was hospitalized
and that he also communicated with her family members. This embarrassing public hoax was
further complicated by increased media scrutiny that questioned whether Manti Teo was a
victim or a knowing participant in a publicity stunt.106 Discrepancies emerged regarding
whether their relationship was only online or by telephone, the veracity of his fathers
assertion that the couple had met in person in early 2009, claims that before the leukemia
diagnosis Kekua was in a near-fatal car accident, and confusion about the date that Kekua died
from leukemia. Media reported that Kekuas death occurred just before Teos grandmother
died (September 12, 2012), and the public wondered why he waited until December 26 to tell
Notre Dame College officials that he had received a call from someone using Kekuas voice
and phone number while he was at a sport awards event on December 6, 2012well after her
supposed death. In the end, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo confessed in multiple U.S. TV interviews that
he had fallen in love with Manti Teo, was the telephone voice of Kekua, and was the sole
perpetrator of the hoax.107 Manti Teo currently is playing professional football in the United
States, and Ronaiah Tuiasosopo had his 15 minutes of fame108 by making the rounds on U.S.
TV shows.
According to an anti-bullying site, NoBullying.com, catfishing is classified as
cyberbullying. Cyberbullying refers to the deliberate use of digital media to communicate
false, embarrassing, or hostile information about another person.109 Unlike traditional
bullying, cyberbullying can be completely anonymous and does not require a physical location
or a face-to-face encounter.110 The power in cyberbullying lies in its anonymity. Cyberbullying
is a growing problem and, as a result, 49 U.S. states have adopted or are adopting laws against
it.111
CONCLUSION
The goal of this chapter has been to help illuminate the inherent rewards and costs of
seeking and developing relationships through traditional and online channels to find love,
affection, intimacy, friendship, companionship, gifts, money, or security. In particular, literature
on matrimonial and personal ads, online dating practices, and romance scams highlights the
issue of deceptive self-presentation on the Internet and the myriad reasons people elect to build
and maintain relationships in the digital era.
Although interpersonal relationships are built on a complex matrix of factors including
emotion, social custom, cultural belief, personal compatibility, family structure, and practical
concerns, social exchange theory crystallizes these complexities into a simple binary of gains
and losses. This is useful because it highlights motives for connecting with others and exposes
patterns in relationship development. Sexual interactions extended the social exchange theory
into what has been termed the sexual exchange theory.112 The value of what is gained and
exchanged depends on the preferences of the individuals involved. Spending time together or
engaging in sexual relations can be viewed as valuable resources. The Internet provides a new
marketplace for the supply and demand of a pool of men or women to date.
It must be acknowledged that the Internet holds the promise of uniting people into
successful romantic relationships. In fact, individuals in online relationships can report higher
levels of trust, intimacy, and communication satisfaction with their partners due to the
hyperpersonal nature of online interactionfactors that predict greater relationship
satisfaction.113 People in online relationships might idealize their partners because of their
dependence on the scant and often skewed cues in a limited medium, but the Internet cuts both
ways. Individuals can preserve electronic communication to verify message content and ensure
the consistency of their partners disclosures.114 As communication technologies evolve,
Internet channels that more closely approximate face-to-face interaction might enhance
relational intimacy and self-disclosure in positive ways.115
Despite the intense emotional arousal online romances often engender, participants often
disrupt offline relationships by using the Internet to initiate online affairs or facilitate other
forms of infidelity.116 Individuals in online relationships reported a strong need for caution as
well as a way to deal with stigma from disapproving family and friends that could endanger the
longevity of the online relationships.117, 118 Although online relationships might originate in a
cyber-cocoon of ardor, the real world often intrudes, creating conflict or exposing faults in
carefully constructed identities. For many in online relationships, happily ever after comes
with a price. As Wildermuth and Vogl-Bauer (2007) stated, many online romantic participants
who mentioned true love also reported the emotional costs of online love. In fact, the intensity
of the pain and heartbreak expressed was overwhelming for some participants.119 Love in
many contexts involves risk, and seeking and maintaining relationships on the Internet is no
different in that respect. However, it is important to understand the unique aspects of
interpersonal communication in cyberspace to help foster healthy relationships and prevent
negative outcomes.
NOTES
1. John W. Thibaut and Harold H. Kelley, The Social Psychology of Groups (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1959).
2. Bram P. Buunk and Karin S. Prins, Loneliness, Exchange Orientation, and Reciprocity In Friendships, Personal
Relations 5 (1998): 114.
3. Ronald M. Sabatelli and John Pearce, J., Exploring Marital Expectations, Journal of Social and Personal
Relationships 3 (1986): 30721.
4. Smeeta Mishra, Mathhukutty M., Monippally, and Krishna Jayakar, Self-Presentation in Online Environments: A Study of
Indian Muslim Matrimonial Profiles, Asian Journal of Communication 23 (2013): 3853.
5. Catherine Cameron, Stuart Oskamp, and William Sparks, Courtship American Style: Newspaper Ads, The Family
Coordinator (1977): 2730.
6. Kay Deaux and Hanna Randel, Courtship in the Personals Column: The Influence of Gender and Sexual Orientation,
Sex Roles 11 (1984): 36375.
7. Anita Pandey, Culture, Gender, and Identity in Cross-Cultural Personals and Matrimonials, World Englishes 23 (2004):
40327.
8. Jacqueline Motyl, Trading Sex for College Tuition: How Sugar Daddy Dating Sites May Be Sugar Coating
Prostitution, Penn State Law Review 117 (2013): 92757.
9. Alex Miller, Sugar Dating: A New Take on an Old Issue, Buffalo Journal of Gender, Law and Social Policy 13
(2011).
10. Melissa Beech, My Sugar Daddy, The Daily Beast (November 30, 2008), accessed December 13, 2014,
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2008/11/30/my-sugar-daddy.html.
11. Stephanie Goldberg, College Sugar Babies for Cash, CNN (February 26, 2013), accessed December 13, 2014,
http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/26/living/students-sugar-daddy-relationships/index.html?hpt=us_t5.
12. Frederick, Evan L., Lauren M. Burch, Jimmy Sanderson, and Marion Hambrick, To Invest in the Invisible: A Case
Study of Manti Teos Image Repair Strategies During the Katie Couric Interview, Public Relations Review 40 (2014): 780
788.
13. Catfish. Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures, 2010) (movie).
14. Catfish: The TV Show. Executive Producer and Director, David Metzler (New York: MTV, 2012) (TV show).
15. Elizabeth Jagger, Is Thirty the New Sixty? Dating, Age and Gender in a Postmodern, Consumer Society, Sociology
39 (2005): 89106.
16. Pratima Dave, Societal Attitude and Gender Bias As Reflected in the Language of Matrimonial Advertisements.
Language in India 12 (2012): 26175.
17. Mara B. Adelman, Mara B., and Aaron C. Ahuvia, Mediated Channels for Mate Seeking: A Solution to Involuntary
Singlehood? Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8 (1991): 27389.
18. Nan Zhou and Zulkifli Abdullah, Canadian Matchmaker Advertisements: The More Things Change, the More They
Remain the Same, International Journal of Advertising 14 (1995): 33448.
19. Ibid., 346.
20. Ibid., 33448.
21. Adelman and Ahuvia, Mediated Channels for Mate Seeking, 27389.
22. Jagger, Is Thirty the New Sixty? 89106.
23. Pandey, Culture, Gender, and Identity, 40327.
24. Srividya Ramasubramanian and Parul Jain, Gender Stereotypes and Normative Heterosexuality in Matrimonial Ads
From Globalizing India, Asian Journal of Communication 19 (2009): 25369.
27. Ibid., 40327.
28. Srilakshmi Ramakrishnan, Wheatish Grooms and Innocent Divorces: Commodifying Attributes in the Discourse of
Indian Matrimonials, Discourse & Society 23 (2012): 43249.
29. Srividya Ramasubramanian and Parul Jain, Gender Stereotypes and Normative Heterosexuality in Matrimonial Ads
From Globalizing India, Asian Journal of Communication 19 (2009): 256.
31. Ramasubramanian and Jain, Gender Stereotypes, 25369.
32. Mishra, Monippally, and Jayakar, Self Presentation in Online Environments, 3853.
34. Ramakrishnan, Wheatish Grooms, 43249.
38. Pratima, Societal Attitude and Gender Bias, 26175.
43. Mishra, Monippally, and Jayakar, Self-Presentation in Online Environments, 3853.
45. Sheena Malhotra and Everett M. Rogers, Satellite Television and the New Indian Woman, International
Communication Gazette 62 (2000): 40729.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Pratima, Societal Attitude and Gender Bias, 26175.
50. Mishra, Monippally, and Jayakar, Self Presentation in Online Environments, 3853.
53. Aaron Smith and Maeve Duggan, Online Dating & Relationships, Pew Research Internet Project, accessed January
1, 2015, http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/10/21/online-dating-relationships/.
54. Mary Madden and Amanda Lenhart, Online Dating, Pew Research Internet Project (March 5, 2006), accessed
December 8, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2006/03/05/online-dating/.
55. Smith and Duggan, Online Dating & Relationships, accessed January 1, 2015.
http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/10/21/online-dating-relationships/.
56. Ibid.
57. Valerian J. Derlega, Sandra Metts, Sandra Petronio, and Stephen T. Margulis, Self-Disclosure (Newbury Park, CA:
Sage Publications, 1993).
58. Malcolm, R. Parks, and Kory Floyd, Making Friends in Cyberspace. Journal of Communication 46 (1996): 8097.
59. Adam N. Joinson, Self-Disclosure in Computer Mediated Communication: The Role of Self-Awareness and Visual
Anonymity, European Journal of Social Psychology 31 (2001): 17792.
60. Joseph B. Walther, Group and Interpersonal Effects in International Computer-Mediated Collaboration, Human
62. Joseph B. Walther, Selective Self-Presentation in Computer-Mediated Communication: Hyperpersonal Dimensions of
Technology, Language, and Cognition, Computers in Human Behavior 23 (2007): 253857.
63. Jorge Pena, Joseph B. Walther, and Jeffrey T. Hancock, Effects of Geographic Distribution on Dominance
Perceptions in Computer-Mediated Groups, Communication Research 34 (2007): 31331.
64. Joseph, B. Walther and Malcolm R. Parks, Cues Filtered Out, Cues Filtered In: Computer-Mediated Communication
and Relationships, in Handbook of Interpersonal Communication, 3rd ed., edited by Mark L. Knapp and John A. Daly, 529
63 (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002).
65. Sarah Tonkin, Getting Hyper-Personal, Global Media Journal: Australian Edition 4 (2010): 19.
66. Madden and Lenhart, Online Dating, Pew Research Internet Project (March 5, 2006), accessed December 8, 2014,
http://www.pewinternet.org/2006/03/05/online-dating/.
67. Paige, M. Padgett, Personal Safety and Sexual Safety for Women Using Online Personal Ads, Sexuality Research
and Social Policy 4 (2007): 2737.
68. Monica, T. Whitty and Adrian N. Carr, Cyberspace Romance: The Psychology of Online Relationships (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
69. U.S. Department of Justice, and Federal Bureau of Investigation, A Parents Guide to Internet Safety, Compiler 19
(1999): 1417, accessed December 25, 2014, https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/abstract.aspx?ID=179127.
70. Smith and Duggan, Online Dating & Relationships, accessed January 1, 2015,
http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/10/21/online-dating-relationships/.
71. Mary McFarlane, Rachel Kachur, Sheana Bull, and Cornelis Rietmeijer, C., Women, the Internet, and Sexually
Transmitted Infections, Journal of Womens Health 13 (2004): 68994.
72. Ibid.
73. Danielle Couch, Pranee Liamputtong, and Marian Pitts, What Are the Real and Perceived Risks and Dangers of
Online Dating? Perspectives from Online Daters, Health, Risk & Society 14 (2012): 702.
74. Tonkin, Getting Hyper-Personal, 19.
75. Ibid.
76. Tom Buchanan and Monica T. Whitty, The Online Dating Romance Scam: Causes and Consequences of Victimhood,
Psychology, Crime & Law 20 (2014): 26183.
77. Ibid.
78. Aunshul Rege, Whats Love Got to Do with It? Exploring Online Dating Scams and Identity Fraud, International
Journal of Cyber Criminology 3 (2009): 494512.
79. Buchanan and Whitty, The Online Dating Romance Scam, 26183.
80. Monica T. Whitty and Tom Buchanan, The Online Romance Scam: A Serious Cybercrime, Cyberpsychology,
Behavior, and Social Networking 15, no. 3 (2012): 181.
81. Rege, Whats Love Got to Do with It? 494512.
82. Tan Hooi Koon and D. David Yoong, Preying on Lonely Hearts: A Systematic Deconstruction of an Internet
Scammers Online Lover Persona, Journal of Modern Languages 23 (2013): 2840.
83. Monica T. Whitty, The Scammers Persuasive Techniques Model: Development of a Stage Model to Explain the Online
Dating Scam, British Journal of Criminology 53 (2013): 66584.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid., 676.
87. Ibid., 66584.
88. Monica, T. Whitty and Adrian N. Carr, Cyberspace Romance: The Psychology of Online Relationships (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
89. Artemio Ramirez, Erin M. Sumner, Christina Fleuriet, and Megan Cole, When Online Dating Partners Meet Offline:
The Effect of Modality Switching on Relational Communication Between Online Daters, Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication (2014): 116.
90. Sandra R. Leiblum, Women, Sex and The Internet, Sex Relationship Therapy 16 (2001): 389405.
91. Ibid., 389.
92. Brandon Wade, Seeking Arrangement: The Definitive Guide to Sugar Daddy and Mutually Beneficial
Relationships (San Francisco, CA: Bush Street Press, 2009).
93. Ibid., 222.
94. Ibid., xi.
95. Ibid.
96. Jacqueline Motyl, Trading Sex for College Tuition: How Sugar Daddy Dating Sites May Be Sugar Coating
Prostitution, Penn State Law Review 117 (2013): 92757.
97. Ibid.
98. Ibid.
99. Nancy Luke, Confronting the Sugar Daddy Stereotype: Age and Economic Asymmetries and Risky Sexual Behavior
in Urban Kenya, International Family Planning Perspectives 31, no. 1 (March 2005): 614.
100. PR Web, New Online Dating Website Survey Shows Positive Outlook for Sugar Babies in 2014 (January 21,
2014), accessed December 13, 2014
http://www.prweb.com/releases/SugarDaddyForMe/2014OutlookForSugarBabies/prweb11499512.htm.
101. PR Web, New Online Dating Website Survey Shows 52% of Women Are Comfortable Dating Men 30+ Years
Older than Them (April 23, 2013), accessed December 13, 2014
http://www.prweb.com/releases/OnlineDatingWebsite/AgeGapSugarBabySurvey/prweb10651128.htm.
102. SugarMamaDatingSite.com, Top 5 Sugar Mama Dating Site Reviews, accessed December 24, 2013,
http://www.sugarmommadatingsite.com/.
103. PR Newswire, Sugarsugar.Com Launches Mobile App to Connect Sugar Daddies and Sugar Babies (May 10,
2011), accessed December 30, 2014, http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sugarsugarcom-launches-mobile-app-to-
connect-sugar-daddies-and-sugar-babies-121558208.html.
104. Catfish, directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures, 2010) (movie).
105. Catfish: The TV Show, executive producer and director, David Metzler (New York: MTV, 2012) (TV show).
106. NBC News, 9 Baffling Questions in the Manti Teo Girlfriend Hoax (January 17, 2013), accessed January 4, 2015,
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/17/16564736-9-baffling-questions-in-the-manti-teo-girlfriend-hoax?lite.
107. Associated Press, Hoaxer Was in Love with Manti Teo, ESPN (January 31, 2013), accessed January 4, 2015,
http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/8900688/ronaiah-tuiasosopo-says-was-love-manti-teo.
108. Andy Warhol, Exhibition of Warhols Work (program). Stockholm, Sweden: Moderna Museet, 1968.
109. Gwen OKeeffe and Kathleen Clarke-Pearson, Clinical ReportThe Impact of Social Media on Children,
Adolescents, and Families, Pediatrics 127 (2011): 801.
110. Allison M. Schenk and William J. Fremouw, Prevalence, Psychological Impact, and Coping of Cyberbully Victims
Among College Students, Journal of School Violence 1 (2012): 2137.
111. Sameer Hinduja and Justin W. Patchin, State Cyberbullying Laws: A Brief Review of State Cyberbullying Laws and
Policies, Cyberbullying Research Center (July 14, 2014), accessed December 10, 2014, http://cyberbullying.us/state-
cyberbullying-laws-a-brief-review-of-state-cyberbullying-laws-and-policies/.
112. Roy F. Baumeister and Kathleen D Vohs, Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in
Heterosexual Interactions, Personality and Social Psychology Review 8 (2004): 33963. doi: 10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_2.
113. Traci Anderson and Tara Emmers-Sommer, Predictors of Relationship Satisfaction in Online Romantic Relationships,
Communication Studies 57 (2006): 15372.
114. Susan M. Wildermuth and Sally Vogl-Bauer, We Met on the Net: Exploring the Perceptions of Online Romantic
Relationship Participants, Southern Communication Journal 72 (2007): 217.
115. Perry M. Pauley and Tara M. Emmers-Sommer, The Impact of Internet Technologies on Primary and Secondary
Romantic Relationship Development, Communication Studies 58 (2007): 411427.
116. Wildermuth and Vogl-Bauer, We Met on the Net, 211227.
117. Kim-Phong Huynh, Si-Wei Lim, and Marko M. Skoric, Stepping Out of the Magic Circle: Regulation of Play/Life
Boundary in MMO-Mediated Romantic Relationship, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 18 (2013): 25164.
118. Wildermuth and Vogl-Bauer, We Met on the Net, 21127.
119. Ibid.
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14
Vomitorium of Venom: Framing Culpable

