Podcast transcript: Digital Engagement review (2019/20)

This podcast is part of the UCIL Digital Society course from the University of Manchester running in 2019/20 semester 2. The story it relates to is hosted on Medium and can be found here.

In this podcast Carlene from the Library eLearning team reviews the topic, Digital Engagement, looking at some of the comments shared so far.

TRANSCRIPT

Carlene: Hello, my name is Carlene and I’m a member of the e-learning team involved in Digital Society. Together with Chris, I am going to be looking at some of your contributions to the first topic, Digital Engagement.

Chris: Hi, Chris here. Welcome to Digital Society! I enjoyed reading your introductions and reasons for signing up — there are 47 of you right now, which is the most we have ever had, across all different subjects. You can look back at the Welcome post to see for yourselves. A lot of you mentioned wanting to explore the way we interact with each other and the world, and wanting to study through a different format. I hope you enjoy being part of this group. If you joined the course recently, go to the Prepare and Reflect tool in Blackboard, and contact us with any questions.

Carlene: This week we looked at the topic of Digital Engagement. You considered questions such as ‘Is digital engagement different from analogue engagement?’, ‘Who do we engage with more?’ and ‘how is our engagement recorded?’. Thank you for voting in the polls and for sharing your comments in the activities.

The comments have been detailed, interesting and thought-provoking. They made me reflect on what I think about the differences between analogue and digital — keep this up and I look forward to reading further comments in the rest of the course.

We started by asking: “Who do you think you engage more with: People or organisations?” So far, 61% of you said people, and 22% said both people and organisations similarly (poll data at time of recording). This is interesting to hear — although really it’s very hard to know who you are engaging with, as we went on to look at.

Chris: The next question had some really detailed comments. We love how much thought you put into this — thank you for sharing your views and experiences. If you haven’t looked back at this activity, please do. Learning from each other and hearing a range of perspectives is a big part of UCIL and Digital Society. You can quote and reference these comments in your assessed work — just call it an anonymous contribution and link to the page it appears on. References for this podcast can be found in the transcript.

Carlene: The Contribute question was: “How, if at all, is digital engagement between people different from analogue? Why do you think this?”

A few of you touched on the area of emotion in digital engagement and how difficult it is to read someone else’s feelings without seeing or hearing them. Without visual clues it’s difficult to see if someone is happy, sad, telling the truth or lying. It led me to think about the lack of “physicality” in the online world which is something some of you mentioned too.

One student said in the Contribute activity, “you cannot completely grasp all the emotions” and another stated “a digital communication is when there is no authentic emotion that is conveyed through the conversation”. One of you suggested this is due to the discrete nature of digital engagement: “It doesn’t matter who typed “Hi,” how hard they pressed the keys, or if they were smiling when they wrote it. Everything you need to know about “Hi” is on its surface, making it efficient, uniform, and consumable.”

In contrast to this, other students commented that we can convey our feelings digitally through emojis, images, memes and gifs — one of you suggesting that a GIF can be “a substitute to body language” — quite a change from the first emoticon in 1982, and another suggesting that while these mechanisms exist, they are not authentic.

If you think about it, we haven’t been communicating in the digital world for very long — it’s a recent human development, and something we will touch on in the Internet and Internet of Things topics.

Whatever view you take on whether we can convey emotion well through digital means, I think one comment stands out, about the effort required:

“I find analogue engagement much easier, because there is not time to think over your responses, so a natural conversation is able to happen”.

In the Padlet, you shared some examples of digital engagement, analogue engagement… and some where it’s complicated. One of you suggested ‘calling someone’ doesn’t fit neatly into digital or analogue — hearing someone’s voice in real time feels analogue, but you are not in the same room, so it doesn’t feel fully analogue. There are no right or wrong answers here, but reading other people’s ideas and thinking about whether you agree and why, can help you to form your own definitions of concepts like digital and analogue. Have a look at the Padlet to see what’s on there.

An important theme touched on was the lack of control people feel they have in the digital world:

“We aren’t even sure others are true or fake. In other words, the credibility that you build online is vulnerable” — It’s true that people can write what they want and often not face any consequences. In the rise of fake news this problem is becoming increasingly significant.

Indeed, our so-called social interactions online may be mediated by corporations anyway. 67% of you said that Facebook is more like a shopping mall, 15% saying it’s more like a park (poll data at time of recording). As to what you thought of this commercial aspect, you were divided: 48% said you were OK with targeted advertising whether or not it was useful.

You were more in agreement about our analogue interactions — 85% of you think our analogue engagements are being recorded too, with 62% having experienced this. Check out the bonus reading, “With voice, offline no longer exists”, and if this interests you, you could consider writing about this phenomenon in the final assessment.

Thanks again for your comments, and I hope you enjoyed this summary. It is only my summary, though — take another look at the page to read more, and keep forming your own views. You can add comments any time to keep the conversation going.

Thanks for listening, thanks to Carlene for sharing her views, and I look forward to hearing more from you all.

Carlene: Enjoy the rest of the course!