March 25, 2024 • 31 mins
I was away last week and Doug had a bit of difficulty uploading the audio of the podcast, so apologies for the delay. Christopher J. Schneider is a professor of sociology at Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada. He is the author "Defining Sexual Misconduct: Power, Media, and #MeToo," and "Policing and Social Media: Social Control in an Era of New Media." In this episode of Based AF, Ashley and Christopher discuss how we should understand the media as a mechanism of control. For part 2 visit: www.patreon.com/AshleyAFrawley
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:03):
You know, here's an example. There was a case in Ohio in 2019 where there was
a police officer who, on his body-worn camera footage, literally planted evidence, drugs, at a scene.
And when they looked at the footage, and I can't help but smile here because
this is what I'm going to say. Sounds like I'm making it up.
You can Google it and read more about this. when they saw the footage
and said hey you're planting drugs like we see you
(00:26):
planting drugs on the body worn camera and the cop response
was literally well no you see
what happened was i arrested the suspect and i found the drugs in the suspect
but then i realized my body worn camera wasn't turned on so i turned it back
on and i went out and i put all the drugs back where i found it and obviously
(00:46):
this was not accepted nobody believed this like this is ridiculous No.
You know what he's doing today? The guy's still a cop on the force. He wasn't fired.
Whereas if I were working at Walmart and surveillance footage found me stealing
food off the shelf, you think I'd still be working at Walmart?
Nope. I'd be fired and anybody else anywhere else would be fired.
(01:07):
So accountability is super problematic in situations like that in relation to body cams.
Hi i'm christopher schneider and i'm
a full professor of sociology at brandon university and my research addresses
and studies the way in which media influence and change sort of everyday life
(01:33):
how people interact and come to understand the world i am the author of a couple
of different books and co-editor of books,
so including Qualitative Media Analysis,
published in 2013 with David Altaydi.
And my recent book is Defining Sexual Misconduct, Power, Media, and Me Too.
Thank you. When people think about social problems like the Me Too movement
(01:57):
or Black Lives Matter or police overreach or something like that,
they think like, Like as a sociologist, that's the thing that you do.
You should go out and count the number of people affected.
And, you know, offer a solution to policymakers.
Why is the media even an important thing to study?
(02:19):
I think the media are indeed the most important thing to study in the social
world in which we currently live,
because the ways in which people come to understand the world in which they
live in and meaning that they derive about that world increasingly comes through mediated spaces.
Now, to be sort of very clear, I'm not suggesting that media determine the way
(02:43):
that people think. They do not.
That's been referred to as the media effects approach and has been sort of widely
dismissed in a lot of different academic circles.
But rather, the media are a powerful and dominant social institution that wield
great influence in how people come to, again, make understandings and meanings about the social world.
And as we've seen, media have had a powerful influence on, say,
(03:06):
the election outcomes, on global pandemics, including vaccine uptake,
and whether or not people believe vaccines are effective,
you know, regardless of what the scientific research literature and scientists
have to say, how these materials then and the meanings that circulate around
the materials, you know, flow through media.
(03:27):
And I use that sort of largely in reference to both what's referred to as traditional
media, which would be television, newspaper, radio, and social media and digital
media is, I think, of paramount importance.
And I think it's incumbent on scholars to investigate these materials to help
better understand the social world in which we live.
(03:47):
So I was I've been following the last month.
Well, it's over now, but I've been following Davos. And one of the big things
that the people there were saying was the biggest threat facing us now is fake news.
That we got to get a control on this we gotta and it
was sort of the subtext was like we've got to control the narratives do
you agree do you think that fake news is the is a
(04:09):
big threat facing us i mean i i think the short answer probably yes i think
the part part of the the problem with i mean fake news again first and foremost
we need to define what exactly that means right so you know what is a legitimate
narrative and what is an illegitimate narrative i think
One of the issues here that ties into this idea of fake news is good news,
(04:34):
good journalism, investigative journalism, and good information is largely behind paywalls.
You know, when you look at major media organizations, the New York Times,
Washington Post, other credible, as it were, news media organizations,
scientific journals and scientific research locked up behind paywalls.
Much of the information that people have sort of regular access to and unrestricted
(05:00):
access to is the stuff that's freely available.
And with that, I mean, there's a price for everything, right?
So the information that's freely available, what's the catch if you're not paying
for it? and the catch is it might not necessarily be accurate, true, or correct.
And I think in some ways, this contributes to the rise of the widespread sharing
(05:23):
of conspiracy theories.
QAnon, Pizzagate, and all this other kind of stuff, because of this freely accessible
information, how people connect and revolve around this information.
In relation to fake news that that comes from, say, politicians.
Notably Donald Trump in the United States.
I mean, one of the problems here, and I think that there needs to be more discussion
(05:46):
about this more broadly, is that media,
and if we want to say good media, as I just did in relation to media that we
have to pay for, is it's a commodity.
I mean, it matters more that you subscribe to media, that you're seeing the
advertisements that are being packaged through media, right?
(06:07):
Advertises, sponsorships, these sorts of things.
And this is also another issue that gives rise to fake news concerns.
We've seen the data and the evidence that Donald Trump gets a lot more press
coverage than other political rivals because Donald Trump says and does ridiculous things.
People tune in. It doesn't matter if what he's saying or doing is true or correct.
(06:29):
Indeed, Indeed, a lot of the times it's completely false, and the evidence has
been shown that it's false, but it gets high ratings, high viewership.
And indeed, the former head of CBS said that, something to the extent that,
you know, Donald Trump might not be good for America, but he's really good for
CBS News or something like that in terms of boosting revenues.
And that's another, I think, serious concern when we talk about the circulation
(06:53):
of these news media platforms. forms and.
If we want to sort of connect this to social media, then we could start talking about algorithms.
Algorithms are something that we know very little about.
And I use the royal we both as publics and as scholars, because algorithms are
closely guarded secrets of social media companies.
(07:15):
There's a really neat book by Frank Pasquale called The Black Box Society,
and sort of he outlined some of that in that book.
And what we do know about algorithms is that they're programmed by their owners,
social media companies,
and they are programmed to do a variety of things, including to boost and value
(07:37):
certain messages and to sort of devalue other messages in terms of what people are exposed to.
