Tag Archives: Tufecki

“Technosociologist” Zeynep Tufecki argues in her most recent blog post along similar lines to what I brought up in class last week, namely, the idea social media has the potential to obviate the need for the use of stereotypes.  As I mentioned in class, the stereotype is often understood to be a universal aspect of human thought.   Especially in a modern globalized world where the things that effect our everyday lives most often occur in places beyond our immediate control and awareness, the need for generalized understandings of others (particularly others that one has no direct experience with) is particularly acute.  There a number of sociologists who make these types of arguments and only argue for gentler, less denigrating stereotypes.  However, if the idea of “direct” experience is expanded to include the type of knowledge and experience one can attain from interacting with someone online through web 2.0 social media, does this need for generalized, relatively fixed understandings of “the other” become obsolete?  Tufecki contrasts the “peer-to-peer” structure of social media with older forms of technology like television and radio which where also heralded as the harbingers of the end stereotypes yet ended up being tools of the powerful used to only reinforce negative and destructive stereotypes (an extreme example being the use of radio in the Rwandan genocide):

Will social media break this pattern of co-optation by the powerful and the hateful?  I am more hopeful for this medium because the Internet combines peer-to-peer structure along with rich-media broadcast capabilities. No previous technology had this particular combination. Telephone was peer-to-peer but you could not truly talk to strangers and it was limited to voice. Television barely had a chance to be anything beyond a vehicle for delivering eyeballs to advertisers in most countries, and has never truly been controlled by a non-state or non-corporate entity.

Although I sometimes share Tufecki’s optimism, I think pointing to the peer-to-peer structure and web 2.0 broadcast capabilities of sites like youtube, facebook, and twitter without also understanding that they are more than just open forums for new types of human relations but also capitalist enterprises subject to the logic of both markets and governments is overly simplistic.  It’s hard not to feel optimistic as we watch protests all across the world be organized through social media and feel that the very nature of social media is to breakdown stereotypes and bring enlightened freedom everywhere.  However, we forget that internet, cell-phone, and television access is routinely cut by governmental bodies under attack from protesters and companies scared to lose access to markets just as routinely fold to the demands of despotic regimes. Social media may have the power to help us break our dependence on stereotypes and be more capable of developing positive understandings of others, but as stereotypes are profitable and convenient tools of oppression, the mediums used for dismantling them must be kept safe from systems based in the logic of profit and oppressive power.