Youth, Bewildered Adults, and the Death of
Amanda Todd
Michelle Stack
INTRODUCTION
On September 7, 2012, Amanda Todd, a 15-year-old Coquitlam, British Columbia, high
school student, posted a video in which she held up handwritten cards that explained how a
man in an online chat room convinced her to show him her breast. Soon after, she received a
message from him threatening to distribute images of her breast if she did not give him a
show.1 She held up more handwritten cards to explain what unfolded next. The police
knocked on her door at 4 a.m. to tell her that a pornographic image of her had been distributed
online. A girl who thought she was trying to steal her boyfriend beat her while other teens
looked on. Amanda attempted suicide and was admitted to hospital. After discharge the
bullying continued. Amanda Todd took her life a month after posting her video online. On the
day of her death, her video went viral; Facebook and Twitter were used to set up online
memorials. Canadas newspaper of record, The Globe and Mail, reported that memorials
were to be held in at least five American states, in many cities in India, and in Copenhagen.2 In
an October 20, 2012, video interview with the Vancouver Sun, Amandas mother Carol Todd
stated:
The media asks, Why wasnt she in sports or an activity to keep her busy? And,
Why was she on the Internet? She did use the Internet sometimes on her downtime.
But, you know what, she figure-skated her whole life in our community, and she swam
competitively in the summer for a couple of years. She did gymnastics. She did soccer.
She cheerleaded for six years. She played ice hockey in our community. She did as
much as any child could and maybe a little bit more. It was not about a child who
had nothing to do who sat on her computer 24/7. That wasnt it.3
Carol Todds representation of her daughterunlike that of much of the media coverage
resists the stereotypes of a girl with no friends, in front of the Internet 24/7, with hapless
parents and uncaring teachers. Amanda Todds death resulted in calls for school and judicial
policy changes from local to international levels. Celebrities including Demi Lovato, Magic
Johnson, Nelly Furtado, and Justin Bieber all responded with pleas to support victims of
bullying. The Canadian government introduced a new cyberbullying bill,4 municipalities made
bullying a fineable offense, and the provincial government created a 10-point ERASE
bullying5 plan. In 2014, police identified a man living in the Netherlands as the person who
violated Amanda Todd.
This chapter examines how policy options related to online violence and sexual violence
were represented in the media coverage of Amandas death. It argues that the media
approached the coverage as a moral panic framing the main issues and policy responses
related to her suicide as online bullyingnot systemic violence against women. This topic is
important because it addresses online violence against young women and identifies the ways in
which media representations reify existing structural inequity.
The resulting policy options were disappointing and contradictory, as they individualized
the proposed options focusing solely on responses to the limited and gendered framings of peer
bullying. Absent was media and policy analysis that acknowledged the simultaneous violence
wrought by global male predatory online violence and violence in local, physical spaces
experienced by Amanda Todd.
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK: MEDIA PANICS, NEWS FRAMES, AND

DENIAL OF STRUCTURAL OPPRESSION
Moral panics often involve youth and frame media as the bad guy. Fear of youth
negatively influenced by media has a long history that includes penny dreadfuls, TV, and video
games.6 Kristen Drotner,7 drawing on Stanley Cohens8 moral panic theory, coined the term
media panics. Drotner argues that a media panic occurs when the media is both instigator
and purveyor of the discussion,9 and is based on good versus bad. Media panics revolve
around adults concerned that youth are being corrupted and acting badly because of media. A
media panic frequently is based on an episode that is used as reason for intervention. The
intervention is seen as resolution and media attention to the crisis decreases.
To speak of media panics is not to deny the harm that can occur through social media. A
number of studies point to the significant numbers of girls and women who experience sexual
violence online and offline, often by the same perpetrator.10, 11 Jane Emma demonstrates e-bile
(vitriolic e-mails)assaults directed at women that focus on them as ugly or slutty. For men,
the focus of e-bile is homophobic or focused on ugly female partners or family members.12 The
anonymity for perpetrators of online violence and lifelong public record of degradation for the
victim is different. Victims often do not know who is bullying them and those bullying can do
so without fear of being named. The number of people that see a degrading or embarrassing
image today is huge in comparison to a few classmates that might have been the audience in
previous times.
Amanda Todd changed schools to try and get away from the violence she endured that
began with an adult male in the Netherlands who threatened to share her picture if she did not
continue to do as he asked. When she didnt, he widely shared her picture to school friends that
he found through her Facebook page. She moved schools and he tracked her down and did the
same thing again. Peers did use these images to cause Amanda Todd harm. Emily Ryalls
analyzed media coverage around the suicide of Phoebe Prince; Prince also was represented as
being bullied to death, predominately by girls using cybertechnology.13 In both cases,
understanding why peers engaged in this behavior requires analysis and action that challenges
collective amnesia around male violence.
John Edward Campbell argues against the liberatory disembodiment cyborg thesis which
creates the Internet as a sovereign realm, distinct from and unaffected by the cultural,
political, and economic forces shaping the mundane world we inhabit.14 Instead he shows that
there is no virtual place that is separatean escape from the material and embodied. Focusing
on mediaand in the case of Amanda Todd, social mediaas the problem individualizes
structural oppression. Mary Lynn Young and Yasmin Jiwani note that there is a hierarchy of
crime in newsrooms, and that how crime is represented in news is gendered and racialized.15
Framing research falls into two major categories: media frames and audience frames. This
chapter focuses on media frames. There is no one definition of media frames. Robert Entman
defines framing as to promote a particular problem definition, causal evaluation, moral
evaluation, or treatment recommendations.16 The process of frame building around youth often
involves government, those seen as experts on children and youth (such as teachers and
psychologists) and media. Previous research points to how journalists are influenced by
frames produced by their own experience as children when reporting on children and youth.17
Media frames, Dietram A. Scheufele and Matthew C. Scheufele argue, both shape and reflect
the policy process.18
METHODS
This chapter focuses on two national Canadian papers, The Globe and Mail and the
National Post; the provincial papers, the Vancouver Sun and the Vancouver Province, paper
of record and widely read in Canadas most populous city. The online Huffington Post, which
is an influential news aggregator and blog, also was examined.19 The author coded all pieces
published by these outlets about Amanda Todd that were classified as news, editorials,
columns, and op-eds, which enabled analysis of the range of views around bullying provided
within the selected media outlets.
Textual analysis was used to examine the content, focusing on the following questions:
Who and what is seen as responsible for bullying?

Who and what is represented as the solution to bullying?
How is social media represented in relation to bullying?
The author coded headlines to analyze media representations of the cause and appropriate
policy response to Amanda Todds death. Headlines were analyzed first because they
frequently alter readers interpretations of news stories (Blake20; Geer and Kahn21). Second,
was the lead paragraph for the dominant/counter frame. Lastly, the entire article was studied to
examine multiple and contradictory frames in one article. Papers included had relatively high
readership; but an argument can be made for their decreasing influence, given the rise of social
media. Indeed, a key part of print medias coverage of Amanda Todds death is focused on
what is represented as the problems created by social media. Some outlets, for example, went
against long-standing guidelines on reporting suicide, stating that they felt pressured to do so
because social media was not compelled to follow the same guidelines.
SOCIAL MEDIA AS A VOMITORIUM OF VENOM

A central theme of coverage was based on the premise that the online world has created
new forms of bullying that require new ways to protect and punish young people. Social media
frequently was discussed as causing crime when in the hands of unsupervised young people.
The solution was harsh punishment to stop the tide of tormentors. A National Post article titled
Like a Terrorist Attack on Our Kids: Amanda Todds Tormentors and Avengers Worse
than Bullies states: Bullies can be identified, confronted. They can be punished, even
reformed. Tormentors like them come from all segments of society, from all age groups,
from all directions. From anywhere in the world. They are increasingly common and they cant
be stopped.22
Brian Hutchinson does acknowledge that violence can be committed by people of all ages,
but the language conveys monsters who emerge out of nowhere. The inexplicability of why
these tormentors spread creates a dystopic future. There is no evidence provided for stating
that tormentors are increasingly common.
The focus of many articles involved whether social media was as dangerous when in the
hands of young people. Rosie DiManno declares social media a vomitorium of venom.23
Many headlines focused on social media as the cause of deadly bullying in the hands of less-
than-human users. DiManno describes social media as a tool without any conscience of its
own. Yet it has become, in the hands of juveniles and the embittered, a malignancy. But how
to reasonably and practically suppress the vomitorium of venom on social media? To
recondition teenagers numbed to the splatter of hatefulness?24
Targeting an entire segment of societyyouthas objects who need to be punished and
reconditioned like a car is common. It appears adults are not violent and, therefore, their job is
to recondition teenagers to be more like adults. Days after Amanda Todds death there were
calls for new policies and legislation. An opposition member introduced a private members
bill to fight cyberbullying, which he stated was at a breaking point.25 There was a frequent
language of crisis caused by social media, but these were often twinned with stories of adults
who experienced bullying prior to the development of social media.
TAKING OFF THE KID GLOVES: REASSERTING AUTHORITY IN
THE INTERNET ERA
Violent language such as crack down,26 laws with more teeth,27 take aim,28 and
shame the bullies29 is common in the coverage. RCMP given more teeth to deal with
bullies: Mayor in Alberta town: In light of the tragic suicide of B.C. teenager Amanda Todd, a
small Alberta town enacted an anti-bullying bylaw in October.30
Action language such as enact is used frequently throughout the coverage and is focused
on what adults will do to youth. Schools are mentioned as needing to catch up with the times
and deal with what is represented as a decline in civility caused by social media. Vancouver
Sun columnist Barbara Yaffe, for example, argued that new rules are needed to ensure that
bullies who pursue their brand of online cruelty are appropriately punished.31
An anti-youth sentiment is paired with a concern that they are ignorant of things their elders
understood at their age: Young people today have little concept of privacy or courtesy when it
comes to their online activities.32 Yaffes solution is to teach social skills. She does not
provide any possible mediating factors because social media is presented as the cause of
youths bad behavior. Because social media causes disorder, there is a need to take strong
measures to restore it.
Michael Den Tandt,33 writing for the Vancouver Sun, states, Bullying can be prevented
but administrators need to change attitudes and take off the kid gloves when dealing with
aggressive perpetrators. Bullies are presented not as children but as aggressive perpetrators,
and the answer to dealing with them often draws on the language of violence (e.g., taking off
the kid gloves). Den Tandt further states that children should be expelled and that parents of
bullies are sometimes loath to face the truth of their childs behavior. They should be required
to do so.34 Here, Den Tandt assumes that parents of bullies are not responsible and therefore
must be required to become so. How this process of requiring should take place is not clear.
Youth violence is represented as something with an easy solution.
Shelley Fralic wrote in the Vancouver Sun about her own experience of being bullied in
school and her desire to see the pictures of bullies published along with their names.35
Research about bullying or frameworks for dealing with bullying in other jurisdictions were
rarely mentioned. Pointing to experiences beyond her own would provide complexity to her
argument. What about children, for example, who are both bullied and bully? What happens to
children who have the bully label for life because adults posted the childrens pictures online?
JUST TELL AN ADULT AND EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY:

REASSERTING ADULT AUTHORITY IN THE INTERNET AGE
Days after Amanda Todds death, Christy Clark, the premier of British Columbia,
announced an anti-bullying initiative with a 10-point plan that focused on apps and an online
site for reporting bullying, training for teacher candidates and professional development, a
provincial advisory group, and threat-assessment protocols.36 Young people were the audience
of the plan, which focused on adult-controlled technology as the solution to deceasing online
bullying. In the 10-point plan, children were not part of deciding how to create a safer school
culture; instead, they are told which adults to talk to. The framing is that adultsnot children
determine what and how a threat will be defined and resolved.
The solution to bullying is framed as making sure that youth who are too scared to tell an
adult will now do so and, requiring adults to be more attuned to risk so they are more
competent at conducting threat assessment and intervention.37 Much of the coverage assumed
youth needed to be forced to come to terms with their lack of humanity. A Vancouver Sun
headline states, Amanda Todds video should be compulsory viewing.38 The focus of the
article is compulsory viewing for young people, but the reader is not told why young people
are the sole focus of the intervention. In a press release, Minister of Education Don McRae
states,
The only way to end bullying is for us all to take a stand against it. I encourage children
to be an example to their friends by taking part in anti-bullying efforts in their
community. If a child sees someone being bullied, I hope he or she chooses not to join
in. If a child is being bullied, I hope he or she can find the courage to report it.39
It is up to children to stand up to bullies and to report bullying. Absent are the voices and
ideas of young people. The assumption that children who are bullied should stand up to their
bully is universal. Vulnerability is represented as something that is resolved through individual
courage and surveillance. Also absent is the possibility that adults might harm children or
implicitly or explicitly make acts of peer-to-peer violence acceptable. When adult
responsibility is mentioned it is usually at the level of stating that parents need to pay more
attention to what their kids do on the Internet.
On the one hand, based on media representation it is clear that Amanda Todds parents
were concerned about her and understood technology. On the other hand, her death is used as a
segue to warn parents that they are responsible for the violence their children experience at
school or elsewhere. Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente writes, Theres no sure way
to bully-proof our kids. But the best protection isnt legislation or a bunch of new programs.
Its the constant, close involvement of responsible adultsparents, teachers, coaches, bus
drivers, aunts, uncleswhore aware of their role in modelling good conduct, empathy and
emotional regulation.40
Based on Wentes statement is the reader to assume this was lacking in the life and death of
Amanda Todd and those accused of bullying her? Children are once again seen as in a vacuum
of evil unless mentored by close adults to be good; therefore children who act badly or are
treated badly are the problem of these ineffective adults. The language of psychology
emotional regulationis frequent in the coverage.
PATRIARCHY AND GOOD GIRLS IN BARBARIC PLACE, BAD GIRLS

IN CANADA
The most common collective responsibility was to punish and to emphasize that bullying
did not fit with a pluralistic, caring societyunlike in some other countries where savage
violence is represented as normal. The Globe and Mail declared that 2012 was a year of
rising up against impunity.
[T]ens of thousands of protesters against a Taliban shooting in Pakistan and a gang rape
in India signaled a broad movement against the cultural norms and state policies that
promote impunity for crimes against girls and women. In Canada, the norms of a free
and open Internet that bullies hide behind came under sustained attack. The year of
rising up against impunity.41
The cultural norms of places deemed other, such as those of India, are singled out as
promoting violence against women and girls. The issue in Canada is represented as bullying.
The former, therefore, is represented as an entire society, whereas in Canada the issue is
represented as episodic and individualized. A letter to the Globe and Mail by Stanley
Greenspoon and titled Malalas example, argues that [i]t would take a small fraction of the
courage of 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai (Teens Shooting Shows Enormity of Challenges
Facing Pakistan) for students in our schools to befriend, support, and stand up for their fellow
students who are being bullied, some to the point of committing suicide.42
Systemic oppression rarely is mentioned, but it often is used to emphasize the past or other
contexts. Daphne Bramham starts her column by citing an American Psychological Association
study finding that early sexualization through media is connected to girls health and to boys
sexist views of girls; however, Bramham quickly moves away from the systemic.
But thats only part of this complicated story. They sucked the life out of her until
she could bear it no longer. Its a little different from the swarm of Victoria teens
seven girls and one boywho murdered 14-year-old Reena Virk in 1997. We shouldnt
trivialize what they did to Amanda by calling them bullies, even if all are adolescents
themselves. They need to be named for what they really are: Tormentors, torturers, and
maybe even murderers. And they need to be brought to account. Amandas tormentors
were worse than mere bullies.43
Similar to coverage after Virks murder, punishing bad individuals rather than challenging
systemic racism and sexism is represented as the solution. Reena Virk was a 14-year-old South
Asian girl murdered by seven girls and a boy. Jiwani argues that media entrench the belief that
racism is a behavior of individuals or hate groups rather than everyday acts that impact the
lives of racialized people.44 The circumstances of the lives of these young people are not
questioned because they are not individualsthey are a swarm.45 If they are a swarm then
they are not human. It thus follows that the day-to-day oppression that shows young people who
is valued and who is not is left unaddressed.
A WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY TO TALK ABOUT SUICIDE
A Globe and Mail editorial reads: Teens suicide seen as a chance to discuss online
bullying.46 The unanswered question is: Why do we only talk about violence when a tragedy
happens? Left unaddressed is the question: What would news coverage look like that includes
discussion of the livesnot just the deathsof young people? The Globe and Mail accused
the Vancouver School Boards urging that media follow suicide-prevention guidelines of
muzzling the media, which gives short shrift to real measures that must be taken.47 It is
unclear from the coverage why ignoring the guidelines provides the information needed to take
real measures. What measures are needed also is unclear. The author was contacted by The
Globe and other outlets for comment on Amanda Todds death and the role of social media. A
repeated theme in these conversations was that the guidelines are outdated because social
media were not bound by professional guidelines and thus were reporting what they wanted to.
However, in its coverage legacy media did not focus on the unfairness of being expected to
follow professional guidelines. Instead the focus was public good:
It would be futile for the mainstream media to tiptoe around Amandas suicide when
young people are informed by social media. Twenty million people watched the video
made by Amanda in which she discussed her pain at being bullied over the Internet.
Her face and her heartbreak are known everywhere.48
The Globe and Mail for example, attributed reporting on Amanda Todds death to the
representative for Children and Youth in BC, pushing for more support and provincial
politicians making promises to improve services. The representative, Mary Ellen Turpel, has
requested more resources. What perhaps was different was the short-term media attention
given to her consistent calls for attention to the rights and needs of children.
Guidelines from organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) do not tell
media not to cover suicide, but suggest that coverage should include where to get help, should
not sensationalize suicide or make it seem like the answer to a crisis, and should avoid explicit
description of where or how someone killed themselves.49 The WHO guidelines suggest that
media professionals recognize themselves as also being affected by coverage about suicide;
however, no coverage was found to speak about youth represented as bullies. Audiences only
know that the individuals bullied others, but nothing about their lives is analyzed. For example,
were they also bullied? Did they have support? What can we learn from research about the
role of boys in girl-to-girl relational violence? I found these frames in feminist research on
bullying,50 but not in any of the news coverage analyzed for the present work.
Social media was reported as causing bullying, opening up discussion about bullying, and
causing harm when in the hands of vigilantes:
The murky online world is full of fake names, ages, identities and photos. Anonymity
has led many to act in ways they never would IRLin real lifeon message boards,
social media and chat rooms, and that anonymity is defended by many experts and
casual users alike. Its part of the presumed freedom of the web.51
These writers both are critical of online hacktivists, but also point to them
sometimes catching pedophiles and helping girls cope with cyberstalking.
ACKNOWLEDGING HOMOPHOBIA, RACISM, AND PATRIARCHY,