We know that the social media algorithms typically tend to promote materials
that are divisive because divisiveness keeps people engaged.
(07:57):
And that's the point with social media is to keep people on these platforms
so that people's information, what they're doing on these platforms can be sold to marketers.
If the material that you're exposed to on social media, you sort of largely
agree with it and you can quickly become disengaged and then you leave that
platform, maybe go to another one or just log off entirely.
(08:18):
Then this is problematic for these companies who want to keep you engaged or,
for lack of a better word, hooked on these platforms.
And I think that's another big issue here when trying to understand the promotion
and circulation of fake news is trying to better understand social media algorithms.
And again, something that we know very little about. And that's problematic
(08:40):
for publics and scholars who wish
to better understand how these meanings circulate in our everyday life.
When I teach about social problems, that's sort of my main area of research
is how social problems are mediated.
It's not like a problem just speaks for itself and finds its way onto a newspaper page.
People have to make sense of the world. They have to frame it in a particular way.
(09:04):
And so I can teach students to kind of shore themselves up against media narratives
or be more active and critically engaged by sort of teaching them to recognize
certain framing strategies, that sort of thing.
But I've found that social media is its
own beast you know so I teach
a course where I kind of bring folklore in and I try to
(09:25):
get students to recognize you know urban legends and aspects
of urban legends and I'm like look when you see this online you know there was
this COVID during COVID it was great because every day there was a new one and
it was like we were you know all over it was like we were waiting in line in
you know I don't know Ohio at a COVID testing place and we we the line Mine was too long. So we left.
(09:46):
And then after we got a text message that said our test was positive,
but we never took the test, you know, perfect urban legends. Wonderful.
Right. The twist at the end. And it was always, and you could see the exact
same tweet over and over and over again, but the details were changed.
We were in Ohio, we were in New York, we were over here.
And so I can tell students to kind of recognize, you know, the,
the satisfying twist at the end, but there's only, it's such a new beast.
(10:09):
Is there anything that we can kind of tell people today? How can you shore yourself
up against this kind of cacophony of strange claims that seem to be bombarding
us all the time from social media?
Now it's not just the news media, it's also Twitter, X, it's Facebook.
What can we do to be more critically engaged?
(10:31):
I think first and foremost, as qualitative researchers, people who research
social problems, is a focus on meaning and process.
So as you just noted, right, there's, you know, a single tweet in Ohio and,
you know, okay, well, are there other similar tweets? And as you said, yes, there are.
And can we start to trace where these,
(10:52):
so the origin of, you know, the original tweet or message or post on social
media, and then start to see how and where it travels,
how it travels, how meanings are attached to those tweets or those social media
messages as they travel.
And through a critical and rigorous scholarly investigation of meaning and process,
(11:16):
this helps us to better understand where these claims come from,
how they move, and how they're adopted by other claims makers,
all of which helps us to better understand the meaning-making process more broadly.
And I think this is something that it becomes, I think, also increasingly difficult
on social media and digital media more broadly, because, I mean,
(11:38):
in some ways we're searching for a needle in a haystack.
I mean, there are billions and billions of documents, posts on social media.
And how do we even begin to...
Trace the origins of a particular message. So one of the things I've given workshops
on qualitative media analysis,
and students and junior scholars will regularly ask me, how do I do this?
(12:04):
Studying the internet, as it were, is akin to drinking water from a fire hose.
You can't really do it. So the short answer is I give to students and junior
scholars is to to make a case and make a case for how you're going to approach these materials.
And one good case that we can sort of do or provide as an instance would be to follow hashtags.
(12:30):
Hashtags, I think, are really interesting because a hashtag is not owned by anyone.
Hashtags aren't owned by social media platforms.
Facebook doesn't own hashtags. Twitter doesn't, although that's where the origin
of the hashtag comes from. is Twitter.
It was developed by Chris Messina, I think is his name, a tech developer at Twitter in 2007.
(12:51):
And, you know, we think about how hashtags changed how people communicate and
people organize around hashtags.
And I think we have an easier time tracing how hashtags move across social media
platforms and how meaning becomes attached to hashtags and drops off other hashtags.
You know, as you noted earlier in our conversation, you know,
(13:11):
you look at the the Black Lives Matter movement and subsequent hashtag.
You look at the rise of the hashtag Me Too, the Time's Up.
I mean, there are a variety of hashtags and seeing how people make sense of
meanings around those hashtags.
So, you know, for example, in my book, Divining Sexual Misconduct,
co-authored with Stacey Hannum at Wilfrid Laurier University,
(13:31):
there's a chapter in there where we investigate the Me Too hashtag and the meanings
that surround that in relation to bringing to to light not only perpetrators
of sexual harms, but discussions and meanings around what very.
Constitutes the idea of sexual harms.
So, I mean, some of the things we found that we thought were quite interesting,
(13:54):
and we sort of, we fleshed this out a bit more in the book more broadly,
is, you know, several of the tweets, I mean, hundreds of the tweets that we collected,
thousands indeed, talked about, you know, sexual assault and some of the really sort of,
terrible forms of sexual harms criminal sexual harms and
we expected to find some of those materials i think
(14:15):
what we were surprised about surprised to find
were people using the hashtag the
me too hashtag and talking about say things like getting cat called or you know
somebody asking for your phone number hashtag me too and one of the things in
our analysis that we noticed was other people mostly women were you know piling
(14:36):
on to these hashtags through the comments and saying, well, wait a minute,
you know, like, because someone asked for your phone number doesn't mean,
you know, this is me too, you know, I was sexually assaulted.
That's what the Me Too movement is about. And you start to see disagreements
among people about what constitutes sexual harms, right?
And, you know, we can't deny or dismiss someone's experience having felt,
(15:00):
you know, that, you know, they were catcalled and that was a type of sexual
harm. It's very real for people.
And, And, you know, as people who are studying social problems,
importantly, we weren't doing that in our book.
We weren't dismissive of these types of claims that people were advancing,
but rather trying to understand how these meanings become attached to the hashtag
itself and how the hashtag moves across social media platforms and brings to
(15:23):
our attention sexual harms,
including the very idea of sexual harms.
