>> Andres Monroy: Welcome everyone. My name is Andres Monroy. I'm a researcher here at
Microsoft. I have the pleasure to introduce Nancy Baym. She is a principal researcher in
Microsoft Research New England in Boston. I was there for a year so we worked together
there. She is also a visiting professor at the MIT Department for Comparative Media Studies.
She was formerly a professor at the Kansas University and she moved to Microsoft about three
years ago now. We were lucky to have her join Microsoft Research and she has been writing
about the internet for many, many years. I was looking at her publication record and I saw a
paper in 1993 talking about soap operas and USENET, how people used discussion groups back
then to talk about soap operas and so on. I was so impressed that people were already thinking
about these issues. One of the things that I really admire about Nancy is that she was one of
the earliest scholars thinking about the implications of the technology, especially the internet in
society. I think maybe when you are starting people were thinking the internet? What is that?
And today, obviously, this company is built around that and tons of people are interested at this
time. I really admire her commitment to this particular topic and today you see that she is well
recognized by everyone as one of the most prominent scholars in this field. Without further
ado, I have the pleasure to introduce Nancy. [applause].
>> Nancy Baym: Thank you, and thanks for showing up. There are so many more of you than I
feared. It's funny that you said that in introducing me because it's true that when I first started
giving papers at academic conferences about the internet, you'd have about 15 minutes data
communications conference to give your wallpaper. And I would literally spend the first seven
explaining the concept that computers could be used to talk to other computers and that there
were humans actually doing this. It blew people's minds. This was like 1991, 1992. It was fun
times. I'll tell you that. I just heard you say the internet has changed so much, and it has. And
that's what I want to talk about. I wanted to start by asking how many of you saw this op-ed in
the New York Times a few weeks ago? A few of you. This is a short Sherry Turkel op-ed and I
see that Sherry Turkel is coming to speak soon. In two or three weeks or two or three months
she's going to be here. The date was up there. She's going to be giving this talk. Sherry has
also been studying the internet for a very, very long time, and she has come to take the position
that I think a lot of people identify with, which is uh oh. The internet is ruining everything. Our
conversations are going to hell. Although in this case she is not particularly as concerned with
the internet as she is with cell phones and what cell phones are doing to our conversations.
And I'll get back to that in a minute. But I wanted to highlight this article because it raised a lot
of discussion and a lot of people really identified with the concerns that she raises about what's
happening to our conversations. Are we able to really pay attention to one another? Are we
able to experience empathy in the same ways? I disagree with her conclusions about cell
phones. I agree wholeheartedly with her conclusions about the value of conversation. Of
course it really ought to be entitled Stop Googling. Let's Bing. [laughter]. I want us to think
about interpersonal communication, which is the field that I come out of and the stance that I
approach all of this from. Interpersonal communication is one of those things that is kind of
invisible and yet obviously completely germane to our daily items. It's those little moments
where we are talking to each other, where we are communicating with each other one-on-one.
Maybe there's a few of us. Maybe we're just bumping into each other in the hall. Maybe we're
doing that thing that I think Turkel and many others mythologize where we are looking deep
into one another's eyes and having a communion of the souls paying full attention with our
whole selves, once in a while. Most of the time it's not very special. It's just the ordinary stuff
of everyday life. Did you get milk? Have you seen the stapler? Which staples do you like? I
think the swinger line work better. Whatever. It's the little things, but they add up, and they
add up in a way that forms our personal relationships, our closest, our dearest, our most
intimate, our archenemies, all of them, our acquaintances, all of that. It adds up through this
accretion of these little moments. And those little moments as they accrete into relationships
also accrete into social norms. And this is how we as a society do things. We value these ways
of treating people. We value these kinds of relationships. We value these connections with
other people and these ways of doing it. So those social norms are really the underlying fabric
of everyday communication of everyday relationships and most social behavior. What happens
when the internet comes along is that they are all kind of thrown out of whack. And not just
the internet, but mobile phones, mobile technology in general. Because social norms depend
on knowing how to categorize things, what belongs where, because you treat things differently
depending on which kind of thing it is. And if the boundaries have been disrupted, then you
don't know anymore what's what. New technologies provoke us because they blur the
boundaries that we have taken for granted. And in the book I identify a number of the
boundaries that get blurred. And what happens when these boundaries get blurred is that we
have to rethink. How should we be doing things? We could take it all for granted when it was
all invisible, but when new technology comes along, suddenly it's visible. Somebody is walking
around with a thing in front of their face and it's hard to not notice that it's there. Then we
have to say we didn't walk around with things in front of our faces before. That was not a thing