WHETHER ONLINE OR OFFLINE
Less frequent were articles that focused on the collective responsibility of adults to
address the bullying of children caused by systemic oppression. These articles often included
personal stories. Morin, an MP, spoke about being bullied and not wanting to tell adults
because I just didnt want to put the focus on my sexual orientation.52 This article is one of
the few that connects a personal experience of bullying with systemic oppression and uses the
personal to talk about other forms of oppression. Kim Mackrael writes, While he [Morin]
was targeted because of his perceived sexual orientation, other kids face taunts because of
their weight, skin colour, religion or any other aspect that makes them different, he said.53
Ashkan Sultani, the father of a son who took his own life, was quoted in the Globe around
the connection between learning disabilities and violence. Rob Mickleburgh noted the learning
disabilities experienced by both Ashkan Sultani and Amanda Todd: When kids have any kind
of disability, they are an easy target, Mr. Sultani said. They are vulnerable, often targeted by
other kids with low self-esteem.54
Here Sultani connects children with disabilitiesincluding his son and Amanda Toddas
particularly vulnerable. This view provides an alternative frame, though what is absent is how
children come to see children with disabilities as targets. Where do they learn that disability is
something to use against another individual? How do institutions, including media and schools,
talk about disability?
Most of the articles that challenged homophobia, misogyny, and racism were online
commentary pieces written by women who told stories of themselves or friends who faced
violence as young women; and most were either in online version of legacy media or were
found in the Huffington Post.55 In the commentary Section of the National Post, Sarah Sweet
Newcombe wrote:
This issue of slut shaming, or blaming the victim, is not new. It was taking place back
in 1997 when I was a teen. It was taking place in the 1970s, when my mom was a teen.
And I dare say it was taking place in the 1940s, when my grandmother was a teen.
While the means and methods are more pervasive than ever thanks to the Internet, it is
the same fundamentally cruel, misogynistic instincts that cause people to shame and
blame in the first place.56
The author provides a frame that includes society and an examination of slut shaming as
a long-term issue wedded to misogyny, but she lets readers off the hook by calling misogyny an
instinct.57 Framing misogyny as an instinct naturalizes the experiencemaking is akin to
breathingsuch that little can be done collectively to stop it. The Internet is represented as an
independent actor: Thanks to the Internet. In an op-ed piece written for the Vancouver Sun,
Claire Pitcher urges readers to see the connections among rape chants used during frosh
week at the University of British Columbia, young women having their drinks spiked, and the
sexual exploitation of Amanda Todd and Rehtaeh Parsons (who died by suicide just months
after Amanda Todd): Equally as troubling have been the vitriolic, victim-blaming
commentaries saying boys will be boys or maybe the girls asked for it. Collectively, we
have created and fed a culture where sexual assault is joked about, its victims blamed and its
existence downplayed, even denied.58
Dene Moore wrote a piece for CP wire that was picked up by the Huffington Post. Moore
quotes Rosalind Prober, executive director of a group that fights child sexual exploitation, as
suggesting that what happened to Amanda Todd was sexual exploitation, and not bullying.59
Wayne Spear, a Huffington Post contributor, argues that the use of the word bullying
distracts from talking about how women are sexualized and then attacked for their supposedly
wanton ways: Bullying, I submit, is a euphemistic way of describing these attitudes, and
perhaps even a changing of the subject.60 Jarrah Hodge, a feminist blogger, writes for the
Huffington Post, But calling it bullying or even cyberbullying doesnt do it justice.
Bullying erases specific social factors and makes it seem like something that you age out of.
Adding the cyber prefix doesnt necessarily make it more accurate. Technology was a
catalyst, but webcams, cellphones, and the Internet arent the key to understanding what
happened to Amanda Todd; systemic sexism is.61
These authors all include characters; either themselves or others. They personalize the
story of violence to talk about violence as ongoing and requiring the action of all to participate
and effect needed change. Rather than state that a violent action is inexplicable, these authors
provide a map to what can be done collectively to create structures for nonviolent change by
acknowledging systemic violence.
RIGHTS OF CHILDREN AND CO-OPTING YOUTH ACTIVISM

Very few articles talked about policy choices that governments make that marginalize
children and youth. Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, British Columbia representative for Children
and Youth, was one of the few experts quoted in mainstream coverage who expressed
frustration about the lack of support available for young people in British Columbia. Turpel-
Lafond drew on news proximity by talking about a child in British Columbia to a BC news
outlet. She also attempted to personalize a structural issue by asking the audience to imagine a
12-year-old child in need of help. A 12-year-old maybe phones themselves. You dont say,
Tell your parents to pay $120 an hour and well have someone talk to you. Theyre supposed
to get support.62
Writing for the Vancouver Sun, McInnis was one of the few journalists to connect the
governments announcement of a new anti-bullying program (soon after Amanda Todds death)
to a report by Turpel-Lafond.63 The report descried children in care who were not provided
adequate care by government and who took their lives or self-harmed. McInnis questioned the
commitment of government to deliver on promises to support children.
This author could not find any articles about a Canadian Senate report titled Cyberbullying
Hurts: Respect for Rights in a Digital Age released in December 2012.64 The first
recommendation of the reportauthored by government and opposition memberssuggests
that a coordinated strategy be developed in accordance with the Convention on the Rights of
the Child and in consultation with children. Recommendations focus on educational and
restorative approaches. The only possible reference to systemic oppression is a call for
research that looks at gender differences.
Rarely mentioned was the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of anti-bullying programs; but
Kheiriddin, writing for the National Post, does cite research that points to the ineffectiveness
of anti-bullying programs that categorize young people as either victims or oppressors.65
Hamilton, also writing for the National Post, cites work by a well-known researcher on
bullyingDan Olweuswho argues that cyberbullying is not on the rise and is less common
than conventional bullying.66 Writing for the Global and Mail, Offman draws on experts and
parents who respond to a proposed Canadian government law that would criminalize the
behavior of more children accused of cyberbullying.67
One study from Alberta showed that one-third of students who had cyberbullied had
also been victims of itand both victim and victimizer share difficulties with
emotions, concentration, and getting along with other people, as well as not feeling safe
at school. Does punishing these kids make things better, or worse? How do police
distinguish between the predators and the preyed upon?68
We Day also received substantial coverage. The focus is adults, and often involves
celebrities telling youth that they can change the world. Harold Munro, editor-in-chief of the
Vancouver Sun, told the 20,000 gathered youth that their take-home bags contained a special
section of the newspaper for them: Its full of stories about people like you with a passion
for social justice. Newspapers have always informed people. I would urge you to read
some of the stories and change the world.69
The use of the term social justice is ambiguous. Youth activism in areas of social justice is
missing from the coverage. Two boys in Canada, as an act of activism against homophobia, for
example, started Pink Shirt Day,70 which has become a corporate-sponsored, depoliticized
We Day.
One Globe article discussed the Miss G Project [for Equity in Education],71 a grassroots
feminist organization started by young women. Miss Gs activism is presented as instrumental
in making gender studies part of the Ontario school curriculum. Goldberg makes the connection
between Amanda Todd, Rehtaeh Parsons,72 and a rape trial in the United States, with the need
to stem gender-based violence and bullying.
There also is a recurring assumption that there are no youth in the Canadian context with
the courage to stand up for what is rightdespite the historical and current role of youth
activism around the world (e.g., Out in Schools, Check Your Head, Shannons Dream, Pink
Shirt Day, Arab Spring).
CONCLUSION
Children are inundated with messages about gender, social class, sexuality, and race long
before they reach school, yet the role of adult policies and structures in teaching children the
world is remarkably absent in responses to violence against young people online and offline.
So, too, is an understanding of how violence against girls and women is not something that can
be mitigated through local policies that ignore how social media are used to circulate violence
and the ways, that these forms of circulation affect women online andas in the case of
Amanda Toddher own community and school.
Media have a central role in facilitating or marginalizing difficult public conversations
about the lives and deaths of young people. They also have a central role in setting the
parameters for public discussion about what policies that respond to the lives of youth could
look like, and in facilitating discussion with youth and adults about what policies would give
youth a reason to want to be in the world.
The most frequent theme in the coverage was amoralityyouth who needed to be punished
through stricter laws and school practices, followed by social media causing amoral behavior.
Social media was reported as causing bullying, opening up discussion about bullying and
causing harm when in the hands of vigilantes. The solution to social media was greater
parental monitoring, social media etiquette skills for youth, and shaming and punishing online
bullies. Mental health in relation to helping bullied youth occasionally was mentioned.
Frames are consequential in relation to services provided to young people, disciplinary
processes, and curriculum imposed on them. This research is consistent with the findings from
other studies73 that point to how representation of youth sets the parameters for policy
solutions. If youth are seen as inherently amoral, then money is more likely to be put into
imprisoning them. If they are seen as capable and valuable members of society, then more
money is likely to be put into ensuring that they have the support to be resilient in the face of
vulnerability.74 The overwhelming focus of coverage of Amanda Todd and the deaths of other
youth where youth-to-youth violence was involved is the role of the state to punish.
When the language of bullying is given precedence, youth violence is presented in
contradictory ways often within the same pieceas a dramatic outlier behavior of bad or mad
youth who become worse because of social media, or as the norm in a dangerous era
controlled by social media.
In either scenario youth are not agents of change, but rather are objects of adult intervention
protection or punishment. The dominant narrative about youth, Kelly argues, has become so
ingrained in the minds of adult audiences that they overlook or discount data highlighting
positive trends among teenagers and explain away their own positive experiences with young
people as aberrations.75 Behm-Morawitz and Dana Mastro provide a counter-frame to the
mean girls epidemic frame by drawing on numerous studies that found female-to female
relationships usually are highly supportive and productive through adolescence.76
The deaths of youth by suicide or homicidementioned in the coverage of Amanda Todds
deathwere overwhelmingly of young girls of color or boys who were gay or were thought to
be gay. Despite this finding, homophobia, systemic racism, and sexism rarely were discussed
as causes of violence. Policy responses and media coverage treated systemic issues of
oppression as individual acts of bad children that could be fixed through adult-controlled
media sites, surveillance, punishment, and curriculum on social responsibility.
A handful of journalists, columnists, and op-ed writers who published pieces did
demonstrate that systemic issues can be addressed within mainstream journalism. The
counterframe pieces provided rich ideas for how to acknowledge vulnerability and collective
responsibility while respectfully telling the stories of individuals. This coverage provides
hope for creating relationships and structures grounded in listening and responding to the lives
and deaths of young people.
NOTES
1. Amanda Todd, My Story: Struggling, Bullying, Suicide, Self-Harm (September 7, 2012), accessed August 2, 2014,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOHXGNx-E7E.
2. The Canadian Press, Multiple Vigils Celebrate B.C. Teen Amanda Todd, Condemn Bullying, The Globe and Mail
(October 19, 2012).
3. Gillian Shaw Interview with Carol Todd, Vancouver Sun Exclusive video: Amanda Todds Mother Talks about Her
Daughters Life: There Is the Amanda Todd That the World Came to Know. But There Was More to Amanda and Now Her
Mother Carol Shares the Story of Her Life, Vancouver Sun (October 20, 2012), accessed August 2, 2014,
http://www.vancouversun.com/business/public-sector-
salaries/Exclusive+video+Amanda+Todd+mother+talks+about+daughter+life/7419523/story.html#ixzz38xbn3QXN.
4. See Department of Justice, Government Introduces Legislation to Crack Down on Cyber Bullying, (November 20,
2013), accessed August 2, 2014, http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/news-nouv/nr-cp/2013/doc_32994.html. For critique of the bill,
see New Cyberbullying Law Has Larger Agenda, Expands Police Powers, accessed July 31, 2014,
http://www.cbc.ca/1.2434797
5. Ministry of Education, British Columbia, Erase Bullying, accessed July 30, 2014, http://www.erasebullying.ca/.
6. Kirsten Drotner and Sonia Livingstone, International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture (SAGE, 2008).
7. Kirsten Drotner, Dangerous Media? Panic Discourses and Dilemmas of Modernity, Paedagogica Historica 35, no. 3
(January 1999): 593619, doi:10.1080/0030923990350303.
8. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (New York: St. Martins
Press, 1980).
9. Ibid., 596.
10. Debarati Halder and K. Jaishankar, Cyber Crime and the Victimization of Women: Laws, Rights and Regulations
(IGI Global, 2012), http://www.igi-global.com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/book/cyber-crime-victimization-women/50518
11. Jerry Finn, Cyberstalking, in Encyclopedia of Interpersonal Violence (Thousand Oaks CA: SAGE Publications,
2008), http://knowledge.sagepub.com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/view/violence/n121.xml.
12. Emma Jane, Your a Ugly, Whorish, Slut, Feminist Media Studies 14 no. 4 (2014): 53146.
13. Emily Ryalls, Demonizing Mean Girls in the News: Was Phoebe Prince Bullied to Death? Communication,
Culture & Critique 5, no. 3 (September 1, 2012): 46381, doi:10.1111/j.1753-9137.2012.01127.x.
14. John Edward Campbell, Getting It On Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality, and Embodied Identity (London:
Routledge, 2014).
15. Yasmin Jiwani and Mary Lynn Young, Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse,
Canadian Journal of Communication 31, no. 4 (2006): 900.
16. Robert M. Entman, Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm, Journal of Communication 43, no. 4
(1993): 5158. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.1993.tb01304.x.
17. Michelle Stack, Constructing Common Sense Policies for Schools: The Role of Journalists, International Journal
of Leadership in Education 10, no. 3 (July 2007): 24764, doi: 10.1080/13603120701373649.
18. Dietram A. Scheufele and Matthew C. Nisbet, Framing, in Encyclopedia of Political Communication, by Lynda
Kaid and Christina Holtz-Bacha (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2008),
http://knowledge.sagepub.com/view/politicalcommunication/n220.xml.
19. The Huffington Post is a popular news aggregator and blog.
20. Andrew Blake, Political Journalism Represented by Headline News: Canadian Public and Commercial Media
Compared, Canadian Journal of Political Science 46, no. 2 (2013): 45578.
21. John Geer and Kim Fridkin Kahn, Grabbing Attention: An Experimental Investigation of Headlines During Campaigns,
Political Communication 10, no. 2 (1993): 17591.
22. Brian Hutchinson, Like a Terrorist Attack on Our Kids: Amanda Todds Tormentors and Avengers Worse than
Bullies, National Post (October 16, 2012).
23. Rosie DiManno, Cyber-Bullying Too Mild a Term, Toronto Star (2012).
24. Kim Mackrael, Federal Politicians Consider Best Way to Fight Bullying, The Globe and Mail, accessed July 31,
2014, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/federal-politicians-consider-best-way-to-fight-
bullying/article 4613200/
25. Terry Pedwell, Cyber Bullying on Social Media Is at a Breaking Point, Says NDP MP Championing Private
Members Bill, National Post (October 15, 2012).
26. Lori Culbert and Tobi Cohen, Federal Bill Cracks Down on Cyberbullying, Vancouver Sun (November 21, 2013).
27. Jen Gerson, RCMP Given More Teeth to Deal with Bullies: Mayor in Alberta Town, National Post (December 10,
2012).
28. Kevin Griffin, Program, Bylaw Take Aim at Bullies, Vancouver Sun (November 28, 2012).
29. Shelley Fralic, Time for a Shame-the-Bullies Campaign; Perpetrators Always Seem to Find a Way to Find a Way Out
of Being Held Accountable for Their Actions and Facing the Consequences, Vancouver Sun (October 16, 2012).
30. Brian Hutchinson, Like a Terrorist Attack on Our Kids: Amanda Todds Tormentors and Avengers Worse than
Bullies, National Post (October 16, 2012).
31. Barbara Yaffe, Prevalence of Bullying in Canada Shows Dark Side of Internet, Vancouver Sun (October 17, 2012).
32. Lori Culbert, and Tobi Cohen, Federal Bill Cracks Down on Cyberbullying, Vancouver Sun (November 21, 2013).
33. Michael Den Tandt, We Have the Remedies, Now We Need Action; Bullying Can Be Prevented but Administrators
Need to Change Attitudes and Take Off the Kid Gloves When Dealing with Aggressive Perpetrators, Vancouver Sun
(October 19, 2012).
34. Kevin Griffin, Program, Bylaw Take Aim at Bullies, Vancouver Sun (November, 28, 2012).
bullying/article4613200/
37. Ministry of Education, British Columbia, ERASE Bullying, http://www.erasebullying.ca/policy/policy-erase.php.
38. Shelley Fralic, Amanda Todds Video Should Be Compulsory Viewing, Vancouver Sun (October 23, 2012).
39. Ministry of Education British Columbia, ERASE Bullying: Strategy to Keep Children Safe Online (news release)
(October 17, 2012), http://www2.news.gov.bc.ca/news_releases_2009-2013/2012EDUC0098-001585.htm.
40. Margaret Wente, Best Protection Isnt Legislation, Globe and Mail (October 16, 2012).
41. Editorial, The Year of Resisting Impunity, Globe and Mail (January 1, 2013).
42. Stanley Greenspoon, Malalas Example, Globe and Mail. Letters to the Editor (October 15, 2012).
43. Daphne Bramham, Amandas Tormentors Were Far Worse than Mere Bullies, Vancouver Sun, October 13, 2012.
44. Yasmin Jiwani, Erasing Race: The Story of Reena Virk, Canadian Woman Studies 19, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 17884.
45. Kheiriddin, Anti-Bullying Education Isnt the Answer.
46. Rob Mickleburgh, Teens Suicide Seen As a Chance to Discuss Online Bullying; School District to Remind Everybody
of Some Basic Internet Safety Messages and Encourage Parents to Have Dialogue with Their Kids, Globe and Mail
(October 16, 2012).
47. Geoff Johnson, Dont Blame the Messenger; Chastising the Media for Showing the Amanda Todd Video Gives Short
Shrift to Real Measures That Must Be Taken, Vancouver Sun (December 10, 2012).
48. Teen Suicide, Contagion and the News Media, The Globe and Mail, accessed January 17, 2014,
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/editorials/teen-suicide-contagion-and-the-news-media/article6116592/.
49. World Health Organization, Preventing Suicide: A Resource for Media Professionals (Geneva, Switzerland:
Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse; International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP), 2008).
50. Emma Jane, Your a Ugly, Whorish, Slut, Feminist Media Studies 14 no. 4 (2014): 5316.
51. Online Freedom, Anonymity Comes at a Cost; Anonymous Dox of Teens Alleged Tormentor Reveals Sketchy
Online World of Predators and Vigilantes, The Vancouver Sun (British Columbia) (October 23, 2012), WESTCOAST
NEWS, A4.
bullying/article4613200/.
53. Sarah Sweet Newcomb, Another Story of Small-Town Slut-Shaming, National Post (April 16, 2012).
54. Rod Mickleburgh, Before Amanda Todd, the Sultani Family Suffered Silently, The Globe and Mail (October 23,
2012).
55. Op-Ed and commentary pieces are not written by employees of the media outlets.
56. Sarah Sweet Newcomb, Another Story of Small-Town Slut-Shaming, National Post (April 16, 2012).
57. Ibid.
58. Claire Pitcher, Sexual Exploitation, Misogynistic bullying in no OK, Letter to the Editor, Vancouver Sun (September
17, 2013).
59. Dene Moore, Amanda Todd, Bullied Teen Sexually Exploited: Advocate Says, Huffington Post, accessed July 31,
2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/10/15/amanda-todd-bullied-teen-sexual-exploitation_n_1968683.html.
60. Wayne Spear, Amanda Todd Was Not Just Bullied, Huffington Post, accessed July 31, 2014,
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/wayne-k-spear/amanda-todd-bully_b_1968740.html.
61. Jarrah Hodge, Calling It Bullying Doesnt Do Amanda Todd Justice, Huffington Post, accessed July 31, 2014,
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/jarrah-hodge/amanda-todd-bullying-gender-slut-shaming_b_1964337.html.
62. Jonathan Fowlie, Childrens Watchdog Raises Concern over Services; Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond Says B.C. Kids and
Their Families Can Wait for up to a Year before Receiving the Help They Need, Vancouver Sun (October 17, 2012).
63. Craig McInnes, Tragedies Offer Political Opportunity and Risk, Vancouver Sun (November 16, 2012).
64. The Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights (December 2012).
65. Kheiriddin, Anti-Bullying Education Isnt the Answer.
66. Hamilton, Rethinking Cyber-Bullying.
67. Craig Offman, The Problem with Cyberbullying, Globe and Mail (October 19, 2013).
69. Christopher Reynolds, We Day Anti-Bullying Message Echoes through Arena; Plea for Tolerance and Compassion,
Vancouver Sun (October 19, 2012).
70. Diane Naugler (2010), Wearing Pink As a Stand Against Bullying: Why We Need to Say More, Journal of
Homosexuality 57, no. 3 (2010): 34763.
71. Jennifer Goldberg, Miss G teaches a Lesson in Activism, The Globe and Mail (May 4, 2013).
72. Rahtaeh Parsons took her life at age 17. She experienced peer-to-peer bullying and sexual violence. For more
information see the CBC Special Report Justice for Rehtaeh, accessed August 1, 2014,
http://www.cbc.ca/ns/features/rehtaeh-parsons/.
73. For studies on the role of media in framing policies that impact youth, see Michael Males, Framing Youth: 10 Myths
about the Next Generation, 1st ed. (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1999) and STILL Blaming Children (Toronto,
Ontario: Fernwood Publishing, 2006).
74. See Martha Finemans The Autonomy Myth: A Theory Of Dependency (New York: New Press, 2005).
75. Deirdre Kelly, Frame Work: Helping Youth Counter Their Misrepresentation in Media, Canadian Journal of
Education 29, no. 10 (2006): 34.
76. Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz and Dana E. Mastro. Mean Girls? The Influence of Gender Portrayals in Teen Movies on
Emerging Adults Gender-Based Attitudes and Beliefs, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 85, no. 1 (2008):
13146. doi:10.1177/107769900808500109.
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Emerging Adults Gender-Based Attitudes and Beliefs. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 85, no. 1 (2008):
13146. doi:10.1177/107769900808500109.
Blake, Andrew. Political Journalism Represented by Headline News: Canadian Public and Commercial Media Compared.
Canadian Journal of Political Science 46, no. 2 (2013): 45578.
Bramham, Daphne. Amandas Tormentors Were Far Worse than Mere Bullies. Vancouver Sun (October 13, 2012).
Campbell, John Edward. Getting It On Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality, and Embodied Identity (London:
Routledge, 2014).
The Canadian Press. Multiple Vigils Celebrate B.C. Teen Amanda Todd, Condemn Bullying. The Globe and Mail (October
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Culbert, Lori, and Tobi Cohen, Federal Bill Cracks Down on Cyberbullying. Vancouver Sun (November 21, 2013).
Den Tandt, Michael. We Have the Remedies, Now We Need Action; Bullying Can Be Prevented but Administrators Need to
Change Attitudes and Take off the Kid Gloves when Dealing with Aggressive Perpetrators. Vancouver Sun (October 19,
2012).
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Accessed August 2, 2014. http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/news-nouv/nr-cp/2013/doc_32994.html.
DiManno, Rosie. Cyber-Bullying Too Mild a Term. Toronto Star (2012).
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Families Can Wait for up to a Year before Receiving the Help They Need. Vancouver Sun (October 17, 2012).
Fralic, Shelley, Amanda Todds Video Should Be Compulsory Viewing. Vancouver Sun (October 23, 2012).
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Held Accountable for Their Actions and Facing the Consequences. Vancouver Sun (October 16, 2012).
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Gerson, Jen. RCMP Given More Teeth to Deal with Bullies: Mayor in Alberta Town. National Post (December 10, 2012).
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Greenspoon, Stanley. Malalas Example. Globe and Mail. Letters to the Editor (October 15, 2012).
Griffin, Kevin. Program, Bylaws Take Aim at Bullies. Vancouver Sun (November, 28, 2012).
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Hamilton, Graeme. Rethinking Cyber-Bullying; Few New Victims in Online Scourge. National Post (October 27, 2012).
Hodge, Jarrah. Calling It Bullying Doesnt Do Amanda Todd Justice. Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/jarrah-
hodge/amanda-todd-bullying-gender-slut-shaming_b_1964337.html (accessed July 31, 2014).
Hutchinson, Brian. Like a Terrorist Attack on Our Kids: Amanda Todds Tormentors and Avengers Worse than Bullies.
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Jane, Emma. Your a Ugly, Whorish, Slut. Feminist Media Studies 4 (14) (2014): 53146.
Jiwani, Yasmin. Erasing Race: The Story of Reena Virk. Canadian Woman Studies 19 (3) (Fall 1999): 17884.
Jiwani, Yasmin, and Mary Lynn Young. Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse.
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Johnson, Geoff. Dont Blame the Messenger; Chastising the Media for Showing the Amanda Todd Video Gives Short Shrift to
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Kheiriddin, Tasha. Anti-Bullying Education Isnt the Answer. National Post (April 11, 2013).
Mackrael, Kim. Federal Politicians Consider Best Way to Fight Bullying. The Globe and Mail. Accessed July 31, 2014.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/federal-politicians-consider-best-way-to-fight-
bullying/article4613200/.
Males, Michael. Framing Youth: 10 Myths About the Next Generation, 1st ed. (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press 1999).
McInnes, Craig. Tragedies Offer Political Opportunity and Risk. Vancouver Sun (November 16, 2012).
Mickleburgh, Rod. Before Amanda Todd, the Sultani Family Suffered Silently. Globe and Mail (October 23, 2012).
Mickleburgh, Rod. Teens Suicide Seen As a Chance to Discuss Online Bullying; School District to Remind Everybody of
Some Basic Internet Safety Messages and Encourage Parents to Have Dialogue with Their Kids. Globe and Mail
(October 16, 2012).
Ministry of Education, British Columbia. Accessed July 30, 2014. Erase Bullying. http://www.erasebullying.ca/.
Ministry of Education, British Columbia. ERASE Bullying Strategy to Keep Children Safe Online. (news release) (October
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Moore, Dene. Amanda Todd, Bullied Teen Sexually Exploited: Advocate Says. Huffington Post. Accessed July 31, 2014.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/10/15/amanda-todd-bullied-teen-sexual-exploitation_n_1968683.html.
Naugler, Diane. Wearing Pink as a Stand Against Bullying: Why We Need to Say More. Journal of Homosexuality 57, no. 3
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New Cyberbullying Law Has Larger Agenda, Expands Police Powers. Accessed July 31, 2014.
http://www.cbc.ca/1.2434797.
Newcomb, Sarah Sweet. Another Story of Small-Town Slut-Shaming. National Post (April 16, 2012).
Offman, Craig. The Problem with Cyberbullying, Globe and Mail, October 19, 2013.
Online Freedom, Anonymity Comes at a Cost; Anonymous Dox of Teens Alleged Tormentor Reveals Sketchy Online World
of Predators and Vigilantes, Vancouver Sun (British Columbia). WESTCOAST NEWS A4 (October 23, 2012).
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15
Finding Fascism in the Comments Section:

