Abstract
Talking about the Internet typically means talking in metaphors. “Social network” is one of course; so was the early catchall term the information highway. As the Internet enters its third decade as a popular medium, discussions about it continue to both recycle metaphors and generate new ones embedded in a range of cultural commentary and scholarship, including education scholarship. Each of the authors whose books we review uses tropes in their titles. Howard Gardner and Katie Davis coin the term “the app generation”; Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green invent “spreadable media”; and Alice Marwick engages a metaphor with which most of us are familiar (if not entirely comfortable): “branding.” These days that term’s social use more or less means personal branding, the application of marketing techniques to one’s interests and ultimately to oneself.
Whereas these books are aimed at different audiences, engage different research methods, examine different if overlapping topics, and require different investments from their authors as researchers, they do share commonalities. Throughout this review, we point to their common concerns but then emphasize the book’s differences as driven, ultimately, by each text’s underlying metaphor (app generation, spreadability, and branding).
The first thing these books have in common along with most books in the field of Internet Studies is that they’re clearly time-stamped, reflecting a particular moment of engagement with and reflections on a hyper-evolving media. That said, the best sections of these books have staying power by offering new insights into our collective thinking about social networks, software such as apps, and the Internet, in general. In addition, all three books involve research on and writing about Web 2.0, a term common since about 2005 and itself a metaphor for sites that allow users to do more than simply retrieve information (the early web). Common features of Web 2.0 include increased interaction between sites and users, social networking sites, cloud computing, apps, and so on. From different perspectives and making different arguments, each author spends time distinguishing the social powers and problems of Web 2.0 from those of the early web and even, particularly in the Gardner and Davis book, from social practices pre-Internet.
Friendship, culture, dependency, surveillance, value, identity, democracy, and money, these are a few of the topics covered across these books. However, the texts differ significantly in the theories they draw upon, the present conditions they assume, and the futures they invoke. The most theory-driven is Status Update, which uses methods typically identified with cultural studies; the most education-specific is The App Generation, which builds on Howard Gardner’s theories of “multiple intelligences”; the most business-friendly, including the business of education, is Spreadable Media, which builds on Henry Jenkins’ theories of “participatory cultures.” To various degrees and with different conclusions, the books also deal with subjects like capitalism, neoliberalism, and technological determinism. We discuss the ways some of these subjects are addressed in these books and use a framework, applying the concepts “imaginaries” and “materialities,” to describe both the works under review and, more broadly, contemporary research on and writing about current iterations of the Internet.
Just over a decade ago, the philosopher Charles Taylor (2003) argued that all technologies in development, dissemination, and usage are embedded within and animated by what he calls “social imaginaries.” According to Taylor, a social imaginary is an epistemological framework of cultural value and identity that is more flexible than (yet firmly embedded in) the body of beliefs, myths, narratives, and so on that we think of as “ideology.” Sociologists, such as Andrew Herman (Herman, Hadlaw, & Swiss, 2015), have since clarified that social imaginaries are not simply a set of ideas about the social world; they are pragmatic templates for social practice that enable some social actions and constrain others. As we see it, all of the books reviewed here raise provocative questions about how Web 2.0 is constructed through imaginaries and how these imaginaries privilege particular definitions and actions. Using the language of social psychology, for example, Gardner and Davis question what young peoples’ developing identities and their desires to imagine themselves in the future tell us about their social and technological presents (for them, not a pretty picture, but one with hope). Alice Marwick, using the lexicon of cultural studies, and Jenkins, Ford, and Green, who mix the discourses of communication studies and business, engage the questions of what current social and technological imaginaries tell us about past imaginaries but, flipping the coin and more urgently, what is possible (and impossible) when we bring historical perspectives and theories to contemporary imaginaries and practices of Web 2.0.
The term materialities invokes a tradition of materialist analysis that has a long, storied, and influential purchase in cultural and media studies. From a neo-Marxist perspective, a point of view prominent in Status Update, the ability of social networks and apps to construct a distinctive form of digital capitalism is a central concern (Herman et al., 2015; Mosco, 2004). Marwick offers a pointed, sometimes, fiery critique of app capitalism, whereas Jenkins et al. suggest what they see as a middle way forward involving a truce between technology producers, consumers, and the profit-driven nature of capitalism. The App Generation, on the other hand, is mostly silent on this subject as it is on a related topic that informs certain arguments in both Status Update and Spreadable Media, the topic of neoliberalism. Status Update, in particular, investigates an array of social relations of power and exploitation embodied in markets (hence, the metaphor of “branding” used throughout) and their constituent social practices. This new form of capitalism is characterized as a distinctive neoliberal formation that appears to promote agency in creating a self one desires to be, but instead markets a public self that is constituted in commercial interests.
