Relating Through Technology

Visit the link below to download the full version of this book:

https://medipdf.com/product/relating-through-technology/

Click Download Now

Power in Close Relationships
Christopher R. Agnew and Jennifer J. Harman, editors
Health and Illness in Close Relationships
Ashley P. Duggan
Intimate Relationships Across Cultures: A Comparative Study
Charles T. Hill
Relationship Maintenance: Theory, Process, and Context
Brian G. Ogolsky and J. Kale Monk
On-Again, Off-Again Relationships: Navigating (In)Stability in Romantic Relationships
René M. Dailey
Interdependence, Interaction, and Close Relationships
Laura V. Machia, Christopher R. Agnew and Ximena B. Arriaga
Relating Through Technology

Jeffrey A. Hall
University of Kansas
 University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India
79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108483308
doi: 10.1017/9781108629935
© Jeffrey A. Hall 2020
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2020
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
names: Hall, Jeffrey A., author.
title: Relating through technology / Jeffrey A. Hall, University of Kansas.
description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge
University Press, 2020. | Series: Advances in personal relationships |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
identifiers: lccn 2020009221 (print) | lccn 2020009222 (ebook) |
isbn 9781108483308 (hardback) | isbn 9781108704724 (paperback) |
isbn 9781108629935 (epub)
subjects: lcsh: Interpersonal communication–Technological innovations. | Information
technology–Social aspects. | Online social networks. | Interpersonal relations.
classification: lcc hm1166 .h35 2020 (print) | lcc hm1166 (ebook) | ddc 303.48/33–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009221
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009222
isbn 978-1-108-48330-8 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy
of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
To all of my friends
 c o n t e n ts

List of Figures page x

List of Tables xi
Introduction 1

1 Social Ecology and Personal Media 13

2 The Social Construction of Technology 31

3 Theoretical Perspectives on Personal Media and Relationships 48

4 Niche, Media Displacement, and Multimodal Relationships 70

5 Mode Comparison and Coexistence 91

6 Three Ways of Seeing Social Media 112

7 Five Enduring Tensions in Personal Media 135

8 Digital Stress 157

9 Social Displacement 171

10 Connectivity and Connection 188

References 208
Index 237

ix
 fi g u re s

1.1 Face-to-face and mediated social interaction page 22

3.1 Communicate bond belong theoretical model 63
3.2 Energy expenditure by modality 67
7.1 Enduring tensions: personalization/responsiveness/attention 146
10.1 Time spent socializing, 2003–2018 193

x
 ta b l e s

4.1 Percentage of daily social interactions by modality page 82

5.1 Comparisons of loneliness, closeness, affective well-being, and
relationship type by mode of social interaction 102

xi
 Introduction

When you are playing a DJ set, you are not exactly making anything. You are
contending with work that other people have already made, reorganizing it,
repurposing it. It’s creation, in the sense that I’m bringing a mood into
existence, but it’s curation in the sense that I’m looking through existing
songs to see which ones I’m going to select.
—Questlove (Thompson, 2018, p. 178)

I considered dozens of ways to start this book and none seemed fitting.
A technical introduction that reported billions of mobile connections or
trillions of texts was tempting, but would be outdated before the book went
to press. A personal anecdote about the ubiquity of social and mobile media
in everyday life would be in the spirit of the book, but I figured no one who
had not already noticed this on their own would need it described for them.
I needed something else.
Questlove – drummer for The Roots, DJ extraordinaire, epicurean, and
author – helped me think about this book in another way.
There I was laboring away on this volume you hold in your hands,
becoming keenly aware of the enormity of media research. With each chapter
I wrote, I realized I was constantly summarizing, borrowing, and reiterating
the thoughts of many outstanding thinkers. I kept wondering what my
contribution would be in writing this book. Doubt was the devil on my
shoulder and I was looking for the angel on the polar. I found it in Questlove’s
concept of the curator as creator as described in his book Creative Quest.
Museum curators, chefs, and DJs share a similar place in the creative
spectrum: they select choice bits and arrange them among other selections.
Through juxtaposition the tasty bits become tastier, more aesthetically appealing,
or even revelatory. When Questlove DJs, he loves to see people who were
thinking about ditching the party drawn back in again by his choice of song.
This type of creator chooses ingredients from the cupboard, mixes them into new
creation, and then presents the new creation to the audience for their consump-
tion. The curator connects with the audience through arrangement and selection.

