Open Psychology Prelude: Professors Sonia Livingstone & Paul Stenner discuss the Psychology of Media

Professor Sonia Livingston, thank you very much for being here today. You're Professor of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics and very famous for your work on media, the internet and young people in particular. And thanks for helping us to explore this format of doing, you know, short interviews with interesting people like yourself who do work that we think resonates with what we're doing in our new Open Psychology Research Centre. Your work is particularly interesting to a group of us who call ourselves CUSP, Cultural and Social Psychology researchers. And one of the things that interests us, of course, is your very interdisciplinary profile. You're a Professor of Social Psychology, but you've also helped, I think, to set up even the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE. And also it seems to me that your work is certainly not a simple matter of applying existing psychological theories and techniques to media-related topics, because in a sense you've been trailblazing a new and perhaps more open way of doing psychology in an increasingly mediatised world. And I know that some of your early work was actually on television talk shows, so you were interested in exploring details of what actually happens on those shows and whether such TV programmes sort of open up new spaces for political participation and so on. And then a little bit later when the internet became a household reality, you were amongst the first to work out how to learn about what's going on in this online life, particularly with children, and how they use it, how they navigate the new dilemmas that it poses. So it'd be really nice if you could take us through something of your own journey, how you came to be a psychologist interested in the media. I think it was fortuitous that I began studying media, which was for my PhD at Oxford, because I had actually got a plan for something else and media was what there was funding in. And so it was a little accidental, but at that time in the 1980s it was a very exciting moment. It was the birth of cultural studies, essentially, and it was the birth of a kind of politicised or critical social psychology. And there was I sitting in, you know, the Oxford Department of Experimental Psychology, feeling a need to discover other conversations happening in other places and looking to kind of broaden the possibilities of what of what I might be thinking about. And there was just so much going on. And I tried to embrace both the social psychological and the cultural studies. And that was kind of an almost impossible tension. I mean, I was very interested in the cultural dimensions of media. I wanted to get out of what I saw as a stale line of work on audience motivations or audience effects, you know, where people plus media seems to mean why do people engage with it or what does it do to them? And that was not a very productive. And then there was this whole kind of burgeoning of understanding that through media, people engage with culture and through culture, people are shaped as social beings. And that kind of shapes their possibilities for action and relationships. Can you say a little bit about when you first began to appreciate quite how significant the Internet was going to be in terms of transforming people's lives? So I was kind of happily studying television genres. I was a researcher of media audiences. I began with soap opera audiences. As you say, I then wrote a book with Peter Lund about talk audiences. And I was then kind of just beginning a project actually about crime audiences and thinking, OK, this is my kind of mode. And there's a lot of very interesting literary theory about genre that organizes social practices and understandings. I thought this is this is what I would do when. And that was kind of mid 90s. And I was, in fact, given a kind of unexpected grant just when I wasn't ready for it to study by Jay Blumler, who was very prescient and saw that the media landscape, the technological landscape was in a process of transformation. And it was time to stop focusing on how television organized people's daily experience and recognize. So so I was a little slow to the recognition. But as soon as I began exploring how how technologies were opening up new possibilities for communication, I think communication became the kind of key driving word for my that all my work has been organized around. And then we didn't see the Internet coming, I think, but we could see that there was this it was evidently this extraordinary cross fertilization of telecommunications and networks with rich cultural contents that could be communicated and a sense of ever greater personalization and choice, which put the the new options into the hand of ordinary people. And I was invited into a research project that tried to get very kind of in deep and ethnographic in family life and the choices people were making. That was with Roger Silverstone at Brunel University. And we kind of studied these families in their in their daily lives. And I saw that what was happening there was what I'd already found as an audience researcher, which is people are authorities, elites, power brokers, as it were, are telling stories about the experience of the audience or the experience of the technology user or the experience of what's going on in private life. And those stories are often wrong and they're often prejudiced and they're often homogenizing of people as if they're all all the same. So so when I think now about the Internet, yes, we are. It took me a while. I finally decided to embrace the concept of the digital age. So I'm accepting a kind of epochal rhetoric, even though I do firmly believe that historical continuities are crucial. And it's hard to think of any phenomenon today that you couldn't find some version of in the past in an interesting way. But I think we are living through this epoch of transformation, which I think about in terms of infrastructure. So the digital technologies, the Internet has become not something we switch on and off, not something we do now and stop doing later. It's something that is like electricity or water. It's a kind of utility. It's an