Where I'm At Right Now
Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, September 24th, 2024 at 8:36 AM, and we have an extraordinary show for you this week. 1st, Georgia talks to Cliff Lampe, professor of information and associate dean for academic affairs at the UMich School of Information about how and why Find My and other location tracking services have become indispensable, if controversial, technologies of friendship in 2024. Then, Hans talks with doctor Brooke Aaron Duffy, associate professor in the department of communication at Cornell University about how being vulnerable online is seen as a necessary component of the attention and therefore influencer economy.
Mike Rugnetta:Two conversations that orbit around one another in really interesting ways. But first, let's talk about a few of the things that have happened since the last time you heard from us. I have 4 news stories for you this week. Brazil wins its spat with Elon Musk, the oversensitive billionaire assented to Supreme Court Judge Alejandro de Moraes' demands that x ban a selection of accounts spreading misinformation, and according to the New York Times, quote, also complied with the justice's other demands, including paying fines and naming a new formal representative in the country, end quote. The social media site could return service in Brazil as soon as this week.
Mike Rugnetta:X first defied the demands on grounds of free speech absolutism, but the ban must have hurt as Brazil is one of X's biggest markets. Will the flood of Brazilians who made their way to Blue Sky return? Only time will tell. Lionsgate, producers of John Wick, Hunger Games, Saw, Twilight, and more, has signed a deal with AI video startup Runway, which will train a new model on the Lionsgate catalog for the purpose of, quote, augmenting, enhancing, and supplementing current operations. Lionsgate vice chair Michael Burns said Lionsgate will, quote, utilize AI to develop cutting edge, capital efficient content creation opportunities, end quote, which is something I, a consumer of films, definitely want.
Mike Rugnetta:Capital efficient content creation opportunities. Capital efficient content creation opportunities. Honestly, let's make it an Oscars category. Film with the most capital efficient content creation opportunities. In other AI news, 3 Mile Island, the site of a nuclear meltdown in 1979 and decommissioned in 2019 after 45 years in operation, could potentially be recommissioned in service of powering Microsoft AI Services entirely.
Mike Rugnetta:If the plan is approved, the plant would provide the equivalent of 800,000 homes worth of power to generating capital efficient content creation opportunities, one imagines. The Washington Post reports that this would be the first American power plant to be recommissioned, and the first time the entirety of a plant's output would be dedicated to a single customer. And finally, Telegram, the encrypted privacy focused messaging app, has updated its privacy policy to say it will now comply with valid requests from authorities for user data like IP addresses and telephone numbers. Telegram has nearly a 1000000000 users, and its privacy features have made it, up until this point, maybe, an attractive platform for criminals. This change comes after CEO Pavel Durov self, was arrested in France under suspicion for aiding criminal activity and not complying with requests for user data around an ongoing investigation.
Mike Rugnetta:In show news, we've partnered with our pal, Sari, over at the newsletter, Oldster, to find out about what it's like being extremely online in your fifties, sixties, and beyond. Sari and our researcher slash producer, Audrey, talk about aging and the internet, and pose a number of questions to the Oldster audience like, how old are you? How online are you? What other magazines, newsletters, podcasts, etcetera about aging do you read and listen to? And more.
Mike Rugnetta:Head on over to oldster. Substack.com to see the post. Give a little subscribe, and eventually we're hoping we can report back here and on oldster what we've learned about the internet and being old. Recently I was a guest on Jacob Geller's podcast, Something Rotten, Where we discussed the 2012 3rd person shooter spec ops, The Line. Which I somehow had not played until Jacob asked me to.
Mike Rugnetta:I had a lot of thoughts. It was a lot of fun to chat with him and Blake about this game that I, I've heard so much about for so long. There's a link to that in the show notes if you wanna go listen to it. You can also catch me this weekend, in the morning on Saturday, September 28th, 2024 on Jacob's sword stream 2024. Which runs for 24 hours from Friday through Saturday to raise money for the Palestine Children's Relief Fund.
Mike Rugnetta:I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. Also, if you're listening to this on September 26th or later, you can catch me on Jay Springett's Experience Computer. A visualization exercise interview show about how people imagine and experience technology. It's an amazing show. I love Jay and his work so highly recommended.
Mike Rugnetta:It's a brilliant endlessly fascinating format. Once again, it's experience computer wherever you listen to podcasts. Alright. Enough yapping. Let's do a show.
Mike Rugnetta:In our first segment, Georgia and Cliff on find my and friend surveillance. In our second segment, Hans and Doctor. Duffy discuss vulnerability and the influencer economy. But first, in our interstitials this week, a series of Tumblr posts where a poem is made through the redaction of text. Removing text to change what results.