we did. What does it mean that we do that now? Is that okay? So we have to rethink these
norms and that's where the tensions come up. I think it's helpful to just get really concrete and
none of this is going to be news to any of you, but I think it's nonetheless helpful to get
concrete about what are these boundaries that are getting blurred. Time and space, the
collapse of time and space is obviously a huge one. You go back to the very, very earliest
communication technologies. Pretty much the oldest one is some bone scratchings, which they
think were used to account for sort of how many grains did you get out of this bushel or
whatnot. It was meant to transcend time and to transcend space, to allow messages to be
conveyed to a place other than where they were spoken. And until the telegraph that couldn't
happen in real time and I love these early ads. The USA is only a few minutes wide. You can
telephone all over the world. They had to advertise these things. And not that long ago the
idea that you could impact transcend space instantaneously with modern technology. And I
think it's useful, again, to see these things because this is not that long ago. This is not like
ancient Mesopotamia. This is the twentieth century. That collapse in time and space also
raises issues about our body and our self. Is our self always in our body? Can ourselves be
someplace else, but our body be here? And this is one of the big complaints about cell phone
use. You're not really here. You're there, wherever there is. And many of us have been in this
situation where you are talking to somebody and they're not hearing anything that you're
saying because they are maybe texting with somebody else. And this would be a fun point to
make a point about teenagers except for that the fact of the matter is that parents are doing it
more than teenagers are, so I'm not going to go there. And I know, because I've got teenagers
and I'm the bad one. And I also know because of research. So when you have body and self in
the same time and place, then you can assume that people are accountable for their behavior
because it was that body and they did it. And as soon as they get separated, it gets a little bit
complicated, especially when we can have different identities in different places all over the
internet, so we can be on LinkedIn been Mister Professional Guy who's got lots of contacts who
highly recommend me and we can be over on Facebook being chatty person who just goes on
and on and on about the kids and favorite recipes or biking, biking to work every day. Or we
can be on Twitter secretly patrolling and attacking people for expressing their opinions and
being really mean and rude and getting outed and maybe fired one day. We can have a lot of
different, and meanwhile we can be over on Pinterest collecting all of our gardening things. I
just love this bouquet of flower arrangements. Which one is the real one when they start
contradicting each other? Who is accountable? How do we decide where the boundaries are
and who gets to do what? Who gets blamed who was just having fun? This setting is one of the
most challenging boundaries, that on the one hand we get so much control with these
technologies and on the other hand we get so controlled by them. On the one hand, I can tell
you I'm running late at the last minute. I can find out where my kid is all the time. There's
nothing more infuriating than when people you like to surveil turn off their cell phone or they
run out of battery and you feel like wait. I don't get to control. I've lost control. You are out
somewhere in the world and I don't know exactly where and I can't tell you to come back or
whatever. But on the other hand, by the same token we are being seen all the time as well and
we are constantly accountable to others for our whereabouts and our activities. And that can
be very constraining. In the context of big data and surveillance and the kinds of scales at
which data is being collected about us, this is really transformed even since the first edition of
this book a few years ago. The boundary between interpersonal and mass communication gets
blurred so that what used to be maybe two friends chatting can suddenly become an
international phenomenon or a video log made for a few friends to watch can become really
widely viewed. Or a personal message can become a front-page newspaper sensation. There is
a lot of ways in which the boundaries between what used to be one to one and this used to be
a mass message delivered to large groups has collapsed. And finally, the boundary between
public and private is very, very skewed in this environment and it's skewed in ways I think so
profound that I'm not even sure that privacy even works as a concept to begin to hold all of the
things that we want it to hold and do all the work that we want it to do. I think that what's
visible and but invisible has just been strained to its limits and we probably need some really
profound rethinking of the very concept of public and private. Ultimately, what all of this
means is that we are left with the situation where it's not really clear what's real and what's not
real. The punch line here is here you are. I've been all over the internet looking for you. The
idea that we might go online, and yet internet the things, my husband likes to turn the blender
on and off with his cell phone. What's real and what's not? My son got a lot of credit on
Facebook for having a dad who connected his blender to the internet of things. Against this
backdrop it makes a lot of sense that we would be worried about what is all this technology
doing to our relationships. Maybe I'll just stop for a second and ask you guys. What are your
concerns? Do you guys feel ambivalence about these technologies and what they're doing?
>>: I think it's like a lot of the different apps have changed the way that people date and like
the social norms that people accept as to what's appropriate and what's not appropriate and
expectations.
>> Nancy Baym: Yeah, expectations in dating, definitely are changing.
