Pablo Boczkowski: When I think of how my daughters access the world of information, how, for instance, they do homework, with three screens not to, so they have the computer screen for work, they have their phone next to the computer screen where they are monitoring Snapchat, and they have the TV, where they’re binge watching their favorite show, and all of that at the same time. So in order to understand their world, and how much their effect and their sociality really resides on the screen,

Noshir Contractor: Welcome to this episode of Untangling the Web, a podcast of the web science trust. I am Noshir Contractor and I will be your host today. On this podcast we bring in thought leaders to explore how the web is shaping society and how society in turn is shaping the web. 

Our guest today is Pablo Boczkowski. You just heard him talking about how his experience as a parent impacts how he thinks about his own research. Pablo is Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, as well as the founder and director of the Center for Latinx Digital Media where he hosts his very own podcast titled El Café Latinx. He’s also the cofounder and the co-director of the Center for the Study of Media and Society in Argentina, and has been a senior research fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin, Germany. He’s the author of six books, four edited volumes and over 40 journal articles. Three of his books are being published in 2021 — Abundance: On the Experience of Living in a World of Information Plenty, published by Oxford University Press The Digital Environment: How We Live, Learn, Work. Play and Socialize Now with Eugenia Mitchelstein at MIT Press and The Journalism Manifesto with Barbie Zelizer and Chris Anderson, published by Polity. His work was featured at a Meet the Authors session at the 2021 ACM Web Science conference. Welcome, Pablo.

Pablo Boczkowski: Thank you very much, Noshir. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Noshir Contractor: You’ve had an incredibly productive 2021. And I’m not even sure which of these three books to start with. But let’s start by talking about the one that I know has gotten a lot of attention. And it’s the book titled Abundance. Tell us a little bit about what got you interested in this particular title, and why you chose to title the book abundance.

Pablo Boczkowski: Well, Abundance is a book that came out in May of this year, but it was in the works since March of 2016. Abundance draws from two major sources of information. The most important one is 21 months of fieldwork in Argentina Muslim one Osiris and the suburbs boroughs in several provinces, amounting to 158 interviews. And about a third into the field research we conducted an in-person survey with a national representative sample of people to get a better sense of the land, some of the larger structural issues. 

The research project started generally as an exploration of the interrelationships between the consumption of news entertainment and digital technology, in particular mobile devices and social media platforms. And in December 2017, we ended the fieldwork. About six months after that I was in Buenos Aires. I was traveling with my eldest daughter, and we are walking down this avenue, which is the main artery in Buenos Aires — a very popular city, about 4 million people. And I saw an image that really stuck with me. It was an image that is sadly quite familiar in many large metropolises around the world. There were two people ostensibly living on the street, this was maybe 7 or 8 p.m, so it was dark already; it was winter time. They were sitting next to each other on a couple of worn out chairs. They were surrounded by cardboard boxes turned upside down as if they were summer demarcating their semi-private space, you know, within the public space. They were facing the street with their possessions tucked away between their backs and the walls of a building. And they had sort of an improvised dinner table, that essentially was as far as I could see a large cardboard box turned upside down. They were having dinner, they were eating from a plastic container. And they had a can of coke next to it.

And all of this was very familiar sadly. What really caught my attention was that one of them was holding a mobile phone. Right? That they were both looking at, right while they were eating. So it was that tiny bit of light emanating from the phone. And it was a little bit, if you wish, a popularized 21st century version of people eating in front of the TV as the iconic media moment of the 1960s right. 

So the reason why I mentioned the story is I have been wrestling with many themes from the field work and many findings from the survey. But what that image did for me was it may coalesce what ended up being the main topic of the book, which was the contrast between even in an extreme situation of material scarcity they were connected to a world of abundant information. 

Noshir Contractor: Well the story is an extremely powerful and evocative way of capturing the central thesis of your book, in terms of seeing the separation between the simultaneous material scarcity, coexisting with the abundance of information in digital environment. A lot of the time what you’re describing as abundance is sometimes equated with terms like information overload, or things like data smog, how do you distinguish what you’re doing as being perhaps more celebratory than words like information overload that make it sound more negative or pejorative?