Mike Rugnetta:In this first interstitial, you're gonna hear the full post unredacted.
Mike Rugnetta:I hate it when I can't even write a poem about something because it's too obvious.
Georgia Hampton:Like in the Airbnb I was at. I guess it used to be
Mike Rugnetta:a kid's room because you could see
Georgia Hampton:the imprint of one
Mike Rugnetta:little glow in the dark star
Georgia Hampton:that had been missed and painted over in
Mike Rugnetta:the Lord White. Like Like like That's a poem already.
Georgia Hampton:What's the point? What's the point? You get it. You get the themes. I don't have time to do it justice.
Mike Rugnetta:Just just
Mike Rugnetta:look at
Georgia Hampton:it. Look
Mike Rugnetta:at it. It's on the ceiling.
Georgia Hampton:A few weeks ago, I went shopping at a store I go to all the time. I was just browsing, wasting time on a Saturday by myself. I didn't even buy anything. Eventually, I left, but then I got a text.
Georgia Hampton:My friend had sent me a screenshot from find my friends of me. There I was, my little blue circle right in the middle of the gray building shaped box with the name of the store printed over top of it, and the photo came with another text from my friend saying, of course, that's where you are. Just a joke, poking fun of how often I go to this place, but this happens to me all the time. In my world, find my friends is like being added to close friends on Instagram. It's a show of intimacy, some proof of friendship, and despite the fact that it's not really a social media platform, it's more like a service, the ubiquity of location services is this essential part of the social experience of being online, but, I mean, why?
Georgia Hampton:Why do we do that? What is it about having access to each other's exact coordinates that feels so normal now? So I talked to Cliff Lamby, professor of information and the associate dean for academic affairs in the University of Michigan School of Information. He has written quite a lot about how our social relationships exist online and how they can be gamified. So I started our conversation off by asking him the exact question that had been bugging me.
Georgia Hampton:Why do we wanna know where our friends are so much?
Cliff Lampe:I mean, I think when you're especially talking about close friends, it's helpful because it gives you a sense of what they're doing in their lives. There's a lot of systems we have that give versions of this. Right? Like I'm thinking of, for instance, be real, where you get, like, these little snapshots that are supposed to be authentic within a person's life. So location services are great for a couple of reasons.
Cliff Lampe:First, they give that window into kind of the the daily life of a person, which helps us feel more connected to them. But they're also harder to fake. Right? So if I put up a heavily curated photo of, you know, a good time I had over the weekend, that has some question to it in terms of, like, how much do I actually get to know the person because of that? But if you see a pin of me stuck at the garage because I'm getting my car worked on, that has that kind of authenticity tag that people seem to want.
Georgia Hampton:It's interesting that you mentioned authenticity here. And I know you've written about among other things how social platforms kind of recreate the bonds between people. Explain to me how that authenticity is is translated into a social platform.
Cliff Lampe:What is you know, the interesting thing is if you think about your daily non online life, we're not really authentic with each other all the time, every place either. Right? Like, you know, there's a whole lot of how are you fine kind of conversations that we have throughout the day. But for the closer the relationship, the more self disclosure you have to have. Self disclosure is basically where you become vulnerable and you tell things about yourself that may not be flattering, and it creates a sense of, kind of mutual obligation between 2 people.
Cliff Lampe:And so when you have that self disclosure, which has to be authentic for it to be a genuine self disclosure, that's where you start to see stronger affective bonds form. So a lot of, like, closer relationship formation is dependent on that.
Georgia Hampton:I wanna talk specifically about the subject of a lot of your writing, which is gamification
Cliff Lampe:Mhmm.
Georgia Hampton:And the gamification of social media. Before we do anything else, could you give me a definition of that?
Cliff Lampe:Yeah. So gamification is the process by which you design elements to encourage certain types of behaviors. It's called gamification because it comes out of ideas in games. So games have lots of little mechanisms that encourage you to do things. Right?
Cliff Lampe:You do things for points or rewards. The game will guide you through how to play it by having little instances set up or a reward for certain type of behavior. So systems that are gamified have little rewards that encourage you to engage in certain types of behaviors all over the place. We use other terms for this. This is all in the same family of terms.
Cliff Lampe:There's a older technology called persuasive design that, you know, is 30 years old at this point, but also tells us how to make technologies that persuade people to do things they wouldn't normally do. Right? So for instance, health applications are often trying to persuade people to get up off the couch or to log their meals or whatever it happens to be. There's also, what we call dark patterns in the user experience design world. Dark patterns are mechanisms social media sites put in to encourage people to do things that they wouldn't normally do or to discourage them from things they want to do.
