13.2: Masspersonal Communication in Practice
- Page ID
- 90736
LEARNING OUTCOMES
- Understand the concept of masspersonal communication.
- Appreciate key ways that masspersonal communication has altered our interpersonal communication practices.
MASSPERSONAL COMMUNICATION IN PRACTICE
Parasocial relationships are the relationships that we form with people we see in the media. In the mass media era, these relationships were limited to celebrities that we watched on film or television, or even characters in books that we read. Today, however, the line between social and parasocial relationships is blurred, particularly on social media platforms where we communicate in a mediated environment with people that we also interact with offline.
As established in prior Units, communication is necessary in order to establish meaningful relationships. However, Hartmann (2016) notes that when our relationships with people, even those we know offline, are conducted more through social media than through face-to-face interactions, we begin to treat those relationships as being para-social. We no longer see the other person as a part of our offline reality. Instead, we begin to idealize them in the same way that we would idealize our favorite television or film star. Consequently, these relationships can become toxic by distorting our sense of reality, and warping our self-image.
Research shows that people who use social media, under any circumstance, even in moderation, largely tend to suffer from the experience (Riehm, et al., 2019). This effect reportedly happens because most users of social media purposely misrepresent themselves in the best possible light. Users heighten the sense of envy or shame that others feel when they view posts, and eliminate the vulnerability that relational communication depends on as a means of both soliciting and sharing support with others. If we begin to reduce our complex social relationships with family and friends to a series of parasocial exchanges, then we may be losing our ability to relate to those people as genuine human beings.
Overall, some of the behaviors described in the development and maintenance of self-concept have taken on new forms in the era of masspersonal communication. Uses of new media to promote personal brands, lifestyle blogs, and other content focused on health and beauty have exacerbated the reach, and use of professional editing technologies that were previously reserved only for mass media (McLean et al., 2015). Airbrushing, a process through which images are digitally edited after being captured, used to be reserved only for magazines and billboards.
Today, this type of editing can be done by anyone, leading impressionable people to compare themselves negatively to what they think are genuine images of other people similar to them (Lincoln & Robards, 2017).
Image editing is not the only way that people are able to manage others’ impressions of them using social media. Many people now engage in adaptive forms of impression management behaviors even when first deciding what content they post to their social media, in effect acting as arbiters of what information about their lives they want people to see, and when. Some people do this by annotating their media content with captions, images, or tags to shape the audience’s perceptions of what they post or by omitting any information that is not consistent with the brand identity they have created for themselves (Lincoln & Robards, 2017).
On the other hand, masspersonal communication also presents new challenges to impression management. A key difference in the affordances of the tightly controlled mass media of old, and the new media used today for masspersonal communication is that on social media, interpersonal messages meant for one person could be unintentionally broadcasted to a large audience of recipients. This mistake can happen simply by clicking the wrong button. Perhaps, you or someone you know may have hit "reply all" to a message meant for only one person, or have posted a message in a public feed composed for only one intended recipient.
The examples above illustrate one of the challenges for masspersonal communicators. In masspersonal communication, most of our interactions are documentable, and therefore they have more permanence. Permanence refers to how permanent a message is when it is shared online. A hurtful exchange that takes place between two people arguing offline exists afterward only in the memory of those present. When two people argue with each other via email, text, social media, or even some teleconferencing platforms those arguments become documented exchanges that can exist forever. They can reside on the platforms' servers, your local disk storage, or potentially in the public view of peers after if you or the interlocutor decide to share the exchange publicly (Pesce & Noto, 2016).
When a single message meant for an individual recipient is relayed via an open channel it is possible, indeed likely, that we may experience what is called context collapse (Marwick & Boyd, 2011). Context collapse occurs when different people, who know you in different contexts, receive a message you are sending to a specific intended audience and then misinterpret that message by decoding outside of the context in which it was encoded. For example, imagine the misinterpretation that could occur if a friend posted a picture of you drinking heavily at a college party to your LinkedIn profile on the day of an important job interview, that your prospective employer immediately sees. What may have been intended as a nostalgic message from one friend might look to your prospective employer like a recent photo displaying your present lifestyle.