>>: My personal experience is that we make a lot of mistakes because how a particular type of
communication, how effective it can be, it is kind of hit or miss. In the early days of e-mail
people thought this was great and then there were so many misunderstandings because people
didn't realize the limitations of the medium and what wasn't there. We have natural
unmediated communications that we grow up with and our brains are kind of tuned to. Then
there are all these new ones and it takes a while to figure out what you can and can't do with
one particular thing. A lot of mistakes arise.
>> Nancy Baym: Yeah, so figuring out what are the norms for using this medium appropriately
and I'll get back to that in a minute.
>>: I see my teenage kids constantly on their phones and I am concerned twofold. I'm afraid
that they won't be able to communicate with other people outside of text messages. Can they
actually argue something? Can they put some logic behind what they're trying to say? On the
other hand I see some kind of obsession with it. It's like they can't be away from it. It's always
about look what somebody is snap chatting or look what somebody put out there and they're
always connected and they feel like if they are not next to it they're missing out on something.
Whereas, in the past were missing out if you were not with other people and value are missing
out if you are not next to your phone.
>> Nancy Baym: Classic concern that people have and often point it at children, or at
teenagers.
>>: On the other hand, I see the same problem with my teenagers but at the same time there is
a commonality that it can bring to us as well. In a lot of the instances you might see an
interesting thing at school but in the old days you couldn't look at it because it was in a
textbook. But now they say look at this. And you can then have a discussion around that thing.
It does open up some doors of communication that were harder to come by as well.
>> Nancy Baym: Yes, and I think that's, and I love this back and forth because I think this is
exactly the tension. On the one hand there's this thing that might be happening that might be
really bad and we might be taken further from one another. It might be impairing our ability to
really connect with one another. On the other hand, there might be a resource for connecting.
It might be enabling bringing new things into our interactions or it might be offering common
ground where there wasn't common ground. Did you want to say something?
>>: In the old days the internet used to be kind of compartmentalized.
>> Nancy Baym: Wait. I just have to say that I love that we are saying olden times like USENET
and FidoNet, okay? Back in the old days, yes? It was compartmentalized.
>>: Some people [indiscernible] talk for a few minutes. Those people are going to see what
you say there. And the second thing real [indiscernible] world. [indiscernible] and then finetune it but it eventually disappears. Everything is safe. Everything is archived somewhere and
sourced for it.
>> Nancy Baym: These concerns I would say are about collapsed context, the idea that people
can see what you should have said to these people over here. Now they're going to see it over
there and persistence and searchability of it, yeah.
>>: I am wondering what [indiscernible] is doing and with whom and what are the
communications when he's in front of a screen all day. But then I realized that when I was his
age I was out with my friends interacting in a different medium. But my parents had no idea
what I was doing or saying or even where I was. At least with my kid I physically know where he
is and that he's not in any immediate physical danger and I don't have to make sure that he's
home for dinner because he's right there.
>> Nancy Baym: That's the control problem, right there, is I don't have control. I don't know
what my kid is doing but I know where he is.
>>: I have to say I on the plus side have one child who is very reserved and I find it's actually
helped her social life because it's much easier for her to text and click things and so she actually
has more social interaction. But there is an addictive quality that particularly the other one has
that just scares me. I recently saw a cartoon or something that had a bunch of people sitting
around on their phones and then next to it a picture of people on a subway car, everyone in
their newspaper. So I don't know if it's really, you know, there's some things, some aspects that
aren't really new.
>> Nancy Baym: Right. You guys couldn't be better plants. And I'm going to stop right here
because that's just exactly where I want to go next is we tend to think of this as this is a thing
that this new technology is doing to us and we are these helpless victims of this new technology
that's come along and is damaging our children or is addictive and taking our power away from
us. And yet at the same time, these are, in, fact concerns that have been raised about almost
every technology and I have some amazing examples in a second. It's a two-way street. These
technologies are taken up in very different ways in different cultures. They arise out of
cultures. We know that being at Microsoft. Microsoft came out of a very particular time and
place and the products that were created were not like mana from heaven ta da, rising fully
formed. It took people embedded in social situations to create these things and they bear the
legacies of that. And they change in response to how people use them. I want to focus on
three particular fears which I think have not gotten addressed here. One being are our
interactions worse. Do we no longer, is it harder to have conversations now? That's a concern
that Sherry Turkel raises. You just raised this about young people. Are our relationships
damaged? Are we having inferior relationships, being less able to connect and feel close to
others? And finally, are we substituting some kind of virtual interaction for a real interaction?
