Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 357.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 10:47:14 +0100
From: "Charles Ess" <sophia42@earthlink.net>
Subject: re. Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 350
Dear Willard:
As I try to catch up on my Humanist mail after an _exceptionally_ busy
eight weeks, I ran across your comment:
Concerning the issue of online vs face-to-face, I thought that Sherry
Turkle among others had shown that there was little or no evidence to
support the claim for a causal relationship between use of the electronic
medium and isolation of individual users. (Contrary scholarship, if you
know of any, please!)
Well, are you recalling both the Carnegie Mellon study of a couple of years
ago, and the more recent one from Stanford - both of which find an inverse
proportion between time spent on-line and social isolation? Or do you mean
that Turkle has effectively refuted these - including the most recent
Stanford - claims?
Perhaps relatedly - one of the more interesting insights I gleaned from
CATaC 2000 was drawn from the keynote address by Duane Varan, a media
scholar who researched the impacts of TV as introduced among the Cook
Islanders. Varan uses four mechanisms of erosion in geology as analogues
suggestive of how media may affect societies and cultures. This analysis
leads to the interesting argument that media research has focused on the
wrong aspects of culture, namely, those core elements of culture most
likely to resist "abrasion" - defined as the conflict between foreign
values and local values - and thus least likely to change. Media impacts
are greatest, he argues, as agents of *displacement* - a more indirect form
of cultural change that occurs as new media displace elements _not_
actively reinforced and consolidated by the culture. So, for example, the
impact of TV is greatest not as, say, the Simpsons may threaten to
encourage anti-social behaviors (which it apparently does not) - but rather
as TV displaces other cultural activities (in the case of Cook Island
culture, preparations for and participation in communal dance and its
traditions). In this way, the culture becomes more vulnerable to erosion.
(Varan's keynote included material drawn from: Varan, Duane.1998. The
Cultural Erosion Metaphor and the Transcultural Impact of Media
Systems. Journal of Communication 48 (2): 58-85.)
Hope this helps! Let me know if you need the references for the CMU and
Stanford studies (although you can almost certainly find them easily enough
on the Web, of course, if you don't already have them).
Cheers and best wishes,
Charles Ess
Professor and Chair, Philosophy and Religion Department,
Drury University
900 N. Benton Ave. Voice: 417-873-7230
Springfield, MO 65802 USA FAX: 417-873-7435
Home page: http://www.drury.edu/Departments/phil-relg/ess.html
Co-chair, CATaC 2000: http://www.it.murdoch.edu.au/~sudweeks/catac00/
"Life is short, and Art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and
decision difficult." Hippocrates (460-379 B.C.E.), _Aphorisms_, 1.
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