Online Responses to Viral Videos of the
Transportation Security Administration
George F. McHendry Jr.
Warning: This chapter contains graphic language that readers might find
offensive.
On November 1, 2013, Gerardo I. Hernandez, a Transportation Security Administration (TSA)

agent was killed while working at Los Angeles International Airport. The Los Angeles Times
reported that Hernandez was shot 12 times, with bullets piercing organs, grazing his heart and
severing a major artery . 1 In the end, Hernandezs wounds were fatal. Two other TSA
officers and a bystander were also wounded, but survived.2 During the shooting, the suspect
appeared to deliberately ignore passengers and targeted TSA agents. The Los Angeles Times
reports that the suspect asked terrified bystanders: Are you TSA? If they answered no, he
moved on.3 The criminal complaint filed against the suspect states, agents recovered a
handwritten letter, signed by CIANCIA [the suspect], stating that CIANCIA had made the
conscious decision to try to kill multiple TSA employees. Addressing TSA employees the
letter stated that CIANCIA wanted to to instill fear in your [TSA employees] traitorous
minds.4 The note and the suspects behavior during the shooting are seemingly indicative of
outright hostility and rage toward TSA.
Reactions to the TSA-LAX shooting underscore the difficult place TSA occupies as an
agency in our discursive culture. Expressions of grief and anger were present in the aftermath
of the shooting.5 Antigovernment conspiracy theorists reacted to the shooting by declaring it a
false flag operation meant to embolden TSA.6 Violent antiTSA rhetoric was not unique to this
event. This chapter explores a persistent subculture of violent antiTSA rhetoric found in online
discussion forums. Although it purposefully does not suggest a causal relationship between
online violent rhetoric and the shooting of TSA agents, they are not unrelated phenomena. The
violence imagined on TSA holds an important key for understanding the desires produced by
airport security.
Violent online discourse about TSA often occurs in response to videos of TSA conducting
screenings online. One such video shows a Salt Lake City man strip down to a Speedo bathing
suit prior to going through a security checkpoint.7 The man also has Screw Big Sis written on
his back, referencing former Department of Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano. The
video shows the man being confronted by TSA agents as they call for a supervisor who asks
him to put a shirt on. This video typifies a rash of attempts to instigate confrontations with TSA
in airports. Another Web video that sparked outrage purports to show a TSA agent strip-
searching a 7-year-old boy. The TSAs conduct with children has been a constant point of
contention.8 Hundreds of videos produced by travelers of their encounters with TSA are
available online and the most egregious of them gain national attention.
This chapter is a critical assessment of two Web videos of encounters with TSA at airport
screening checkpoints. It focuses on the movement of those videos across the World Wide Web
and the discursive force they gain as certain groups use them to articulate arguments against
TSA. It argues that, although these groups find in these videos evidence of the harm TSA
causes, the vitriolic and reactive content of their responses marginalizes their case in a larger
debate about the role of TSA security procedures. In essence, in studying the articulation of
online comments to these Web videos, the chapter argues that we can account for some of the
vitriolic nature of the politics of TSA detractors.
To support this argument, the chapter analyzes online commentary responding to two Web
videos of TSA supposedly botching the screening of passengers. These two videos pose a
potential public relations nightmare for TSA by providing moving images that support the
belief of some people that TSA is an invasive government agency. This chapter argues that
Web videos of TSA checkpoints and the discourse that articulates cause the videos to swarm
across the World Wide Web and, in that process, antagonize the relationship between TSA and
its detractors. This chapter proceeds in three sections. First, it introduces the concept of
haecceity to analyze the movement of Web videos. It then analyzes videos of TSA botching
security screenings and the movements of those videos across the Internet in conjunction with
TSA responses. Lastly, it discusses critical implications and conclusions based on the analysis.
WEB VIDEOS AS HAECCEITY

YouTube is an unlikely place to begin the search for resistance to TSA; however, it is a
growing digital archive for important cultural events. Lucas Hilderbrand explains, Much of
YouTubes success has been attributed to its user-friendliness. Users do not need to log-on in
order to view clips, and videos start streaming as soon as the webpage loads, so there is no
need to worry about software compatibility, downloading files, or even clicking the play
button.9 These attributes have made YouTube the default video-sharing site for millions of
Web users. As a cultural archive, YouTube is enormous. Kristen English, Kaye D. Sweetser,
and Monica Ancu claim in 2008 alone Americans watched 14 billion YouTube videos.10 Aside
from its overall market share, YouTube also outpaces its nearest competitor; Ryan Skinnel
explains that the site hosts ten times more videos than their next largest competitor.11
YouTube has become a dominant cultural force in framing the consumption of Internet video.
The arrival of YouTube as a cultural force speaks to its presence beyond a space for banal
videos of cats playing pianos (although it offers plenty of that, too). YouTube is a place of
cultural, political, and economic exchange; it has altered the dynamics of video dissemination,
particularly for those who participate in the Web sites social discussion opportunities. Skinnel
observes, It is unlikely that YouTube is either a beacon of cultural salvation or a sign of the
apocalypse but rather is complexly embedded in mainstream U.S. culture in ways that cannot
be accounted for by either extreme view.12 YouTube offers a way to disseminate and discuss
Web content on a scale that is altogether new.
The primary metaphor used to describe the mass dissemination of Web content is
epidemiologicalWeb content is said to go viral. This metaphor suggests that these videos
spread like a virus from person to person, infecting a huge population in a relatively short
period. Hilderbrand explains, Rather than being promoted by multi-million dollar branding
campaigns by major networks or tech firms, YouTube became popular by word of mouth
which in the Internet era means forwarded email links, blogs and social networking sites.13
The viral nomenclature invokes contagion; videos contaminate the Web, spreading from person
to person, infecting our in-boxes and social media feeds; we spread the videos to those with
whom we come in contact. Dylan Wolfe reminds us, however, that unlike contagions, we
exercise some agency in the spread of Web content, put simply, audience members are not at
the whim of an autonomous infection, but, conversely, make individual choices regarding
dissemination.14 When Web content goes viral, it appears across the Web and seems
unavoidable, as if demanding that we respond to it.
A viral video, story, or photo, however, never arrives on its own absent context. It arrives
in an e-mail from a friend encouraging us to click, or in a social media post from an extended
acquaintance asking us to share. These pieces of content are all connected to one another. A
video moves across the World Wide Web in a swarm of discourse as a material collection of a
Web video and its multiple disseminations and commentary provided by people as they
disseminate the video and comments about the video in multiple online forums.
The concept for this swarming and accumulation of discourse is haecceity. Mark Bonta and
John Protevi argue that haecceities can be thought as set[s] of relations that have
dimensions of multiplicity that enable us to write about the uniqueness of things or events
without resorting to the traditional Aristotelian genus/species/individual scheme.15 In other
words, haecceity enables exploration of material relations among phenomena that emphasizes
their complexity and malleability without forcing upon them a static classification system.
Haecceity, a swarm or thisness, enables a critic to examine the ways videos and users and
discourses travel together.
Haecceities are collections of matter with some coherent consistency, but also can be
dissipated by the forces which act on them; they are matter-movement bearing singularities.16
Or, stated another way, a video disseminated across a public screen is set in relation to news
stories about the video and discussions about the video.17 Those stories and discussions alter
the way that the video is understood. This movement is not monolithic either, like a swarm it
changes as the video further disseminates. Videos are bound together; each swarm is [a video
+ acts of sharing a video + online discussions of a video + news reports about a video + the
context in which the video occurred + the material practices with which the video deals]. For
example, a video of Senator Rand Paul being held after refusing to either use TSAs whole-
body imagers or to undergo an enhanced pat-down spread rapidly around the Web. That video
also made national news. It often came coupled with personal expressions of solidarity against
TSA and stories of harassment by TSA from TSA detractors. These elements compose a
haecceity that swarms across the World Wide Web. The concept of haecceity enables analysis
that emphasizes, at one and the same time, the interconnected nature of the videos, their
discursive elements, expressions of embodied experience, and anti-TSA discourse articulated
to them.
WATCHING TSA ON YOUTUBE