Are we substituting having our phone for being with other people? And these are concerns
that as Andres said, I started looking at these things in 1990. People weren't talking about him
so much then, but by 1994 when AOL merged with the rest of the internet and suddenly public
was online. I did a study and I talked about it in the book of letters to Ann Landers and Dear
Abby and when they start showing up in the mid-1990s it's all so fun. Let's start with this
question of quality. Are the interactions worse? This is a study I love. Forty percent of the
messages are pointless babble. How do you determine that 40 percent of Twitter is pointless
babble? You create a category called pointless babble and anything you don't see the point of
you put it in there. But a very real concern, here we have in 1927 about telephones. Hold the
line a minute dear I'm trying to think what I have on my mind, 1927. It goes back even further
than that. It goes even further than that. Even Socrates had to say about the alphabet, it's
Plato quoting Socrates quoting an Egyptian goddess, so make of it what you will. This discovery
of yours will create forgetfulness. The discovery is the alphabet. It will create forgetfulness in
the listeners' souls because they will not use their memories. They will trust to the external
written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is
an aid not to memory but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the
semblance of truth. They will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing. They
will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing. They will be tiresome company,
having this show of wisdom without the reality. That doesn't sound anything like what people
say now, does it? I'll let you all finished taking your pictures before it goes away. It's a good
one, isn't it? You got to love this. This is like 350 BC. You see it all there. You see it's going to
appear to be reality but it's not really reality. People are going to be tiresome. This technology
is damaging our relationships and it seems so absurd now to imagine seeing the alphabet and
writing as that kind of threat. But it was. And one can argue actually that it did damage orality .
Is that where you were going with that?
>>: [indiscernible] memorize. I'm terrible at that stuff.
>> Nancy Baym: Thank goodness. We filled it up with so much more varied stuff. But yes, this
is true. We have lost ways of memory. We have lost ways of remembering. That may or may
not be a problem, but it was a realistic concern. Whether or not we've all become tiresome
company who know nothing, that may be an extrapolation. I got really interested in this
question of what is, what do people think about the quality of their communication? I did a
study with undergrads at the University of Kansas, a large Midwestern University, as we call it in
social science research literature. And I asked them, in general, how do you feel about
communicating face-to-face or on the phone or on the internet. They wrote things like face-toface is best because I can see them and I can hear them and the telephone is next because at
least I can hear their tone of voice. And the internet is worse because it's really hard to read
people and I don't have a sense of their feelings or anything like that. It came out like it was a
script. It was like these people all had had this drilled into them in grade school or something,
although they hadn't. You think that sounds really sincere. I also asked them to think of the
most recent conversation that they had had and they got different versions of the survey that
manipulated whether they were asked to remember one face-to-face or online or on the phone
and whether it was with a friend or family member or an acquaintance or a romantic partner.
Then I had them evaluate the quality of that particular conversation. You would think from this
whole, face-to-face is so awesome and then the phone is okay and then the internet is the
worst, that you might end up with something like this where this is perfection. Face-to-face is
here and phone is there and that poor little internet is merely mediocre. This would be
generous. But when it actually looked like was not like this. What it actually looked like was
this. Again, this is a perfect conversation. Face-to-face came in at 3.94. Phone call came in at
3.99 and the internet at 3.75 which is to say, first of all, the phone was the best. And
statistically the phone was different from the other two but the other two were not different
from one another.
>>: Does that apply actually to how it affects the face-to-face because it takes more effort to
arrange? One may have to travel and they could rate it to be negative. I don't know.
>> Nancy Baym: All this says is think of the most recent voluntary face-to-face conversation you
had. So the most recent one, so what you see here is this is actually a pretty common finding
that the use of the phone is really related to intimacy. If you think about it, you probably have
voice calls with very few people on any regular basis. There is work from TeleNor, the
Norwegian telephone company showing most people have voice phone calls with five or fewer
people regularly. So those are the people who we're really close to. The internet, yeah, it was
statistically not as awesome as the phone, but it was still pretty darn high quality conversation.
But this suggests that maybe we're romanticizing face-to-face a little bit.
>>: What does it say about the quality of the media? It might be correlated to why they use
phone. So you mentioned that usually people use phone calls to talk to close friends and
family.