Cliff Lampe:And it's all related to behavioral economics. This is all incentive centered design at the end of the day. Gamification is a fun way to describe it, but it's really all in the same way where you basically use human psychology to design a system to encourage certain types of behavior within that system.
Georgia Hampton:So then what happens when authenticity is gamified?
Cliff Lampe:It there's no harm in gamifying a behavior. So the the term game makes it seem, I think, unserious, occasionally. But it's really just about incentivizing certain behaviors. And incentivizing authenticity is not inherently a bad thing. So it can be fine if what you're trying to do is to create authenticity, or to to really especially to create closer relationships between a small group of people to put in mechanisms that encourage people to self disclose, for instance.
Georgia Hampton:Is there a way to win the game if we're playing?
Cliff Lampe:Well, so there's a difference between a game and play and a game and the mechanisms of the game. So, and not all games of course are winnable. So the games literature is very broad. There's all sorts of cooperative games and things like that, where the goal isn't to, win necessarily. And if you take a step back and think about what a game is, a game is basically a social interaction, often play, that is structured with a bounded set of rules.
Georgia Hampton:Why are games so effective as a model for things like this?
Cliff Lampe:It get back it gets back into that psychology. So when we study behavior and economics, and incentive centered design, we know that there are lots of things about the human brain that respond to game mechanisms. So one thing, for instance, is dopamine. Dopamine is a chemical that gets released in the brain that gives you a sense of accomplishment, sometimes pleasure, every time that you accomplish a goal. And it's something that we know, it's almost like internal heroin for the body, right?
Cliff Lampe:It feels so good that it's something that we keep chasing, quite a bit. Games are structured very nicely to kind of, keep ramping up that dopamine hit from accomplishing certain goals. And so the way we structure games is to make sure that the brain is constantly getting that little signal of accomplishment that releases the chemical, and that helps the person keep kinda feeling a sense of pleasure from participating in the system. So that's it's an important mechanism that's behind a lot of incentive centered design. There can also be games also provide you mechanisms that help you to balance that.
Cliff Lampe:So there's something called flow theory in games, where if a if a task is too easy, it's boring. And if a task is too hard, it's frustrating. So game design allows us to think about that flow of how do you keep a person challenged without frustrated being frustrated and without being bored. Right? So it's all this helps provide the human psychology behind these mechanisms.
Georgia Hampton:So if I were to imagine this grafted onto social media and the way I interact with other people, maybe that in between, you know, not too easy, not too hard, Goldilocks style situation Mhmm. Is, you know, on TikTok, I get a little fire emoji if I've shared a certain number of videos with a specific friend. Right. And that feels good. And I'm like, oh, we're friends.
Georgia Hampton:We're close. We're friends.
Cliff Lampe:But it's amazing what people will do for digital points that don't really mean anything. So it's this is true of all games. That's the other thing we know is that, having a marker of success, you know, whether it be points or, you know, score, whatever it happens to be, is incentivizing for people. Right. It allows them to benchmark their progress against other people.
Cliff Lampe:It provides again that dopamine hit when you make accomplishments on that. It's a very concrete thing. It, you know, in a lot of our life, success is very ambiguous and there's no number attached to it. So when you attach a number to success, the brain really likes to respond to that pretty heavily.
Georgia Hampton:But like you said, it's these imaginary Internet points that don't actually mean anything.
Cliff Lampe:Yeah. But your brain doesn't know that. Right?
Georgia Hampton:Yeah. Fair enough. I mean, thinking of that, though, thinking of the sort of ambiguity and and the fact that that doesn't really matter to us, to our brains. I'm just thinking about Snapchat specifically and how Snapchat has these components like streaks and basically a modern equivalent of a top 8, like, on on Myspace. And I wonder where that line is between succeeding, if not winning in the game, and and failing when it comes to relationships or friendships?
Cliff Lampe:Well, I
Cliff Lampe:think there's a higher level concern there. Is Snapchat in the business of helping you have good relationships? Not really. Right? Snapchat's in the business of selling advertisements.
Cliff Lampe:So this is something that, professor Shoshana Zuboff called surveillance capitalism
Georgia Hampton:Mhmm.
Cliff Lampe:In her 2015 book. It's the idea that in these social platforms, because they're almost all ads based in their sales marketing, their their main purpose, of course, is to, sell ads. And the best way to do that is to keep you on-site for as long as possible. So kind of the inherent deal that a site like Snapchat or Meta or whatever Instagram makes with their user is that we'll provide you value in these connections to your friends. And the more value you provide in that, the longer you're gonna stay on the site and and be able to see ads that we serve you.