Another tradition of materialism, Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) and Harold Innis’s (1951) well-known “medium theory,” which holds that the material forms of communication are as important as the meaning of the messages they carry and convey, is a ghost presence in these books. But the more recent and widely influential actor–network theory (e.g., Latour, 2007) surprisingly receives no mention at all. We wish these books had engaged this strand of social materialism as assemblage. The fact is that everything matters from the digital architecture of 3G networks to Wi-Fi towers, from the cable boxes in our schools to the design of Internet devices in our hands, especially as the materialities of the mobile Internet have increasingly encompassed what’s known as the “Internet of Things” (International Telecommunications Union, 2005) in which human-to-human communication is increasingly supplemented by human-to-things and things-to-things. For example, in schools, it matters whether iPads or laptops are used; who uses tools, when, where, and how; how pedagogies are shaped by digital tools; what relationships between youth and digital tools are enabled or constrained (e.g., can they produce or only consume?); and how the architecture of school space (historically and in situational contexts) creates and limits possible ways of co-existing and interacting with objects. There are a small number of good books in the field of Internet studies that do some of this work (not related to education), including those by Gerald Goggin (2010), Jason Farman (2011), and Lisa Gitelman (2006), but we could use more.
Whereas all the books engage the specific materialities and imaginaries they cover as ongoing and converging processes, The App Generation, as suggested in its subtitle, “How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World,” is neither supple nor subtle. Working from handfuls of generalizations concerning generational differences (“today’s youth”), social practices, media engagements, identity formations, and so on, the authors try to distinguish between what they call “app-dependent” and “app-enabled” behaviors. Having read the book a few times, we’re still not sure exactly what the distinction is or how, importantly, the authors make this distinction, although they passingly refer to (in an authoritative tone, but not in much detail) their empirical methods and sets of research findings. Among other problems, it’s hard to understand whom the audience for this book might be —parents, perhaps, or teachers already inclined to accept Gardner and Davis’s cautionary (but mostly dark) inclinations and interpretations? Readers be warned: In The App Generation, the U.S. middle class is used to represent the world’s population. And although the authors acknowledge this when they write “it’s important to bear in mind that our portrait is based on, and applies primarily to middle-class and upper middle-class youth living in an affluent, developed society” (p. 77), they do nothing to complicate or problematize what we see as a serious problem in this book. A moodiness in the narrative drives The App Generation; that is, mixed in with forward-looking possibilities, there’s a lot of nostalgia and a pining for so-called simpler (pre-Internet) times. The narrative structure of the book is set up so that intermittently, but not terribly productively, Gardner contrasts his own childhood in the 1950s with the childhoods of his former student and co-author, Davis, now in her early 30s, and Davis’s sister, a high school student. As you might expect, Gardner and Davis use the metaphors of and strongly believe in differences between “digital natives” (young people) and “digital immigrants” (the rest of us).
All of the books dismiss technological determinism, the reductionist and mostly abandoned theory that presumes that technology is responsible for a society’s structure and cultural values, but the relationship between technology and society is such that it’s difficult to juggle without sometimes falling into the determinist trap. As the historian Melvin Kranzberg (1986) famously noted, “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral” (p. 545). Jenkins, Ford, and Green may be best at pulling off this balancing act by taking Jenkins’ well-known concept of “participatory culture,” an up-beat (though not, they argue, celebratory) social perspective on Web 2.0, and refining it. The authors wisely engage other writers’ critiques of the concept, link the notion of participatory culture to specific practices (mostly in the world of business), and, significantly, flesh-out several new media models. Along the way, they dismantle certain current imaginaries, including the digital native/immigrant “myth.” Although not quite seamless, the collaborative narrative mostly works well (and is sometimes intentionally funny), stitching a range of stories and voices from academics, technology writers, and industry researchers. A team approach fits the topic that, among other things, explores what we’ve all come to know as the “sharing economy,” and specifically targets the relationship between “sticky” content and “spreadable” practices on the Internet.
Spreadable Media attempts to better understand the movements of media content in networked communities and not just on social network sites. The authors bring historical perspectives and theories to contemporary imaginaries and practices of Web 2.0, detailing practices that have long been part of participatory culture in relation to contemporary digital media environments. Objecting to familiar metaphors for the movement of media content like “stickiness” and “viral,” both of which suggest the desire of producers to colonize audiences, Jenkins, Ford, and Green recommend that businesses use the concept of “spreadability.” They argue that this concept (while admitting the term itself is a bit awkward) will encourage industry producers to reconsider their conceptions of audience, promote more “participatory” strategies for turning a profit through messaging, and generally rework the larger commodity logic that structures the ways producers create and distribute media. As we said, it’s an optimistic book.