>> Nancy Baym: It doesn't count for the relationship. It does control for the relationship, what
kind of relationship because we had four. And, in fact, what we found is that by far the best
predictor of low-quality conversations, this is my advice to you. If you want to ensure only
having high-quality conversations, do not talk to acquaintances. That is by far the best
predictor of how good your conversation is. It matters who you're talking to. It's all that
matters in a lot of ways is who are you talking to. The medium we work through. And I have
more to say about that in a minute. So let's talk about the quality of relationships. Are we
having damaged relationships? On the relationships not as good if we are dating online? Is
that messing up romance? Well that's kind of a whole other kettle of fish. Is somebody you
met online capable of being as good a partner somebody you met face-to-face? Is it
inauthentic, is it inadequate? Is it somehow impoverished? Again, if we go back to thinking
about those Kansas kids and their relationships that they had conversations in, I also asked
them in this relationship what percentage of your communication would you say you do in each
of these three media so you could sort of say this person talks on the phone with this person a
lot more than they see him face-to-face. And this relationship is much more face-to-face then it
is internet and so on. And what we found there and I don't want to get lost in the numbers, but
the main thing we find is that when you look at relational satisfaction and relational closeness,
all of the correlations with face-to-face telephone and internet are all positive. I'm giving
examples from my own research, but the book has a lot of other studies that support this same
kind of perspectives. You don't see that face-to-face and telephone are positively associated
with satisfaction and closeness but the internet is not. You see that the internet is also
positively related. Of course, these are people who they chose to have a conversation with. It
was a voluntary conversation. And they're not statistically different. I also did some research
on the website LastFM, which is like a social network for music listening. That had the nice
quality that when you loaded it, your friends showed up in random order, so I worked with the
people on the site to do a survey and people would bring up their profile. They'd take the first
friend and they would fill out a survey about this friend. Did they know each other face-to-face
can see how far where do they live? Did they have an age difference? Those kinds of
questions. And then also how many different ways did they communicate and in 18 item scale
that measured how close they were. And what we found was that for any of you stat geeks, it
was a multiple regression analysis. What we found was that the factor that erased all of the
other variables and that accounted for 65 percent of the difference in quality of relationship
was how many media the used to communicate. What I'm saying is each medium that they
used they got a quarter of a point closer on this relational development scale. Each one of
those media contributed the closeness. So rather than seeing that one is less associated with
closeness or another is more, what you see is that the closer you get to somebody the more
ways you communicate. And then you can think about the phone, right? Certainly all of this
texting, these texting relationships cannot be good. Calling people on the phone cannot be
good. We should be sitting in the park chilling out. Instead we have to be in communication. I
did another survey at Kansas where we surveyed people about the person that they use their
phone with most, their mobile phone with most. And this is a map showing what we found and
I won't go into a whole lot of details, but what I want to summarize for you is that using the
phone together created expectations that they would use the phone to maintain the
relationship. If they never used the phone together they wouldn't expect each other to. But
the fact of using the phone creates an expectation that you're going to keep using the phone to
communicate with each other. On the one hand, this creates a sense of interdependence. We
rely on one another. We are connected to one another, and that increases the satisfaction in
the relationship. The phone brings us closer because we're more dependent on one another,
but at the same time, it also creates a sense of overdependence and a being trapped which
makes us less satisfied with our relationship. So they are both happening at the same time. We
are simultaneously feeling closely to our friends because of our phone relationship and feeling
trapped and less satisfied. I think that's really the crux of the matter is that it's both. This is the
Sherry Turkel concerned, what about using the phone together? You're with somebody and
you're on the phone. That can't be good. These are all Flickr creative commons licensed
images, by the way. Another study that we did last year that was published is we asked people,
we searched the literature and newspapers and remember a couple of years ago there was a
huge row about somebody talking on the phone while buying something at a store in England
and it was all over the internet? I think it was a video and the cashier went crazy and it was like
she's right. It's an injustice that it's terrible. One of those viral things, so what we did is we
collected a list of norms about cell phones like don't cuss when you're out in public on your
phone or when you are having a conversation with somebody don't look at your phone, those
kinds of things. We came up with a list of them and we gave them to pairs and we said on a
scale of 1 to 5 do you think this is a rule in your peer group? On a scale of 1 to 5 how much do
you agree that this ought to be able. How much do you follow these rules when you're with
your partner? And how much does your partner follow these rules when they're with you?