Hogan (2010) explains that because of the greater potential audience for online exchanges we tend to be more sensitive to what Goffman called facework. Facework is the work of maintaining our reputation in front of others. The result of the public/private dynamic of new media is that we are all more inclined to engage in facework, including a tendency to reply to messages that we might otherwise ignore.
The increased work required to maintain our face online may actually make us more inclined to escalating styles of conflict. New studies show that while new media may make conflict easier to avoid, people who communicate through social media are typically more inclined to escalate conflicts than they would face-to-face (Brady et al., 2017). In part, this has to do with the physical distance that removes us from immediate bodily harm in such exchanges, but it is also a product of the meshed public/private arena where even an exchange of text messages could be shared with a broader audience making every interaction online a matter of impression management.
One of the major concerns about the popularity of masspersonal communication, especially among young people, has to do with privacy (Vitak, 2012) and the widespread use of mobile technologies. Because we can now take our personal phones with us into public spaces, conversations that are meant for the private arena may be taking place with an unknown and unintended audience present.
More concerning is the access that our smartphones provide to confidential online files or interfaces. Through our applications, we communicate with many people, organizations, governments, and even AI programs. All of these interactions leave traces on our phones that reveal much about our identities. If someone steals your cell phone and bypasses security measures, they could have full access to your private emails, texts, voice messages, recordings, documents, and browser history. They could also gain access to your bank records, tax information, and even how many steps you walk on an average day.
Notice that in modern spy movies, secret agents are breaking into the files of the KGB, they’re downloading cell phone and laptop hard drives in order to uncover a cornucopia of information that in bygone eras were stored physically in a broad array of different places.
The wealth of information that your phone provides reflects the fact that our communication reveals a great deal about who we are. It is for this reason that governments, hackers, corporations, and advertisers are all so interested in the data that accumulates from the masspersonal interactions we have using networked devices.
This process of compiling a nuanced record of user behavior in a profile that sold to others is called data mining, and it occurs most readily through social media sites like Facebook who depend on the sale of user data as a prime source of income (Cadwalladr & Graham-Harrison, 2018). Data mining is only possible because of the expanded memory capacity of new media technologies.
All of our interactions online, right down to the keystrokes we choose, are recorded and documented by the companies who provide the hardware, software, websites, and applications that we use every day. Once our data is available to people with the right tools to analyze it, many facets of our identities can be interpreted in order to create what is called a psychographic profile. These profiles are used to determine what kinds of messages we are likely to respond to, and in what ways.
Years ago, advertisers focused on the use of demographics as a way of grouping together potential customers based on shared factors like age, race, income, marital status, or education. These broad categories were used to help segment a market of consumers into groups in order for advertisers to decide what types of messages might be most appealing to their target customers.
Today, this approach to advertising has been greatly refined because advertisers no longer need to guess at what groups of people may or may not like. Using the psychographic profile of a specific consumer, they can determine exactly what message that individual consumer is most likely to find appealing, which enables them to tailor their advertisements to meet that person’s disposition.
While virtually all interactions online are now part of the public record, concerns over privacy are amplified in the case of social interaction because the data derived from these exchanges is being constantly mined and analyzed by big data analysts. These analysts refine the individual online profiles that exist for each of us, which are used not only by retailers tapping into our psyche as a way of selling products (De Corniero & De Nijs, 2016), but now also by special interest groups, and even foreign governments trying to influence your behavior.
The reason that concerns about data mining are greater for social interactions than just individual online activity is that in an exchange with another person your information is more easily recorded given that it is exposed to data miners monitoring either of the people involved. Though young people frequently express concerns about how their masspersonal communication may impact the security of their private information, very few feel empowered to stop their masspersonal practices (Hargitai & Marwick, 2016).