Pablo Boczkowski: That’s an excellent question. There is a long tradition of thought dealing with this notion of information overload as the umbrella term. All the work about information overload has a few characteristics that cut across most of the scholarship. One of them is the idea that there is an optimum amount of information, and that after you reach that threshold, it sort of is an inverted U shape in which you start getting diminishing returns. It’s the idea that the information is used to make decisions about which there is a right and a wrong. The notion of information overload tends to focus on the cognitive side of the human experience, and much less on other dimensions of experience. If you look at the terabytes and terabytes and terabytes of information that are consumed today, most of this information is not consumed on a daily basis by most people to make decisions. It is consumed to entertain themselves on Netflix, to learn about others on social media and to express themselves on social media,? And there is really no optimum. So what is the optimum number of episodes of your favorite thriller that you should watch in a day of release of a new season? How many hours should you spend on social media? It’s the same question of how many hours should you spend socializing with your friends at the park? There is no real optimum there. It is situationally dependent.

And when you consume that information, you’re not only processing cognitively you’re living it emotionally and relationally,. So information overload has this discourse of deficit associated with it. I wanted to move away from that. So the notion of abundance is much more sort of agnostic with regards to valuation. The idea is that whether something is positive or negative depends on the situation and the values that people assigned to that, that there is no right or wrong answer to most of the uses of information. And that it’s not only about the cognitive, but also the emotional and the interpersonal. 

Noshir Contractor: Well, I think you just absolved a lot of people who have been feeling guilty about the amount of time they have been doing doomscrolling and bingewatching. And now all of a sudden, they’re gonna feel good about the fact that they are doing exactly what you’re calling for. And that is wallowing in the abundance of information that they receive on the web.

Pablo Boczkowski: I have a funny story. My favorite show on Netflix is Money Heist. When season number three came out, I told everybody, the day comes out, I’m not leaving my apartment. People laugh, but I didn’t feel guilty at all. 

Noshir Contractor: Basically says that you live up to your research in your own practices as well. Good for you! One of the things that is a recurring theme, both in this book, but also in other work that you’ve done is the observation that a lot of people who are looking at the study of media in general and web science, in particular, tend to focus on what is happening in the global north, and you have made a very concerted effort and a very passionate plea for being able to broaden that stage to include the global south in the case of abundance, specifically Argentina? Why Argentina? 

Pablo Boczkowski: There are three factors that I think make Argentina a very, very suitable national setting for the questions that I posed in the book. The first one has to do with the use of material scarcity. you know, when we talk global north, we talk about 14% of the global population between 13 and 14%. So it’s a minority in statistical terms, and these are countries which are much more prosperous economic conditions. And they tend to be countries with more stable political situations. Now, most of the world is not like that, the other 86% registers much less prosperous economic conditions, much more income inequality and inequality in terms of social capital access to opportunities, etc, etc. and political environments and social institutions in general that are weaker and more uncertain. So Argentina sits a little bit in the middle. It is a middle income country by World Bank standards. It has a long and very sad history of political and economic instability. During the 20th century, it had the recurrent cycle of democratic governments being interrupted by dictatorial regimes.

I mean, a lot of the discussion of information overload, etc, etc, most of the research has been done in the global north, and it assumes access to material resources, it takes that for granted. Looking at Argentina shows that you cannot really take for granted access to the wealth of information. So, for people to to be able to access WhatsApp — and WhatsApp is by far the most popular platform in the country more than Facebook — people have to make much more of an effort, you know, to get a smartphone, relative to their income than will they have to make in a country like Norway, or Germany, or Canada, or the US or the UK. So it shows, you know, how much people care about this world of information, and then the lengths to which they’re willing to go in order to access it.

And therefore, it puts the issue of inequality in a different light. The second issue for why Argentina is a very good case for this, as I said, before people use or access this information, use these devices, these platforms, not only to make decisions, instrumentally, about work settings, but for the most part to connect, to relate to each other. So it’s been a lot of work over the past 10 years mostly, 20 stretching, that has looked at the relational side of this, what does this mean for our everyday sociality?