And one of the things that we discuss in the book is, you know,
that historically, sexual harms have largely been understood in the context of the criminal law.
And if somebody is harmed with sexual assault, and a crime happens, that's bad, obviously.
(15:45):
Anything outside of that, that is not recognized by the law as a crime,
therefore, the reasoning is that it must not be harmful.
And that's just simply not true. And so these are the things,
you know, this sort of meaning making process is some of the stuff that emerged
from our analysis of the use of the hashtag MeToo.
That contestation is really interesting because I always remember this paper
(16:08):
from years and years ago, Nichols, something about the dialogical nature of claims making.
And it used to be just that we would say news media are dialogical,
that you would make a claim and then you would be subject to counterclaims and
you kind of change your rhetoric as a result.
Well, but that process was slow.
(16:29):
You know, if anyone paid attention, if anyone paid attention at all,
you might get a counterclaim if you were successful, you know,
enough to shut for someone to notice.
But now it seems that that dialogical nature of, of claims making is so apparent,
you know, you make these, you make an expansive claim about,
(16:50):
and this was, it's a very common thing, right?
To expand the nature of a claim to say, look, this, this thing that you think
of typically only is very, very harmful in extreme cases, actually represents
a spectrum of experience.
It's a very common thing that people do. For better or for worse,
it's a controversial thing.
People say, well, it tends to expand or inflate our understanding of harms in the world.
(17:12):
And we get a very kind of inflated idea of just how bad things are.
Because when someone gives you a statistic, they don't tell you that what's
behind the statistic might be that inflated definition. The same time,
you don't want to leave anybody out, right?
But that example just really shows just how that controversy can be so much in your face.
And I wonder if, a part of me wonders if some of the fears around fake news
(17:37):
and discussions on social media and polarization is that incredibly quick and
in-your-face dialogical nature of claims making.
So a claims maker, like a policymaker, can't just tweet something without having
a ton of abuse, but also push back immediately.
And I just wondered if you had any thoughts about that, that kind of what effect
that dialogical nature has on our understanding of social problems.
(18:01):
Well, I mean, there are a few things that are going on there.
I mean, first and foremost, when you look at claims-making around the policy
around science, these things happen slowly, of course.
So studying whether vaccines are effective or cancer treatments are effective,
or whatever it may or may not be, it takes time.
And, you know, there's a methodological rigor there. There's a scientific rigor.
(18:23):
And when we factor in,
Online and social media, everything is immediate.
And I think this has really changed the public's expectations about the immediacy
of information, especially when members of the public might not really understand how science works.
And science is slow and it's a conversation. And so for on the one hand,
(18:47):
for scientists and policymakers to put out a social media post,
a tweet or whatever, you know, hey, we're working on the vaccines.
We don't fully understand yet, but all the other evidence points to people pile
up. What do you mean all the other evidence?
Where's the evidence for this?
Why are we talking about? And there's a lot of questions around that.
On the other hand, when we look at, you know, the sort of the diametrically
opposed statements that people might make, social media is what it's done has exacerbated.
(19:15):
Media performativity. So with individuals performing on these spaces,
the point of media performativity on social media is to get likes,
it's to get attention, it's to go viral.
This is why people post images of selfies.
And indeed, this has given rise to new social problems and new social phenomenon,
(19:39):
including selfie deaths.
I mean, it's been called the a public health crisis, that people are doing more
drastic and extreme measures to take the selfie in the lion's den or whatever
it might be, and then they're mauled by lions, because that's what gets attention.
And the cultural space is crowded. And this is something I think that people
(19:59):
are engaging in more extreme statements, whether or not they believe them or not is less relevant.
That sort of contributes to this idea of fake news and more about,
can I go viral by saying this thing so you mentioned cove covid for example
and i was reminded of one of the more.
Ridiculous in my opinion tweets was the one that was made by nikki minaj the
(20:25):
rap artists who said something to the extent that her cousin's testicles became
swollen and it became impotent because they got the COVID vaccine,
which is completely not true and not supported by any scientific evidence. And that,
Tweet went viral. I think it was tweeted over 100,000 times and people,
(20:48):
they pay attention to that.
It became the subject of late night news media commentary, jokes, other sorts of things.
I mean, you look at, again, with social problems, how, how jokes and memes contribute
to this process as well of the claims making process. process.
Did that actually happen? I don't know. Does Nicki Minaj actually believe that?
I don't know. But she said it, and it got a lot of attention.
(21:12):
She's got millions of followers online. This is another problem,
as I spoke to before, in relation to algorithms,
which tend to promote and boost messages, not only that are divisive,
but those that are made by celebrity In a lot of ways,
the hierarchy in news media or traditional media in relation to celebrity and
(21:34):
providing spaces for celebrities to make claims has been mapped onto social media,
where, you know, again, when we studied this with Me Too,
the Me Too movement was incorrectly attributed to Hollywood actor Alyssa Milano.
Now, she sparked the Me Too movement by putting up the post on Twitter that
(21:54):
said, you know, if you've been sexually harassed or assaulted,
write Me Too in response to this tweet.
She did not use the hashtag. That's important to clarify.
And, you know, that sort of sparked the Me Too movement. We know that African-American
activist Tarana Burke started Me Too in 2006.
And Tarana Burke, prior to, you know, the Me Too movement was unknown.
(22:15):
You know, she was an activist. She was not a celebrity and, you know,
did not get the same type of attention that people like Alyssa Milano.
And since, Alyssa Milano said that she had never heard of Tarana Burke and indeed
did give credit to Tarana Burke for starting the Me Too movement.
So, I mean, this is another issue we start talking about, you know,
the evolution of claims making, the meaning and process, the role of algorithms
(22:39):
and promoting content and celebrities saying and doing things.
And, you know, you look at, you know, Donald Trump, for example,
and, you know, his sort of gonzo approach to politics.
And Donald Trump is himself a meme.
