Get To Know 23-24 RSM Visiting Scholar: Jeffrey Hall
Dr. Jeffrey Hall is a 2023-2024 Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Rebooting Social Media (RSM) at the Berkman Klein Center. He is a Professor of Communication Studies and the Director of the Relationships and Technology Lab at the University of Kansas. His work focuses on the intersection of online and offline communication. During his time at the Institute, he hopes to create guidelines that promote digital well-being for everyone.
Your research at RSM will focus on creating guidelines for promoting digital well-being for everyone. Could you elaborate more on what “well-being” in social media means to you?
I hope to actually focus more on discovering whether there are online communication spaces where there's a set of practices that, if you do more of them, then you're more likely to experience the positive benefits of social media, and if you do less of them, it's neither here nor there. So, it's not like if you don't do it, you're harmed; it's if you do it, it enhances your experience. It’s right to make a distinction between “I'm maintaining my autonomy of my well-being and not letting social media ruin it,” versus, “I'm using social media in a way that I think actually enhances my experience of connection or well-being.” And those are slightly different, and they're actually really tricky because a lot of my own thinking says that our online/offline worlds are intrinsically connected, and there's no such thing as them being separate. So maintaining well-being outside of that space also implies it has no bearing on what happens in your social media space. Yet, it absolutely does—from what kinds of things you pick to do, to what kind of streams you picked to watch, and what kind of texts you choose to write or receive. I think they're too tightly intertwined to be able to really keep them separate.
The question that I'm trying to work on at the Berkman Klein Center is really trying to say, if we know what the practices are that actually helped the people who are feeling better about social media and are mitigating the harms of it, what are those people doing with it? The issues about social media are very, very challenging. That's in part why I'm trying to take a real step-by-step approach to say, what do we already know? What can we say with some confidence? What can we say are characteristics of users that seem to cross everybody? So whether or not you're a 75-year-old grandparent or a 15-year-old teen, being able to use social media in this way seems to be good. If we could really, over and over again, say, here are the practices, this is why it works, and these are the conditions that it works in, we’d have a much better grasp on understanding what seems to help or hurt and what would the evidence to that be.
As a communication scholar, how do you conceptualize social media?
Social media has two huge pillars. One pillar is content consumption, or streaming content: TikTok content, Instagram content, and YouTube content. Content consumption is a huge pillar of social media consumption that is largely stolen from TV time. To most users, the distinction between [content] coming from YouTube versus coming from Netflix or something else doesn't matter. It’s called social media if it’s Youtube, but it’s not called social media if it’s Netflix, and that's an important distinction in terms of measurement and understanding what people are worried about.
The other big pillar has to do with interpersonal communication. This includes texting, group chats, seeing your family pictures or sharing them, or your older sister or brother having a baby and them having a family group app. Or, they use WhatsApp to keep in touch. Families who are immigrants or who are incarcerated use social media to try to keep in touch and do all kinds of things to keep connected. I focus on these things because I grew out of a tradition that has to do with interpersonal communication. The default for interpersonal communication up until the point I went to graduate school was face-to-face with some telephone calls and letters. Then it was texting. We're now seeing this bizarre thing where social media is gobbling up texting. So, texting used to be a standalone platform, and exclusive to the mobile phone. Now, texting is Facebook direct messages, Instagram direct messages, WhatsApp, and in China, there are apps like Weibo. What's weird is those are technically social media, but texting and social media for most of the history of research on these topics were not the same.
What's left in the social media space, besides these two pillars of consumption and texting, is this weird in-between space where you're kind of watching stuff of people you kind of know but don't really know. The point, the whole bevy of things, is whether it’s good or bad for us to watch other people we know do stuff on social media. We don't know because most of our research is using social media as the catch-all for everything–and we have no idea. The one thing that I know a lot about, is the value of interpersonal connection, and the ways in which texting and social media can get us there.
In your ideal world, what would social media look like in a way that promotes interpersonal relationships?
Social media already has a complete list of your social contacts, a very nice kind of like up-to-date how to contact them, how to reach out to them, and what's going on with their lives kind of thing, in a very integrated way. Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram are proxies for thinking about what social media can be. I have always believed that an overlay or some other program, such as an app or Meta, which could be purchased, would provide you with the ability to only display your contact list and nothing else. This would allow you to maximize your exposure to people who care about you, prompting you to remain in touch with them, send texts, become more responsive, and keep true to your goals. One could say, “I want to have more content from these people, because I love and care about them, and I want to keep in touch with these people more because I'm not doing as good a job as I want, and these are my goals and these are my people.” Then, all the app does is organize it all. It gives you subtle nudges. Like, “Hey, do you want to see some cool stuff about your family?” And you’re like “Yeah, I'll see this.” Or, “Hey, you know, you haven't talked to someone for a while. Would you like to send them a text?” And you’re like, “Yeah, I'd like to do that.” Just easy and simple nudges to just say “I care about you and I’m thinking of you, and I saw this cool thing I want to share with you.” And that cool thing could be a TikTok, the cool thing could be a song that you love or a show that you're recommending—it doesn't really matter. But, I've always imagined that if people were able to interlace their goals with the integrated functionality of social media, that would be pretty fantastic.
Interviewer
Sofia Marin is a student at Boston University, where she studies Sociology and Political Science. During the summer of 2023, she interned with the Berkman Klein Center’s Institute for Rebooting Social Media.