This section follows two anti-TSA videos uploaded to YouTube, attending to the ways the
two videos are framed, analyzing comments about them, andwhenever possibleexamining
the ways TSA frames the content of their responses to the videos. Many Web sites that shared
these videos expressed antifederal government attitudes. The author located Web sites that
posted the video by using Googles search engine as well as Web sites that referred the most
users to the two videos on YouTube. The comments on these Web sites are clustered into
dominant themes, at times numbering as few as four and as many as tens of thousands of
comments. In instances where the author sampled comments instead of reading every comment,
sampling decisions are specified. The comments are unadorned by marks so as to avoid
intruding upon the commenters remarks.
STRIP-SEARCHING CHILDREN
The first video critiqued here involves a child who was screened without his shirt on. TSA
contact with children is especially contentious. Fears over whole-body imagers yielding
pornographic images of children have been prevalent, so has the lingering fear of pat-downs of
children constituting child molestation. Child abuse prevention expert Ken Wooden argues that
TSAs policy of telling children that pat-downs are like a game is similar to a technique
pedophiles use, and that children could become more comfortable with strangers touching
sensitive areas of their body.18 Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn investigated the criminal
history of TSA officers. Among other crimes, child pornography and sex crimes (including
child molestation) account for 14 of the 50 crimes she found; it is the second most prevalent
crime after theft.19 These issues suggest anxiety and controversy over the contact between TSA
and children.
Given that proper TSA screening procedures for children have been a source of
controversy, it is no surprise that one of the most widely disseminated TSA screening videos
involves minors. On November 19, 2010, Luke M. Tait was waiting in a security line at Salt
Lake City International Airport when he saw a dispute involving TSA screeners, a father, and a
child who was just past the metal detector in front of him. Tait recorded the incident on his cell
phone and uploaded it to YouTube. The video has more than 2.8 million views and more than
20,000 people have commented on it. YouTubes own analytics indicate that 157,724 people
watched the video on Facebook.com, another 447,088 watched the video on a mobile device,
and the largest referrer of traffic was the conservative news aggregator Web site Drudge
Report, which referred 561,475 people to the video. The top audiences for the video, in
descending frequency, were Male, 4554 years, Male, 3544 years, and Male, 5564
years.20
Taits 38-second video is shot from behind the action with several other passengers
standing between the camera and the metal detector. The childs father stands between the
camera and the child, obscuring much of what occurs during the screening. Tait gave the video
the provocative title Young Boy Strip Searched by TSA, rhetorically framing TSA as the
active agent in the video. The title of the video was amended by Tait when he posted about the
incident on the conservative news Web site The Blaze to Young Boy Strip Searched by TSA
(New Link to TSA lies interview). Tait writes as an introduction to the video: The boy went
through a metal detector and didnt set it off but was selected for a pat down. The boy was shy
so the TSA couldnt complete the full pat on the young boy. The enraged father pulled his
sons shirt off and gave it to the TSA agent to search, thats when this video begins.21 The
commentary and the framing of the video appear to be far more provocative than the video by
itself. The only discernable audio in the video comes from somebody near Tait asking,
Unknown Passenger: Theyre harassing a kid?

Tait: Yep.
Unknown Passenger: Nice.
Tait: Its ridiculous.
Unknown Passenger: Unbelievable.22
Visually, three TSA officers and the boys father are huddled around the child. A male
officer performing the pat-down is handed the boys shirt. The father steps to the side at the 17-
second mark showing the boy without his shirt as the pat-down begins. For 10 seconds the
agent conducts the pat down and then helps the boy put his shirt back on. The father and child
then appear to be walking away and an officer is walking next to them.
Comments about the video fall into two categories: antagonistic remarks against individual
TSA employees and anxiety over TSA as a larger government organization. Posts were
overwhelmingly anti-TSA with only a few commenters supporting TSA procedures. Comments
on YouTube necessitated sampling. The author read a six-month sample of comments, or
approximately 300 comments (from May 2012 to September 2012). Posts were sorted into
dominant motifs, and many posters commented on several themes at once. Approximately 270
posts contained scathing commentary about TSA that fell into the dominant themes found.
Comments on Web sites that disseminated the video did not require sampling. Within the larger
categories of attacks on TSA employees and attacks on TSA as an organization, attacks on TSA
employees included demeaning remarks and suggestions that agents are pedophiles. A typical
attack on TSA agents include this one posted by toolmkr:
I feel so much safer seeing TSA groping a five year old. Were the passengers on the
plane safer after that assault? Three agents surrounding the poor kid in case he resists.
That fat cow standing there with her fat arms folded with her fat attitude, chewing her
cud. What a disgrace. Have a nice vacation!!23
The dehumanization of individual agents is not uncommon in posts about TSA. In another
post, libertyordeathus wrote:
Ever wonder why pedophile priests who are defrocked get jobs as TSA agents? Now
you know why. Ever wonder why someone who wants to keep 15 year old girls as a
sex slave would want to be a TSA agent? Now you know why. Ever wonder why a guy
who distributes child porn would want to be a TSA agent? Now you know why.24
The broad suggestion that TSA employees are all pedophiles and that TSA is a haven for
sex offenders is both unsubstantiated and widespread in the posts studied; a common
discursive practice sexualizes encounters between TSA and passengers. The sexualization of
encounters with TSA at times turns violent. For example, fishrcoolturtles2 writes we should
rape the TSA so they will know what it feels like. This vitriolic, violent, and aggressive
rhetoric typifies the obscene rage many posters expressed toward TSA employees.
A second broad area of affect in the comments was a persistent fear that TSA was
perpetuating the downfall of the United States. Webdesignjunkie writes, its just a matter of
time before we have NO freedom.25 Commenters dealt with a perceived loss of freedom by
questioning the legality of TSA actions and by seeking racial profiling. On www.dailypaul.com
a Web site devoted to supporters of Republican representative Ron Paulfor example,
posters examined specific laws that authorize TSAs actions.26 Those postings claimed that the
TSA is violating their rights. Posters emphasize the theme of the inevitable downfall of
America by attacking the father in the video for capitulating with TSA, referring to him as one
of the good Germans, alive and well in Amerika in the year 2010, a reference to
individuals who do nothing while these terrible events are being perpetuated.27 Racist posts
were also common. On theblaze.com, JohnHenry writes: Hey folks all you need to do to
avoid all the hassle is wear a burkka and tell them you are a moslem and they will let you right
thru. After all your Religious Freedom to kill all infidels comes first.28
In a similar post on texasgopvote.coma Web site of bloggers seeking to reclaim a more
politically conservative Texasthe video was introduced with, Maybe if this young boy was
wearing a burqa, he wouldnt have had to endure a strip search!29 The post claimed religious
objections to TSA procedures have rendered all of TSAs procedures useless. These comments
are aimed at angst over broad TSA procedures, not primarily at individual employees. Within
comments aimed at TSA, posts emphasized TSAs role in destroying American freedoms and
often called for racist profiling.
Online responses to this video underscore anxiety toward both individual TSA agents and
to TSA as an institution. The articulation of the video to commenters on these Web sites also
demonstrates the capacity of the video to affect; the video calls forth rhetorical acts that are
violent and vitriolic.
The TSAs official response stated, The boys father removed his sons shirt in an effort to
expedite the screening and [n]o complaints were filed. Additionally, in an update almost a
month later, TSA clarified the need for a pat-down in the first place, claiming: The TSA
officer intended to pat-down the child, due to a TSA requirement to check passengers with
bulky clothing, which the boy was wearing.30 Although appearing to clarify the situation,
TSAs response is strategically narrow. The TSA appears responsive but responds without
addressing the larger question of how to deal with children in airport checkpoints.
Ultimately, this video and the furor it produced are a complicated set of articulations. The
video, Young Boy Strip Searched by TSA suggests TSA is the entity doing the stripping. The
creator of the video made it clear that the boys father removed the childs shirt. Descriptions
of the video emphasized TSA as villain or perpetrator, accusing them of Concentrating on 5
year old boys from Davenport Iowa going to visit Grandparents for Thanksgiving31 or using
the headline Tyranny: TSA Strip-Searches Young Boy.32 Even when articles indicate that the
father removed the boys shirt, some detractors ignored that information.
That it is possible for a video to produce such forceful and contradictory texts indicates the
problematic nature of meaning making. The video mobilizes bodies to construct arguments,
beliefs, and rhetorical enactments that matter in these digital domains even if they contradict
other claims about what happened in the video. When mixed with fears of the State visually
inspecting and touching our bodies, civil liberties, encroaching government surveillance,
fevered racist imaginations, and pedophilia, the video gains force as it moves. The violentat
times pornographicrhetoric mobilized by this video suggests the force at work as the video
forms haecceities and swarms the Web. The dominant themes of aggression toward TSA, fear
of the deterioration of the United States, the sexualizing of TSA procedures, discussion of the
legality of screening procedures, and calls for racialized profiling were produced via
discursive articulations to Taits video. In the second video studied, the protagonist takes a
much more active role than did Tait.
DONT TOUCH MY JUNK

The second video examined was produced by an individual who used his cell phone to
record his protest of TSA procedures. This video demonstrates anxiety regarding TSAs use of
whole-body imagers and pat-downs. John Tyners video of his refusal to be patted down by
TSA captures this (dis)ease. Tyners warning Dont Touch My Junk, was widely
disseminated online, despite the fact that he never uttered that phrase in the video.
Tyners two-part YouTube video attracted more than 1.4 million views, a remarkable
number because the two parts are dramatically longer than most videos on the siteexceeding
YouTubes length limit (15 minutes) for a single video. The first video is 12 minutes long, the
second runs for 9 minutes and 27 seconds. Tyners video also has been repackaged into shorter
consumable clips by a number of other Web sites. Like Taits video, Tyners saw significant
traffic from The Drudge Report (31,423 views) and from mobile devices (61,591 views);
however, it had the most traffic from Tyners own Web site, directing almost 200,000 hits to
the video. The audience demographics on YouTube are similar to those of Taits video, males
(4554, 3544, and 5564) dominate viewership.33
Tyners video differs from Taits, drawing less online interaction in terms of number of
comments, but it developed widespread attention from major news organizations. For example,
Tyners video only produced about 8,000 comments on YouTube; search results for the video
on Google return many more mainstream news organizations. Nonetheless, the content of the
video, the YouTube comments, and postings around the Web continue to express anxieties about
state-sanctioned touching, encroachment by the federal government, and intense anti-TSA
affect.
John Tyners video is shot covertly, the camera facing the ceiling from the inside of a bin
holding his possessions as they are x-rayed. The video opens with him chatting with someone
off camera. You then see the bin enter the x-ray machine before the screen goes completely
dark and the bin emerges on the other side. The bin eventually is picked up and carried over to
a secondary screening area where viewers can hear, but not see, the remainder of Tyners
interaction with TSA representatives. Tyner is in line to be screened by a metal detector but is
asked to go through a whole-body imager by a TSA Officer. At this point Tyner is away from
the camera but when he and his possessions are moved to a secondary screening area the
conversation makes it clear he has refused. When the officer describes the pat-down Tyner
says, If you touch my junk I will have you arrested.34 At this point the officer informs Tyner
that the officer will need to get a supervisor. Tyner asserts that he will go through the metal
detector like other people are doing but he will not receive either a pat-down or imaging. A
manager for TSA gives Tyner an ultimatum that he can cooperate with the pat-down or he can
be escorted out of the airport. Tyner chooses to leave rather than submit to the pat-down, at one
point insisting that only his wife and his doctor can touch him where TSA is required to touch
him.35
There are three prominent themes in comments about Tyners video: anxiety over TSA
touching as sexual, antigovernment sentiment, and vitriolic comments aimed at TSA employees.
First, there is a persistent concern that contact between TSA and the public constitutes a
sexualized encounter. For example, in a particularly vulgar post SonicYouth5469 writes:
I love how in any other circumstance this would be fucking illegal. Its arguably
molestation. What if someone has been molested as a child? They have to fucking
relive this shit? Or the other choice is be scanned nakedly and have some creep rub one
out to them (which has happened already). But I guess its legal when the govt does it
they are above the law. Pretty soon in order to leave yr house u will have to strip
searched.36
Likewise, GoldeneyePwner focuses on the pat-down as molestation keying in on the need for a
supervisor, Actually were going to have a supervisor here because of your statement so
I can molest you.37 There is a common theme among those critical of TSA: Touch by the State
is by definition inappropriate, but dangerous bodies should be touched. There is an obsession
with touching, more than any other TSA practice. As Xoxonunuxoxo writes, feeling up
someone who isnt a terrorist is i mean they scared the crap out of a little girl before.38
TSA detractors continue to worry that TSAs contact with them constitutes a sexualized
encounter. The articulation of the video to them is productive of vitriolic comments and
persistent worries about the States contact with bodies.
Second, antigovernment and anti-TSA discourses are the predominant responses to Tyners
videos. These comments speak to a perceived loss of democratic values and a new fascism in
the United Statesoften drawing on crude and vulgar analogies with the German Third Reich.
Examples of these claims include NaturalGroundations clear antipathy for authority,
Security out weighs alot of things. Like your Free liberty. You will bend over and take it and
you will like it if you want to fly.39 Another commenter, sinand99 writes, Fascism finally
arrived to USA. Nice to see america is slowly collapsing. Enjoy your nazi government,
suckers :).40 The raging against perceived loss of the American Republic and contempt for
those who enable TSA are strident themes in these posts.
Posters also discuss the legality of TSA action at checkpoints. In The Week, commenter
bnm73 writes:
A person does not give up their rights to be free of unwanted sexual touching simply
because they buy a plane ticket. A person does not give up the right to keep their sex
organs private just because they buy a plane ticket. Most people can deal with a certain
degree of intrusiveness, but the right of a person to keep their genitals to themselves is
sacrosanct. How do you think any of the founding fathers would react to having a
stranger say they had to grope them?41
Similarly, in a Wired article Luke writes, It would seem TSAs stance is let us take naked
pics of you or at least just feel you up a little. It is DISGUSTING. The government has no
right to do this in fact, the government is supposed to protect us from agencies violating our
personal rights like this.42 These comments underscore the continued anxiety over the States
practices of touching and scanning the bodies of citizens at security checkpoints.
Online comments about Tyners video reiterate similar antigovernment affects that many
anti-TSA individuals express. For example, PACRAT writes:
Our rights are being taken away every day, that\s Obamas agenda. Israelis have far the
best security in the world, but dont expect the Feds to change this policy, because they
don\t want to offend Obama\s friends. Who are these gropers anyway? Pilots have
already weighed in, and how are the Aiirlines going to handle this invasion of privacy?
43
These discussions are typical of the second theme that underscores posters worries about
TSAs role in undermining freedom in the United States.
Lastly, posters make misogynist comments about female TSA employees. Bloodguzzler
writes, Wouldnt you just love to hear that whore say that to Ben Franklins face? He said so
himself that as Americans you are to never give up your rights under any circumstance.44 The
need to denigrate the officers authority by sexualizing her, calling her a whore, engages in a
gender politics that delegitimizes her presence and the authority of TSA. Dehumanizing TSA
officers is not unusual. The bodies of TSA employees serve as vulnerable targets for hostility.
For example, kellerbier2 writes, Who is worse? the slaves doing the pat downs? or the slaves
submitting to pat downs? Positioning both passengers and TSA employees as slaves in a
historically passive and submissive role dehumanizes them. There are numerous examples of
such comments. Norm writes, Lets face it. TSA is manned by people with little training, no
experience and at minimum wage.45 It is not uncommon to see comments that attack the
training, experience, wages, and self-worth of TSA employees. Even in a post aimed at
attacking President Obama, Canuck writes, Yes, TSA employees are the vile beings who do
his dirty work, but he is ultimately responsible for every assault.46 Often TSA employees are
reduced to caricatures; commenter SteelRat writes, My idea is that the TSA should hire only
ugly, overweight men and castrate all of them. Then, no matter how you look, you know for a
fact that you look better naked than any of the TSA Eunuchs who are looking at you.47
Comments like this continue to read sexuality into encounters with TSAparadoxically
seeking to remove sexuality from the very encounters with TSA that the commenter is
sexualizing.
TSA felt a need to clarify what happened in Tyners video and did so in a way that
demonstrates the disjuncture between TSA and its detractors. TSA emphasized that individuals
may always opt out of whole-body imaging but if they do so they will receive another
screening method, such as a pat-down. TSA states, Obviously a passenger cant completely
opt out of all screening if they opt out of AIT. That would not make good security sense.48
Even if it makes good security sense not to let passengers dictate the circumstances under
which they are screened, TSAs response is broad and does not speak to Tyner directly. This
impersonal approach and policy focus makes sense, but it can embolden critics. Evidence of
this can be found in the antagonizing tone of responses posted to TSAs response to Tyners
video. This continued antagonizing relationship suggests that current communicative patterns
are unlikely to produce alternative politics between TSA and its critics.
The Web site, Know Your Meme, a warehouse for Internet culture, curates Tyners
experience with TSA under the titles John Tyner, Dont Touch My Junk and TSA Gate
Rape. Dont Touch My Junk became a rallying cry for TSA critics who supported Tyners
resistance to the agency. Although the change was subtle, when disseminated the title became
more repeated than any other part of the video. Moreover, when examining the comments made
about the video both on YouTube and other sites, the video articulated other fears about TSA,
the government, and fears of fascism and Nazism that made the video a locus of collective
phobias about governmental occupation. The video swarmed through networks articulating
with bodies, histories, and beliefs, and people who viewed it disseminated messages that
emphasized their fears of being touched by the state, their fear of the government, and their
contempt for TSA employees. At this symbolic-material relationship these texts are calling
forth identities to act in the world. The bodily politics of TSA affects articulations in the world
in ways that are productive of rhetoric. In this case TSA detractors articulate to these videos
and produce discourse that that underscores their political relationship with TSA.
IMPLICATIONS OF ONLINE RESISTANCE TO TSA