David Altaydi has made this claim in his most recent book, and this is part
of the sort of the mediated social
(23:01):
world in which we live, all of which contributes to a real muddying,
if you will, of truth claims, claims making more generally, this idea of legitimate
and illegitimate news or fake news,
all of which I think has become very difficult to not only for just members
of the public to understand or differentiate between the two,
(23:23):
but also for the public to understand.
You know, what they think is good and, you know, legitimate information, but also.
You know, for scholars who are attempting to do similar things.
And as social problems scholars, scholars who engage in social constructivist
research, you really got to pull back on that.
It's not about what's true and what's not true, but rather it's about the meaning
making process in relation to claims and how claims are made and advanced.
(23:47):
And that could become difficult to do when some of this information that we're
analyzing as scholars is, you know, outrageous, ridiculous, ridiculous.
Inflammatory, racist, sexist, homophobic, all these sorts of things.
And, you know, it's hard. I think it's a challenge. And that's something I think
we need to talk more about on as a social problems analysis,
(24:09):
not necessarily taking a moral side or stance, the claim that you're trying to investigate.
This is something I've seen, we've seen a shift in over the past several years, indeed,
several decades where, I mean, previously, when
you you look at claims making in you know those scholarly research
that's looked at you know news reports in the 80s and
(24:30):
the 90s and you know the satanic panic from the 1980s one
of my favorites research that's that's done
that those claims were
ridiculous ish right but they appeal to groups of people but because of of you
know anybody could log on to social media and like people like donald trump
they can make claims that are not only just ridiculous but are just just outrageous
(24:53):
and offensive and morally reprehensible and all these sorts of things.
And trying to sort of step back from that becomes, I think, a challenge.
It becomes, I think, particularly challenging because I think this approach
encourages you to be a kind of a slow thinker, you know, that when everyone
is sort of panicking about something, I'm always sort of like,
(25:14):
oh, that's interesting.
And I'm sort of like collecting the claims and that, you know,
oh, why? Why that particular thing? Why that motif?
Why do I see that again and again and again? end.
And I get a lot of flack for that. Because people are saying,
why don't you care about this problem?
Oh, you're always downplaying this problem. Don't you realize it's a really
big issue? That's the biggest issue facing us.
(25:37):
And I'm sort of saying, well, I know that the biggest issue facing us is often
the one that has been packaged in a particular way.
And, you know, you need to know something. In order to think like this,
you need to know something about the medium.
Because when I see a message, I'm thinking about the medium immediately,
like why did this get into the headline why did the editor either commission
(25:58):
or accept this particular piece why you know but people don't do that there's
a sense that there's like,
this thing we're all talking about it because there's some truth to it not necessarily
the case which is why the satanic panic is such a great example because you
know there's at least some groups in society latched on to this for very particular
(26:18):
reasons and not because there there were cabals of Satanists sacrificing babies, you know what I mean?
So the question that we ask ourselves is, well, why has this become so powerful?
And so you mentioned about jokes and memes, which I found very interesting because
this was always part of the broader kind of repertoire of what,
you know, someone who studies communications would study, right?
(26:42):
Jokes, joke cycles, photocopier lore, you know, this sort of thing.
But now it's come together in a much more clear way with social problems.
So what's this relationship or is there a relationship between sort of jokes,
memes and the way that we talk about the problems that face us?
Well, I think one of the things is memes are easier to share and they go viral more quickly.
(27:12):
Memes also, there's much less initial engagement in the meme.
So, for example, you know, if you had to think about, again,
the satanic panic, we keep coming to that because, you know,
that's a shared favorite one here.
You know, there was a story there, you know, and the story, as you know,
with the the Ohio COVID thing, it it sort of morphs and it starts with,
(27:35):
you know, these kids sacrificing and then, you know, Ozzy Osbourne and they're
listening to, you know, whatever it is.
And there's a narrative, essentially.
And following a narrative takes time.
There's a heightened level of engagement when we're following narratives.
And people like this, of course. I mean, they watch reality TV,
(27:56):
we watch Netflix, you know, people read books.
I mean, you know, people engage with narratives, but it's time consuming.
And when you're looking at materials in
relation to social problems and the contemporary you
know social media and virality and getting
stuff out there quickly there's a lot less time it doesn't correspond with the
logic of social media in terms of its immediacy memes are immediate and they
(28:20):
take a lot less engagement in terms of following a particular story or narrative
and you can quickly share it and then people quickly share it and these go viral
and they give they can give rise I think,
to new and different types of narratives that might be surrounding a particular
set of claims making or claims makers.
And I think that's one of the reasons why we've seen sort of memes take off and jokes as well.
(28:43):
But again, the joke is a slower type of narrative. You know,
you have to sort of tell the joke, as it were.
And same with research, as you know, like the slow thinker.
When we're doing research and writing about these materials,
we're also developing a narrative.
And, you know, again, the logic of social media and the different platforms
in how the content, you know, when we look at the difference between form and content.
(29:06):
This becomes paramount as well. And you already noted that. So to have something
go viral on, say, TikTok involves a particular understanding of the way in which
that social media platform works.
It's short video snippets, a couple of seconds or whatever it may be that you're
trying to put out there versus a post on Twitter or a photograph on Instagram,
Facebook, YouTube, so on and so forth.
(29:28):
Now, to be clear, these different social media platforms can often accept different types of content.
So Instagram, you could put a photograph and you can write a narrative underneath
the photograph and use hashtags, people do.
But the dominant way in which people communicate on that particular platform is through photos.
TikTok is videos. Again, you could add text to videos, but the dominant way
(29:50):
in which people engage in that platform is through the use of video.
So taking all this into consideration as well, I think,
is is important can you think of an example of a movement or a problem that
was propelled by a particularly well-placed meme or joke or or even an individual
not to put you on the spot or anything.
(30:13):
I'm not sure i would say you know maybe the let's go brandon you know around you know the,
dismissal of everything that is joe biden
and democrats you know and the way in which you
know because that's just the text you write let's go brandon and you put
it over say a picture of joe biden or maybe even just type
(30:33):
let's go brandon and that ties into
a whole narrative about you know the
evil democrats and you know this and that and the other and
you don't even really have have to have a full awareness or understanding of
exactly what Let's Go Brandon is being used in reference to other than it's
(30:54):
anti-Joe Biden and it's anti-Democrats and it's pro-Republican,
pro-MAGA, pro-Trump.