Communication Competence
Masspersonal communication has greatly complicated the ability to communicate competently in the more dynamic new media era. In Unit 1, you learned about the transmission and transactional models of communication. Think about how masspersonal communication relates to those models.
When we mediate our interpersonal interactions through the use of digital devices, we reduce the richness of our channels, making it easier for us to misinterpret the relational meanings behind the content we are seeing, and making it harder for others to interpret the meaning of our replies Kelly & Miller-Ott, 2018). Masspersonal communication blends the affordances of online and offline channels, giving us more work to do when encoding and decoding messages because it is harder for us to anticipate what types of noise might occur.
How do you enact conversational management, for example, during a group text? Is it rude to be typing when you can see from the little gray bubbles that someone else may be typing too? Are you adequately involved if your reply comes two hours late? On the other hand, you may have other conversations taking place at the same time offline, do they get first priority? These types of questions reflect the complex demands of masspersonal communication.
To begin our discussion of this, let us consider the new questions raised about what constitutes appropriateness when communicating in a masspersonal way. As we learned earlier in the book, appropriateness is a key component of competent communication. However, appropriateness, like other aspects of communication, is highly contextual. We already know that context collapse can affect impression management by exposing our messages to scrutiny from others than our intended audience. There are implications regarding what people consider to be appropriate or ethical acts of communication due to the permanence of our masspersonal interactions.
For example, consider the routine use of Twitter by American President Donald Trump where he fires cabinet members, negotiates trade deals, and even threatens war (Boczkowski & Papacharissi, 2018). Before Twitter made it possible for a President to speak directly to the American people just by typing into a cell phone, these kinds of decisions were typically announced through formal meetings with the invited press, and after much vetting and consideration. Nevertheless, President Trump does not view himself as announcing information. Instead, he is relaying personal news to a wide range of followers, sometimes using hashtags to indicate that he is replying to a specific person. Is it appropriate to relay personal news, even when it has broader implications for everyone else on the planet?
Another example would be Prince Harry’s decision in 2020 to announce he was stepping down from the British Royal family via Instagram. This type of announcement used to be conveyed via a formal proclamation issued by the Queen through her own administrators. However, Harry and his wife decided to surprise everyone with the news by simply posting it on their social media pages (Booth & Adam, 2020). This announcement resulted in a raucous public debate about the propriety of using social media to broadcast information. This behavior was suggested to be unorthodox because it was not possible until recently. The question remains, however, whether such behavior will ultimately be accepted as appropriate. What do you think?
Another gray area regarding communication competence in the masspersonal era has to do with how we manage conversations. Prior to mobile networked technologies, it was far easier to segment your conversations. If you were in conversation with someone, you could close doors, ignore a ringing phone, and give your attention to that person. Today, we are receiving more messages in more ways at more times. Not only that, but many of us use alerts and notifications on our devices that are designed to draw our attention (Carr, 2011). Turkle’s (2011) extensive research concluded that all these competing bids for our attention have altered our social expectations. We are more forgiving today of distracted listeners in a face to face conversation, but more demanding of immediate responses from people we communicate with online.
Questions of clarity and intent are also complicated when communicating in a masspersonal way. Prior Units in this publication showed how verbal and nonverbal communication cues help us to interpret messages at either a denotative (content) or connotative (relational) level. These interpretive practices apply to the masspersonal realm. In fact, some text-based icons were intentionally created to bridge the gap between the verbal and non-verbal affordances of new media technologies. The emoticon is the most prominent example of this.
The emoticons (or emojis) that we now use frequently in our texts and emails were invented to provide a digital form of a nonverbal cue. They accompany the text of our message in order to help the receiver contextualize what we are saying using our typical nonverbal cues (i.e. kinesics, vocalics, etc.). Before emojis were created, text-based messages were subject to a lot of miscommunication due to the difficulty of reading the connotative (relational) meanings of what was being said. The purpose of the original emojis was to provide a facial cue that would signal to the receiver what tone the sender was intending. Today, emojis have evolved into a language of their own- all of which is, again, based on cultural contexts (Kelly & Miller-Ott, 2018).
