Creating a Space 1
RUNNING HEAD: Creating a Space
CREATING A SPACE FOR “EVERY WOMAN” AT OPRAH.COM
Leda Cooks, Associate Professor
Erica Scharrer, Assistant Professor
Mari Paredes, Assistant Professor
Department of Communication
University of MA, Amherst
Amherst, MA01003
Fax 413 545 6399
Contact phone 413 545 2895
Paper submitted for consideration to the Communication and Technology Division of the International Communication Association
CREATING A SPACE FOR “EVERY WOMAN” AT OPRAH.COM
Oprah Winfrey has a personal fortune estimated at a half billion dollars (Tannen, 1998), is the head of a media empire that includes a perennially popular television talk show, an immediately prosperous magazine, a film and television production company, and an extremely busy fan-based web site. Her book club selections virtually guarantee immediate success for book and author. Guests on her show have become successful in their own right by virtue of their association with Oprah as a mentor and a friend (e.g. Dr. Phil McGraw).
Yet, Oprah’s success certainly cannot be measured by her finances and economic impact alone. Her value lies in the degree of esteem with which she is held by millions of women throughout the world. Her primarily female audience describes her as a trusted friend, a confidant, and an ally. Winfrey interacts with audiences both present in studio audiences and tuning in through the media alike, allowing insight into her own life and establishing a rare sense of intimacy (Haag, 1993; Tannen, 1998). Winfrey is perhaps unique in that she has inspired this sense of connection across multiple mediated channels; her image, established in the mass medium of television, can extend to the more interactive realm of the Internet through the conversations and discussions taken up by her fans on Oprah.com. In this article, we analyze the ways women[i] participate in this on-line forum, in an attempt to understand how such participation is symbolized and what it represents for practical notions of interpersonal relationships, communication and community as well as more abstract academic theorizing on the virtues of virtual relationships for women.
The Oprah.com web site is fascinating to observe. Women visit it to seek support from others, to give advice, to voice opinions or describe an experience, and to come together as a community with Oprah fan hood as a common thread. In this work, we study the formation of relationships and community in this particular area of cyberspace through analysis of written contributions of web site users. We also assess the characteristics and qualities of the space itself, the opportunities it affords in providing a forum for women as well as the constraints it imposes by virtue of its commercial and structured form. What results is somewhat unique to the “Oprah experience” but also points to common themes as well as tensions around the notions of communities as they exist both on and off line for women.
Thus, three important questions drive this study: (1) How do women participate, how do they form relationships on Oprah.com? (2) What are the cultural and social bases for their participation? (3) Are spaces such as Oprah.com important sites for women? The theoretical underpinnings of this investigation come from social constructionist approaches to communication that put communicative practices at the center of meaning making. While the medium for the practices we analyze is the Oprah.com web site, the focus for our study is how participation in this particular community is enacted in cyberspace and what consequences attributed to their on-line participation.
While the strategy of media convergence[ii] plays an important role in the structuring of Oprah.com and the marketing value assigned to the site, a discussion of the political economy[iii] of this community is beyond the scope of this paper, and is taken up in a related study (This author, 2001). For our purposes here, we wish to acknowledge that “O Place” on Oprah.com has been created as a unique media form that both extends and generates other Oprah Winfrey media holdings. The on-line venue is marketed and commodified as a community in which members can and must invest. The marketing of Oprah’s image as well as her style of connection and intimacy helps to make the site possible and plausible as a site for community formation and more or less real to those who travel there.
The importance of defining and naming sites such as Oprah.com “communities” is at the center of much CMC scholarship on the virtues of virtual communities. While we touch briefly on the debates about the authenticity of such communities, our focus is directed more toward the interpersonal, social and cultural premises for interaction in this virtual space. In the sections that follow we detail the theoretical and methodological considerations that inform our analysis.
Searching for Community: Theoretical Considerations
Jones (1998) and Wood and Smith (2001), among others, have noted that the idea of virtual community and the quest to find it remains primarily an academic venture. While we would not argue with this claim, we feel that the academic focus on the concept does not warrant its dismissal. The idea or ideal of community remains critical for those who theorize and analyze communicative practices as well as those who participate in them, whether on or off line (Ashcraft, 2001; Depew & Peters, 2001; Rothenbuhler, 2001; Shepherd, 2001).
The formation of relationships and community in cyberspace has been the focus of a large body of interdisciplinary research concerned with the relative stability or fluctuation of these concepts and the degree to which they have promoted social interaction and social change. The debate over the nature and consequences of what “counts” as relationship or community in computer-mediated communication generally results in some predictable conundrums: between the unitary body located in physical space and the fragmentation of identities in cyberspace, between the virtual space of information and the material space of day-to-day reality, between the authentic and the imaginary spaces of community, between spaces of anonymity, isolation, difference and hierarchy and affiliation, relationship and equanimity.