1
2 Introduction

I am an academic curator and composer. I have scanned the breadth of

research on the intersection between personal relationships and technology,
and I am presenting my exhibit for you. I dug through the e-crates of
academic records and this book is my set list. This book will report new
findings from my own research, but it is primarily an act of curation. The
order and assembly of this book is a unified exhibit, a spectacle meant
to reveal my understanding of the intersection between relationships and
technology.
I am humbled by this opportunity to play academic DJ with the ideas of
others. I hope that my picks – expressed in ten book chapters – bring together
ideas that you may have come across before, but never considered in relation
to one another. Or maybe it exposes you to totally new ideas. Like a good
playlist, I hope that the chapters fit together in ways that promote repeat
visits. I hope this book sets your mental taste buds alight.
I have done my best to be a respectful creator – to warmly and accurately
present the work of others, to give credit where it is due, and to provide
proper context for any critique. And if any of this research is yours, thank you
for giving me the ingredients from which this ten-course meal has been
prepared. Thank you for your commitment to your craft.

section one: what’s on this playlist?

Why do we need a book that offers a relationship-focused approach to the
study of personal media? After all, there is an abundance of research on the
array of media platforms and services. From the ever-growing literature on
social media (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter) to the two-decade
tradition of research on texting, the research on media and technology is so
deep as to be overwhelming.
One motivation for writing this book is to refocus the conversation. For
my taste, there is too much research on technology rather than on the people
using it. A recent bibliometric analysis identified the twelve primary themes of
20,330 articles on social media, and not a single theme is focused on personal
relationships (Foote, Shaw, & Hill, 2018). The most common theme (i.e.,
media use) has the key words “Facebook” and “people” but not friends or
relationships. Of the twelve most common themes, there were zero using the
words “relationships,” “friendship,” “romantic,” “personal,” “conversation,”
or “social interaction” (Foote et al., 2018).
Another bibliometric analysis of research on online social networks
published in the top scholarly journals the past twenty years made this
astonishing claim: articles dedicated to the study of the role of social
networking sites (SNSs) in interpersonal relationships “did not necessarily
examine the social relationships did not necessarily examine the social rela-
tionships mediated by those social technologies” (Fu & Lai, 2020). In other
 Section One: What’s on This Playlist? 3

words, these articles did not recognize that relationships are the foundation
upon which online social networks are built, not the other way around. This
same analysis (Fu & Lai, 2020) found very little research on multimodal
relationships because research tends to be very platform specific, rarely
accounting for uses of various platforms and modalities. Furthermore, social
media research is by and large unconcerned with face-to-face (FtF) contact.
In research on personal media, users’ preexisting relationships with
communication partners are treated as ancillary or, worse, utterly irrelevant
to studying the phenomenon (Fu & Lai, 2020). For example, researchers often
prioritize measuring technology use in relation to outcomes like well-being,
but rarely consider the preexisting relationship between the people on the
sending and receiving ends of messages.
When researchers insufficiently attend to the relational context of per-
sonal media use, they are adopting a technology-focused approach. I would
like to start a larger conversation about what a relationship-focused approach
to personal media use could look like. I want to join my voice with Madianou
and Miller (2012), who call for a “re-socialization of media” (p. 184) where
each modality is understood by the ways that it nourishes or diminishes
human relationships.
One of the core observations of this book is that relationships are and
have long been multimodal, and, as such, much communication through
media is an extension of those preexisting relationships. Although the media
choices are vast, people continue to rely on a narrow set of modes of
communication with a small number of important others. I will explain
how these seemingly incompatible trends are possible. This book will synthe-
size and critique existing research on the questions of whom do we communi-
cate with, using which media, for what purpose, and to what effect?
This book will focus on everyday social interactions both FtF and through
media. Everyday talk between relational partners has been an important topic
in communication for at least fifty years (Knapp & Daly, 2011). Similarly,
research has long explored how people adopt, become accustomed to, and
integrate new technologies and platforms into their everyday patterns of
communication. As a research community, we need to transcend the bound-
aries between offline and online communication: “What happens via new
technology is completely interwoven with what happens face-to-face and via
other media” (Baym, 2009, p. 721). To do so, this book will focus on daily uses
of technology to socially interact, highlight how digital technologies are used
for maintaining existing relationships and forming new relationships, and
examine the ongoing integration of technology into users’ social life. In short,
this book will explore the intersection between everyday social interaction and
personal relationships as experienced in the digital age.
One thing I want to be crystal clear about: this book will not review
research on the use of digital media for information seeking, entertainment,
4 Introduction