Georgia Hampton:But it it does need those relationships to sell those ads. So what kinds of relationships does it need?
Cliff Lampe:Well, you can make a lot of money off any type of relationships. Right? So Snapchat made a pretty, like, heavy deal towards closer relationships by having the ephemerality and but you can see even they shifted, right, by shifting to stories and having kind of a broader market. You can see they're trying to play for a different type of relationship within Snapchat. You know, Instagram, same thing.
Cliff Lampe:And with all of these sites, you can see them, you know, kind of looking at each other. The the mechanism that they have is, of course, to make money on ads. Some of them are still very much in kind of unique bubbles. So, for instance, sites like Instagram and Facebook, you know, they have close friends on there, but they're what I call, you know, personal social network sites where their main business is has been to really kinda foster more distant relationships as well as close relationships. That's a secret sauce that they have.
Cliff Lampe:But all of these things, you can basically monetize any type of relationship along with, of course, other types of ways that people find enjoyment online.
Georgia Hampton:So if social platforms are banking on mimicking relationships that we have in the real world but online in order for us to stay on those platforms so that we can look at more ads. How does location sharing factor into this?
Cliff Lampe:Yeah. So it it's one of those things that's new from offline relationships. Right? Like, that's, I always like to think about what is what's true online that's not true offline. And that's one where I can look and observe and see where people are.
Cliff Lampe:I couldn't do that previously. I'm not sure that we know entirely yet. I think there is a curiosity for where your friends are. That's part of it. I think there's a care.
Cliff Lampe:Like, I feel better knowing where people are and their relationship to me. And like I said, there's also, partially just a self disclosure that location data is authentic self disclosure. We tend to not trust signals or things that we say online that we can control. Recorded behaviors are usually more trustworthy or stronger signals than stated behaviors are. And so people have an easier time believing them and they create more authenticity.
Georgia Hampton:What does that do to how we imagine our relationships? Do we see ourselves as much closer to people? Like, do you how how does that affect us?
Cliff Lampe:It can. There's another common finding in my field around parasocial relationships. Parasocial relationships are relationships that you feel you have with somebody based off having seen a lot about them, even though you actually haven't had the mutual interaction that would lead to a real relationship. Pre Internet, this is most common around celebrities. So you would see a lot about a celebrity and you would feel like you had a relationship with that person.
Cliff Lampe:But, of course, they had no idea who you were. Right. And we see this now more in social media sites where, you know, you say, person A posts a lot and is has a lot of self disclosures. Person B doesn't, but sees a lot of person A's things. They might feel like they have a stronger relationship with person A than they actually do just because they're getting a lot of those friendship signals, the self disclosures, the, you know, details about their life and things like that.
Cliff Lampe:And person b is is not sharing those things, so they're not fully participating.
Georgia Hampton:So it sounds like we have parasocial relationships with our own friends.
Cliff Lampe:I wouldn't say with our close friends, but with people in, like like, more distant people in our social media sites. And that's the other thing is, of course, with your close network of friends, you're very rarely using one channel of communication with them. Right? Like, the closer the friend there's been a lot of research that show shows that the closer the person is to you, the more channels of communication you use with them.
Georgia Hampton:Does it then make sense that the more channels of communication, whether that be through other social media platforms, text messaging, find my friends, that kind of undoes this parasocial bond and makes it real?
Cliff Lampe:It does. It also, of course, diminishes the power of any one platform to control or affect relationships. Right? So we use an ecology of platforms to interact with our close friends. And no one of them is gonna shape or define that relationship.
Georgia Hampton:So thinking on something like find my friends, to me, that's an interesting component of this. Because in my experience, I would never give my location to someone I wasn't already pretty close friends with. Like, it's just not a social platform in that sense.
Cliff Lampe:Right.
Georgia Hampton:But but sometimes it does offer a level of access that can be kind of shaggy.
Cliff Lampe:Well, I mean, closeness is dynamic. Right? And it's also context is so important in relationships. So, you know, I'm very close with people that I wouldn't necessarily want them to know where I'm at all the time or the people I am close to. And 95% of the time, I want them to know where I'm at.
Cliff Lampe:5% of the time, I might not. Right. And so, you know, that's it's an interesting thing because human relationships are so fluid and dynamic. And typically, our technical tools are not fluid and dynamic. Right.
Cliff Lampe:They're static. They're programmed in. They're kind of set in stone. They change, of course, all the time, but they're still digital, whereas human relationships are very much analog. So there's always some bit of gap between those two things.