infrastructure. And we don't we need to understand how it's reshaping our possibilities. Wonderful. I mean, one of the one of the things that I know that you're involved with now is a big project called eNurture that is interested in young people, the Internet and mental health. And, you know, you mentioned just now how in a sense what you've tried to do is avoid some of the more dominant narratives that circulate about those topics and try to focus in on what the young people, the children themselves are interested in. And I think you're particularly concerned about the idea of a sort of climate of anxiety and fear that sort of surrounds children's use of the Internet. And in a sense, there's if I read some of what you're saying, right, there's a there's there's a almost a self-fulfilling scenario whereby we're making each other up. And if we make each other up in this climate of anxiety, we're we're we're sort of amplifying problems. I think one of the most depressing things I find when interviewing children and young people, which I try to do fairly regularly, is that in the last couple of years, probably, they have started to, as it were, speak the anxious discourse that surrounds them from adults. So I say how, you know, how tell me about what you do online and what it means to you. And they'll say, oh, yeah, I'm a bit addicted. I think I'm getting addicted. The kind of or I'm getting worried about my screen time or the kind of talking, beginning to talk in the labels because it's become the the adult anxieties about what is complex and new and technologically uncontrollable, more or less, are beginning to kind of feed through and affect the the language with which adults talk to children, teachers, parents, everyone kind of is bringing them up, not only in a digital world, but in anxious discourse about this kind of foreign object from Mars, as it were, landing and reshaping their values in problematic ways. What I find heartening is that after a child, a young person tells me this, I just probe a little more and they kind of throw away that that kind of adult anxiety. And then they start telling me with excitement what they enjoy or with kind of a more spontaneous concern what it is that they have problems with or how they hate the kind of toxic interaction that goes along with their favorite computer game, for example, in the in the inertia project. We're trying to look both ways. So we're trying to understand what it is that children and young people who are struggling with mental health problems, which seems to be an increasing proportion of children and young people. So trying to understand what they what they want and what they could get from the digital world. So how it could be some kind of enabler, how it could be a new source of belonging or help. So I think of the child in the class who has a particular problem that maybe no one else has. And online, there can be a community of others who understand who kind of get them and can share information and support. And on the other hand, the digital world is not neutral. It's not just a kind of benign, helpful space where you can find friends. It not only is it full of all kinds of people acting incredibly problematically, which is interesting psychological problem, how much it is kind of hate filled and hostile. And but also it's proprietary. Also, you know, these are spaces owned by the biggest companies in the world, and they've become the biggest companies in the world in my career, you know, from from nothing, something you kind of watch with amazement as they overtake manufacturer and all other infrastructure and armaments and whatever. And they are now the biggest companies in the world. And they absolutely run these spaces for profit. And so there are young people kind of with mental health problems, you know, at their most vulnerable looking for support they can't find in the real world, in this extraordinary space that the adults around them don't understand very well. And that does have within it very well meaning folk try to provide help service or signpost some constructive information. But it's all controlled in this kind of, you know, algorithmic automated processing that is turning a profit and collecting data. And so it's just an extraordinarily fascinating moment. And it is about looking both ways the experience of the young people and their needs, the provision by both well meaning providers and major companies and platforms. I know that one of your, in a sense, more political concerns has been with privacy issues. Because of the way in which, especially since the pandemic, you know, our private homes have been, in a sense, very much occupied by media. And we do it, you know, all of us on our, well, many of us are doing our work virtually, and so on. And there's a new sort of public nature to our, you know, we're now used to other people seeing our bookshelves, for example, or our rooms. So there are huge privacy issues, but particularly Rachel, but at the same time, you know, you, as you mentioned, there's a certain sort of personalizing aspect to the internet. So in a sense, the psychological questions, psychological issues, the psychological vernacular and vocabulary of things like, as you mentioned earlier, addiction becomes more and more important somehow. So at the same time, as we're becoming more, more psychologically savvy. At the same time, you know, our private sphere is marketable, is something that is making lots of money for, as you say, for some of the biggest companies in the world. Can you talk us through how you're, how you're currently thinking about those, those sort of privacy issues and the politics of those? Sometimes living and doing research in this digital age makes me really puzzle about how we lived before. And we kind of, the things, the decisions we made that we didn't notice quite, or the ways we organized our lives that we weren't so reflexive by. There's something about this moment that makes us incredibly reflexive. So I think every young person in the country has now thought about how their home is visible, how they present themselves, what name they have on their little Zoom screen, whether they use a real background or a fake background. I'm not sure, you know, which I've got here. Or, or what, you