And then we had the whole quality of relationship scales. The idea is that you can sort of see
does this mean that the people who don't follow the rules have bad relationships, like we
always hear all the time? This is what people are always telling us. I was called on the call-in
radio incredibly naïve and ignorant for thinking that in restaurants not everybody is on their
phones overtime. I actually hear everybody is always on their phone in restaurants. And
actually, that is not true. Yes it is. You are so ignorant and you are so naïve. I started looking in
restaurants and at any given moment there's like one table where there are a couple of people
on the phone and that table moves around. But at any moment most people are not on their
phones. But these guys both are, which they found entertaining enough to photograph. What
we have found was that following the social norms had absolutely no relationship to the quality
of that relationship, absolutely none. What did affect relational quality was if they were
following the norms that you personally hold dear. To oversimplify, that might be like if you are
the kind of person who doesn't really think it's important to have a lot of eye contact in
conversation because you know you're intimate and you don't really need to prove it and your
partner is also that way, you're fine. But if you're not, if you're that way and your partner is not
an you're not looking me in the eye you don't love me, Norm, then you've got a clash. So what
we're saying, what this shows is being similar to one another, having the same norms is more
important. But also, it's following the norms yourself that matters. It's not just having your
partner follow them. It's you yourself following them. It's messier than that, but that's the
short version that I will give you. Last concern, are we substituting fake relationships for real
relationships? Are we substituting mediated relationships for face-to-face relationships? As a
woman over there said the photo of the people on the train, this is a really old concern. This is
like 1954, I think this one is. You have the woman daydreaming of the romantic dinner while
her husband keeps his nose in the newspaper. My 15-year-old said, yesterday, I was teasing my
15-year-old and I said hey. Let's spend some quality time and have a conversation, you know,
the kind we used to have before cell phones ruined our relationship. And he said oh mom, cell
phones didn't ruin our relationship. You would have just been looking at the paper. That last
FM study where I asked everybody how many ways do you communicate with each other is to
the best of my knowledge still the only study that has actually started with the relationship and
said how many ways do you communicate and how does that affect how close you are. Again, I
don't want you to get lost in the weeds in this table. I just want to show you that these are all
the different media that we asked them about and their correlations with one another and the
main point here is that there is no negative signs. Using any one medium makes you more
likely to use another medium, so face-to-face, communicating face-to-face is positively related
to all of the other means of communicating except for communicating via LastFM. There you
go. This is a phenomenon called media multiplexity, that the closer you are the more media
you use to communicate. I think that's really important because it means that we are talking
additive here, not talking substitution and when we hear fears like oh no. They're texting. They
can't have real conversations. We're substituting Facebook for real friendship, we're doing a
grave injustice to our understanding of ourselves because, in fact, we are doing both. What I
take from this is that conventional wisdom and research disagree and which side do we want to
be on? We're all for research. What I've been covering comes out of my own research, which I
wanted to highlight in part because I am in-house and it might be useful to some of you to
know what kind of research skills do I bring. But the book covers a very wide range of research
from the last 20 or 30 years that covers these things and by and large most of these
assumptions that people have about harm do not hold up very well, just as they haven't held up
especially well for prior media. That said, I'm not one of those people who says technology is
fantastic. It solves all of our problems. It's great, rah, rah, rah. It does come with
complications. It does disrupt norms. It does make patterns that were taken for granted
questionable, and create new patterns that we might find questionable. There are huge
questions of etiquette that we have not begun to resolve of how to be a polite and civil person
with your devices when other people are around, or how to behave through these technologies
in ways that are civil and polite. And we seen a lot of, I don't know if you guys saw the essay
going around the other day Umar Hate [phonetic] saying Twitter is dying and it's because of the
abuse. It's because we built all these technologies and nobody's paid attention to treating one
another nicely and ensuring that we treat one another nicely. A prospective, but a valid
perspective in the sense that there is a lot of abuse. There is a lot of meanness. There is a lot
of nastiness. There are a lot of problems that arise around these technologies. Etiquette is one
set of these problems. The pressure to use them when you want to be free of them is certainly.
I take the point about feeling anxious when you're not near your phone. I wouldn't want to say
it's only true of use because I certainly see a lot of adults on my Facebook and Twitter going I
left the house without my phone today. I'm always sort of relieved when I find I left the house
without my phone. A day free from pressure. I left my phone at home. That pressure is very,
very real and it's a problem. Then you get into these questions of data collection that I feel
personally very concerned about the fact that so much of our social interaction has shifted onto
media that are privately owned or that are publicly held but are for-profit corporations and
they're mining our personal interactions in order to maximize profit and sell us stuff, which I
think is a very problematic conflation of interpersonal connection and the sacredness of human
connection and capitalism and selling and just because we can get the data we should kind of
thinking. I would hope that we as a company could think more about that and have more to
say about it. That said, despite complications, despite the concerns that are raised, the
company here is mixed but sociable. Whatever the internet is doing, whatever these
technologies are doing, they are not making us less social. I think the research from the last 20
to 30 years has consistently in case after case, this is not to say there aren't counterexamples.