Georgia Hampton:Since Find My Friends at least doesn't explicitly have ads. I'm curious if people, whether they realize it or not, use it because of that, because it feels intimate and like it exists outside of that ecosystem of other social platforms that are kind of constantly selling things to us and banking on our friendships and our relationships to keep us somewhere to sell things to us. Like, is is that the mark of actual intimacy, like, that we can't since we can't kinda really trust it completely elsewhere?
Cliff Lampe:It's a good question. I'm not sure. Most of the literature would say that people are fine giving up some privacy for convenience. So in general, I'm not sure how much people are actually paying attention to the lack of ads in terms of defining the authenticity of the relationship. There are other sites that try that lemonade and be real and sites where they have fewer ads because they're trying to build a market and, are trying to create these kind of authentic experiences.
Cliff Lampe:But I haven't seen too much that show that people consider that when they're picking sites to use.
Georgia Hampton:And, I mean, to this idea that people will give up certain things for convenience, Find My Friends kinda does that, where for the the sacrifice of a certain degree of privacy, you can have access to where all your little friends are.
Cliff Lampe:Yes. That's one of the most common findings in my field is we call it the privacy paradox. Whenever you ask people, they always say, yes. I'm a very private person. I wanna preserve my privacy.
Cliff Lampe:Privacy is very important to me. But then when you look at what they actually do, they don't do hardly anything to actually protect their privacy. And they're usually very willing to sacrifice privacy for convenience. Part of it too is, is there a literacy that we develop? Like, for instance, will the younger generation just immediately know that their location is being shared all the time and change where they go because of that?
Cliff Lampe:Well so will for instance, the upcoming generation, will their behaviors change as they're more literate about their location being shared?
Georgia Hampton:Do you see any any sign of that?
Cliff Lampe:We, frankly, just don't know yet. If I had to guess, I would say that they're just not going to care about the self disclosure, that they'll go wherever they want to. They're not gonna change their actual, like, moving around behavior. But they're also not going to be worried about if somebody says like, oh, hey. I saw you at the comic book store or or, you know, at the, you know, Urban Outfitters or whatever it happens to be.
Cliff Lampe:And they're just going to be, yeah, that's where I was.
Georgia Hampton:Does this does this change us?
Cliff Lampe:It's funny. Every every information technology changes us. Yeah. You know, the invention of writing as an information technology definitely changed how we interact and what our brains are like. The invention of the telephone changed society.
Cliff Lampe:The invention of the Internet certainly did. So every new information technology does absolutely change us. But at the same time, we change the technology through our uses. Like, I don't wanna become technologically deterministic where we think, like, oh, technology comes out and it just shapes humans. It's really not that way.
Cliff Lampe:Technology is like architecture. Right? It may direct some flows, but really, humans are affecting the technology more strongly than the technology is affecting the humans.
Georgia Hampton:Cliff, thank you so much for talking to me about this. It's something I could talk about for much, much longer, but you've given me give me a lot of things to think about.
Cliff Lampe:Well, thanks for having me. It's always a fun thing for me to talk about as well.
Georgia Hampton:If people are interested to learn more about you, read more of your work, where can they do that?
Cliff Lampe:You know, honestly, the easiest thing to go do is to go to scholar.google.com and type in Cliff Lampe. That's, the best way to get to know me is through the research. That's for sure.
Georgia Hampton:Amazing. Well, thank you so much.
Cliff Lampe:You bet. Thank you.
Georgia Hampton:Huge thanks to Cliff Lampe again for taking the time to tease this out with me. I don't have any plans to stop using find my friends, but I'm curious how you use or don't use location services like Find My Friends or anything else like it. How does the level of access change the way you see people on social media? Do you find yourself building parasocial relationships with, I don't know, some girl you went to high school with, write us an email, send us a voice mail, leave us a voice note. All the info about that is in the show notes.
Hans Buetow:Write a poem about something too obvious, like,
Georgia Hampton:a kid's room. You could see
Mike Rugnetta:one little glow
Hans Buetow:in the dark star
Georgia Hampton:painted over in landlord white.
Mike Rugnetta:That's a poem. The point.
Georgia Hampton:You don't have time.
Hans Buetow:To do it justice. Just look.
Georgia Hampton:At the ceiling.
Rob Scallon Clip:Really? Yeah. How do we do this video? Yeah. Mhmm.
Rob Scallon Clip:I like to keep my corner of the Internet pretty much about lighthearted fun music stuff, and this is not gonna be that. 2023 was my hardest year by far.