It is toward the latter dimensions of community (affiliation, relationship and equanimity) that Interpersonal Communication research has focused, implying both explicitly and implicitly that intimacy, supportive social ties and community are highly valued goals to be achieved (Burgoon, 1995). Adams (2001) observes “although intimacy and close social ties may be desirable qualities for a community, they are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for the structure and functions of communities” (p. 39). While Adams’ argument is directed at communities located in physical space, where people are often born into communities or join them, research and theory on cyber communities has perhaps explicitly relied on interpersonal relationships as criteria for community both because of the voluntary nature of most social interaction on-line as well as the reliance on relatively limited and relatively homogenous means for communicating.
To widen the scope of analysis of communities, rather that limiting the focus to their veracity, Baym (1998) describes other important factors that help to determine how meaning is made of on-line communities and how they become meaningful. Baym (1998) provides a set of preexisting structures that are useful for analyzing an on-line community’s style (the scaffolding that helps provides a context for interaction): external contexts (the cultural contexts that shape people’s use of and meanings given to their on-line interactions), temporal structure (synchronous or asynchronous, fleeting or long term), system infrastructure (physical configurations, system adaptability, and level of user friendliness), group purposes (whether discussing particular topics, providing advice, or participating in a community of Oprah fans), and participant characteristics (ranging from the size of the group to members’ experience with and attitudes toward new technologies).
Moving from a focus on the structure and processes through which virtual communities articulate themselves, a crucial concern for feminists and others researching gender, technology and community is whether, how or where women’s lives have been improved as a result of the information revolution. Here, as in many debates about CMC and community, the debate tends toward utopian and dystopian versions of the same story (Preston, 2001), with some feminist scholars reporting that not only are women underrepresented as users of the technology, but when they actually gain access to the technology they are immediately reminded that the “electronic frontier” is once again a male space. Scholars such as Herring (1996), Spender (1995), and Kramarae (1997) report that women post (to listservs) in a “different voice” from men, and while it is notable that both men and women can create “alternative” genders on-line (Bruckman, 1996; Turkle, 1995), negative stereotypes of women tend to be upheld (Kendall, 1996; Kramarae, 1997). Other feminists argue that gender switching online simply serves to reify previously existing gender categories of male and female, and little room for alternative constructions of identity (Danet, 1998)
On the other side of this debate are those feminists who see a natural link between women and on-line technology. They see the web as offering a metaphor for connection, for linking women to each other in ways that make them more powerful than they have ever been before. Where women link to each other’s sites, they are weaving a complex pattern of relationships and concerns that has historical precedent (Plant, 1995). This sentiment is expressed in the Women’sSpace Web article on the culture of cyberspace:
There is a spirit of generosity in cyberspace which reminds us of the early days of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Networking activism and support are interwoven as we push ourselves to learn to work with the new electronic tools we are encountering. Together we anticipate a future where growing numbers of women can access and use the global connections to promote women’s equality (Women’sSpace Vol. 1(3), Web page).
Ito (1997) attempts to move beyond this debate over the virtues of computer mediated communication (CMC) for women, to examine the “inter and intra-textuality of the Net as itself a social and political context where history, politics and discourse are being constituted” (p. 93). We extend her analysis of the text and use the context of the Internet as real social facts by looking at the ways participation is constructive of agency and community for women.
Building Relationships On and Off Line: Methodological Considerations
We look to the work of Lannamann (1994) and Fitch (1994) to build a theory of interpersonal ideology which is, as Fitch says, “grounded in material practices, that is, language use; well informed, though not dominated by the possibilities of human interpersonal structures, including power imbalances…inclusive of the beliefs and values…that are so basic that they are rarely stated; and grounded in a firm notion of what is and is not cultural” (Fitch, 1994, p. 114) Such an interrogation of the operation of ideology in the interpersonal communication of Oprah-identified web site participants should prove instructive in tackling the question of how people create meaning when “positioned and responding to the positions invoked by others” (Lannamann, 1994, p. 145). We respond to Fitch’s question about how people “transcend differences in schemas, unknowable intentions, variable interpretations, conflicting goals, and other individual complexities to a degree that allows actions to be coordinated and relationships to form” (Fitch, 1994, p. 105) in order to provide some insight into the dynamics of the creation of and participation in virtual communities.
