Why we think villains are always more efficient at using the Internet
Media and responsibility for their effects: Instrumental vs. environmental approaches
Not surprisingly, the instrumental view of media – “somebody uses it as a tool for something” – almost always “reveals” conspiracies behind media use. Read more in The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology.
The trap of the instrumental approach to media effects
The Internet is surely a vehicle for enemy’s covert operations. As Hillary Clinton once stated, “Russian trolls and bots and agents are still fomenting discord and conflict within our country. That is classic propaganda, and the Russians are really good at it.”[1]
Vladimir Putin shares a similar view regarding the Internet but with one exception: he is confident that the Internet is the tool of American operatives. He said: “Everything goes through servers in the [United] States, everything is controlled from there… As you know, all this emerged once, at the beginning of the Internet, as a special project of the CIA. And thus, it has been developing since then.”[2]
Do these comments reflect the nature of the internet or the nature of those who comment?
A look at history makes it clear just how inconsistent it is to link media effects to the user’s intent. For example, after the 2016 presidential election in the US, Twitter came to be seen as a harmful tool in the hands of bad actors. It was widely argued that Twitter not only gave a platform to the alt-right but also helped Donald Trump bypass the mainstream media and hijack the news agenda.
Earlier, however, Twitter was judged very differently for doing the same. In the 2008 US presidential election, Barack Obama was praised for using Twitter to bypass the mass media and reach voters directly and personally. The same positive view dominated in the early 2010s, during the Arab Spring, when Twitter was celebrated as a democratic tool that helped organize grassroots protests against political establishments—exactly what it did in the mid-2010s, but this time for right-wing ressentiment and against left-leaning establishments.
Similar confusion occurred regarding fake social media accounts used for ideological influence. The use of fake accounts by the Russians was condemned after the 2016 US presidential election. However, the same instrumental use of fake accounts and troll farms for ideological meddling abroad was first registered five year with a different attitude. In 2011, The Guardian revealed that “the US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence Internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.” An “online persona management service” would allow one US operator “to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.”[3]
The use of user data for political targeting was also judged differently depending on who used it. In 2012, Obama’s re-election team was praised for “building a vast digital data operation that, for the first time, combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before”, as reported by the Guardian in 2012.[4] The media cheered the efforts with naïve admiration:
[…] a crack team of some of America’s top data wonks <…> draws much of its style and inspiration from the corporate sector, with its driving ambition to create a vote-garnering machine that is smooth, unobtrusive and ruthlessly efficient. <…> If 2008 was all about social media, 2012 is destined to become the ‘data election’.[5]
The people developing the technology were called “the digital wizards behind Obama’s tech-heavy re-election strategy”.[6]
But on a different occasion, the psychographic profiling for customized delivery of political message caused a scandal and investigations after Trump’s shocking victory in 2016. “Digital wizards” from Cambridge Analytica were blamed and accused rather than praised, a backlash that led to the company’s scandal-ridden shutdown.[7]
So, is Twitter good or bad? Should faking one’s identity be prohibited? Are data profiling and social media message customization good or bad? Do social media serve democracy or evil? Or does it just depend on who the user is and who the judge is? If so, what is the effect of the medium itself?
The answer that usually comes first is that the Internet and social media simply amplify what users do. Such an answer tends to satisfy both experts and the general public.
However, when media are seen as mere tools of particular actors, they lose their own media properties and are reduced to the properties of the user. This mirrors the argument that “guns don’t kill people, people do,” a claim of “media neutrality” that assumes media have no characteristics of their own. Within this approach, media analysis is reduced to the user’s intent, meaning there is no media analysis at all.
Curiously, when media are seen as tools, they are almost always treated as tools in the wrong hands. For reasons that are never quite explained, bad actors and conspirators are assumed to take over every medium. This approach has never identified a “right” or “appropriate” instrumental use of a medium. Instead, it is usually acknowledged that media a posteriori amplify evil, while the task of amplifying good is seen as a desired but not yet achieved ideal.
This, in turn, creates pressure to regulate media so that they serve only those seen as “right” or “good” actors, while restricting the access of others. Within this approach, regulation shifts from setting rules for media to deciding which users are good or bad, and therefore who should be allowed access to media and who should be banned.
To separate media effects from the users’ intents and, therefore, to separate judging media from judging users, it will be beneficial to distinguish between the instrumental and environmental approaches to media effects.
The instrumental approach assumes that a medium works as a tool used by a user for a purpose.
The environmental approach focuses on the capacity of a medium to become an environmental force that reshapes both the habitat and inhabitants.
The Lasswellian instrumental tradition in communication studies
The instrumental view of media has historically dominated communication studies. The practical, “administrative” approach to communications originated from the famous Lasswell model “Who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect?”[8]
The Lasswell Formula with corresponding elements of the communication process. A graphic variation by McQuail and Windahl.[9]
The ideas behind the Lasswell model have been applied and developed in adjacent fields. In 1949, Shannon and Weaver developed a formula for their information theory, reflecting a cybernetic view of communication and centering on the “signal/message” transmission. While it is not clear if Shannon and Weaver were influenced by Lasswell, their linear model of communication looks very much similar.
