Kuipers talks new-media problems

On Feb. 29, 2012, a student at a Georgia high school sent a text to a friend that read, “Gunman be at West Hall today.”

The recipient of the message notified the police, who immediately locked down the school until further investigation.

When the sender of the message was tracked down by the police, he said that wasn’t the text he sent. Instead, he said, his phone had done it by autocorrecting the message. The text actually said, “Gunna be at West Hall today.”

Joel Kuipers, a professor of anthropology and international affairs at George Washington University, said this is one way new media disrupts communication.

“A simple one-word autocorrect caused trouble that took the school three hours to repair,” he said. “It ruined schedules, caused widespread panic and raised a number of questions, some of which I’d like to ponder a bit today.”

Kuipers visited IU on Monday for a lecture that was part of a series made possible by an endowment to the IU Anthropology Department by David Skomp in 1983.

In his lecture, Kuipers spoke on some of the findings of a collaborative research project he was part of, which focused on cell phone technology.

“My point today is, I hope, a simple one,” he said. “It is, put simply, cell phones and social media are primarily a cultural phenomenon and not preeminently a psychological one.”

Kuipers focused on three observations he has made on the social and historical context of social media. He said social media makes it possible for everyone in the network to produce, consume and distribute content. Its power comes from the connections made between users. And lastly, social media allows users to coordinate activities between themselves at speeds not previously possible.

He said social media simply provides different ways of exerting knowledge. It isn’t a completely new concept, just a more advanced medium.

Though he doesn’t see a change in the amount of communication between people, Kuipers said communication through new media is not always clear.

“One context that we’ve found productive is looking at the context of repair,” he said. “Repair is an integral feature of all social life, of all living systems.”

Kuipers helped conduct a survey done among students in Washington D.C. It found that 93 percent of the students had smart phones. Their primary uses were texting and accessing the Internet, rather using the phone for calling.

With the new autocorrect feature, Kuipers said understanding via text can often be lost. He found the most common way to clarify was to switch media, for example going from texting to calling.

Kuipers concluded that social media doesn’t necessarily result in a single outcome, but it has changed many things.

“One way to think about how we can go about studying the relationship between subjective states and social media is to focus on culturally, and linguistically, defined interactions characterized by prevalent data,” Kuipers said.