There are people who will argue this. Some of us might say some of their data is somewhat
cherry picked. Some of us might quibble with the methods. But by and large the body of
research as a whole suggests that people are not getting less social because of these
technologies. They are getting more social because of these technologies. What to do about
this, I thought I'd finish up with just some recommendations about what you do with this kind
of information. The first thing is if you think about that cell phone study showing that if you are
not following your own norms in the relationship, then you are less satisfied with the
relationship. One way we create good relationships is by being clear on what are the standards
that I have or technology is in this relationship both in terms of in my communication with this
person through technology, but also in terms of my use of technology when this person is
around. What are the standards that I value and am I living up to them, because we always
tend to seem to start with you're doing it wrong, especially if you are a teenager. We love
pointing our fingers at teenagers. The research consistently shows that teenagers are way less
bad than grown-ups on almost all of this stuff. As much as grown-ups blame, it's sort of like
teenagers are this mirror where we look in them and we see all of the things that we don't like
about ourselves and blame them. So are we living up to our own standards? This is one that
we hardly ever do because we don't actually have a whole lot of conversations about our
relationships in general with our partners, but I recommend that people have explicit
conversations about how do I feel about the way you use the phone. How do you want me to
use the phone? Do you like it when I call you? You are saying it's hard to know which medium
to use. People are different. Sometimes it really helps just to say are you a phone person or
would you rather text? Do you want me to e-mail? Do you want me to call? What works for
you? Because people do have very different preferences and when we're not clear on those
differences, we start blaming them for things that they did that were maybe, that was what
worked best for them. I got a colleague who is all about long e-mails. And I'm all about you're
down the hall; just talk to me. And that causes a lot of conflict. But then you can have those
explicit conversations and at least you learned that the problem is not a problem between you.
It's a mismatch, not a dislike. Look at it that way. Given that these are concerns that have
come up with technology after technology after technology, as somebody who is very
concerned with people having high quality relationships and holding onto that desire that we
have to have that kind of personal connection with other people, and having consistently found
in the research that new technologies are not actually destroying our relationships, I would say
hey if we are really concerned about our relationships, let's think about what are the underlying
structures. What are the underlying causes that are causing relational conflict? And sometimes
it's because we don't actually get along very well. It's not about the technology at all. It's about
people. Lots of times it's about these larger social structures, like the fact that we all have to
work all the time and our colleagues and employers expect us to be available after hours to
work even more. Lots of times when mom's on the playground looking at her phone, mom is
talking to her boss or colleague or her client or something like that. So we need to think about
how do we as society support healthy relationships if that's what we really want instead of
going ew, phone bad, which is a lot easier, way easier and always a preferred strategy. I don't
know if you guys know about the famous comic books study or the commission to look in the
comic books that said that the reason that there was so much youth crime was because of
comic books. Okay. And then finally, as a technology company, I think we can be pushing for
technologies that don't just say yay; technology is great. It lets people connect, but to think
seriously about the kind of conflicts that technology causes in relationships, the inevitable ways
that technology pushes us in some directions, pulls us in others and push for technologies that
allow people to manage those competing demands of relationships. I think by and large most
tech companies, this goes back to your concern about things being isolated and not being that.
Most tech companies think that if you know somebody in one place, you want to know them
everywhere, and it's all about, and it makes sense because, of course, if you're thinking from a
data perspective, if we can get all of that data in one place, if you've got your whole social
graph, then we know so much about you and we can totally serve the ads that you want. But
we might not want those people in the same place as one example. There's a lot of ways in
which we might want to manage. And I think there are ways in which technologies are getting
more sensitive to these needs. But it's something that we have to keep pushing for because at
the same time that you have a public that often says these technologies are harming our
relationships so much, you also have tech companies that say the solution to all of society's
problems is the right technology. And that's unfortunately just as misguided. There is an in
between there that is technologies can help; technologies can harm. We have to be conscious.
We have to be iterative. We have to be aware of unintended consequences that technologies
have, and we have to keep paying attention to how they're being used once they get out there.
Yes?
>>: When you talk about containing the demands in the relationship, have you looked at what
those are generationally, how that's for young kids versus, because I can only understand it
from my perspective. Like I understand the demands that I'm in, but I don't understand it for
someone that's a teenager or a middle school student. Have you looked at how that's different
or are they the same?
>> Nancy Baym: That's a great question. I think the demands in relationships depend a
tremendous amount on the context that we are in, so that they do differ a lot by age group.
When I think about people say in middle school, they are constantly immersed in their peer
group. By the time you are our age we may like our colleagues a lot, but we don't spend all of
our time with our peer group. So that's a huge difference that is going to change the tensions
around our relationships and the uses of technology right there. So if you look at cyber
bullying, for example, it's almost all an extension of in school bullying. It's not this radical weird
phenomenon that is happening out there. Whereas, if you look at bullying among adults, I'm
not sure that would hold, that it's the same people we're with all day who are the ones being
mean to us online. So that might be one example of change. But you're also seeing variation
amongst different populations. For example, I just edited a special issue of a journal about
selfies and one of the articles in there was by somebody who had done research in the favela in
Brazil and he was looking at the way that the teenagers there use selfies. They were using
selfies as a way of saying look mom, I'm okay. And as a way of saying, hey guys; I'm
participating in social life but I'm not going to say anything that could get me in trouble with
anyone because there's no words. It's just me smiling. That's a really different use of the selfie
to control a really different set of pressures from what it might mean from my 15-year-old son
to post a selfie which might be like hey, I'm looking good, aren't I? Maybe with selfies and
teens we tend to go for the vanity and narcissism explanation, which may, I don't actually think
it does apply, but it could apply in some context, but it certainly doesn't work in the favela.