Hans Buetow:Little bit of behind the curtain stuff here quick. Here at Never Posts, sometimes we help produce each other's segments. So like, we'll sit in interviews with each other, another set of ears, someone to take notes, editorial stuff. So I was sitting in George's taping with Cliff, the interview that we just heard, and my ears were immediately and completely caught by something that Cliff said very early in his interview.
Cliff Lampe:The closer the relationship, the more self disclosure you have to have. Self disclosure is basically where you become vulnerable and you tell things about yourself that may not be flattering, and it creates a sense of kind of mutual obligation between 2 people. So a lot of, like, closer relationship formation is dependent on that.
Hans Buetow:This totally makes sense to me. I share with my friends as a more full person, and in that sharing, our bond strengthens. But here's what I couldn't help wondering as I listen to Cliff talk. And I was wondering this because of an interview I had done recently. While Cliff was talking, I just kept thinking, what if this outcome of forming a closer relationship is not just being expected on an individual level or even a small group level?
Hans Buetow:What if these same norms are expected on a one to many relationship? So in the parasocial relationships that Cliff described, what does it look like, not for us as observers, but for the people being observed? What do they have to do to simulate that closer relationship with their audiences as, and these scare quotes are genuinely scary, as friends? And there's one word in what Cliff said that gives us a bit of a clue.
Cliff Lampe:Vulnerable.
Hans Buetow:Vulnerability.
Clip:Hey, guys. I wanted to just be vulnerable here.
Clip:I wish I could say it was easier today,
Clip:but it's not.
Rob Scallon Clip:So this is Rob's embarrassment corner. When this comes out or when things are getting more real, they're definitely here's a warning at the beginning of the video that we get into some really serious stuff.
Rob Scallon Clip:Yes.
Rob Scallon Clip:Yeah.
Hans Buetow:So can you define vulnerability for me as it exists on the Internet?
Brooke Erin Duffy:Broadcasting parts of us that we maybe wouldn't think about putting in the public domain, whatever the feedback may be.
Hans Buetow:This is doctor Brooke Aaron Duffy. Brooke is the person who was in my brain the whole time that Cliff was talking. Brooke is an associate professor at the Department of Communication at Cornell University, where she holds appointments in feminist, gender and sexuality studies as well as media studies. And amongst other things, Brooks studies the creator economy, specifically how visibility functions and often doesn't function within communities and platforms online. And in 2023, Brooks cowrote a study called the politics of vulnerability in the influencer economy.
Brooke Erin Duffy:And I came to this because I was studying visibility, and there is such a thin line between visibility and and vulnerability. And so when we think about what it is that it means to be public in the age of social media or visible in the age of social media, it often boils down to being vulnerable to various potential outcomes.
Hans Buetow:Those potential outcomes are what I talked with Brooke about. In the paper, there are 3 main types of vulnerability that Brooke and her team outlined. These 3 create a sort of cycle of vulnerability.
Brooke Erin Duffy:It can garner metrics. It can garner feedback. It can elicit likes and and, grow attention. And so the other side of the coin is is being vulnerable can, garner kind of visibility you don't necessarily want. So that could include surveillance.
Brooke Erin Duffy:It could include hate and harassment. It could include people exploiting your very personal moments for public gain.
Hans Buetow:In short, when posting is an influencer, the platforms incentivize vulnerability as a virtue and authenticity as a goal. This is personal vulnerability. Then audiences respond and that make number go up. But when number goes up, that brings the vulnerability of exposure, a social vulnerability. And then, those folks are left hanging out on that limb, dangling without proper supports from the platforms that made it necessary to be out there in the 1st place.
Hans Buetow:This is platform vulnerability. Personal, social, platform. 3 types of vulnerability all tied up together. The whole cycle starts with the personal. What does personal vulnerability look like on the Internet and why is that important for people to display?
Brooke Erin Duffy:Yeah. One way to think about that question is what does personal vulnerability look like on the Internet, especially after 2020? Because I feel like the rise of TikTok as well as stay at home orders with different senses of what it meant to be enjoying life. And so I would say now personal vulnerability is sharing the less glossy or less glamorous moments of our life. It's being relatable.
Brooke Erin Duffy:It's sharing a breakup. It's putting your insecurities on display. And so, we see various examples of this, whether it's, like, the no makeup selfie or talking about heartbreak or, again, these highly individualized personal moments and now sharing them in a very public way.
Clip:I'm not someone that posts
Clip:or cries or anything on the Internet, so this is this is a new one for me.
Clip:Hey,
Clip:guys. I just wanted to tell you. I was hanging out with my friend. We were just, like, discussing trauma.
