Technoscientific Musings at WUSTL

Gershon’s article read as dated in its approach to and interpretation of social media, breakups, and media ideologies. She exoticizes digital mediums, or thinks of them as rigid/ahistorical, in a way that the other two readings pushed back against. I think she is right to want to probe into media ideologies, which do, of course, work in concert with the formal content of texts/emails/etc to create meaning, but media ideologies don’t exist in a vacuum. Gershon is looking at breakups—the kind of tricky, non-spatially defined field site that requires reworked and creative ethnographic strategies discussed in Hine—and her broad claim is that misaligned media ideologies create special and additional layers of friction to breakups. "Media ideology” is too strong a label for the different expectations/uses/values of social media platforms that interest Gershon. Media ideologies do exist, but within a media ideology there can be permutations/person-to-person variation due to its mingling with non-media specific ideologies, identities etc. There’s a fluidity that Gershon might have been better able to capture through “embodied engagement,” which Hine thinks is key for knowledge generation.

The “Why We Post” authors warn that studying social media can lead people to simplify the prior experience of offline communities in contrast to those online. Social media gets braided into different societies/classes/cohorts’ existing practices and identities (discussion of which is conspicuously absent in Gershon), and a point which seems to elude Gershon is that “a genre of interaction might remain stable despite migrating between supposedly very different platforms.” The “Why We Post” authors also claim that sociality “new to” or “created by” social media is really just latent in human beings and made visible by social media. “Latent” veers into dicey human nature territory, but this point—that social media can be a tool for seeing existing phenomena from a different perspective—is what’s missing from Gershon, who akin to Huffington Post-style articles about "millennials" gives the platforms far too much credit for exaggerated generational change. 

Somewhere in “Why We Post” the authors refer to failure as a marker of the integrity/quality of their research, which was weirdly evocative of Silicon Valley’s failure fetish. We only read a snippet of the complete volume, but their collaborative and comparative research method made me curious about the findings of their research and want to read more.