Let us look deeper into verbal and nonverbal communication practices, and how they have been affected or adapted in the era of masspersonal communication.
Verbal Communication
Verbal communication is increasingly popular today because of new media. Phone calls, meetings, and private catch-up sessions are all possible through text-based modes of communication like email, texting, and social media. This reliance on mediated communication increases the odds of miscommunication at the relational level. It can be equally confusing at the denotative level due to the rapidly changing use of language by young people in the United States (Thurlow, 2017).
Text speak is one of the ways that language is evolving in the masspersonal era. Because people rely more on abbreviated text-based messages sent at random intervals throughout the day as a way of communicating with others, there is also a greater emphasis on brevity in messages. To reduce word and character counts in the messages we send, many of us employ language codes for common phrases we call text speak. Examples of text speak include BRB for ‘be right back’, TTYL for ‘talk to you later’, or the most well known of all: LOL for ‘laughing out loud’ (Dixon, 2011).
This new coding of language, paired with the emojis that often accompany such messages for context, has created new demands for competent communication in the masspersonal era. Many of the youngest people in society find themselves more adept at textspeak than their elders, despite falling behind in their ability to communicate in standard English in their classrooms (Shlowiy, 2014).
Meanwhile, many older people are struggling to manage their feelings of ineptitude when trying to communicate masspersonally, even though they have long considered themselves competent speakers of the English language. As proof of the bridging qualities of masspersonal communication, text speak is no longer just reserved for text-based messages. People have begun using text speak when they talk out loud to others (Head, 2011).
Some studies suggest that today’s college graduates are less literate than they were a decade ago thanks to the rise of text speak and the formatting limitations of many social media sites (Mallow & Lister, 2016; Graff, 2017). For people born before the nineteen nineties, standard education included rigorous schooling on grammar and spelling. Once spell check became popular, the emphasis among students likely lessened. By the mid-nineties, as students everywhere began carrying computers with them to class, research shows a precipitous slide in spelling and grammar skills. Most young people consider spelling and grammar trivial factors in their ability to communicate (Perry et al., 2018). Unfortunately, this view is not shared by everyone.
Thurlow (2017) points out that while young employees might not realize it, co-workers consider proper spelling to be a primary factor in message clarity, even when they can understand the intended meaning. More importantly, older workers are equally inclined to consider literacy skills to be a critical reflection of overall job competence, meaning that textspeak could lead to job termination (Thurlow, 2017).
Other studies find that grammatical and spelling errors can even impact your ability to find a mate, because spelling and grammar can take on greater importance when searching for a date through online sites (Van der Zanden, et al., 2019). Most alarmingly, research also shows that in the healthcare field, people have died as a result of workers misunderstanding one another because of their use of text speak on the job (Head, 2011).
Non-Verbal Communication
Almost all elements of nonverbal communication have been affected in some way by the augmented reality of new media. In this section, we consider some key aspects.
Chronemics
Our concept of chronemics has seen major changes due to masspersonal communication. The same nonverbal codes that were once given priority in western culture (timeliness, promptness, and synchronicity), have been replaced by the affordances of new media that emphasize efficiency, speed, and dexterity (Doring & Poschel, 2017). How often have you panicked because you were running late to meet a friend in a public place, and you’re worried they might leave in a huff before you get there? Before cell phones were ordinary, this was a significant concern. Now that most people can relay last-minute messages to each other, even after they have left for their destinations, timeliness is valued differently.
Consider, for example, the question of time as it relates to an interpersonal interaction. In a face-to-face interaction, we are in a synchronous dynamic- meaning that everything is happening at the same time. An asynchronous dynamic would be something like writing letters, where a sender writes their letter at a different time from when the receiver reads it. These distinctions were straightforward in the past, but in a masspersonal setting, we no longer know for sure whether our communication is synchronous or not. If I send a text message, you might be reading it immediately, or you may not see it until later. We may even be in the middle of sending messages in a seemingly synchronous exchange only for one person to get distracted and disengage without the other person knowing it (Lim, 2017).
