Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: When a whistleblower from Facebook (now Meta), leaked the company’s research showing that Instagram was psychologically harmful to girls, newspapers and public commentary framed this as a revelation, but the story felt familiar.1 It seemed another example of a media panic, which many scholars explain have long been intertwined with moral panics.2 New media and media technologies—from the novel to social media—have traditionally generated familiar but slightly transformed and occasionally distinctive concerns about media effects. Such concerns typically revolve around age, gender, and race. But media is also essential to spreading moral and media panics. Reactions in the aftermath of the leaked Facebook documents are a perfect example of both—people expressed concerns about media’s impact and news media’s narrow focus on the documents’ more sensationally negative content exacerbated these concerns. Analysis of the so-called Facebook files focused on the revelations of harms of social media instead of other research in the leaked documents about possible benefits through community building.The most publicized research in popular press accounts suggested that the body comparison springing from Instagram use promoted eating disorders and depression.3 These findings are certainly cause for concern, but the studies about body comparison associated with social media use do not seem radically dissimilar than older research about the effects of fashion and fitness magazines.4 People have also been reporting on the harms of the internet—for girls in particular—for a long time, be it bullying and harassment or pro-Ana groups. Even Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, has said that “the web is not working for women and girls” and worries about it becoming a “digital dystopia.”5Scholars have debated what is cognitively different about social media addiction versus other kinds of media “addictions.” The “unpredictable rewards” of “likes” and affirmation online are qualitatively different from those offered by many other forms of media and may keep people more tethered to social media than other consumption habits.6 Nevertheless, the Facebook files invite us to revisit the frequently asked question of what is “new” about new media.7As someone who has done a great deal to demonstrate the continuities and resonances between new and old media, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that there is an “important discontinuity” with new media that challenges genealogies some scholars construct that go back to the printing press.8 Even as we take seriously Chun’s warning about the consequences of failing to recognize the difference media makes, identifying the echoes of earlier moments gives us a thicker perspective. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter (X), and Instagram are not the first examples of communities and identities organized around mediated texts and technologies. Young women connected over novel reading and the fantasies in their pages were considered “infectious” and dangerous, from early novel reading to the rise of Harlequin and historical romance novels in the late twentieth century.9 Psychiatrist Frederic Wertham fretted over the raced and gendered harms of comic books, even as the content and the communities that can form around comics often model new just worlds and offer a sense of belonging to the socially marginalized.10 The fan cultures from comics and other “geek cultures” like gaming and science fiction have notoriously been marked by misogyny, racism, and homophobia, even as the same groups marginalized by white supremacy and toxic masculinity have built their own affirming and pleasurable communities.11But as Chun argues, such histories must be attentive to the differences that medium makes.12 While acknowledging that there are differences, experiential and discursive echoes might help us think through how we work and live through contemporary media panics. One primary focus of social media panic is the crisis of misinformation and polarization that threatens democracy. Another strand, which was the popular media and political focus of the Facebook leaks, surrounds girls’ and women’s cultures. Much of the literature around harm comes from psychologists, education scholars, sociologists, and some communication scholars, as opposed to media historians, and one of the reasons may be not only methodological but also a resistance to causality claims around media. On the one hand, we have many reasons to be concerned about how social media operates in the world. On the other, as many scholars have noted, it has been a site for productive political mobilization and, in some cases, community building for some populations. What if we took seriously the need for a long view that looks at other media in thinking about how to address social media as a “problem”? What might previous examples of people being social through media teach us about the present?Contributors to this special issue take a long view. Social media can be a site in which girls and women are treated as being particularly vulnerable to content and a place where corporations can often denigrate their consumers, in ways that may echo the classical archival evidence about girl fans and the Hollywood studio system. Capitalism is both the foundation for mass media and seen as disrupting the creative and political possibilities of it, but creators who have been cut out of corporate modes of production can find each other and audiences in social media as they have in alternative markets like underground comics. The internet can be a site of horrible danger and harassment for women while they also may return to these spaces, finding pleasure in proximity to—and sometimes in relationship to—the danger, and it was that way long before Twitter (X), Facebook, and Instagram. Fans who call out racism, misogyny, and homophobia on social media are met with rage because they are seen as disrupting not only pleasure but also the offenders’ views of their community, a politics of in-group regulation that harkens back to practices of fan exclusion that precede contemporary social media forms. Social media can feel different and be different, even as we know that there are other sites where we see people negotiating relationships through media. Nonetheless, the struggle over certain binary oppositions—consumer