Brooke Erin Duffy:Sharing in and of itself is less of a risk than the potential feedback that it can spark. And so when creators share their experiences with mental health struggles or burnout, and the reaction to that, and I've seen this lately, is for people to say that, that's just clickbait or that's just rage bait, and so people dismiss it. People you didn't necessarily anticipate are having access to the content. And so that's what I mean by the the personal vulnerability where you're sharing elements because our culture, because social media culture, because audiences demand it, but you don't necessarily anticipate what the fallout could be.
Hans Buetow:Yeah. Vulnerability is not equally valued across all cultures, all groups in an offline setting. Online, are there any qualities in who's expected to be vulnerable and how people react to them? Like, are there people who are exempted from this need for vulnerability?
Brooke Erin Duffy:I would say absolutely. And I would say, vulnerability is is certainly gendered. It's it's racialized. It's steeped in, class politics. And, well before I started doing this work, I did a lot of work interviewing women entrepreneurs about their experiences online.
Brooke Erin Duffy:And with one of my collaborators, we we talked about what we call the digital double bind, which is essentially the fact that women in entrepreneurial roles were compelled to share particular elements of their personal lives with their audiences, but they were also negatively judged for this. And so
Hans Buetow:Mhmm.
Brooke Erin Duffy:Women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ plus community experience much harsher criticism and surveillance from their online content. And so that's where we get to the kind of this notion of of the double edged sword of you know, there's very positive elements of this where someone will say, like, I shared my, struggles with mental health or, I'm thinking of a trans creator who I interviewed and said that she received so much positive attention from people saying like, wow. I I could really found someone who shared my struggles. And so there is a a positive element to this. But at the same time, people talk about kind of walking on eggshells because you don't know.
Brooke Erin Duffy:And so you you can imagine the kind of angst that comes from posting and worrying on one side, is anyone gonna pay attention? Do I matter? But at the same time, am I going to get positive feedback? Am I going to generate, likes and and good responses from my community, or is this going to essentially end up as online antagonism, which again Yeah. Is much more of a risk for marginalized communities.
Hans Buetow:So what are the expectations for influencers to manage this type of vulnerability, this social vulnerability where people are responding back to them and making judgments against them.
Brooke Erin Duffy:I would say the expectations vary quite considerably. And one of the narratives I hear a lot is, you have to have a thick skin to do this, and that that's a problematic narrative because it it justifies, online toxicity as as merely part of the job.
Hans Buetow:It's just in the air. Oh, well. Just in
Brooke Erin Duffy:the air. You just have to you just have to deal with it. Yeah. And so influencers and creators rely upon various mechanisms in order to mitigate this. I mean, some, they they fall back on self censorship, and they become less likely to post things.
Brooke Erin Duffy:And so, you know, what I what I often hear is this sort of frustration or maybe disappointment with the appeal or the allure of a job, which is all about creative self expression and the realities of having so much of your livelihood and and creative life tethered to the expectations of these imagined audiences, it's something that very few of us can opt out of.
Hans Buetow:Like, to me, this brings up one of the ugliest words in all of this, which is resilience. It's a word that I don't care for in the first place. Stay with me. Not because I don't think that resilience is an admirable good thing that we should have in our lives, but because, like, the way we talk about resilience, it feels exactly like how I hear you talking about, like, a thick skin. And that that's the only appropriate response to trauma and attack, and then it's on you to have it.
Hans Buetow:It's on you as the individual to fix it. It's on the user and really, doesn't that just serve to protect platforms? Like, it's not actually on the user to fix some of this stuff, but this narrative of resilience, figure it out. How does resilience and a platform interact with each other?
Brooke Erin Duffy:Yeah. I'll start by saying I think you're absolutely right about the the insidiousness of this narrative of of resilience or maybe a different way to think of it is, like, the individualization of risk.
Hans Buetow:There you go.
Brooke Erin Duffy:That's not my term, but that's a a term sociologists of labor talk about. And it's essentially the idea that success is all on you, but failure is also all on you because because social benefits and structures are are slipped
Brooke Erin Duffy:away. And so you need
Brooke Erin Duffy:to manage it all for better or for worse. And, you know,
Brooke Erin Duffy:that's kind of bound up
Brooke Erin Duffy:with the entrepreneurial ethos as well. And but what this means in the context of platforms is if it's all on you to manage, what does that do when we're thinking about how to deal with the broader structures of online toxicity and and hate and harassment? And so was really kind of brought home by one of our interviewees who who talked about this case where a woman of color was receiving all kinds of negative hate on her content often related to her role as a woman of color. But she was afraid to block it because that would mean her numbers would go down. Right.
