Abstract

The Generation Wars, between Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millenials and Gen Z, has a tendency to provoke lifestyle debates. ‘Back in my day’ is the preface of many a brag about how society today is poorer than the society of yesteryear. Older generations tend to nostalgically reminisce about the past. Conversely, has historically been the case, society is constructed for the ‘now’, making whatever the 25-34, or so, demographic the trendsetters of a given day. This paper looks back 10 years at a critique of social media, writ large, that declared social media to be antisocial, particularly as compared to the days of the primacy of print media.
 

From Newspapers to Social Media: Paradise Lost?

Although the two lie on a spectrum, and are not an entirely binary proposition, antisocial behaviour and community are, generally, considered mutually exclusive to each other – the presence of one means the absence of the other – but lie on a spectrum (Farrow & Prior, 2006; Hopkins-Burke, Hodgson & Chamberlain, 2015). Antisocial behaviour is associated with criminal behaviours that diminish the sense of ‘connectedness’ that represents the presence of the kinds of social bonds that make up a community (Licoppe, 2004; Damianakis & Woodford, 2012). Commentary abounds about the impact of social media on society and the associated sense of community. Academic analysis comments on the various elements of the ecosystems that form in certain pockets of the internet, not too unlike the way biologist David Attenborough comments on the behaviour pattens of animals (BBC Earth, 2020). Writing under the pen name Alt Ledes, also acting in this Attenborough-like role, commentator Corey Hutchins (heretofore ‘Alt Ledes’) pens, in my view, a heavily flawed defence of the pre-digital era, in his 2014 essay All This Technology is Making us Antisocial (Alt Ledes, 2014; MuckRack, n.d.; Colorado College, 2024). I find its observations to be pollyannish, idyllic, perhaps even a Rockwellian portrayal of the heyday of print media (Alt Ledes, 2014; Christies, 2014; Nilsson, 2021). The paramount point of his piece seems to have been that, after reading newspapers, people went and talked to other people about what they had read, and that this fact makes print media more social than social media. Many other writers seem to share Alt Ledes pessimistic view of social media, resulting in, for example, an abundance of more empirically supported views expressing concerns about negative impacts of social media on community.

On the other side of this philosophical ledger, one might also consider the views of other observers of various digital communities who are more reticent to agree with the sentiments and concerns expressed by Hutchins and his ilk. Yet, even those critiques of social media may concede that there are social benefits to social media, for example, that “…social media platforms are important sources of socialization and relationship-building for many young people (Glasofer & Mellins, 2021, para 4)”, even while enumerating other ways that social media might be potentially harmful to certain cohorts of society (Ahn & Shin, 2013). This alternative perspective of the impact of digital media might include both those who feel that changes to the social landscape are not yet observable enough to declare and those who are outright detractors (Hampton, 2016), However, Alt Ledes laments media fragmentation, celebrating a time when people “could engage in civic discourse about the news of the day, because they were all reading the same basic material (Alt Ledes, 2014, para 7).” He seems to characterise the technological progress represented by social media as some form of unprecedented devolution of community into uncharted territory.

Hampton, concedes that the changes modern technological changes are unprecedented, himself describing these changes as “metamodernity (p. 101, para 1)”, or are perhaps simply false, dubbing such concerns as ‘moral panic’ (Hampton & Wellman, 2018). The Alt Ledes camp and the Hampton camp of the debate do agree that there is change. Alt Ledes uses a slew of anecdotes to characterise the modern era of digital communication, whereas Hampton gives analysis that is based on rigorous academic framing. However Hampton trumps the argument of Alt Ledes and those of similar sentiment, and this can be illustrated by using the very topics that would normally be found in a newspaper, and comparing how modern communities around those news topics are faring in the digital age, through the lens of Hampton. When looking at the changes made by technology to community relationships around politics and current events, as a test case. Hampton’s assessment of the digital age as improvement, through the lens of his Persistent-Pervasive Community framing, triumphs over Alt Ledes pessimism and detraction, which has aged much more like milk than wine.


 
What is the ‘Persistent-Pervasive Community’?