Consideration of interpersonal dynamics in the formation of community also shifts the focus from community as a homogenous product of interpersonal interaction and toward interpersonal interaction as a product of community. Thus, interactions grow and are shaped by the community rather than vice versa. Adams (2001) notes that “A fascinating approach for interpersonal scholars might be the ways in which communities influence communication and relationships, as well as how the new communities are, in fact, built out of interpersonal relationships”(p. 39).
A growing body of research has focused on the interpersonal dimensions of on-line interaction. Wood and Smith (2001) note that three broad perspectives characterize research on on-line relationships: the impersonal perspective, the interpersonal perspective and the hyper personal perspective. The impersonal perspective portrays interaction on the web site as limited in terms of the amount of nonverbal cues and emotional content that could be exchanged. Proponents of this approach viewed computer mediated interaction as a poor substitute for face-to-face communication and those who spent a good deal of time on the medium as isolated and disconnected with more traditional forms of community.
The interpersonal perspective views the relationship among the various media through which interaction occurs as more complex. One medium for interaction (e.g., computer mediated) does not necessarily substitute for another, but rather supplements or extend the forums in which people form and maintain relationships. Thus, while I might meet someone on-line, the fact that this is followed up by face-to –face contact neither presumes the authenticity of one form over another nor does it mean that I have moved in a linear fashion from impersonal interaction toward intimacy.The hyper personal perspective (primarily based on Walther’s 1996 research) observes that CMC promotes an environment where people are in more control over their self-presentation than in face-to-face interaction and thus are better able to express themselves and form relationships on-line than in “real life”. Walther (1996) highlights several conditions that allow this to occur: the sender can control how she wishes to present herself to others, the receiver can exaggerate the positive qualities of a potential relational partner, the asynchronous nature of the medium allows messages to be posted with more forethought than typically occurs in face to face interaction, and feedback can intensify the relationship in the absence of other nonverbal cues (Tidwell & Walther, 2002).
Adapting these considerations to feminist conceptions of community, we see that naming a community for women gives rise to forms of communicating that are expected and encouraged. Nonetheless, as Ashcraft argues, promoting an ideal for feminist community carries consequences:
(a) it favors particular structures and procedures (e.g., minimal hierarchy, consensual decision making) to the exclusion of process and outcome considerations; (b) it promotes the rather bleak view that confrontation is inevitably disabling; (c) it depicts any form of power imbalance as an antifeminist development, thus equating feminist empowerment with absolute equality . . . At best, theoretical bias bounds our understanding of feminisms-in-practice (Mayer, 1995). At worst it brands feminist community an impossibility—an endeavor inherently destined for compromise (2001; 83).
Although Oprah.com can be more accurately described as a space created for women, rather than a community devoted to a particular vision of feminism, Ashcraft’s concerns are instructive as we consider what assumptions structure the network and values presumed to be important to the women who participate there. Importantly, both Ashcraft (2001) and Adams (2001) place emphasis on the resonance between ideology and practice without forsaking the creativity and agency that arises from human interaction.
Although perhaps neglecting somewhat the power dynamics and complexities of virtual communities in relation to those formed in other spaces, Rheingold’s (1993) oft quoted criteria for community: sustained conversation, public feeling and webs of interpersonal relationships apply to the relationships constructed at O’s Place. To these conditions, we would also add implicit criteria for credibility and membership through knowledge of and appreciation for Oprah as a media personality, and, by extension the values and virtues she and her media outlets/enterprises promote. Even more implicit and important are the rules for membership according to social and cultural categories that apply in everyday physical spaces of community that are maintained in interactions on the Oprah message boards and chat rooms. Forms of social and cultural capital that cannot be seen in a text-based format are re-created to determine the credibility of one’s story, one’s place in the community and, particularly in this community, one’s right to offer advice to others in need.
At this point, it is important to note that this project moves back and forth from the details of the everyday use and discourse on the Oprah chatrooms to the ways in which such use reflects larger social and cultural patterns of power. We utilize both descriptive and discourse analysis of the site and the messages posted in the message and chat rooms over an eight-month period. Our goal as participant/observers on the site is to extend previous analyses that focus primarily on the textual (conversation analytic approaches) or on the structural dimensions of Internet use.
Methods and Procedures
In the next section, we describe the site of our research and cyber fieldwork: the structure and space of “O Place.” The length and duration of our fieldwork in this site has been eight months. Our baseline was determined by previous assessments of the structure of communal space on the Internet, the intertextual nature of this particular community (members of the web site are also clearly fans of other Oprah related media), and the unique expectations of and commitment to virtual communities, given their potential anonymity and ease of access for those who have a computer and a modem.