Brooke Erin Duffy:And so since doing that study, I've I've talked to a number of creators who've said something along the the same lines where, engagement is engagement. It doesn't matter if it's positive or negative. And so hate sharing
Hans Buetow:Which could be just as productive from a platform perspective
Brooke Erin Duffy:as Absolutely.
Hans Buetow:Any other form of sharing. Maybe more.
Brooke Erin Duffy:Yeah. Yeah. Maybe more. I mean, I get the compulsion to do this because it it plays to algorithmic systems where visibility begets more visibility. But at the same time, thinking about who can afford to participate in the rage bait economy again and not worry about the potential fallout of hate, harassment, trolling, doxing, all the the negativity.
Brooke Erin Duffy:And I guess the other thing that I've been thinking about since you posed the question about individualization is the fact that there's often, people try to compare the careers of influencers and creators to traditional celebrities. And Yeah. I I think it's important to see those cultural antecedents because they're they're there. But the key difference is if you're a Hollywood celebrity or a TV star, you have agents, you have publicists, you have lawyers, all to help mitigate the risks.
Hans Buetow:Yes. Yes.
Brooke Erin Duffy:You have systems. Yeah. But that said, I I, you know, I try to find ways that, you know, acknowledge how people are working together to resist this, and I'm struck by the way creators kind of band together informally. A lot of the streamers I've talked to have, like, free volunteer moderators who will kind of go through and and block and and ban bad faith actors. They will work together and do mass reporting if there's a particular violator.
Brooke Erin Duffy:And so, there's also been a number of efforts of creators to strike. I interviewed a few folks who were part of what was called the insurrection a few years ago instead of insurrection. I know. I love that. And, you know, they were protesting outside the offices.
Brooke Erin Duffy:I see, some lineages to this in what creators are doing to talk about larger issues of work, labor, and employment.
Hans Buetow:A lot of the labor that we've been talking about specifically is emotional labor, which is famously, very real and also, not considered labor in another very real, sense. So, like, is there a way to protect emotional labor, which is like a ton of it is being asked in all of these circumstances? First putting yourself out there, then dealing with people who come after you, and then trying to navigate the platforms that are or are not supporting you.
Brooke Erin Duffy:I mean, one way to think about that is how are we protecting the emotional labor in an offline world and, you know, the answer, I think, is is not not very good. And I I don't know what that would look like, but I think we can rephrase and say, how are we valuing it
Hans Buetow:Mhmm.
Brooke Erin Duffy:And recognizing that, this is not something that comes naturally nor something that that should come free.
Hans Buetow:I think it's very easy in reading through the study, in talking to you now, and maybe in hearing this for some folks to say that this is a problem that exists for other people. This is a problem that exists for influencers. This is a problem that is, exacerbated by trolls. This is a problem that is people who post online in a certain way. This is platforms over which I have no control.
Hans Buetow:I am merely a bystander. I am merely a passive participant, if I'm a participant at all in this system. And so but it I don't think it's that easy to remove ourselves, the casual participant from this equation and from this cycle? Like, should I value my and think about my feed differently if I understand the vulnerabilities, the map of vulnerabilities that exist in the creation of it?
Brooke Erin Duffy:Yeah. And I think, you know, that brings up an important point of how much of this is predicated on audiences' involvement and feedback and interactivity. And, I think audiences are increasingly, realizing the power they have over creators' careers and in some ways weaponizing it Mhmm. Given how much of this economy is predicated on visibility. I mean, you know, as as viewers, our engagement and our our follows, our likes, like, they do matter.
Brooke Erin Duffy:They matter to platform companies, but they do matter to create creators whose livelihoods depend upon this.
Hans Buetow:Brooke, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about visibility and vulnerability and all the things that go into it.
Brooke Erin Duffy:Thank you so much for a thoughtful and engaging conversation. It was great to chat.
Hans Buetow:If people wanna find you, read more of your work, read some of your books, or find out what you're doing next. Where should people find you online?
Brooke Erin Duffy:You can find me through my website which is www.brookduffy.com.
Hans Buetow:And we will put links to that in the show notes. Thank you again to doctor Brooke Erin Duffy. We will throw a link to her paper, the politics of vulnerability in influencer economy into the show notes. The question this conversation brings up for me is one of scale. Is there a too far with vulnerability?
Hans Buetow:Is there a window of vulnerability that makes sense, that fulfills the need that we have as an audience to consume? Like, what is acceptable vulnerability? And does it ever tip over into unacceptable? Or is it more like the more you push it, the more visibility you get and there is no outer limit? The more you can share, the bigger it goes?
Hans Buetow:I would love to know what you think. Please let us know in one of the many ways that you can get a hold of us, all also in the show notes.
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