This chapter concludes by drawing out several implications of the haecceities these videos
form as they are disseminated. First, the issue of veracity in online discourse is examined.
Next, the idea of how productive discourse between TSA and TSA detractors might proceed is
considered. The chapter then discusses the implications of the violent rhetoric used by
commenters online.
One of the explicit aims of this study was to track the movement of discourse from
encounters in airports to their capture on recording devices, to their dissemination across the
public screen. With the advent of online commenting, researchers have the advantage of
accessing reactions to conversations that otherwise might not be seen or heard. A pervasive
phenomenon among Internet commenters is that some individuals purposefully post
provocative material to offend and derail online conversation (this is known as trolling).49
An obvious drawback of studying online discourse is the inability to verify the veracity of
posted comments. Individuals could post some of the comments studied here with the intent of
trolling. The repetition in comments articulated to these videos, however, suggests shared
anxieties. Dismissing online comments because of the presence of trolls seems to ignore the
presence of hyperbolic provocateurs in the public sphere.
Next, given the vitriolic rhetoric of TSA detractors, it is important to reconsider the
grounds upon which TSA and TSA detractors might engage. There obviously are some who
would refuse any productive communication with TSAthose who think TSA is an escalation
of American fascism will likely not be persuaded that TSA has merit. Likewise, TSA often has
been recalcitrant to change. There are four ways, however, that current anti-TSA messages
undermine efforts to critique the agency. Although it is not the authors intention to discipline
speech or rhetorical practices, the commitment to being critical of de facto surveillance is at
odds with the reactive nature of the status quo of anti-TSA discourse.
First, many TSA detractors argue for privatization as a solution to TSA, but neglect to
provide any explanation as to why corporate surveillance is preferred to State surveillance.
Corporate actors under the logic of late contemporary capitalism should do little to ease our
anxiety of bodily contact. Second, many critics also assert that TSA is unconstitutional, despite
a number of court rulings affirming the constitutionality of TSAs proceduresmost recently by
the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.50 Although legal challenges are under wayand
legal challenges represent the proper venue for such claimstelling TSA that it is
unconstitutional when courts have ruled otherwise is an untenable approach. Third, both critics
and TSA staff alike must cope with the fact that threats innovate, thus children, the elderly, and
others can be terrorists. The people and means by which threats are brought to airports and
aircraft are malleable. This is why profiling can be ineffective. Fourth, threats persist in
airports and an alarming number of handguns are found by TSA each month. Many TSA
detractors focus their efforts solely on terrorism, but there are other potential threats to air
travel. Coming to terms with potential threats to airports and airplanes outside of a reactionary
posture and in good faith is a needed next step.
Additionally, the intersection of bodies, desire, and anxiety is producing very violent
online rhetoric. TSA appears to be exacerbating fundamental anxieties about our bodies. A
constant obsession in the threads studied was with the surveillance of, and contact with, the
body. The insertion of violent sexual politics into airport checkpoints is immediately obvious
in the online comments about videos of airport security. The confluence of antigovernment
rhetoric, homophobic fantasies, racism, and violence at first seems almost inexplicable. It is
irresponsible to leave such phenomena unexplained, especially given Deleuze and Guattaris
contention: Every investment is collective, every fantasy is a group fantasy and in this sense a
position of reality.51 The collective fantasies of TSA detractors share collective affects about
TSA.
TSA detractors exhibit a paranoid-fascistic drive in their online discourse. Drawing from
Deleuze, Hawes argues, A paranoid or fascist subject is overcome by scarcity and
deficiency.52 This is not to be confused with the state fascism, but is an interpersonal politics
of domination, control, and asserting ones will over others.53 Paranoid-fascist desires are
driven by a sense of lacking something in airports. Lack for TSA detractors is especially clear;
the lack of rights and the lack of personal security are all pervasive in the rhetoric of resisting
TSA. The violent rhetoric that desires to assert force over TSA is aimed at gaining what
detractors feel they lack. Hawes argues, Conflict thereby is imagined as the product of desire
for what is lacking: the greater the lack, the more value it acquires, the more intense the
competition for it becomes, the more reactively it evolves, and the more traumatic its effect.54
TSA detractors engage in violent rhetoric out of a sense of frustration with lack generated
in airports. It is impossible to see detractor discourse as productive to TSA because of its
constant reactionary politics. The desire for violent fascism over TSA bodies as an
interpersonal politics in online TSA detractor discourse is explained by the bodily politics in
airports, although certainly it is not excused or excusable.
CONCLUSION
This chapter explored resistive encounters in airports recorded on videos and then
disseminated across the public screen. In doing so the author argues that these videos move
like swarms containing pieces of material discourse that articulate to other discourses in
different ways as they are disseminated. The analysis showed how two videosa popular
video of a child being searched without his shirt on and a video of a traveler refusing to be
patted downmoved across the public screen articulating with affect that ultimately reveal a
desire to read encounters with TSA as fascist and sexualized. These videos get disseminated
and become evidence for what the viewers desire to then frame their own resistive narratives
about TSA. These videos function as machines that connect with the desires of the viewers
even when such connections alter what the videos curators claim the videos mean. These
videosthese haecceitiesswarm with desires flowing in creative ways that generate
resistance to TSA that are problematic for both TSA and its critics.
NOTES
1. Richard Winton and Kate Mather, Autopsy Report Reveals TSA Agent Shot 12 Times in LAX Attack, Los Angeles
Times (November 22, 2013), http://articles.latimes.com/2013/nov/22/local/la-me-tsa-agent-20131123 (accessed January 5, 2014).
2. Richard Winton and Kate Mather, Autopsy Report Reveals TSA Agent Shot 12 Times in LAX Attack.
3. Kate Mather, Matt Stevens, and Ashley Powers, Suspected LAX Gunman Had His Targets Clearly in Mind, Los
Angeles Times (November 2, 2013), http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-1103-lax-shooting-
20131103,0,7342159.story#axzz2jmqKVQgo (accessed January 5, 2014).
4. United States of America v. Paul Anthony Ciancia (November 2, 2013).
5. Ian Lovett, Danger to T.S.A. Officials Hovers over Memorial Service, New York Times (November 13, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/13/us/danger-to-tsa-officials-hovers-over-memorial-service.html?_r=0 (accessed January 5,
2015).
6. For a swath of this conspiratorial rhetoric see: TSA False Flag Shooting Evidence Mounts, InforWars.com (November
3, 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KExOEM2I-Zs (accessed January 5, 2015); Shawn Helton, L.A. Ontario Airport
October Drill Nearly Identical to LAX Shooting Scene, 21st Century Wire (November 2, 2013),
http://21stcenturywire.com/2013/11/02/l-a-ontario-airport-october-drill-nearly-identical-to-lax-shooting-scene/ (accessed January
5, 2014); Shawn Helton, LAX Shooting: Drills, Mannequins and The New World Order, 21st Century Wire (November 4,
2013) http://21stcenturywire.com/2013/11/04/lax-shooting-drills-mannequins-and-the-new-world-order/ (accessed January 5,
2014).
7. TheJimmyAndEricShow, TSA Speedo Protestor, YouTube video (November 23, 2010),
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sL3uMWujmw (accessed December 14, 2010).
8. ABC, Chaffetz Wants Ban on Airport Whole Body Imaging, ABC 4 News (Salt Lake City) (April 22, 2009),
http://www.abc4.com/content/news/slc/story/Chaffetz-wants-ban-on-airport-whole-body-imaging/9eQFe4o-Uka9A-D5-
RCWxg.cspx (accessed May 5, 2010).
9. Lucas Hilderbrand, YouTube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge, Film Quarterly 61, no 1 (2009): 49.
10. Kristen English, Kaye D. Sweetser, and Monica Ancu, YouTube-ification of Political Talk: An Examination of
Persuasion Appeals in Viral Video, American Behavioral Scientist 55, no. 6 (2011): 733.
11. Patrick Vonderau, Circuity in Motion: Rhetoric(al) Moves in Youtubes Archive, Enculturation 8 (2010): 1.
12. Patrick Vonderau, Circuity in Motion: Rhetoric(al) Moves in Youtubes Archive.
13. Lucas Hilderbrand, YouTube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge.
14. Dylan Wolfe, The Video Rhizome: Taking Technology Seriously in The Meatrix, Environmental Communication 3,
no. 2 (2009): 320.
15. Mark Bonta and John Protevi, Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2004), 94.
16. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 512.
17. See Kevin DeLuca, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (Mahwah, NJ: LEA, 2006), 139
40; Kevin Michael DeLuca, and Jennifer Peeples, From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the
Violence of Seattle, Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 2 (2002): 141.
18. Daniel Tencer, Exclusive: TSA Frisks Groom Children to Cooperate with Sex Predators, Abuse Expert Says, The Raw
Story (December 1, 2010), http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/01/airport-patdowns-grooming-children-sex-predators-abuse-
expert/ (accessed October 7, 2012).
19. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, Not on My Watch, 50 Failures of TSAs Transportation Security Officers (May 30, 2012),
http://blackburn.house.gov/uploadedfiles/blackburn_tso_report.pdf (accessed October 1, 2012).
20. Luke Tait, Young Boy Strip Searched by TSA (New link to TSA lies interview).
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Daily Paul. Young Boy Strip Searched by TSA, Daily Paul (November 20, 2010)
http://www.dailypaul.com/comment/1586273 (accessed October 7, 2010).
27. Ibid.
28. Scott Baker, Blaze Exclusive: Rep Demands TSA Correct Account of Boys Strip Search, The Blaze (November 24,
2010), http://www.theblaze.com/stories/blaze-exclusive-rep-demands-tsa-correct-account-of-boys-strip-search/comment-page-
2/?corder=desc#comments (accessed October 8, 2012).
29. TexasGOPVote, (Video) Young Boy Strip Searched by TSA Agent at Airport, Texas GOP Vote, (November 21,
2010), http://www.texasgopvote.com/restore-families/security/video-young-boy-strip-searched-tsa-agent-airport-002146
(accessed November 8, 2012).
30. Transportation Security Administration, Response to Young Boy Strip Searched by TSA, The TSA Blog.
31. LiveLeak, Young Boy Strip Searched by TSA as His Father looks on, Live Leak, http://www.liveleak.com/view?
i=a06_1290354378 (accessed October 8, 2012).
32. Pam Geller, Tyranny: TSA Strip-Searches Young Boy, Atlas Shrugs (November 22, 2010),
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2010/11/tyranny-tsa-strip-searches-young-boy-.html (accessed October 8,
2012).
33. tsanonflyer, TSA Screening, Terminal 2, SAN, Nov. 13, 2010part 1, YouTube Video (November 13, 2010),
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7txGwoITSj4 (accessed October 9, 2012).
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. TheWeekStaff, The Dont Touch My Junk Guy: Should the TSA Leave John Tyner Alone? The Week (November
17, 2010) http://theweek.com/article/index/209417/the-dont-touch-my-junk-guy-should-the-tsa-leave-john-tyner-alone (accessed
October 9, 2010).
42. Kim Zetter, TSA Investigating Dont Touch My Junk Passenger, Wired (November 16, 2010),
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/11/tsa-investigating-passenger/ (accessed October 9, 2010).
43. TheWeekStaff, The Dont Touch My Junk Guy: Should the TSA Leave John Tyner Alone?
44. tsanonflyer, TSA Screening, Terminal 2, SAN, Nov. 13, 2010part 1.
45. TheWeekStaff, The Dont Touch My Junk Guy: Should the TSA Leave John Tyner Alone?
46. Zetter, TSA Investigating Dont Touch My Junk Passenger.
47. G4, TSAs Dont Touch My Junk Controversy, g4tv http://www.g4tv.com/videos/49861/tsas-dont-touch-my-junk-
controversy/ (accessed October 9, 2012).
48. Transportation Security Administration, Opting-out of Advanced Imaging Technology and the Pat-Doesnt Fly, The
TSA Blog (November 16, 2010) http://blog.tsa.gov/2010/11/opting-out-of-advanced-imaging.html (accessed October 10, 2010).
49. Whitney Phillips, Meet the Trolls, Index on Censorship 40, no. 2 (2011) 6876; Amy Binns, Dont Feed the Trolls,
Journalism Practice, 6 no. 4 (2012) 547562.
50. Blitz v. Napalitano, 112283, (2012) http://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/Opinions/Published/112283.P.pdf.
51. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: Penguin, 1977), 280.
52. Leonard C. Hawes, A New Philosophy of Social Conflict, Unpublished Manuscript, 20.
53. Mark Bonta and John Protevi, Deleuze and Geophilosophy.
54. Hawes, A New Philosophy of Social Conflict.
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Index
ABC, 138, 141, 147148

Abdelrahman, Dina, 60
Abdullah, Zulkifli, 229
Abrams, Dan, 148
activism; boundaries, 95107; digital, 95107; youth, co-opting, 260261
Adelman, Mara B., 229
Affordable Care Act, 8485
Ahuvia, Aaron C., 229
Al-Arabiya, 64
Al-Baradi, 56
Al Jazeera Mubasher Misr, 6364
Al Qaeda, 97
Albanna, Hassan, 59
Alexander, Keith, 95, 9798, 103104, 106107
Alien Nation, 157
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 2021
The American Heritage Dictionary, 155
American Library Association, 2425
American Press Institute, 84
American Psychological Association, 256
American Singles, 215
anchor babies, 155165; as a node of identification, 161164; godterms and, 162164; history of term, 157158
Ancu, Monica, 273
Anderson Cooper 360, 139, 145
Anonymous; arrests, 102; Hillary Clinton and, 105; IRC channels, 97, 101; networks, 96, 101; pseudonyms in, 99100; raids, 99;
Terrorist Identification Chart, 98; Twitter, 98; What is Anonymous? 102105
anti-birthright citizenship, 156161
anti-immigration rhetoric, 155165
Arab Spring, 59, 261
#ArrestZimmermanNow, 140144
Ashcroft v. ACLU, 23
Assange, Julian, 97, 101
athletes; confrontational fans and, 3545; death threats, 36; fans and hateful messages, future directions and implications, 43
45; hateful messages to, 3843; response to criticism, 43; self-esteem and, 40; social media and, 3638
The Atlantic, 29
Atlas Ti, 196
Baggett, Andrew, 36, 41

Ballard, Dawna, 179
Barr, Roseanne, 141
Baym, Nancy, 157, 161
Beeson, Anne, 20
Benkler, Yochai, viiix
Berlant, Lauren, 161
Bethel School District v. Fraser, 57, 11
Bieber, Justin, 250
The Big Bang Theory, 189
Blackburn, Marsha, 275
Blake, Kristen, 36
Blake, Steve, 36
The Blaze, 275, 277
blogs, 10, 14, 86; feminist, 259; political, 1415, 155, 160
Boetcker, William J. H., 83
Bonta, Mark, 274
Boston Globe, 139
Boston Marathon bombings, 81, 106
Boston Police, 106
Boston Tea Party, 100
Bowen, John, 2627
Boyd, Danah, 157, 161
Bramann, Jorn, 180
Bramham, Daphne, 256
Breitbart, Andrew, 160
Brimelow, Peter, 157160
Brown, Barrett, 99, 101
Brown, Michael, 117119, 123126, 133
Buchanan, Patrick, 157158, 160
Burke, Kenneth, 159, 162163, 177
Bush, George W., 39, 106
Californias Proposition 187, 158159