and producer, pleasure and danger, victim and agent, and perhaps most of all, utopia and dystopia, have long histories that could be cited more often in public conversations about social media in the present.We may still be in what Dana R. Fisher and Larry Michael Wright describe as a cultural lag around the dystopian and utopian binary produced around the possibilities of the internet.13 Even as there are many conversations about social media creating a dystopian hellscape—particularly in relation to misinformation—many scholars have celebrated the utopian, world-building possibilities of social media. Such conversations are particularly common in discussing Black and queer communities, populations who have not only had less access to producing traditional media but have been victims of distortion and erasure. Even the most prominent discussions of social media dysfunction that focus on the dangers of misinformation are also organized around interrogating why identity makes particular populations more likely to cohere around media communities—finding them liberating or destructive.The utopian in media signifies not only the traditional meaning of the ideal but also adds a twist to the “no place,” since inhabiting media is often occupying a space that is no material place that people can live. Yet the act of consuming media can often be experienced as spatial—media is discussed variously as if it is transporting to fictional or virtual worlds or as if it augments and multiplies the material spaces in which it is consumed. In contrast, the dystopian is used both as a descriptor of the material world we inhabit and the world people fear will be enacted. But both have in common how central identity is to people’s understanding of either world—there is no way of imagining a topos without people defining what kinds of people they wish to be there, which people will be excluded, which people will have power, and which people will be hurt by it. Identity is thus essential to the construction of what makes a space dystopian or utopian.This special issue looks at a longer history of media we can term “social,” and how other media, often removed from conversations about social media, have negotiated the same issues around identity, idealization, and demonization. There is still a tendency to treat social media in relation to binaries, and such binaries are related to the utopian/dystopian binary that has haunted discussions of the internet since its early days. We see resonances between such binaries in other mass media discussions, with scholars and laypeople alike having a tendency to overcelebrate media and see it as revolutionary or worthy of complete condemnation in relation to the injuries it causes. Social media is an example of a media identitopia—the space of consumption and association that offers the promise of utopian community while dystopian harms threaten or overtake the pleasurable political possibilities of connections made between people through media. The popular always holds the ideal and suffering in the same place because of identity—people’s ideal worlds are shaped by ideas of belonging and exclusion. Political economy is also key to media identitopias because it naturalizes exclusions in the name of marketability, resource scarcity, and property. In this issue we look at histories of that tension, exploring the space between that shapes the quotidian negotiations that transpire in the identitopias we inhabit.When we place identity at the center of discussions of the possibilities and problems of (social) media, there may be more overlaps between disciplines than we often acknowledge. Media historians and many other media scholars can see causality claims as an anathema, but nonetheless constantly talk about what media does. Media scholars believe that media and representation matters—this justifies the existence of the field. That this belief is a frequent presence in scholarship in the field suggests that there is a relationship between “media effects” research and other media scholars’ engagement with the fact that media does things and people also do things with media. What media does is particularly a concern with media scholars who work with representations of race, gender, and sexuality. Scholars such as Racquel Gates, Mireille Miller-Young, Celine Shimizu, Cáel Keegan, and many others have pushed audiences to move away from simplistic readings of “negative” representations or “bad” media objects.14 Even when the binaries of positive and negative are not directly being engaged or challenged, the most productive media scholarship often helps us see how media texts and technologies (as well as critiques of media) can work by offering more expansive imaginings of how to understand and relate to the world.For example, in her work on “negative” representation in derided media forms like reality television, Racquel Gates critiques the assumption that it is positive representation, rather than other political or social changes that can Black people from The assumption of who call for positive seem to be that their a more positive view of Black by white cultural or that some of Black representation helps people feel In contrast, Gates for an and of the of negative that argues possibilities for and that not possible in the spaces of positive when the of positive and negative work that scholars like Gates have their own in exploring what media can than that representations can or have positive effects by or ideal representations of an identity the positive or work that representation can do instead from the possibilities that they to or of they positive or offer media representations still are with even as their benefits or harms are studies has the relationship between media and identity in many other ways from the of positive and negative of have out that popular media politics and representations in ways that narrow the of that on and that and political in of and the ways that these critiques one of the of this is to see media as working to political We could that the is how these texts common sense about and and queer studies have a for the relationship between and social media, the of has been a space in which more effects claims have to with about and 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Source: Feminist Media Histories
Authors: Rebecca Wanzo, Reem Hilu
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4390478516