(The following comes from my extended position in a debate on the benefits and drawbacks, the harms and hopes, of social media.  This debate was developed for the Dominican University Caritas Veritas symposium and was delivered on Tuesday, September 24th, 2013.)

My name is Dr. CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, and since I am the director of our new social media minor program here at Dominican University, I am taking the negative stance on the resolution “Social media is harmful to the intellectual and emotional development of young people”.

According to media and cultural historians Carolyn Marvin, Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, we should take not a technologically determinist, artifactual, instrumented-centered approach to understanding the interplay between the technology and the people.  Instead, we should understand the people’s relating to each other, and how the medium’s introduction impacts these relationships.  To quote Marvin from her book “When Old Technologies Were New” (p. 8):

Media are not fixed natural objects; they have no natural edges.  They are constructed complexes of habits, beliefs, and procedures embedded in elaborate cultural codes of communication.  The history of media is never more or less than the history of their uses, which always lead us away from them to the social practices and conflicts they illuminate.

When we look at the media technologies this way, Gitelman and Pingree argue that they seem to have a common pattern: every introduction of a new medium, or a new communication technology, seems to undergo a phase of “identity crisis” as the meanings and use of the technology are negotiated over time.  And part of this pattern is how they are met with the same two polarized positions: risk and potential.  Risk is the reactionary position, which sees the introduction as a detriment to the current and future status of civilization – this is the position my friend here is espousing.  Potential is the revolutionary position, which sees the introduction as the long-awaited arrival of the savior of civilization.

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