There's a whole lot going on there. But to just share something with Let's Go
Brandon, I think that's sort of the first thing that comes to mind putting me on the spot.
You know, here's an example. There was a case in Ohio in 2019 where there was
a police officer who, on his body-worn camera footage, literally planted evidence, drugs, at a scene.
And when they looked at the footage, and I can't help but smile here because
this is what I'm going to say. Sounds like I'm making it up.
You can Google it and read more about this. when they saw the footage
and said hey you're planting drugs like we see you
(00:26):
planting drugs on the body worn camera and the cop response
was literally well no you see
what happened was i arrested the suspect and i found the drugs in the suspect
but then i realized my body worn camera wasn't turned on so i turned it back
on and i went out and i put all the drugs back where i found it and obviously
(00:46):
this was not accepted nobody believed this like this is ridiculous No.
You know what he's doing today? The guy's still a cop on the force. He wasn't fired.
Whereas if I were working at Walmart and surveillance footage found me stealing
food off the shelf, you think I'd still be working at Walmart?
Nope. I'd be fired and anybody else anywhere else would be fired.
(01:07):
So accountability is super problematic in situations like that in relation to body cams.
Hi i'm christopher schneider and i'm
a full professor of sociology at brandon university and my research addresses
and studies the way in which media influence and change sort of everyday life
(01:33):
how people interact and come to understand the world i am the author of a couple
of different books and co-editor of books,
so including Qualitative Media Analysis,
published in 2013 with David Altaydi.
And my recent book is Defining Sexual Misconduct, Power, Media, and Me Too.
Thank you. When people think about social problems like the Me Too movement
(01:57):
or Black Lives Matter or police overreach or something like that,
they think like, Like as a sociologist, that's the thing that you do.
You should go out and count the number of people affected.
And, you know, offer a solution to policymakers.
Why is the media even an important thing to study?
(02:19):
I think the media are indeed the most important thing to study in the social
world in which we currently live,
because the ways in which people come to understand the world in which they
live in and meaning that they derive about that world increasingly comes through mediated spaces.
Now, to be sort of very clear, I'm not suggesting that media determine the way
(02:43):
that people think. They do not.
That's been referred to as the media effects approach and has been sort of widely
dismissed in a lot of different academic circles.
But rather, the media are a powerful and dominant social institution that wield
great influence in how people come to, again, make understandings and meanings about the social world.
And as we've seen, media have had a powerful influence on, say,
(03:06):
the election outcomes, on global pandemics, including vaccine uptake,
and whether or not people believe vaccines are effective,
you know, regardless of what the scientific research literature and scientists
have to say, how these materials then and the meanings that circulate around
the materials, you know, flow through media.
(03:27):
And I use that sort of largely in reference to both what's referred to as traditional
media, which would be television, newspaper, radio, and social media and digital
media is, I think, of paramount importance.
And I think it's incumbent on scholars to investigate these materials to help
better understand the social world in which we live.
(03:47):
So I was I've been following the last month.
Well, it's over now, but I've been following Davos. And one of the big things
that the people there were saying was the biggest threat facing us now is fake news.
That we got to get a control on this we gotta and it
was sort of the subtext was like we've got to control the narratives do
you agree do you think that fake news is the is a
(04:09):
big threat facing us i mean i i think the short answer probably yes i think
the part part of the the problem with i mean fake news again first and foremost
we need to define what exactly that means right so you know what is a legitimate
narrative and what is an illegitimate narrative i think
One of the issues here that ties into this idea of fake news is good news,
(04:34):
good journalism, investigative journalism, and good information is largely behind paywalls.
You know, when you look at major media organizations, the New York Times,
Washington Post, other credible, as it were, news media organizations,
scientific journals and scientific research locked up behind paywalls.
Much of the information that people have sort of regular access to and unrestricted
(05:00):
access to is the stuff that's freely available.
And with that, I mean, there's a price for everything, right?
So the information that's freely available, what's the catch if you're not paying
for it? and the catch is it might not necessarily be accurate, true, or correct.
And I think in some ways, this contributes to the rise of the widespread sharing
(05:23):
of conspiracy theories.
QAnon, Pizzagate, and all this other kind of stuff, because of this freely accessible
information, how people connect and revolve around this information.
In relation to fake news that that comes from, say, politicians.
Notably Donald Trump in the United States.
I mean, one of the problems here, and I think that there needs to be more discussion
(05:46):
about this more broadly, is that media,
and if we want to say good media, as I just did in relation to media that we
have to pay for, is it's a commodity.
I mean, it matters more that you subscribe to media, that you're seeing the
advertisements that are being packaged through media, right?
(06:07):
Advertises, sponsorships, these sorts of things.
And this is also another issue that gives rise to fake news concerns.
We've seen the data and the evidence that Donald Trump gets a lot more press
coverage than other political rivals because Donald Trump says and does ridiculous things.
People tune in. It doesn't matter if what he's saying or doing is true or correct.
(06:29):
Indeed, Indeed, a lot of the times it's completely false, and the evidence has
been shown that it's false, but it gets high ratings, high viewership.
And indeed, the former head of CBS said that, something to the extent that,
you know, Donald Trump might not be good for America, but he's really good for
CBS News or something like that in terms of boosting revenues.
And that's another, I think, serious concern when we talk about the circulation
(06:53):
of these news media platforms. forms and.
If we want to sort of connect this to social media, then we could start talking about algorithms.
Algorithms are something that we know very little about.
And I use the royal we both as publics and as scholars, because algorithms are
closely guarded secrets of social media companies.
(07:15):
There's a really neat book by Frank Pasquale called The Black Box Society,
and sort of he outlined some of that in that book.
And what we do know about algorithms is that they're programmed by their owners,
social media companies,
and they are programmed to do a variety of things, including to boost and value
(07:37):
certain messages and to sort of devalue other messages in terms of what people are exposed to.
We know that the social media algorithms typically tend to promote materials
that are divisive because divisiveness keeps people engaged.