know, do they put their camera on? There's, there's these, all these decisions, which in a way, digital technology kind of makes the decisions very kind of binary, camera on or off, sound on or off, name this way or that, which were more subtle and more, you know, we just kind of grew into them before, but now suddenly everyone's making, so I think it's making everyone both very conscious about the degree of control that we have, and also very conscious of the degree of control that we don't have. So, so I've learned, for example, that, that institutions can negotiate with Zoom for a more privacy preserving contract, but not everyone has that. Knowing how little control we have over our appearance and kind of life in this digital world makes people very sensitive about where they're losing control. So a lot of talk about the digital world, and I heard this very strongly from both young people and parents, is about loss of control, and a kind of a world that's developing too fast that they can't understand, and they can't grasp, and they can't, and it's sold to us as a world of choice, and it's experienced as completely the opposite, as a world in which the choices have been made for us, and we just better kind of get on board, and data and privacy kind of encapsulates that perfectly, so any young person, I think of any age, knows as soon as the pop-up comes that says, you know, can we put cookies on your computer, can we, whatever it means, they know they have no choice. I want the service, so I give my data, and I've had conversations with, you know, 11 year olds, 12 year olds, about the kind of Faustian deal in which they have no control, so I think people are seeking small forms of control, and at this point, you're right, I do become a bit, I don't know if I've become political, I've become a bit of an advocate for those, to speak up for those who I feel, and who feel themselves to be relatively powerless, so I kind of find myself in these new conversations, because where the levers of choice are, and where the possibilities for change are, are part of the expertise of different kinds of disciplines, and yet there is still the person reflexively trying to understand the choices available to them, because it is their privacy, their identity, their relationships, their intimacy that is at stake. Some colleagues of ours at the Open University, Rose Capdevila and Lisa Lazard, have got a, you know, a grant associated with your eNurture project, and I know that they're very interested in the way in which young women, you know, present themselves on social media, and, you know, I think it's a very good example of, you know, when we learnt our classic social psychology, we had Goffman from the 1950s telling us about impression management, and now it seems absolutely mundane and naive, I mean, the super intense way in which people can hyper-manipulate any image that they create, and, you know, once you can, if you like, control the impression that you're generating, in a sense that very quickly becomes, you must control the impression you're generating, and, you know, I think that this is such a new territory, and, of course, does touch on, it's easy to see why, even though it might be exaggerated, people become concerned with the relationship between that degree of hyper-concern with impression management and mental health. I think it's very hard, it's very hard to think about these changes, we're tempted to think about these changes, I think, in terms of a kind of, you know, is it better or is it worse, what are the pros and cons, and this is not very kind of analytically satisfying to me yet, but I think of it mainly in terms of kind of intensification, it's like what used to be minor choices or less important are now so intensified by being able to take not, you know, one but a thousand photographs, and pick the best, and use filters, and even now create deep fakes that can be, you know, more perfect than perfect, and when I talk to young people about it, they are in a kind of similarly ambivalent state, so they, you know, they engage with it, they kind of feel it's a space of agency and possibility, but they also feel tormented by it, and judged horribly, and sometimes, you know, their self-worth is destroyed by this kind of, you know, because it is also amplified by the platforms, and it's made competitive, and quantified, so it is very intense, and it's not the people, you know, you can't say they haven't had the choice to engage with it, it's not kind of come out and said you will take all these photos, and you must post them, but it feels like a compulsion, because that's how belonging in the social world is, and there's some very kind of interesting experiments going on now, should Instagram recently turned off the number of likes, right, and that was a, you know, that was a bit of psychology, we might call it cod psychology, I don't know who advised them, but it was okay, if quantifying is bad for young people's mental health, let's turn off the numbers, and then I hear the workarounds, I hear the kids who found some kind of other metric for comparison, and they will kind of brag about that, or compete with that, because kids love to find their own language, and their own way of kind of making this space theirs, or this opportunity theirs, so there is something, you know, it's just very hard to make a judgment, but you can see that there are lots of ways in which the opportunities have been designed, and could be differently designed, and could be designed more with mental well-being in mind, rather than either profit, or actually not thinking very much about the young people using that platform, so it's, yeah, it's kind of intense, and it makes people very reflexive, but they find it very hard to imagine how it could be otherwise, how it could be different, and one of the things I'm increasingly trying to do in my research, especially with the Digital Futures Commission, is trying to kind of imagine how could we kind of redesign this differently, and what would be more positive, or better for their well-being. That's one of the features of your research that, of course, is very, very, I think, important, that you affirm and recognise that there's nothing static about these things, the internet is