Alice Marwick is more skeptical. Depending on the scene she’s observing or event she’s attending, she’s seen by some of her colleagues, subjects, and friends as an insider; she’s a postdoc at Microsoft Research. At other times, especially among rich and powerful new media producers who are her primary subjects, she’s positioned as an outsider with a modicum of cultural capital, nevertheless, because of her background in commerce and technology. Marwick’s a colorful writer, her prose is lively, her descriptions vivid, and her turns of phrase and metaphors inventive. Like some other ethnographies, hers is a kind of adventure story, a journey through various elite tech-driven communities between 2006 and 2010. The book, which has a fairly narrow focus at the outset, broadens as her story unfolds. Seeming to take at least some of her interpretations from sociological patterns famously noticed by Pierre Bourdieu (1984), who strangely does not figure in her text or citations, Marwick describes how both social capital and economic capital figure in the formation of cultural capital. Like Bourdieu, she is concerned with the dynamics of power and especially the diverse and subtle ways in which power is transferred and social order maintained within and across communities and audiences. In the end, the nexus of technology and society reflected on in Status Update supplies the author with telling anecdotes and offers interesting implications as she marries material and intellectual labor to social status, neoliberalism, and the so-called “Californian Ideology” of Silicon Valley producers. The title of a 1996 essay by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, the “Californian ideology,” as Marwick uses it in her analyses,’ is an imaginary that combines countercultural techno-utopianism with elements and practices drawn from radical individualism, libertarianism, and neoliberal economics.
Among other things, Marwick examines social media tools/sites/companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube and concludes that these money-making instruments have a pedagogical function: They “teach users strategies and practices to achieve ‘micro-celebrity’” (p. 10) by encouraging consumers to use these strategies in combination with marketing and advertising techniques drawn from commercials and celebrity culture. They encourage “attention-getting” and the quest for social capital, practices that Marwick argues are baked into social media tools and are meant to update (read: upgrade) one’s status. Although, as Marwick writes, there have been many studies of celebrity in recent years, most focus on fans and fandom. (Coincidentally, Jenkins has, on this topic, coined the term “aca-fan” (p. 6) a hybrid of “academic” and “fan” to acknowledge both intellectual and emotional cultural engagements.) But few studies have represented the perspectives or experiences of celebrities themselves, particularly in “real time” as Marwick is able to do here. The celebrities discussed are technology celebrities, of course, the Valley’s many “micro-celebrities,” but she encounters a few macro-celebrities, too, like the founders of Wired and Twitter.
Apps and social networks create zones of connectivity that can be fluid, meaningful, and mobile as all three books describe them, but Marwick’s book in particular makes us wonder about the structures, economics, and politics of immobility. Involuntary immobility (as in the so-called “digital divide”) forced on those who occupy the so-called “lower registers” of various socio-economic hierarchies is, of course, inegalitarian and unjust. But what about immobilities enforced by people who simply do not want to be part of Internet culture on those (technology producers, cable companies, retailers that largely depend on the Internet, etc.) who would prefer that they, and things, just keep moving? How do we think about those relationships? Anonymity, surveillance, and privacy, these are a few of the issues at stake in these scenarios that aren’t seriously covered in the books under review, but could be key subjects in an education course on, say, Critical Digital Literacies. In a chapter in the recent volume Theories of the Mobile Internet (2015), Darin Barney questions the moral economy of social and geographical mobility in which freedom is assumed to be contingent upon open access to Internet communications. Barney argues that access and mobility are not by those very facts a ground of freedom and empowerment; indeed a politics of immobility in relation to work and labor may be the more politically progressive line of flight. Going against the grain of the books we’ve reviewed, although Gardner and Davis hint at this possibility in nostalgic rather than forward-leaning terms, Barney’s article opens new avenues for researchers to explore.
As we know, critical literacy research and education that focuses on digital media can help develop informed, reflective, and engaged citizens. Recognizing how the Internet works for whom and in what ways as elements of democracy, capitalism, ideology, and identity is unquestionably important. So are the terms, as we have noted, in which writers and researchers represent their work since conceptual metaphors are always already there in our language and they shape not just our communication but also the ways we think and act. Communication technologies such as the Internet (as well as once-new technologies such as film, television, and so on) have historically acted as sites on which negotiations over competing social imaginaries, values, and desires have been played out. Among other things, these negotiations almost always end up broadening our conceptions of “literacy.” By adding new metaphors, debating and complicating others and bringing theory-inflected strategies and research methods to contemporary social practices, including literacy practices, these books actively if unevenly contribute to what is currently a very lively conversation.