As a result of the hybridization of online and offline identities, some researchers say that we now live in what is called an augmented reality, where our identities are expressed in equally essential ways online and offline at the same time, all the time (Jurgensen, 2012). Part of this augmented reality means that we are never fully disengaged from online communication. The newly networked society that makes us more connected than ever also means that many employers no longer demand that their employers work the same standardized business hours in the same physical place. We can see that the shifts in chronemics now impact the changing expectations regarding proxemics (Doring & Poschel, 2017).
Proxemics
Are we together or apart? Does distance matter as much today as it used to when it comes to mediated communication? If I can reach you equally quickly via text message, whether you are standing beside me, or climbing K2, what difference does it make? It turns out that we may be inclined to want more physical space in a masspersonal era because we are not as used to having to share space in the same way.
Face-to-face communication is waning in the twenty-first century, especially as we become a more global society with social ties reaching across further distances as a result of people moving for personal or professional reasons. Bridging the geographic gap that used to interrupt interpersonal communication is the popularity of masspersonal communication, which takes place primarily through social media platforms and through networked mobile phone use (Quinn & Papacharissi, 2017).
The trend of people moving more readily in this century is partially driven by the affordances of new media technology which augment our social interactions, so that our relationships with people who live far away are easier to maintain now than they might have been before. Thanks to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok we can still communicate regularly with people no matter where they live in the world, so long as they have access to the internet. This concept is called networked connectivity, which means people today view the internet as more than just a channel through which they communicate, they view it as an essential precondition to their ability to communicate (Papacharissi, 2010).
When someone we know loses access to the internet, we may revert to thinking of them in the same way that people did in the mid-twentieth century when their family members traveled overseas to places where they were inaccessible by phone (Quinn & Papacharissi, 2017).
Much of our modern communication is mediated by our digital devices, and researchers have begun to study the relationships we have with them. Prominent among these researchers is Sherry Turkle (2011), who found in her studies of mobile phone usage that young people in the twenty-first century viewed themselves as tethered to their digital devices. Tethering, as Turkle uses it, means that the devices were no longer considered to be just machines like a toaster or a photocopier. Instead, people today view their cell phones as an extension of themselves that is essential to their ability to function in society.
Kinesics
Physical media objects like records, books, magazines, and documents have been replaced by cloud culture, where digital versions of ‘things’ are now easily acquired and stored. As a result, the design of physical spaces has been re-thought, with the modern apartment and housing developments making space for home offices and digital interfaces where physical storage of objects might have been (Hauser et al., 2005).
The digitalization of media has also increased consumer demand for electric sockets to keep electronics powered, as well as the demand (and price) of computer and phone accessories like headphones (Shugan, 2018). Consider how much more noise there is today, with every person able to carry their music or movie collections on a device that also functions as a TV, phone, and teleconferencing device. For this reason, spaces are being designed to allow individuals more space to be as Turkle (2011) says, “alone together.”
Vocalics
In concert with the ways that our perception of shared space is affected by the affordances of new media, we also have new conceptions of vocalics in the masspersonal era. When we are alone together, as Turkle (2011) describes it, we either gather in public spaces only to ignore those around us so that we can communicate online, or else we gather in a digital ‘community’ while isolating ourselves physically by remaining in separate locations. The result of this is that the noise we used to expect in large gathering spaces like a park, or even a party is much reduced today, while in other spaces where noise used to be kept at a minimum people are now able to talk, watch movies, or listen to music.