(07:57):
And that's the point with social media is to keep people on these platforms
so that people's information, what they're doing on these platforms can be sold to marketers.
If the material that you're exposed to on social media, you sort of largely
agree with it and you can quickly become disengaged and then you leave that
platform, maybe go to another one or just log off entirely.
(08:18):
Then this is problematic for these companies who want to keep you engaged or,
for lack of a better word, hooked on these platforms.
And I think that's another big issue here when trying to understand the promotion
and circulation of fake news is trying to better understand social media algorithms.
And again, something that we know very little about. And that's problematic
(08:40):
for publics and scholars who wish
to better understand how these meanings circulate in our everyday life.
When I teach about social problems, that's sort of my main area of research
is how social problems are mediated.
It's not like a problem just speaks for itself and finds its way onto a newspaper page.
People have to make sense of the world. They have to frame it in a particular way.
(09:04):
And so I can teach students to kind of shore themselves up against media narratives
or be more active and critically engaged by sort of teaching them to recognize
certain framing strategies, that sort of thing.
But I've found that social media is its
own beast you know so I teach
a course where I kind of bring folklore in and I try to
(09:25):
get students to recognize you know urban legends and aspects
of urban legends and I'm like look when you see this online you know there was
this COVID during COVID it was great because every day there was a new one and
it was like we were you know all over it was like we were waiting in line in
you know I don't know Ohio at a COVID testing place and we we the line Mine was too long. So we left.
(09:46):
And then after we got a text message that said our test was positive,
but we never took the test, you know, perfect urban legends. Wonderful.
Right. The twist at the end. And it was always, and you could see the exact
same tweet over and over and over again, but the details were changed.
We were in Ohio, we were in New York, we were over here.
And so I can tell students to kind of recognize, you know, the,
the satisfying twist at the end, but there's only, it's such a new beast.
(10:09):
Is there anything that we can kind of tell people today? How can you shore yourself
up against this kind of cacophony of strange claims that seem to be bombarding
us all the time from social media?
Now it's not just the news media, it's also Twitter, X, it's Facebook.
What can we do to be more critically engaged?
(10:31):
I think first and foremost, as qualitative researchers, people who research
social problems, is a focus on meaning and process.
So as you just noted, right, there's, you know, a single tweet in Ohio and,
you know, okay, well, are there other similar tweets? And as you said, yes, there are.
And can we start to trace where these,
(10:52):
so the origin of, you know, the original tweet or message or post on social
media, and then start to see how and where it travels,
how it travels, how meanings are attached to those tweets or those social media
messages as they travel.
And through a critical and rigorous scholarly investigation of meaning and process,
(11:16):
this helps us to better understand where these claims come from,
how they move, and how they're adopted by other claims makers,
all of which helps us to better understand the meaning-making process more broadly.
And I think this is something that it becomes, I think, also increasingly difficult
on social media and digital media more broadly, because, I mean,
(11:38):
in some ways we're searching for a needle in a haystack.
I mean, there are billions and billions of documents, posts on social media.
And how do we even begin to...
Trace the origins of a particular message. So one of the things I've given workshops
on qualitative media analysis,
and students and junior scholars will regularly ask me, how do I do this?
(12:04):
Studying the internet, as it were, is akin to drinking water from a fire hose.
You can't really do it. So the short answer is I give to students and junior
scholars is to to make a case and make a case for how you're going to approach these materials.
And one good case that we can sort of do or provide as an instance would be to follow hashtags.
(12:30):
Hashtags, I think, are really interesting because a hashtag is not owned by anyone.
Hashtags aren't owned by social media platforms.
Facebook doesn't own hashtags. Twitter doesn't, although that's where the origin
of the hashtag comes from. is Twitter.
It was developed by Chris Messina, I think is his name, a tech developer at Twitter in 2007.
(12:51):
And, you know, we think about how hashtags changed how people communicate and
people organize around hashtags.
And I think we have an easier time tracing how hashtags move across social media
platforms and how meaning becomes attached to hashtags and drops off other hashtags.
You know, as you noted earlier in our conversation, you know,
(13:11):
you look at the the Black Lives Matter movement and subsequent hashtag.
You look at the rise of the hashtag Me Too, the Time's Up.
I mean, there are a variety of hashtags and seeing how people make sense of
meanings around those hashtags.
So, you know, for example, in my book, Divining Sexual Misconduct,
co-authored with Stacey Hannum at Wilfrid Laurier University,
(13:31):
there's a chapter in there where we investigate the Me Too hashtag and the meanings
that surround that in relation to bringing to to light not only perpetrators
of sexual harms, but discussions and meanings around what very.
Constitutes the idea of sexual harms.
So, I mean, some of the things we found that we thought were quite interesting,
(13:54):
and we sort of, we fleshed this out a bit more in the book more broadly,
is, you know, several of the tweets, I mean, hundreds of the tweets that we collected,
thousands indeed, talked about, you know, sexual assault and some of the really sort of,
terrible forms of sexual harms criminal sexual harms and
we expected to find some of those materials i think
(14:15):
what we were surprised about surprised to find
were people using the hashtag the
me too hashtag and talking about say things like getting cat called or you know
somebody asking for your phone number hashtag me too and one of the things in
our analysis that we noticed was other people mostly women were you know piling
(14:36):
on to these hashtags through the comments and saying, well, wait a minute,
you know, like, because someone asked for your phone number doesn't mean,
you know, this is me too, you know, I was sexually assaulted.
That's what the Me Too movement is about. And you start to see disagreements
among people about what constitutes sexual harms, right?
And, you know, we can't deny or dismiss someone's experience having felt,
(15:00):
you know, that, you know, they were catcalled and that was a type of sexual
harm. It's very real for people.
And, And, you know, as people who are studying social problems,
importantly, we weren't doing that in our book.
We weren't dismissive of these types of claims that people were advancing,
but rather trying to understand how these meanings become attached to the hashtag
itself and how the hashtag moves across social media platforms and brings to
(15:23):
our attention sexual harms,
including the very idea of sexual harms.
And one of the things that we discuss in the book is, you know,
that historically, sexual harms have largely been understood in the context of the criminal law.