and other instrumental purposes (e.g., shopping). My playlist will exclude all
nonsocial uses of technology.
The book will take into account choices to not socially engage through
media, choices to not be available via media, and choices to be intentionally
alone. It is part of my broader perspective on social ecology, wherein seeking
solitude and how we feel when we are alone are critical components of a
nourished social life (Hall & Merolla, 2020). For the purposes of this book,
intentionally making oneself unavailable through media and seeking times of
solitude can be understood from the perspective of relating through technol-
ogy in a way that shopping for shoes cannot.

1.1 Mode + Feature

Communication, both as a concept and as a discipline, is at the core of the
study of media. Mass communication researchers study radio, TV, film,
newspapers, and the many forms of digital content. These media are often
used to broadcast information in a one-way fashion to a large audience of
unknown others. In this book, I will use the term personal media to refer to
media used to send messages back and forth through some technology,
platform, or device. These messages are primarily, but not exclusively, sent
to a known other or others. There are several classic personal media (e.g.,
telephone, posted letter) that are addressed to a specific other and facilitate
one-to-one communication. Some old-school mass media can be used as
personal media or for the purpose of interpersonal communication, such as
CB radios used to connect enthusiasts and personal ads in newspapers used to
initiate personal relationships or find estranged loved ones. In such cases,
each would qualify as personal media. As a rule of thumb, personal media
enables interpersonal communication.
Computer-mediated communication (CMC) refers to messages sent and
received through a technological platform or mediated device. Thus, CMC
occurs through personal media. For much of the early history of CMC
research, these messages were primarily textual. For example, the bulletin-
board system (BBS), a precursor to the internet and World Wide Web, was
primarily a textual medium because audio or visual files were comparably
large and could overwhelm the system’s capacity (Delwiche, 2018). Although
CMC can facilitate mass messages, such as using a BBS to advertise a
community event or a modern-day listserv, CMC can also be directed and
interpersonal, which is the primary focus of this book. Media refers to the
various modalities and platforms used to convey messages to others. Personal
media are technologies that offer the possibility of two-way, interactive
communication between known others or between individuals who are seek-
ing to connect with strangers (e.g., looking for a dating partner, posting on a
social support website).
 Section One: What’s on This Playlist? 5

The mode of communication refers to the different forms media can take.
Parks (2017) defines mode of communication as “the basic form into which a
message has been encoded (e.g., speech, written text, still image, moving
image, touch)” (p. 506). Thus, FtF interactions offer several modes of com-
municating at once – visual, audio, and tactile. In the nonverbal communi-
cation tradition, these are called channels of communication. In CMC and
mass media research, channel refers to the “physical mechanisms and soft-
ware of message transmission” (Parks, 2017, p. 506). Thus, a channel is a
distinct and separable technology-enabled mechanism to convey a message.
When I suggest that relationships have long been multimodal, I am
arguing that people have long encoded messages into several modes of
communication – letters, phone calls, and FtF conversations. This gives rise
to what Parks (2017) calls mixed-media relationships and I will call
multimodal relationships, both of which refer to any nominally interdepend-
ent relationship (e.g., romantic, colleague, friend) maintained through more
than one modality. Modality switching occurs when people switch among
media to manage the stream of communication between them (Ramirez &
Wang, 2008). For example, a woman might follow up on the content of a text
exchange with her girlfriend later that day when they are at home together.

