Nancy Baym and The Digital Age: A Brief Overview

In framing the debate over digital media and their influences on users, Nancy Baym describes the more pessimistic side as Determinists:

The tendency is to think about new technologies deterministically, asking what they do to us, and whether that is good or bad. Thus we see concerns that mediated communication damages our ability to have face to face conversations, degrades language, undermines our connections to our communities and families, and replaces meaningful relationships with shallow substitutions... Determinism can be recognized from its causal construction. The media are positioned as cause, the people are positioned as changed. (Personal Connections in the Digital Age, pg. 150-51)

Even the most casual readers of this blog should recognize that Postman and Carr would fit very nicely into this "Deterministic" caste. Baym's strength throughout her book is not that she outright denies these claims, but that she carefully shifts the emphasis by asking different questions. She makes this shift most explicit at the end of her book:

To ask whether mediated communication is as good as unmediated interaction, or whether online relationships are as good as unmediated relationships, is to miss the point. It is not a question of either/or, of one versus the other. It's a question of who's communicating, for what purposes, in what contexts, and what their expectations are. There are circumstances in which mediated interaction is preferable to face to face interaction, circumstances in which it is worse, and others when it's interchangeable. (pg. 153)

In some ways Baym, like Postman, also casts the discussion in terms of form and content, but she is far more accepting of different kinds of content. She asks important rhetorical questions in order to see what form would be most appropriate - an experience I had recently when I wanted to wish my father-in-law a happy birthday: text (my preference), email, or phone call. Purpose and expectations required that I make a phone call, but in other contexts with different expectations - the purpose being the same - I could appropriately wish someone a happy birthday on Facebook.

Baym rightly describes technology as mirroring our culture and simply allowing us to do what we would otherwise want to do more easily - shaping us along the way (e.g., she says digital media are "developed and deployed in social and cultural contexts" pg. 153). She denies that technology could cause any kind of revolution in and of itself (a very different sentiment than Postman, according to whom the revolution had already arrived). In the end she sees our relatively quick appropriation of digital media for socially-oriented purposes as evidence that we will not lose interpersonal relationships, identity, and community in the ever-changing digital age.

This last bit of optimism could sound a bit like the technological Marxism that Postman brings up at the close of his book, but I think Baym makes some important arguments that make this conclusion sound less speculative than "progress for progress's sake." All in all, I recommend Baym's book as a good interlocutor among the more negative voices of Postman and Carr.