And if somebody is harmed with sexual assault, and a crime happens, that's bad, obviously.
(15:45):
Anything outside of that, that is not recognized by the law as a crime,
therefore, the reasoning is that it must not be harmful.
And that's just simply not true. And so these are the things,
you know, this sort of meaning making process is some of the stuff that emerged
from our analysis of the use of the hashtag MeToo.
That contestation is really interesting because I always remember this paper
(16:08):
from years and years ago, Nichols, something about the dialogical nature of claims making.
And it used to be just that we would say news media are dialogical,
that you would make a claim and then you would be subject to counterclaims and
you kind of change your rhetoric as a result.
Well, but that process was slow.
(16:29):
You know, if anyone paid attention, if anyone paid attention at all,
you might get a counterclaim if you were successful, you know,
enough to shut for someone to notice.
But now it seems that that dialogical nature of, of claims making is so apparent,
you know, you make these, you make an expansive claim about,
(16:50):
and this was, it's a very common thing, right?
To expand the nature of a claim to say, look, this, this thing that you think
of typically only is very, very harmful in extreme cases, actually represents
a spectrum of experience.
It's a very common thing that people do. For better or for worse,
it's a controversial thing.
People say, well, it tends to expand or inflate our understanding of harms in the world.
(17:12):
And we get a very kind of inflated idea of just how bad things are.
Because when someone gives you a statistic, they don't tell you that what's
behind the statistic might be that inflated definition. The same time,
you don't want to leave anybody out, right?
But that example just really shows just how that controversy can be so much in your face.
And I wonder if, a part of me wonders if some of the fears around fake news
(17:37):
and discussions on social media and polarization is that incredibly quick and
in-your-face dialogical nature of claims making.
So a claims maker, like a policymaker, can't just tweet something without having
a ton of abuse, but also push back immediately.
And I just wondered if you had any thoughts about that, that kind of what effect
that dialogical nature has on our understanding of social problems.
(18:01):
Well, I mean, there are a few things that are going on there.
I mean, first and foremost, when you look at claims-making around the policy
around science, these things happen slowly, of course.
So studying whether vaccines are effective or cancer treatments are effective,
or whatever it may or may not be, it takes time.
And, you know, there's a methodological rigor there. There's a scientific rigor.
(18:23):
And when we factor in,
Online and social media, everything is immediate.
And I think this has really changed the public's expectations about the immediacy
of information, especially when members of the public might not really understand how science works.
And science is slow and it's a conversation. And so for on the one hand,
(18:47):
for scientists and policymakers to put out a social media post,
a tweet or whatever, you know, hey, we're working on the vaccines.
We don't fully understand yet, but all the other evidence points to people pile
up. What do you mean all the other evidence?
Where's the evidence for this?
Why are we talking about? And there's a lot of questions around that.
On the other hand, when we look at, you know, the sort of the diametrically
opposed statements that people might make, social media is what it's done has exacerbated.
(19:15):
Media performativity. So with individuals performing on these spaces,
the point of media performativity on social media is to get likes,
it's to get attention, it's to go viral.
This is why people post images of selfies.
And indeed, this has given rise to new social problems and new social phenomenon,
(19:39):
including selfie deaths.
I mean, it's been called the a public health crisis, that people are doing more
drastic and extreme measures to take the selfie in the lion's den or whatever
it might be, and then they're mauled by lions, because that's what gets attention.
And the cultural space is crowded. And this is something I think that people
(19:59):
are engaging in more extreme statements, whether or not they believe them or not is less relevant.
That sort of contributes to this idea of fake news and more about,
can I go viral by saying this thing so you mentioned cove covid for example
and i was reminded of one of the more.
Ridiculous in my opinion tweets was the one that was made by nikki minaj the
(20:25):
rap artists who said something to the extent that her cousin's testicles became
swollen and it became impotent because they got the COVID vaccine,
which is completely not true and not supported by any scientific evidence. And that,
Tweet went viral. I think it was tweeted over 100,000 times and people,
(20:48):
they pay attention to that.
It became the subject of late night news media commentary, jokes, other sorts of things.
I mean, you look at, again, with social problems, how, how jokes and memes contribute
to this process as well of the claims making process. process.
Did that actually happen? I don't know. Does Nicki Minaj actually believe that?
I don't know. But she said it, and it got a lot of attention.
(21:12):
She's got millions of followers online. This is another problem,
as I spoke to before, in relation to algorithms,
which tend to promote and boost messages, not only that are divisive,
but those that are made by celebrity In a lot of ways,
the hierarchy in news media or traditional media in relation to celebrity and
(21:34):
providing spaces for celebrities to make claims has been mapped onto social media,
where, you know, again, when we studied this with Me Too,
the Me Too movement was incorrectly attributed to Hollywood actor Alyssa Milano.
Now, she sparked the Me Too movement by putting up the post on Twitter that
(21:54):
said, you know, if you've been sexually harassed or assaulted,
write Me Too in response to this tweet.
She did not use the hashtag. That's important to clarify.
And, you know, that sort of sparked the Me Too movement. We know that African-American
activist Tarana Burke started Me Too in 2006.
And Tarana Burke, prior to, you know, the Me Too movement was unknown.
(22:15):
You know, she was an activist. She was not a celebrity and, you know,
did not get the same type of attention that people like Alyssa Milano.
And since, Alyssa Milano said that she had never heard of Tarana Burke and indeed
did give credit to Tarana Burke for starting the Me Too movement.
So, I mean, this is another issue we start talking about, you know,
the evolution of claims making, the meaning and process, the role of algorithms
(22:39):
and promoting content and celebrities saying and doing things.
And, you know, you look at, you know, Donald Trump, for example,
and, you know, his sort of gonzo approach to politics.
And Donald Trump is himself a meme.
David Altaydi has made this claim in his most recent book, and this is part
of the sort of the mediated social
(23:01):
world in which we live, all of which contributes to a real muddying,
if you will, of truth claims, claims making more generally, this idea of legitimate
and illegitimate news or fake news,
all of which I think has become very difficult to not only for just members
of the public to understand or differentiate between the two,
(23:23):
but also for the public to understand.
You know, what they think is good and, you know, legitimate information, but also.