Most of this work has been done in the global north, where patterns of everyday sociality tend to be more instrumental. And the cultures are more individualistic than the more gregarious, collectivistic cultures that you find in South America and Southeast Asia, for instance, for that matter. So Argentina, in particular, has a very, very strong associational culture. It’s a very, very suitable space to test, then, whether really, these devices are making us more lonely, as it has been, in general, the idea circulating in academic and media settings, or whether in a context that has a very strong associational culture, the effects are different. And the third reason why Argentina is a very important case, I think, has to do with news, politics and trust. 

So Argentina is a country with a long, deeply held distrust of institutions in particular news, and in that sense, it’s a little bit of an avant garde of where the work has been going. So the competing of these three things, and the role of information in the polity, I think presents a very good combination for why this is not a lesser version of what you find in the global north, but a country where you have national conditions that are particularly suitable for an inquiry of this kind, and that reflect much more what what is happening in the other 86% than what you can come up if you study only the 14% of the global north and and try to imagine that that also applies to Ghana, Nigeria, Paraguay, the Philippines, or Pakistan.

Noshir Contractor: I think you’ve just made a very eloquent argument in support of why being able to expand web science to focus on the global south is not just a luxury, but a necessity. Another issue that you raised in your work is also the generational differences. You wrote this book, while you were parenting two teenage daughters, tell us about how the experience of parenting and listening to how media is being consumed by different generations influenced your thinking in the book?

Pablo Boczkowski: If I situate myself in my adolescence, as most Argentine, I’m a huge soccer fan, Argentina won its first World Cup in 1978. At home, I was 13 years old, and I watched that tournament in a black and white TV. We had a landline at home that we had to wait over a year to get that installed. And maybe there was also some bribing to the local government. So they will please give us a phone, right? So when I think of, you know how my daughters access the world of information, how, for instance, they do homework, with three screens not two, so they have the computer screen for work, they have their phone next to the computer screen where they are monitoring Snapchat, and they have the TV, where they’re bingewatching their favorite show, and all of that at the same time. So in order to understand their world, and how much their affect and their sociality really resides on the screen, that what happens on Snapchat, or on Instagram, a lot of their sociality of who they are as individuals, all of that happens through information that is mediated that is not face to face. And, and in order to help them you know, when they came to me with questions, so when they told me stories in angst or when they cried or when they left, for me, in order to fully participate in that I had to ask them a million questions in order to understand that world. the project is a little bit the result of a breach that my children and I built to communicate so that I could partake of their world and they could express their world to me. 

Now that is that crosses another dimension about age that was very surprising to me. And it has to do with the fact that as measured, you know by the survey and also clear in the interviews, age has become the dominant social structure organizer to access and use to personal screens, to social media platforms and to the world of entertainment, more so than socioeconomic status.

Noshir Contractor:  That is interesting. So in some ways, people share consumption of social media based more on the age than on the socioeconomic status.

Pablo Boczkowski: And which devices they use — not only the platforms or the hardware, if you wish, and how they entertain themselves. Now, the implications of this are humongous, because if you think about social structure, you know, social structure is something that in the daily lives of people is fairly stable. That is, what research has shown time and again, is that you change socioeconomic status, very, very rarely and very slowly. But you, age every day, and you change cohorts, right, you know, when Mannheim — when Carl Mannheim, who was the first social scientist to talk about the importance of cohorts, and generations really in history. A generation lasted 20 years. A generation that is in part, defined by access and use of technology lasts less than five years now. And we age every day, our experiences are changing all the time. So our society is much more in motion as a result of the dominance of age over socioeconomic status. It is changing constantly. It is in motion, and it’s much more uncertain. 

Noshir Contractor: Well, one of the things that you have been working on even before the current work is focusing not just on media consumption, but the production of news. I remember seeing your work a long time ago, where you were looking at how newspapers were trying to navigate what was happening with the digital environments, and with the web, etc. And then again, I see that you now have this book, titled The Journalism Manifesto. What is it that the journalism manifesto looks like today that was different from a few decades ago?