As its name implies, there are two components to the relationships that make up a Persistent-Pervasive Community – “persistent contact (p. 110, para 1)” and “pervasive awareness (Hampton, 2016, p 111, para 3)”. To be fair to other researchers, these two terms are part of the lexicon of digital researchers at large (Erickson, 1999; Treem, Leonardi & van den Hooff, 2020; Khan, Metaxas & Markopoulos, 2008). In lay terms, persistent contact refers to the positive actions that people take to express to each other a desire to have an interpersonal relationship. The other component to Hampton’s Persistent-Pervasive framing is pervasive awareness. Hampton takes care to distinguish ‘pervasive awareness’ from more aggressive forms of pursuit of information about others, such as outright “surveillance (Hampton, 2016, p. 103, para 1)” (ReplicantFish, 2024). Nevertheless, the expression ‘pervasive awareness’ attempts to characterise the amount, and nature, of information that may be received, gleaned or inferred, about a person through passively or inadvertently shared information, such as an overheard conversation, peripheral objects in a photograph, metadata about the time and geolocation of a communication, or the other online friends of a person, demonstrating to third parties that they are, rightly or wrongly, in contact with each. By comparing the pre-industrial, urbanindustrial, and Persistent-Pervasive communities around politics and related post-consumption discussion, observers can assess how commentary about news and current affairs has changed in this Persistent-Pervasive Era, and decide for themselves if it is improved or diminished.

Hampton’s more academic approach to the question of the impact of technology on community, as compared to Alt Ledes’, is one that Hampton describes it as a “transdisciplinary (Hampton 2016, p. 102, para 1)” topic, that stems from something called The Community Question (Wellman, 1979). His concept of communities, in any form, hinges on what he calls “the mobility narrative (Hampton, 2016 p. 105, para 2)” – an examination of how reliance on a certain set of media, to make persistent contact, or to receive pervasive awareness, is affected by the cost of exercising either of those two components of community. He examines them through the prism of costs. In order to maintain the relationships that make up a community, he argues, changes in geography, like moving interstate or overseas, disrupt contact, disrupt awareness and, therefore, disrupt community. So, whereas the geographic disparity between social media users is something that Alt Ledes and his ilk lament, that same geographical separation, Hampton argues, is not the deal-breaker, in terms of defining community, is actually positive (Horan, 2024). It is not ‘antisocial’ to him. To make his argument, Hampton goes on to describe a chronological framing of various eras of community is divided into three (3) time periods, which are, in order, a) the pre-industrial community, b) the urbanindustrial community, and, finally, today’s digital version, which he calls c) the Persistent-Pervasive Community.

In the preindustrial era, ‘shared place’ dictated the sense of community. Geographic proximity defined what candidates were available for, exclusively, in-person (IRL) experiences. Later, when urban-industrial relationships “replaced shared place with shared interest (Hampton, 2016, p. 107, para 3)”, latently observed details became much sparser, of a high value commodity in its own right, and greater concern to both acquire and protect. Matters that might actually be in one’s self-interest to know, and plan for, might be completely withheld from that person if there was perceived to be no ‘shared interest’ between the two participants in the relationship by the person with access to that information. In the urbanindustrial era, that could be those same things, but with the added options now, such as a phone call or telegram. Then, in the digital era, to all of these has now been added the text message, the email, and mutual membership to any number of social media platforms offering, for example, direct messaging and posts, leading to the proliferating rate at which information about each other’s lives and activities now comes to our attention, or are observable by software firms (Dantas & Silveras, 2012). Despite these obvious privacy concerns Hampton feels that today’s digital sense of community has brought societal connectedness and community “full circle (p. 113, para 3)” to present “a hybrid of the preindustrial and urban-industrial forms (p. 109, para 4).”

Politics and Current Affairs Communities

Small communities have a reputation for being an environment where everyone knows everyone else’s business. Some people people welcome this, always having something, or someone, to discuss. Establishing a time period to the expression ‘pre-industrial’ is difficult, because academia did not have a clear view of community. This is partly because the infrastructure of the social sciences did not yet have the ‘pervasive awareness’ of which Hampton speaks. Rutman describes how the early American settler communities were small, due to “material constraints (Rutman, 1986, p. 168, para 1)” that made relationships personal, and face-to-face by default. Alt Ledes pre-occupation with the ability for people who have consumed media to establish community after consumption of common media might best be characterised by the common teachings of a church, particularly because early America was a religious, settler colony. However, we might also cautiously rely on media portrayals, such as popular 1970s broadcast television program Little House on the Prairie set in the late 1800s in rural America (IMDb, 2024). There is no technology as we know it today. All relationships play out face to face, just as Hampton describes that they would have during that period, but don’t necessarily translate into connectedness, unity, or the absence of antisocial behaviour (Novak, 2023).