Calvert, Clay, 14
Campbell, John Edward, 251
Canada; cyberbullying in, 249263; ERASE bullying plan, 250; patriarchy, 255256; personal ads, 229; Representative for
Children and Youth, 257, 260
capitalism, 179
Capus, Steve, 139
Carpini, Delli, 121
Carter, Alexis, 146
Castells, Manuel, vii, ix
Castoriadis, Cornelius, 162
Catfish, 215
Catfish: The TV Show, 237
catfishing, 227, 237238
Cator, Karen, 30
CBC, 5960
CBS, 88, 138
Center for Immigrant Studies (CIS), 157158, 164
Change.org, 140
Charlie Rose, 147148
Check Your Head, 261
Cheney, Dick, 39
Chicago Bears, 45
child refugees, 157
Childrens Internet Protection Act (CIPA), 24, 26, 2829
Childrens Online Protection Act (COPA), 23; filters and, 24
childrens rights, 260261
Church of Scientology, 105
Cincinnati Reds, 36
Citizenship Without Consent, 160
Clapper, John, 103
Clark, Christy, 254
Clinton, Hillary, 105
CNN, 84, 120, 131, 139141, 147
Cohen, Stanley, 250
comments sections, 271284
Communications Decency Act (CDA), 2122; overturning, 2324
communication load, 179180
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), 97, 99
Comte, Auguste, 174
conspicuous consumption, 178
Convention on the Rights of the Child, 260
Corey, Angela, 143144
Couch, Danielle, 233
CougarLife.com, 237
Coulter, Ann, 160
#cowardly, 133
Cronkite, Walter, 89
Crump, Benjamin, 146
cyberbullying, 911, 35, 237238, 249263; media response to, 253255; reasserting adult authority, 254255; reasserting
authority, 253254; standing up to, 254255
Cyberbullying Hurts: Respect for Rights in a Digital Age, 260
cyberfeminism, 193
Cyberguerilla.org, 96, 102
cybersex, 234
cybersubjectivity, 193
cybersecurity, 95107
Daley, Tom, 44
Davis, Chris, 41
de la Rionda, Bernie, 146
Debord, Guy, 173175, 182183
Democratization, xi
Demographics of Internet users, 191
Den Tandt, Michael, 254
DePauw University, 81
Dershowitz, Alan, 143
DiManno, Rosie, 253
Discipline and Punishment, 194196
Doe V. Pulaski County Special School District, 9
Doninger, Lauren, 1011
Doninger v. Niehoff, 1011
Dorin, Jenny, 120
Drotner, Kristen, 250
The Drudge Report, 275, 279
Duran, Kevin, 36
e-bile, 251
Earth First!, 105
Eckhardt, Chris, 5
eDateReview.com, 190, 194196, 201202; discipline, 198201; message boards, 196
Egypt; Al-Karamah Dignity party, 56; Al-Wafd Delegation, 56; Missed opportunities for diversity, 6470; political
interactions on Facebook, 6270; Popular Defense Committees, 55; protests, 5860; social capital, 5570; social media sites,
59
eHarmony.com, 189190, 196, 200
Ehrlich, Paul, 158
The Elements of Journalism, What Newspeople Know and the Public Should Expect, 83
Ellison, Nicole, 211, 213215
Elonis, Anthony, 14
Elonis v. United States, 14
Emma, Jane, 251
Emmett, Nick, 3
Emmett v. High School District, 4
English, Kristen, 273
Entman, Robert, 251
Excitebuzz.com, 26
face-to-face interactions, 35, 193, 231, 235, 239; rejection, 191

Facebook, 14, 27, 40, 80, 160, 219, 249; cyberbullying, 251; daily active users, 35; Egypt, 56, 59, 6270; lying on, 221222;
petitions, 140; social capital and, 5570; terms and conditions, vii; unfriending, 6768
FactCheck.org, 85
FAIR, 158, 164
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 97, 101, 106, 232
Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 2729
Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), 157
Feldman, Noah, 148
#Ferguson, 126131, 133
Ferguson protests, 117133
fetishism; commodity, 173175; digital society and, 174176; participation, 173184
First Amendment Press Freedom Awards (FAPFA), 2627; schools, 2627
Florida Department of Law Enforcement, 144
Foster, Cade, 4142
Foucault, Michel, 194196
4chan, 96, 100
Fox & Friends, 160
Fox News, 84, 131; online, 155
Fralic, Shelley, 254
France, 177
Franklin, Benjamin, 98
Fraser, Matt, 56
free assembly, 95
free speech, 9899; cyberspace and, 9596; digital speech and, 95100; schools and, 415
Frederick, Joseph, 67
Fulton, Sabrina, 146147
Furtado, Nelly, 250
Gallegly, Elton, 160

Garner, Eric, 120
Gates, Bill, 97
Geekdaily.com, 26
Gibbs, Jennifer, 211, 213214
The Globe and Mail, 252, 255258, 260
Goddard, Andrea, 105
Greenspoon, Stanley, 256
Greenwald, Glenn, 101
Griffith, Adam, 41
god-terms, 162164
Good, Jonathan, 145146
Goodman, Mark, 2324, 26, 30
Google, 26, 218, 222, 274
Green Bay Packers, 45
Habermas, Jrgen, x
Hacker Culture, 97
hacktivism, war on, 95107, 258; digital component, 101102; discursive component, 9798; legal component, 99100
Haddad, Gehad el, 61
Hammond, Jeremy, 99
Hancock, Jeffrey, 215
Hardball, 143
Harvard University, 143, 148; Journalists Resource, 85; Neiman Fellowships, 84; Shorenstein Center on the Media, Politics and
Public Policy, 85
Harvey, David, 179, 183
Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 6
HB Gary, 101
Heino, Rebecca, 211, 213214
Henriks, Thomas, 183
Hernandez, Gerardo I., 271
Hilderbrand, Lucas, 272
Hodge, Jarrah, 259
Holder, Eric, 130
homophobia, 258262
Houston Texans, 39
Huang, Priscilla, 158
Huffington Post, 252, 259260
Huntington, Samuel, 157
Hurricane Katrina, 81
Hutchinson, Brian, 253
Ignatow, Gabe, 155, 160161, 163

In re Anonymous Online Speakers, 100
India, 256
individualism, 177
Instagram, 35, 178
International Marriage Broker Regulation Act, 219
Internet, protection from, 1923
Internet filters, 1930; circumventing, 26; nuanced, 30; problems with, 2425; removing, 2627; voluntary, 25
The Interview, 98
Iraq War, 130
J. S. v. Blue Mountain School District, 12

James, LaBron, 141
JDI Dating Ltd., 219
Jeantel, Rachel, 146147
Jiwani, Yasmin, 251
Johnson, Magic, 250
Jones, Stephanie Tubbs, 84
Journalism Education Association (JEA), 2122, 26; Scholastic Press Rights Committee, 2627
journalism/journalists; code of ethics, 85; copyeditors, 85; credibility, 7990; deference to, 8889; editing, 84; fact-checking, 85;
high school, 28; objectivity in, 81; online, 7990; legacy of, 89; social media and, 85; source(s), 7990; sources, evaluating,
8287; sources, reasons for using, 8182; source skepticism, 81, 84, 8788; source validity, 80, 84, 88; technology for
accessing news, 80; traditional, 79; transparency in, 86
Juel, Henrik, 182
Kaiser Family Foundation, 25

Kaminsky, Margot, 99, 101
Kasich, John, 83
Kelly, Brian, 4445
Kelly, Harold H., 227
Kentlake High School, 3
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 104
KnightSec network, 101102, 105
Kovach, Bill, 8384
Kowalski, Kara, 11
Kowalski v. Berkeley County Schools, 1112
Kranich, Nancy, 2425
Kuhlman, Jeff, 5
Lakoff, George, 60
Lavalife, 196
Lawson, Helene, 210
Layshock, Justin, 1213
Layshock v. Hermitage School District, 1213
Leck, Kira, 210
Lee, Bill, 141
Lee, Spike, 141
leisure time, 176179, 183
Lemon, Don, 131
Liamputtong, Pranee, 233
Lincoln, Abraham, 83
Los Angeles International Airport, 271
Los Angeles Times, 271
Lovato, Demi, 250
LulzSec, 100101
Lundberg, Chris, 161162
Mac Donald, Heather, 159

Mackrael, Kim, 258
major depressive disorder, 210
Major League Baseball (MLB), 39
Malkin, Michelle, 158, 160
Manalo, Jeannee, 144145
Manfull, Aaron, 28
Maree, Daniel, 140141
Martin, Trayvon, 137149
Marx, Karl, 173, 175, 179, 183
Massumi, Brian, 163
Mastro, Dana, 262
Match.com, 189, 196, 215
McBride, Kelly, 81, 8586, 88
McCann North America, 140141
McChesney, Robert, 121
McClain, David and Elaine, 141
McCulloch, Robert, 117120, 123, 126
McRae, Don, 255
media convergence, 124126; diversity and, 124125; mediated messages and, 125
Media Credibility Watch, 64
media dependence theory, 190
media panics, 250251
memes, 96
Mesthene, Emmanuel, 181182
metadata, 101
Miami Heat, 141
#MichaelBrown, 128
Microsoft, 177
#MidwestPrayer, 129
Mike and Molly, 189
Million-Hoodie March, 140141, 144, 148
Miss G Day, 261
Moore, Dene, 259
moral panic theory, 250
Morozov, Evgeny, 105
Morse v. Frederick, 67
Morsi, Mohamed, 5861
MSNBC, 131, 143
MTV, 237
Mubarak, Hosni, 55, 65
multiuser domains (MUDs), 192193
Munro, Harold, 261
Muslim Brotherhood, 55, 5961, 65, 67
Must Love Dogs, 189
MySpace, 1112, 28; fake profiles, 1213
Napolitano, Janet, 272

National Basketball Association (NBA), 36
National Basketball Players Association, 141, 144
National Center for Education Statistics, 28
National Football Conference, 36
National Football League (NFL), 39, 45
National Post, 252, 259260
National Scholastic Press Association, 26
National Security Agency (NSA), 95, 101, 107
NBC, 97, 139141
The New Ethics of Journalism, 86
New York City Department of Education, 30
New York City Police, 120
New York Giants, 40
New York magazine, 82
New York Times, 80, 87, 139, 155156; online, 155
news; credibility, 7990; fake, 8283; frames, 250251; knowledge vs., 8990; neighborhood, 88; posts, 80; social media, 86, 88
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 174
9/11, 106
Nixon, Jay, 130
NoBullying.com, 238
Nofal, Bassil, 64
#NoIndictment, 129
NumbersUSA, 157158, 164
Nurullah, Abu Sadat, 181
Obama, Barack, 28, 97, 130

#Obama, 131
Occupy Wall Street, 105
Ogletree, Charles, 148
OKCupid, 202
Oklahoma City Thunder, 36
OlderWomanDating.com, 237
Olson, Parmy, 100101
Olweus, Dan, 260
Olympic Torch Relay, 6
online dating, 231232; applications, 209222; benefits of, 235; construction of bodies in, 189, 197198; discipline, 198201;
disclosure and, 197198; end-goal of, 218; filtering systems, 221; gender and, 200201; history of, 190191; identity
development, 209222; impression dominance, 220; as an industry, 211; infidelity and, 233; information verification, 218219;
internet relay chats (IRCs) and, 195; market metaphors and, 211213; misrepresentation, 209222; power in, 189203; race
and, 192193; reasons for, 210; relationshopping, 211213; rewards of, 235; risks of, 232235; scams, 233234; self-
representation, inaccurate, 214215; self-representation strategies, 213215; sex-offender checks, 219; sexual orientation
and, 221; sexual abuse, 234; sexually transmitted diseases and, 232233; social cues, 214; uncertainy reduction, 218219;
user demographics, 209; weight and, 199200
online profiles, 189; body markers, 199200; computer generated, 219; deceptive representation, 215216; embodiment online,
191200; gender and, 193; honesty and, 193, 216218; image manipulation, 216; linguistic deception, 217218; nature of
identity and, 192; photos and, 199, 216
Online Journalism Handbook, 85
Op Wealth, 101
#opCharlieHebdo, 96
Operation Payback, 102, 104
Operation Paycheck, 96
Operation RollRedRoll, 105
Out in Schools, 261
Parsons, Rehtaeh, 259, 261

Paterno, Joe, 84
Paul, Rand, 274
Paul, Ron, 277
PayPal, 102
Penn State, 84
Peoples Daily Online, 82
personal ads, newspapers, 190
personal matrimony ads, 227, 229231
Pew Research Center, 58, 122, 231232; Internet Project, 121, 127, 212
Philadelphia Eagles, 40
Phillips, Joshua Daniel, 137149
physical relationships, digital participation versus, 174176
Pink Shirt Day, 261
Pitcher, Claire, 259
Pitts, Marian, 233
Plain Dealer, 84
Plummet Mall, 82
Poland, 96
police brutality/militarization, 118, 125133
#PoliceState, 130
political engagement; cascading activation, 123124; distrust, 130133; definition of, 120121; social media and, 120122
PolitiFact, 83, 85
#PoorLegalSystem, 131
The Population Bomb, 158
population control, 158159
Porter v. Ascension Parrish School Board, 9
post-traumatic stress disorder, 210
postmodern theory, 191
Poynter Institute, 81
Project Chanology, 105
#PrayForFerguson, 129
Prince, Phoebe, 251
Prober, Rosalind, 259
Protevi, John, 274
Pruchnic, Jeff, 163
public culture, networked, 155165; right wing, 156161
public sphere, efficacy of, 176
publicity, self, 178179
PunditFact, 85
Quill and Scroll International Honorary Society, 26
racism, 138140, 142, 144, 258260, 262, 277278

Redfield, Marc, 106
Reddit, 80
Reno v. ACLU, 20, 2223
RICO statutes, 100
Rideout, Vicky, 25
Roberts, John, 7
Rogers, Michael, 95
Rose, Charlie, 148
Rosentiel, Tom, 8384, 8688
Ryalls, Emily, 251
Sabahi, Hamdain, 56
Said, Khaled, 58
Salt Lake City International Airport, 275276
Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, 6
San Francisco 49ers, 36
Sanford Police Department, 139, 141
Saudi Arabia, 96
Scammers Persuasive Technique Model, 234
Schaub, Matt, 39
Scheufele, Dietram A., 251
Scheufele, Matthew C., 251
Schilling, Curt, 3940
schools; free speech and, 415; free speech and, Supreme Court decisions regarding, 48; free speech, where to draw the line,
1315; Internet filters in, 1930; Internet restrictions and students, 315
Schuck, Peter, 160
Scripps News, 99
SeekingArrangement.com, 235
Seibold, David, 179
Seminole State College, 146
Senate Intelligence Committee, 97
sexism, 250251, 255256, 259, 262
Shannons Dream, 261
Sharpton, Al, 142
Sisi, Abdel Fattah Saeed Hussein Khalil el-, 6061, 67
60 Minutes, 88
Skinnel, Ryan, 273
slut-shaming, 259
Smith, Rogers, 160
Smith, Steve, 40
Snowden, Edward, 97, 101, 106
social capital; Egypt, 5570; social media and, 5658
The Social Contract, 157158
social exchange theory, 227239
social identity theory (SIT), 40
social media; action and, 128130, 132; anonymity and, 123; conspiracies, 145146; conversation, 127128, 132; cyberbulling
and, 249263; cultural resistance and, 125; distrust, 130132; education, 45; filtering, 2728; government mistrust and, 117
133; guidelines, 30; ideological protests via, 137149; lying on, 221222; new media theories, 122123; news and, 121122,
156161, 164165; obligation to participate in, 173184; political engagement and, 58, 120133; social capital and, 5658;
social support and, 210; sports and, 3638; trial by, 137149; vomitorium of venom, as a, 252253
social networking sites, 87; clickbait, 88; news and, 87
Society of Professional Journalists, 85
#SoMeGuidelinesNYC, 30
South Asians, marriage and, 229230
Spear, Wayne, 259
spectacle, 173174, 183
Steele, Bob, 8182
Stewart, Potter, 20
#STL, 129
Student Press Law Center (SPLC), 2324, 2627
S.A.S.H. (Students Against Sluts Herpes), 11
State of Florida v. George Zimmerman, 137149; ideology surrounding, 147149; inaccurate initial reports, 138140; race and,
138140, 142, 144; trial, 144147
structural oppression, 250251; gender-based, 255256
sugar daddy relationships, 236
sugar Web sites, 227, 235237
SugarDaddyForMe.com, 236237
SugarMommaCupid.com, 237
SugarMommaMate.com, 237
suicide, talking about, 257258
Sultani, Ashkakn, 258
Summy, Hank, 140141
Surdyka, Jayne, 145
surveillance malware, 101
Sweetser, Kaye D., 273
Tait, Luke M., 275276

Taliban, 256
Tanton, John, 157158, 160, 164
Teo, Manti, 237238
technology, impact on society, 179182
TheAnonNews, 98
Thibaut, John W., 227
Thomas, Douglas, 97
Time Magazine, 155
Tinder, 202, 220
Tinker, John and Mary Beth, 5
Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 45, 7, 1012, 15
Tirrito, Sara, 2628
Todd, Amanda, 249263; death, media coverage of, 250252
Todd, Carol, 250
Toma, Catalina L., 215
Tonkin, Sarah, 233
Toobin, Jeffrey, 139
Trakur survey, 222
Transportation Security Administration (TSA), 271284; Dont Touch My Junk video, 278282; implications of online
resistance to, 282284; online discourse about, 272; strip-searching children video, 275278; violence against agents, 271272
Trestman, Marc, 45
Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar Anzorovich, 106107
Tuiasosopo, Tonaiah, 237238
Turkle, Sherry, 192
Turpel-LaFond, Mary Ellen, 257, 260
Tweakandtrick.com, 26
Twitter, 4344, 141, 178, 181, 249; anchor baby on, 155, 160; Anonymous on, 98; death threats via, 36, 4142, 141; Ferguson
protests, 119120, 123126, 129; hashtags, 80, 175176; monthly active users, 35; petitions, 140; political engagement and, 58,
120133
Tyner, John, 278282
Un, Kim Jogn, 82

United Kingdom, 95, 97; British Intelligence, 101102; Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ), 102; online dating
scams in, 234
U.S. Constitution; 1st Amendment, 315, 2122, 2627; 6th Amendment, 143; 14th Amendment, 159160, 164; online speech
and, 913
U.S. Department of Education, 2829
U.S. Court of Appeals; 2nd Circuit, 811; 3rd Circuit, 12; 4th Circuit, 1112, 283; 5th Circuit, 9; 8th Circuit, 9; 9th Circuit, 100
U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), 95, 97, 106107
U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 272
U.S. Department of Justice, 232
U.S. Supreme Court, 48, 2223, 84, 100, 102, 107
University of British Columbia, 259
University of Florida, 14
University of Missouri, 41; University of Western Ontario, 220
Unofficial Kentlake High Home Page, 3
USA Today, 120
Vancouver Province, 252

Vancouver School Board, 257
Vancouver Sun, 252253, 259261
VDARE, 155, 158, 160
Veblen, Thorstein, 178, 183
The Verification Handbook, 85
Vietnam War protests, 5
violence; gender-based, 255256, 261; relational, 257258
viral videos, 271284; definition of, 273274; Dont Touch My Junk video, 278282; strip-searching children video, 275278;
web videos as haecceity, 272274
Virk, Reena, 256
Wade, Brandon, 235