Pablo Boczkowski: A lot has changed. You know, more has changed in the news industry in the production of news in the past 25 years than probably in the previous 50 to 75. So The Journalism Manifesto is a manifesto as it says in the title. It’s a strong and polemic argument that the news needs to change and how we think of it needs to change. 

So my coauthors, Barbie Zelizer, Chris Anderson, and I focus on three main interfaces of the news. The role of elites — historically, the news has been made for the elites, and by elites, and we argue that that has led to a very narrow storytelling of the society we live in today, or first draft of history, that there are many groups that have been historically marginalized, even among the best intended, that have not been part of those telling the stories on or those whose voices are represented in the news. The second interface is the interface of the norms. The idea of norms is how information is processed, right, norms of objectivity, neutrality, etc, etc, we argue that norms that historically favored certain kinds of processing of information at the expense of others. So, we argue for other norms to be included, like norms of inclusiveness, laws of cosmopolitanism. And the third interface is the interface of audiences. And the interesting thing about these is that 100 years ago, even 25 years ago, what the research show is that newspaper people or news people told the stories for each other and to each other. They had very little knowledge of the audience, it was very badly seen that you would cater to the audience and for that you needed to know them. And they assume that the audience is who are going to be there, they took the audience’s for granted, essentially, if they build it, they will come if they publish a story, somebody will read. What the web has done is two things for the audiences. Number one, it revealed a lot of information about the audience is because as we know, every time the server serves your page, the server records information about that. Number two, what that revealed is that the audience became not only known but much more uncertain, because once the web opened competition up across the information industries, right? Before, you know, news organizations had sort of a quasimonopoly, natural monopoly oligopoly position. You know, in America, for instance, in 97% of the Metropolitan markets, there was only one newspaper.

Now everybody competed with everybody else. And the other thing that we know now is that the audience is different than the audience we imagined in the 1960s. That is an audience that is much more emotional driven by what news makes them feel, not only what makes them think. It is an audience that is really cared about kin and being represented not the abstract polity, but having their own kin, their own social network represented. It’s an audience that wants to express themselves as much as they want to consume — to tell their own stories. So if the news media are to survive, they need to engage the audience where they are at, they need to tell stories that are told by people from different groups who feature a broad spectrum of factors in society, guided by norms of inclusivity, cosmopolitanism, among others, and that therefore tell stories about kin in emotional ways, and allowing people to express themselves, not only to listen.

Noshir Contractor: As I look at the conversation we’ve had today, as well as the corpus of your scholarship, I think you are making a really compelling intellectual argument for much more of a cultural perspective on web science. Where do you see this work go in the future? And how do you think web science needs to be paying more attention to these aspects that you have raised today?

Pablo Boczkowski: I think the development of computational tools in the social science has been one of the most incredible and productive areas of growth in the social science. And I think it’s only the beginning of that, for obvious, you know, technical reasons. But I think the energy and the attention that has been paid to that has made us sometimes pay comparatively less attention to dimensions of the human experience, that cannot really be captured by that. For instance, counting frequencies of words, would not tell you what that means, to the people who are using them. So I wish that as the development of computational methods and an actual, you know, computing technology develops, we don’t forget to continue investing intellectual resources and capital resources for that matter, in the development of intellectual work on a more cultural perspective that can complement from a cultural interpretive standpoint, the incredibly exciting work that is at the forefront of computational social science.

Noshir Contractor:  Thank you, again, Paulo for all the work that you’ve been doing in this area, and for coming and sharing some of these insights with that. So I will certainly recommend Abundance to anyone who is interested in learning about different ways of rethinking the extent to which we are consuming media for cognitive purposes, rather than for affective purposes, as well as for understanding that we might be blinded by views of media consumption based on the global north versus the global south or by our own age groups, as you’ve described. Thanks again, Pablo, very much for taking time to talk with us.

Pablo Boczkowski: My pleasure. Thank you very much for the invitation.