It seems self-apparent that this same sense of community is even harder to observe, reliably, in anitbellum (late 1800’s) American, Black, slave communities, although media portrayals such as Roots, or 12 Years a Slave, inform our modern dialogue about them. Herein lies another flaw in the celebration of older forms of media (IMDb, 2024b; IMDb, 2024c). American slaves only knew, generally, what their owners permitted the to know. However, perhaps the existence of the African-American public holiday, Juneteenth, characterises the sense of community of that time. Multiple historians and academics describe the lag in information when news should have been sent to American slaves that US President Abraham Lincoln ended slavery in 1865 by signing the Emancipation Proclamation (Schwartz, 2015; Memmott, 2022). Conveniently, it took months for the news that slaves had been freed to get to the slaves themselves. This reflects a society that did not have the pervasive awareness of which Hampton speaks. One’s freedom to make ‘persistent contact’ and eligibility to receive widely disbursed information, or ‘pervasive awareness’ was inhibited by the spaces and places into which one was allowed. This ‘preindustral’ era is a time frame that predates Hampton’s ‘urbanindustrial’ period, but does not predate the newspaper, Alt Ledes’ preferred form of media (Ferguson, 2023).

However, in 1890, an important journal article, that continues to shape our views on community today, is written, called A Right to Privacy (Warren & Brandeis, 1890). The natures of the relationships, being less personal in the urbanindustral era, introduced concerns such as privacy laws, non-disclosure agreements, commercial-in-confidence concepts. So, the common knowledge of others’ affairs came to be viewed as problematic, especially as press expanded and the early American gentry sought to protect their reputations, images, and brands. These things were disruptive to the notion of community. Nevertheless, the paparazzi experienced its modern-era birth (Culnan, 1993). The newspaper culture, which Alt Ledes prefers, then came to hold the position in society that perhaps the small community church once had, becoming the “same basic material (Alt Ledes, 2014)“ from which all obtained their common information. While Alt Ledes celebrates the time period when people were having common conversations, because of having a single source of truth, Hampton touches upon how “visibility of political affiliation in networks where political discussion may be taboo (p. 115, para 1)” can create the “spiral of silence (Noell & Numan, 1974)” that cuts off the kinds of positive outward actions embodied in the concept of persistent contact needed to maintain community, and avoid divisive, antisocial behaviours.


Today, in the Pervasive-Persisent era, YouTube content creators, and their followers, do, such as Viva Frei, Faucette Media, The Lead Attorney, LegalBytes, Anton Daniels, Crimson Cure, Boyce Watkins, Nate the Lawyer, and others. These social media channels discuss current events, not only facilitating debate in their respective ‘Comments’ sections, but often basing episodes on responding to users who have posted comments. Much of the very dialogue that Alt Ledes declares to be missing, because of the world’s large-scale transition to social media, is found in the ‘Comments’ sections of social media platforms. There is even a YouTube channel named The Comments Section with Brett Cooper (Cooper, 2024). Social media doesn’t kill discussion, it facilitates it.

Of course, reading newspapers, silently, to oneself, means that one’s reactions to the material consumed is not shared; and, in the digital era, the subject matter that a user chooses to consume is visible to third parties. These are valid privacy concerns. However, this was not Alt Ledes’ critique. His critique was that the interaction of consumer after consumption suffered. Yet, the same visibilities of political affiliation that can be demonstrated after consuming digital media can be demonstrated after consuming print media. There is no significant point of difference here. By also criticizing the way that cell phones can alert people to the delivery of news and information, Alt Ledes refers to a valid difference between print and digital media (Boczkowski, Mitchellstein & Matassi, 2018). This is another form of Hampton’s ‘pervasive awareness’. However, it is at the discretion of the user how informed one wants to be at any given time, and with the proliferation of financial information, due to the democratisation of the investment community, competitive intelligence is in demand. The concept is explored by many works of fiction, such as the television series Early Edition, running from 1996 to 2000 (IMDb, 2024d).



Conclusion

Clearly, Alt Ledes observation, that technology is making us antisocial is incorrect. If one follows his path of reason, through the time periods as framed by Hampton, defining today’s diversity of opinion and ubiquitous access to information as being novel and unwelcome infers a preference for times past where information was controlled, and communities could be defined by what information they were allowed to possess. Conversely, what Hampton’s reasonings imply is that the same human issues that are of universal concern to humanity are no longer siloed in ways that put a false, social ‘stencil’ around society, as if these interests were not the universal interests that they are (Primack, Karim, Shensa, Bowman, et al. 2019). The various sections of a newspaper – the media vehicle for which Alt Ledes pines – covered dating and marriage, cooking recipes, and current events in business, politics and finance within that community. In the digital era, humanity has these very same concerns, but running tickers or chyrons, digital desktop widgets, metadata, and visible friend groups on social media sites overcome some of the hurdles of access to information brought on by the urbanindustrial period, without the confines of geography. Widespread use of social media is, admittedly, a different form of ‘community’ which can be a vehicle for the contagion of social ills that are not inherint to the infrastructure of it, but imposed on it by users. It is a network of platforms that, yes, do take on the characteristics of its users, but social media is not antisocial (Escobar-Viera, Choukas-Bradley, Sidani & Mihaux, et al., 2022).







 
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