Cyber Means Pilot

Beyond the fact that my latest book, “Digital Culture in the Platform Era: Studying Celebrity, Influence, and Superstars Online,” has given me a place to flesh out some of my previous concepts I covered with a little more clarity, the book became a way to organize my research agenda to the point that I can share it with others without tripping up. It was hard to craft the narrative thread that tied all of my interests together into one logical presentation. I could highlight terms with clarity. I could define memes as “active, multilayered communication constructions that are influenced by social factors and represent a mode of individual expression, in which meaning-making is controlled by both a community that understands that the whole of the work is greater than the sum of its parts and a collective that places that creative content into some part of the broader cultural industry embedded in society.” It is also easy to point at defining nanocelebrities as “any credential expert in a given field of study who tends to grow their fame, popularity, and/or recognition by shaping their knowledge effectively into content that is suitable for social media and compelling them to read, listen to, and watch” or platform persona dynamics as the “presentational adjustments one makes as they shift from one website community to another that impacts their communication practices or aesthetic decisions of who they are in those spaces.” What was lacking in this overview of terminology was the broad themes that tied all of the efforts together from my publications over the past decade. I think I can point to five after some reflection time on the subject.

It seems easy to point to digital communication as the first of the common themes in my work. As a communication professor for nearly a quarter of a century, I hope that there is some crossover between my research and my teaching. I see digital communication as the encoding and decoding of the practices we take part in to exchange information and interact with each other, which involves the use of electronic devices and tools as part of these exchanges and interactions. Looking back at my earlier work to see how the early days of Facebook gave us the digital communication tools to help first-year college students make meaningful connections (back when Facebook was mostly harmless), explain how digital communication practices made it easier for misinformation to spread in citizen journalism platforms like CNN’s iReport during the misreporting of Steve Jobs’ death, or even the various chapters that I wrote that presented different psychological aspects of the video games that we play and enjoy. Pointing out the through line of digital communication’s influence on society in my work means understanding how we can ethically connect with others through these communication practices and why this type of communication is meaningful, given the type of engagement that was happening online ten years ago. This understanding leads me to the second thematic that was common in my work.

The next thematic hits on the sociological aspects of my work, specifically in the field of Internet culture. It is easy to look at Internet culture as those beliefs and values that can be transmitted and aesthetically expressed through the artifacts that are shared to normalize what it means to be part of this collective of the disembodied masses. I frame Internet culture through the internet vs Internet argument that I often present in class and bring into my scholarship. I frame the (lowercase i) internet as the “social co-construction that allows for communities and societies to transmit cultural artifacts” and the (uppercase I) Internet as the “superstructure that allows for the distribution of files and folders between web-accessible devices.” This theoretical grounding formed the foundation for studying memes as the cultural artifacts that they are in “Meme Life: The Social, Cultural, and Psychological Aspects of Memetic Communication,” and attempts to explain why studying Internet celebrities’ personality types, purposeful content, and powerful modes of communication helps us better connection with others in “Digital Culture in the Platform Era.”

It is those connections with others that formed my third theme of research in the form of studying online communities, which I choose to define as the shared social bonds between people and groups who have some common active connections that allow them to interact with one another in virtual spaces. Studying how a group of people interact over the Internet and make connections through their common interests, goals, or purposes truly gets to the heart of the power of digital platforms. It is how people can come together to support cancer research through various social media groups, as shown in the case studies that examined social media campaigns of #nomakeupselfie and #thumbsupforstephen,or even observing the impact that gaming has had to bring the academic community together during the time of COVID-19. I have even attempted to make the argument for online communities differently from online collectives, as one is grounded in social identity (communities), which the other is grounded in the need to perform direct action towards a given goal (collectives). We can point to communities as privileging relationship-oriented forms of communication, where issues surrounding inclusion and affection are primarily addressed. Collectives tend to privilege task-oriented communication to implement and achieve the goals of the group. Using digital platforms like forums, social media groups, or dedicated apps to coordinate task-oriented communication to share the collective’s knowledge or build up social bonds via relationship-oriented communication practice only happens with the pathways to do so.

My fourth research thematic is definitely borrowed from the previous literature in the realm of cyberstudies. It is fair to argue that the research that I did in grad school was influenced by Jan van Dijk’s work (especially “The Digital Divide” and “The Deepening Divide”), James Martin’s work on the wired society, Paul McLean’s “Culture in Networks,” and the keywork of this field in the form of Manuel Castells’ “The Rise of the Network Society” (my dog-earred copy of his book is still getting good use in my home office). These wise scholars helped me see that the work that I categorized as cyberstudies during the first couple of years of my doctoral work from 2005 to 2007 was part of the knowledge economy, as I was producing writing that was driven by intellectual capital that led me to perform information-intensive activities to advance my program of study and the end goal of getting my doctorate. This nexus of knowledge let me focus on the questions surrounding a network society, especially the digital divide issues that faced the Appalachian region of Ohio and the rest of the United States that lived under the shadow of that mountain range. The concept of the network society is looking at the Internet as this global superstructure in which the social aspects are driven by the nodes that we use to access the network, the roads that connect us with other nodes, and the loads that represent that information that we share with one another. I would point to my “Appalachian Discourse” presentation I did at the 2017 Theorizing the Web conference in New York City at the beautiful Museum of Moving Images, or the power of naming the aspects that we encounter as part of living in a network society. It is that ability to give names to our online experiences that led to my final research thematic.

The final of the five research thematics takes me back to 2008 and my first attempt to nail down a public phenomenon that was occurring in popular culture. I wanted to explain how experts in the field were using online mediated tools to both spread their knowledge across the Internet and present themselves in a manner that matched the aesthetics that celebrities were using to attract an audience. At that time, I was looking at an individual who was promote him or herself on the media and channels that are available to them and broadcast that presentation to the general public, and generally has an audience of under a thousand. It was this definition that I used first to frame the concept of the nanocelebrity. That term expanded from 2011 (when I presented my work at SxSW Interactive 2011) to the final version of the definition, which appeared in “Digital Culture in the Platform Era.” It was the concept of nanocelebrities that fit the last of my research themes. Nanocelebrities are part of the scalable selves that make up the Internet celebrities I studied in my last book. I look at the scalable self as the means that we use online to construct a unique personality profile that may or may not be different depending on the platform that we are on, and be dynamic enough to make these changes on the fly without losing who we consider to be our coherent selves both online and in face-to-face engagements. The idea of the scalable selves is one of the main reasons that I refer to Twitch Streamers as platform superstars, as I am not sure how long Twitch will last and if something will replace the star power that Twitch has provided these Internet celebrities over the past decade. It is also how we shift from the average Internet user in most aspects of our virtual existence to potentially reach Internet celebritism in those particular niches that enjoy our work.

It is through this vantage point of seeing the connections between digital communication, Internet culture, online communities, network society, and the scalable self that not only gave me insight towards explaining the sociological aspects of our virtual existence, but also allowed me to address how the information we exchanged and the interactions that took place within those walled gardens of social media site and the open worlds of the traditional web. I like to call those five thematics the DIONS. Beyond being a quasi-cool acronym, DIONS reminds me of the nexus of my research. It is a simple way to ground my work as interdisciplinary (as evidence by the wide variety of research projects I have taken on in the last fifteen years) and interlocking (as I pull from my past research often to support claims and terms in whatever I am currently working on, instead of simply repeating myself). The DIONS moniker is a nice way to tie up the loose ends of my research and pull back on the idea that there isn’t a narrative thread that connects all of my work.