That's not what's going on there at all, so it's always important to disassociate the particular
form of the medium or the use of the medium from what does it mean in that particular
context to those people? And they're going to see a lot of, even amongst teens you're going to
see variation by cohorts. That's basically all's I got for you. I'd love to hear your thoughts and
talk about this more. I believe we have some time. Yes?
>>: I have an interesting question for sort of observation and see if you can point me to further
research on it. It's on the notion of media multiplicity and you're showing how they're additive.
Clearly one isn't taking away from the other. So I'm curious if there is any work on the what can
you or can you not communicate through these different media. It seems like if people are
ganging up and using multiple modes for people they are most intimate with, then they are
having multiple forms of communication.
>> Nancy Baym: Which ones are they doing for which modes?
>>: Correct. And what are the consequences if you were to artificially subtract some of the
modes that really would be best fitting, but for some reason they are not available, say distance
between people who want to talk face-to-face.
>> Nancy Baym: I would say that, in general there's an unfortunate lack of research. It starts
with the person or the relationship and then says across all of these different possible modes,
what are you doing and what's working. They tend to go what are people doing on this? How
are people using Facebook? How are people using Twitter? How are people using Snapchat.
Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of cross cuts like that. That said, certainly some stuff we
know like the cell phone, there's a lot of research talking about micro coordination and how
useful it is for those little things like running late, be there in 10 minutes. It doesn't make a lot
of sense to go to somebody's house and say it face-to-face. Or even necessarily to call, it can be
easier to text. There's research including by people in our MSR Cambridge lab about Skype and
the centrality of Skype in maintaining long-distance romantic relationships and immigrant
relationships between people who have left the country and people who stayed behind. So
clearly, audio video is much better for intimate relationship maintenance over distance in a way
that other media aren't. But in terms of sort of systematic, here's a table and here's what's
good for what.
>>: [indiscernible] if you look at some completely mediated activities, say open source software
development collaboration, they have evolved into a certain culture because the
communication media was limited to a certain type. So the interaction models that have
evolved in order to do that are ones that don't require channels that weren't there. Whereas, if
you look at say the workplace where we may try to replicate group teambuilding and working
collaboratively together but we try to do it across geographies with web cams and that sort of
thing, we are trying to take the face-to-face thing and augment it. From a workplace
perspective it seems like having a better understanding of what's likely to work and what's not,
and so we will switch our norms to this because we need everybody to be working together and
that's not possible under these constraints, so we'll eliminate the ones that have that. I just run
into a lot of that cyber tribalism where you've got one group of people who work together and
another group of people work together. I refer to it in my own work as to tribes on a wire, the
things that go wrong there. I've encountered the problem a lot and I'm just curious.
>> Nancy Baym: In the field of organizational communication there is work going back and in
fact the earliest work on computer mediated communication was when do we need to get
people together in person and when can we get away with a teleconference and when will a
phone call do? And that generally suggests that it's related to ambiguity, that the more
ambiguity there is and the more right solutions there are, the more face-to-face helps. I hope
I'm getting that right. It's in the book. There's trade-offs. If you want everybody's voice to get
on the table, then anonymous can be more important than him person were some people are
going to be cowed into silence and some people are going to talk all the time. There are quite a
few factors to weigh there, but at the same time I think your point about the open source
community evolving norms to manage working with the constraints that they had is really
important because what that says is that if you give humans a task to do and you say here. Or if
human society we want to do this task together and a limited medium is the only thing they
have to do it in, instead of saying can't do it. They'll figure out how. It's not always clear to me
that there is a one-to-one match between what you want to get done and which medium is
going to be best and that all of the people that are going to be involved in that task are going to
agree that that's the right medium for that job. It might be that maybe for you Skype would
work perfectly for this task, but for those people, they get all flustered in Skype meetings and
they don't remember what they wanted to say until it's over and it would work so much better
for them if they could do it via e-mail where they had the time to actually write out their
thoughts. I guess I go back to having conversations about what works instead of just assuming
that what you are you feeling about it or what they're feeling about it is what is. Other
questions or comments? Punching matches ready to get going? All right, thanks so much for
coming. I appreciate it. [applause].