Shannon and Weaver’s view of the linear communication model.[10]
All the reiterations of the Lasswell model were intrinsically instrumental. As McQuail and Windahl wrote,
The Lasswell Formula shows a typical trait of early communication models: it more or less takes for granted that the communicator has some intention of influencing the receiver and, hence, that communication should be treated mainly as persuasive process. It is also assumed that messages always have effects. Models such as this have surely contributed to the tendency to exaggerate the effects of, especially, mass communication. On the other hand, this is not surprising when we know that Lasswell’s interest at the time was political communication and propaganda. For analyzing political propaganda, the formula is well suited.[11]
Marshall McLuhan was probably the first who divorced from the Lasswellian tradition. He highlighted the difference between the then-prevailing “transportation” view of communications and his own approach, which he called a “transformation” view. In his 1974 lecture at the University of South Florida, he stated that,
My kind of study in communication is really a study of transformation, whereas information theory and all the existing theories of communication that I know of are theories of transportation. All the official theories of communication studied in the schools of North America are theories of how you move data from point A to point B to point C with minimal distortion… [This] is a theory of transportation, and it has nothing to do with the effects which these forms have on us. … The problem in the transportation theory of communication is to get the noise, get the interference off the track and let it go through.
… I don’t have much interest in that theory. My theory or concern is what these media do to the people who use them. What did writing do to the people who invented it and used it? What do the other media of our time do to the people who use them? Mine is a transformation theory, how people are changed by the instruments they employ…[12]
Distinguishing the environmental from the instrumental: A media ecological take
Not surprisingly, the Lasswellian/instrumental tradition almost always “reveals” conspiracies behind media use. Time after time, the instrumental approach to analyzing the effects of, for example, social media typically identifies the same well-known villains, rendering media analysis itself redundant, as precisely these villains were meant to be detected before the analysis even began.
Media as tools produce effects for people in a more or less controllable way. However, media as an environment have effects on people, and this occurs in uncontrollable ways and often remains unrecognizable. The instrumental approach might help understand what people do with media, but it is blind to what media do to people. This approach might allow for the exploration of mediated human behavior, but it does not allow for the exploration of the media conditions that induce this behavior. As Marshall McLuhan once noted,
… and yet we still cannot free ourselves of the delusion that it is how a medium is used that counts rather than what it does to us and with us. This is the zombie stance of the technological idiot.[13]
If communication studies regard media as a means of communication and influence, media ecology explores media as an environmental force that modifies both the user and the environment, regardless of what is communicated, by whom, to whom, and with what intent. Hence, McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” which means the medium itself, not its content, is the determinant of the outcomes of its use.
Another fundamental statement representing the basic idea of media ecology belongs to John Culkin, who said that “we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” Culkin clarified: “Since our tools are extension of our senses, they shape the way we experience reality.”[14]
Tools are designed for a user to make some changes to the environment. Any new medium is first introduced as a better tool for some “old” operations with the environment. For example, an ax can hit better than a fist, and Zoom allows communicating better than a phone. However, a new medium then unleashes its own power and “imposes” new media functions that lead to environmental changes. The ax eventually enabled colonization, wars and the warrior culture, and Zoom created a new work culture. Thus, at a certain point of use, a medium, if it has succeeded, starts changing the environment and the users themselves.
The media ecology approach allows for singling out of two phases, or pathways, for a medium as an instrument to turn into a medium as an environmental force.
1) The environmentalization of an instrument begins at the sensory level. An instrument becomes successful when a user starts sensing an operated object and not the operating medium. For example, if a fisherman senses the fish, not the fishing rod, then the rod as a tool has succeeded: the sensorium is readjusted.
2) When a medium’s use becomes unrecognizable (meaning essential) for a sufficient number of users, its convenience starts reshaping their modus operandi at the cultural level. After that, a medium turns into an environmental force. The environmentalization of an instrument is complete when a user is not just an individual but a community.
When used by a person, a fence is an instrument to protect and defend, a further extension of the skin, beyond clothes and huts. However, when used by a culture, a fence is an environmental force that transforms a nomadic tribe into a sedentary culture and eventually leads to urban civilization reshaping the planet. Similarly, what seemed to be just the instrumental use of a medium in an isolated act (or a series of acts) becomes an environmental force when the user is not an individual but an entire culture <…>
Read more in the chapter “Media and responsibility for their effects: Instrumental vs. environmental views” in: The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology.
See also books by Andrey Mir:
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
[1] Hoffman, Ashley. (2017, 2 November). Hillary Clinton: Russia’s 2016 Election Meddling Is a ‘Form of War’. Time.
[2] Agamalova, Anastasia, and Golitsyna, Anastasia. (2014, April 24). Putin is certain that the Internet appeared as the special project of CIA. Vedomosty.
[3] Fielding, Nick, and Cobain, Ian. (2011, March 17). Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media. The Guardian.
[4] Pilkington, Ed, and Michel, Amanda. (2012, February 17). Obama, Facebook and the power of friendship: The 2012 data election”. The Guardian.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Cadwalladr, Carole, and Graham-Harrison, Emma. (2018, March 17). Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach. The Guardian.
[8] Lasswell, Harold. (1948). The structure and function of communication in society. In The Communication of Ideas. Pp. 37–51.
[9] McQuail, Denis, and Windahl, Swen. (1993 [1982]). Communication models for the study of mass communication. London: Routledge. P. 13.
[10] Ibid. P. 17.
[11] Ibid. Pp. 14-15.
[12] McLuhan, Marshall. (1974). Living in an acoustic world. Marshall McLuhan Speaks, Special Collection. University of South Florida Public Lectures.
[13] McLuhan, Marshall. (1969, March). The Playboy Interview, p. 56.
[14] Culkin, John. (1967). Each culture develops its own sense ratio to meet the demands of its environment. In McLuhan: Hot and Cool. Gerald Stearn (Ed.). New York: New American Library. P. 52.