Walkhausen, Abigail, 29
Wall Street Journal, 128, 164
WALL-E, 180
Walters, Barbara, 89
Walther, Joseph B., 231
Wantz, Melissa, 28
Warner, Michael, 160161
Warren, Neil, 189
Washington Post, 88
Watergate scandal, 88
We Day, 261
#WeAreTrayvonMartin, 141
Web 2.0, 155
WebDate, 215
The Week, 280
Welfare Reform Act, 158
Wells, David, 177
WEnte, Margaret, 255
#WeWantJustice, 141
#WeWantJusticeForTrayvonMartin, 141
West Virginia v. Barnette, 4
#WhatIsJustice, 131
Wheeler, Tom, 2829
Whitty, Monica T., 234
WhoIsHostingThis?, 222
WikiLeaks, 102
wikis, 86
Williams, Alexander T., 155, 160161, 163
Williams, Kyle, 36
Wilson, Darren, 117, 119, 123, 126
Wilson, Pete, 160
Wired, 280281
Wisniewski v. Board of Education of Weedsport Central School District, 9, 11
work flexibility, 179180
World Health Organization (WHO), 257
Yaffe, Barbara, 253254
Xbox One, 177
Yahoo! Personals, 196, 215

Yale Law School, 160; Information Society Project, 99
Youve Got Mail, 189190
Youm 7, 64
Young, Mary Lynn, 251
Yousafzai, Malala, 256
Yousef, Khaled, 60
YouTube, 30, 272273; petitions, 140; TSA on, 274282
Zero Population Growth (ZPG) movement, 158

Zhou, Nan, 229
Zimmerman, George, 137149
EDITORS
DANIELLE SARVER COOMBS (PhD) is an associate professor in the School of Journalism
and Mass Communication at Kent State University. Her research primarily focuses on sports,
politics, and the intersection of the two. Danielle co-edited two anthologies for Praeger: We
Are What We Sell: How Advertising Shapes American Life and Always Has (2014) and
American history through American Sports (2013). Dr. Coombs is coauthor of Female Fans
of the NFL: Taking their Place in the Stands (2015), and the author of Last Man Standing:
Media, Framing, and the 2012 Republican Primaries (2014). Danielle also has published in
major international journals, including International Journal of Sport Communication, the
Journal of Public Relations Research, and Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media,
Politics. Dr. Coombs has been invited to provide expert commentary on sports fandom and
political affairs around the world.
SIMON COLLISTER is a senior lecturer at the London College of Communication, University

of the Arts London in the United Kingdom, where he teaches strategic communication, social
media, and critical approaches to public relations. Collister currently is completing doctoral
research into strategic political communication and digital media at Royal Holloway,
University of Londons New Political Communication Unit. His current research interests
include strategic communication, big data, computational aspects of communication,
algorithms, the mediation of power, 21st-century organizational models, and the future of the
public relations industry.
Simon has recently authored and coauthored articles in leading journals, including
Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization and the International Journal of
Communication and authored and coauthored book chapters on PR and big data in Share This
Too (2013) and social media and text-mining in Innovations in Digital Research Methods
(2015). He is cofounder of the research hub The Network for Public Relations and Society and
also a founder member of the UK Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) Social Media
Advisory Panel. Before academia, Simon worked with some of the worlds leading public
relations consultancies, including We Are Social, Edelman, and Weber Shandwick.
CONTRIBUTORS
ALAMIRA SAMAH FARAG ABD-ELFATTAH SALEH is an assistant professor at Faculty of
Mass Communication, Cairo University. She attended University of Westminster, Arab Media
Center, United Kingdom as a postdoctoral holder. Alamira Samah completed her PhD in Media
Studies (Mediatized Crisis & Public Collective Action) (2011) with Honors from Cairo
University. Alamira Samah was awarded a MENA Scholarship Program (MSP), Radio
Netherlands Training Center (RNTC) Using Media for Development 2014 course, Hilversum,
Netherlands; Cairo University Award for the Best MA Thesis in Media & Social Science
Studies, 2008; and The Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) New Paradigms
FactoryCycle 2 Fellowship. Dr. Alamira Samahs main research interests are global and
local crisis reporting with particular reference to its consequences of audience collective
actions and perceptions; demonstrations and the changing media politics of dissent; forms of
contemporary mediatized ritual; and journalism and civil society now reshaping the public
communication of crises. Dr. Alamira Samah has published a number of papers and scholarly
work in both Arabic and English, including: Media and Creating Collective Insecurity:
Egyptian Crises As a Model; Not Only Believe in, but also to Be Active: The Role of New
Preachers in Enforcing Islamic Teachings; A Chapter in Cyber Islam: Global Media and
Boundaries of Religion; Climates of Risk: Egyptian Journalism Attitudes toward the Islamist
Political Power after the Parliament Elections; A Rebellion from the Inside: Social Media &
Muslim Brotherhood Youth New Political Identity; Social Medias Future: Analytical View
from Muslim Brotherhood Youth Social Media Habits; Communication and Journalism
Education in Arab World & Global: Current and Future Trends; and The Relationship
between Ideological & Political Orientations & Evaluation of Arab News Channels: An
Empirical Study.
NERMEEN N. ALAZRAK is an assistant professor in the journalism department at the Mass

Communication faculty, Cairo University, Egypt. Her main interests are media laws and ethics,
freedom of the press, and new media. She obtained a PhD with honors in media from Cairo
University. The title of her thesis is Press Freedom in Egypt: Study of the Relationship
between Governmental Policies and Practices of Egyptian Newspapers in the Period from
19952005. For more than 15 years she has been teaching curricula of media laws and ethics
for undergraduate and postgraduate students. In addition, she teaches two other curricula,
media theories and research methodologies. She worked as coordinator for Specialized
Diploma of Media Law and Ethics. She has four published articles in different Egyptian
scientific journals.
CANDACE PERKINS BOWEN is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and

Mass Communication at Kent State University. Bowen teaches newswriting and the methods
course for education majors, Teaching High School Journalism. She directs both the Center for
Scholastic Journalism and the Ohio Scholastic Media Association. She also oversees the
schools online masters degree program for journalism educators and teaches occasional
courses there. Her research and creative interests focus on scholastic media and their
intersection with free speech issues. She is a past president of the national Journalism
Education Association and continues to serve on its board.
MAGGIE FRANZ is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication Studies at
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research is at the various intersections of
rhetoric and public culture; media and technology studies; womens, gender, and sexuality
studies; as well as ethnic studies. Her current project investigates the digital- and print-based
reading cultures involved in the contemporary Christian pronatalist movement in the United
States.
MARK GOODMAN joined Kent States School of Journalism and Mass Communication in
2008 as the first Knight Chair in Scholastic Journalism. Before that he served for more than 22
years as executive director of the Student Press Law Center, a national organization that serves
as a legal advocate for and educator of student journalists. Goodman has a degree in
journalism from the University of MissouriColumbia and a law degree from Duke University.
Goodman has received more than two dozen national awards for his work in support of student
journalism including a First Amendment Award from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of
the Press and the Intellectual Freedom Award from the National Council of Teachers of
English.
JASON L. JARVIS is an assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles,

CA. Dr. Jarvis earned his PhD in communication from Georgia State University in 2014. Dr.
Jarvis is a scholar, photographer, and global citizen. He has worked and traveled across Asia,
traveling to 25 countries (and counting) and spent seven years as a resident in the advanced
digital city of Seoul, South Korea. Dr. Jarviss research examines digital culture and visual
rhetoric. He is keenly interested in the way images function as tools of protest in networked
communication environments. Dr. Jarvis also maintains a secondary interest in environmental
communication, with a particular focus on transnational environmental conflicts.
BRENT KICE is an associate professor of Communication Studies and basic course director at
Frostburg State University. His research explores popular media (such as television
commercials, Web sites, and gaming) and dictator rhetoric (specifically, Fidel Castro) to
discern various communicative strategies of constructing communal crusades in the eyes of
message consumers. He also researches pedagogical techniques for the modern college
classroom. He is the project leader for the departments grant-funded redesign of its basic
course in collaboration with the National Center for Academic Transformation. He teaches
courses on the First Amendment, ethics and social responsibility, argumentation, rhetorical
criticism, small group communication, and the departments basic course.
SHANA KOPACZEWSKI currently is an assistant professor at Indiana State University. She

holds a PhD in interpersonal communication from the University of Iowa. Her current research
is centered mainly on intersections between interpersonal communication and new media,
particularly online dating, stigma in online spaces, and discourses of the body in online
environments. She has presented papers at national and regional communication conferences
and coauthored a piece titled Pornography Addiction and the Medicalization of Free Speech,
published in the Journal of Communication Inquiry.
JUSTIN LAGORE, a central Ohio native, holds a BS degree from Kent State University, where
he completed both the advertising and public relations sequences in the School of Journalism
and Mass Communication. During his academic career, Lagore studied abroad short term in
London, where he examined variances in social medias applications to marketing and
customer service in the United States and the United Kingdom, specifically within the
hospitality industry. His other research interests include online community management, digital
media applications for reputation management, online identity and self-esteem, and content
creation and consumption in the digital age.
JAN LEACH is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication
at Kent State University. She teaches media ethics, newswriting, public affairs reporting, and
other courses and is director of Kents Media Law Center for Ethics and Access, which
annually hosts the Poynter KSU Media Ethics Workshop. Leach serves on several university
committees and is an officer in the Media Ethics Division of the Association for Education in
Journalism and Mass Communication. She also is an ethics fellow at the Poynter Institute for
Journalism Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida. Before joining the faculty at Kent State, Ms.
Leach was editor and vice president of the Akron Beacon Journal. During her tenure there, the
Ohio Society of Professional Journalists named the Beacon Journal Best Newspaper in
Ohio three times. Ms. Leach came to Akron from the Cincinnati Enquirer where she was
managing editor. She held previous reporting and editing positions at other newspapers in Ohio
and Arizona. She has a BA in journalism from Bowling Green State University and an MA in
journalism with a concentration in media ethics from Kent State University.
SARAH TURNER McGOWEN is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at

the University of Missouri, holds a BA in mass communication from Northeastern State
University, and an MA in communication from Northeastern State University. Her research
primarily focuses on scandals, political engagement through social media use, and critical
issues related to gender and class. Her dissertation is a study of the cultural discourses
surrounding political sex scandals in a new media environment, exploring the ways in which
the media, politicians, and the public interact to reinforce ideologies of gender and sexuality.
McGowen has presented her own as well as coauthored competitively selected papers at
numerous conferences, including the National Communication Association, Central States
Communication Association, and Kenneth Burke Society. Her coauthored work was published
in The Journal of Radio and Audio Media and Disasters. McGowen was awarded the Frank
and Lila Gilman Scholarship (given to outstanding graduate students in rhetoric and public
address) in 2013. During her time at the University of Missouri, she has taught political
communication and public speaking and was a teaching assistant for Survey of Communication
Studies. McGowen has experience teaching in online formats and serving in departmental and
disciplinary leadership roles.
GEORGE F. McHENDRY JR., PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of
Communication Studies at Creighton University. He received his PhD from the Department of
Communication at the University of Utah. His research works at the intersection of rhetorical,
cultural, and performance studies. McHendrys criticism has been heavily influenced by the
philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. His current research examines public
performances of security in airports and the relationship between the public and the
Transportation Security Administration. He examines how security and resistance is performed
in airports and how those performances can dominate our ways of experiencing airports. At
Creighton University he teaches courses on rhetoric and public culture, performance and
resistance, and gender and communication.
JOSHUA DANIEL PHILLIPS, PhD, is an instructor in the Department of Communication Arts

and Sciences at Penn State Brandywine. His academic focus includes rhetoric and intercultural
communication with particular interests in media, sexual violence, race, sport, and poverty.
His recent publications include, LeBron James as Cybercolonized Spectacle: A Critical Race
Reading of Whiteness in Sport, Black Women and Gender Violence: Lil Waynes How to
Love as Progressive Hip Hop, and Crystal Mangum as Hypervisble Object and Invisible
Subject: Black Feminist Thought, Sexual Violence, and the Pedagogical Repercussions of The
Duke Lacrosse Rape Case.
JIMMY SANDERSON holds a PhD from Arizona State University and is an assistant
professor and director of the Sports Communication Program in the Department of
Communication Studies at Clemson University. His research interests center on the influence of
social media on sport media, sport organizational governance, fan-athlete interaction,
advocacy, and identity expression. Sandersons research has appeared in outlets such as
Communication & Sport, Journal of Sport & Social Issues, Journal of Sports Media, and
Mass Communication and Society. He is the author of Its a Whole New Ballgame: How
Social Media Is Changing Sports (2011).
CAROL A. SAVERY holds a BFA from University of Calgary and an MA from The University
of Akron and is an associate lecturer at the School of Communication at The University of
Akron. Her research interest is primarily in interpersonal communication. Publications include
hospice volunteers as patient advocates, incorporating nonverbal communication in the college
classroom to analyze political candidates, transdisciplinary analyses of health communication,
storytelling as an instructional technique in problem-based learning, diffusion of innovations
by U.S. public relations practitioners, and most recently gender issues in the portrayals of
matrimony in Hindi popular cinema.
REKHA SHARMA holds an MA and an MS from Kent State University and is a doctoral
candidate and an assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies in the College of
Communication and Information at Kent State University. Her primary area of research is mass
communication, with a secondary specialization in political communication. Sharma has an
educational background in journalism and information use, and has examined a diverse array of
topics in mass media and computer-mediated communication, including portrayals of issues
and people in news and film, messages about war and about consumerism in animated
cartoons, potential knowledge gains from infotainment, motives and outcomes of political
social media use, history and applications of viral marketing, and case studies of television
fandom. Her research has been published in academic journals such as the Ohio
Communication Journal, Mass Communication & Society, Electronic News; Global Media
JournalCanadian Edition, Media, War, & Conflict, and the Journal of Fandom Studies.
She has also contributed to the following anthologies: War and the Media: Essays on News
Reporting, Propaganda and Popular Culture, We Are What We Sell: How Advertising Shapes
American Life and Always Has, and Heroines of Film and Television: Portrayals in
Popular Culture.
MICHELLE STACK is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the

University of British Columbia. Her research centers on the nexus between educational policy
and media, media education for youth and adults, and media-academic communication aimed at
expanding public discussion and input concerning public policy.

Danielle Sarver Coombs, Simon Collister, Jacqueline Marino Debates For The Digital Age (2 Volumes) The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Our Online World

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2016 Danielle Sarver Coombs and Simon Collister

Volume 1. The Good

2. The Positive Side of Social Media: Encouraging Developments from Sport

4. Narcissism or Self-Actualization? An Evaluation of Selfies as a Communication Tool

5. Everyday Expertise: Instructional Videos on YouTube

7. Leaks, Whistle-Blowers, and Radical Transparency: Government Accountability in the

8. Rethinking Digital Democracy in a Time of Crisis: The Case of Spain

9. Will the Revolution Be Tweeted? Activism, Politics, and the Internet

11. Ground-Up Expert: Everyday People and Blogs

13. The Rise of Journalism Accountability

PART III COMMUNITY AND GLOBALIZATION

14. Social Media Mechanisms: A Change Agent

16. When Bad Timing Is Actually Good: Reconceptualizing Response Delays

About the Editors and Contributors

One of the defining characteristics of contemporary societys metamorphosis from a

THE BAD AND THE UGLY

SUBTHEMES: ACCESSIBILITY, DEMOCRATIZATION, COMMUNITY,

VOLUME 1 CHAPTER SYNOPSES

New Audiences, New Markets: Accessing

NEW AUDIENCES AND MARKETS

Beatport Takes Aim at Millennial Culture

YouTube Music Key

Other Streaming Contenders

Google Chrome Cast

Spotify and Music Economics

TV, FILM, AND STREAMING

ULTRAHIGH SPEED BROADBAND INTERNET CONNECTIVITY

PERSONAL VIDEO DISTRIBUTION

THE INTERNET, POSTMODERNISM, AND ACCESSING ART

GOOGLE ART PROJECT AND DIGITAL MUSEUM INITIATIVES

VIRTUAL REALITY AND THE VISUAL ARTS

MOBILE AND STREAMING IN THE ARTS

THE INTERNET AND THE WRITTEN WORD

KINDLE UNLIMITED PROGRAM

The Positive Side of Social Media:

BENEFITING FROM FAN ADVOCACY

ENGAGING IN ADVOCACY AND ACTIVISM

Another athlete commented,

POSITIVE SOCIAL MEDIA USAGE: DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE

Reaching the World with One Song and a

THE INTERNET AND THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

THE SLOW SPREAD OF A MUSICAL MESSAGE

SOME PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

THE IMPORTANCE OF MUSIC BEFORE THE ADVENT OF THE

DOWNLOADS READILY AVAILABLEFOR BETTER OR FOR

THE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL FOR LISTENERS

GENRES AND SOUNDS EXTEND BEYOND THEIR HOME

RADIOHEAD AND THE RECORD LABELS

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE SELFIE

Self-Portraiture before the Camera Phone

SELFIES AS COMMUNICATION TOOLS

WHY PEOPLE POST SELFIES

Everyday Expertise: Instructional Videos on

Dan is a tween (preteen) interested in Asian (visual) culture. He is particularly

BACKGROUND: FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS AND

As shown, a walkthrough basically is a step-by-step guide to exploring as many aspects of

ANALYZING THE INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEO ON YOUTUBE

Table 1 Assessment Model for Instructional Videos

YOUTUBE AS AN FAQ FOR LIFE

Formalization as the constitutive variable of the continuum manifests itself in a variety

Informal learning commonly is described as the learning that is a part of everyday

THE NON-NEUTRALITY OF YOUTUBE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF