WASHINGTON – Social media plays a major role in how individuals, groups and cultures recognize themselves and each other, an emerging area of study that begs more academic research, according to speakers on a panel at the 69th annual conference of the International Communication Association.
In terms of achieving recognition and exercising power, particularly in political participation, social and digital media are “becoming ubiquitous” around the world, said Dr. Jakob Svensson of Malmo University in Sweden, who presented Friday during a panel about platforms, data and visibility as part of a daylong track titled “Mediated Recognition: Identity, Justice and Activism.”
“Digital media works in tandem with processes of individualization and reflexivity,” he said. “Social media is important in this. It is changing the way we are behaving. The birth of individualism and focus on self and increasing focus on self-fulfillment are related to the idea that you reflect upon yourself through the eyes of others.”
For example, someone posting on Facebook and seeing the number of “likes” it generates affirms the old idea that being recognized by others helps define one’s sense of identity and importance, Svensson said.
Thanks to digital media advances, especially social media, he added, “recognition is perceived to increasingly lie in the hands of the individual.”
Recognition can be translated into power, he observed, as seen with many recent activist groups and social movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo and in populist and far-right movements around the world.
Or in Stockholm, where he studied a group’s efforts to save a bathhouse. A coalition of citizens used digital media in tandem with offline communication to save the facility by turning recognition into four kinds of capital – participating, mobilizing, connecting and engaging – and then turning the capital into power.