1.2 Variability between Modalities

Back when the modes of communication were few, there was a pretty clear
sense of what any given mode did or did not do. In the age of social media and
mobile applications, software developers actively compete to be the hub of
users’ engagement with the internet, with other platforms, with other people,
and with users’ geo-located environment. Thus, it has become increasingly
difficult to account for what any given technology or platform actually does or
can be used to do.
Throughout this book, I will advocate for a mode + feature approach to
distinguish between media. A feature is a technological option built into a
modality, which may or may not be available at a certain time, to certain
users, or with certain devices. Back in the era when landline phones were the
primary means of making voice calls, a then-new feature was call waiting.
This feature allowed a person to know when another call was coming in while
already talking to someone. In the smartphone era, it is more common that
features can be turned on or off or enabled or disabled (with greater or lesser
ease). Within any given mode of communication, the number of features can
be many or few. Features are more numerous, more technology-dependent,
and more changeable than core modalities. To be clear, I am asserting there is
limited variability within a singular mode. While features vary, modes share
core aspects across time, devices, and platforms. Traditional modes (e.g., voice
calls, email) and newer modes (e.g., video chat) are distinct.
6 Introduction

There are several ways to distinguish between modalities and features,

and organizing this variability is important theoretically and practically. In
2010, Baym offered seven key concepts to help differentiate between modes of
communication. These concepts have been reevaluated and expanded (e.g.,
Evans, Pearce, Vitak, & Treem, 2017; Nesi, Choukas-Bradley, & Prinstein,
2018), but it is important to note that all exist on continua rather than a binary
fashion.
Synchrony (concept number 1) (as opposed to asynchrony) describes the
temporal structure of media, wherein totally synchronous communication is
like FtF interaction. When modalities require pauses or breaks between
messages, either due to the limits of connectivity itself or due to time needed
for reception and response, they become asynchronous.
Text-based exchanges do not contain the amount of nonverbal infor-
mation that FtF communication does. This concept (number 2) is called social
cues, which varies based on the number of nonverbal channels available on a
given modality (Parks, 2017). The idea of anonymity is sometimes folded into
the concept of social cues because given sufficiently low social cues, an
individual can (nearly) anonymously send and receive messages (Nesi et al.,
2018). Another component of social cues is the degree to which a mode
promotes certain cues over others. As a concept that describes variability
within a mode of communication, it refers to the idea that some modes of
communication include visual media or images (e.g., video chat), and others
are primarily textual communication (e.g., texting). This issue is also salient
when comparing types of social media (e.g., Twitter versus Snapchat) and
what type of social cues they offer and promote.
The next three concepts speak to the size of the audience and permanence
of the message, both in the moment and over time. Reach (concept number 3)
refers to the number of individuals to whom a message is sent. Voice calls
used for interpersonal rather than broadcast purposes (such as a webinar)
have very limited reach, but tweets on Twitter can be very broad in reach.
Reach also speaks not just to the intended audience but also to the potential or
final audience size. Replicability (concept number 4) is the degree to which a
message is permanent (versus ephemeral) or has a left digital trace (Nesi et al.,
2018). Combining reach and replicability, some modes of communication
have a much bigger reach than may have been intended because their digital
trace can be dug up and shared. Concept number 5 is searchability, which is
closely aligned with digital storage. Voice calls are searchable in the sense that
call records indicate the length of a call and that the two numbers that were
connected, but are not totally searchable as the contents of voice calls are not
stored and thus are not searchable. By contrast, text messages and emails are
much more searchable because the message content itself is stored. Search-
ability includes the related concept that certain platforms make it easier to
search an archive.