I suspect that, every once in a while, I’ll be posting in-progress meditations on the thinking I’m doing in advance of my fall course. This is one of those.

It’s prompted in part by danah boyd’s recent piece for Social Media + Society called “Social Media is Now Parasocial Media.” (Rather than linking you directly to the short article, which I think is paywalled, I’ll refer you to boyd’s newsletter1, where she provides a link to the article and talks a little about the motives behind it.) It’s a short piece, well worth reading—rather than summarize it myself, here’s a chunk of its abstract:

When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms and protocols that allowed people to socialize with friends and communities of interest by using digital technologies. Twenty years later, users of social media are far more likely to scroll than post – and the content that they consume is often strategically produced and algorithmically curated. In this essay, I argue that the very essence of social media has changed. To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.”

boyd gives more space than you might expect to the question of how we eventually named the technologies and platforms that were emerging 20 years ago (discussions where she was an active participant). Back in the mid-00s, this extended conversation was about how to frame these nascent platforms collectively, to give a name (and a category) to the experience of using MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Flickr, Twitter, et al.

Many people genuinely believed that these tools would allow people to meaningfully express themselves, connect to people across the globe, and work to strengthen democracy (Papacharissi, 2010/2011). Others were focused on how digital social media enhanced physical connections (Humphreys, 2007).

Social media did accomplish these things to an extent, but as boyd explains, the context surrounding these platforms slowly turned away from them (and yes, she does cite Doctorow’s work as part of her own analysis).

I wrote a bit about the way that Herbert Simon framed his early exploration of the attention economy in terms of the language that we use to understand it, and that’s part of why boyd’s essay clicked for me. The language we use to describe phenomena—the names we give them—inevitably shape the ways we pay attention to them. What began as an attempt to generalize and describe these platforms has, 20 years on, become instead an alibi that disguises the impact that they’ve had (and continue to have) on our politics, culture, and communities.

It was not inevitable that social media platforms would become the dumpster fire that they did become. But I do think that we made a mistake when we collectively agreed to call this phenomenon “social media.” That linguistic frame biased how we normatively interpreted the practices on these platforms.

I’m not entirely sure that I’d characterize it as a “mistake” that “we” made in any meaningful sense2, but knowing what we do now about how these platforms have evolved certainly warrants the new “tools of analysis” that boyd advocates for.

Attendant Circumstance

boyd frames much of her discussion in terms of inevitability; the quote above is the 4th and final appearance of the word. Each serves to remind us that, for all of the optimism of those early discussions, the eventual development of social media was the consequence of decision-making, corporate strategy, government policy, et al.

As I’ve begun to obsess over the word attention, I’ve been thinking about its etymological permutations, and this week I was mulling over the phrase “attendant circumstance.” It has its roots in the law: the burden of proof to prosecute someone for a crime involves the defendants’ actions, their mindset, and then the broader third category of attendant circumstance, “the surrounding facts or conditions that exist when a crime or legal event occurs.” It’s the legal term, in other words, for context, the question of the scale at which attorneys present their case. There are always conditions, facts, circumstances that help to sharpen our focus on the (criminal) act under consideration, many of which aren’t necessarily part of the act itself.

Most of the resources I’ve gathered so far for my fall course speak directly to questions of attention, using the word itself, but the question that boyd’s piece poses for me is also one of scale. How broadly do I want to set my sights when I invite the other participants in the class to consider how our contemporary attention economy has emerged? Just this year, I’ve read several books that feel to me as though they fit squarely within that category, that help explain how the transition from social to parasocial has both evolved and been enabled. Not just Doctorow and Wu, but Pelly, Read, and Wynn-Williams as well, and those are just ones that I’ve reviewed officially. I’ve got dozens of other texts that don’t otherwise dip into attention directly, but certainly overlap on the map that I’m building in my head about these issues.

I feel like I’ve omitted a step above: I think boyd’s essay does a nice job both of synthesizing resources and laying out a specific narrative about what has happened to social media. Most importantly, though, I think it lays out some of the attendant circumstances for the attention capture that has accompanied that development.

Parasocial relationships are one-sided connections….In a parasocial world, people dedicate their attention and emotions to tracking the dramas of individuals who exist at a distance. Parasocial relationships can be emotionally intense, but they do not produce…social fabric.

I don’t know if I’ll be adding a page to this effect on this site, but I think I need to start keeping track of some of the ways that we describe and understand attention. boyd implies here both symmetry and persistence as qualities of attention that are perhaps lost when we use economic metaphors to understand it.

I think that’s all I have to say at the moment. I’ve added boyd to my list, and I’m going to be on the lookout for similarly manageable pieces that will help me provide accessible context (attendant circumstance) without drifting too far from a focus on attention itself. We’ll see how it goes. More soon.