The Limits of Technological Determinism

The topic of yesterday's lecture may have left the impression that, due to the affordances of the technology we currently have, online communication is pretty much a negative experience in 'human terms', i.e. we're destined to communicate and perceive the communictions of others (and our co-communicators) online rather negatively. "The message is salient but the person isn't"...."Lack of social context clues leads to present-focused, self-absorbed, de-regulated possibly de-individuated behaviour", etc, etc, but I hope that, by the end, you concluded that these early models, those that essentially took the 'human' out of the human, computer-mediated, communicative process, were only really nibbling at the tip of the iceberg. They were somewhat, perhaps necessarily given the pioneering nature of them, simplistic and totally failed to consider the influence of individual personality on the noted 'affordance effects'.

Given that a lot of this early theory and some of the later, (as you'll see), hinges on the possibility of de-individuation and group influence, I thought it might be a good point at which to have you revisit the classic studyof de-individuation, i.e. Stanford Prison Expt. You can read about Zimbardo's study here http://www.prisonexp.org/ and see a short Youtube clip on it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxGEmfNl-xM. In the 'Discussion Questions' page of the prison experiment website, it asks the following question...What prevented "good guards" from objecting or countermanding the orders from tough or bad guards? This cuts to the essence of de-individuation....and brings us back to the impact of individual personality traits on group influence in both real life (like Stanford) and online. Those 'good guards' in Stanford who DIDN'T object to the orders of bad guards simply didn't have the psychological profile to resist de-individuation and assimilation of group identity. I'm reckoning that if they'd tested enough people as gaurds, they would have encountered those that did. They certainly found a prisoner who refused to de-individuate into a 'prisoner role' (Prisoner 416).

So what about online? Isn't it the same? There are those who are inherently incapable of resisting the de-individuation that the medium encourages whereas others are armed with an arsenal of attributes to deflect the draw of de-individuation. Spend some time considering the types of traits and abilities that would make one naturally resilient.....do you possess them? Furthermore are the technological determinants of online behaviour situationally dependent?