You know, for scholars who are attempting to do similar things.
And as social problems scholars, scholars who engage in social constructivist
research, you really got to pull back on that.
It's not about what's true and what's not true, but rather it's about the meaning
making process in relation to claims and how claims are made and advanced.
(23:47):
And that could become difficult to do when some of this information that we're
analyzing as scholars is, you know, outrageous, ridiculous, ridiculous.
Inflammatory, racist, sexist, homophobic, all these sorts of things.
And, you know, it's hard. I think it's a challenge. And that's something I think
we need to talk more about on as a social problems analysis,
(24:09):
not necessarily taking a moral side or stance, the claim that you're trying to investigate.
This is something I've seen, we've seen a shift in over the past several years, indeed,
several decades where, I mean, previously, when
you you look at claims making in you know those scholarly research
that's looked at you know news reports in the 80s and
(24:30):
the 90s and you know the satanic panic from the 1980s one
of my favorites research that's that's done
that those claims were
ridiculous ish right but they appeal to groups of people but because of of you
know anybody could log on to social media and like people like donald trump
they can make claims that are not only just ridiculous but are just just outrageous
(24:53):
and offensive and morally reprehensible and all these sorts of things.
And trying to sort of step back from that becomes, I think, a challenge.
It becomes, I think, particularly challenging because I think this approach
encourages you to be a kind of a slow thinker, you know, that when everyone
is sort of panicking about something, I'm always sort of like,
(25:14):
oh, that's interesting.
And I'm sort of like collecting the claims and that, you know,
oh, why? Why that particular thing? Why that motif?
Why do I see that again and again and again? end.
And I get a lot of flack for that. Because people are saying,
why don't you care about this problem?
Oh, you're always downplaying this problem. Don't you realize it's a really
big issue? That's the biggest issue facing us.
(25:37):
And I'm sort of saying, well, I know that the biggest issue facing us is often
the one that has been packaged in a particular way.
And, you know, you need to know something. In order to think like this,
you need to know something about the medium.
Because when I see a message, I'm thinking about the medium immediately,
like why did this get into the headline why did the editor either commission
(25:58):
or accept this particular piece why you know but people don't do that there's
a sense that there's like,
this thing we're all talking about it because there's some truth to it not necessarily
the case which is why the satanic panic is such a great example because you
know there's at least some groups in society latched on to this for very particular
(26:18):
reasons and not because there there were cabals of Satanists sacrificing babies, you know what I mean?
So the question that we ask ourselves is, well, why has this become so powerful?
And so you mentioned about jokes and memes, which I found very interesting because
this was always part of the broader kind of repertoire of what,
you know, someone who studies communications would study, right?
(26:42):
Jokes, joke cycles, photocopier lore, you know, this sort of thing.
But now it's come together in a much more clear way with social problems.
So what's this relationship or is there a relationship between sort of jokes,
memes and the way that we talk about the problems that face us?
Well, I think one of the things is memes are easier to share and they go viral more quickly.
(27:12):
Memes also, there's much less initial engagement in the meme.
So, for example, you know, if you had to think about, again,
the satanic panic, we keep coming to that because, you know,
that's a shared favorite one here.
You know, there was a story there, you know, and the story, as you know,
with the the Ohio COVID thing, it it sort of morphs and it starts with,
(27:35):
you know, these kids sacrificing and then, you know, Ozzy Osbourne and they're
listening to, you know, whatever it is.
And there's a narrative, essentially.
And following a narrative takes time.
There's a heightened level of engagement when we're following narratives.
And people like this, of course. I mean, they watch reality TV,
(27:56):
we watch Netflix, you know, people read books.
I mean, you know, people engage with narratives, but it's time consuming.
And when you're looking at materials in
relation to social problems and the contemporary you
know social media and virality and getting
stuff out there quickly there's a lot less time it doesn't correspond with the
logic of social media in terms of its immediacy memes are immediate and they
(28:20):
take a lot less engagement in terms of following a particular story or narrative
and you can quickly share it and then people quickly share it and these go viral
and they give they can give rise I think,
to new and different types of narratives that might be surrounding a particular
set of claims making or claims makers.
And I think that's one of the reasons why we've seen sort of memes take off and jokes as well.
(28:43):
But again, the joke is a slower type of narrative. You know,
you have to sort of tell the joke, as it were.
And same with research, as you know, like the slow thinker.
When we're doing research and writing about these materials,
we're also developing a narrative.
And, you know, again, the logic of social media and the different platforms
in how the content, you know, when we look at the difference between form and content.
(29:06):
This becomes paramount as well. And you already noted that. So to have something
go viral on, say, TikTok involves a particular understanding of the way in which
that social media platform works.
It's short video snippets, a couple of seconds or whatever it may be that you're
trying to put out there versus a post on Twitter or a photograph on Instagram,
Facebook, YouTube, so on and so forth.
(29:28):
Now, to be clear, these different social media platforms can often accept different types of content.
So Instagram, you could put a photograph and you can write a narrative underneath
the photograph and use hashtags, people do.
But the dominant way in which people communicate on that particular platform is through photos.
TikTok is videos. Again, you could add text to videos, but the dominant way
(29:50):
in which people engage in that platform is through the use of video.
So taking all this into consideration as well, I think,
is is important can you think of an example of a movement or a problem that
was propelled by a particularly well-placed meme or joke or or even an individual
not to put you on the spot or anything.
(30:13):
I'm not sure i would say you know maybe the let's go brandon you know around you know the,
dismissal of everything that is joe biden
and democrats you know and the way in which you
know because that's just the text you write let's go brandon and you put
it over say a picture of joe biden or maybe even just type
(30:33):
let's go brandon and that ties into
a whole narrative about you know the
evil democrats and you know this and that and the other and
you don't even really have have to have a full awareness or understanding of
exactly what Let's Go Brandon is being used in reference to other than it's
(30:54):
anti-Joe Biden and it's anti-Democrats and it's pro-Republican,
pro-MAGA, pro-Trump.
There's a whole lot going on there. But to just share something with Let's Go
Brandon, I think that's sort of the first thing that comes to mind putting me on the spot.
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