Ask yourself this: is it rude to speak aloud in a library? At one time, it was considered inconsiderate to speak at anything more than a whisper inside a library, but today with everyone sporting earbuds attached to their phones, some people are less concerned about whether their voices are disrupting other people’s peace. In their minds, people who want to tune out our conversations can just plug in their earbuds and literally tune up the volume to block out the sound. This type of logic may be useful to some, but what about the now nostalgic concept of shared silence. In a masspersonal era where people have individual control over the sounds they can put in their ears, there seems to be less and less value attached to the ability to hear nothing at all (Smith et al., 2018).
People who grew up prior to the advent of new media might never have guessed just how much their ability to communicate would someday depend on their sense of touch. Today we constantly type to send messages to one another through email, text, and touch screen interactions. Our sense of touch was once studied primarily in terms of the touch between living beings. However, haptic scholars have renewed their consideration of the touch between people and things in order to study the ways we use our sense of touch to manipulate networked digital devices (Parisi, 2018).
In the masspersonal context, we should remember that our touch screen technologies demand more from our abilities to touch. People with less nimble control over their fingers may struggle with touchscreen keyboards, or with functions like zoom that require specific motions of the hand. For those with poor hand-eye coordination, the ability to type on mobile devices can result in many spelling errors, sometimes changing the meanings of messages sent. This can also be a hindrance to message receivers.
As young people have become more and more inclined to communicate through images rather than words in masspersonal exchanges, the haptic demands of phone-usage have increased. In order to view images sent via text, users have to pincer their fingers on images, press harder to select them, and manipulate their hands in more complicated ways. Each of these activities requires dexterity that may be limited for some users (Gordon & Zhai, 2019).
As this unit illustrates, interpersonal communication remains highly relevant online or offline. In the age of new media, we find ourselves adapting all the same principles and techniques we use when we interact interpersonally to our interactions online, making this period a masspersonal era. As you reflect on what you have learned in this chapter, bear in mind that the technologies we discuss here are still developing, and their impact is not yet fully understood. Part of the fun of masspersonal communication is that it is new and adaptive. However, using lessons from the past, we can at least begin to chart some of the methods that we can succeed as communicators despite the new challenges that face us.
LEARNING ACTIVITIES
Activity 1: Avatar
Using a game demo you can find on YouTube, walk the students through the experience of creating an avatar and have them discuss with you what each decision in crafting that avatar means to them, and how they think it will be interpreted by others. The purpose is to open the door to a broader discussion about the strategic ways that manage our identities online, and whether they mirror identity characteristics we exhibit offline.
REFERENCES
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Lim, F. P. (2017). An analysis of synchronous and asynchronous communication tools in e-learning. Advanced Science and Technology Letters, 143(46), 230-234.
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Van der Zanden, T., Schouten, A. P., Mos, M. B. J., & Krahmer, E. J. (2019). Impression formation on online dating sites: Effects of language errors in profile texts on perceptions of profile owners’ attractiveness. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407519878787.
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GLOSSARY
Asynchronous: A message exchange that does not happen for all parties at the same time
Augmented Reality: The state of existing online and offline at the same time
Context Collapse: Message failure because some receivers do not understand the context
Data Mining: The collecting of online behavioral information
Emoticons: Digital substitutes for non-verbal cues
Facework: The work of maintaining one’s reputation
Networked connectivity: The view held by mediated communication users that mediated platforms are not a luxury, but a necessity for interpersonal communication.
Parasocial Relationships: Relationships we form with those we only know through the media
Permanence: The length a time that a message can stay visible on a mediated platform.
Synchronous: A message exchange that happens for all parties at the same time
Text Speak: The use of abbreviations in text based online communication
MEDIA
Erving Goffman and You: Impression Management
This video titled, ‘Erving Goffman and You: Impression Management’ demonstrates the theory of facework and impression management through a specific example that makes the concepts easy to understand in practical terms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpiX6nRDJ_c
TED Talk: Social Media and Mental Health
This TedX video titled, ‘Is Social Media Hurting Your Mental Health?’ features CEO Bailey Parnell discussing her own struggles with social media anxiety and covers a number of theoretical issues that are relevant to young people coping with the impact of social media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czg_9C7gw0o