ever-changing, and in some respects, the people who are going to be making the lion's share of the changes are the young, the people who are young people now, you know, and so in some respects, you know, I sense that in your argument, there's a sense that one response in the climate of anxiety is to sort of curtail people's possibilities of movement, to make the spaces safe, whereas you're sort of also saying, well, hold on, you've got to get yourself familiar with this territory, you know, we used to talk about surfing the internet, but at least saying navigating, becoming at home in that reality, and so there's, you know, there's that sense of encouraging proactive but positive interventions, I suppose. So one of my favourite analogies is the most boring one in the world, probably, which is town planning, and I think a lot about the nature of the built environment, because, you know, and I don't know how it would have been for people moving from kind of agrarian to urbanised societies, but clearly, in retrospect, we can look back and see there were a million choices and options that could be made by them and for them. And that's kind of, you know, that now we're designing this digital infrastructure, and we're designing these digital spaces for us to live in. And there's an inevitability in that it's not going away, I can't imagine that we're turning it all off. But there are all kinds of possibilities in terms of how it could be planned better. And the advantage of town planning in a way is it's very boringness, you know, I don't want to kind of seem like a naive optimist who thinks, you know, we could have a happy world if only we kind of all put our hearts first and our purses behind, as it were. But, you know, sensible decisions, where do people need to go? How do we kind of enable them to get there? What can be publicly funded? And what is legitimately an area of profit? What are the protections we need to put around children such that they can still grow and develop and still sometimes be naughty and transgress and climb digital fences and, you know, hang out at digital bus stops and do all the things that are important to growing up? Listening seems to me to be, you know, pretty fundamental to what you do. And it can sound very simple. But actually, maybe listening isn't as easy as people imagine. And methodologically, there's a lot of complications around listening. But it's certainly not a high tech thing, in some sense, it's a skill that people have always had. But so what, you know, I wonder if you if that, yeah, if you what you would say about the, the, the importance of listening, I guess, I think academics find it very hard to listen. But psychologists have got to be committed to listening. We can't go around imposing our views. And so I agree with you, I think I have learned to listen. And I've learned to listen. And it is a whole set of kind of micro techniques that in a way we teach in our methodology classes. And in a way, it's very hard to teach in a methodology class, because it takes real time. And it kind of unfolds as you, I think, actually, we do it in teaching as well, as you kind of gradually see that you might have an idea, but just leave a space instead, and someone will fill it, and they might fill it in a way that doesn't, wasn't what you expected. And so you've got to listen and recognize what the impulse might be and find the prompt that encourages some elaboration or further kind of expression. And so, increasingly, you know, I do lots of qualitative work where listening is all about finding different modes that make different people comfortable. And it can be it can be very different. So, you know, there are times when I do an interview with, I can think of an interview with a kind of rather, how should I put it, a rather kind of full of himself, middle class man, who needed to have with a very kind of fast expert discussion with me, to kind of check me out and make sure I was, you know, I knew my stuff, before he could suddenly pause and say something that wasn't part of that competitive moment, but actually was something he was troubled by. And I can think of other interviews where I seem to be interviewing a child, and I was interviewing a child, and we were having a whatever kind of interaction. And then there was a pause at the end. And then suddenly, the mother said something to me that was revealed something quite painful for her. And I hadn't thought that I, you know, I wasn't especially ready, but I had left, I just learned to leave gaps and not to wrap up quickly. It's the kind of the equivalent of in the last year, I've decided I'll never close a Zoom window, a Zoom on somebody, especially not on a student or somebody young, I'll always wait for them to click off. And it's that kind of thing. It's like, you know, leaving the spaces, because you're never quite sure when people are going to say things. And then being quick to recognize. And I love all of that. I mean, I love the kind of moments when people do, you know, because they don't, there are things people want to say, and they're not enough. And especially children are not listened to very much in a way that takes them seriously. So I'm also increasingly doing, I'm doing a consultation with young people at the moment about digital play. And it's very important to me that I don't just listen, but I also commit to doing something with what they say, and kind of taking it back to those who are not listening to them. And, you know, using my expertise and position to find a way to enable them to be heard. So there's lots of dimensions of listening, but it's, yeah, other people are usually more surprising and interesting than I might be, because I know what I'm going to say already. I don't apply that principle to department meetings, but otherwise. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure listening to you, Sonia, and having this conversation. And I'd like to thank you very much, and I wish you all the best with your next phase of research. Thank you, Paul. And I'm delighted to be part of this open conversation, and I'm curious to learn more about what the CUSP group and your colleagues are going to do. The idea of opening up psychology is something I feel I've been waiting decades for, so great.