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3

Mediated Communication

S itting at an Arizona Diamondback baseball game, the Alpha Chi Omega sorority sisters were doing something commonplace in this day and age: holding their phones at arm’s length, taking selfies while posing with hotdogs and churros. But this ordinary act drew extraordinary interest from the sportscasters commentating on the game. For almost two minutes, the television cameras switched between the selfie-shooting women and the play on the field. And when the focus was on the women, the broadcasters made mocking remarks, such as,¹

¹ Content that follows adapted from White and Hwang (2015).

“Do you have to make faces when you take selfies?”

“That’s the best one of the 300 pictures I’ve taken of myself today.”

“Can we do an intervention?”

The video footage quickly went viral, prompting tweets, blog postings, and national news coverage. Opinions about the selfie session were varied. Many social media postings reflected harsh stereotypes, suggesting that the women were vain and self-centered, and didn’t appreciate the game of baseball.

But they also had a host of defenders. One sports editor, Tanya Bondurant (2015), directly chastised the sportscasters for engaging in selfie-shaming, writing:

Welcome to 2015, gentlemen. Everyone is on their phone all the time. Baseball is a game with a lot of breaks and using that downtime to capture a fun moment with your friends shouldn’t make you the topic of a two-minute call-out. It just makes you a human in the 21st century.

Indeed, posting selfies is a common practice for maintaining an online presence. In 2015, the hashtags #me and #selfie accompanied over 200 million Instagram photo postings. Celebrities and sports figures fill their social media feeds with selfies as a way of letting fans into their lives. Actor James Franco (2013) believes selfies are meaningful “tools of communication.” He goes on to observe:

I am actually turned off when I look at an account and don’t see any selfies, because I want to know whom I’m dealing with. In our age of social networking, the selfie is the new way to look someone right in the eye and say, “Hello, this is me.”

Although selfies are an integral part of how we communicate online, the act of taking and posting selfies influences perceptions others may form of us and our messages. Just as the Arizona Diamondbacks’ broadcasters misperceived the young women at the game, we, too, can be misunderstood. Communicating through text messages, tweets, video chat, and the many other ways available to connect with others online presents unique challenges.

In the wake of the controversy, Alpha Chi Omega turned what could have been an enduring embarrassment into a charitable triumph. When the Diamondbacks offered the sorority free tickets to a future game, they politely declined. Instead, they asked that the tickets be donated to a local nonprofit supporting victims of domestic violence. They were then invited to appear on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, where Ellen surprised the women with a $10,000 donation to support their charity work.

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We won’t all go viral or be invited onto The Ellen DeGeneres Show for shooting selfies with friends at a game. But like the women of Alpha Chi Omega, we live our lives immersed in technology, and the devices we use play a major role in how we communicate with others. Understanding how various media affect your communication will help you communicate more competently. In this chapter, you’ll learn: